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His Own Private Armenia

Anne Hollander: Arshile Gorky, 1 April 2004

Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work 
by Hayden Herrera.
Bloomsbury, 767 pp., £35, October 2003, 9780747566472
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Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective of Drawings 
edited by Janie Lee and Melvin Lader.
Abrams, 272 pp., £30, December 2003, 0 87427 135 5
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... work of the great Hudson River School painters of the early 19th, or of Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer in the late 19th, or of the Ash Can School in turn of the century New York. Like those earlier Americans, they wanted to make the point that their themes were indigenous, not borrowed from the Old World. At the turn of the century, on the other hand, John ...

Dreadful Apprehensions

Clare Bucknell: Collier and Fielding, 25 October 2018

The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable 
by Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier, edited by Carolyn Woodward.
Kentucky, 406 pp., £86.50, November 2017, 978 0 8131 7410 5
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... the full pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses and parroting the ‘acknowledged authority’ on Homer are all forms of performative smartness that ‘the Cry think necessary towards shining in conversation’, the narrator observes; they are also yardsticks for judging and deriding the lesser brilliance of others. ‘If any person had forgot who was the ...

Half-Wrecked

Mary Beard: What’s left of John Soane, 17 February 2000

John Soane: An Accidental Romantic 
by Gillian Darley.
Yale, 358 pp., £25, September 1999, 0 300 08165 0
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John Soane, Architect: Master of Space and Light 
by Margaret Richardson and Mary-Anne Stevens.
Royal Academy, 302 pp., £45, September 1999, 0 300 08195 2
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Sir John Soane and the Country Estate 
by Ptolemy Dean.
Ashgate, 204 pp., £37.50, October 1999, 1 84014 293 6
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... and so on. Only to be upstaged by the final, and instantly recognisable, figure of ‘Homer Simpsoane’, who (obviously having read Darley’s frank biography) has no trouble at all in identifying this obsessive and sadistic father as ‘the first Dysfunctionalist’. The 20th-century enthusiasm for Soane’s work might seem to be just another ...

The Call of the Weird

Michael Ledger-Lomas: Last Gasp Apparitions, 4 April 2024

Andrew Lang: Writer, Folklorist, Democratic Intellect 
by John Sloan.
Oxford, 285 pp., £78, June 2023, 978 0 19 286687 5
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Troubled by Faith: Insanity and the Supernatural in the Age of the Asylum 
by Owen Davies.
Oxford, 350 pp., £25, September 2023, 978 0 19 887300 6
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... biography. Volumes of verse (generally good). Novels (generally not good). A prose translation of Homer (durable). Lives of a Tory statesman and of Walter Scott’s biographer (solid). Revisionist histories of Scotland (unpopular in Scotland). He only dropped his pen to whack golf balls, flick fishing rods or browse the bookstalls by the Seine (Henry James ...

Witchcraft

Perry Anderson, 8 November 1990

Storia Notturna: Una Decifrazione del Sabba 
by Carlo Ginzburg.
Einaudi, 320 pp., lire 45,000, August 1989, 9788806115098
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... first stage in a tale concerned with travel to the world of the dead. The portrait of Achilles in Homer does not even mention his heel – which is a late accretion first registered under the Roman Empire. Undeterred, Ginzburg tells us that behind the hero depicted by Homer, and unknown to him, a prior god of the dead ...

Inspector of the Sad Parade

Nicholas Spice, 4 August 1994

A Way in the World 
by V.S. Naipaul.
Heinemann, 369 pp., £14.99, May 1994, 0 434 51029 7
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... black lawyer Evander, father of one of Naipaul’s school friends, wrongly attributes his name to Homer instead of Virgil, his precocious young visitor sees through the pretence of the self-made man immediately. The bluff and affable manner of the failed writer Foster Morris cannot hide the evidence of an inner incompleteness – ‘the dimness of the ...

Disintegration

Frank Kermode, 27 January 1994

The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 
by T.S. Eliot, edited by Ronald Schuchard.
Faber, 343 pp., £25, November 1993, 0 571 14230 3
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... poetry, ‘greatness’ is not the aim or the criterion. The aim is not to emulate Shakespeare or Homer or Dante or anybody else; for if and so far as one is a poet these criteria and ambitions are nonsense. Poetry is in this respect like science: the aim of the true poet is not to be a ‘great poet’, but to make a contribution to poetry: merely to say the ...

