Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Longinus, in A Treatise on the Sublime, describes Sappho's achievement thus: Do you not wonder how she gives chase at once to soul and body, to words and tongue, to sight and colour, as as if scattered abroad, how, at variance within she is frozen and burns, she raves and is wise? For she is either panic-stricken or at point of death; she is haunted not only by one single emotion but their whole company, All things befall a lover, but she took the extremes of love's history and binding them in one achieved a masterpiece (trans. by Frank Granger). The description is alluring, especially given the fact that, not withstanding the recent discovery of a nearly whole poem, all we have of Sappho's poetry are fragments. And few, therefore precious, are the glimpses of poetry in this ALSC conference where the linguistic currency is made up largely of abstraction. I was glad to encounter a poet I did not know in Sarah Barnsley's talk on "Sappho, Mary Barnard and American Mod...

From Seamus Perry's review of New Writings of William Hazlitt , edited by Duncan Wu: Hazlitt may lack Jarrell's mastery of the Groucho-like wisecrack, but in other respects they are surprisingly alike, as though defining the scope of a genre--the brilliantly crisp opening gestue, the dance of register between formally essayistic and freely conversational, the thrilling gift for an unexpected summative simile. "When you have read Paterson ", said Jarrell, "you know for the rest of your life what it is like to be a waterfall"; "He seems always hurrying from his subject, even while describing it", said Hazlitt no less wonderfully about Shakespeare, "but the stroke, like the lightning's, is as sure as it is sudden." * Wordsworth and Coleridge called up his wittiest masterpieces of misgiving. "It is as if there were nothing but himself and the universe", he wrote of The Excursion . "He lives in the busy solitude of his own h...