ellauri053.html on line 1377: During the first years of marriage, they experimented with automatic writing; she contacted a variety of spirits and guides they called "Instructors" while in a trance. The spirits communicated a complex and esoteric system of philosophy and history, which the couple developed into an exposition using geometrical shapes: phases, cones, and gyres.[71] Yeats devoted much time to preparing this material for publication as A Vision (1925). In 1924, he wrote to his publisher T. Werner Laurie, admitting: "I dare say I delude myself in thinking this book my book of books".
ellauri064.html on line 85: Benjamin revolutionised text, image and film criticism. His essay ‘Hashish in Marseilles’ confirms that he experimented with drugs (‘under medical supervision’). He argued that reawakening the long-forgotten dreams of childhood could help recover the betrayed potential of technological progress, in the service of humanity's ‘redemption’ in this life. He collected children's books and recorded attentively the development of his son Stefan from behind the crib bars like his contemporary Piaget, especially sensation, imitation, gestures and spontaneity. This is from his celebrated modernist short pieces collection One Way Street:
ellauri094.html on line 654: The body of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetry is so vast and varied that it is difficult to generalize about it. Swinburne wrote poetry for more than sixty years, and in that time he treated an enormous variety of subjects and employed many poetic forms and meters. He wrote English and Italian sonnets, elegies, odes, lyrics, dramatic monologues, ballads, and romances; and he experimented with the rondeau, the ballade, and the sestina. Much of this poetry is marked by a strong lyricism and a self-conscious, formal use of such rhetorical devices as alliteration, assonance, repetition, personification, and synecdoche. Swinburne’s brilliant self-parody, “Nephilidia,” hardly exaggerates the excessive rhetoric of some of his earlier poems. The early A Song of Italy would have more effectively conveyed its extreme republican sentiments had it been more restrained. As it is, content is too often lost in verbiage, leading a reviewer for The Athenaeum to remark that “hardly any literary bantling has been shrouded in a thicker veil of indefinite phrases.” A favorite technique of Swinburne is to reiterate a poem’s theme in a profusion of changing images until a clear line of development is lost. “The Triumph of Time” is an example. Here the stanzas can be rearranged without loss of effect. This poem does not so much develop as accrete. Clearly a large part of its greatness rests in its music. As much as any other poet, Swinburne needs to be read aloud. The diffuse lyricism of Swinburne is the opposite of the closely knit structures of John Donne and is akin to the poetry of Walt Whitman.
ellauri095.html on line 157: Usually writing Miltonic sonnets of 14 lines, he experimented with such unusual forms as a “curtal” sonnet of 10 2/5 lines (“Pied Beauty”) and a “caudal” sonnet of 24 lines (“That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire”). As an experimenter, he was a modern poet before “modern” poetry existed.
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