Eliot had his own doubts about the desirability of an academic form of literary criticism. His misgivings stemmed, in part, from his belief that the qualities needed to be a critic included a kind of taste that developed in a gradual, organic manner, rather than being a skill to be taught. In the Introduction to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Eliot stated that he was … Read the rest
Tag: poet
Abandonment in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Abandonment in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou’s autobiographical novel opens with three-year-old Maya and her four-year-old bother Bailey traveling alone across the United States wearing wrist tags that read “To Whom It May Concern.” The siblings are being sent away from their newly divorced parents to live with their paternal grandmother, and Maya reacts by pretending her parents are dead. “I couldn’t believe that our mother … Read the rest
The House of the Spirits
The House of the Spirits (1982)
Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, published in 1982, tells the history of several generations of the Trueba family against the backdrop of Chile’s socialist government and the 1973 military coup that gave rise to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Clara, who regularly converses with the spirit world, marries Esteban Trueba, a wealthy landowner who regularly rapes peasant women working on his hacienda. … Read the rest
Literary Scripturism
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Character” (1866)
If there is anything in art that can take the place of religion, we should
like to see it.
Josiah Gilbert Holland, Every-Day Topics, 2nd series (1882)
That American thought before 1865 was markedly religiocentric is a
scholarly commonplace. Such was especially true of New England, owing
to the Puritan imprint, which Enlightenment … Read the rest