Word: vergil
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...magic and spectacle, handled most ingeniously (and without the 140-man stage crew that Charles Kean needed in 1857). When Miranda is put to sleep, she slumbers levitated a couple of feet above ground. The instantaneous appearance and disappearance of the banquet (borrowed from Book II of Vergil's Aeneid) is truly miraculous, as are the periodic flashes of St. Elmo's fire all over the place...
...although that message is undeniably in the work. The cosmology he assembles is as elaborate and beautiful as any set to poetry since Yeats wrote of gyres and phases of the moon. It also dances with humor. The late W.H. Auden, now an onlooker in heaven, plays an owlish Vergil to Merrill's Dante. "Did you realize," Merrill asks, "that people have plutonium in their lymph glands?" Auden taps back: SURELY ONLY THE BETTER CLASSES...
Blue feels part of an even older tradition, though. In fact, he believes he is carrying the mantle of the great storytellers of all time, including himself among such epic figures as Homer, Vergil and Dante, as well as Bob Dylan, B.B. King, and John Coltrane. Albert B. Lord, Porter Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature, and lecturer in Hum 9b, Oral and Popular Literature, calls Blue "sui-generis" though. Lord believes that Blue "does not really belong to any particular tradition in storytelling." He says that Blue relies on autobiographical material in an improvisational...
...school. The schools were not, by and large, free. Nor were they compulsory in the sense that every child in a certain area had to attend them. Some fortunate boys were educated in grammar schools with college in mind: they studied the Bible, Erasmus, Aesop, Ovid, Cicero, Vergil, Homer, Hesiod; Latin and Greek. Above all, there was what might be called a strongly moral education. Such an education for the colonists was by definition religious-God's will made known to the child...
...read a manuscript, circa 400 A.D., by the Roman historian Johannes Clivius, who states, "Those absurd fellows who believe that Rome is in decline are ignorant of our empire's tremendous technological capacity: our roads, bridges, aqueducts, chariots, public buildings, feats of military engineering. Moreover, more people are reading Vergil than ever before." Peter Wirth...