Word: syntax
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
Iowa: Democratic Incumbent Herschel Loveless' corn-belt syntax and his rumpled common-man appeal, plus rural discontent with Ezra Taft Benson, all combined to give Loveless the nod over Republican William G. Murray, whose polished professorial phrases were largely wasted on Iowa ears...
...avidly reads such books as Let's Go Into Politics, by onetime Connecticut Governor Raymond E. Baldwin ("Never admit you are losing; if you think you are, don't talk about it"). In rural Iowa, Murray's burnished phrases have less appeal than Loveless' lacerated syntax, and his urbane presence (Loveless loves to refer to him as "the college professor") is a liability, whereas the stocky, rumpled figure of ex-Railroader Loveless is a definite campaign asset. Democrat Loveless can pit his veto of a state sales-tax increase against Murray's campaign...
...Boulez, Tchaikovsky is "abominable," Brahms "a bore," Twelve-Tone Pioneer Arnold Schoenberg an arrested post-Romantic who "discovered the words but never found the proper syntax for them." Just about the only older composers for whom Boulez has a kind word: Schoenberg's late pupil Anton Webern, and France's 49-year-old Organist-Composer Olivier Messiaen, from whom Boulez sought composition instruction after giving Paris' traditionalist Conservatoire the back of his hand ("The composition professors were imbeciles"). From Webern, Boulez derived and refined Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique to its uttermost austerity, and from Messiaen...