Word: soul
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...where everyone is more or less free to advocate schemes for the improvement of society, lively and self-confident minds are inclined to expend their intellectual and emotional potential on reform movements. The attention of the reformer is consequently drawn away from contemplation of the state of his own soul . . . How then can he be sure that he is the right person to prescribe for his neighbors...
...change did not come at once. In 1794 President Dwight of Yale was speaking for Harvard as well when he said in his "Essay on the Theatre" that "to indulge a taste for playgoing means nothing more or less than the loss of that most valuable treasure, the immortal soul." And as late as 1821 the Faculty Records show that three students were fined ten dollars each for attending the theater in Boston...
...Sickness of Today. "My soul is a submarine," Eugene O'Neill once wrote. His plays were his torpedoes. Half the torpedoes that he launched from the brooding depths of his imagination were duds, the other half jolted theatergoers from Tokyo to Copenhagen. When O'Neill first upped periscope on the U.S. scene, he joined that literary wolfpack which, as one critic put it, was staging "an ill-will tour of the American mind." H. L. Mencken was lustily swatting the "boo-boisie." Sinclair Lewis was baiting Babbitt. O'Neill tried to go deeper than both...
...version of George F. Babbitt is William A. Brown. He appeared for the first time in The Great God Brown (on the stage of the Greenwich Village Theater in 1926), an outwardly happy businessman ("the visionless demigod of our new materialistic myth-a Success"). His antagonist is an artistic soul both envied and victimized by Brown. The artistic soul cries out: "Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am L. afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of earth...
...years ago, Eugene O'Neill complained that America was losing its soul. More likely; it was he who had never quite found his. Yet there was a deep-down probity in the man and his work. He never cheated with his evidence, and his evidence came from the secret places of the heart. Though he manhandled the English language, recalling Dreiser's powerful clumsiness, he never consciously wrote a shoddy line. On the 20th century stage, so far, only Shaw and Sean O'Casey outrank him. He failed in his ultimate goal, to go beyond the tree...