In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot wrote of the literary canon as an “order of monuments.” A lot of unwelcome monuments — of Robert E. Lee, Christopher Columbus, and others — have come down recently, but the de-platforming of literary eminences has been going on for some years now: Eliot himself, who once bestrode the Anglophone scene like some Colossus of Rhodes, now seems more like a crankily eloquent … Mark Scroggins-The Monumental and Human Poetry of Paul ValéryRead more
