The Very Best Of All

Criticism Starts - It Has To Start - With A Real Passion For Reading. It Can Come In Adolescence, Even In Your Twenties, But You Must Fall In Love With Poems.

It Is By Extending Oneself, By Exercising Some Capacity Previously Unused That You Come To A Better Knowledge Of Your Own Potential.

No One Yet Has Managed To Be Post-shakespearean.

Rebecca Mead's My Life In Middlemarch Is A Wise, Humane, And Delightful Study Of What Some Regard As The Best Novel In English. Mead Has Discovered An Original And Highly Personal Way To Make Herself An Inhabitant Both Of The Book And Of George Eliot's Imaginary City. Though I Have Read And Taught The Book These Many Years I Find Myself Desiring To Go Back To It After Reading Rebecca Mead's Work.

All That A Critic, As Critic, Can Give Poets Is The Deadly Encouragement That Never Ceases To Remind Them Of How Heavy Their Inheritance Is.