256. (Samuel Beckett)

Beckett said Samuel Johnson was always with him; yet reading the trilogy, Molloy etc, one feels also (Kenner remarked on … More

218. (William Wordsworth)

Perverse as it is to redefine words against conventional meanings, it is nonetheless possible to loosen from conventional meanings an … More

Amy Clampitt’s “Nothing Stays Put” opens with an allusion to Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much With Us,” and the … More

The post on the Aeneid has been temporarily removed, as I prepare a review essay on Ferry’s translation for Essays … More

Poetry consoles the feelings of betrayal and disappointment as it does no other feelings because poetry is inherently awakened by … More

This post will open with George Eliot and then drift, possibly to return. For a starting point, consider one of … More

On either side of John Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” sit Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” and Tennyson’s “Vision of … More

Wordsworth is one of the revolutionaries of English literary history, and not just because, as critics since Coleridge have … More

If the project of the humanities is the recovery of the past, then a part of that recovery must be … More

His sentences are moved to excess with a wariness of waste. The inheritance of scrupulous, new-world economizing is carried over, … More