New Criterion articles from April 2005

New Criterion archives from April 2005

Notes & Comments: April 2005.
April 1, 2005... A thank-you to Ward Churchill We suspect that most of our readers will be familiar with the case of Ward Churchill, the professor of "ethnic studies" at the University of Colorado whose comparison of the victims of the 9/11 terrorist...

The metaphysics of Richard Wilbur.
April 1, 2005... During World War II the Allied forces in Europe had trouble maintaining a staff of cryptographers. There were few who could do the difficult work of deciphering enemy codes. Some got killed and others cracked up under the pressure of constant...

Travels in "The Waste Land.".(Critical Essay)
April 1, 2005... According to the calendar, The Waste Land is more distant from us today than In Memoriam and Leaves of Grass were from T. S. Eliot when he completed his masterpiece in 1922. Yet as Eliot himself proved, poetic time, like Einsteinian time, is...

Rochester's honesty.(Selected Works)(Book Review)
April 1, 2005... In 1974, Viking Press issued Lord Rochester's Monkey, Graham Greene's biography of the Restoration poet John Wilmot. Greene actually wrote the book forty-four years earlier, but was unable to publish it for fear of the scandal its salacious...

The fortunes of formalism.
April 1, 2005... Of the three books currently on my night table--a flaking early edition of the poems of Abraham Cowley, a coffee-table book on wooden boats, and a book from 1911 entitled A Study of Versification, by Professor Brander Matthews of Columbia...

Daybreak, Benedict Canyon.(New poems)(Poem)
April 1, 2005... Daybreak, Benedict Canyon Thick fog has filled the canyon overnight And turned it to a sea of milky gray. The steep-sloped chaparral and streets below Are drowned from view; hilltops across the way Form a low-lying...

The swing.(New poems)(Poem)
April 1, 2005... The swing She shrieks as she sweeps past the earth And, rising, pumps for all she's worth; The chains she grips almost go slack; Then, seated skyward, she drops back. When swept high to the rear, she sees Below...

Ethel Taylor.(New Poems)(Poem)
April 1, 2005... Ethel Taylor Bookkeeper for a small firm that made dyes, She boarded at my grandparents' and loved But had an allergy to strawberries. Strawberry imagery adorned her note cards; On her wall hung a still life of a dish...

Chekhov & Tolstoy.(Reconsiderations)
April 1, 2005... After he had written Anna Karenina, Tolstoy reacted against literature. He wanted henceforth to be a moral philosopher, a prophet, a sage, and a saint, rather than an artist. (How often we mistake the nature of our own gifts!) And many people...

Stuart Davis in Philadelphia.(Art)(Critical Essay)
April 1, 2005... In 1937, Stuart Davis received a commission from the WPA Federal Art Project to paint a mural for a low-income public housing development in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (Then, the neighborhood was a downmarket blue-collar enclave, rather than...

The Maastricht fair.(Art)(Critical Essay)
April 1, 2005... A long, thin sliver of Holland extends southwards, squeezed between Belgium and Germany. At its center, minutes from Aachen, is the town of Maastricht, population of 125,000. Declaring itself with some justification the oldest urban enclave in...

The New York fairs.(Art)(Critical Essay)
April 1, 2005... You may think the story of "The Armory Show: The International Fair of New Art" begins at the Hudson River piers that recently hosted 162 galleries from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Miami, San Francisco, Santa Monica, and...

Responding unkind.(The media)
April 1, 2005... A pointed dissent, written by a theologian, from my February column on God and the tsunami was received by The New Criterion a few weeks ago, and I happily set about composing my doubtless crushing reply until the editors informed me that the...

Robert Southey: pathos & tragedy.(Critical Essay)(Biography)
April 1, 2005... "A great many second-rate poets, in fact, are second-rate just for this reason, that they have not the sensitiveness and consciousness to perceive that they feel differently from the preceding generation, and therefore must use words...

Bardolatry made easy.(Book Review)
April 1, 2005... Stephen Greenblatt Will in the World. W. W. Norton, 386 pages, $26.95 Who among us hasn't read, heard, or uttered the complaint, "Isn't it too bad that we know so little about the life of Shakespeare?" Actually, we know more about...

Pitt boss.(Book Review)
April 1, 2005... William Hague William Pitt the Younger. Knopf, 576 pages, $35 William Pitt the Younger was, along with Winston Churchill, Britain's greatest Prime Minister. Unlike Churchill, however, he was as successful in peacetime as in war. He was the...

Hybrid etymology.(Book Review)
April 1, 2005... Camille Paglia Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems. Pantheon, 272 pages, $20 Does Camille Paglia contradict herself? She certainly does contain multitudes. How better to describe a homosexual...

The interior of a heron's egg: Michael Donaghy, 1954-2004.(Notebook)(Obituary)
April 1, 2005... Once I heard a well-known poet grumble when faced with the prospect of following Michael Donaghy onstage. The poet didn't offer an explanation and didn't have to. Those in earshot simply understood that Donaghy abundantly possessed a skill lost...