Monday, July 25, 2011

Concerning Reviews

"Few 21st-century journalists can match the cool snark-power of this passage. Croker's rhetorical muscle and shrewdness shine through the formal idiom and manners of 200 years ago. This is nastiness at its most effulgent." The critic John Wilson Croker speaking about John Keats and supposedly contributing to the poet's death as a result.

The rest of the article lays out a few simple rules for reviewing which, I agree, are not often followed to the fullest.  Sometimes gloriously, as in the above. Read the whole thing.

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