LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Seamus Perry: Pluralism and Poetry; James Wolcott: Updike Reconsidered; James Meek on Romania’s Far Right;
Seamus Perry · Pluralism and the Modern Poet: Pluralism and Poetry
‘Art arises,’ Auden writes, ‘out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge that they are not identical.’ We want things two ways, which analysis says we cannot have; but for a moment a poem lets us, in a way that discursive prose, for instance, cannot.
Jonathan Rée – Kojève v. Hegel
Alexandre Kojève described his book on Hegel as ‘very bad’, and he had a point. His take on The Phenomenology of Spirit is not only misleading but slapdash, dogmatic, frivolous and flamboyant. The characters he filled it with, from the Master and Slave to the Sensualist and the Sage, sound rather like Mr Worldly Wiseman, Madam Bubble and Mr Sagacity in Pilgrim’s Progress.
Boomers Daily 