My review will be coming on my blog later (probably much later, given my review backlog), but just wanted to thank you for letting me know about this.

Nicholson Baker is as smart as I keep wanting Bill Bryson to be.

It’s even been in my mind lately because I was trying to think of a good book to give my grandmother. I decided on The Anthologist because she has so much poetry memorized–which she enjoys reciting from at random–and she pretty much holds all Paul Chowder’s views on the subject. It’s fun to have a fictional character agree with you and make good arguments you can pretend you would have come up with yourself.

Everything you described about Swinburne – you like him even though many of his poems strike you as very silly, and the whole “rhyming til he couldn’t rhyme no more” thing – is pretty much how I feel about Baudelaire. I find it especially silly to have such neat, consistent rhymes when he’s writing about, like, decadent nests of existential decay.

Ummmm, I don’t know. I have never been a scholar of poetry at all, and I only a few years ago started really liking it myself. But I think yes. It’s not set up as a primer of poetry or anything like that, and it’s quirky and jump-about-y, so it doesn’t feel like a lesson (which might be patronizing). He doesn’t really rehash the political stuff about Pound, no. He mentions it, but it’s not a huge thing.