Word: essayistic
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...would be hard to find, in this day of soggy prose and involuted criticism, another modern essayist who yields such constant pleasure. (She wrote, said E. M. Forster, with "inspired breathlessness.") Unlike so many American critics who seem intent on smothering their readers with erudition, Virginia Woolf wrote as if she were conversing with friends. To read her essays at one sitting is too much of a good thing; they then seem a bit boneless and soft, their smoothness too consistently stylized. But taken one at a time, as they were written to be read, they are rare works...
...find I still preach best," Pastor Edmund Wylie once said, "when the congregation is against me." His son, Author Philip Wylie, felt much the same way. As a slick-paper fictioneer and essayist (Generation of Vipers'), he had profitably entertained large congregations, often as not by insulting them. But as a newspaper columnist he had emptied the church. Off My Chest was a vitriolic series of sermons against clericalism, bigotry, and the worship of "Mom." Last week, after three years as a syndicated columnist, Philip Wylie admitted defeat...
...this theme, Holbrook Jackson, eminent British bibliophile, essayist and editor, begins a leisurely but purposeful wandering through the land of literature. He comments widely on the aims, techniques, and inner lives of writers from Horace to Hemingway, trying always to get behind the props and wings of the literary stage...
...Risk of Dyspepsia. Reading, says Essayist Jackson, is an art. The real reader is a collaborating artist in the production of literature. "The writer expresses himself in a book, the reader through a book. Reading at its most intense becomes writing by proxy. When Schopenhauer said that reading was merely thinking with other people's brains, he was right. Reading is even further in that direction. IHs becoming someone else for the time being . . . and when we read we do not so much enter into the souls of others; we let them enter into us. We become Shakespeare...
York tempered his pronouncement with a word or two of archepiscopal caution. For one thing, confiscation of State endowments would deal the Church a grave financial blow. Far worse, Disestablishment "would be regarded, however illegitimately, as the national repudiation of religion." Further, the Archbishop cited what Poet-Essayist T. S. Eliot wrote in The Idea of a Christian Society: "The very act of disestablishment separates [a church] more definitely and irrevocably from the life of the nation than if it had never been established...