The value of the Washington Review of Books is in its poetry of vision, its intuition of the rise, growth, and decline of cultures.
Links:
Reviews:
In the TLS, A. K. Blakemore reviews a collection of vampire fiction (Vampire Tales, edited by Nick Groom, September):
Perhaps the first banner year of the literary vampire came in 1819, almost thirty years before Stoker’s birth. Vampire Tales begins with five pieces from 1819, which saw the publication of Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and the first translation of Goethe’s “Bride of Corinth” into English. Both iconic narrative poems are included in this anthology, but it is The Vampyre—which famously emerged from the artistic retreat to the Villa Diodati, on Lake Geneva, where the teenage Mary Shelley was inspired to begin Frankenstein—that is perhaps better known today than either. Written by Byron’s physician John Polidori, The Vampyre was first published anonymously as “a letter from Geneva” that included “anecdotes” of the author’s employer. The story, which Polidori describes in his own introduction as founded on “a superstition very general in the East,” is a really quite silly and histrionic production, certainly more notable for seminality than style. The most innovative aspect of The Vampyre was the characterization of its antagonist, Lord Ruthven: an urbane participant in London’s fashionable demi-monde, he is shown as a master of “the serpent’s art” of manipulation. By making Ruthven less manifestly monstrous and more Machiavellian, Polidori imbued his “vampyre,” and those that followed, with a more clandestine, and therefore potent, menace. Ruthven is the clearest literary progenitor of Count Dracula, and Polidori’s ground-breaking depiction of a cultivated, aristocratic bloodsucker more than makes up for the amateurish qualities of The Vampyre’s realization.
[They really did build an entire artistic movement out of not getting past Book 2 of Paradise Lost, didn’t they, with all their Satans who never deteriorate into a mass of flop sweat. But I suppose that, if your vampire story is transparently about how titled aristocrats leech off of other people’s hard work while devoting themselves to sexual perversion, your vampire has to play as a titled aristocrat. You wonder what Byron made of that—so far as I can tell he never commented on that aspect of the story.
Later in the piece Blakemore gets into the female vampire emerging from male imaginations characterized by “a simultaneous terror of female sexuality and an intense yearning to become its object.” Better than most of this literature—the authors tend not to make anything interesting out of their barely-concealed feelings about women—is Coleridge’s vampire-adjacent Christabel (1816, although written earlier) and its suggestion of sapphic vampirism ipso facto inaccessible to the male poet. This combination of vampirism and inaccessibility is strongest here, when Geraldine tells Christabel what is happening:
“In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell,
Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel!
Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow,
This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow;
But vainly thou warrest,
For this is alone in
Thy power to declare,
That in the dim forest
Thou heard’st a low moaning,
And found’st a bright lady, surpassingly fair;
And didst bring her home with thee in love and in charity,
To shield her and shelter her from the damp air.”
There is no real way into this; the vampire figure denies her victim the power to speak about it, and there is no Van Helsing figure to explain it. The same goes for the earlier description of Geraldine’s—well, the poem doesn’t say what it is:
Behold! her bosom and half her side—
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!
Horror has always been succumbing to the temptation to explain what exactly the monster represents; Coleridge’s poem is all the more effective for its total refusal. —Steve]
Two in our sister publication on the sweet Thames:
Maureen N. McLane reviews a collection of Fanny Howe’s poems (This Poor Book: A Poem, May) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 29, 2026.]:
Howe’s is a posture of dispossession. A communal abjection underlines the possibility of solidarity: “I was just one more person who had no skills or money. / My education was self-inflicted. This was an advantage.” At times one might feel that she protests too much. Her writing across genres is nothing if not skilful. But mere skill is something she would have scoffed at. And what matters in Howe is the rejection of official hierarchies, the divestiture of privilege (hence the resonance of figures such as St. Francis and Weil, dramatic renouncers both). It is also true that the “I” of Howe’s poems is a shimmering semi-allegorical thing, not a clearly biographical figure—“an idea, even an abstract example, of consciousness shifting.”
In 2004 Howe envisioned her future reader as a solitary figure encountering one writer’s “record”: “If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone’s notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle.” An apparently modest gloss on her work, this becomes, on reflection, something more capacious. For all her modeling of poetic encounter as a one-to-one affair, Howe summons a communal “we” throughout This Poor Book.
Nicholas Spice reviews a history of Western classical music (Music’s Odyssey: An Invitation to Western Classical Music, by Robin Holloway, October in the UK):
“Music, by natural bent, is that which at once receives an adjective,” Roland Barthes wrote, disheartened. Holloway is a virtuoso of the epithet. His descriptive vocabulary is like a Pantone color swatchbook, shaded and graded to allow, in kaleidoscopic permutations, the finest of distinctions and a supple exchange between evocations of what the music may be said to be like and reflexive descriptions of the way it affects us. Imagery blossoms on the page. Metaphors of social encounter, taste and smell predominate. Weber’s style is “at once aristocratic—elegant, dapper, Beau Brummell; yet indefinably vulgar, Cockney, sentimental . . . refined and bumptious.” Tendresse, the fifth of the pieces from Fauré’s Dolly Suite, is “a flawless miniature world of tact, gentleness, humor, sweetness, without anything cheap, faked, condescending.” Beethoven’s Emperor concerto is “unattractively boastful, assertive, bullying”; Mussorgsky’s song “Hobbyhorse” “absolutely unaffected, without whimsy, archness, cuteness, coyness: on a knife-edge of sheer awfulness.” Hippolyte et Aricie (Rameau) is “ravishing,” “delicious”; Fauré’s late songs are “odorless and taste-free”; Borodin’s first symphony “a bit dry and chewy”; Ravel’s violin and cello sonata “a crinkled thing—acrid, rebarbative, acerbic”; Mozart’s last piano concerto “not without touches of wryness, even acidity” (shades of wine writing here). At times the characterizations take off into prose poems. Here are three: of the opening of Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand, “black swelling waves, so soft as to be near inaudible, through which is perceived a shadowy marine monster groping along the ocean floor”; at the close of Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream overture, “the vision passes into the distance; overheard, glimpsed down the wrong end of a telescope—crystal-clear yet unfathomably mysterious—through a glass lightly, uncanny without shadow”; and, of the chorus “How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling-place” from the Brahms Requiem: “It portrays the delights of the celestial mansion with unabashed worldliness—one seems to tread on carpets, sit on sofas, glance through the potted palms at Johann Strauss and his band.” Eat your thesaurus, Barthes!
[Tag yourself. I’m “a crinkled thing—acrid, rebarbative, acerbic.” —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:
The geography of imagining Iowa
What makes poems by children good
A Poem by John Milton and promises of poetic immortality
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]
