More than 900 people tried to hear Archibald MacLeish, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, lecture on "Words as Sounds" yesterday afternoon.
The crowd formed in Lamont Library's Forum Room, where the speech was originally scheduled to be held, then rushed to Emerson D, where the young and nimble finaly heard MacLeish's address.
About 400 others were jostled in the stampede, only to be turned away at the door by the University police enforcing fire laws against overcrowding. To the remaining 450, MacLeish spoke for 50 minutes about two phases of poetry.
In analyzing a poem's sounds and their relation to its meaning, he spoke of repetition as being the "major element of sound in poetry." To support his feelings, he played a recording of Dylan Thomas's reading of his poem "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," and later recited the poem himself.
"Each and every poem is charged with meaning," he said, using a recording of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake as an example. Here, Joyce has tried to make the sound of his words carry the meaning of his piece, MacLeish explained.
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