I survey my intellectual history, especially the evolution of my thinking about literature’s impact on human behavior.
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Tag Archives: Percy Bysshe Shelley
Why I Think the Way I Think
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Antonio Gramsci, Beowulf, Carl Jung, Carleton College, Hans Robert Jauss, Harper Lee, Huckleberry Finn, intellectual history, J. Paul Hunter, J. R. R. Tolkien, Jerome Beaty, Karl Marx, Literary Theory, Madame Bovary, Mark Twain, New Criticism, Norman Holland, racism, Reader Response Theory, reception theory, Sigmund Freud, Terry Eagleton, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tobias Smollett Comments closed
Poets Unacknowledged Legislators? Maybe
A debate on whether poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Introduction to a Poet", Defence of Poetry, Scott Bates Comments closed
Can Pastoral Elegies Ease the Pain?
In a grad school class I once heard Peter Lehmann, a friend of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, say that, during the London blitzkrieg of 1940-41, all the London bookshops sold out their poetry. This means, I think, that in times of tragedy we turn to poetry for solace. It’s like the way that people who […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Adonais, death of a child, John Milton, Lycidas, Samuel Johnson Comments closed