Word: syntax
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...death watch" for visiting Americans due to catch the boat train from the Gare St. Lazare for Cherbourg. The Sparrow saw his pal to the station, bounced off in the full dawn to do his chipper column on the night's adventures. It was a unique column -a syntax-slaughtering chronicle which editors were carefully warned not to unscramble. Said Playwright Eugene O'Neill of its author: "Why, he's the greatest writer in the world...
...group of Oxford poets, sparked by W. H. Auden, and including MacNeice, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis, staged a revolt against current English linguistic muddlement. By introducing modern technological terms into their verse, and by unburdening themselves of their subconscious minds-let the syntax fall where it might-they tried to make their language reflect life as it was actually being lived...
...Pound and Eliot are not the only anti-Miltonians. There are also Middleton Murry, Herbert Read, Bonamy Dobree. Against their stock charges of Milton's logorrhea, his maulings of English syntax, his Puritan intolerance, his philosophic narrowness. Defender Smith has a pat answer - "Not the thing said makes poetry, but a way of saying it." Milton "is world-great," says Smith quoting Carlyle on Dante, "not because he is worldwide, but because he is world-deep...
...Hitlerism"; denounced her "innocent, wholehearted, humane enthusiasm" as "only a disguise." To Mrs. Roosevelt's defense leaped the smart-chart New Yorker, which has social sensibilities if not a social sense. After a mixed tribute to the Pegler prose ("a nice combination of ginmill epithet and impeccable syntax"), The New Yorker deplored "discussing the First Lady as if she were a crooked wrestling promoter...
HARDY OF WESSEX-Carl J. Weber-Columbia University Press ($3). Centennial biography of the great tragic English novelist, which traces the originals of Hardy's Wessex characters. Hardy of Wessex offers an excellent dossier on Hardy's weaknesses-his melodramatics, re-use of plots, gnarled syntax, dullnesses-gives only a fuzzy clue to the central Hardy enigma: How, out of his sardonic imagination and crabbed style, could come scenes so vivid, characters so memorable...