Word: poetics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...MacKinlay Kantor. The Noise of Their Wings, laid in Florida of 1937, revolves around the obsession of an aged millionaire, who hankers for a living pair of passenger pigeons. The main role, however, devolves on the millionaire's old friend, an ornithologist, who is Author Kantor's poetic mouthpiece. In a series of melodramatic disasters which involve half the main characters, as well as all the pigeons, the ornithologist is everywhere at once, confirming his mystical foreboding that no good can come of the millionaire's fanaticism, that "this entire historic enterprise had become archebiosis-the science...
...effect, takes place in a recognizable world of village gossip, youthful lovemaking, Kentucky feuds, with characters who are farmers, truck drivers, wise widows and runaway girls. The telephone and radio have reached Miss Roberts' countryside but the people have not changed much: they are superstitious, religious, poetic, great musicians, ballad makers, storytellers. They are also high-spirited: 23-year-old Dena Janes runs away with a truck driver, leaves him when he threatens to kill her, lives in dread of a shot from ambush while she lives down her disgrace in her home town. Weakened by a few cloudy...
English translators have generally found the Greek tragic poets too much for them, have produced tortured versions in an idiom neither poetic nor colloquial and almost impossible to read. In the joyless task of selecting the best, Editors Oates and O'Neill unaccountably passed up two excellent modern translations: Sophocles' Oedipus the King by William Butler Yeats, Euripides' Alcestis by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. Otherwise, their handsome and handy collection presents all of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in about the best light available. More interesting to most readers will be ten "anonymous" translations of Aristophanes...
...Poetic license and a readiness to believe miracles did the rest. ("When you object, in the scientific twentieth century, to the magic of the fifth, it is no use expecting me to share your incredulity.") Readers are likely to prefer Gogarty's pilgrimage when he loses track...
...Suwannee River more than lives up to its folk-song fame. (Although Stephen Foster never saw the Suwannee, a stone to his memory stands at its source.) Author Matschat describes the primitive, fantastic swamp country of Georgia and Florida, the swamp folk and their legends, like a naturalist with poetic imagination...