Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (Convergences)

by Tom Paulin

Release Date: April, 1992

Edition: Hardcover

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Stylish and perceptive insights into politics and literature

I've been moved to write about this book after reading a previous 'review' denigrating Tom Paulin for his views on Israel. Personally I disagree with his belief that violence against Israeli settlers in the occupied territories is justified. However, it should be pointed out that Paulin (a somewhat cantankerous leftie) has repeatedly courted controversy in the UK by addressing issues of racism, colonialism and anti-semitism in the fine arts. He has written lengthy condemnations of TS Eliot's anti-semitism, and a couple of years ago denounced Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen as an underhand apologia for a Nazi. He's not a racist. Now to the book: Minotaur, which I read several years ago, is a collection of brilliant readings of the interrelationship between politics and literature in (mostly English) literature. It's written in a dazzling, quicksilver prose closer to high journalism (Paulin's a known devotee of Hazlitt) than the stale jargon of most academic writing. Paulin's strength is in restoring a historical/political context to works generally studied in a kind of aesthetic vaccuum, and the results are always stimulating. I'd recommend this to anyone interested in literature.

Tom Paulin Speaks

Just so you know what you're buying, here's the text from a Telegraph (U.K.) story on poet Tom Paulin:

"THE Board of Deputies of British Jews is considering making a complaint to the police over a newspaper interview with the poet Tom Paulin in which he is reported as saying that American-born settlers in Israel should be shot dead.

"Paulin, who appears regularly on the panel of the BBC2 arts programme Newsnight Review (formerly Late Review), allegedly made the comment in an interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram.

"The interviewer wrote that Paulin, a consistent critic of Israeli conduct towards the Palestinians, clearly abhorred 'Brooklyn-born' Jewish settlers. Paulin, a lecturer at Hertford College, Oxford, was then quoted as saying: 'They should be shot dead.'

"'I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them." Earlier in the interview, he was quoted as saying: 'I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all.'"

Tom Paulin has the right to say whatever he chooses (free speech and all that); so I have should have the right to point out to people thinking about subsidizing him with book purchases the kinds of things that emanate from his vile soul.