Latest Posts

by Steven M. Critelli November 29, 2012 2
Literary Criticism

Reading Michael Robbins – Alien vs. Predator

While he writes as a new age poète maudit, following the example of François Villon, Tristan Corbière, and Claude Baudelaire, one can hardly recall a more confrontational voice that challenges the sanctity of everything, especially poetry, which Robbins cannibalizes with evil delight. The fading glory of the natural world and the Keatsian ideal, “truth is beauty, beauty truth,” hold nothing for him, except as sullied palimpsest upon which to write his inspired graffiti. In the Bizarro world of the irrational, profligate and amoral that Robbins apprehends, “The truth makes me hurl; the truth is a mistake.”

by Steven M. Critelli November 9, 2012 Number of comments0
Literary Criticism

Randall Jarrell and George Steiner – Contemporary Reading and Writing

In 1950, Harvard hosted a conference called “The Defense of Poetry” where Randall Jarrell delivered his famous lecture on “The Obscurity of the Poet.” To Jarrell the obscurity of contemporary poetic expression was less an absolute value and more the result of the decline of readers who relied on literary texts as a primary means of cultural edification. Twenty-eight years later, George Steiner (in “Text and Context,” the first essay in his renowned treatise, On Difficulty) came to the same conclusion, albeit with a different treatment of the subject matter, and offered a more draconian solution to the problem of the evaporating degrees of literacy among English readers.

by Steven M. Critelli November 4, 2012 2
Prose

Golf Whore

Since that time part of my internal life has been absorbed by this convergence of senses: the smell of freshly cut grass, the bounce of the turf under foot, the hazard wind on my cheek, the weight of a bag of clubs over my shoulder, the sunlight on a white-hot golf ball flung against an intense blue sky and falling to an absinthe-green fairway, where it bounces and rolls to a breathless stop, and the faintest of sounds that is heard when a ball is finally struck along a tightly mowed and sinuously undulating surface of grass toward the inevitable, unsuspecting hole.

by Steven M. Critelli October 7, 2012 2
Literary Criticism

Prose style – Christopher Ricks on William Empson

Ricks sees  Empson’s perception grounded in his “magnanimity,” i.e., his complete grasp of the sensibility bearing upon literary expression and the real-world circumstances to which it is addressed. So, when Empson examines the select authors in Using Biography, noticing that critical appreciation had focused on their misplaced link to Christianity, Empson finds fertile ground by attacking the question from another side, showing that this lens was in fact a way to misapprehend their work.

by Steven M. Critelli June 26, 2012 1
Literary Criticism

The Casual Perfect by Lavinia Greenlaw

Science has also shown that our sense of being “in love” is the product of the hormonal activities of phenylethylamine, norepinephrine and dopamine. In The Casual Perfect, Ms. Greenlaw has found a way to tap these hormones so that receptive readers experience a sense of love’s intoxication, its joy and pain, as if “jacked-in” to its Matrix. Indeed, this may be the greatest book of poetry about being in love since Elizabeth Barrett’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, for like that great work Ms. Greenlaw has made the trajectory of a personal love story the heartbeat of this volume.