Oxford transformed Moses from florid poet into terse bureaucratic writer

Evidence

The thesis contained no “torch divine o’erhead.” The floridness of Moses’ Yale poetry and prose style had turned hard, cogent and marvelously lucid at Oxford. Short, hard sentences must have carried his professors through the intricacies of parliamentary in-fighting and regulation rewriting with refreshing ease. He displayed not only a complete familiarity with a bewildering array of bureaucratic technicalities but a gift for the felicitous phrase. Describing Carlyle’s appeal to Parliament to muck out the “Augean stables of bureaucracy,” Moses wrote that Carlyle appealed with “excremental eloquence.” Macaulay’s speech on the need for promotion by merit was, he said, “the most masterly vindication of the principles of competition ever left unanswered.” — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 229

Categorization

• XREF: The shift from ornate to clipped, technical prose at Oxford is a motif in Moses’ formation — his power later rested on the masterful bureaucratic memo and report. — connects to: Mature Moses’s reform prose reduced complexity to fundamentals — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 453; Belle Moskowitz’s tutelage converted Moses from idealist into a practical politician — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 595

Broader Connections

• Mature Moses’s reform prose reduced complexity to fundamentals #expands (0.85) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 453
• Belle Moskowitz’s tutelage converted Moses from idealist into a practical politician #corroborates (0.70) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 595