Contemporary Literary Criticism | Lee, Laurie - Verlyn Klinkenborg (review date 25 July 1993)

Verlyn Klinkenborg (review date 25 July 1993)

SOURCE: "One Poet's War," in The New York Times Book Review, July 25, 1993, p. 7.

[Klinkenborg is an American editor and nonfiction writer. In the review of A Moment of War below, he discusses the contemporary relevance of Lee's autobiographical account of the Spanish Civil War.]

For some artists and writers—I think of Goya or Michael Herr—war is a kind of fugue state, from which they return with a lingering vision in which you feel an expressive haste, a hysteria under flushed skin. These are the artists and writers for whom war retains a kind of esthetic sublimity, immoral to be sure and always undercut by the blatant ironies of combat, but with the mix of fear and beauty that Wordsworth could find in a mountain landscape unmolested by shellfire or that Byron could find in incest. The emotion with which such works are charged is a commentary on war and a gauge of authenticity. But...

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