Word: menckenism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Basically Professor Babbitt's criticism is the same as it was some years ago, but Mencken is out of fashion, and his remarks mean far less to the contemporary student and critic than Professor Babbitt would have us believe. Essays on the primitivism of Wordsworth, on Coleridge and Dr. Johnson and the imagination, are studies more immediately interesting to the student of literature. Professor Lowes comes in for his share of criticism in the former essay, and Professor Carpenter is nicked once in the course of the book. All in all, however, they fare better than do Rebecca West...
...busy person. Few days after his inauguration last week he was to argue a case against the City of Baltimore, which for two years he has kept enjoined from building a viaduct which Taxpayer Henry Louis Mencken describes as being "useless as a suspension bridge over the city reservoir." President Gordon is a bibliophile. Some years ago Federal officials seized as "obscene" a set of Rabelais sent him from a European bindery. When Congress passed the amendment admitting recognized classics for private collectors, President Gordon persuaded Secretary Mellon to remove Rabelais from the Treasury Department's blacklist. Lately President...
...GLASTONBURY ROMANCE-John Cowper Powys-Simon & Schuster ($3.75). In spite of the considerable success of his two-volume novel Wolf Solent, in spite of Critic H. L. Mencken's dictum that no two-volume novel ever failed, Author Powys confines the 1,174 pages of his latest fanciful vignette within the covers of a single book. Hard on the reader's wrist, its insistent author's perverse philosophizing is liable to be hard on many a reader's patience too. "Folks 'ud rayther brew their own broth theyselves then...
...hear each other groan." He has sought comradeship in vain. The Jester has been in seclusion, incubating puns on the Shanghai situation. George Bernard Shaw has climbed off the apple cart to mount the band-wagon of reform (thereby adding another name to the firm of Wells, Russell, and Mencken, Ltd., Odd-jobbers Specializing in the Repair of Democracy, Sex, The Facts of History, and God.) The spirit of fun untainted by prostitution to a cause lives on only in the Vagabond's breast...
...Mencken recently observed, the royal road to entrance in "Who's Who" is birth in Vermont. That state has presented to the nation a wholly disproportionate share of its distinguished intellects. Of course, it may only be an accident that Vermont is also the state in which simplicity of living is probably more general than any other state in the Union. It may be an accident, and again it may not. Of the five states that have contributed most to "Who's Who" three are New England states whose soils are so poor that luxuries are little known. If plain...