Big Thoughts, Human-sized Canvas
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end…
They don’t make ‘em like they used to. Lowell’s poem “The Present Crisis” is an 18 stanza argument against slavery. This is poetic editorial, crammed with passionate pleading, laced with two-dollar words and high-minded symbolism. Can you imagine Khrushchev writing a poem instead of…
Admire, exult, despise, laugh, weep, – for here
There is such matter for all feeling: – Man!
Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear,
Ages and realms are crowded in this span…
I took down one of them at random. It stood at the very end of the shelf, was called LIFE’S ADVENTURE, or some such title, by Mary Carmichael, and was published in this very month of October. It seems to be her first book, I said to myself, but one must…
We are in the beginning of the greatest change that humanity has ever undergone. There is no shock, no epoch-making incident – but then there is no shock at a cloudy daybreak. At no point can we say, “Here it…”
To my mind, therefore, no excuse is needful for the attempt made in the following pages to familiarise the reading public with what was once a famous knowledge-book of the Middle Ages. But the reader…
Peaches are as old as China,
reserved for the first emperors
This one will be gone in a day
the pit a prize fit only for compost…
Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form…
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo,
Shovel them under and let me work–
I am the grass; I cover all.
The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist…
