On Language, 'Channeling' →
Without getting into my qualms with having William Safire, inexplicably, writing the Sunday Times Magazine’s language column, the latter half of his piece last week piqued my inside baseball sort of linguistic interest: poetic allusions in print. To wit,
Paul Krugman of The Times is doing his best to preserve the grand tradition of oblique poetic quotation. He recently wrote: “Right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.” No Bethlehem slouch, he; that’s based on William Butler Yeats’s familiar “The Second Coming,” in which “things fall apart; the center cannot hold” and “the best lack all conviction, while the worst/are full of passionate intensity.”
