Word: afflatus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...editors of Signature have failed to realize that they are dealing not with literary productions, but with the crude, unshaped, often hollow, lumps of expression that come out of the undergraduate, or "afflatus," period in a writer's development. With absolute respect for the contributors to the current issue, I'm willing to bet that six out of the seven will soon be ashamed that these fragments were ever set in type. This writing has to be done, if these folks are ever going to be writers, but there is no law which states that it must be published...
Somewhere between the hack writer living off the slicks and the "divine afflatus" genius penning prose lyrics incomprehensible to all but himself, lies the elusive middle road that all young writers spend their apprenticeships trying to find. Occasionally, a guide appears who can help fuse the sometimes contrary desires for literary expression and cash returns. It is the growing realization that the best of these guides are the writers themselves that has called John Ciardi to the Briggs-Copeland assistant professorship of English Composition...
...conference's end, as the emotional afflatus of Churchill's oratory subsided, it was clear that Britain's Tories were still fumbling for a policy which would rally anti-Socialist forces, offer a new direction comparable to that achieved by some of the new progressive anti-Marxist parties on the Continent. Staring British Tories in the face was the finding of the latest British Institute of Public Opinion poll: in spite of difficult months in both domestic and foreign politics, Labor's strength had slightly increased...
...London Times also delivered itself of some occasional thoughts: "Britain, as much as any nation of the modern world, has learned the Roman lesson and followed in the Roman path. It may be fanciful to imagine that any afflatus of high statesmanship passed from Caesar to his noble and valiant adversary Cassivellaunus, or that by any mystical communion a spark of the Virgilian light of empire was tended through the centuries in Merlin's cave. Yet somehow the grand ideals of Roman dominion have not been lost in the modern world: jus, the conception of a law that should...
...memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of wartime. These memories, which are my life-for we possess nothing certainly except the past-were always with me. . . . These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime. These hours of afflatus in the human spirit, the springs of art, are, in their mystery, akin to the epochs of history, when a race which for centuries has lived content, unknown, behind its own frontiers, digging, eating, sleeping, begetting, doing what was requisite for survival and nothing else, will, for a generation...