Word: tone
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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HEARING MANY of these poems--there are thirteen in all--is a completely different experience from reading them. Plath's tone or inflection often brings out a sinister sadness that is only latent in the printed word. The well-known poem "Cut," for instance, can be read merely as a strangely detached, almost innocent investigation of an everyday occurrence; but when Plath reads it, it is savage...
...interested at that particular moment in conveying things through the eyes of the New York photographers. They don't know the rental agent's name so neither will McPhee's readers. By concerning himself with things like point of view and particularly with achieving a certain kind of narrative tone, McPhee sacrifices the kind of reportorial strictness and tone that readers of journalism are used...
...tone is the key to it all; it lets McPhee write in an unusually personal way. He begins an article about Loch Ness, home of the monster, by telling his readers that he and his wife and four daughters were sitting next to the Loch picnicking on "milk, potato sticks, lambs' tongues, shortbread, white chocolate, Mini-Dunlop cheese." Another article is about a basketball game McPhee played in some time ago. Another, about a white-water canoeing championship, spends much of its time talking about the kinds of canoes McPhee paddled in as a child and how he went about...
McPhee, however, has accomplished quite a trick: he has gotten himself so perfectly attuned to his audience that he can write the way he does without beginning to grate. Part of it is that he is an extraordinarily meticulous writer, able to achieve an effortless, limpid tone without leaving any loose sentence ends, or losing the thread of his story, or using words that do not belong exactly where they are. His articles seem to convey information almost by accident and to flow along without any forethought, McPhee having just sat down and written out his impressions of something...
...decay of Atlantic City. In both McPhee the educated family man on vaction fades away; he is not present at all in the racing article, and he takes on an unusual, ghostly Monopoly-playing persona in Atlantic City. The removal helps, because it gets rid of the chummy, comfortable tone that dominates the rest of the book. McPhee's writing works best when he is confronting the unfamiliar and making an effort to convey it, not when he's recounting things that only reinforce his own view of the world...