Some Necessary Angels: Essays on Writing and Politics

by Jay Parini

Overview

Distinguished poet and novelist Jay Parini presents some of his best essays—both classic and unpublished works—on topics ranging from baseball to Frost and Emerson to the culture of creative writing. For aspiring writers, Some Necessary Angels is an illuminating glimpse into the workshop of a distinguished novelist and critic. For readers who share Parini's love of language, it is an invigorating expression of faith.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231110709
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	01/20/1998
Series:	Studies of the East Asian Institute
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.15(w) x 9.24(h) x 1.01(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jay Parini is Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College. A former Guggenheim Fellow and visiting fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford, Parini has published four volumes of poetry, five novels (including The Last Station and Benjamin's Crossing), a critical study of Theodore Roethke, and biographies of John Steinbeck and Robert Frost. The latter won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award for the best work of nonfiction in 1999. He has also edited numerous volumes, including The Norton Anthology of American Autobiography, The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry, and The Columbia History of American Poetry.

What People are Saying About This

William A. Pritchard

As this lively and intelligent collection amply illustrates, Parini is a literary critic of sensitivity and a delightful essayist.

— William A. Pritchard, author of Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered

Sam Pickering

No one explains the workings of poetry better than Parini.

— Sam Pickering, author of The Blue Caterpillar and Other Essays

Editorial Reviews

Parini's prose, like his poetry, is fluid and generous. As a working poet, he is able to distill to its essences his subjects'work. These essays are imminently approachable.

American Book Review

Parini's book is a find; it is large enough to speak authoritatively on poetry and poetics, but intimate enough to linger on the language.

Virginia Quarterly Review

Parini (The Last Station) got his title from a quote by Wallace Stevens extolling "the necessary angel of reality." Without it, says Parini, "we can have no poetry, no imagination, and no politics....We must learn to sit down before reality like small children, open mouthed, attentive. This is the beginning of art." If a combination of awe and actuality makes for good art, it also makes for fine essay writing. Here, Parini has selected essays from the past 25 years that move smartly from the particular to the general. He begins by hooking the reader through personal writings such as appreciations of mentors Alastair Reid, Robert Penn Warren and Gore Vidal, followed by equally elegiac recollections of "Town Life"at college in St. Andrews and while teaching at Dartmouth and, now, Middlebury College. Having found his study "just too damn quiet," Parini began "Writing in Restaurants," and now spends part of every workday in Calvi's ice cream parlor in Middlebury, where from the porch "that somewhat perilously overhangs Otter Creek and its waterfall, the noise of that waterfall is white noise squared." The second section consists of poetry criticism in the stricter sensekeen insights into, and perceptive excerpts from, Warren, Reid, Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney and Charles Wright. In the last section, Parini covers larger subjects, including his brilliant "Fact or Fiction: Writing Biographies Versus Writing Novels," in which he weaves the Vulgate phrase verbum caro factum est (the word made flesh) into a scintillating essay on the shaping of reality. Eloquent, clear and learned, without being pedantic, these essays provide a voyage into delight. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Typical of such gatherings, these previously published essays deal in part with writers the author admires (such as Blake, Frost, Roethke, and Heaney) and with mentors who personally affected his thought and art (Reid, Penn Warren, and Vidal). What sets this book apart is its further concerns, from a ringing endorsement of life in Italy to a cold anger toward the media ("largely an extension of the entertainment industry") and an intelligent if perhaps too-hopeful attitude toward the rift between theory hardliners and imaginative writers in academe and the possibility of "reintigration." The result is a sort of half-realized intellectual autobiography; Parini is a novelist, biographer, poet, and professor at Middlebury College, and the more one peers into his lucid, broad-ranging mind, the more one sees how a certain kind of consciousness is shaped, one passionately engaged with every form of human expression, from poetry to politics. Recommended for academic libraries.David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee

Library Journal

Parini (English, Middlebury College) presents a sampling of his recent essays on such topics as his life and writing experience, prominent poets, post-structuralist literary theory, and the relationship between literature and politics. He includes previously unpublished essays on Charles Wright and the later poetry of Robert Penn Warren, and discusses the work of such authors as William Blake, Robert Frost, Ted Roethke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Seamus Heaney, and Alastair Reid. No index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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