Word: punsters
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Inevitably, much of it turns out to be chaff; Frost, for instance, was a tireless and occasionally tiresome punster. But from the mass of letters stretching back to 1915, a perceptive reader can piece together a startling self-portrait of the artist. Some of it will go against the grain of Frost's more sentimental adulators. People thought of him, Untermeyer explains, "as benevolent, sweet and serene. Instead he was proud, trou bled and jealous. Robert did not converse, he spoke...
...delightfully unpredictable. There was Cummings the crazy syntactical iconoclast who rarely used capital letters and recklessly (often unintelligibly) strewed syllables, commas and other gimcracks around the page. On the next page, though, he would turn up as a solemn, sonnet-writing traditionalist-or as Cummings the dreadful punster ("honey swoRkey mollypants"), or the pseudo pornographer happily smirking from the decks of his ship, the S.S. Van Merde: "May i feel said he (i'll squeal said...
...trouble is that more and more the author is a punster who sees the laughable relations between words, but not those between people. An Indian in the present novel refers to his mother as "Sweet Sioux." A malaproping wife says that a nominal fee is "nominal in name only." At best, this sort of thing produces a sheepish smile, and at worst, a wince of embarrassment. And De Vries is no more able than any other punmaker to hold back his worst. Possibly De Vries' worst refers to a "great" comedian: "Harry has many things that make him grate...
...chest muscles). There he spies the girl of his dreams-but alas, she loves a weight lifter. Can the underpected salesman sunder this pair? Sure he can, if he will only assert his baritoned intelligence against the rival falsetto. A falsetto, of course, is-in the definition of Poet-Punster Mark Van Doren-a guy with a false set o' values...
...deeply serious one. In a profession populated largely by somnambulistic hacks, his Shavian emphasis on the relation of drama to life is rare and valuable. But his seriousness never declines into solemnity; his awareness of the social significance of the stage is leavened by wit (he is a punster as well as a pundit), and by an understanding that dramatic criticism, is not merely a department of literary criticism, but something unique: an attempt "to give a permanent form to something impermanent. That," he says, "was certainly the impulse that pushed me into dramatic criticism--the impulse...