Volume 49, Number 8 · May 9, 2002
The Impossible Blue Butterfly
By W.S. Merwin
Darlington's Fall
by Brad Leithauser
Knopf, 313 pp., $25.00
Since the age of the great Victorians ended, it has come to be taken for granted, in English, that narratives, particularly if they are of any length and complexity, will be in prose. By now the assumption seems to us to be part of a deepening condition, something that has become obvious, ineradicable, the manifestation of an unnamed emergent desire, like the development of language itself. Even so, it has not been quite the whole story. From the end of the nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth century, each generation, from Hardy and Masefield and Edgar Arlington Robinson to Stephen Benet and Archibald MacLeish and Robinson Jeffers, produced stories told in verse.
Review, 3692 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |