Stefan Beck reviews Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems, by Camille Paglia, in The New Criterion:
Does Camille Paglia contradict herself? She certainly does contain multitudes. How better to describe a homosexual atheist who has so much good to say about Roman Catholicism? A feminist who outraged feminists by claiming that, if raped, she would “dust herself off” and get on with things? A strange and controversial critic of art and culture with the almost comic brashness to call her most beloved poems the “world’s best”?
Well, a few adjectives spring to mind, but none are quite fair to the odd—albeit inconsistent—pleasure to be taken in reading her new book.
More here.