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Literary Critic and Columnist

Micah Mattix

692 articles 2011–2018

Micah Mattix is a professor of English at Houston Baptist University and a literary critic. He was a prolific contributor to The Weekly Standard, where he wrote extensively on poetry, literature, and the reading life, including his long-running "The Reading Life" column. His work frequently explored major and underappreciated figures in the literary canon.

‘Wide and Starry Sky’

November 4, 2018 · Books & Arts, culture, Magazine

Micah Mattix on how Robert Louis Stevenson came to live, die, and be buried in Samoa.

Milton's Morality

January 19, 2018 · Literature, Books and Art, Shakespeare

In 2016, during the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, the Bard was feted by dozens of books, hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, performances of his plays, lectures, and a Shakespeare Day gala attended by Prince Charles himself. The London Tube map replaced the names of its…

Cracks in Language

September 8, 2017 · Books and Art, English Language, New York City

Remembering Pulitzer-winning poet John Ashbery, last of the New York school.

Systemic Racism Is Everywhere ... and Nowhere

July 18, 2017 · Books, racism, Today's Blogs

Last week, Amanda Nelson, managing editor of book blog Book Riot, claimed to have definitive proof of “systemic bias” in the publishing industry. Apparently, the Book Riot editors put their lab coats on and tracked all the unsolicited galleys sent to them by publishers for possible review for “a…

Charlton Heston's Public and Private Lives

April 23, 2017 · magazine_repost, Charlton Heston, book reviews

It's a moment that washed-up comedians and humorless TV hosts still use when they're running low on material. On May 20, 2000, Charlton Heston lifted a revolutionary-era style flintlock long rifle over his head at the 129th National Rifle Association convention in Charlotte and announced that if…

The Hero as Actor

April 21, 2017 · Charlton Heston, book reviews, Magazine

It’s a moment that washed-up comedians and humorless TV hosts still use when they're running low on material. On May 20, 2000, Charlton Heston lifted a revolutionary-era style flintlock long rifle over his head at the 129th National Rifle Association convention in Charlotte and announced that if…

Birds of Paradise

March 10, 2017 · Magazine, Micah Mattix, Birds

A bird that lives 500 years before it dies—sometimes by fire, sometimes not—only to be reborn from its ashes and live another 500 years is, today, one of the most widely known mythical creatures. Towns are named after it; its figure adorns coins and publishing logos; and it haunts plays, poems, and…

Minds Like Ducks

March 3, 2017 · book reviews, Magazine, Micah Mattix

Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric—a guidebook of rhetorical devices—was an unexpected success in 2010. David R. Godine, the noted Boston publisher, had planned a print run of 4,000 copies, but sales shot to over 20,000 following glowing reviews in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. Ward…

Jerry Saltz and the Art of Vacuous Art Criticism

December 22, 2016 · Russia, Terrorism, Art

The photos of the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey in Ankara shocked many people. Jerry Saltz, the senior art critic for New York magazine, was mesmerized by their artistry.

The Long Haul

November 18, 2016 · Table of Contents, Casual, Magazine

My family and I recently moved to Virginia Beach. It is, according to my calculation, the 13th time we’ve moved since my wife and I were married 20 years ago and the 20th time I've moved in my 43 years.

Bard for Life

November 4, 2016 · Table of Contents, Shakespeare, Magazine

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past several months, let me be the first to tell you that this year marks the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death. There have been essays on nearly every aspect of the Bard's life: his religion, his money, his politics, his view of gender…

Flowers of Evil

September 23, 2016 · book reviews, Magazine, Micah Mattix

Taste—to paraphrase a good line from a bad writer—is the hobgoblin of little minds. At least, that's the general view today. People who complain about sagging jeans, low-cut blouses, and high-cut skirts are either laughably old-fashioned or offensively narrow-minded. Those who take exception to…

Westward, Oh

September 2, 2016 · Magazine, Micah Mattix, Books and Arts

If there’s a novel that today's "microaggressed" students should read, it's Wallace Stegner's Pulitz-er Prize-winning Angle of Repose. Published in 1971, it focuses on the life of Susan Ward (modeled on the 19th-century writer and illustrator Mary Hallock Foote), who leaves her home in the Hudson…

Teaching Progressive Politics in Southern Lit Courses

June 9, 2016 · Micah Mattix, Blog

A panel at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association annual meeting in November plans to discuss how to use classes on Southern literature as “Trojan horses" to "build common cause with campus protest movements."

Has the Left Lost Its Mind on Transgenderism?

May 12, 2016 · Micah Mattix, Blog

It may seem, at times, that the left has lost its mind when it comes to transgenderism – either blindly supporting its agenda or dutifully keeping council. But there have been a handful of leftist critiques over the years of both the reality and politics of transgenderism. These have been mostly…

A Friendly Society

September 28, 2015 · book reviews, Magazine, Micah Mattix

It is often accepted without question that the New England Puritans were hardhearted religious fanatics who took pleasure in publicly humiliating each other and calling down damnation on the heads of heathens. In 1917, H. L. Mencken wrote famously that the Puritan was characterized by his “utter…

Where’s Waldo?

January 19, 2015 · Magazine, Micah Mattix, Books and Arts

Last February, Harvard’s Belknap Press issued the final volume of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Collected Works, a project that had taken over 40 years. It was conceived at the beginning of what is now called “The Emerson Revival.” Before the 1970s, Harvard professor Lawrence Buell remarks, “even…

Go Down Swinging

July 14, 2014 · book reviews, Micah Mattix, Magazine

In 1949, Vernon Scannell (1922-2007) was working at an English fairground boxing booth, taking a fall in one fight and avenging himself on a hapless challenger in the next. Behind him were convictions for bigamy and desertion, an abusive childhood, short stints as a professional boxer and a private…

Frost Unplugged

May 5, 2014 · Magazine, Micah Mattix, Books and Arts

In a recent story published in Harper’s, Joyce Carol Oates imagines what it would have been like for an elderly Robert Frost—fat and drooling—to be interviewed by a young, female college student on his front porch in 1951. The student adores Frost at first, but as she speaks with him, she discovers…

Bard of Honor

March 17, 2014 · Magazine, Micah Mattix, Books and Arts

Questioning the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays has long been the domain of amateurs, and Delia Bacon was one of the first. An American schoolteacher, and mostly frustrated writer, she argued in her Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded (1857) that the middle-class and…

The Human Factor

June 10, 2013 · book reviews, Micah Mattix, Magazine

Marilynne Robinson is afraid we are losing our “loyalty to democracy” in America, though her reasons for fearing this might (or might not) surprise you. Tribalism and austerity—a general lack of generosity—will kill America. Individuals are generous enough, she admits, but what is lacking is a…

The Secret Society

March 25, 2013 · Literature, Micah Mattix, Magazine

Nathaniel Hawthorne is an enigma. 

Address Formal

August 20, 2012 · Micah Mattix, Magazine, Books and Arts

The story goes something like this: From Chaucer to Wordsworth, English poetry was marked by formal innovation. Shakespeare’s sonnets, Donne’s epigrams, Milton’s line, and Wordsworth’s lyrics were indebted to classical Greek and Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Italian forms, altered by the poets who were…

The Reading Life

September 19, 2011 · Magazine, Micah Mattix, Books and Arts

Americans have always prided themselves on being a practical, self-made people, suspicious of newfangled theories in foreign books. Early cultural heroes were worldly-wise figures like Daniel Boone and David Crockett, and bookishness was nearly the end of Ichabod Crane. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for his…