Word: insight
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PRESENT AT THE CREATION, by Dean Acheson. Harry Truman's Secretary of State, in these well-written memoirs, recalls the formative years of the cold war with much wit, knowledge and insight...
...complained about the refusal of our literature to "shed its skin." to talk about what wasn't "exclusively human.": "One can predict first of all that such a nation will bomb foreign populations very easily, since it has no sense of anything real beyond its own ego." To this insight Bly has brought the evidence of poets in translation, publishing in small editions the work of Spanish. German, and Scandinavian writers who were receiving little or no attention in this country. It is from poets like Trakl and Neruda, or Vallejo, that we must learn about the poetry of "feeling...
...Taylor's central characters perform their own self-analysis. Each is tremendously curious and thoughtful about what and why something is happening to him and why he reacts as he does. The reader experiences with him every nervous blush, sweat, grope, and moment of insight...
...fall into a particular kind of self-indulgence as the homosexual revenges himself on a hostile world by writing grotesque exaggerations of straight customs, concentrates on superficial stylistic furbelows or develops a "campy" fetish for old movies. Somerset Maugham once said of the homosexual artist that "with his keen insight and quick sensibility, he can pierce the depths, but in his innate frivolity he fetches up from them not a priceless jewel but a tinsel ornament...
...many cases, including Maugham's own, that is an exaggeration. Indeed the talented homosexual's role as an outsider, far from disqualifying him from commenting on life, may often sharpen his insight and esthetic sensibility. From Sappho to Colette to Oscar Wilde and James Baldwin, homosexual authors have memorably celebrated love?and not always in homosexual terms. For example, W. H. Auden's Lullaby?"Lay your sleeping head, my love/Human on my faithless arm"?must rank as one of the 20th century's most exquisite love lyrics...