Word: maudlinity
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...must be getting to be a maudlin old so'n so. At any rate, "What Is an American?" had me shaking with emotion...
...political historians will find little in Enjoyment of Living to give them an inside view of that magazine. Nor, indeed, will they find much information about any kind of American life-except Max Eastman's own. There is endless talk of his sexual and mental characteristics-an often maudlin study which is not so much a matter of enjoyment as an involved, embarrassing account of the continuous trials & errors of an uncertain and mentally harried intellectual. The book carries Eastman from his unwanted birth ("a gloom in a minister's family") to the night when, already married...
Ludicrous & Loving. Ready to grant most of the criticisms made of Wolfe, he admits that "no other important modern writer has appeared so often naive, extravagant, maudlin, ludicrous." But the strength of Wolfe's novels lies in their deep and loving evocation of significant segments of U.S. life; Thomas Wolfe's "image is the great national myth, the American Dream." No one else has so vividly rendered the inner tensions of ordinary, unintellectual small-town Americans-and done so in the traditional rolling phrases of the American declamatory style which Wolfe inherited from Whitman and Melville...
...from Lohengrin as an accompaniment is no more of a historical figure than any other secondhand dealer." Neither does he think that movie music is getting much better: "Progress has become perverted into calculating the audience's reactions, and the result is a combination of third-rate entertainment, maudlin sentimentality. ... It consists only in the fact that trash was taken out of its humble hiding place and set up as an official institution...
...that their conduct was partially not of their own volition, the powers that finally dispose of Germany's future should temper their firmness with merey. But they should not be either weak or apologetic. Germany should be reconstructed in a fashion best suited to promote peace. Maudlin sympathy, such as Mr. White drools, should not be permitted to sheme Americans into letting Germany write its own ticket...