WRB—Feb. 4, 2026

“constant compass”

Men do not understand the Washington Review of Books until they have had a certain amount of life.

Links:

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Alastair Benn on “hyper-literacy”:

  Many modernist novelists sought to impose discipline on the sprawling realism of the Victorian novel. They were intensely aware of the potential risks in doing so. In E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, George describes Lucy Cavendish’s fiancé Cecil as “the sort who are all right so long as they keep to things—books, pictures—but kill when they come to people.” The drama of the novel turns on precisely this fault line. Aesthetic refinement can lead to moral weakness if precision and discernment are used to avoid the messiness of real human encounters. Robert Louis Stevenson, a consummate stylist who nevertheless experienced a persistent sense of inadequacy even after achieving worldwide commercial success, found himself wanting against his forebears—men who had built the first lighthouses along the Scottish coastline: “Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life,” he wrote.

  • Ezra Pound [In arguing that Chaucer is superior to Shakespeare, strangely enough. —Steve]:

    Men do not understand BOOKS until they have had a certain amount of life. Or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. The prejudice against books has grown from observing the stupidity of men who have merely read books.

  • Gilbert Highet:

    The poetry of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound is full of similar abrupt transitions from the present to the distant or mythical past. In The Waste Land, among scenes and speeches from contemporary London, the figures of Tiresias, the old blind seer of Thebes, and Philomela, the ravished princess who became a nightingale, appear several times, in order to add dignity to the modern themes, or perhaps, by contrast, to emphasize the squalor of today. A poet like Eliot or Propertius, who is deeply read, and who lives as much in the world of the imagination as in reality, cannot record his own emotions without at the same time recalling the mythical parallels which intensify his experience. So also the great painters often portrayed the women they loved, not simply as contemporaries in the dress of their time, but as saints, goddesses, nymphs, and madonnas.

    [“The mythical parallels that intensify his experience are a load of crap,” I think my father, Philip Larkin (not actually my father), said. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Thames, Christian Lorentzen reviews a biography of Peter Matthiessen (True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, by Lance Richardson, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 11, 2025.]:

  After the split​ from Patsy, Matthiessen stopped playing at being a fisherman and started freelancing for magazines, turning in pieces that he would then expand into or collect in books. More than twenty of these appeared over fifty years, most of which can be categorized as travel and nature writing, always with a shade of political advocacy. Richardson calls him the New Yorker’s “gentleman naturalist.” The job description no longer exists, certainly not the “gentleman” bit. He ventured into the wilderness with anthropologists, zoologists, oceanographers, paleontologists and occasionally crackpots, a few of whom he threw in with during his decades-long search for Bigfoot, a quest that never yielded what he was looking for but introduced him to the landscapes and people that inspired his books on Native Americans as well as his trilogy of novels about the Everglades. He wrote about auks, cranes, peafowl, gulls, condors, sharks, whales, turtles, crabs, otters, beavers, badgers, bears, wolves, lions, cougars, tigers, wildebeest, elephants and zebras. Air travel was now making travel writing simpler in terms of logistics, but globalization was rendering it both obsolete and politically suspect—however noble Matthiessen’s conservationist intentions. The tendency to romanticize “traditional people” (his preferred term later in life) as noble innocents, especially in their relationship to landscape and wildlife, never quite left him. He was taken to task for it in this paper: “His specialty is to articulate that sense of innocent wonder at the natural world usually assumed to be the prerogative of primitive peoples,” Kathryn Tidrick wrote in the LRB of February 25, 1993. Indeed, innocence, its absence and its possible reclamation is the theme that unifies Matthiessen’s fiction and non-fiction, for better and worse.

  [“We are stardust, we are golden / And we’ve got to get back to innocence, its absence, and its possible reclamation,” I think Joni Mitchell said. And hanging out with “traditional people” to get your innocent wonder at the natural world is like going to a restaurant because you can’t cook the dish yourself. Fishermen don’t have an innocent wonder at the natural world anyway. Especially not the ones who do it for a living. —Steve]

• Two in Literary Review:

  • First, Felicity Brown reviews a book about love (In Love With Love: The Persistence and Joy of Romantic Fiction, by Ella Risbridger, 2025 in the UK):

    Risbridger’s self-proclaimed resistance to serious scrutiny of her subject reads as more defensive than liberating. George Eliot’s essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” is not an example of cool-girl disdain for the genre, as is implied. It is a playful polemic on the ethical demands of fiction in a gendered marketplace. And Austen’s novels—on the page as opposed to the screen—do not float along on fond feelings, but are propelled by a ferocious satirical intelligence. Irony is not a rejection of love, nor is expertise. They are its conditions: ways of ensuring that attachment is earned rather than merely asserted. To mistake critique for contempt, as Risbridger repeatedly does, is to underestimate quite how robust romance can afford to be, in literature as in life.

