Danny Karlin

Danny Karlin, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Bristol, is the author of Browning’s Hatreds and the editor of The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse.

Recurring Women: Emily Dickinson

Danny Karlin, 24 August 2000

Publication – is the Auction Of the Mind of Man –

(#788)

Editing Emily Dickinson’s poetry is a problem which continues to vex literary scholars and textual critics; meanwhile the publication, or dissemination, of Dickinson goes on apace. A trivial instance: the giant puppet of the ‘Belle of Amherst’, dressed in that distinctive ghost-white dress, which...

Letter

Undesirable

9 May 1996

I hesitate to respond to Tom Paulin because what I have to say about the subject of Eliot and anti-semitism is personal and anecdotal. I own a copy of T.S. Eliot’s poems stamped with the crest of St Paul’s School and given to me as a school prize. At the time I went to St Paul’s there was a quota for the entry of Jewish pupils: the school’s Christian orientation (it was founded by John Colet,...
Letter

Jobs Wanted

22 February 1996

I have reached the end of Iain Sinclair’s piece (LRB, 22 February) and am lost in admiration. Here is a man who, in the dust-clouds of narcissism, malice, puffery and insider-speak which make up his back-handed (or rear-ended) tribute to Peter Ackroyd, has slipped away with £273-worth of the Tate Gallery’s collected edition of William Blake’s illuminated books. Have these been well produced,...
Letter

Clubbability

11 March 1993

Alasdair Gray’s dismissal of that well-known Victorian triple-headed verse-monster ‘Tennyson, Browning and Arnold’, as ‘hardly ever reflecting their nation’, is facile and dim, but I read it with resignation, just like the time before and the time before that; in Victorian poetry that’s just the way things go (LRB, 11 March). What’s harder to swallow is this: ‘Leopardi, Schopenhauer,...

Joinedupwritingwithavengeance

Danny Karlin, 7 January 1993

The history of punctuation is bound up with the most important shift in the theory of writing to have taken place in our culture. The written word began as a record of speech, a priority of voice over text which held sway in the ancient world and was literally (i.e. graphically) enforced. Reading meant reading aloud; texts were the libretti of performances so there was no need for elaborate pointing. Indeed there is no need even for the most minimal punctuation of all, word division. Classical texts were copied in scriptio continua (joined-up writing with a vengeance) so that the opening of, say, ‘Resolution and Independence’ would have looked like this (only more so, because there would have been quirks of orthography, such as contractions and elisions, to contend with as well):

Ventriloquism: Dear Old Khayyám

Marina Warner, 9 April 2009

Edward FitzGerald transfused his own life, even as he deemed it a paltry thing, into the persona of Omar Khayyám, who would lift it from that paltriness and transfigure him. He was able to formulate through...

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I’ve been comparing Daniel Karlin’s anthology here and there with other anthologies of English verse of the same period (Victoria’s reign 1837-1901) and of the 19th century as a...

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When in Rom

John Sutherland, 9 June 1994

Ask what has been the single greatest influence on literary research since the Sixties and the answer might be the Xerox machine, the jumbo jet or Jacques Derrida. Ask what will transform...

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Browning and Modernism

Donald Davie, 10 October 1991

Browning is in high favour once again, or promises to be. Has not A.S. Byatt, CBE, declared him ‘one of the very greatest English poets’? In a switch to fighting talk, she adds that...

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