Word: bardic
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...those tales are generally somber, despite their lyrical intensity. Hanley's novels, which have enjoyed a considerable reputation in England since the 1930s, exude a chill that corresponds to the spare, cramped lives of his characters: a bardic policeman who becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a tramp from his village, a spinster who lives with her father on a remote farm. It is a landscape out of Hardy, but with none of Hardy's ruminative asides; a master of idiom and intonation, Hanley relies on dialogue to disclose character. His prose reads like a play...
...fate of David's portrait of Lavoisier and His Wife was instructive. He rendered this savant, the discoverer of oxygen, in heroic terms, though muted by domesticity; like Homer or Dante, Lavoisier is seen with symbolic appurtenances (the magnificent still life of scientific instruments does duty for the bardic wreath and scroll), presided over by his wife as Muse. Yet Lavoisier was guillotined in the Terror, and the painting was kept from exhibition for political reasons...
...matrix of these Negro work songs, field hollers and spirituals of the 19th century sprang the first crude country blues. It was spread by bardic singers with guitars or harmonicas?beggars, itinerant farm laborers, members of jug bands and medicine or minstrel shows. Then, with the Negro migrations to Northern cities in the early decades of the 20th century, the blues gathered a more elaborate accompaniment around itself (sometimes a jazz group) and moved into theaters, dance halls and recording studios. This was the era of Bessie Smith's classic records. By the 1930s, a new style was forged around...
...book about a book about a man writing a book about characters who write a book about him. Under cover of this preposterous stratagem, O'Brien parodies, satirizes and otherwise spoofs a number of Irish social and literary conventions. Among them: the realistic novel, the bardic gigantism of Celtic literature, the circumlocutions of Irish journalism, the Irish anecdote, Irish prudery, and, in its wonderfully garrulous way, Irish garrulity itself...
John N. D. Bush, professor of English, commented, "The early death of Dylan Thomas means the loss of a richly individual poet. He was both erratic and inspired, but at his best he had a rare intensity of vision and bardic prodigality of utterance." Bush is a specialist in 16th and 17th century poetry...