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Poetaster
Poetaster , like rhymester or versifier, is a derogatory term applied to bad or inferior poets. Specifically, ''poetaster'' has implications of unwarranted pretensions to artistic value. The word was coined in Latin by Erasmus in 1521. It was first used in English by Ben Jonson in his 1600 play ''Cynthia's Revels''; immediately afterwards Jonson chose it as the title of his 1601 play '' Poetaster.'' In that play the "poetaster" character is a satire on John Marston, one of Jonson's rivals in the Poetomachia or War of the Theatres. Usage While ''poetaster'' has always been a negative appraisal of a poet's skills, ''rhymester'' (or ''rhymer'') and ''versifier'' have held ambiguous meanings depending on the commentator's opinion of a writer's verse. ''Versifier'' is often used to refer to someone who produces work in verse with the implication that while technically able to make lines rhyme they have no real talent for poetry. Rhymer on the other hand is usually impolite despite ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Poetaster (play)
''Poetaster'' is a late Elizabethan satirical comedy written by Ben Jonson that was first performed in 1601. The play formed one element in the back-and-forth exchange between Jonson and his rivals John Marston and Thomas Dekker in the so-called ''Poetomachia'' or War of the Theatres of 1599–1601. ''Poetaster'' was entered into the Stationers' Register on 21 December 1601, and was first published in quarto in 1602 by the bookseller Matthew Lownes. The title page of the first edition states that the play was performed by the Children of the Chapel, one of the companies of boy actors popular at the time. The play was next published in the first folio collection of Jonson's works (1616). A prefatory note to the folio text identifies the main actors in the 1601 production as Nathan Field, John Underwood, Salomon Pavy, William Ostler, Thomas Day, and Thomas Marton. The quarto and folio texts both supply subtitles, with slight variants: in the quarto, the title is ''Poetaster ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ben Jonson
Benjamin "Ben" Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – c. 16 August 1637) was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for the satirical plays ''Every Man in His Humour'' (1598), '' Volpone, or The Fox'' (c. 1606), ''The Alchemist'' (1610) and ''Bartholomew Fair'' (1614) and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry. "He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I." Jonson was a classically educated, well-read and cultured man of the English Renaissance with an appetite for controversy (personal and political, artistic and intellectual) whose cultural influence was of unparalleled breadth upon the playwrights and the poets of the Jacobean era (1603–1625) and of the Caroline era (1625–1642)."Ben Jonson", ''Grolier Encyclopedia of Knowledge'', volume 10, p. 388. His ancestors ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
War Of The Theatres
The War of the Theatres is the name commonly applied to a controversy from the later Elizabethan theatre; Thomas Dekker termed it the ''Poetomachia''. Because of an actual ban on satire in prose and verse publications in 1599 (the Bishops' Ban of 1599), the satirical urge had no other remaining outlet than the stage. The resulting controversy, which unfolded between 1599 and 1602, involved the playwright Ben Jonson on one side and his rivals John Marston and Thomas Dekker (with Thomas Middleton as an ancillary combatant) on the other. The role Shakespeare played in the conflict, if any, has long been a topic of dispute among scholars. Sequence of events The least disputed facts of the matter yield a schema like this: # In his play ''Histriomastix'' (1599), Marston satirized Jonson’s pride through the character Chrisoganus. # Jonson responded by satirizing Marston's wordy style in '' Every Man out of His Humour'' (1599), a play acted by the Lord Chamberlain's Men. (Note: the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James McIntyre (poet)
James McIntyre (baptised 25 May 1828 – 31 March 1906) was a Scottish poet who emigrated to Canada in 1851. He is sometimes called ''The Cheese Poet'', as cheese was a recurring theme in many of his poems. Life and works McIntyre was born in Forres, Scotland, and came to Canada in 1851 at the age of 24. He worked as a hired hand to begin with, performing pioneer chores that formed the basis of a number of his works. Later, he settled in St. Catharines, Ontario, where he dealt in furniture. There he married and had a daughter and son John William McIntyre. He later moved to Ingersoll, Ontario, then a town of 5,000 on the banks of the Thames in Oxford County, the heart of Canadian dairy country at the time. He opened a furniture factory on the river as well as a store which sold furniture, along with such items as pianos and coffins. He was well loved in the community, from which he often received aid in hard times, due in part to his poesy and oratorical skills—he was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Marston (playwright)
John Marston (baptised 7 October 1576 – 25 June 1634) was an English playwright, poet and satirist during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. His career as a writer lasted only a decade. His work is remembered for its energetic and often obscure style, its contributions to the development of a distinctively Jacobean style in poetry, and its idiosyncratic vocabulary. Life Marston was born to John and Maria Marston ''née'' Guarsi, and baptised 7 October 1576, at Wardington, Oxfordshire. His father was an eminent lawyer of the Middle Temple who first argued in London and then became the counsel to Coventry and ultimately its steward. John Marston entered Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1592 and received his BA in 1594. By 1595, he was in London, living in the Middle Temple, where he had been admitted a member three years previously. He had an interest in poetry and play writing, although his father's will of 1599 expresses the hope that he would give up such vaniti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Topaz McGonagall
