In May 1757, Christopher Smart, Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, renowned poet, writer for John Newbery, was involuntarily incarcerated in a London madhouse, where he spent the next seven years. His crime: Spontaneous public prayer, which arose from his conviction that it was a crime to resist the impulse to pray, no matter what the circumstances. And, according to his Samuel Johnson, “Another charge was, that he did not love clean linen.” Johnson might have risked confinement himself, for he... Read more

Another sign that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is being noticed again is the publication of Christoph Irmscher’s Longfellow Redux , reviewed in the January 5 TLS. Several things about Longfellow are striking: First, what Irmscher calls his “relentless availability” to readers, not only in the “undemanding nature of his published work” but also in his willingness to receive strangers to his home and his diliegence in answering mail; second, his unsentimental acceptance of the transitory character of art, including his own... Read more

Stephen King, that is. Ross Douthat has an interesting article on King in the current issue of First Things . He places King’s novels in the context of modern fiction, which has ignored supernatural events and beings: “King has effectively expanded the definition of realism to include a set of human experiences that have been systematically excluded from the novel’s purview for two centuries or more. At their best, his works aren’t just a wide-open window into the bedlam of... Read more

Stephen King, that is. Ross Douthat has an interesting article on King in the current issue of First Things . He places King’s novels in the context of modern fiction, which has ignored supernatural events and beings: “King has effectively expanded the definition of realism to include a set of human experiences that have been systematically excluded from the novel’s purview for two centuries or more. At their best, his works aren’t just a wide-open window into the bedlam of... Read more