Features April 2010
The reasonableness of Donald Justice
On the critical prose of Donald Justice.
There are critics by nature and critics by necessity, and perhaps even critics by accident. Donald Justice liked the idea of criticism more than he liked being a poetry critic. When he came to collect his essays just before turning sixty, there were scarcely a hundred pages to trouble him. The rest of Platonic Scripts (1984) was pieced out with interviews and scraps from his notebooks, the detritus of a writer’s life, though no less revealing for that. There were reviews from the 1950s he chose not to preserve, reviews that displayed a more captious temper than his later essays; much as Justice relished the corrosive wit and mortal lightning of a Randall Jarrell, he had decided his interest in critical prose could better be served by the rare essay, written when the spirit moved him.
What to Justice might have seemed a lazy engagement with criticism proved an exemplary...
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