Word: syntax
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...more than 20 years ago, English is his most beloved enemy, but Waterloo is not in his capricious vocabulary, and as the stars with which he decorates his name on the blackboard testify, his ego is still imperial. He attacks sense and syntax with the same insouciance that originally made him such a verbal charmer. To Hyman Kaplan, the discoverer of the laws of gravity is "Isaac Newman,'' the plural of blouse is "blice'' and the opposite of nightmare is "daymare...
Carey illustrates all his points with apt quotations from recent books or newspapers. His commentary is pellucid; and it avoids all, but the most elementary technical terms of grammar and syntax. From time to time evidences of a delightful wit even crop...
...with striking images, and create effective moods. In his best poems this ability is exploited, and so the simple lyrics are the most effective, and those of a more didactic, or purely symbolic nature tend to fall flat. Mr. Phelps also has a tendency to use slight inaccuracies in syntax, under the impression that they are eminently subtle and thus convey a nuance which could not be obtained any other way. Needless to say, the subtlety remains in the poet's mind, somewhat beyond the reach of the reader, and so phrases such as "the chairs obliquely ignore each other...
Despite the simplicity of his syntax, Roethke is often as impenetrable as many another modern and lesser poet. If always seeming to promise more than any one poem entirely achieves, always seeming on the verge of breaking through his obscurities into the clear radiance of revelation, he still achieves more than most moderns can even hint at. His best lines have the directness of that other master of obscure simplicities, William Blake. Of hope: "My gates are all caves." Of love: "The pure admire the pure, and live alone; I love a woman with an empty face." Of the clear...
Historian-Educator Jacques Barzun can be a mean critter when aroused, as he has been of late by contemporary prose (a "mixture of jargon, cant, vogue words, and loose syntax"). Higher Learning (he could find only "an immense amount of Lower Learning" in the U.S.), and the Ph.D. racket (TIME, Nov. 25, 1957). In American Scholar Barzun castigates his latest victim: detective stories, which, he says, have fallen on evil days, turning increasingly into "novels of haze and daze...