“The cure of the mind, for Stevens, as for the Romantics, and perhaps for Milton in his blindness, is poetry. Such is the alternative to the sad cure of forgetfulness.”. —Bret van den Brink.

‘I ate a fragment of an underdone potato, and you won’t believe the dreams I had!’.

Introducing Grok Imagine.

RT @BretVDB: I love how C.S. Lewis, in this half-paragraph on Spenser, mangages to wrangle in Soloviev, Ficino, Dante, Dionysius, and Plato.

RT @BretVDB: “Whatever Plato’s conscious mind was doing when he wrote the account of Atlantis, he was not inventing a myth so much as relea….

Update: a friend complimented my Alexandrines today. 😁.

“Wanderer, this is the pre-history of February. The life of the poem in the mind has not yet begun. You were not born yet when the trees were crystal.Nor are you now, in this wakefulness inside a sleep.”. —Wallace Stevens, “Long and Sluggish Lines”

I wish Harold Bloom had lived to write another mad book on religion. It would have been interesting to see how his reading of David Bentley Hart’s work would have shaped his own.

This may be one of Harold Bloom’s “Tristram Shandy did not last” moments (to allude to one of Samuel Johnson’s great blunders).

I’ve never read Updike: is Harold Bloom’s assessment fair?. “A minor novelist with a major style, he hovers always near a greatness he is too shrewd or too diffident to risk. He rarely fails, but nothing is got for nothing, and the American Sublime will never touch his pages.”

RT @BretVDB: Harold Bloom on David Bentley Hart: a 🧵.

RT @BretVDB: “As Kafka prophesied, our one authentic sin is impatience: that is why we are forgetting how to read. Impatience increasingly….

U of T is a rather lovely place, isn’t it?

If professors want students to read the course syllabus before the first class, not to mention any texts, they should ensure that the syllabus is available to students at least 24 hours prior to the class.

RT @BretVDB: @ethantgibson The plot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein could have been peacefully resolved if only the Creature could have foun….

Frankenstein’s Creature is both a misunderstood victim and a wicked aggressor. But being the former doesn’t give him the licence to be the latter.

“I consider very wrong the kind of reading of my works, the ones Frederic Jameson would never indulge in, according to which I am working out some kind of construction which is outside of the social world and is moreover completely opposed to that world. Jameson knows very well

And their astonishment would have been redoubled if only they could have intimated the contents of the book in question.

RT @BretVDB: “Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confine ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest power.”. —Percy….

RT @BretVDB: “Plato was essentially a poet—the truth and splendor of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most intense that….

“18 For the elements were changed in themselves by a kind of harmony, like as in a psaltery notes change the name of the tune, and yet are always sounds; which may well be perceived by the sight of the things that have been done. 19 For earthly things were turned into watery, and.