It Is Useless Either To Hate Or

... Woman Is Frequently Praised As The More "creative" Sex. She Does Not Need To Make Poems, It Is Argued; She Has No Drive To Make Poems, Because She Is Privileged To Make Babies. A Pregnancy Is As Fulfilling As, Say, Yeats' Sailing To Byzantium.... To Call A Child A Poem May Be A Pretty Metaphor, But It Is A Slur On The Labor Of Art.

What Was Lost In The European Cataclysm Was Not Only The Jewish Past--the Whole Life Of A Civilization--but Also A Major Share Ofthe Jewish Future.... [ellipsis In Source] It Was Not Only The Intellect Of A People In Its Prime That Was Excised, But The Treasure Of A People In Its Potential.

All Politicians Know That Every 'temporary' Political Initiative Promised As A Short-term Poultice Stays On The Books Forever.

Novels Are Routinely Denigrated When Characters Are Not Found To Be Likable. Is Raskolnikov Likable? Is King Lear? The Plethora Of Such Naive Readers Testifies To A Failure Of Imagination - The Capacity To See Into Unfamiliar Lives, Motives, Feelings - And This Failure Must, At Least In Part, Be The Failure Of The Teaching Of Literature In The Schools.

What's Impossible Not To Notice, Though - It's All Around Us - Is The Diminution Of American Prose: How Pedestrian It Has Become. Pick Up Any Short Story And Listen To Its Voice, The Tedious Easy Vernacular That Mistakes Transcription For Realism. This Would Display An Understandable Pragmatism If It Were A Pandering To Common-denominator Readers; But It Is, In Fact, A Kind Of Hifalultin Literary Ideology, The Less-is-more Hemingway Legacy Put Through An Up-to-the-minute Industrial Blender.