Among those brilliant readers and critics, Johnson, Coleridge, Eliot, and Empson, the primary engine of productivity, whether in marginalia, publications, … More
Category: 20th and 21st Centuries
357. (T.S. Eliot)
Approached from the direction of monumentality, The Waste Land calls for the literary historian: the poem is a post-Romantic attempt … More
355. (Robert Lowell)
“My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” has become one of my favorite poems by Robert Lowell and one that … More
352. (William Empson)
Aristotle, frustrating some, claims that “a life of virtue is a life of flourishing.” The statement can be variously … More
350. (Paule Marshall)
Paule Marshall’s debut novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones is one of the best American novels of the mid-twentieth century. When Marshall … More
346. (W.B. Yeats)
The early Yeats, the earliest aesthete, late pre-Raphaelite Yeats, the world is presented as a tumult of passion, fading into … More
345. (Wallace Stevens)
William Empson on the foundation of humanism: “the world is good enough for me; let me be good enough for … More
344. (Robert Lowell)
Robert Lowell is a genius of scale, disproportion, and incongruity; from the earliest poetry, the most intensely Catholic, he developed … More
329. (Franz Kafka)
Kafka’s The Trial takes as its subject matter the disenchantment of turn-of-the-century bourgeois modernity; but it presents, in what it … More
325. (Yves Bonnefoy)
On first reading the collection, I found Yves Bonnefoy’s The Beginning and End of Snow to be one of the … More