ValuPlus-Poems focus on behavioral tendencies ranging from human beings to animals. They tend to extol virtues like perseverance, steadfastness, obedience to laws of nature and man at all levels of governance, reciprocity, tolerance that upholds harmonious living together in peace. Others include cooperation between great and small, act of doing to others what one wants others to do to one in return, sense of appreciation, situation of not all that glitters is gold, some sort of interplay of cultural differences with their diverse norms and many more. Let us leave the area of literary appreciation and critiquing to those doing technical analysis of the poems. This summary therefore pays attention to making references to where the virtues come to light in the poems in general. Whether the reading is for pleasure or for literary study, it is going to make useful impact on any reader. The framework of the poems cuts across international boundaries and cultures. Perseverance Seasons of Long Night epitomizes readiness to persevere in the face of challenging or daunting situation. At the end of a dark night, is always a glorious dawn of a new day. A Season, Not For Ever is in line with this virtue. In the Cats Nocturnal Privilege, there is no other place where perseverance comes to the fore better than how the cat uses its soft- padded feet to lay in wait for its kill. The cat never complains over how long it takes either the insect or the mole to emerge from its hole. The cats instinct causes it to endure any frustrating wait until it is able to pounce on the prey as it eventually emerges. The life of anyone who perseveres and bears his or her burden with equanimity is likely to be shinning example to others. Steadfastness Searching tries to condition our mind into resolutely pursuing what one desires or tries to achieve as set goal. The poem emphasizes that searching is an age long phenomenon. It states, Mans age long searching intent brought various stages of development one does not because of apparent difficulty call it quit. Quitters are never usually able to become champions no matter how easy it takes to win the laurel. The lack of steadfastness tends to bog them leaving them with no option than throwing in the towel. In Circumstantial Homelessness the lesson is that of resilience or steadfastness. In spite of vicissitudes of life, the affected person will not see any justification for abandoning what was so close to the persons heart. Oftentimes the experience may be extremely grave but such person, like ball, goes down and bounces back wiser and stronger. Obedience to Laws of Nature In Mother and Child the lesson of life is showing the role mothers as they are endowed to play in the life of their children. A single father or surrogate parent is also expected to perform this role as assigned to a childs mentor. In Teenage, parents are to virtuously guide their teenagers along the path of wisdom. Indeed, this is the stage when a growing child goes through transition from childhood to respectable adulthood. It is vital for parents to speak goodness into the life of the up and coming teenagers. They lead, counsel and educate them with respect to start making decisions on their own. At that stage of life, parents must not make the mistake of ordering the teenagers around. They are no more the toddlers of a decade ago. Parents and mentors are to watch it that they do not provoke their teenagers. Teenagers tend to believe that they are ready to function as full-grown adults but the biological significance of their age often times prevent such. So also, Marriage of Souls tends to fulfill natures need for couples to be equally yoked partners in marriage. People believe that it is in this stead that marriage and family can be successful. Guiding and guarding the teenagers are natures demand on parents and adults. In The Boss there is need

Charges of abandoned standards issue from government offices; laments for the loss of the best that has been thought and said resound through university corridors. While revisionists are perplexed by questions of value, critical theory--haunted by the heresy of relativism--remains captive to classical formulas. Barbara Herrnstein Smith's book confronts the conceptual problems and sociopolitical conflicts at the heart of these issues and raises their discussion to a new level of sophistication. Polemical without being rancorous, Contingencies of Value mounts a powerful critique of traditional conceptions of value, taste, judgment, and justification. Through incisive discussions of works by, among others, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Northrop Frye, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and Jürgen Habermas, Smith develops an illuminating alternative framework for the explanation of these topics. All value, she argues, is radically contingent. Neither an objective property of things nor merely a subjective response to them, it is the variable effect of numerous interacting economies that is, systems of apportionment and circulation of "goods." Aesthetic value, moral value, and the truth-value of judgments are no exceptions, though traditional critical theory, ethics, and philosophy of language have always tried to prove otherwise. Smith deals in an original way with a wide variety of contemporary issues--from the relation between popular and high culture to the conflicting conception of human motives and actions in economic theory and classical humanism. In an important final chapter, she addresses directly the crucial problem of relativism and explains why a denial of the objectivity of value does not--as commonly feared and charged--produce either a fatuous egalitarianism or moral and political paralysis.

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