ellauri053.html on line 1165: “It is a style of Pater,” Eliot justly said, but then he indulged himself in a little racial prejudice, saying “it is a style of Pater, with a trick of the eye and a hanging of the nether lip that come from across the Irish Channel, all the more seductive.” “Mr. Yeats,” he says, “sometimes appears, as a philosopher of aesthetics, incoherent”:
ellauri107.html on line 242: In surveying Billy, “sometimes [Claggart’s] melancholy expression would have in it a touch of soft yearning, as if [he] could even have loved Billy but for fate and ban.” Evidently, Claggart has not fully disguised his private appreciation of Billy; but, because he believes something forbids any future for such feelings, he hardens his heart more and more fiercely toward the object of his desire. What “fate” and what “ban” does his misguided imagination perceive? Do their roles on the ship or elsewhere in society somehow doom any intimacy between them? Or does Claggart just presume Billy could never reciprocate his feelings? Might the Master at Arms simply despise sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular and, as a result, find himself driven all the more mad by his uncontrollable “yearning”? Whatever the accurate diagnosis, it is clear that Claggart distorts any positive feelings he possesses for Billy into negative ones with terrible consequences.
ellauri107.html on line 246: Billy Budd provides an implicit indictment of the culture, whether military or civil, that encourages the kind of closet where a Claggart so readily succumbs to his “depravity according to nature.” Captain Vere likewise shows a closed, perhaps also “closeted” mind as ready prey for the phenomenon of evil. In Vere’s presence, as Billy is struck dumb by Claggart’s accusation, Claggart is struck dead by a single blow from Billy’s fist, the only response he can muster to defend himself. Although Vere cherishes Billy as “an angel of God” and knows him to be innocent of Claggart’s charges, he resists any bending of rules to protect him against the harshest of consequences for his act of insubordination. Ruthlessly silencing the dictates of his heart, “sometimes the feminine in man,” Vere effects what Claggart’s malice alone could not -- Billy’s total destruction.
ellauri198.html on line 144: Not all reviewers agree that Warren’s work deserves such unqualified praise. Though Warren tackles unquestionably important themes, his treatment of those themes borders on the bombastic. Warren becomes ridiculous on occasion, whenever we lapse from total conviction. His philosophical musings are “sometimes truly awkward and sometimes pseudo-profound.” Warren thus joins a central American tradition of speakers—Emerson, Thoreau, Henry Adams, Norman Mailer—who are not only the salesmen but the advertisers of their own snake oil.”
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