Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Great Regulars: I first encountered the three requirements

in the 1970s, when I used to write the old, traditional Consumer Reports style of reviews I have in mind here--sometimes under a pen name--because I needed the money, even in the small quantities paid to reviewers. This was the age of the typewriter, and one of the newspapers I wrote for gave me the rules as part of the same photocopied style-sheet that specified the quality of ribbon, the size of margins, where to double-space, when to use italics, all-caps, or quotation marks for titles, where to put the reviewer's byline, and so forth.

from Robert Pinsky: Slate: How Not To Write a Book Review

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But on some level, Emerson's days and Keats' lifetime refer to one thing: the daily pressure and the lifetime's need to fulfill the intentions and capacities of imaginative work. Where the two poets differ most may appear in the resolving lines at the end of each poem. Emerson, with those effective pauses ("I, too late,") attributes the climactic word "scorn" to the most recent Day of the procession. Keats himself has the final emotion in his poem's conclusion, where he thinks until "love and fame to nothingness do sink"--a feeling more mysterious than its distant cousin scorn, and larger.

from Robert Pinsky: Slate: Seize the Day

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