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Article: Some Jazz a While.(Review)
- Article from:
- Poetry
- Article date:
- May 1, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Modern Poetry Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems, by Miller Williams. University of Illinois Press. $42.50 cloth; $21.95 paper.
Reading this small batch of books by men who write in English, I was briefly reminded of T. S. Eliot's famous sentences, from his 1921 review of Grierson's The Metaphysical Poets, about difficulty, variety, and complexity. They strike me now as quaint:
It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in
philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely
that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.
Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and ...