That purity went hand in hand with a simplicity that Stephen Sondheim would call “naked plain-spokenness,” a quality that has left Hammerstein’s lyrics vulnerable to the barbs of sophisticates over the decades. “Hammerstein’s work is full of life, but not liveliness,” Sondheim once wrote. “He is easy to make fun of because he’s so earnest.” Hammerstein himself once explained his success as a lyricist by saying that his own vocabulary was not enormous, and that a bigger one might well have hampered him, or persuaded him, as Philip Hamburger wrote in the New Yorker at the height of his success,
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