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Books

Critics can be creative - look at Malcolm Cowley

The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley reveals a great reviewer who preferred to rehabilitate and encourage, rather than rebuke or revile

11 January 2014

9:00 AM

11 January 2014

9:00 AM

The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915–1987 Hans Bak

Harvard University Press, pp.775, £29.95, ISBN: 9780674051065

Even Spectator book reviewers have to concede that their craft is inferior to the creative travail of authors. Henry James railed against the practitioners of literary criticism long ago:

So much preaching, advising, rebuking & reviling, & so little doing: so many gentlemen sitting down to dispose in half an hour of what a few have spent months & years in producing.

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