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Text 69
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A NEW AGE
So an age ended, and its last deliverer died
In bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe:
The sudden shadow of a giant's enormous calf
Would fall no more at dusk across their lawns outside.
They slept in peace: in marshes here and there no doubt
A sterile dragon lingered to a natural death,
But in a year the spoor had vanished from the heath:
A kobold's knocking in the mountain petered out.
Only the sculptors and the poets were half sad,
And the pert retinue from the magician's house
Grumbled and went elsewhere.
The vanished powers were glad
To be invisible and free; without remorse
Struck down the sons who strayed in their course,
And ravished the daughters, and drove the fathers mad.
Of the youngest generation of English poets who were under the influence of Communist ideas, John Cornford (1915-1936) is the best known. While at Cambridge, he became an active students' communist leader. On the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Cornford joined the International Brigade. In lulls between fighting, he managed to write poems, both political and lyrical. Probably, he himself never separated the two. One of his best love poems, To Margot Heinemann, is commonly found in every anthology of English love poetry. Cornford was killed near Cordoba, on the first day after his twenty-first birthday. Had he survived, like George Orwell, he would have probably written about the rotten russet base of revolutions, wouldn't he?
We will never know.
5.6 He was acquainted with the night…
This great poet lived a long live; long enough to see both World Wars and the advent of the Space Age. Robert Frost (1874—1963) was born in San Francisco. When he was ten, his family moved to his father's native New England. There Frost remained for the rest of his life. His education was sporadic. Though he went to Harvard, he stayed there for only two years reading classics.
For most of his life he was a farmer. After eking a precarious living with his wife and children in his twenties and thirties, working on farms, editing the local paper and writing a great deal of verse which was rarely published, Frost sailed to England in 1912.
The English received Frost's poetry as exotic transatlantic utterances. His poetry, deceptively simple and homely-seeming, came into vogue. Two books followed. When he returned to America, a year after the outbreak of the First World War, Frost found that his English reputation has preceded him. He was lionized.
The critics made him a sort of "cracker-barrel" philosopher, the 'high school' poet whose sweet and simple verses were ideal for the ordinary person who could not normally "understand" poetry. He became poet-in-residence at Amherst College.
After the Second World War he made many trips abroad, reading, and talking to appreciative audiences. The Kennedy administration took him up. For a huge readership, his work typified American poetry: full of earthy wisdom, tangy with New England names.
Later in life, with his pure white hair and old-fashioned manner, Frost became a kind of a folk hero. The poem that follows (Text 70) was forever welcome at his recitations, the audiences simply loved it. Shall we try to say why?
Дата публикования: 2014-11-02; Прочитано: 227 | Нарушение авторского права страницы | Мы поможем в написании вашей работы!
