Michael Fried’s books of poems include To the Centre of the Earth. He is the Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
To be nothing but fire not even the fuel that feeds it
wasn’t my father’s style. When the time came for him to die
(of a cirrhotic liver caused by poisoned blood
flushed through him one winter dawn to fight a bleeding ulcer)
he found a stone wall with, at its base, a tunnel
just too narrow to admit a man. Undaunted he crawled through
hand over hand to the other side.
‘What a bitch of a thing prose is!’ Flaubert complained in a letter to Louise Colet while at work on Madame Bovary. ‘It is never finished; there is always something to be done...
The upright canvas, some 4’6’’ by 3’, stood on Salvator Rosa’s easel, prepared with a burnt umber ground. The painter first attacked it, as far as I can see, with a...
Michael Fried, who is also a poet, has a dense, self-questioning, fervent prose style. Somewhat perversely he has, over the last three decades – that is, since his doctoral dissertation on...
I said, I once heard a story which I believe, that Leontius the son of Aglaion, on his way up from the Piraeus under the outer side of the northern wall, becoming aware of dead bodies that lay...
A family listening as their father reads them the Bible; a philosopher poring over a book; an artist, who turns his back on us as he draws; a secretary absorbed in taking dictation, and another...
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