Word: prose
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...stop, and the moon stood still, until the nation took vengeance on their foes." [It] is as if a British chronicler, writing about King Henry V, came upon Shakespeare's Henry VI and Bedford's outcry: Hung be the heavens with black! and added, in his prose, "The heavens were hung with black when Henry died." Or, as if a dull reader quoted: Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, and commented: "Shelley says the skylark never was a bird...
...speech on the BBC some time ago, Mr. Eliot put forth his views on poetic drama, arguing that "there are things which can be said in poetic drama that can't be said in poetic drama that can't be said in the ordinary speech of prose drama." That he is right, there can be no argument. But while the dialogue of "The Cocktail Party" has wit, intelligence, and a genteel flow and rhythm-all of which are certainly desirable in verse drama-one is not altogether sure that what Mr. Eliot has to say could not just as well...
...foreword to "The Lady," Mr. Fry says that his poetic form is really "no one's business but my own, and every man is free to think of the writing as verse, or sliced prose, or as a bastard offspring of the two. It is, in the long run, speech, written down in this way because I find it convenient, and those who speak it may also occasionally find it helpful." Mry Fry's glittering poetry is fun to listen to. Ignore the meaning, and watch it soar and spin about the page or stage, like a toy airplane would...
Published last week in the U.S. was the final section of Msgr. Ronald Knox's brilliant translation of the Bible-Volume II of the Old Testament (Sheed & Ward; $5). Readers who are familiar with the graceful flights and sudden surprises of Translator Knox's Bible prose will not be disappointed in his mining of the beauties of the Psalms and Proverbs, the Song of Solomon, Job, Jeremiah and Ecclesiastes, whose oft-quoted "Vanity, vanity" passage he renders...
Technically, the novel is weak. The loose, rambling prose does out take hold of the reader until the genuinely rich plot begins to move by itself. Lamkin falls to take advantage of the dramatic situations he has devised, and much too often he uses the hack writer's crutch of divulging information about one character through the lips of another. It is true that this indirectness of style produces a wispy, unrealistic effect that is appropriate to the subject matter, but at times it becomes apparent that Lamkin does not yet know how to explain a character's motives effectively...