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INTERVIEWER: You've often said that you think poetry should be ‘‘chiefly hair-raising.” At the same time, however, you’ve spoken of the desirability of a strong bond between the poet and the community he lives in—a bond that you seem to believe has been broken in modern times. Do you see any contra…

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever feel like arguing with James?

EDEL: Not often. I did like his balanced view of life, his calm, his general “cool” compared to my own impulsive way of approaching life. But I think I can best answer your question by telling you the one dream I had about him.I never dream…

EDEL: I believe the secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossi…

These are hardly heartwarming conclusions. Moreover, the deep influence of status on our individual choices challenges our very sense of free will. The sociologist Pitirim Sorokin writes, “When we ourselves determine something, we feel ourselves free; and especially when this self-determination flo…

At some point our expectations will adjust to these structural realities, but at the moment, we suffer from what Pierre Bourdieu calls hysteresis—the lingering values of a previous age continuing to guide our judgments. Take our feelings toward fame. In the past we assigned high status to anyone wh…