(no subject)

Authors who for some reason you forget how bloody brilliant they are when not reading them:

Shakespeare
Charles Dickens (in spades, poor bloody brilliant bastard)
George Eliot
Walt Whitman
Spenser

Damn shame too because you could make a case for those five as the best things readable in the one language we'll ever read with real sensitivity. Something too glaring about our birthright?

Qui d'autre?

Frost has a similar problem, where you forget that he's smarter than basically anyone except when you read a bunch of his poems in a row. He has a way of pretending he's saying nothing--no, next to nothing, because with nothing you'd be suspicious and look farther. Actually he shares this with Bishop, to a T--the poems of both are always fourteen and a half dimensions deeper than they appear, w/ every article, shrub and speck savagely allegorical. I'd say she must have learned it from him but she seems to have frequently underestimated him also? Of course that too could be calculated. There's a lot of him in her.

 

(no subject)

 I read Empson's 1st chapter of Milton's God just now and I think I'm in love--though I actually disagree with a number of his points, due to my temporary Milton expertise after those two classes and that soul-draining paper. But I love how he's arguing what he's arguing and that he's arguing it. And some of the malice toward Eliot is so delicate, so craftily innocent. Sublime! Why isn't this book on every shelf? Why not even a paperback edition? This is a literary critic where I consistently give a damn what he is saying.

I'd glanced at it while writing, but just long enough (c. one sentence) to see that it might get too close to what I was saying. Couldn't handle being swamped so close to the deadline.