Word: orphic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ellmann's Wilde is neither the corrupt seducer his enemies reviled nor the Orphic martyr enshrined by his champions. He emerges instead as a celebrant of mixed motives, a pioneer in the uncharted terrain of what would much later, and inelegantly, be termed the identity crisis. Except that, for Wilde, there was no crisis. The pampered, brilliant youth from Dublin set out to make his fortune by inspired conversation and the constant reshaping of himself. "My Irish accent was one of the many things I forgot at Oxford," he noted, characteristically telling the truth and a joke at the same...
...lived 13 days past his 39th birthday and has been dead now for nearly 33 years. Yet the story of his spectacular rise and fall, recounted in several biographies, numerous memoirs and even a Broadway play that starred Alec Guinness, retains an eerie, timeless allure. Dylan's saga combines Orphic myth with cautionary tale. Depending on who does the reading, the hero was either an inspired, fragile bard who fell upon the thorns of life or an overpraised, cadging drunk who finally got what he had been asking for and deserved. Thomas' Collected Letters will fuel such disagreements but hardly...
...strange that this orphic saint who dined on clouds became a prophet of the culture's materialism. He was the nation's first international-class man of letters. He taught much of the 19th century how to write. He gave America a metaphysics: he sought to join the nation's intellect to its power. Emerson sanctified America's ambitions. Like the nation, he was, he said, "an endless seeker, with no past at my back." He was the wonder-rabbi of Concord, Mass., our bishop, the mystic of our possibilities...