I Have Never Believed That

I Have Read All Of Daniel Aaron's Books, And Admired Them, But In The Americanist I Believe He Has Composed An Intellectual And Social Memoir For Which He Will Be Remembered. His Self-portrait Is Marked By Personal Tact And Admirable Restraint: He Is And Is Not Its Subject. The Americanist Is A Vision Of Otherness: Literary And Academic Friends And Acquaintances, Here And Abroad. Eloquently Phrased And Free Of Nostalgia, It Catches A Lost World That Yet Engendered Much Of Our Own.

Rebecca Mead's My Life In Middlemarch Is A Wise, Humane, And Delightful Study Of What Some Regard As The Best Novel In English. Mead Has Discovered An Original And Highly Personal Way To Make Herself An Inhabitant Both Of The Book And Of George Eliot's Imaginary City. Though I Have Read And Taught The Book These Many Years I Find Myself Desiring To Go Back To It After Reading Rebecca Mead's Work.

To Be A Poet Did Not Occur To Me. It Was Indeed A Threshold Guarded By Demons.

I Realized Early On That The Academy And The Literary World Alike

The Second, And I Think This Is The Much More Overt And I Think It Is The Main Cause, I Have Been Increasingly Demonstrating Or Trying To Demonstrate That Every Possible Stance A Critic, A Scholar, A Teacher Can Take Towards A Poem Is Itself Inevitably And Necessarily Poetic.