Word: neurally
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...lost any of his 300-odd matches since graduation. Famed on the force and around the mats for his polysyllabic vocabulary, Wittenberg has a master's degree from Columbia's Teachers College, taught public school briefly before turning cop. He talks earnestly of "pectoral muscles" and "neural paths," is proud that he is one man who can mangle his opponent but not his mother tongue. After hours, he dabbles in oils and plays enthusiastic chess. In fact, he considers wrestling a kind of "body chess" ("You give a man a leg as a gambit"), thinks body position more...
Some of the earlier poems in this collection are marked by arty borrowings from the jargons of pseudo science and verse mannerisms ("the vowelled beeches," "the neural meaning," "the scurry of chemic blood"); in others, sense and emotion itself become lost in a game with words. But where Thomas is inspired by nothing more complicated than plain joy or direct recognition of beauty, his verse has a clear and bouncing simplicity-as in his picture of summer on a Welsh farm...