I Long For The Raised Voice, The

Cooper Wrote A Novel Which Is Absolutely Indistinguishable From Austen, Completely From A Female Point Of View, Completely English, No Sense That He Was An American.

I've Been Writing About James Fenimore Cooper. He Was Not A Writer. Here Was A Man Who Was 30 Years Old And Had Never Put Anything More Than His Signature On Paper.

To Be An American (unlike Being English Or French Or Whatever) Is Precisely To Imagine A Destiny Rather Than To Inherit One; Since We Have Always Been, Insofar As We Are Americans At All, Inhabitants Of Myth Rather Than History.

I Think The Pattern Of My Essays Is, A Funny Thing Happened To Me On My Way Through Finnegans Wake.

Anybody In The Next Centuries Wanting To Know What It Was Like To Be A Poet In The Middle Of The 20th Century Should Read Kaddish.