Senses of Style

Style is a central but neglected category of literary experience. It is a way of knowing literature, one that is always with us. The poet and critic Jeff Dolven here offers an apology for style that breaks down the barriers between reading and writing. In a sparkling series of remarks and observations, Dolven explores qualities of style both in general and through the parallel stories of two men: Sir Thomas Wyatt, a poet and diplomat in the court of Henry VIII; and his admirer Frank O’Hara, a poet and curator in the New York of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Using Wyatt and O’Hara as foils, Dolven opens the larger question of what we talk about when we talk about style, in the 1530s, the 1950s, and today. Dolven’s claims about style are eminently portable to other authors and other periods. Above all, his book is a defense of reading covetously, for reading imitatively, for reading as writers. Teachers of literature today school us and one another in a criticism that is objective, that is about what we read, discouraging us from writing (or being) like what we read. But this state of affairs, Dolven argues, is historically idiosyncratic, one that neither Thomas Wyatt nor Frank O’Hara would have found much use for. Style, Dolven shows us, is a kind of freedom, allowing us to negotiate the puzzle of our own imitative natures.