Word: dictional
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...magazine's most significant critical contribution to date has been a lively discussion on the work of Edwin Muir, this year's Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer. In his first issue, editor Ralph Maud charged that Muir's ineffective allegory and poetic diction produce a kind of poetic chastity. The main value of Maud's essay was that it evoked a highly articulate and sympathetic defense of Muir's poetry from Dr. Harold Martin, director of General Education...
...speculations on death are the most acceptable. Although the poem is not inspired, it is well-turned, with a pleasing repetition of phrase structures. Both of Robert Johnston's two offerings are well-conceived, but their execution is sometimes muddled by clumsy syntax and a rather loose use of diction. Through the thoughts of a door-to-door salesman who feels guilty for having "sold knives to the women of levittown," Peter Heliczer protests against the impersonality of modern life. The salesman, however, expresses this protest so melodramatically and with such inordinate sensitivity, that it all seems incredible. Heliczer...
...singer to use breathing for dramatic effect. He actually learned to breathe in the middle of a note without breaking it (an old trick of the American Indian singers), and so was able "to tie one phrase to another and sound like I never took a breath." He carried diction to a point of passionate perfection. But what made Sinatra Sinatra, when all came to all, was his naive urgency and belief in what he was saying. As one bandleader put it: "Why, that dear little jerk. He really believes those silly words...
...continues, the careful, self-conscious diction breaks down, the sidewalk elisions appear. "Either we were gonna get the confidence of the people or perish. I'd been in the business a long time. It was the only one I knew. I figured I'm in so deep I gotta...
...because his facility with language and prosody allow him to fit the words and form of the individual poem to its subject in the light in which he sees it, where less gifted or skilled poets would find their expression cramped by a self-imposed strictness in form and diction. A comparison of two passages, one from "First Morning," and the other from "Corrida," shows this flexibility...