Reviews for Twentieth century pleasures

The average rating for Twentieth century pleasures based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-01-01 00:00:00 Adam Hendricks “Images haunt. There is a whole mythology built on this fact: Cézanne painting till his eyes bled, Wordsworth wandering the Lake Country hills in an impassioned daze. Blake describes it very well, and so did the colleague of Tu Fu who said to him, ‘It is like being twice alive.’ Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have that explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is this. In the nineteenth century one would have said that what compelled usa bout them was a sense of the eternal. And it is something like that, some feeling in the arrest of the image that what perishes and what lasts forever have been brought into conjunction, and accompanying that sensation is a feeling of release from the self. Antonio Machado wrote, ‘Hoy es siempre todavía.’ Yet today is always. And Czeslaw Milosz, ‘Tylko trwa wieczna chwila.’ Only the moment is eternal.”

Review # 2 was written on 2009-06-18 00:00:00 David Dovnarsky Though this is a collection of essays, and most of them leaning very heavily into a personal narrative where Hass describes his relationship with a poet's work, I felt there was a larger argument at work in the book. It seems to me form is an organic structure for Hass, and it grows out of a poet's experiences and his identity. This doesn't mean that he surrenders himself to some touch-feely version of how a poem ought to be, Hass is as strict in his analysis of sonics, and rhythms, and meter. It does mean that these elements take on a character unique to a really good poet.