Word: profounder
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...year-old work, opening with Joan at the stake and flashing back and forth through her persecution, trial and condemnation, revealed the basic weakness in the libretto by France's late Poet-Ambassador (to the U.S. in 1927-33) Paul Claudel: its tendency to reduce a profound, many-faceted conflict to charcoal black and Rinso white. But Bernstein gave the music the surging, evocative reading that its subject demands, kept a near-perfect balance be tween orchestra, soloists and his acres of chorus. Actress Montealegre gave her reading with luminous conviction and a fine sense of tandem with...
...appear, they lurk menacingly just behind the last hill. The major's men achieve grace or disgrace under pressure, but, unfortunately, they are etched in bas-relief-nearly flat characters caught in symbolic or merely arbitrary poses. The book is even shallower when it tries to be most profound, e.g., in suggesting that the major is the compulsive victim of his self-corrupting power when he goes on an irresponsible shooting spree to avenge the killing...
...sense of vocation. A violin note spins out over the hushed audience, "thin and glittering like a gold thread in sunlight . . . the echo felt like a kind of weeping in one's chest. A weeping that could not be wept." At novel's end, with a profound sense of release shared by boy and reader alike, the boy is ready to abandon his grey world of failing sight for the luminous realm of pure sound...
...other development found some of its earliest modern representatives in the German romantic philosophers, who sought to preserve the validity of various dogmas by taking them symbolically--seeing them as poetic anticipations of their own profound ontological discoveries. Thus Hegel explained the Trinity as a figurative approximation to his everlasting metaphysical waltz-step of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, and Professor Tillich finds the doctrine of the Incarnation still viable because it expresses "the principle of the divine self-manifestation in the ground of being itself ... the dynamic spiritual word which mediates between the silent mystery of the abyss of being...
...stylist's stiletto. With malice toward some, he dubbed Noel Coward's Design for Living "a pansy paraphrase of Candida"; dismissed T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party as "bosh, sprinkled with mystic cologne." Maxwell Anderson, jeered Nathan, "enjoys all the attributes of a profound thinker save profundity." Nor did Nathan spare his fellow critics: Said he: "Impersonal criticism is like an impersonal fist fight or an impersonal marriage, and as successful. Show me a critic without prejudices, and I'll show you an arrested cretin...