A TNR review of a new edition of Kipling’s poetry includes this unexpected information: Kipling wrote The Jungle Books , Captains Courageous ,and many of his most familiar poems on the crest of a hillside overlooking the Connecticut River, with a view across the river valley of Mount . . . . Continue Reading »
Shakespeare’s English tetrologies explore the demands and perils of political ceremony . . . . . Continue Reading »
Marilynne Robinson reviews Flannery O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal in the NYTBR . At one point O’Connor thanks God for making her his instrument, and Robinson ponders: “Every writer wonders where fictional ideas come from. The best of them often appear very abruptly after a . . . . Continue Reading »
In her TLS review of the Royal Shakespeare production of Richard II, Katherine Duncan-Jones points out that the play is “the most consistently poetic of all Shakespeare’s plays,” without any speeches in prose, even from Welshmen, gardeners, and grooms. The effect is comically to . . . . Continue Reading »
Reading good literature will make you better in dealing with people, according to a new study published in Science. The study found that after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social . . . . Continue Reading »
Dante learns a lesson from Virgil, and that lesson is about motion and poetry. Robert Pogue Harrison writes , that he learns “what it means to write a poem whose narrative not only moves but has movement as its prime directive. After the fall of Troy, Aeneas mobilizes the Trojan refugees and . . . . Continue Reading »
Dillard ( The Writing Life ) stresses that writing is as material an art as painting, architecture, or sculpture. Which means that you don’t follow the vision; you follow the words. Of course, she says it better: “you are wrong if you think that in the actual writing, or in the actual . . . . Continue Reading »
Annie Dillard ( The Writing Life ) “comforts the anguished” writer with some anecdotes about writers’ pace and habits: “The long poem, John Berryman said, takes between five and ten years. Thomas Mann was a prodigy of production. Working full time, he wrote a page a day. . . . . Continue Reading »
Willa Cather once insisted that “a story is made out of an emotion or an excitement, and is not made out of the legs and arms and faces of one’s friends or acquaintances.” The New Republic reviewer of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather quotes this axiom, but later in the piece . . . . Continue Reading »
No poem is as note-laden as Dante’s Comedy. The glosses are absolutely necessary, but as the TLS reviewer of Clive James’s recent The Divine Comedy observes, they can get in the way: “The trouble is that the supplementary material can be as off-putting as it is notionally helpful. . . . . Continue Reading »
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