    [“What has romantic fiction to do with love?” I think Tertullian said. (“Fiction” is in the name! “None of it really happened, it’s all made up by the author.”) Critique is not identical to contempt, but I would go further: critique is not even necessarily negative. Being a critic, like being a lover, is to choose a particular way of being in the world, a way of orienting oneself towards the other things in it. For me, at least, it’s basically the same—wanting to understand, whether it’s the lover or the world (each of which reflect the other.) . —Steve]

  • Second, Jonathan Keates reviews a collection of essays by Patrick McGuinness (Ghost Stations: Essays and Branchlines, 2025 in the UK):

    Movement, for McGuinness, paradoxically implies a chance to find balance and stillness where the rest of us grow fretful, muddled or merely exhausted. Throughout this collection of essays and sketches the railway station takes on a positively numinous significance, linked to the author’s absorption with worlds in a state of flux. “Anything on the spectrum of terminality, from the freshly stricken to the fully decomposed, interests me,” he tells a journal interviewer. “I think things reach their apogee just as they’re about to collapse.” He likes crossings, bridges and hinterlands, a world of becoming as opposed to just being.

    [“The owl of Minerva flies just as things are about to collapse,” I think Hegel said. “In the railway station the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo,” I think T. S. Eliot said. Having spent more hours in my life than I care to recall in railway stations due to the vagaries of Amtrak, I think the idea of them as being places in flux is precisely wrong. People pass in and out of them; they remain the same. You might as well say a dentist’s waiting room is a place in flux. It’s the trains themselves where things change. —Steve]

• In the Literary Review of Canada, Irina Dumitrescu reviews a verse novel by Daniel Cowper (Kingdom of the Clock, 2025):

  At the same time, Cowper offers the sensuous pleasures and insights of verse. His metaphors fuse nature, technology, and human life: a nervous mother’s “thumbnails click / her fingernails like a sequence of switches.” Elsewhere, he harmonizes the city’s sounds through internal rhyme and assonance. At breakfast, “toasters ding when their springs release,  // bowls flecked with cereal clink in sinks / and seagulls keen.”

  Cowper has a gift for arresting images that also develop the story. As the sun rises, Connor eats breakfast at his window, looking at “his bleary, slowly self-erasing / likeness on the glass.” It is a perfect snapshot of a man who has already lost himself. A bus drives by “glittering sheets of condo curtain wall // that show, like screensavers, gliding icons / of innumerable gulls.” The suggestion might be that the people inside those condos have become machinery as well. Visual motifs echo one another, adding more beams to the poem’s structural frame. In one scene, Viró throws a cigarette filter from her bedroom and “watches it flitter // like a de‑winged moth” into the alley below. The moment is told in slow motion, so it can seep in. Many things in the book will follow that falling arc.

• In The New Yorker, Katy Waldman reviews Daniel Poppick’s new novel (The Copywriter, February 3) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Jan. 28, 2026.]:

  Like all believers, D__ must also grapple with the problem of doubt. How do you keep something alive when you’re not sure what it is or if it even exists? Poetry makes nothing happen, poets like to intone. In The Copywriter, D__ experiences his art as invisible, ineffable, lacking the numerical markers of value possessed by, say, a commercially successful novel or a viral social-media post. He writes Lucy an anniversary pantoum; she breaks up with him anyway. He writes a eulogy for Ashbery, and the guy’s still dead. (Given his friend group’s protracted mourning period, it’s unclear that he can raise any spirits at all.) At one point, he buys his twenty-four-year-old boss a used copy of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde, passing it off as a cherished keepsake. He explains that the text reenchants online shopping, revealing the “invisible webs of relationality” behind digital transactions; it’s a naked attempt to keep his job. The ploy fails, delaying but not averting D__’s scheduled termination. Poetry, he concludes, is “labor’s ash.”

