I disagree with your reading of Byron, Alex. Indeed, it is, to my mind, the very lack of precision, the irreverence of tone, the frequent digressions, which render his work compelling, compelling in...
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I disagree with your reading of Byron, Alex. Indeed, it is, to my mind, the very lack of precision, the irreverence of tone, the frequent digressions, which render his work compelling, compelling in...
Well said.
1) Fair point. Anecdotal examples don't make for compelling evidence, though I suspect that his claim is attenuated by the fact that this site forbids political discussion and we must be pushing our...
I think you're simply begging the question here Drk. Indeed, the invocation of 'good taste' and 'moral sense', tout court, is exactly the kind of uncritical reaction to which stlukes is referring....
Interesting point mortal. I think it was Leavis who remarked that Pope had a sureness and precision of tone that Byron conscpicously lacked, a distinction that is, as you point out, borne out in Don...
Time's Arrow - Martin Amis. The tale of a Nazi doctor told in reverse chronology. Thus, corpses are given life, families are reunited, ghettos are dissolved etc. The closest thing to a comic...
White must be one of the most under-read English language novelists. Indeed, despite considerable critical acclaim, he is largely out of print even in his native Australia. To be fair, he is not what...
JM Coetzee has published an essay on the topic of Kafka's translators in which he discusses the many problems that plague the Muirs' efforts. As Kiki points out, their renderings were considerably...
I surmise that the OP is asking about living/recently deceased authors and that by 'most interesting', he or she means 'best'.
Saul Bellow: Herzog
Don DeLillo: White Noise
Philip Roth:...
I've recently read The Loser (Der Untergeher) and Correction (Korrektur). I won't wax lyrical about Bernhard's digressive, obdurate style, nor the exceedingly bleak (though possibly redemptive)...
I agree that that it's not simply a numbers game Dodo, but I think you're being a little dismissive of the Germans, and Goethe in particular. It's probably true that few authors can compete with...
Indeed. Hughes himself puts it in similar terms here:
http://www.amien.org/forums/showthread.php?38-Art-amp-Money-by-Robert-Hughes
And whatever one thinks of Hughes' criticism generally, we...
Given that the bolded are the third novels of the respective authors, they don't exactly match the OP's criteria. However, given that said criteria is a tad arbitrary, I wholeheartedly endorse them...
Selected Poems 1908-1959 is a decent introduction, including poems from Personae through to the Cantos. I find Pound frequently compelling, though I think you have to be prepared to wade through a...
I'd second Larkin. His bleakest collection is probably High Windows.
Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel
Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty...
Mending Wall - Robert Frost
In the Station of the Metro - Ezra Pound
The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock - TS Eliot
One Art - Elizabeth Bishop
The Second Coming - WB Yeats
Aubade - Philip...
I think it's a combination of factors, most of which have been articulated in this thread. An appreciation of poetry requires a basic knowledge of prosody, of poetic meter and form. Most high school...
I'm of the opinion that Dostoyevsky rarely gets it right and that his characters tend to collapse into mere mouthpieces for his sandbox philosophy. The tendentious novel is, however, a tough ask, so...
I'm currently reading Roethke's Collected Poems and I find it hard to disagree with the assertion that Roethke, though undeniably talented, struggled to locate and sustain his own poetic voice. That...
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/
I tend to agree Mortal. I applaud Amis' opposition to the hackneyed, but his own prose, unfocused and awkward, has always struck me as inauthentic. Indeed, in prosecuting his 'war against cliche', he...
Mr Crouch is probably correct when he claims that the 'masses always preferred the loud and the obvious to the subtle and the intricate.' Today we have more masses, and, in part due to democratic...
"I am completely an elitist in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive,...
It is my opinion JBI and you are welcome to assume that all my future posts pertaining to the merits or otherwise of novels and/or novelists contain my opinion.
The process of speculating on...
Franzen is an author of considerable talent but his need to wax sociological undermines the authenticity of his protagonists. I don't think that he can lay claim to having produced a great novel.
...