New Criterion articles from March 2001

New Criterion archives from March 2001

Notes & Comments: March 2001.
March 1, 2001... The tendency of our culture By the time the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee died in 1975, he was world famous. His multivolume magnum opus, A Study of History (which began appearing in the mid-1930s), had secured his place as an...

Sanctimony serving politics: the Florida fiasco.(2000 presidential election)
March 1, 2001... A great deal more than the name of the new president was at stake in Bush v. Gore. As columnist Tony Blankley wrote in The Washington Times on November 11, [W]hat is sticking in the craw this time is the brazen, slick, daylight ...

Schiller's "Aesthetic Education".
March 1, 2001... It is now about twenty years since the whole race of Germans began to "transcend." Should they ever wake up to this fact, they will look very odd to themselves. --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1826 It is still the question whether the...

Sylvia Townsend Warner's "very cultured voice".
March 1, 2001... The urge to escape is probably as universal, and as intellectually inexplicable, as the urge to procreate. Even the richest, the most beloved, the most successful, the most powerful must occasionally long to get away from their lives. It's not...

The potency of pure painting: Manet's still lifes.
March 1, 2001... On a visit to Venice, exasperated by the endless allegorical pictures and scenes from Gerusalemma Liberata and Orlando Furioso and "all that rubbish," Edouard Manet is supposed to have told an artist friend that "a painter can say all he wants...

Four poems.
March 1, 2001... In trying to keep in the English to the rhymed metrical regularity of these four poems, I have had to supply words of my own on occasion, to fill out a line or make a rhyme. That is a dangerous business, putting your own words into the mouth of...

Autumn day.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... Lord, it was much, the summer: but it's time now. Lay down your shadow on the stone sun dial and let the winds run loose upon the meadow. Command the last fruits to be round and ripe; allow them two days' more meridional...

Archaic torso of Apollo.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... We never knew his extraordinary head, with swelling stone eyeballs. Yet even broken, his torso still glows like a lighted lantern in which his gaze, damped down, not out, not dead, keeps burning on. Or else the breast's...

Leda.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... When in his need the god surprised the swan, its beauty almost scared him, he found, ravished-- a good deal flustered, into it he vanished. His shamming had already led him on to doing before he'd had time even to test...

The panther.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... Jardin des Plantes, Paris From bars forever going past, his gaze so jaded's grown there's no more it can hold. To him a thousand bars are what there is, bars only, and behind the bars no world. The paws' soft fall...

The egghead's "Gioconda".(Ferruccio Busoni's 'Doktor Faust')(Critical Essay)
March 1, 2001... The composer Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) was of mixed Italian-German parentage, but his life and career was spent largely in Berlin. In his lifetime, he was famous throughout Europe and the United States as a formidable technician of the piano...

Covering governing.
March 1, 2001... To journalists there could have been little surprise in the announcement that former Vice President Gore was to teach a class in journalism at Columbia. Not only did he have some experience as a hack on the Nashville Tennessean before beginning...

A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1970-1950.(Review)
March 1, 2001... His creed is a fixture. --Walter Bagehot on Macaulay It was said of Macaulay's History of England that its author never tired of drawing comparisons between the backwardness of earlier times and the progressiveness of his own. Whig...

A Life of James Boswell.(Review)
March 1, 2001... Peter Martin A Life of James Boswell. Yale University Press, 613 pages $35 Published in 1791, the Life of Samuel Johnson became famous at once, but left everyone baffled that such a tremendous masterpiece could have been produced by James...

Boswell's Presumptuous Task.(Review)
March 1, 2001... Adam Sisman Boswell's Presumptuous Task. Hamish Hamilton, 392 pages, 17.99 [pounds sterling]. Published in 1791, the Life of Samuel Johnson became famous at once, but left everyone baffled that such a tremendous masterpiece could have been...

The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Volume 2: The Elegies.(Review)
March 1, 2001... Gary A. Stringer, editor The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Volume 2: The Elegies. Indiana University Press, 1046 pages, $69.95 After the detail of these thousand pages, with their exhaustive bibliographical analyses, lists...

Mihail Sebastian.(Review)
March 1, 2001... Mihail Sebastian Journal: 1935-1944, translated by Radu Ioanid. Ivan R. Dee, 641 pages, $36 Right up until the middle of the 1930s, Mihail Sebastian, a young Bucharest writer, lived a life that would have been recognizable to any other...

The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters.(Review)
March 1, 2001... R. L. Barth, editor The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters. Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 423 pages, $49.95. No one aware of Yvor Winters's reputation for brawling literary criticism will be taken aback by his letters' ability to...

In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing.(Review)
March 1, 2001... Thomas Mallon In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing. Pantheon, 352 pages, $26.95 Thomas Mallon did not, in fact, set out to become a historical novelist, much less a writer of against-the-grain cultural essays and literary criticism, but...

Once upon a time in France.
March 1, 2001... It is widely believed, and with reason, that, in the art of cooking, the French are supreme. France gave birth both to the techniques of the haute cuisine--its many ways to slice, peel, combine, heat, and the like--and to its repertoire: its...

Letters.
March 1, 2001... Umberto Saba To the Editors: In the often thankless work of translating poetry, the translator is usually content with any attention that might be paid to his labors. Thus I suppose I should, and do, prefer Eric Ormsby's lengthy,...

Correction.(Brief Article)(Correction Notice)
March 1, 2001... There was an error in our review of Godel: A Life of Logic, by John L. Casti and Werner DePauli (December 2000). On page 77, in the sentence "If complete, it would contain an infinity of true statements that could not be proved by the system's...