WRB—June 17, 2026

“disdain for female friendships”

The Washington Review of Books is large, the Washington Review of Books contains multitudes.

Links:

• In Plough, a symposium on “America’s Homer.” Joseph M. Keegin, arguing for Whitman:

  Homer and Hesiod, Hegel notes, “gave to the Greek gods their names and their form,” but only the former concerned himself too with heroes. Both of Homer’s great poetic epics open with divine invocations directed at human objects: “Sing the rage of Achilles, goddess,” Homer demands at the outset of the Iliad; “Tell me of the man, Muse,” begins the Odyssey. Several centuries later, Virgil starts his self-consciously Homeric fabrication of the founding of Rome by pulling poetry down from the heavens: “I sing”—no longer the gods—“of arms and the man.” Nearly two millennia later, a poor, barely-schooled Quaker’s son writing from “this puzzle, the New World,” the “athletic Democracy” unfolding an ocean away from all known civilization, made himself both singer and song: “One’s-self I sing.”

  Thus Walt Whitman, too, named for the Americans their hero and their god. We are, Alexis de Tocqueville once said, natural Cartesians: “In most of the operations of the mind, each American calls only on the individual effort of his reason.” I think, therefore I am American. We are a nation of isolatoes, in Melville’s phrasing; an entire country corrupted by Socratic skepticism and folded inward by Luther’s doctrine of the heart. In earlier times, this made America a Petri dish of Protestantisms—more recently, it has made us the world’s greatest exporter of breaking news (as Hegel observed, modern man’s lauds) and all varieties of moralism, egoist occultism, and psychotherapy.

  Whitman presages this all.

  [It’s a ridiculous question. I am reminded of Ralph Wiley’s response to Saul Bellow’s “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?”: Proust is the Proust of the Papuans. In the same spirit, Homer is the Homer of the Americans. Note also that in forming his questions Bellow mentions two non-Americans: attempt to answer “who is the Tolstoy of the Americans” and you might not like what you find. The question in the article’s subhead also makes a rather large jump: “If England has Shakespeare, Spain has Cervantes, Italy has Dante, and Russia has Pushkin, then who do we have?” They do indeed have Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dante and Pushkin, but are they busy insisting that such figures are “our Homer”? (Surely “the Homer of Spain” would be the poet of El Cantar de mio Cid and “the Homer of England” Milton anyway. I was under the impression that Homer composed epic poems.)

  Framing the question in this way is engaging in almost every American intellectual vice at once: A massive inferiority complex with the Old World revealing itself in hilarious braggadocio (“we have, like, ten Homers over here!”) that poorly conceals justified insecurity (we have, in fact, zero Homers over here). An inability to understand the scope and scale of human history (part of what makes Homer Homer is that people have been reading him for three thousand years). An adjacent belief that everything that happened before America didn’t really count (“we have it in our power to begin the world over again”—immanentizing the eschaton from the beginning). And yet, as a whole, the question flinches before it can go all the way (come on, ask the question you know you want to: “what is the American King James Version?”) It makes you understand James and Eliot.

  But, if we really have to do this, someone should have suggested that the American Iliad and the American Odyssey are not in fact by the same person. —Steve]

• Adam Roberts on various treatments of the fall of Hephaestus:

  There is a strange, knotted mytheme here, and it’s saying something interesting, only glancingly related to the events of the Iliad—or indeed of Paradise Lost. Why is Hephaestus lame and ugly? Because he has been cast out of heaven, hurled to the ground and broken. Why did this happen? In the first instance, it was because he was ugly and lame, his mother Hera disgusted at what she had given birth to and throwing him away. But this is to place cause and effect in reverse, for he was born ugly and lame before he was broken and lamed by the fall. Zeus’ hurling of Hephaestus from Olympus speaks to the artificer’s challenging of divine authority, his lawlessness; but it is only after his fall that he is taken up and raised by the lawless ones, the pirates, the Sintians. He falls onto a volcanic isle, because in popular imagination volcanoes are the smithies of the gods—hence the Roman version of his name, Vulcan—except that the Sintians are a mainland Greek population of bandits, not islanders. And in Milton the myth softens, mulcifer-mulcts, further along the lines of causality’s precession: Hephaestus falls, in the golden days of Greek myth, and tumbles slowly to Lemnos—except that he has always already fallen, before time, into a deeper abyss than a Lemnian crater. The maker, the artisan and creator, the poet, is cast out, punished for his ugliness and physical incapacity, for his lawlessness, even though it is the casting-out that causes his brokenness and lame body, that introduces him to the lawless realm, a place at once sea and land, fire and water. In this is the mystery of the artist, the poet, part of the divine world yet expelled by it, punished though innocent yet always already transgressive, to-be-broken and always already broken. The paradox of artistic creation, always both transgressively reactive to, and proactively prior to, time.

