Word: prose
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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There are no pyrotechnics, even, of language; the brilliance lies in the precision. Much of the verse is spoken-and strikes the ear-as prose; where the emotion or situation intensifies, the rhythm does. Yet there are echoes of Eliot's own verse and a few faintly Elizabethan ones; examples of his skill in having characters pick up one another's phrases like dropped cues; and of speeches in which a key word is repeated several times with fine effect...
Right in the first sentence of the first story, An Habitation Enforced, a leggy prose takes the reader in stride: "It came without warning, at the very hour his hand was outstretched to crumple the Holz and Gunsberg Combine." The third and fourth stories, a political allegory and a science fiction (which predicts that in 2000 A.D. the dirigible will replace the airplane), are empty shows of the author's variety. He seems to do everything easily, and nothing really well. But in the fifth story, A Deal in Cotton (a wild yarn, all fever and cannibals, about...
Hands in the Brain. Childe Rosie progresses through Italy to the accompaniment of a mighty lurching, whanging and screeching of the prose mechanism. Anybody with half an ear would call for a garage stop, but Author Llewellyn doggedly goes on piling up mileage. His princess does not get angry: she "looked through scarlet lace." A soldier does not feel regret: "hands were wringing in his brain." Snowy's leg is not suddenly weak: it goes to "laughing gristle." Other Llewellynisms that would flood any ordinary carburetor: "A quick thrust of pity alchemised her feeling to a silt of motherly...
...pamphlet makes light reading. There are plenty of graphs and diagrams so that the prose is dispensable, and all sorts of interesting and important facts can easily be found...
Candidates must file their entries with Archibald MacLeish, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, in Warren House 3 by February 28. Declamations may be taken from English, Latin, or Greek prose or poetry...