Word: greek
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Emerson's best letters were written to his family on his lecture tours. They considerably spoil the conventional picture of New England's Transcendentalist-in-chief as shy, frail and retiring. Because Emerson was surrounded by people like volcanic bluestocking Margaret Fuller, semi-insane Greek Scholar Jones Very, zany Poet Ellery Channing and "this Gautama" Bronson Alcott, myth has made him one of them. His letters show he never wholly...
This year Greek archeologists have been exploring the site of Thermopylae, hoping to find some tangible trace of the battle. Last week they reported success-spears, arrows and other weapons, crusted with rust after lying 2,419 years where the warriors of Thermopylae dropped them. They were buried in silt deposited by the River Spercheius, which has enlarged the pass from a bottleneck 14 yards wide to an alluvial plain one and one-half to three miles across...
From Homer on, hardly a serious poet has been without a guardian conscience which he called his Muse. To the Greek poets, the Muses were goddesses who led a life apart from the bullheaded and goatish gods but were, like them, bland absentees. After paganism, when Christianity started trying to hatch out a more personal and better world, the Muse turned from goddess to angel-like Dante's Beatrice, who spoke to him from heaven. But with the Renaissance, poets found their angels nearer home and less angelic: in Elizabethan times, on the streets and in the Court...
Compounded of puns, disjointed syllables, half-words, it is closest to English, but Erse, Latin, Greek, Dutch, French, Sanskrit, even Esperanto appear, usually distorted to suggest both an alien and an English notion. The ablest punster in seven languages, Joyce sometimes combines puns and snatches of songs. Example: "ginabawdy meadabawdy!" (from a passage dealing with Earwicker's dream of a night out). Using a favorite device, he suggests that Anna Livia is the River Liffey by slyly punning on the names of other rivers: "he gave her the tigris eye," "rubbing the mouldaw stains," "And the dneepers...
...years ago and went to Trieste, then in Austria-Hungary, to live by "silence, exile and cunning." In Trieste his children were born. In 1915 Joyce was so busy with Ulysses that he scarcely noticed that Italy and Austria were about to fight until frontiers began to close. A Greek friend (Joyce is superstitious about Greeks, believes that they bring him luck, that nuns do not) got him permission to leave through Italy. Along the frontier, each time he passed a station, it was dynamited behind...