The rhetorician who practices “amplification” is not thereby misleading his audience, because we are all men of limited capacity and sensitivity and imagination. We all need to have things pointed out to us, things stressed in our interest. The very task of the rhetorician is to determine what feature of a question is most exigent […]
William Barret Travis (“Buck”) is the revolutionary idealist of Davis’s book. The Alamoitself was his shining and penultimate moment as its doomed leader who refused to yield his position, thus dying in defense of it. As soon as the fighting began, Travis reportedly rushed out to the North wall and, leaning over the parapet, began […]
James Bowie is cast as an absolutely fearless, daring, and dangerous leader of men — his impulsive recklessness matched by his extraordinary ability to repeatedly overcome overwhelming odds to the astonishment of all involved. He was a man of big ideas and fortunes, and men naturally were attracted to his banner, whatever the endeavor, legal […]
Dawn at the Alamo, Henry Arthur McArdle (1905) The corn-shuckings and square dances, the fiddles, The barrels of gin and whiskey, the jerked venison, Juicy bear meat, hot corn pone, molasses, And the girls giggling in corners — those are the things That make life merry. But there came a time When I neglected them […]
“The study of literature is hero-worship. It is a refinement, or, if you will, a perversion of that primitive religion.” Ezra Pound, from The Spirit of Romance The Bardic Dynamic focuses on the magnetic relationship between a speaker and an audience and the communication of a fundamental series of ideas. Traditional examples of this can […]
After many and long attempts to analyze complex problems by the aid of the method of analogies, you feel the uselessness of all your efforts; you feel that you are walking alongside a wall. And then you begin to experience simply a hatred and aversion for analogies, and you find it necessary to search in […]
