Eager Imagination

My latest realization has to do with Pound's hypostasizing of desire (rather than letting it flow, Deleuze and Guattari style). The poe...

I suppose anyone dealing with Ezra Pound and Imagism must respond to "In a Station of the Metro." I'm going to provide what is...

Harold Bloom constructs a complicated system of literary history based on poets and their anxieties in relation to their poetic influences. ...

There's a tendency in vulgar Freudian criticism to transform images of verticality into dramas of male sexual desire, and I usually shun...

John Crowe Ransom's 1947 essay "The Iconography of the Master" begins in typical New Critical fashion by pointing out syntacti...

Eliot's important essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" has been roundly criticized because it actively deplores the one...

Edmund Burke insists that aesthetic responses are first and foremost physiological responses. When he suggests that the sublime operates b...

It seems ironic that William Carlos Williams's Paterson includes the line "It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly wri...

"The Mirror Stage" must be the most productive few pages of theory ever written. I go back again and again to the ideas in this v...

Freud theorizes that dreams are wish-fulfillments. Because not all dreams involve pleasurable occurrences, he suggests that "distortion...

In my last post, I described the temporal experience of the sublime as outlined by Thomas Weiskel. But Weiskel moves beyond this observation...

I enjoy Eliot's poetry. I understand that he held some very unpleasant social, racial, and political opinions, but the poetry is finely ...

The first section of Freud's essay examines the etymology of the German word heimlich . Rather than being an exercise meant to discover ...