Song of a Reformed Headhunter

TLS September 16 2011 from Seamus Perry's review of Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali (translated by William Radice); The Essential Tagore (edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty); Boyhood Days (translated by Radha Chakravarty); and Farewell Song (translated by Radha Chakravarty): Tagore's familiarity with the nineteenth-century poets was evidently very deep, and in his critical pronouncements, he can sound the clear high note of Romantic idealism which Yeats would have recognized. "The world becomes another world in our mind.... This act of the mind enables us to individualize external reality"; and an even more strikingly Yeatsian turn, "How to express the world the mind creates within itself? It has to be expressed in such a manner that it leads to a mood". * Many of Tagore's best writings are animated by a similar sense, sympathetic but accepting, of the unshapely desultoriness of the lives that they narrate, as though exploring th...

I returned last night from the People of Color Conference with a mixed bag of impressions and one main thought. The impressions first: 1. I do not like the term "People of Color." It implies White is not a color. It assumes too much similarity or solidarity between different ethnicities. It emphasizes racial and ethnic diversity over other kinds of diversity such as gender, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status. It is also not a term with which I can imaginatively identify. 2. John Quinones, an award-winning TV journalist, told the compelling story of his rise from immigrant poverty to mainstream success. The story highlighted the personal qualities of ambition, perseverance and talent. It described racist discrimination but also the advantages afforded by his ethnicity. My impression is that the crucial difference in Quinones lies, not in his circumstances, but in his response to his circumstances. The difference is the mystery of character. 3. It is easier to ta...

TLS June 12, 2009 from Terence Hawkes’s review of Michael Holzman’s James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence: Holzman’s brisk, uncluttered book offers valuable access to previously untapped material on Angleton, who became the first head of the Counter-intelligence Staff of the CIA. In particular, it makes incisive use of his years as a student of English at Yale and the influence on him of the New Critics and modernist poets of his day. * [William Empson] identified a kind of universal, all-purpose ambiguity in human relations which melted simple-hearted trust and wrought havoc with lame notions of truth and clarity. One kind of dramatic irony may result: Irony in this subdued sense, as a generous scepticism which can believe at once that people are and are not guilty, is a very normal and essential method . . . . This sort of contradiction is at once understood in literature, because the process of understanding one’s friends must always be riddled with suc...

TLS January 16 2009 from Joe Phelan's review of Robert Crawford's The Bard: Robert Burns, a biography : Through his membership of the Freemasons, his participation in the Tarbolton "Bachelors Club", and his friendship with like-minded people of his own class and background, he found ready support and assistance for his earliest poetic efforts, and encouragement for his desire to have his songs and poems published. It was not a wealthy patron, but his Irvine friend Richard Brown who first suggested that he send his verses to a magazine for publication. Such networks enabled Burns to develop and sustain a sense of the value of his literary output independent of that placed on it by wealthy supporters who drifted into and out of his life. Unlike John Clare, he was no reduced to debilitating social and intellectual isolation by the withdrawal of patronage. * Both [Robert] Fergusson and Allan Ramsay provided him with validating examples of a vernacular poetry which drew on...