Ambrose Bierce on Critics With Narrow Minds

Have you noticed that in many current reviews, anything at all close to horror is linked with King, Lovecraft, or Ligotti, no matter how little the work in question resembles theirs? Have you noticed that reviewers never compare new writers to Bernard Capes, or to L. A. Lewis, or to Ralph Adams Cram, not even when such a comparison would actually make sense? All too often, people who write about stories have a limited grasp of how wide the field has been, and so they pull out the first names -- the only names? -- that come to their minds.

This is nothing new; Ambrose Bierce had quite a bit to say about the failure of certain critics and reviewers to understand the width and depth of any field:

"Until Gabriel, with one foot upon the sea and the other upon the neck of the last living critic, shall swear that the time for doing this thing is up, every writer of stories a little out of the common must suffer the same sickening indignity. To the ordinary microcephalous bibliopomps -- the book-butchers of the newspapers -- criticism is merely a process of marking upon the supposed stature of an old writer the supposed stature of a new, without ever having taken the trouble to measure that of the old; they accept hearsay evidence for that. Does one write 'gruesome stories'? -- they invoke Poe; essays? -- they out with their Addison; satirical verse? -- they have at him with Pope -- and so on, through the entire category of literary forms. Each has its dominant great name, learned usually in the district school, easily carried in memory and obedient to the call of need. And because these strabismic ataxiates, who fondly fancy themselves shepherding auctorial flocks upon the slopes of Parnassus, are unable to write of one writer without thinking of another, they naturally assume that the writer of whom they write is affected with the same disability and has always in mind as a model the standard name dominating his chosen field -- the impeccant hegemon of the province."

-- Ambrose Bierce, "On Literary Criticism."
From THE COLLECTED WORKS OF AMBROSE BIERCE, VOLUME 10.
The Neale Publishing Company, 1911.

William Wordsworth: No Motion Has She Now, No Force

Wordsworth? Words words. Too many words, at too great a length.

Sometimes, though, he could hit the target with one shot.

A SLUMBER DID MY SPIRIT SEAL,
by William Wordsworth.

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

From
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, SELECTED POETRY.
The Modern Library, New York, 1950.

Emily Dickinson: That Long Shadow

Because I am not religious, I feel nothing when I read the many poems by Emily Dickinson that convey pious thoughts in conventional terms. What force me to sit up and take notice are the poems that evoke, in her own way, the unsettling mental states that precede religion....

[764]
by Emily Dickinson.

Presentiment -- is that long Shadow -- on the Lawn --
Indicative that Suns go down --
The Notice to the startled Grass
That Darkness -- is about to pass --

c. 1863

From
THE COMPLETE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, edited by Thomas H. Johnson.
Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1960.