  [Do poets really like to intone “poetry makes nothing happen,” or do they do so because whatever the ancient connection between poetry and magic was has been lost? (Maybe the wave of poets experimenting with writing novels should instead experiment with rhyming rats to death.) Maybe Yeats knew it, or at least wanted to seem like he did. Auden didn’t, hence the line. —Steve]

N.B.:

• Adam Roberts on Homer’s “wine-dark sea”: “The perhaps over-obvious explanation (Homer was blind, and didn’t know shit about colors) does not seem to have been part of the critical debate.” [Imagine a world where οἶνοψ πόντος went over like “bag of sand” in The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005). This would, however, deprive me of substituting in “wine-dark” for metrically identical descriptions of the sea. My favorite is in “Nova Scotia Farewell”: “For a poor simple sailor just like me / Must be tossed and driven on the wine-dark sea.” (Perhaps the Mediterranean is wine-dark—I don’t think the North Atlantic is.) —Steve]

• The lack of trash cans in Japan.

• Epistolary novels and love letters. [“Every thinkpiece about epistolary novels that is written and every thinkpiece about love letters written signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who are lonely and not consoled,” I think Dwight Eisenhower said. —Steve]

• New issues:

  • Literary Review February 2026 [As linked to above.]

  • Literary Review of Canada March 2026 [As linked to above.]

  • The London Magazine February/March 2026 [As linked to below. Can somebody please figure out what month it is? Thank you. —Steve]

  • n+1 Issue 52

  • The Point Winter 2026 | Issue 36

Poem:

“helen of troy on the affair (vii)” by Maria Zoccola

Musée National Gustave Moreau: Helen at the Scaean Gate, Gustave Moreau

on the night i knew was our last, we sat down to a feast
in the smoking section of the perkins beside the city walls,
which differed from the perkins in my town only in the number
of dead men who ate there. the air con was running pretty good,
stiffing up the hair on my shins and souping the windows
thick enough to hide what the sky was doing outside,
a mean mess of clouds tinting themselves yellow and gray
and yellow again, galloping above a world pre-flinched
for its next bruising. he lit a cigarette and passed it to me,
which was a new thing i was doing, another small light
flashing frenetically in the background. i was so hungry
in my body. i wanted more than the glut on the laminated menu,
identical in every offering to the one at the perkins back home,
the same meals exhumed from a walk-in’s dark freeze.
columns of smoke rose from every table. the booth heaved
with plates of grease and blood. when the hail began
at last to hurl itself downward, it struck against
the wood paneling with a hollow call i felt in my belly,
a pounding that signaled the end of what we were eating,
whatever it was we were putting in our mouths.

[Like Sebree, Zoccola has written a collection of persona poems. Hers is a reimagining of Helen of Troy, set in 1993, often in conversation with other works referencing the Iliad, such as Helen at the Scaean Gate.

I like what this poem is doing with verbs: “stiffing up the hair on my shins and souping the windows”, “galloping above a world pre-flinched for its next bruising,” “hail began at last to hurl itself downward.” I enjoyed less the choices made in “the booth heaved with plates of grease and blood” or “clouds tinting themselves” but those are the exceptions. In each instance, even the less successful, Zoccala’s pairing of active verbs with inanimate objects gave a sense of unreality to the poem, adding texture to its aura of malaise. And, while it might be because the story here is so well known to me, I was nonetheless impressed by how effectively this poem was able to capture that story—yet make it a little new. Helen of Troy, whose new thing is cigarettes, knows the boredom of sameness, that the menu has never been good and will never change. —K. T.]

Upcoming books:

Pantheon | February 10

The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief
by Richard Holmes

From the publisher: Tennyson rose to eminence as rapid and revolutionary discoveries were being made in the fields of biology, astronomy, geology, and marine science. It was a period of immense change akin to our own. For the first time, people were pursuing answers to questions that had felt previously unknowable—about biological evolution, the notion of a godless, unpitying universe, and of planetary extinction. These were as terrifying to Tennyson as climate catastrophe is to us today. It forced many to grapple with their understanding of the known world and their place within it and fostered a growing tension between religion and science.

Tennyson’s work during these years is suffused with strangely modern magic, and in Holmes’ extraordinary biography, we witness Tennyson wrestling with mind-altering ideas about geology and deep time, the vastness, beauty, and terror of the new cosmology, and the challenges of social revolution. Tennyson’s wild imagination and deep engagement with these concepts helped him emerge as the poetic voice of his generation—and he remains an inspiration for our own age.

