Republished with permission of "The Wall Street Journal," July 16, 1993
Ms. Dickinson’s TV Western for… A cone of force, perspective sharp… pricked with gleams from sabers si… moves out at dawn to cross the pla… and save the souls at the distant…
God’s antelopes have eyes placed f… And horizontal pupils, features th… Employ to see wide spans and speed… From lurking predators they’ve eas… But carnivores, with eyes in front…
A big brown dog, gray around the muzzle, lay in the front yard of an old h… between his front paws a tennis ba… As we walked by,
Poets are, to most, myopic geeks, Effeminates with scarves and inch-… writing schmaltz with feathered qu… There are, it’s true, purveyors of… of teddy bears and valentines,
I am 88. I need much equipment: I need my walker so I can shuffle about, a lift chair to stuff me in the wa…
Elephants, Lawrence wrote,* let love bloom slowly “in their vast shy hearts.” But Lawrence dreamed. The beasts, it’s true, were once
Old novels have their faults, but… I’m sure we’d all rush out to buy… If on the jacket lovely Hester tr… To show us all a little cleavage a… New credit cards could quickly sto…
He could not paint a world that g… For his shimmered softly. His cliffs, cathedrals, seas appe… congenial things of liquid light; and even locomotives seem
I will not wear shorts, wing-tip s… I will continue to be grateful tha… I will not listen to any salesman… I will quit telling people how I… I will not say, “I don’t know wha…
The score now even after Jordan’s… up yours, you punk, confess before… she’d deceived you, Lance, her pre… see the Bible, frayunds, Isaiah f… four-car wreck on Hempstead, now t…
An Abomination* Ice-gleamed streets, sky an ebony… and a girl accordions her tiny car into the back of mine. She, carmine-streamed, head throug…
Drama 101 Belief in righteousness began the… Fanaticism breeds most violence: See Beowulf remove poor Grendel’s… To conquer (from his view) malevol…
“St. Chris’s statue on my dash Will surely keep me safe,” he said… But then one day he struck a pole And hit the dashboard with his hea… Oh, woe! Six-inch St. Christophe…
One morning Leda, sitting on the… Saw Zeus appear transmogrified to… She heard too late the honks and w… And so with godly force he conquer… (Some skeptics say she could have…
(George Meredith advised Thomas Hardy to fill his novels with bizarre and exciting people and events. Subsequently, Hardy in an early novel had a person following a person following a ...