Critics are getting less cruel. Alas
This is good news for writers and bad for readers
IT IS DELICIOUS to know that one reviewer called John Keats’s poetry “drivelling idiocy”. It is more pleasing yet that Virginia Woolf considered James Joyce’s writing to be “tosh”. And surely no one can be uncheered to hear that when the critic Dorothy Parker read “Winnie the Pooh” she found it so full of innocent, childish whimsy that she—in her own moment of whimsical spelling—“fwowed up”.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “The death of the hatchet job”
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