[We linked to a profile of Holmes in WRB—Sept. 27, 2025. You can find my abortive career as a rapper by looking up “Young Tennyson.” —Steve]

Also out Tuesday:

Archipelago: A Parish Chronicle by Halldór Laxness, translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton

Celadon Books: The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema by Paul Fischer

Duke University Press: Ocean, as Much as Rain: Stories, Lyrical Prose, and Poems from Tibet by Tsering Woeser, edited and translated from the Tibetan by Fiona Sze-Lorrain and Dechen Pemba

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Frog: And Other Essays by Anne Fadiman

Out Wednesday:

University of Michigan Press: Robert Altman’s “Nashville”: An Archival Exploration by Justin Wyatt

What we’re reading:

Steve didn’t really read anything. [Sorry. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• In The London Magazine, Zoe Guttenplan on style as message:

  Publicity budgets have been slashed and authors are often expected to promote not just their books but themselves on social media. Surely related is the fact that, despite some claims to the contrary, the first-person essay still dominates the glossy and pixellated pages of periodicals. In 1946, George Orwell proposed that “one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality.” But personality is the hottest commodity on the internet.

  Orwell’s next sentence is one of his most famous lines: “Good prose is like a windowpane.” Like Warde before him, he saw his craft as best when invisible, when it doesn’t get in the way of the real meat: the idea, or the truth, depending on how worthy you’re feeling. It’s possible he was influenced in this by the radical writer William Hazlitt, who, a little over two centuries prior, wrote “On the Prose Style of Poets.” Hazlitt claims that poets’ writing is often too concerned with beauty to arrive at truth. In good prose, he contends, “nothing can be admitted by way of ornament or relief that does not add new force or clearness to the original conception.” Here, too, extraneous decoration is the enemy. Clarity is the goal.

  [In the first line Guttenplan quotes, Orwell is cribbing T. S. Eliot:

  In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

  “One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality” is, more or less, “In fact, the bad writer is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious.” (“In fact, the bad editor is running personal essays that he ought to kill”?) Personality is pretty easily changed into content, but art requires a bit more craft. —Steve]

• Victoria Moul on compasses (both kinds) in seventeenth-century poetry:

  Moreover, Borough’s image, though clearly of a navigational compass, seems to be slightly infected by or mixed up with the much better-established poetic image of the mathematical compass. Line 5—“Yet doth the constant compasse quiet stand,” surely the best single line of the poem—draws on the contrast between constancy or fixity on the one hand and movement on the other (“the moving barke”) which is the standard set of associations with the mathematical compass, as we saw in Jonson’s poem.

  One other element similarly seems to fit the mathematical compass better than the navigational one, and that’s Borough’s striking phrase “howe’er . . . my forked body move.” I thought immediately of Shakespeare again, especially King Lear (“unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art”). A person is “forked” because he or she has two legs. But when you think about it, the image of the “fork” of a man’s legs works much better for a mathematical compass—the prongs of which are indeed often described as “legs” or “feet”—than it does for a navigational compass, the needle of which is a straight, not forked, piece of metal.

  [The most famous compass in English poetry, I think, is Donne’s:

  If they be two, they are two so
  As stiff twin compasses are two;
  Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
  To move, but doth, if the other do.
  
  And though it in the center sit,
  Yet when the other far doth roam,
  It leans and hearkens after it,
  And grows erect, as that comes home.
  
  Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
  Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
  Thy firmness makes my circle just,
  And makes me end where I begun.

  There is motion here, but motion in the service of constancy; so that the poet’s foot of the compass returns to where it started, the other “leans and hearkens after it.” And there is also constancy in the service of motion; both legs of the compass are “stiff,” and the last two lines explain that this stiffness is necessary to make a circle. What at first seems opposed is revealed to be unified. The stanza before this conceit, employing a frankly even stranger conceit, works similarly:

  Our two souls therefore, which are one,

  Though I must go, endure not yet

  A breach, but an expansion,

  Like gold to airy thinness beat.

  Just as the compass is both moving and constant, the two souls are both separated and united. In fact, their seeming separation creates a broader unity than was previously possible, like the gold that becomes impossibly thin in order to spread out—“not yet / A breach, but an expansion.” —Steve]