In the NYTBR , Margo Rabb discusses the frequent experience of disillusionment that readers have when they meet the authors of books they love. When they aren’t perfectly loathsome, writers are often smaller, less witty than the constructed persona of the “author.” But then . . . . Continue Reading »
Blake’s comment that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it is well-known. Louis Markos shows in his survey of Western poetic views of the afterlife ( Heaven and Hell: Visions of the Afterlife in the Western Poetic Tradition ) that Blake’s view of Milton’s Satan . . . . Continue Reading »
In a Poetry magazine review of Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (Second Edition) , Michael Robbins questions the categories of “avant garde” and “mainstream” with respect to poetry. The Norton volume and those anthologies like it are “predicated upon the . . . . Continue Reading »
Analyzing Plato’s critique of poetry, Schindler ( Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic , 295) notes that the critique in the last book of the Republic is “not in the first place a moral one . . . but primarily ontological.” Schindler . . . . Continue Reading »
Honor games are competitive, but the competition is always qualified by the mutual need of honor-seekers. Achilles wants to be the hero of the battle, and that means that Diomedes cannot be. But Achilles’s honor exists only in the respectful regard of other heroes like Diomedes. Honor-seekers . . . . Continue Reading »
Judith Shulevitz offers a novel (ha!) defense of the liberal arts in the latest TNR . Liberal arts should be supported because they produce science fiction and science fiction inspires scientific breaththroughs that make a lot of money. Shulevitz’s challenge: “Take any world-altering . . . . Continue Reading »
A reader asked Orwell whether he intended Animal Farm to condemn revolution as such. Orwell said no: “Re. your query about Animal Farm . Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a wider application in so much that I meant that that . . . . Continue Reading »
In the TLS , Tom Shippey reviews Christopher Tolkien’s recent edition of his father’s The Fall of Arthur . The poem was the product of Tolkien’s early excursions into alliterative poetry, a project he shared with CS Lewis: “The later success of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. . . . . Continue Reading »
Groves ( Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592-1604 (Oxford English Monographs) , 15-6) notes that Protestants had an early and strong tradition of theater: “Foxe even classed the theatre with sermons and books as a didactic tool, writing that ‘plaiers, Printers, . . . . Continue Reading »
Critics have again become attuned to the religious overtones of Shakespeare’s plays, not so much in a new-critical sense of tracing allusions as in the new-historicist sense of seeing how Shakespeare’s plays are embedded in and interact with the contested religious world of Elizabethan . . . . Continue Reading »
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