Great Portland Street Blues

Karl Miller, 25 January 1990

Boswell: The Great Biographer. Journals: 1789-1795 
by James Boswell, edited by Marlies Danziger and Frank Brady.
Heinemann, 432 pp., £25, November 1989, 0 434 89729 9
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... bottom a deep religious melancholy, to divert the shocking thoughts of which he is now translating Homer. He has been woefully deranged – in a strait waistcoat – and now is sometimes so ill that they take away his shoebuckles, that he may have nothing within his reach with which he can hurt himself. It seems he apprehends himself to be in a state of ...

Poet Squab

Claude Rawson, 3 March 1988

John Dryden and His World 
by James Anderson Winn..
Yale, 651 pp., £19.95, November 1987, 0 300 02994 2
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John Dryden 
edited by Keith Walker.
Oxford, 967 pp., £22.50, January 1987, 0 19 254192 7
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... taken it from all the World’. Such statements, frequently co-existing with fervid assertions of Homer’s greatness, were a common critical manoeuvre to dissociate the poetry of the epic from its morality. A comment in the Spectator stated that Achilles was ‘Morally Vicious, and only Poetically Good’. Neither Dryden, nor Pope after him, was deterred by ...

Ezra Pound and Evil

Jerome McGann, 7 July 1988

The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism and the Myths of Ezra Pound 
by Robert Casillo.
Northwestern, 463 pp., $34.95, April 1988, 0 8101 0710 4
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A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Faber, 1005 pp., £20, May 1988, 0 571 14786 0
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... morality are not Poetry but Philosophy.’ Or, as he expresses it in his engraved manifesto ‘On Homer’s Poetry’: ‘Unity and Morality are secondary considerations [in art] & belong to Philosophy & not to Poetry.’ Blake thought the Bible the greatest literary work of the ‘Western tradition’, but he did not therefore see it as work which was free ...

‘I can’t go on like this’

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 19 January 1989

The Letters of Edith Wharton 
edited by R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis.
Simon and Schuster, 654 pp., £16.95, October 1988, 0 671 69965 2
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Women Artists, Women Exiles: ‘Miss Grief’ and Other Stories 
by Constance Fenimore Woolson, edited by Joan Myers Weimer.
Rutgers, 341 pp., $42, December 1988, 0 8135 1347 2
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... translation. Having received a copy of Barrett Wendell’s Traditions of European Literature from Homer to Dante (1920) – a work based on Wendell’s comparative literature course at Harvard – she characteristically reports to Berenson that the first thing she did was glance at the bibliography (‘they tell so much in such books!’), and was ...

Running on Empty

Christopher Hitchens: The Wrong Stuff, 7 January 1999

A Man in Full 
by Tom Wolfe.
Cape, 742 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 224 03036 1
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... No one was ever moved to tears by reading about the unhappy fates of heroes and heroines in Homer, Sophocles, Molière, Racine, Sydney [sic], Spenser, or Shakespeare. Yet even the impeccable Lord Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, confessed to having cried – blubbered, boohooed, snuffled and sighed – over the death of Little Nell in The Old ...

Subjects

Craig Raine, 6 October 1983

Peter Porter: Collected Poems 
Oxford, 335 pp., £12.50, March 1983, 0 19 211948 6Show More
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... with ‘our desolate concrete plain’. The gist seems to be that the poet will never be Dante or Homer, only a philosopher of captions. This is clear despite the bodged dovetailing of ship and concrete plain. The final line of the poem (‘That pain is the one immortal gift of our stewardship’) relates to this presumably by the menial role of steward in ...
... Most of its members had most probably never heard of him. When Vico’s theories about Homer came to the notice of the Homeric scholar F.A. Wolf, and Vico’s writings on early Rome to that of the great Roman historian Niebuhr, these eminent men were not pleased. Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt. At least Vico, whatever his other anxieties, had ...

Nationalising English

Patrick Parrinder, 28 January 1993

The Great Betrayal: Memoirs of a Life in Education 
by Brian Cox.
Chapmans, 386 pp., £17.99, September 1992, 1 85592 605 9
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... of Greek and Latin literature. The highest standards are set not by the English poets but by Homer, Virgil and Dante. If anything deserves to be part of the school curriculum merely because of its contribution to our cultural heritage it is Latin, which until recently was a requirement for university entrance. The intellectual shallowness of the ...

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