  [Whether the Incarnation would have happened if man had not fallen is beyond the scope of this newsletter. But, if not, it makes artistic creation like the first creation.

  Roberts mentions being rebuked by C. S. Lewis’ A Preface to Paradise Lost for enjoying Milton’s retelling of the pagan myths about Mulciber:

  This, Lewis insists, is not the point of an epic poem like Paradise Lost: “Milton is not a collection of exquisite little moments and images; it must be apprehended as a colossal whole, people who fixate on these moments are missing the point of” etc etc. I paraphrase.

  Enjoying those specific lines, though, gets you a rebuke from John Milton: “thus they relate, / Erring.” I assume this is Stanley Fish’s favorite phrase in the whole poem, since with it he transformed our understanding of the poem. (Well, with that phrase and finding liberals extremely annoying. This second part has, I think, been mostly ignored as a piece of Fish’s understanding of Milton, despite it being basically on the surface. When he revisited all this material in How Milton Works (2001) he included a passage that goes like this: “Liberals believe x. Liberals believe y. Liberals believe z. Liberals believe . . . [This paragraph goes on for over a page in this fashion. Next paragraph:] Milton believes none of these things.” And the argument in “There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech, And It’s a Good Thing, Too” opens by invoking the Areopagitica as not a defense of free speech but an example of what Fish says in the title (“I want to say all affirmations of freedom of expression are like Milton’s”). Fish always presents his reading of Milton as obvious; only the poor reading of liberals, forcing their liberalism into what Milton actually wrote, made Fish’s arguments were so new and shocking. But I digress.)

  In Book 3 of Paradise Lost Milton links the casting-out of his physical deformity (attributed in part to God as light: “but thou / Revisit’st not these eyes, that rowle in vain / To find thy piercing ray”) to the deeper insight (heh) necessary for his poetic project:

  But cloud in stead, and ever-during dark

  Surrounds me, from the chearful wayes of men

  Cut off, and for the Book of knowledg fair

  Presented with a Universal blanc

  Of Nature’s works to mee expung’d and ras’d,

  And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out.

  So much the rather thou Celestial light

  Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers

  Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence

  Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell

  Of things invisible to mortal sight.

  —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication in California, Eric Gudas reviews a reissued novel by Barbara Pym (The Sweet Dove Died, 1978, 2025):

  This meeting sets in motion an increasingly dire power struggle marked by jealousy, possessiveness, and desire, both repressed and painfully awoken. In her introduction to the novel’s 2025 NYRB Classics reissue, British novelist Susie Boyt astutely characterizes The Sweet Dove Died as “a matrix of longing and loathing, the two states often indistinguishable.” Pym, both mesmerized and repelled by her own fictional creation, gets drawn into the matrix too. In 1969, she disconsolately asked Larkin, her superfan and pen pal, “[W]hat reader would want to identify herself with Leonora?” Identification implies a capacity for empathy, but Leonora possesses so little that even a photograph of James’s dead mother calls forth only her “rather bored reverence.” If Pym envisioned a female readership for The Sweet Dove Died, then what Boyt calls Leonora’s “disdain for female friendships” might have been a poison pill. Within the novel, that disdain has not only grown reciprocal but has also morphed into schadenfreude. Leonora’s frenemy Liz wants “the cold, proud and well-organized Leonora to suffer as she had suffered and so to provide an interesting spectacle.”

[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:

• I invent a poem by A. E. Housman

• Esoteric readings of “the wheels on the bus”

• K. T. on a Poem by Stephan Torre and the landscapes of the American West

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]