Word: idiom
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...poltergeist who tipped over the stuffed birds, broke the bric-a-brac and put the ladies into a flutter. It is the thesis of Veteran Biographer Frances Winwar (Coleridge, the Wordsworths, Byron, Shelley, Keats) that Poe's "ghoul-haunted" imagination has contemporary validity. For all its outmoded idiom (castles, princesses, etc.) Poe's death-obsessed verse speaks true today. In this admirable biography, Author Winwar lets a hundred well-informed witnesses speak for themselves and lets Poe rhyme where reason does not run. He wrote...
...some degree, all prison publications are censored. Newsmen at Folsom are ruled by instructions to show "mercy and kindliness" in print, "beware of seekers of free publicity," and avoid prison idiom, e.g., "isolation area" instead of "the hole." But the Angolite at the Louisiana State Penitentiary has published a cell-block correspondent's story griping about the chow. And the Menard Time recently printed a convict's poem to prison guards which began: "The screw stomps in on big flat feet...
Since then, the primitive idiom has had its effect upon others, many less inspired and less knowing than Picasso. There have been artists who recognized in the forms of these figures, masks and fetishes, a display of rhythms, colors, and impulses universal in nature, and who identified with it and drew from it. But there have been others eager to exploit the primitive motif rather than enrich their work with the deeper currents of primitive expression. Many of these have been commercialists rather than painters qua artist, and they haven't done the real article much good...
...Dublin slums, he educated himself between odd jobs (railway porter, cook, butcher, postman), went to sea and found no romance in it. His history and temperament have preserved him from the British novelist's preoccupation with class and the detail of social life. He writes with no special idiom or accent about the human condition. Hanley has been obsessed by his purblind Furys for a quarter of a century. (This volume is the fifth installment of their saga, the third to be published in the U.S.) Those who treasure the art of fiction above entertainment will read...
...more unadulterated pleasure out of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats-my young godchildren call me Uncle Possum-than anything else I've ever written." What would he like to write next? Possibly more poetry, but "it will have to be in a new idiom-Four Quartets brought something to an end." Possibly "abstract prose." Possibly another play "which would be completely successful theatrically and give the highest possible quotient of poetry." Smilingly he added: "That's aiming at Shakespeare under different and more difficult conditions...