"The Poet Ridiculed by Hysterical Academics" by W.D. Snodgrass (poetry reading)

There are plenty of sly references, so here are a few notes. "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. " "Doctor Faustus" Christopher Marlowe He ridicules the "poetic paraphernalia" affected by would-be poets: the aesthetic Oscar Wilde's velvet suit and flowing locks, beatnik Ginsberg's rejection of conformity in T-shirt and sandals. It may be a reference to an anthology "New Poets of England and America" in which poets are divided into the Academics and the Beats, or the Tweeds and the Sandals or, as Lowell put it the Cooked and the Raw. The spondee is a metrical foot of two stong syllables "slow spondee stalks strong foot". Ending an iambic line with a spondee reflects pain or effort "Whose lips will you be kissing now with love sharp bites?" - Catullus Ben Jonson refers to "Marlowe's mighty line". The poet "released from Iowa" who tells of "wondrous scandals" was Robert Lowell, whose poetry workshop Snodgrass attended at the University of Iowa. Snodgrass didn't count himself as a confessional poet, even though he is branded such by association with Lowell. Psychoanalysis didn't destroy him, he didn't top himself, he lived to be 83 and he didn't take himself seriously enough to suit that label. "Ah, what avails the sceptred race! Ah, what the form divine! What every virtue, every grace! Rose Aylmer, all were thine. " Rose Aylmer, by Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) Actually he was more like Walter Savage Landor. Alas, Snodgrass died last month on the 13th January, 2009.