Word: afflatus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...going to Rougemont, Switzerland, and has set aside five weeks to churn out another thriller. Après-ski and pre-harpsichord practice, Buckley, 52, plans to produce 1,500 words a day. Why the regimen? "The 20th century notion that you should stare at the ceiling until the afflatus [inspiration] hits you is self-indulgent," harrumphs Buckley, who does admit to slight concern about having no plot so far. But, he adds brightly, "by January I'm confident that the ideas will come rolling out like toothpaste...
Elevation of spirit is the obvious in tent of Whiting's language, but an afflatus of rhetoric is what we often get. With the play running a ponderous three hours, a pace-and-scissors job might be a distinct blessing...
Evidently, many people now find poetry easier to write than to read. The demolitions of old poetic constraints-inaugurated by such elitists as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound-have allowed just about any flyspecked page to masquerade as divine afflatus. "Poetry," Pound insisted, "must be as well written as prose," but he did not reckon on the grunts, snorts and limping non sequiturs that his epigones would later commit to paper under the banner...
Erica Jong's first novel feels like a winner. It has class and sass, brightness and bite. Containing all the cracked eggs of the feminist litany, her souffle rises with a poet's afflatus. She sprinkles on the four-lettered words as if women had invented them...