November 16, 2012
The Literary Critic Considered as an Illuminator of Manuscripts
Of the forms literary criticism can take, the lowest asserts the critic’s taste in reading as a fact about a book; the middle attempts to draw general conclusions about […]
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 […]
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 […]