March 3, 2015
Night Thoughts (I)
Dickinson’s dashes and erratic capitalizations seem unusual or eccentric only to those who are unfamiliar with 19th century letter-writing. Byron’s letters, for example, are punctuated entirely in Dickinsonese, and similarly […]
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 […]
December 16, 2014
Patterns of Poetic Revolution
One of the most famous lines in English poetry about poetry is Moore’s “I, too, dislike it.” The interesting thing is just how much the best poets, historically, have […]
November 30, 2014
Ruefle, Redux (Part Two)
I wrote about Mary Ruefle in early October—and now, on this last day of November, I’m writing about her again. Tomorrow my workshop will discuss “Lectures I Will Never Give,” […]
October 15, 2014
Antrim, Fabled and Antic
If you’ve been teaching for a while, you’ve probably at some point included A Midsummer Night’s Dream on a syllabus. Perhaps you’ve blasted through the play in a week or […]
August 25, 2014
What About Foghat? (Part 1 of 3)
In her essay “On Being Ill” Virginia Woolf ponders (and wanders through) the major themes of literature—jealousy, love, war—and the writers who have taught us how to speak on these […]
November 23, 2013
Turning (Back) to Performed Language
Why sit down and read quietly? Is this really the only way, or even the best way, to experience language? The three central works of Western literature were never, and […]
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 […]
October 19, 2013
Betjeman’s Reverse Blazon: Assembling and Disassembling the Loved Body
John Betjeman’s “The Licorice Fields at Pontefract” is a curious thing. The first two lines go as follows: In the licorice fields at Pontefract My love and I did meet* […]
September 14, 2013
Genius and Unpredictability
We all know that which book or author “takes off” and which one doesn’t is, at least in part, a matter of chance. The process by which large numbers of […]
September 9, 2013
Human Beings Writing about Human Beings
I am, I am told, an “Indian-American” writer, and my novels are Indian-American novels. Sometimes they’re called “immigrant fiction,” even though I’ve never immigrated from or to anywhere. My […]
August 19, 2013
The Projection of Personality
The tightness or rightness of sentences, images, metaphors, the snapping-together of word and word, phrase and phrase—in other words, the stylistic elements writers spend years perfecting—are useless without the supreme […]