April 13, 2019
Review: Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Poems
Tagore, Rabindranath. Selected Poems. Translated by William Radice. Penguin Modern Classics (India), 208 pages. Some writers write different things the same way over and over again. All of Emily […]
May 7, 2015
How the West Inverted its Literary Values
In a true missing-the-forest-for-the-trees phenomenon, modern literary criticism has left unremarked, to my knowledge at least, the totally anomalous body of “great literature” that has come out of Europe and […]
January 2, 2015
When Goethe Met Napoleon
During Napoleon’s 1808 campaign in Germany, he visited his favorite author, Goethe. The two giants of the age met twice, once at Weimar and once at Erfurt. Andrew Roberts’s […]
October 29, 2013
The Twenty-Year Rule
Just as there is a sharp division between a 19th century Yeats (the “Celtic Twilight” material) and a deliberately developed, 20th century Yeats (the “Byzantine” Yeats of the more […]
June 3, 2013
On the Approaching 100th Anniversary of Tagore’s Nobel Prize
To understand Tagore, we 21st-century readers must expand our notion of what a “writer” is and does. No writer, Indian or American, is to his or her country what […]
November 8, 2012
Entertainment and Excess: The Great Literary Audiences
At the most basic level, what’s success for a biological organism is success for a literary one—whatever survives, wins. A sequence of words has an effect on a given […]
October 19, 2012
Now or Never: The Writer and the Age
One thing that’s underestimated about writing is how now-or-never it is, how suddenly it crowds out of a few people. Many of the most powerful, permanent “ages” in literature have […]
August 22, 2012
A selected history of selective history
For the past few weeks I’ve been reading John McPhee’s 1994 book The Ransom of Russian Art, a slim work of immersion journalism that recounts the adventures of Norton Dodge, […]
August 7, 2012
On “Literary Fiction” and “Genre”
If you look at Wikipedia’s list of the bestselling fiction writers of all time, you’ll notice that the majority are English-language authors of the 20th century. So Barbara Cartland’s on […]
July 22, 2012
American Poetry Critics and Literary Memory
The poetry critic of the New York Times, David Orr, gives us a capsule overview of “novelist-poets” in a July 20th article: “The club of novelist-poets is distinguished but […]
June 24, 2012
Riff on Goethe
Versatility is the least of poetic virtues. It may seem an impressive sign of poetic prowess to be able to turn out a poem on any subject, in any of […]
February 11, 2012
Reading List: Old-School Narrative Poems
We prefer our extended stories in prose now. That’s just the way it is. It’s not just American poetic culture that’s made this decision. It seems to be a common […]