Word: sonneteer
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...kernel of Sadow's devotion to Harvard football is his philosophy that one must live the fleeting, evanescent years of youth to their fullest. He delights in quoting the Robert Burns sonnet: "O man! While in thy early years how prodigal of time, mispending all thy precious hours, thy glorious youthful prime...
...swift vanishing of my older/ generation," Robert Lowell lamented in a sonnet not long ago, "the deaths, suicide, madness/ of Roethke, Berryman, Jarrell and Lowell." There was a justifiable pride in this facetious reference to himself, for while his contemporaries died early, Lowell seemed to thrive on middle age. He too had been humbled by madness-an experience he documented in Life Studies (1959)-but had survived to become America's most distinguished contemporary poet. When Lowell died last week of a heart attack in a New York City taxi at the age of 60, he was enjoying...
...humiliation. But in the second act he shows that he has remained vulnerable by his own choice, because there's a degree of sensitivity that he refuses to lose to the prisoners' tough conformity. When he finally refuses to let Smitty become his "old man," declaring with the Shakespeare sonnet that he cares too much for Smitty to play by the groundrules of sexual domination, he displays a lot more guts than Rocky and Queenie. These two immediately submit to Smitty once he slaps them around the crapper a few times...
...young clerk notes: "Engaged at the office all day on a sonnet - surreptitiously." Two years later he writes his future wife: "It is such an odd thing that bright boys should be expect ed to be successful men . . . Brightness disillusions." So the bright boy becomes the plodder, then the secret craftsman who will not publish his first book of po etry until the age of 44. The material world gains in importance and the rare leisure hours are steeped in philosophy. The demise of Stevens' mother is a pre sentiment of Sunday Morning. "Death is the mother of beauty...
...techniques to serve the hard reality of an "unpoetic," mechanized present. But it was Spender in particular who, as Louis Untermeyer put it in Saturday Review, "transformed material considered too raw and crude for poetry. He invoked the magic of machinery; he packed an epic of travel into a sonnet contrasting a picturesque but fading past with the sharp contours of the present...