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The critic's compass
Sarang Gopalakrishnan (in his Glass-Bottom Blog) muses on the directions a reviewer can take in his medium—whether to make for a stand-alone essay that advances some independent ideas (and will later be worthy of collection) or to more directly handle the work at hand and make himself most useful to his immediate readers. These aren’t mutually exclusive, exactly; but they’re certainly not easy to reconcile. In his brief treatment, Sarang unearths this bit on the tendencies of W. H. Auden, who, according to John Berryman:
… has done one of two things with books entrusted to him for comment: either he wrote about what interested him at the moment, making some spidery connection with the book in hand, or, with books he felt keen about, like Cyril Connolly’s vivid Enemies of Promise, he quoted from them at agreeable length.