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
