From the (London) Times Literary Supplement, John Barnard takes up this old question: did all the nasty critical press John Keats got during his short life hasten his physical decline?  (Yes, educated people used to care intensely about what newspaper literary critics said.)  For an older take on this conundrum, have a look at Shelley’s great elegy for Keats, “Adonais,” which makes claims similar to Barnard’s.

From the language wars, two interesting articles.  In The American Conservative, Peter Wood reviews a somewhat skeptical new book on Strunk and White’s Elements of Style.  This new study finds good old S & W to be a little stiff in some places, and uncharacteristically unclear about their principles in others.  Meanwhile, Liam Julian takes an equally intelligent look at another classic writer’s guide, the re-released and newly edited Fowler’s English Usage (first published in 1926 and still indispensable for anyone who cares to write anything well in English).  It’s very unhip–if you are an academic–to mention books like Fowler’s, because, faced with university students who can’t write grammatical sentences in the language they grew up speaking, the rulers of various campus Writing Programs would have teachers focus on, uh, not grammar or style.   (Such topics are “conservative” and “old-fashioned” and supposedly of little use to today’s student–hence it’s much more kosher to teach things like Computer Literacy and blog design and interactive group projects).  I wonder why our students continue getting clumsier and dumber?   But it keeps writing professors and pedagogical “theorists” in business on many an elite campus, even if the kids at said campuses can’t tell the difference between a plural and a possessive noun (or just don’t care–they long ago got the message that that’s OK).

Christopher Hitchens on some of our nation’s current top-dog demagogue’s weirder connections and more glaring idiocies.  Yes, yes, another article on why Sarah Palin is evil and dangerous to a democracy.  The Hitch is still lucid at times, and when he’s on, it is great fun to read him.

LASTLY, an NPR piece on the relation between race, language, and nerdiness.  The gist of it is that white nerds borrow slang from black English far less than their more socially popular Caucasian peers do.  Not sure about that–I myself am a giant nerd who grew up listening to and (sometimes) parroting hip-hop language–but nonetheless it is fascinating.  And you needn’t even read, because it was on the radio!   (thanks to Mary Claire for this one).

-TGR

I know a lot of you like Wallace Stevens. Although English teachers conventionally stress the “difficulty” of his poetry, my perception—gleaned from years of being that slightly too observant person at the coffee house, the friend who looks at your library while nervously smirking about people who look at other people’s libraries, the dude inspecting your book on the bus, a guy who will bloviate about literature on first dates (thereby often assuring no second dates)—is that he is genuinely popular. As far as poetry goes, that is; although I don’t like admitting it, I realize that the serious novel has a much bigger audience than serious poetry.

About Stevens’ reputation as an especially demanding poet. To a certain extent it’s a fair one: if for no other reason than his opulent language, Stevens demands a great deal of attention. That said, like all great poets he also makes you love him at the same time, and hence desire to pay attention. Love is at the heart of reading and is the basis of one’s taste in books.

Part of the Difficult Poet rep is the idea that Stevens’ poetry is cut off from history, from the real life we all agree to live, as if he were just a Connecticut dandy. Since the 1950s, when the New Critics got hold of him and used Stevens to help make generations of college students think poems are otherwordly, atemporal puzzle boxes, that misperception has dogged him. Without denying the complexity of Stevens’ work, James Longenbach does a lot to correct this image in Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (Oxford, 1991). Longenbach gives the requisite biographical details from Stevens’ life, which was outwardly bourgeois (guy was an insurance exec at The Hartford) but inwardly astonishingly complex. He also reads Stevens’ poetry in relation to contemporary history: this means dealing with the Great Depression and nuclear war as much as with the influence of writers like Emerson and Yeats, and Longenbach does it masterfully. A poet himself,with a writer’s intuitive feel for the work of other writers he likes, Longenbach is also a professor of literature, and he brings the scholar’s deep, wide perspective to his aid. Stevens comes across as an artist who spent his entire life meditating on the relation between art, the making and consumption of which demands time away from other concerns, and history, which is public and involves all other people as much as it does the writer, which is those “other concerns.”

The Plain Sense of Things is lucidly written, not dogmatic, and thoroughly humane. This is criticism written by a great teacher. As such, it’s entertaining if you have any interest in poetry. If you do suffer from that interest, you might consider scanning a chapter or two of Longenbach, whose work can also be found in shorter formats at places like Slate.com. The Google will point you there.