Word: prose
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Once the plot of "Intruder in the Dust" has been separated from Mr. Faulkner's unique prose style, its characters are found sadly lacking in fullness. The author's writing was frequently so confusing as to give the story an additional element of mystery and suspense it would not otherwise have...
...best popular scientific literature is written by scientists who having a command of their subject to begin with, learn to express their thoughts in prose clear and simple enough that the average person can understand it; in short, they successfully "write down" to their reader. Possibly the worst science writing is the reverse of this process; a journalists or some other unqualified commentator "writes up" to a subject, trying to explain to the reader something that he himself only vaguely understands. In "Cancer", Bewa Doherty attempts just such a feat and fails rather miserably...
Poet-Critic Lloyd Frankenberg started with a good idea. He would write a plain-spoken book to "provide a bridge to modern poetry for readers . . . brought up on prose." And since "poetry is an art of the ear's discrimination," he would persuade a record company to issue an album of readings by the poets discussed in his book. The result: this batch of essays on modern poetry and an identically titled album (Columbia, 8 sides, $4.95; or LP, $4.85) of readings by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas and other modern poets...
...Frankenberg shows how Poet E. E, Cummings intends his wrenchings of language, typography and punctuation as devices to praise the individual "human" in man and to satirize his faceless "public" front; how the delicate verses of Poetess Marianne Moore pounce on details of sight and touch in a way prose seldom does ("the blades of the oars moving together like the feet of water-spiders...
...midway through Pleasure Dome in an essay on Insuranceman-Poet Wallace Stevens, Frankenberg suddenly takes a deep dive into little-magazine jargon, while the eager reader waits expectantly on the bridge between prose and poetry. Author and reader never quite meet again, and from here on, if the reader is to get across that bridge, he has to do it by himself...