Word: sonneteering
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...heroes or villains in A Month in the Country, only human beings submitting ruefully to love's power. Seymour, an inspired actress, almost dances words as well as feelings. Ashton is one of ballet's supreme storytell ers. His pas de deux resemble poems. Dowell dances a sonnet with Natalia, a schoolboy's idyl with Vera, a naughty couplet or two with a coquettish maid. The clear dance designs, all curves and spirals, are infused with his classic sensibility. Let us hope for many another Ashton delight...
Joyce (James Booth) appears wearing a jacket with shamrocks on it, spouts limerick after limerick and intermittently becomes Lady Bracknell. Tzara (Tim Curry) comes on with a pair of scissors, slices up a Shakespeare sonnet, dumps the lines into a top hat, and extrapolates them as gibberish to show that antiart reigns supreme. In the Wildean substructure of Travesties, Tzara doubles as John Worthing (Earnest in town-Jack in the country). Carr once again plays his friend Algy. Lenin (Harry Towb) has no role in Earnest. Isolatedly aloof, he delivers a stinging diatribe on the duties of an artist...
...Collegium displayed the polished technique that has become the hallmark of Adams's choruses. Their tone was solid and well-blended; their diction was a model of properly popped consonants. Yet the performance didn't really get off the ground until well into the second half. Like a sonnet reader who calls attention to each iamb, Adams tended to emphasize the repetitive Baroque rhythms at the expense of larger phrases. Part of this problem can be traced to the widespread malady of the pick-up orchestra. This was the usual random group of instrumentalists thrown together to accompany a university...
Auden was always more interested in experimenting with syntax than with things like meter and stanza and he was content to pour his unusual grammar into the molds of sonnet, quatrain and blank verse. His chief experiments in Thank You, Fog are with verbs. Poets who write in English, he tells us in one of his "Shorts," "can very easily turn nouns, if we wish, into verbs." He proceeds to do so with gusto, not only to nouns but almost every unit of syntax he can get his hands on. Some examples from a single new poem, "Archeology:" "vacancied long...
Shakespeare was repeatedly showing off. There are numerous setpieces that, while lovely poetry in themselves, impede the dramatic flow. And he imposes on his dialogue a number of traditional forms from outside the theater. For instance, the lovers' first meeting is cast in the mold of one complete Elizabethan sonnet and part of a second; their postnuptial parting is a Provencal alba (which the Bard may have known through Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and which reaches its peak of effectiveness in the second act of the aforementioned Tristan); Juliet declaims a Classical epithalamium; and Paris delivers an elegy...