Word: bard
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...Bard and Bartlett
...immunity, like Lear's Fool, to criticize Government policy as he wishes. The plan might open up an interesting game: select the poet who goes with the President. Thus James Dickey probably would belong more with Lyndon Johnson than with Carter; Rod McKuen might be Carter's bard (although the President's favorite poet, officially, is Dylan Thomas). Ronald Reagan's lyricist might have been the late Oscar Hammerstein II; he would have to pick another. Eisenhower's? Edgar Guest. J.F.K.'s? Another lyricist, perhaps: Alan Jay Lerner. Harry Truman's? Edgar...
Americans might even honor the exuberant, slightly bizarre poetry of their commercial muse. Two or three generations ago, the national laureate might have been the anonymous bard who wrote the Burma Shave roadside quatrains ("In this vale/ Of toil and sin/ Your head grows bald/ But not your chin/ Burma Shave.") The beer commercial ("You've danced all day on a pool of fire," or some such: "Now Comes Miller Time!") has invented a sort of macho haiku that might turn into a national verse form...
...Ontario this season, a waspish Woolf out-tongues the Bard...
...that Londoners don't want a half-ton, half-heroic bronze of British-born Comedian Charlie Chaplin in Leicester Square. After all, Will Shakespeare already stands there, although the Bard's appearance and dignity have been besmirched by pigeons, air pollution and porno spreading through a once tony neighborhood that used to be home to Painters William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds. But installation of the statue of the Little Tramp, who died at 88 in 1977, has been stalled by a standoff between the Greater London Council, which wants to rehabilitate the square speedily, and the more snail...