The Critical Sphere

Reginald Shepherd re-reads Donald Allen's influential anthology, The New American Poetry (1960), and finds it is much less "political" than many people think:

Looking through the poems and the author’s statements, though many of them manifest a strong will to transformation, the forms in which this transformation is imagined rarely correspond to political impulses, and often imagine politics as another shackle that must be broken or transcended. The rebellions which many (though hardly all) of these poets engaged or hoped for were often explicitly anti-political, as utopianism often is. . . .

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Joshua Harmon on the role of description in fiction:

. . .I have to agree with [William] Gass; the lines of books that stay with me are always of the dream-rupturing variety, those over which I pause in my reading—to work out an image, to enjoy a rhythm or sound, to marvel at diction. Given the prose cited as impressive [by reviewers], as well as my own experiences with editors and other readers, most people, even though they prefer the passive [John] Gardner model of reading, still like some minor verbal thrills as they read; the question thus becomes one of degree, and taste, with a sort of middle-class (or Puritan, or WASP, or whatever social group you like) disdain of too much showing-off. And someone such as Updike or Bellow (i.e., someone telling a straightforward narrative with occasional linguistic flourishes) seems far more likely to be granted leniency in these matters than, e.g., Gass. . . .

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Jim H. (Wisdom of the West) on Hamlet as "ur-story":

. . .We've been theme-blogging something we call the 'Ur-Story' as a purely human way of understanding the inevitable sense of loss that accompanies death. Indeed, Hamlet is precisely about Hamlet's response to the death of his father. The traditional response to such sadness and loss (whether as a function of honor and duty or emotional satisfaction) has been to find out who's to blame and exact revenge/justice. Hamlet, then, we might say, poses the question, inter alia, 'whether the testimony of a ghost is sufficient to indict and convict someone for the murder of a king/father?' The answer, of course, is no. At best it can arouse our suspicions, maybe give us a clue where to look. (Though, in Macbeth, the appearance of Banquo's ghost is sufficient to elicit a sense of guilt in the regicide. Here, though, the ghost is merely an aide to, or representation of, conscience—not a coming to or representation of consciousness.) And that is insufficient legally to convict or, as the case may be, exact revenge.