I am, of course, a New Critic snoot. However imperfectly, I aspire to the condition of one who reads, evaluates, appreciates, or condemns a poem based upon the poem an sich. I might have declined to allow Mr Pound into my living room to meet my family. That is not why I find The Cantos unsatisfactory. Lord's Byron's incest neither contributes to nor detracts from my pleasure in Don Juan. Dr Johnson is one of my personal heroes. That doesn't salvage Irene.
Because I am a man, I like the gossip of literature as well as the substance. People are perpetually interesting. Eliot is an interesting man, Dickens even more so. I endeavor to separate my view of Fagin in Oliver Twist and Riah in Our Mutual Friend from my own ethnicity and the way Semitic prejudices "wants to make my flesh creep." I don't entirely succeed. But I mostly do.
RHE
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