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  1. Culture

Rooted Cosmopolitan

In 2011, I reviewed what was then Adam Zagajewski’s recent collection, Unseen Hand. In it, the poet, then in his mid-sixties, turned toward themes of life and death, loss and preservation. My review was laudatory. After its publication, a friend passed it along to Zagajewski, who on his . . . . Continue Reading »

America’s Fat Knight

Harold Bloom, who died in October at age eighty-nine, was The Last Great American Literary Critic. The Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, he wrote best sellers, appeared on talk shows, and collected honorary doctorates like lint. Bloom championed the Western Canon against its critics, . . . . Continue Reading »

Mid-Century Manhood

No man celebrating his eighty-sixth birthday can avoid thinking about whether he has measured up to the standards he held when he was first starting out. I am not speaking here of the mundane problems that plague all men: how good a living he made, the professional success he achieved, or where he . . . . Continue Reading »

Ibsen's Soulcraft

The Norwegian master Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) is and will remain the most important modern playwright—which is not to say there are no flaws in his work. Of all artists, playwrights are the most beholden to the moralism of their time; they must love and hate what their audiences love and . . . . Continue Reading »

Loyal to Death

Walter Scott once observed that although astrology, which had enjoyed almost universal credit in the middle of the seventeenth century, had become an object of ridicule by the beginning of the eighteenth, it still retained a number of devotees, even among the learned: Grave and studious men were . . . . Continue Reading »

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