Word: zeus
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From Pound to the Beats. In the 20th century so far, the devotees of the "second chance" have constituted a remarkable poetic pantheon. The Zeus of that lofty company is himself still alive, though he has long since had his say. Erza Pound, 81, now living in Italy, fathered modern English poetry, freed it from excessive strictures of meter, rhetoric and prosody. One of his earliest converts was T. S. Eliot, who sensed the dilemma of modern, urban and areligious man, and whose dry, ironic style and endless rhythmic ways of weaving contemporary sounds are echoed in virtually every poet...
...understand," said Lahr, an alumnus of the Columbia Burlesque Circuit '23, "that Aristophanes allowed the comedian to do whatever he wanted." But no one in 23 centuries ever winged the Birds as Lahr did. When Prometheus reveals some of Zeus's confidences to him, Lahr calls him "a fink." When Zeus offers Lahr his wife, Bert busses her and then bellows his trademarked "annng-anng-anng." When Lahr stumbles over the pronunciation of "Agamemnon," he quips, "That's Greek to me." At one point, he even digresses into a rendition of his famous Frito-Lay TV commercial...
...modern communications, mythmaking, which is essential to heromaking, is far more difficult. The democratic press exposes leaders to a relentless scrutiny that no putative hero of the past had to survive. Alexander the Great was able to achieve hero status by his own declaration that he was descended from Zeus, and his far-off conquests were known to Macedonian peasants only by a crying in the market-the more magical because it was imprecise. If he slapped a soldier in the face or picked up a beagle by the ears, they might never have known...
...trees, animals, earth and sky. To the more sophisticated societies of the ancient world, cosmological mystery was proof that there were many gods. Ancient Babylonia, for example, worshiped at least 700 deities. Yet even those who ranked highest in the divine hierarchies were hardly more than invisible supermen. The Zeus of ancient Greece, although supreme on Olympus, was himself subject to the whims of fate?and besides that was so afflicted by fits of lust that he was as much the butt of dirty jokes as an object of worship...
Blindman's Buff. Man has always held the night in terror?from Homer's day, when the warriors in the Iliad besought Zeus to "deliver from darkness the sons of the Achaeans," through Biblical times, when God's direst threat was to "set darkness upon thy land," right down to the present, on those rare occasions when he encounters...