The diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner

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To Cambridge... Dined in Corpus with an air-marshal whose name I can't remember and then on to King Arthur by the Cambridge Operatic Society. Dryden simply could not go wrong when he wrote for the stage.  There is no corner of the cheek his tongue was unacquainted with - the scene where Emmeline recovers her sight is almost Barrie-ish; yet over the whole is the nobility of a Godlike rational technique.  The music is neither Godlike nor rational - perhaps only Gluck's is: but O Lord how lovely and how English it is, English in its inadequacies, for Purcell's small-talk is all about the weather, and in its excellencies, its extraordinary poetry and eccentricity, queerness, authenticity of imagination.

excerpt from 'The diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner' pp. 13 (118 words)

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