Reviews for Malcolm Cowley

The average rating for Malcolm Cowley based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-02-07 00:00:00 Antonio Ortiz Amazingly detailed bio of Cowley, his life—including his inner life—and his development as a poet and man of letters to age thirty-two. Derived from his voluminous correspondence with his literary contemporaries, his private notebooks, his published and unpublished writings, poems, and book reviews. And from interviews with the Cowleys at their Connecticut home. There is talk about aesthetics, poetics, the mechanics of poetry: rhyming schemes, free verse/modernism versus classicism, etc. They are relevant because they were important to Cowley, but can be dead wood to readers who are not interested in them. And there is literary criticism. Lots of good insights into other, mostly American, authors. Because Cowley believed that literature was a collaborative effort, to be viewed within the context of contemporary literary trends. My main complaint is the size of the type—too small for reading comfort. I had to use a magnifying glass. This is too big a book to read under such conditions, so I will never finish it. I’d like to see a condensed version in larger, more readable, type, with some illustrations. This version has only one illustration. But it will tell you everything you might want to know about Cowley’s formative years.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-06-08 00:00:00 Douglas Brtalik The book is a mix of farm dairy passages during WWII and editorialized editions from a few years later. It’s interesting that many of the arguments made are still being made today (not abusing the land and soil, the struggles of small family farms to compete with large companies, etc). The political commentary is also interesting (lots of discussion about the New Deal). The comments about black folks not being stupid but just not having been ‘civilized’ properly might have sounded almost progressive to white northerners, but now just sound racist. Without the racism, I’d probably give the book four stars (I found the agriculture parts really engaging) but one can’t ignore parts of a work that we find reprehensible. As a piece of history, it’s worth reading, but only through a modernized lens. I’ve chosen not to rate it at all.