New Yorker: The assassination of J.F.K., fifty years later

[Douglas Caddy]

The assassination of J.F.K., fifty years later

by Adam Gopnik November 4, 2013

The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/11/04/131104crbo_books_gopnik?currentPage=all

[Martin Blank]

read this and felt it to be the egotism of ignorance on display.

[Paul Brancato]

So glib, what a waste of a clever mind.

[Richard Hocking]

read this and felt it to be the egotism of ignorance on display.

... with a dab of poetic misinformation.

He takes various shots at the critical community, then jumps into the arena himself, spilling his own reputation in the process.

[Martin Blank]

And he cops, with no attribution, his first sentence from Norman O. Brown:

"Poets are not the unacknowledged legislators of the world, lucky for us, but they can be worldly judges of poetic legislators."

Norman O. Brown said in his address “Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind,” which he delivered at Columbia university in 1960:

"And so there comes a time – I believe we are in such a time – when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of new mysteries, by the undemocratic but sovereign power of imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, the power which makes all things new."

[David Andrews]

Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

It's too good a line for the twentieth century - it would have eluded Ted Sorenson.

Edited October 30, 2013 by David Andrews

[Martin Blank]

Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

It's too good a line for the twentieth century - it would have eluded Ted Sorenson.

thanks for the heads up, david