Word: wordsworth
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...obscure. It is. Here is an example. "He could be called versatile (by his critics) because he knew such a virtue to be incapable of doing well two things at once." Here is another example. "Schwartz, however, in the preface to Genesis, allies himself with the '"morbid pedestrianism" of Wordsworth and Hardy', and a reactionary romanticism we think of as typical of the genre. He has, moreover, rehearsed a certain formalism just as Coleridge corrected Wordsworth's mistaken nations about diction: besides the 'heavy accent and the slowness' he prefers, he has elsewhere explained that it is easier to write...
...shortly before World War II, "our world seems particularly susceptible to brutality. There is a touch of nostalgia in the pleasure we take in gangster novels, in characters who have so agreeably simplified their emotions that they have begun living again at a level below the cerebral. We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a revolution, and those half-castes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea. It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay forever at that level, but when...
...knew something about symphonies and poetry. On the walls of the classroom, he hung reproductions of paintings by artists Bunk did not know: Cezanne, Bellini, Rouault, Rousseau, Winslow Homer. And on the blackboard, he wrote things like "The best portion of a good man's life, according to Wordsworth, is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love...
...Wordsworth was a romanticist, Addison wrote newspaper articles in 18th Century London, Newman was a Cardinal, and Donne did not always practice what he preached. These are some of the miscellaneous and disconnected facts about English literary history, which are about all most of the men who are taking English 1 will ever remember. This gigantic survey course, which attempts to cover all of English literature from Beowulf to Beerbohm, is required for all English concentrators and has been consistently criticized through the years as being exhausting, boring, and worthless...
Though he warns that ,the human implications of truth are tragic, he does not condemn the pursuit of happiness which modern civilization, more than any other, has legitimatized. But he implies that the pursuit of happiness loses measure, just as optimism loses reality, if neither is aware of what Wordsworth called "the still sad music of humanity." And he gives a discipline of mind and a structure of meaning to the tragic cry of Philosopher Miguel de Unamuno: "A Miserere sung in a cathedral by a multitude tormented by destiny has as much value as a philosophy...