Word: rhapsodist
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...Emersonic boom was his, and Whitmanic energy. Like Emerson, he saw the Greek roots in enthusiasm -- the word means divine possession -- and knew that the poet "speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly . . . Not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar." And like Whitman, his fellow rhapsodist of Brooklyn, he sang only of himself -- in that great American form, the comic-romantic monologue -- but found in the self everything he needed: "If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without." Celebration, not cerebration, was his thing: even...
...nymphets. At 55, she has been one of the most visible intellectual figures in American life for more than two decades. In two novels, a collection of short stories and five volumes of essays, Sontag has come to symbolize the writer and thinker in many variations: as analyst, rhapsodist and roving eye, as public scold and portable conscience. In private, she can be funny and informal, tilting her head sideways when she laughs, so that the band of gray in her hair fans out like a comet's tail. But on the page, she emanates an implacable gravity, a command...
Emerson was the rhapsodist of beginnings. In the disintegration of Puritanism, he cut loose from the granite Thou Shalt Nots of his forebears, seven generations of New England clergy. The 20th century has apocalyptic fantasies about the end of things. The trajectory of our thoughts tends to be downward. We are transfixed by Auschwitz and Hiroshima and Cambodia and Bangladesh and lesser barbarisms. The 20th century has rarely felt transcendental. What does Emerson's optimism have to say to such a civilization...
...African leprosarium to find a metaphor adequate to express his mood; nothing less would be sufficiently wasted, blighted, defunct. Querry was, Greene meant, A Burnt-Out Case, like the leper Deo Gratias, his soul far gone. He was a masterpiece of acedia, a skull full of ashes, a rhapsodist of his own desolation...
Citation: "Great American composer, lyricist, researcher, music editor, music publisher, trumpeter, modern bard and rhapsodist, creative genius and father of a distinct and novel contribution to American culture...