The TV retelling of the epic poem drew 2.3 million viewers and a 10.5% share of audience between 7pm and 8pm, down from its 2.6 million debut.
Some time back, I wrote a blog about Chris Torrance's The Magic Door, in which I spoke about the way the poem drew on both modernist influences and on the peculiarly British version of the late 1960s/early 1970s counterculture.
In it, Mr. Grass writes: "Why do I say only now, / Aged and with my last ink, / That the nuclear power of Israel endangers / The already fragile world peace?" The poem drew reactions that fell along a predictable divide, but it has been difficult to find much immediate support for Israel's decision to bar the 84-year-old author.
Saunders was in a conference-call meeting, and began doodling, "writing these stupid Doctor Seussian poems, drawing the picture, writing the poem, drawing the picture, putting them on a pile.
At other points "The Song of the Nightingale," an exuberant symphonic poem drawn from Stravinsky's first opera, remembers his recent "Rite of Spring" with almost perfect accuracy.
But as the poem draws to a close, after Aleko has murdered Zemfira, we understand that he is (and we are) in the wrong.
Christopher Tolkien contributes an extended scholarly essay on how his father's poem — drawn largely from an obscure Middle English poem known as "the alliterative 'Morte Arthure' " (to differentiate it from other similarly titled works) — relates to the existing Arthurian tradition.
McGregor's "Infra" is technologically advanced and physically extreme, while Scarlett's "The Age of Anxiety," based on Auden's 1947 poem, draws upon such homespun values as storytelling and detailed characterization.
Although the poem draws on Howard's technical description, it is equally indebted to the iconography of apotheosis, recalling the theatrical use of simulated clouds to signal and frame divine intervention.
The poem draws on and shatters into pieces the polite culture of Eliot's cultivated youth – bits of Arthurian lore, echoes of Shakespeare and Goldsmith and Ovid – as well as less conventionally acceptable literature – a line from Baudelaire here, of de Nerval there.
It's an exalted poem, drawing on a profound spiritual tradition anchored by writing, and infusing intimacy with a lover with all the heat and force of the deepest, holiest form of study, of close reading, of blazing adoration and gratitude.
