PRESTOPUNDIT -- A Good Blog at a Great Price. Guaranteed.

"One of the most mysterious of writing�s immaterial properties is what people call �voice.� .. Prose can show many virtues, including originality, without having a voice. It may avoid clich�, radiate conviction, be grammatically so clean that your grandmother could eat off it. But none of this has anything to do with this elusive entity the �voice.� There are probably all kinds of literary sins that prevent a piece of writing from having a voice, but there seems to be no guaranteed technique for creating one. Grammatical correctness doesn�t insure it. Calculated incorrectness doesn�t, either. Ingenuity, wit, sarcasm, euphony, frequent outbreaks of the first-person singular�any of these can enliven prose without giving it a voice. You can set the stage as elaborately as you like, but either the phantom appears or it doesn�t."

"When it does appear, the subject is often irrelevant .. A lot of the movies that James Agee reviewed between 1942 and 1948, when he was The Nation�s film critic, were negligible then and are forgotten now. But you can still read his columns with pleasure. They continue to pass the ultimate test of good writing: it is more painful to stop reading them than it is to keep going. When you get to the end of Agee�s sentences, you wish, like Auden, that there were more sentences." Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack