JAMES MATTHEW WILSON
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The Divine Comedy meets Southern Gothic

9/4/2015

 
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My review of Wyatt Prunty's new book, Couldn't Prove, Had to Promise, has just been published in The Weekly Standard (click the picture, or here to read). An excerpt:
The strange vision of “Nod” marks an achievement and a departure. Prunty definitively leaves the humble simile behind for a weird allegory. He lets the certitudes of his personal past become the stuff of a spiritual Everyman tale with a Southern twang. For Prunty, to speak of being “fallen from the symboled world” was once just a figure of speech; but in this new poem, we discover that, for humankind, to be fallen is a metaphor only in the strong sense of the modernists, by which I mean, as G.K. Chesterton once said, it is an empirical fact.

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