I’ve been reading in anthologies of Victorian verse in preparation for the summer symposium. I’d like to share a couple of poems I particularly like, both satires, progenitors of satiric currents that flow throughout twentieth-century commentary, high and low, to our own times. Both I found in Victorian Verse (1969), edited by George Macbeth.
Ray Olson
During the 1960s I forged my conception of movies as an art form rooted in entertainment and involving performance, like theater and dance, but also narrative form, like prose fiction; the composition of line and volume, light and color to represent things and atmospheres, as in fine graphic art and painting…..
On my century-spanning big list of favorite movies, there are more titles from the fifties than from any other decade.
The 1950s are often called the American decade, a time when the United States ruled the roost militarily, economically, and culturally. Hence, the title of this list of my favorite movies.
The world is always at war, but twice the fact was admitted. And though war has a well-recorded effect of changing everything, that was particularly true of World War II.
In the 1930s, MGM’s top directors were Clarence Brown (a favorite of Garbo’s), the prolific W. S. Van Dyke, of whom I’ve written for FF, and Victor Fleming. In 1939, MGM observed its silver anniversary. Since it was the biggest American movie studio, it launched a campaign to make 1939 known as Hollywood’s greatest year
I’ve just finished reading what is sometimes called Shakespeare’s Ovid because the playwright borrowed from it extensively. The passage below comes in the twelfth of the poem’s fifteen books.
On the supposition that lightning strikes twice, the movie industry loves remaking box office bonanzas. There are six Hollywood versions (and one Japanese) of Peter B. Kyne’s short novel, The Three Godfathers (1913). In 1929, when the talkies were taking, if not baby, then toddler, steps, everything clicked.
