January 1, 1986
Imagining America
Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime by Elizabeth McKinsey. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. xvi + 331 pages. Notes and index. $34.50. American Silences: The Realism of James […]
January 1, 1986
A Monk Sacred and Profane
The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton by Michael Mott. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984. 690 pages. $24.95. There is something uncanny about this official biography of Thomas Merton. Like all […]
January 1, 1986
Men of Letters
Selected Letters of John Crowe Ransom edited, with an Introduction, by Thomas Daniel Young and George Core. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. 430 pages. $32.50. Randall Jarrell’s Letters […]
October 1, 1985
Searching for the Capital of the Mind
Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Others by Christopher E. G. Benfey. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. 128 pages. $15.00. Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender by Vivian R. Pollak. […]
October 1, 1985
The Blessed and the Forsaken
The Infinite Passion of Expectation: Twenty-five Stories by Gina Berriault. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982. 252 pages. $12.50. The Lights of Earth by Gina Berriault. San Francisco: North Point […]
October 1, 1985
Some Versions of Ireland: The Poetry of Tom Paulin and Paul Muldoon
We in this country had a bad time through the centuries when England did not like us. But words choke in the pen when one comes to describe what happened […]
October 1, 1985
Brady’s Boswell: Enthusiastic Indiscretions
James Boswell: The Later Years, 1769-1795 by Frank Brady. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1984. 609 pages. $24.95. Of course James Boswell would have been pleased with such thorough and […]
July 1, 1985
The Livelier Art
Icehouse Lights By David Wojahn. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. 69 pages. $9.95; $4.95, paper. Fire in the Conservatory by Linda Gregerson. Seattle: Dragon Gate, 1982. 65 pages. $13.00; […]
July 1, 1985
Faulted into Consciousness: Recent Writing on Auden and Eliot
Auden: A Carnival of Intellect by Edward Callan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. 299 pages. $25.00 W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage edited by John Haffenden. Boston: Routledge & […]
April 1, 1985
The Name of Frailty
The Weaker Vessel by Antonia Fraser. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. 560 pages. $19.95. This book teems with entertaining stories: Ann Fanshaw braves the turbulent seas; Joan Flower dons […]
April 1, 1985
A Lovely Ritualist at Play in the Fields of Poetry
All Ransom’s thoughts are dialectical, games of pieces in opposition. None can be expelled, or maneuver without bumping. ROBERT LOWELL, “John Crowe Ransom: A Tribute” Selected Essays of John Crowe […]
April 1, 1985
A Framework of Steel
The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume Five 1936-1941 edited by Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. 402 pages. $19.95. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. […]