Word: dionysian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...series of lectures at Harvard in 1940 he tried to explain what he means: "The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free . . . The Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion . . . must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must finally be made to submit to the law: Apollo demands...
...Moscow hospital bed, Russia's Dionysian cinema genius Sergei Eisenstein rolled and roared with joy. The cause of his delight was the medical opinion that he was dead. He had died, according to doctors, during his celebration of the completion of Part II of his three-part chef-d'oeuvre, Ivan the Terrible. Dancing with a young girl had been too much for his heart and he had collapsed...
...millionaire who likes to cry hopefully to his guests, "Happyhappy-HAPPY!" In the course of their work the tourists watch a Mexican peasant wedding and several pieces of professional entertainment, notably by Miss Brazil (Louise Burnett), who can span three octaves without turning a hair, and Cuba's dionysian Miguelito Valdes, who suggests a three-power compromise between Cab Galloway, Orson Welles and Rube Bandleader Spike Jones...
Before long the girl-shy Whirlwind, drunk with love, is as friskily unmanageable as a brontosaurus in a bridal suite. (Good scene: his Dionysian rumba with exhausted Miss Russell in her apartment, to ear-cleaving radio music, deep in the night.) Meanwhile the Honest Man (Brian Aherne), who is writing Miss Russell's profile, loafs around with his hat jammed on (to prove he is a journalist), befriends the bemused Whirlwind, sneers at double-dealing Miss Russell, grabs her the instant she betrays a dawning sense of decency...
...that were all there was to the book it would be plenty, though no man could quite judge of what. But for Dionysian William Faulkner the story is, as usual, a mere set of springboards and parallel bars for the display of one of the most dazzling and inchoate talents in contemporary letters. The reader who takes in the show exposes himself to so furious a narcotic cyclone of Poe, Melville, Mark Twain and original Faulkner that the best he can do is to hang on to his hat and wits. As the storm screams past he may discern...