Word: wordsmiths
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...DIFFICULT to read Elizabeth Hardwick's third book of essays. "Bartleby in Manhattan", without a growing sense of irritation and dismay. Hardwick is a wordsmith who cannot, apparently, control her craft; her essays meander and bring one at long last to a denouement of sorts, without ever really engaging one's interest. She writes with constant reference to pundits both past and present, but without really linking her own criticisms and those she cites to form a coherent whole. A Columbia English professor, Hardwick is strongest with literary criticism, but weaker on popular issues. All too often she writes cryptically...
Those graceful and profound words were delivered 20 years ago on a muggy June morning at American University. John Kennedy's Inaugural Address and Berlin speech are best known to the public. But when Ted Sorensen, J.F.K.'s chief wordsmith, is asked which Kennedy talk was the greatest, he says with no hesitation, "The American University speech...
John Lennon, 40, brilliant musician and imaginative wordsmith who, as the Beatles' poet laureate and primus inter pares, stressed the themes of peace and love, helping not only to touch but to transform an entire generation...
...much freer will Chancellor be to speak his piece as commentator? That too is something of a neuter craft. Even as gifted a wordsmith and observer as Sevareid could, on days when his brow was furrowed but his mind only half engaged, sound merely sententious. As the CBS News code defines the job, the analyst is "to help the listener to understand, to weigh and to judge, but not to do the judging for him . . . the audience should be left with no impression as to which side the analyst himself actually favors...
Nabokov is a brilliant wordsmith and an impressive artificer. If that were enough, Look at the Harlequins! would be a very good book, and as it is, little nabokovs will find it entertaining and, often, funny. Others may find it empty--Nabokov's narrator takes a poke at "readers who are all head," but there is not much pleasure for the heart in this book...