poetry

Puccini's personal life was an interesting one. He was exceedingly fond of hunting, smoking, attractive woman, mechanical devices of any kind, and acquiring houses. He died in 1924 from a heart attack while undergoing treatment for throat cancer. He was 65 years old. A national state of mourning was declared in Italy. Despite torrential rain, mourners lined the streets of Milan in tribute to the composer of some of the most popular works in the history of opera. Puccini chose to write about the everyday rather than the heroic. He understood the little things of life and portrayed them with sensitivity. Another reason for his popularity was his ability to write glowing melodies --- intimate, tender, passionate melodies. He understood the power of melody to express the deepest emotions, and his orchestral writing was eloquent. He was not only a highly skillful musician, but a poet who understood the significance of the smallest details, and a dramatist who possessed an innate sense of pacing and timing. While he was in the process of composing La Boheme, he wrote that his style was "poetry and again poetry - tenderness mixed with pain; sensuality; a drama surprising and burning; and a rocketing finale."

Facts, to become poetic, must be fused with being.

The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.

I wonder if the human touch, which people have, is not one of the greatest assets that one can have. You meet some people, and immediately you feel their warmth of mind or heart. You read a book, sit before the performance of a fine actor, or read a poem - and there it is - something that streams into your consciousness. . . . Those who keep climbing higher, in their chosen work, all have this outstanding something. The nurse in the hospital, the man who delivers your mail, the clerk behind many a store counter, and the effective minister or public speaker. Without this human touch, hope has little on which to feed or thrive.

Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: - in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. . . . One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

These are the saddest of possible words, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance. Trio of Bear Cubs fleeter than birds, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance. Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble, Making a Giant hit into a double, Words that are weighty with nothing but trouble, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance. This brief poem, immortalized the Chicago Cubs' double-play combination: Shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman Johnny Evers, and first baseman Frank Chance.

"I know perfectly well that at this moment the whole universe is listening to us," Jean Giraudoux wrote in The Madwoman of Chaillot, "and that every word we say echoes to the remotest star."That poetic paranoia is a perfect description of what the Sun, as a gravitational lens, could do for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

It makes little difference what the trade, business, or branch of learning, in mechanical labor, or intellectual effort, the educated man is always superior to the common laborer. One who is in the habit of applying his powers in the right way will carry system into any occupation, and it will help him as much to handle a rope as to write a poem.