Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez, 1656. Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain.

Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez, 1656. Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain.

Arts & Letters

Volume III, Number 2 | fall 2010

Preamble

Lady in a Veil

By Lewis H. Lapham

Despite being told that art is somehow sacred, it’s better to take a naive delight in the thing itself.

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In the Gloom the Gold

By Jamie James

Consider the legacy of Ezra Pound—no poet has ever been so influential, so controversial, and so little read.

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Map

Telling Tales

The evolutions of four stories.

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1853 | Paris

Grand Tour

Harriet Beecher Stowe appreciates the defects of the masters.More

c. 680 | North Yorkshire

Divine Inspiration

God gives man the art of song.More

1711 | London

Half-Formed Insects on the Nile

Alexander Pope takes on his critics.More

Charts & Graphs

Sing to Me, O Muse

Inspirations for various works.

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Photograph of American novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler.

German composer Richard Wagner.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

- Aristotle, c. 350 BC

Arthur Fifield & Norman Maclean

Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

Charlotte Brontë’s Teaching Career

By John Pfordresher

How the novelist’s work as a governess shaped her worldview—and her writing. More

DÉjÀ Vu

Apropos of Nothing

2017:

The Trump administration lies about terrorist attacks.

c. 1517:

Machiavelli assures “fraud is fair in war.”

More

LQ Podcast

#07 Kory Stamper

Lewis Lapham talks with Kory Stamper, lexicographer at Merriam-Webster and the author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. More

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