Iterary criticism

All is not well at the literary journal Hobart Pulp, Cockburn has learned — and it's all down to one of our mischievous Spectator contributors. His words have caused violence, apparently, as nearly the entire staff of the journal have resigned in protest. Last month, Alex Perez sat down with Hobart Pulp's top editor, Elizabeth Ellen, to discuss the state of the literary and publishing scene — ranging from MFAs to woke writers to how he got his start in writing. Perez, a Latino writer who graduated from the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, had some choice words about the cowardice of writers and editors today. The interview, originally posted to the Hobart Pulp website last month, didn't make much of a stir until this week, when its editors and contributors began to take notice.

The life of poète maudit and gunrunner Arthur Rimbaud is a puzzle to nearly everyone who knows it. A precocious student who won a regional concours académique for a poem in Latin, Rimbaud left school at fifteen, shortly after the start of the Franco-German War. After two attempts to escape home for Paris, he finally moved in with the poet Paul Verlaine in the fall of 1871, where he succeeded in insulting all the literary lights of Paris in three months. The two men began an affair, which ruined what was left of Verlaine’s marriage to Mathilde Mauté (whom Verlaine regularly beat). They made two debauched trips to London and eventually fell out in Belgium, where Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist.

The death of Terry Teachout has put me in a funk. In 2019, we lost Clive James and John Simon. In 2020, we lost Roger Scruton and George Steiner. In 2021, Adam Zagajewski, Denis Donoghue, and Joan Didion all passed. Now we start 2022 with the sudden death of Terry Teachout. Most of these critics (though not Teachout) came of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s during one of the great periods of literary criticism in the last two hundred years. Consider some of the works that were published between 1947 and 1957. We have Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn in 1947 and F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition in 1948. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren published their influential Theory of Literature in 1949.