WRB—Jan. 28, 2026

“animal eyes”

It’s not the side effects of the WRB
I’m thinking that it must be love

Links:

• In Harper’s, an essay adapted from Katie Kadue’s contribution to a recent book about close reading (Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 18, 2025; we linked to an essay by Winant about teaching students how to close read in WRB—Nov. 29, 2025.]:

  We often write under the influence of others, and of language itself. Our train of thought turns into a runaway locomotive, words plowing through the page by means of their own internal combustion. We weave others’ words with our own until we start to forget our own voice, become complicit, even when we quarantine sentiments in quotation marks. This metaphor of close reading as interweaving is barely a metaphor at all; it’s a dead metaphor, a kind of cliché, such a common way of describing the integration of textual evidence that the picture of strands of fiber interlaced at right angles on a loom is hardly present in our minds. This uninspired image is inspired by Ricks’ writing on the seventeenth-­century poet Andrew Marvell, famous for a stylistic technique that another critic, William Empson, referred to as the “self-­inwoven simile”: a practice of defamiliarization in which a familiar image is enfolded upon itself, like a mill that is also its own grist. “Grist to the mill”: itself a phrase so overused as to have been ground down to almost nothing. This cliché works as an image of the manufacture of cliché: an unthinking machine taking the raw material of language and overworking it into a homogenous slurry. But the proverbial mill’s grinding of grist might also be analogous to what certain authors can do with clichés when they process unremarkable material into a refined final product.

  [“A mill that is also its own grist” reminds me of the central idea of Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe,” which (as I discussed in WRB—Dec. 10, 2025), picks up on a suggestion in the Biblical source material and portrays the babe as both the fire and subject to the fire’s heat. But Southwell was writing before the metaphysicals, when this kind of thing was fresh. Marvell, writing at the end of a poetic tradition that had extracted everything possible from the most bizarre conceits, needed a new means of defamiliarization and employed comparing things to slightly altered versions of themselves, as in “The Garden,” where the imagination employed in said garden leads “to a green thought in a green shade,” or in “The Mower’s Song,” where

  My mind was once the true survey

  Of all these meadows fresh and gay,

  . . .

  When Juliana came, and she

  What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.

  My mind is like the meadows, which are like my mind. Maybe the clearest example is found in “On a Drop of Dew,” where the titular drop

  But gazing back upon the skies,

  Shines with a mournful light,

  Like its own tear,

  The drop is now a tear, but it is still itself. (Kadue mentions this one in an essay of her own on Marvell.) Later in that poem Marvell refers to the drop’s “pure and circling thoughts,” working off multiple meanings of that second adjective. The drop is round, of course, but the image of the circle also implies endlessness. The drop looks back on the skies, but the skies are the source of the light the drop reflects, and so they look at the drop, which looks at the skies, which look . . . And even more fundamentally, the drop is like itself, which is like itself, which is like itself . . . —Steve]

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson: “All minds quote.”

  • T. S. Eliot:

    Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

    [For as often as these lines get quoted you never see discussion of what happens next, which is Eliot walking through a bunch of lines from Philip Massinger and comparing them unfavorably to lines from Shakespeare and Webster (the Shakespeare is supplied by the book Eliot is reviewing, and the Webster he adds himself). The alternation—the interweaving—of Massinger and the other playwrights is close reading by quotation; close reading one text requires being able to quote many others. —Steve]

  • Wyatt Guyon [“Wyatt” from Thomas Wyatt, bringing the sonnet into English by imitation of Petrarch, and “Guyon” from The Faerie Queene, who keeps getting distracted by beauty as he’s supposed to be destroying the Bower of Bliss. —Steve], quoting his teacher in William Gaddis’ The Recognitions (1955):

    That romantic disease, originality, all around us we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original . . . Even two hundred years ago who wanted to be original, to be original was to admit that you could not a do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way.

  • David Bowie: “You know the music comes out better on a stolen guitar.”

• In The New Yorker, Hermoine Hoby on Infinite Jest at 30:

  We understand Don to be one of the bewildered young fish, although, owing to Mr. Death in the unlikely role of sage, perhaps a young fish now coming to terms with the water in which he swims, learning to pay attention to what merits attention. Wallace’s piscine material is much more successful in this rambunctious, dynamic, take-it-or-leave-it novelistic form than in his fish-out-of-water public performance, years later, before the class of 2005. Wallace gave a commencement speech for the ages, but homily was not his métier. His great novel proposed that the compulsive, addictive character of America, not least its addiction to entertainment, could best be resisted through the engaged reading of fiction. Here is a book about addiction that offers itself as a kind of counter-addiction, an example of the compounding value of sustained attention. The infamous length of Infinite Jest is, in this sense, a central feature of its ethic: not bigness as brag but duration as discipline. In a distractible age, Wallace made an argument for the long novel that is won simply by being heard.

  [I figure we have probably ten or fifteen years until Infinite Jest can be evaluated as a novel instead of a cultural totem. Wallace’s essays are already there; Infinite Jest will get there too. In his “brodernism” essay Federico Perelmuter says that group views it as “rather too mainstream and easily read,” which is in its way promising—it’s a reaction against the novel not rooted in feelings about Wallace or what the figure of Wallace symbolizes. (While going through that essay to pull the quote I noticed that Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era makes the “brodernism canon” but Pound’s Cantos don’t; that seems somehow important.) —Steve]

Reviews:

• In the TLS, Boris Dralyuk reviews an anthology of sonnets (Scanty Plot of Ground: A Book of Sonnets, edited by Paul Muldoon, 2025):

  Such departures—and more radical ones, too—are only meaningful if the reader retains a sense of where the boundaries are, and Scanty Plot of Ground is full of reminders. Not only do most of the poets at least in large part abide by Petrarchan or Elizabethan rules (with the recently departed Tony Harrison sticking close to the Meredithian sixteen-line model in his quietly piercing “Long Distance II”), but we even get a primer, albeit in unruly verse, from Billy Collins’s “Sonnet”: “All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now, / and after this one just a dozen . . . ” Other self-referential sonnets, including Robert Burns’ “A Sonnet upon Sonnets” and Wordsworth’s “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room”, from which the book’s title is taken, pepper the pages. My personal favorite of these is Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines,” in which the speaker holds the personified mess of her life “in the strict confines / Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape” he is reduced to “nothing more nor less / Than something simply not yet understood.” It is as if Yeats’ Leda, whose appearance in “Leda and the Swan” closes Muldoon’s selection, had turned the tables on the divine Swan, pinned him down and forcefully “put on his knowledge with his power.”

  [The strict formalism of the sonnet subjects the twin frenzies of love and poetry to restraint. And because, as the old Lay’s slogan goes, you can’t write just one sonnet, poets end up thinking a lot about why they keep coming back to write more. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• Even more about the compulsion to write sonnets (this time John Berryman’s)

• The best thing to put on a cheeseburger

• K. T. on a poem by Chet’la Sebree and the dangers of invoking The Waste Land

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]