The Troubling Role of Artistic Theory

“In the arts, theory comes after the fact of original creation and, far from improving future work, usually spoils it by making the artist a self-conscious intellectual, crippled or mislead by ‘ideas.’ Not everything that is good can be engineered into existence” (Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve, p. 19).

No Metaphor Mechanics

“The other use, direction, or bent, Pascal called the esprit de finesse—we might call it ‘intuitive understanding.’ . . . It does not analyze, does not break things down into parts, but seizes upon the character of the whole altogether, by inspection. Since in this kind of survey they are no definable parts, there is …

Metaphor Blindness

“Even Cotton Mather, in his sermon at Wigglesworth’s funeral, identified Wigglesworth’s poetry as catechism and his audience as simple people and children . . . One reason for its failure, and one difference between Wigglesworth and most other Puritan poets, is Wigglesworth’s dismissal of the natural world, his inability to perceive, and hence to use, …

Where Scholarship Gets Underfoot

“We are mistaken when we believe that culture and the humanities are being served by scholarship. The truth is that art and culture do not belong in a university. It cannot be a home for them, because culture proper and scholarship proper are diametrically opposed” (Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve, p. 10).

Some Caricatures Really Lived

“So closely does Michael Wigglesworth approximate the unhappy popular conception of our seventeenth-century forbears that he seems more plausible as a satirical construction than he does as a human being. In their descriptions of a Puritan so obsessed with himself, with his own quest for salvation, that he suppressed or ignored all purely human experience, …