Word: splendid
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Auden wrote a splendid poem called "1 September 1939," which, in the original version, he ended with the line, "We must love another, or die." He expunged the line in later editions, judging, rightly, that it rang false, sentimental. I do not think it is the business of the law to tell us, "We must love one another, or else." Nor is it the business of law to forbid us to hate one another...
...Library of Congress bicentennial exhibit of Jefferson's books and writings offers a splendid display of the vastness and the complexities of the man. The complexity begins, of course, with the central contradiction: prophet of freedom, owner of slaves. You see in his own hand the journal entry deploring the removal from the Declaration of Independence, at the insistence of Georgia and South Carolina, of the clause condemning African slavery. You recall the famous line regarding slavery in his Notes on the State of Virginia: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just...
Still, Boss Cupid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 111 pages; $22) offers a splendid introduction for the uninitiated. Almost all of Gunn's virtues are on display here: his playful metrical dexterity, his unflinching celebration both of beauty and of its transience. The subject of love crops up repeatedly in the book's 60 lyrics, but the Boss Cupid of the title is not the chubby winged cherub of popular lore. He is something of a hooligan, "devious master of our bodies," wreaker of joy and havoc: "Love makes the cuckoo heave its foster-siblings/Out of the nest, to spatter...
People hankering for a peaceful, rustic existence should probably curl up with Edna O'Brien's splendid new novel Wild Decembers (Houghton Mifflin; 272 pages; $24) before moving to the sticks. Things are not as pleasant in the tiny western Irish village of Cloontha as the scenery suggests. Michael Bugler has arrived fresh from a sheep farm in Australia to claim the land left to him by a deceased uncle, and the newcomer's presence stirs up the villagers. Especially agitated is Joseph Brennan, whose ancestral farm borders Bugler's property. Brennan tries to be neighborly, but his true spirit...
...Seeing Mary Plain (Norton; 939 pages; $35), Frances Kiernan, a former fiction editor at the New Yorker, has written a portrait not only of McCarthy, the critic and novelist, but also of her literary generation. Kiernan's book teems with a splendid cast of characters--starting with McCarthy's Partisan Review crowd of the 1930s and '40s (Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Delmore Schwartz and Dwight Macdonald), then widening to include other figures in McCarthy's busy, contentious life, including Wilson, whom she called "the monster," her unexpected soul mate Hannah Arendt and dozens of gifted walk-ons, such as Robert...