A Long the Riverrun

by Richard Ellmann

Book Overview

A splendid collection of literary essays by "the greatest biographer of the century"--The Sunday Times, London. Ellmann's Oscar Wilde was a tremendous critical success, winning both the NBCC and the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 039457768X
• ISBN13: 9780394577685
• Release Date: March 1989
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 277 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Last testament of the pre-eminent literary biographer

"The claim of being reasonable and honest did not impress him, for Yeats felt that 'poets were good liars who never forgot that the Muses were women who liked the embrace of gay warty lads'." (93)"Yeats astonishes us by the bluntness with which he makes clear the defects of our world. But having made clear its limitations, he suddenly enters upon its defense. It has pain, it has struggle, it has tragedy, elements denied to the daimons. Seen from their point of view life always fails. Yet it does not fail utterly, for man can imagine their state even if he cannot participate in it. And the capacity to imagine is redemptive; man, in a frenzy at being limited, overthrows much of that limitation. He defiantly adsserts his imaged self against futility, and to imagine heroism is to become a hero." (27)"[Beckett] saw besmirchment as the human condition. What right had he to exempt himself from it? Might not his claim to privacy be the last rag of egotism?" (231)"By making his book the matrix for the ontogeny of the soul, Joyce achieved a unity as perfect as any of the Edwardians could achieve, and justified literally his description of the artist as like a mother brooding over her creation until it assumes independent life. The aspiration towards unity in the novel seems related to the search for unity elsewhere, in psychology for example, where the major effort is to bring the day-world and the night-world together. Edwardian writers who commented on history demonstrated the same desire to see human life in a synthesis. In 1900, Joyce announced in his paper on 'Drama and Life' that 'human society is the embodiment of changeless laws', laws which he would picture in operation in Finnegans Wake." (159)"The difference between Wilde and the Romantics was not in estimating the value of art, but in putting so much emphasis as Wilde did on artifice. When he said, 'A sunset is no doubt a beautiful thing, but perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets', he was suggesting that artists were not only the Shelleyan unackwoledged legislators, but the quickeners of perception. Nature as we know it is built up out of imaginative fictions. Strip as we will, we will never be naked. People fall in love because poets have talked up that sentiment. They limp because Byron limped. They dress up because Beau Brummell did. Wilde's point here being that people are not only affected by the works of art that are written down, but by the works of art that are lived." (7). . . vintage quotes from the 'inside' of the process of literary creation. Ellman got there more often than any commentator I have read. There are many fascinating chapters in this svelte yet far-ranging collection of papers, mostly posthumous. But, my favorite section of the book is his remarkable reminiscence of the period when he essentially lived in Yeats' home and, with Yeats' widow, explored the life and writings of that great and controversial poet, first-hand. Extrodinar