Books
Sex Provided
Edmund Wilson in the 1930s
Poetry
Never have so many written with such technical skill: this remark, as often an expression of frustration and dismay as of admiration, has become a commonplace of poetry criticism in the 1970s. Never, of course, have so many written. And published. And competed for a lamentably small audience: there are perhaps more writers than readers of poetry at the present time. READ MORE >>
Full Disclosure
In its long and distinguished history, The New Republic is again about to break new groun: the first four fold table in a book review. (I am feeling the same pangs of achievement as when I invented the "illustrated footnote" while writing a history of American political cartoons.) The purpose of the following table is to establish some distinctions for reviewing a novel that is not by Saul Bellow and does not pretend to be. READ MORE >>
The Metropolitan Opera
Half Lesson
Watchmen in the Night by Theodore C. Sorensen MIT Press; $8.95 "Watergate is like a Rorschach," Aaron Wildavsky observed at a Washington seminar last year. "If you want to know what anyone thinks is wrong with the country, ask him what Watergate has to teach us." READ MORE >>
Edmund Wilson on <i>The New Republic</i>
Choosing Supreme Court Judges
You Wouldn't Believe It
A review of Bullet Park by John Cheever. There are people who believe that when writers pass middle age their imaginative power—like their sexual energy—tends to diminish. If they are good writers, the argument runs, they have learned their craft by this time, and so their later books have a carefully disciplined, if comparatively lifeless, quality. READ MORE >>
A Sort of Moby Dick
A review of Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. READ MORE >>
