Word: lyrical
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...attempt at a solution, from her earliest novels, through her boldly experimental short stories, to the great achievements of her middle period, and the less successful attempts of her later years, which were carried off by sheer virtuosity in her command of language. He shows how she introduced the lyric element into the novel, turning from the epic style of earlier novelists to focus on the moment, on the unique personal experience. This experience is given added poignancy by her feeling that "personality . . . was a unity arising out of continual change...
Today Johnny Mercer lives in a Hollywood bungalow, tailors lyrics to fit the suavely hocketing voice of his friend Bing Crosby, rolls up between $50,000 and $85,000 a year in cinema lyric contracts and ASCAP royalties. A one-finger pianist, he does his composing with the help of Tunesmith Harold Arlen. After a two-hour stretch with Tunesmith Arlen, he usually knocks off for an afternoon of golf. Says Johnny: "If I get a good title and the first couple of lines within two hours, that's a damn good day. . . . Most of my titles and lyrics...
...cannot be so easily and quickly uncrowned. Obscurity, still one of them, reigns supreme in Phemister's three love sonnets. Musically reminiscent of Donne, they lack Donne's fine-grained intensity. In "Furlough" Crockett tries with some success to fit a difficult French verse form to a mood of lyric nostalgia, but the same attempt in "Embarkation" does not come off as well. Both, however, are considerable improvements on his earlier work. Harrison's "The Trap" is a rather conventional cry of despair in the Eliot tradition...
...music critic in Chicago. Her two 18-carat assets: 1) a shrewd sense of musical values, 2) a gift of writing pointed criticism engagingly. Examples: (after Galli-Curci's ill-fated attempt at a comeback) "Instead of cream velvet jeweled with coloratura splendor there is an unsteady little lyric soprano quavering like a sad ghost pleading for reincarnation"; (describing William Walton's Scapino Overture) "A blithe, scapegrace carefree sort of score, it makes you think Walton must have whistled it when he drove his ambulance through the London streets, spiritually thumbing his nose at Hitler...
...reality, and to the problems of communication in a time which had no public alphabet, she once wrote: "One word is sufficient. But if one cannot find it?" She could not find it. But she rubbed innumerable words and insight against each other, achieved a luminous friction between lyric and narrative art. Her feminine intuition was strangely modulated by an obsession with time, and struck its profoundest resonances from the sounding board of death...