To phrase "the object of desire" as a cluster of promises is to allow us to encounter what's incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality but as an explanation of our sense of our endurance in the object, insofar as proximity to the object means pro...
He adopted another unnerving phrase in the course of this explanation: that there will be ‘adequate food supplies’. Inadequate politician (photo by Chris McAndrew, source, CC BY 3.0) Plenty of other people have pointed out the unattractive nature of this statement. I think I’ve seen at le...
Finally, in the third quatrain, Shakespeare uses the image of the "forge" to describe the way that the speaker has manufactured his own responses to his beloved's cruelty. The word "forge" suggests a kind of intentional deception or fabrication, as if the speaker is deliberately manufacturing ...
“In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style; namely: its untranslatableness in words of ...