William Topaz McGonagall (March 1825 – 29 September 1902) was a Scottish poet of Irish descent. He gained notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited no recognition of, or concern for, his peers' opinions of his work. He wrote about 200 poems, including "The Tay Bridge Disaster" and "The Famous Tay Whale", which are widely regarded as some of the worst in English literature. Groups throughout Scotland engaged him to make recitations from his work, and contemporary descriptions of these performances indicate that many listeners were appreciating McGonagall's skill as a comic music hall character. Collections of his verse remain popular, with several volumes available today. McGonagall has been lampooned as the worst poet in British history. The chief criticisms are that he was deaf to poetic metaphor and unable to scan correctly. His only apparent understanding of poetry was his belief that it needed to rhyme. McGonagall's fame stems from the humorous effects these shor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Milk-Eyed Mender
''The Milk-Eyed Mender'' is the debut studio album by American singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom, released on March 23, 2004, by Drag City. Background Newsom wrote all the songs on the album except for "Three Little Babes", a traditional Appalachian song by Texas Gladden. According to the liner notes, Newsom plays "a Lyon & Healy style 15 harp, a wurlitzer electric piano, a harpsichord, and piano." A bandmate in San Francisco band The Pleased, Noah Georgeson, produced and recorded the album, as well as contributing guitar to two tracks and backing vocals to one. Cover art embroidery is by Emily Prince and photographs are by Alissa Anderson. Newsom thanks former touring partners Will Oldham, Devendra Banhart, and Vetiver, along with many others. The song "Swansea" was covered by the band Bombay Bicycle Club and featured on their sophomore album '' Flaws'' in 2010. The song "The Book of Right-On" was both sampled from and reprised by Newsom on The Roots' 2010 release ''How I Go ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Big Daddy Kane
Antonio Hardy (born September 10, 1968), better known by his stage name Big Daddy Kane, is an American rapper who began his career in 1986 as a member of the Juice Crew. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential and skilled MCs in hip hop. ''Rolling Stone'' ranked his song "Ain't No Half-Steppin'" number 25 on its list of ''The 50 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs of All Time'', calling him "a master wordsmith of rap's late-golden age and a huge influence on a generation of MCs". Biography 1980s In 1984, Kane became friends with Biz Markie, and he would co-write some of Biz's best-known lyrics. Both eventually became important members of the Queens-based Juice Crew, a collective headed by renowned producer Marley Marl. Kane signed with Tyrone Williams's (Marl's manager) and Len Fichtelberg's Cold Chillin' Records label in 1987 and debuted the same year with the 12" single "Raw", which was an underground hit. The name Big Daddy Kane came from a variation on Caine, David C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joanna Newsom
Joanna Newsom (born January 18, 1982) is an American singer-songwriter and actress. Born and raised in Northern California, Newsom was classically trained on the harp in her youth and began her musical career as a keyboardist in the San Francisco-based indie band the Pleased. After recording and self-releasing two EPs in 2002, Newsom was signed to the independent label Drag City. Her debut album, '' The Milk-Eyed Mender'', was released in 2004 to critical acclaim and garnered Newsom an underground following. She would receive wider exposure with the release of '' Ys'' (2006), which charted at number 134 on the ''Billboard'' 200 and was nominated for a 2007 Shortlist Music Prize. She released two further albums: '' Have One on Me'' (2010), and '' Divers'' (2015), the latter of which outsold all of her previous albums. Newsom has been noted by critics for her unique musical style, sometimes characterized as psychedelic folk, and for her prominent use of harp instrumentation. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edgar Guest
Edgar Albert Guest (20 August 1881 – 5 August 1959) was a British-born American poet who became known as the People's Poet. His poems often had an inspirational and optimistic view of everyday life. Early life Guest was born in Birmingham, England in 1881. In 1891, his family moved from England to Detroit, Michigan, where Guest lived until he died. Career After he began at the ''Detroit Free Press'' as a copy boy and then a reporter, his first poem appeared on 11 December 1898. He became a naturalized citizen in 1902. For 40 years, Guest was widely read throughout North America, and his sentimental, optimistic poems were in the same vein as the light verse of Nick Kenny, who wrote syndicated columns during the same decades. From his first published work in the ''Detroit Free Press'' until his death in 1959, Guest penned some 11,000 poems which were syndicated in some 300 newspapers and collected in more than 20 books, including ''A Heap o' Livin (1916) and ''Just Folks' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modernist Poetry
Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting the dates. The critic/poet C. H. Sisson observed in his essay ''Poetry and Sincerity ''that "Modernity has been going on for a long time. Not within living memory has there ever been a day when young writers were not coming up, in a threat of iconoclasm." Background It is usually said to have begun with the French Symbolist movement and it artificially ends with the Second World War, the beginning and ending of the modernist period are of course arbitrary. Poets like W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) started in a post-Romantic, Symbolist vein and modernised their poetic idiom after being affected by political and literary developments. Imagism proved radical and important, markin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Trees (poem)
"Trees" is a lyric poem by American poet Joyce Kilmer. Written in February 1913, it was first published in '' Poetry: A Magazine of Verse'' that August and included in Kilmer's 1914 collection ''Trees and Other Poems''.Letter from Kenton Kilmer to Dorothy Colson in Grotto Sources file, Dorothy Corson Collection, University of Notre Dame (South Bend, Indiana).Kilmer, Joyce."Trees"in Monroe, Harriet (editor), ''Poetry: A Magazine of Verse''. (Chicago: Modern Poetry Association, August 1913), 2:160.Kilmer, Joyce. ''Trees and Other Poems''. (New York: Doubleday Doran and Co., 1914), 18. The poem, in twelve lines of rhyming couplets of iambic tetrameter verse, describes what Kilmer perceives as the inability of art created by humankind to replicate the beauty achieved by nature. Kilmer is most remembered for "Trees", which has been the subject of frequent parodies and references in popular culture. Kilmer's work is often disparaged by critics and dismissed by scholars as being too si ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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