Nicholas Bradley

William Chapman was not a great poet. Not terrible, not the worst, but not very good. That hardly makes him unique. Au contraire! Bad poets are a dime a dozen. But as Tolstoy might have said, each bad poet is bad in his own way. In Chapman’s case, the absence of genius was not for lack of…

The question is asked all the time, usually in unpoetic moments; it’s an occupational hazard of teaching literature. There I’ll be at the clinic, sinuses on fire, when sure enough the doctor asks, “What’s your favourite book?” My practised answer, no hemming and hawing, is Moby-Dick. Everyone’s heard of it, and it sounds reassuringly…

When Harold Bloom died last October, the word “canon” was suddenly everywhere. Invariably, the obituaries and reminiscences that eulogized or reviled him mentioned The Western Canon — his popular and thoroughly Eurocentric account of Great Books, from Dante to Beckett, with Shakespeare, like God, everywhere and nowhere at once. Well before The Western Canon appeared in…

There are many places to hide along the convoluted coastlines of the Pacific Northwest. In Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings, the English author-cum-sailor Jonathan Raban writes that he “had never seen charts on which land and sea were so intricately tangled, in a looping scribble of blue and beige.” Laurie…