October 1, 1989
Purloined Sincerity
Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature edited by Elizabeth C. Goldsmith. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989. 296 pages. $32.50. The writing of letters—real old-fashioned ones, as distinguished from […]
October 1, 1989
Keeping the Covenant
A Walk with Tom Jefferson by Philip Levine. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. 64 pages. $16.95. A Walk with Tom Jefferson is an exceptional book by an exceptional poet. […]
July 1, 1989
The World of Bobbie Ann Mason
Spence and Lila by Bobbie Ann Mason. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. 176 pages. $12.95. Love Life by Bobbie Ann Mason. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. 208 pages. […]
July 1, 1989
The Music of Fatality
Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism by Herbert F. Tucker. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 1988. 496 pages. $37.50. “Someone had blundered.” So Tennyson’s poetry survives in the modernist […]
July 1, 1989
Still Playing Possum after All These Years
The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume I, 1898-1922 edited by Valerie Eliot. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. 639 pages. $24.95. Eliot’s New Life by Lyndall Gordon. New York: […]
April 1, 1989
The Theorist as the Letter ‘T’
Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens by Frank Lentricchia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. 259 pp. $22.95. Frank Lentricchia’s Ariel and the Police presents itself […]
April 1, 1989
Religious Immoralism
Jung: A Biography by Gerhard Wehr. New York: Shambhala, 1987. 549 pages. $25.00. William James: His Life and Thought by Gerald E. Myers. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. 672 […]
April 1, 1989
Indelible Otherness
The Eight Corners of the World By Gordon Weaver. Chelsea, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1988. 448 pages. $19.95. Cain was the first. Slaves, convicts, Jews in concentration camps, fugitives, […]
April 1, 1989
Rat-Rhymers, Shit-Burners, Transformation, and Grandpa Dave
Praises and Dispraises, Poetry and Politics, the 20th Century by Terrence Des Pres. New York: Viking, 1988. 246 pages. $18.95. Poetry and the World by Robert Pinsky. New York: Ecco, […]
October 1, 1988
A World of Ethical Images
Find You the Virtue: Ethics, Image and Desire in Literature by Irving Massey. Fairfax, Va.: George Mason University Press, 1987. 288 pages. $27.50. In this extraordinary book, the subtitle […]
October 1, 1988
Masking the Needs of Art
Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. 680 pages. $24.95. Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism by James Longenbach. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 329 […]
October 1, 1988
The (Class-) Structural Selfishness of Tityrus
Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery by Annabel Patterson. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. 343 pages. $45.00 Few poetic genres, it seems fair to say, bear […]