Word: laureateship
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Poetry has long been regarded in America as unprofitable and sissy. A laureateship would be a way to give the craft some livelier hormones. It might also serve to draw poetry more into public realms, out of the excruciating and quivering privacy in which it now abides. To avoid the English laureate's hobbling obsequiousness, an American laureate would have to be guaranteed his independence. But beware of a lifelong appointment, like one to the Supreme Court; it might make a poet fatuous, "official" and eventually senile...
...Tears, idle tears . . . tears from the depth of some divine despair." Characteristically trying to keep cheerful, Lear referred to his own numbing bouts of depression as "the morbids." His versifier's reaction to such metaphysical miseries would never win him the laureateship, but they essayed an heroic humor outside Tennyson's reach...
...coin for the privilege of sharing his wonder. In 1930, after the publication of more than half a hundred volumes of his poems, short stories, biographical and historical studies, novels and plays, King George V crowned the onetime sailorman's efforts with the well-meant accolade of the laureateship...
...curator of the Nieman Collection of Contemporary Journalism at Harvard. There he rides herd on eager reporters who come to steep themselves in history, literature, sociology and talk with visiting pundits. This job took more time than Poet MacLeish bargained for. But unless he should make a laureateship out of the librarianship, his new job will take hours longer beyond reckoning. Poet MacLeish accepted it because, he said, it is one of those posts which "no man has a right to refuse." That he will skimp it, let technicians do all the dirty work, can be suspected only by persons...
...never produced a line to order because the spirit never moved him at the right moment. One of the conscientious was Lord Tennyson who, according to Carlyle, sat "on a dungheap amid innumerable dead dogs" (i.e., buried himself in Homer and Virgil) during the early years of his laureateship, but later rallied sufficiently to produce such gems as The Charge of the Light Brigade...