Word: afflatus
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...spirit capable of this sort of afflatus has trouble in this world. His most characteristic letter is the one that most eloquently set forth the bitter awareness that his great gifts needed as great a discipline to create the form in which they might be expressed. He was only 24 when he wrote, promising to send a copy of his book of poems. Permit Me Voyage: "I am in most possible kinds of pain . . . and the trouble revolves chiefly round the simple-sounding problem of how to become what I wish I could when I can't. That, however...
Having come within one word (afflatus) of winning last year's Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee, dark-haired Sandra Owen, 14, of Navarre, Ohio, had thought of practically nothing else but boning up for another crack at the title. Her second chance came last week when the 67 finalists assembled in the Commerce Department's auditorium for this year's bee in Washington...
...Ciardi, author of five books of verse,* "that the art of poetry is more important than Mrs. Lindbergh or than you or than me. I am compelled to believe that Mrs. Lindbergh has written an offensively bad book-inept, jingling, slovenly, illiterate even, and puffed up with the foolish afflatus of a stereotyped high-seriousness, that species of aesthetic and human failure that will accept any shriek as a true high...
...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...