Tom Paulin

There is a particular type of literary criticism – these days very rare – that aims to exist intensely as bravura performance, dramatic spectacle. It would be pointless to object that the performing critic is merely a rhetorician engaged in digging and falling into a subjective pit of empty images, further descriptions, meaningless or questionable value-judgments. If we admire the critic’s imagination then we are bound to attend to the performance – a performance that lives only, of at least most intensely, in a first reading. Go back over the text and much of it seems to have melted into a series of repetitive rhetorical gestures that are all dead letter, not living spirit.’

On the banks of the Hooghly River there’s a huge banyan tree the biggest in all Asia – it’s two hundred and twenty-five or more years old and ever since 1923 there’s been a sort of hole where the main trunk should be – on our way north from Bhubaneswar I found this sprawling woody creature its branches propped by vertical tubers –...

During the first push on the Somme a temporary captain in the Royal Engineers – Peter Nissen a Canadian designed an experimental steel tent that could be erected from stacked materials by an NCO and eight men in 110 minutes

so the Nissen hut is the descendant and enriched relation of the Elephant and other similar steel structures that were adopted and then...

In a recipe for turnip soup the cookery writer Ambrose Heath asserted that turnips have ‘an entirely masculine flavour, peppery and very definite’. For several centuries male writers have been saying much the same thing about poems: from Dryden to Hopkins and beyond, adjectives like ‘masculine’, ‘virile’, ‘manly’ were used freely as value-judgments in critical discourse. As Helen McNeil points out in her centenary study, Emily Dickinson entered the 20th century seeming to have written a series of ‘over-sensitive, coy, rather ill-disciplined poems’. Feminist critics have challenged this sexist view of her writing, and argued that she radically undermines traditional masculine values. In another centenary study, however, John Robinson insists that she is a timeless lyric poet whose work is not ‘centrally representative of women’. Robinson’s refusal to consider Dickinson’s polemical and subversive imagination is disappointing, but it can be argued that certain writers identify with various generic categories – national, sexual, political – while others identify against them: I would no more want to publish a book of essays entitled We Men, than I would want to identify with one called We Irish. Dickinson referred to God as ‘Burglar! Banker – Father!’ and in many of her poems she identifies herself against the dominant masculine values of 19th-century American culture. She searched for role models among famous women writers of her day – George Eliot, the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yet as Christanne Miller points out, Dickinson didn’t actively support the political campaign for women’s rights ‘or, apparently, sympathise with women generally’. It is in the radical new language of the poems themselves that the battle against the father is fought.’