Word: epics
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...such bald outline can give even the superficial taste of this big (912-page) book. It contains hundreds of characters, scenes that range from harsh realism through satire and humor to passages of Joycean impressionism, Whitmanesque poetry. In form it is variously a narrative, an epic, a diatribe, a chronicle, a psalm, but in essence it is a U. S. voice. Author Wolfe's whole theme: "Why is it we have crossed the stormy seas so many times alone, lain in a thousand alien rooms at night hearing the sounds of time, dark time, and thought until heart, brain...
...question "What is the world's No. 1 Poem?" they might have some difficulty in arriving at a verdict. But certainly many a vote would be cast for the Divina Commedia of Dante. Unread in these days except by amateurs of literature or professional students, this Catholic epic is one of the boasted glories of Italy. Many a schoolboy has heard of Dante and his Beatrice, could even recognize a picture of the poet, but no one knows much about his actual life. Biographer Papini, adducing no factual discoveries, intends his book to be "a moral and spiritual portrait...
...story is the tale of these forty days of hardy struggle against the Turkish forces from without and the equally fearsome forces of starvation and chaos from within. The story is a grand one and so inspired has Werfel been with his material that he had attained truly epic reaches in his telling of it. His occupation with narrative details is at times responsible for overlength and unnecessary minutia. He also errs in neglecting the personalities of his characters who become sculptured impersonations rather than human beings. These faults are unfortunate limitations on the greatness of the work...
...ordinary U. S. reader, "Armenian" suggests Levantine rug-dealers, massacres, Michael Arlen. But last week Author Franz Werfel gave the word a new and heroic significance. In The Forty Days of Musa Dagh he recited an Armenian epic founded on an actual incident of the World War. Humanizing one more bloody no-man's-land, this 817-page novel immediately takes its place, with All Quiet on the Western Front and The Case of Sergeant Grischa, as one of the War's big books...
...scribes from the two serious magazines have been planning this epic encounter for some time and hope to make it an annual affair. Harvard's literary gridsters are already in New Haven apparently in fine condition for the affair. They were brimming over with good spirits when they left Cambridge...