There are no absolute lines in this. But there does seem to me a real difference between the things Empson – who is an absolutely wonderful writer and an amazing companion – is trying to do in his critical articles and the things Jarrell is trying to do in his. Jarrell conceives of criticism poetically. That is, that it should have some of the surprise and delight of personal revelation: "I felt this then, and I passed through the prism of a work of writing" rather than "this is a general truth of literature".
With essayists, we feel we're reading their first names rather than their honorifics. We're reading Clive and Virginia and Randall rather than James and Woolf and Jarrell, in a way we never feel we're reading William and Wystan rather than Empson and Auden.
You have written that the essay has an implicit politics to it, and that the job of the essay is "to drain the melodrama from overwrought debate and replace it with common sense and comedy".
---SPSmith
No comments:
Post a Comment