Word: dictional
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...Maria of Josquin des Pres was considerably better. Elliot Forbes blended the voices with a skill that made Josquin's simple lines shimmer with restrained feeling. When florid melodies did appear, as on the tricky words Nostra Glorificatio, their rhythm and diction were superb...
...actually a woman's part, demanding the majesty of the Ring's Erda. But Harvery Mole discarded all stature and gave his voice a harshness which was supposedly villainous but instead was merely ugly. Neither he nor the Spirit, Michael McDonald, knew how to pronounce properly either for diction or sonority: McDonald was so ineffective that Aeneas seemed the more powerful when the Spirit told him to depart. And the witches could not sing. The chorus blended well and enlivened the evening with their vigor. But they were plagued with faulty pitch, particularly in the woman, and fell apart when...
With his first two volumes, Fighting Terms and The Sense of Movement, Mr. Gunn became famous in England (though not, to our disgrace, in his adopted America) for toughness of diction, the swiftness and healthy outrageousness of his far-reaching, quasi-"metaphysical" conceits, and the organic tightness of his stanzaic units. In My Sad Captains epigrammatic audacity has largely given way to a sustained unity of impression. There is less concern with patterened formality here; the use of false- and half-rhyming, for example, hase become so ubiquitous that Mr. Gunn's "schemes" are mainly of assonance...
...article on poetry [Mar. 9]. The quotations are wonderful. Your final paragraph implies that poets have deliberately exiled themselves from the human race. If schoolteachers-who give most Americans their one and only experience of poetry-could be persuaded to ignore the 19th century with its artificial diction and clumsy constructions-and give their classes the poetry of today the human race could rejoin the poets...
...form, the poems range from the most elaborate metrical experiments to Christmas-card doggerel. The language extends from recondite embroidery to rather heavy-handed colloquialism. But Wilson's verse bears the mark of homelessness: it wants to break with the old topics and the exhausted diction, but it cannot get a foothold on the new. The very title of the volume is borrowed from the once-famous work of Edward Young, an 18th century poet, now, significantly, quite unreadable...