Word: wordsworths
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WHEN I came to Harvard, I had never read Pope or Chancer or Dryden or Wordsworth, and the only reason I knew who Robert Lowell was was because I had read about him in Time. In school, I had been taught that poetry was different from prose, but I didn't really know what the difference meant. I did know that I wanted to try and write poems, though, and because I had an understanding and indulgent teacher, I spent the spring term of my senior year of high school writing an autobiographical poem. It was so long...
...only reminded of his dead mother by a chance conversation overheard in a pub. "Peter can talk about nothing," a girl complains about her absent boy friend, "but- the Ashes."* The urn is recovered, but not before Auntie's servant (and lover), an enterprising Sierra Leone black named Wordsworth, has emptied Mother out and replaced her with some hot pot. The police get into the act and the chase runs from London to Paris to Istanbul, and finally to Paraguay. Greene is not only putting the reader on. He is putting himself on. We are back in The Orient...
...time Henry Pulling has learned that his outrageous aunt is really his mother, he has been thoroughly corrupted (or liberated) by the old girl. Except for Wordsworth (who is conveniently knifed), everyone lives happily ever afterward on the proceeds of the family smuggling business. As the story closes, Henry is about to marry the daughter of the chief of customs-as soon as she turns...
Then and now, romanticism had a special feeling against Original Sin and for Original Innocence, seeing it exemplified in youth. William Wordsworth hailed a child of six: "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" That sentiment was obliquely echoed last summer at the Amherst College commencement; the class valedictorian declared: "Our parents and our teachers believe in adulthood and maturity: our wish is to stay immature as little children." It was meant metaphorically; yet it expressed a profound disillusion with the values of the "older generation"-or perhaps the lack of them. Given little to believe in or rebel against by their liberal...
...expurgator may begin quietly enough by "lopping" or "cutting." He might omit, say, Sodom and Gomorrah from Old Testament stories. But before he is through, he is likely to end up as a compulsive cleaner-"the sort of man who is capable of bringing out an expurgated edition of Wordsworth," as a Victorian clergyman with a penchant for editing was once described...