Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Galchen, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Monday, January 27, 2025

The Art of Quotation (Part VI)

Robert Macfarlane, in his brilliant The Old Ways (2012), says of the poet Edward Thomas,

The overlooked and the unnoticed attract him: the “flowers of rose-bay on ruinous hearths and walls” or “the long narrowing wedge of irises that runs alongside and between the rails of the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway,” almost into the heart of London.

The wonderful quotes are from Thomas’s journal. I like the way Macfarlane introduces them, briskly stating Thomas’s aesthetic (‘The overlooked and the unnoticed attract him”), then using a colon to adduce the examples. Macfarlane’s addition at the end (“almost into the heart of London”) is inspired!

Credit: The above photo of Robert Macfarlane is by Charlotte Hadden.

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