In response to:

Blow-Up from the April 20, 1967 issue

To the Editors:

The phrase “the intense inane,” quoted by Elizabeth Hardwick in her review of William Manchester’s Death of a President, is not Poe’s but Shelley’s. It appears in the last line of Act Three of Prometheus Unbound: “Pinacled dim in the intense inane,” where its use is by no means sardonic.

Peter Wirth

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

This Issue

May 18, 1967