Word: enfants
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When television began to reveal itself as an enfant terrible six or eight years ago, educators like Robert Maynard Hutchins, then Chancellor of the University of Chicago, could say with some justification that TV, if unimproved, would soon reduce the intellectual caliber of the American public to something resembling the lower forms of plant life. "Who knows," said Hutchins, "but that the strange green vegetation which scientists have seen growing on Mars may be the result of exposure to television...
...wrapped in the academic cocoon of teaching, was downright dreary. The year saw the publication of the collected poems of Wallace Stevens, a Hartford insurance executive who puts a high premium rate on intelligence, but pays off as solidly as an annuity; and of E. E. Cummings. the aging enfant terrible who can be soaringly lyrical, typographically cute and earthily human, all in a dozen lines. It was depressing to think what U.S. poetry would amount to when these men as well as Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers and William Carlos Williams-all over 60-stopped writing...
...hilt. The only trouble is that there is no blade. The play's light volleys of wit come from a Coward who only plays doubles and no longer will go to the net; from a Coward who has written more like some fondly reminiscing oldster than a mocking enfant terrible-and with an oldster's fearful garrulousness. But however unthinkable Quadrille would be without the Lunts, with them Coward's very mildness is not altogether unwelcome...
...century. As recently as 1910, Speaker "Uncle Joe" Cannon protested against putting the Lincoln Memorial where it now stands, on the grounds that it would surely collapse of loneliness and ague-fever. Only in the past 50 years has the capital begun to live up to L'Enfant's plans...
...handful, such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens' quiet Grief (p. 72), merit long study. What Saint-Gaudens meant to express, according to recent research, was not grief at all but "the intellectual acceptance of the inevitable." The capital as a whole attests the fact that Washington, L'Enfant, and a host of later men foresaw the inevitable greatness of the U.S., accepted it, and planned accordingly...