It’s difficult to know what to do with Robert Burns, besides read and enjoy him, and take fortification from him; he doesn’t seem to play games with words that invite others to play along, and the poetry is disarming for criticism of a certain fervent close-reading type, less by its honesty than by its plausible claims to honesty. Maybe it’s easier, initially, to appreciate the … Continue reading 176. (Robert Burns)
Showing, earlier this week, some poems I’d written to a critic I admire and trust, I received back some critical suggestions that struck at a peculiar blind-spot: the first-person singular, where it is needed and where not, how it shifts the weight of a poem, dragging a great deal in with it, and excluding a great deal also. To write, for instance, “I would say” … Continue reading 139. (Matthew Arnold)
One of the chief differences between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century voices of critical prose is that the former wrote for the salon or coffee house; for rooms that could hold fewer voices, where no voice dominated quite as easily. The critical prose of the nineteenth-century, on the other hand, comes, with Hazlitt being a definitive early case, to be written for a lecture hall, in the … Continue reading 77. (R.H. Hutton)
“Now Burns loses prodigiously by translation.” Thus Hopkins in a letter to Robert Bridges. Though prejudiced against the Scots, Hopkins expresses a fundamental doubt motivated by more than prejudice: whether dialect is intrinsic to Burns’ success, or whether it is a trapping of national pride and performance. These days, we mis-trust such dismissals. That English is a web of dialectic tissues, that the political and … Continue reading 76. (Robert Burns)
Born this day, December 24, in 1822, Matthew Arnold would have today celebrated his one hundredth and ninety second birthday, had he been a tortoise or a koi. A man, he lived to sixty six. T.S. Eliot said that he was more of an advocate for criticism than a critic, but that would mean a great many Victorians were not sure what criticism was; R.H … Continue reading 52. (Matthew Arnold)
I was mostly in my right mind when I blustered, a few years ago, that John Dryden was among the five great poets in English. The number five was arbitrary and probably a stretch, and rankings are adolescent indulgences; but adolescent indulgences can’t be given up without incurring some serious damage and my point, which I stand by, was that Dryden really was a great … Continue reading 22. (John Dryden)
