Word: wits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...manner has always been topical, chatty, a bit brash, unfailingly poised, only rarely lyrical. Above all, Auden's work suggests that there is nothing a poet cannot write poetry about, and most young poets since the early '30s have borrowed his air of verbal freedom. With wit to spare, cleverness sometimes beyond bearing, and effortless technique, he dazzled his contemporaries well before he had anything of lasting value...
...Eleonore's cousin-lover tries to escape from the snowbound chateau, but in the spring his small bones are found near by. No matter: word arrives that another cousin is coming. It all sounds like an insane parody of bedroom farce, but Playwright Sagan wrote it with skill, wit and a minor wisdom as dry as an eight-year-old fig leaf. Virtually all the critics, including hoary Academician Frangois Mauriac, praised Chateau. Dissenters could point to an occasional over-cleverness and seize on one of Sagan's lines for their text. "Intelligence has become a terrible thing...
From the figure it cuts in the accounting department, things could hardly be better: circulation is up 81,500, to 427,000, since Ross died. The sophistication that used to be found in the wit of contributors has been successfully transferred to the advertising pages, which are the glittering showcase of the Madison Avenue specialty shop, inhabited by more Virginia hams and truffled pate, glittering gems and vintage brandies than any other major magazine. Last year's $17,751,924 gross and $1,985,785 profit set alltime records, and one share of New Yorker stock, valued...
...great whooping cranes of scholarly controversy. As a man who travels "full-speed in the wilder regions of my own, some say crazy, head," Graves ranges airily from poetry to poltergeists, from mushrooms to Majorca (his expatriate home). Though the form changes-essay, lecture, story, poem-the wryly cantankerous wit and charm remain the same...
...Julian and Aldous Huxley. Ironically. Scientist Julian praises grandfather's prose, while Stylist Aldous praises his pedagogics. Without much help from pedestrian Author Bibby, who bears down too heavily on Huxley's role as an educational reformer, the book crackles with examples of Huxley's wit as his other careers unfold-physician, biologist, lecturer, theological controversialist. The greatest "scientific humanist" of his age, Huxley was once tempted to become a brewer in Australia, an artist and a poet-though Huxley's quoted lines on the death of Tennyson prove nothing but that he had read Tennyson...