Dana Gioia writes in praise of the poetry of Elizabeth Jennings: “The English poet Elizabeth Jennings had the peculiar fate of being in the right place at the right time in the wrong way.”
Why Liverpool matters, and why he’s been forgotten: “Liverpool spent nearly fifteen years as prime minister, an uninterrupted tenure no successor has yet matched. Only two earlier prime ministers, Sir Robert Walpole and William Pitt the Younger exceeded it. Holding office so long itself marks an accomplishment, but Liverpool built a formidable record leading Britain through the final stages of the Napoleonic Wars, a peace settlement that won unprecedented security, and then social turmoil worsened by a postwar slump. Prime ministers before and after him dealt effectively with either foreign crises or equally difficult problems at home. Liverpool handled both with more success than most. Weathering those challenges, he set down a line of conservative policy with lasting effect. If, as an observer remarked, whoever writes England’s history of the period must necessarily write Liverpool’s biography, his life and career offer a revealing palimpsest for a pivotal era.”
The Folger Shakespeare Library has put together a list of online resources for early modern scholars. Check them out. They include an historical calendar, a map of early modern London, and an atlas of early printing.
In case you were wondering, it matters a lot who teaches introductory college courses, and full-time faculty generally teach them better than adjuncts, which, you know, is generally better for students.
Marc Chagall painting recovered after 30 years.
Edward Gorey’s illustrated covers.
Essay of the Day:
Are literature professors partially responsible for the election of Donald Trump? Eric Bennett thinks so. It’s a long trip around Robin Hood’s barn, and you won’t agree with everything, but it’s not a waste of time. Here’s a snippet:
“The humanities were once upon a time a laboratory for experiments in shared interpretation. They have become, like politics — and, in fact, as politics — aggressively individualistic and resolutely anti-historical.
“This goes even for those who write in dedication to progressive solidarity. A recent text embodies the disease we left-leaning English professors share with our political enemies. Joseph North’s Literary History: A Concise Political History (Harvard University Press, 2017) makes good on the adjectives in its subtitle. In a stock gesture, North excoriates the postwar establishment. He blames the New Critics and their Anglo counterparts for destroying the leftist potential of literary criticism. North believes that the formative work of I.A. Richards in the 1920s laid a foundation that stood undeveloped ever after by those on the left. Instead, John Crowe Ransom, F.R. Leavis, and friends built on that foundation a reactionary edifice. They ‘remade and institutionalized it as a thoroughly idealist practice, based in a neo-Kantian aesthetics of disinterest and transcendent value, directed toward religious cultural conservatism.’
“North has nothing to say about Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union under Stalin, the New Critics’ reconciliation with the postwar welfare state, or their great fear of mobs duped by autocrats. Instead he charges with villainy the moderates who wished to help prevent another world war. The figures North discusses would not recognize themselves in the portrait. North draws no distinction between the Southern Agrarians of the 1920s and the men they later became, the New Critics of the 1940s and 1950s. As Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. has made clear in The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950 (LSU Press, 2009), the war chastened and transformed this group from apologists for slavery to centrists for republicanism. But North treats as homogeneous the most volatile 20 years of American political history, ignoring the headlines and election cycles that shaped the minds he castigates.
“North declares unabashedly his disregard for the past. He is writing a ‘strategic’ history. He ‘reflects on the past less for the sake of seeing “the full picture” and more for the sake of discovering its main lines of force; and not even for the sake of discovering all the forces that were relevant at the time, but instead limiting oneself to those lines of force that still seem to condition what occurs today.’ Astonishing or not, this accords with the norms of our moment. The past is not an intricate reality deserving meticulous fidelity. It is a source to be used selectively in service of the Editorial Now.
“I don’t doubt that North considers his work a far cry from the shamelessness and ruthlessness of the demagogic media. I do as well, because his political goals resemble my own. But on what grounds can we insist on the distinction? How does a ‘strategic history’ that carefully selects its ‘lines of force’ differ from a Fox News story that makes the tiny something huge and the huge thing tiny? A scholar who denies the claims of history because they complicate the argument he wishes to make partakes in the forms of denial that are at the heart of our crisis.”
Image: Sunrise and aurora
List: Ten superstitions of writers and artists
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