Word: poems
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...poem was chosen as the epigraph for this splendid, pioneering collection of verse by women. Sadly, Sappho's fears of oblivion have proved valid. For each poet represented in this anthology there are uncounted others whose work has been diminished, dispersed or utterly lost. In A.D. 1073, virtually all existing copies of Sappho's work were burned in Rome and Constantinople, because the church perceived her lesbian love lyrics as a threat to Christian morality. In 12th century China the parents of Chu Shu-chen incinerated the body of the poet's work after her death...
WALT WHITMAN was an American genius. He brought originality to an imitative literature, cutting and hewing poems out of the city streets and country ponds of a vast America. "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem," he said in the 1855 preface to his masterwork, Leaves of Grass. Never before had an American writer captured this relationship between the word and the state, the poem and the nation. Emerson wrote Whitman a few weeks after the publication of Leaves of Grass, saying he found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed...
...Ransom, magically evoked a land where larks' tongues are never stilled, "sunlight lies like pale spread straw" and ladies of "beauty and high degree" arrange jasmine in vases, as courtly gentlemen pace the veranda. "Turn your eyes to the immoderate past," Agrarian Allen Tate advised in his best poem, Ode to the Confederate Dead...
...newspapers and displayed small Polish flags, a symbol of union protest. At the Ursus tractor factory, flash point of the 1976 food riots, more than 600 assembled workers cheered as union organizers from other Warsaw plants pledged to shut down their enterprises. The battle cry was contained in a poem read by one union leader: "It's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees...
...saved for her diary. In her letters she is determinedly light, at times kittenish; but she gives full play to her quick eye, sharp tongue and mocking sense of social comedy. An unfavorite cousin's face reminds her of a "mandrill's behind." T.S. Eliot's poem Ash Wednesday she greets as "Tom's hard-boiled egg." She describes avoiding an encounter with Ethel Smyth, the doughty, pipe-smoking feminist and composer who became infatuated with her: "I could not face her, though she was passing our door. Her letters sound...