Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter?, a follow-up to his famous 1991 article in The Atlantic. The article and book caused quite a stir. Gioia observed that poetry was no longer a part of intellectual life in America. It was not published in . . . . Continue Reading »
Bad reviews killed the poet Keats, so the story goes. Even though the tale has been debunked, it remains popularly repeated. We enjoy the éclat of unjust criticism, especially of the famous, even as we relish pitying the weakness of the oversensitive. The great film director Akira . . . . Continue Reading »
To seek publication is to seek to be judged. It is to learn, finally, what kind of writer one is (or is not) meant to be. Continue Reading »
A list of some of the most perceptive cultural critics of the last two centuries. Continue Reading »
The Claremont Review of Books has granted First Things readers free access to Mark Bauerlein's latest essay. Continue Reading »
The Bible in a Disenchanted Age: The Enduring Possibility of Christian Faith by r. w. l. moberly baker, 240 pages, $24.99 The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible by a. n. wilson harper, 224 pages, $26.99 The Bible and the Believer: How to Read the Bible Critically & . . . . Continue Reading »
What follows is a historical footnote on the Catholic fiction debate.
Continue Reading »
After being displaced by detachment and suspicion, aesthetic pleasure may be making a comeback in criticism. Continue Reading »
What do we do with—or, more accurately, without—that strange breed of writer, the literary critic? Continue Reading »
Today Allen Tate is remembered—if at all—as a Southern Agrarian or New Critic. His name barely registers in discussions of “Catholic” writers. It was not always so. Tate’s 1950 conversion from atheism to Catholicism was so well celebrated that Marshall McLuhan would say that his was “the nearest American equivalent to Newman’s conversion.”Why do we hear so little of this American Newman? I started to wonder recently why do we not hear of his going to Mass with Ernest Hemingway in Paris, his pilgrimage to see T.S. Eliot in London, his correspondence with W.H. Auden? Why had I not heard of his time as poet-in-residence at Princeton where he spent countless hours discussing the Catholic faith with Jacques Maritain – who would eventually become his godfather? A friend who knows his work said to me, it is because he wrote the poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” and because we think he defended an old South that we are keen to expunge from our stained memory. Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
