Stephanie Burt

I wonder whether Perry Anderson’s mention of George Eliot might not give readers unfamiliar with her work the wrong impression. Romola does take place much further from her own time than any of her other novels, but those other novels are not all ‘realistic representations of contemporary life’. Adam Bede (published in 1859) begins in 1799, while Felix Holt (1866), and Middlemarch (1869-72) both...

Elif Batuman’s great piece gets one thing wrong. Kal-El is not (or at least not usually) the city where Superman was born, but his name in the language of his home planet, Krypton (he is the son of Jor-El).

Readers who want to know more about William Carlos Williams’s enjambments, and about his exemplary poem ‘To a Poor Old Woman’, should seek out Stephen Cushman’s monograph William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure (Yale, 1985), two references to which were cut from my review in the LRB, 7 March.

Ian Hamilton can think what he will (LRB, 2 March) about Randall Jarrell’s poems and essays, but his account of the man ought not to be let stand. Hamilton makes Jarrell sound unmannerly, oblivious, unbearably ego-driven, ‘pretty good at looking after Number One’. Jarrell, he writes, ‘was praised as one of America’s best war poets but saw no military action’: in fact, he underwent training...