One of the mysteries of reading (and of criticism, which ought to be disciplined reading)is how a writer once considered essential can become almost unreadable. This is from "Walter Scott: Falling Out of the Canon," by Irving Howe. I'm not very interested in the question of Walter Scott, but I think Howe is right that our sense of how things ought to move is very different from that of earlier times. This probably has even more profound consequences for poetry than for prose.
"There is still another, and I think fundamental, reason for Scott's decline in literary standing. It may at first seem a narrowly literary reason, but it is actually rooted in the depths of history. Scott wrote as if not only he but all his readers enjoyed world enough and time. That narratives might be foreshortened, conversations clipped, and tempos hastened seems never to have occurred to him [...]. The clock does not check his imagination. Must every scene be painted to the last tint? Every byplay of minor figures rendered to the last turn of dialect? Every hero orate in swollen prose? I fancy the thought of Scott edited by Beckett."
One of my teachers used to reply, when asked what he taught, "Slow reading." He should have said that he tried to teach slow reading, since he was working in defiance of the great cultural forces that Howe claims have made us unable to read Scott.
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