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Critical Provisions

scraps of literary criticism–from the classroom, works in progress, private musings, public soliloquies, barroom disputations, and more.

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Tag: Empson

107. (Algernon Charles Swinburne)

Though Wilde mocked his pronouncements of sexual deviance,  Swinburne quarried queer desire for a reinvention of the metaphysical tradition. Even … More

anthro, Empson, James Smith, Poetry, Queer, Shelley, Swinburne, T.S. El, Victorian Poetry

62. (John Donne)

Central to Donne’s intelligence is a legalistic capacity to contest claims to property: since so much of the world cannot … More

Empson, John Donne, Metaphysical Poetry, Poetry

47. (Andrew Marvell)

Even Christopher Ricks, whose criticism is chary in its courtship of the political, feels that Marvell, in one of the … More

Andrew Marvell, Christopher Ricks, Empson, Poetry

29. (Anne Bradstreet)

How nice, on a sunny morning, to roll away from Lawrence in disgust and find unexpected pleasure. Mistress Bradstreet takes … More

Anne Bradstreet, Empson, Herbert, Poetry, Wordsworth

23. (William Empson)

Of his drafting and redrafting process, he explained: “the careless ease always goes in last.” The ease was his affectation, an affectation … More

Empson, T.S. Eliot, William Empson

19. (John Milton)

The wryly and slyly passionate William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral, at the end of the chapter on Milton and … More

Empson, Marvell, meter, Milton, nostalgia, pastoral, Renaissance, waste, Wordsworth

18. (Laurence Sterne)

Judge the bar to be set where you will, what follows is going to be worse than what I usually … More

Attention, Charles Dickens, Empson, George Eliot, Laurence Sterne, Robert Browning

6. (Ben Jonson)

My first thought was: how odd for Eliot, poet-critic who railed against the dissociation of sensibility, to write: “The immediate … More

Ben Jonson, Empson, Erving Goffman, John Hollander, Painting and Poetry, Realism, T.S. Eliot, Thom Gunn, Wordsworth

1. (First Words)

The title of this blog is from R.P. Blackmur, who’s in my personal pantheon of nine or ten great twentieth-century literary … More

Blackmur, Empson, welcome
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  • 398. (William Wordsworth)
  • 397. (Robert Browning)
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