Escapist literature, yes! But then, how much of literature, how much of mankind's nobility, springs from the heart's irrepressible yearning to transcend the reality by which we unhappy mortals are fettered!
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, July 27, 2013
Escapist Literature
G.P. Goold (1922-2002), introduction to Propertius, Elegies, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 9: