Criticism
In his Round the World, Andrew Carnegie praised Bret Harte as uniquely American:
A whispering pine of the Sierras transplanted to Fifth Avenue! How could it grow? Although it shows some faint signs of life, how sickly are the leaves! As for fruit, there is none. America had in Bret Harte its most distinctively national poet.
Writing in his autobiography four years after Harte's death, however, Mark Twain characterized him and his writing as insincere. He criticized the miners' dialect used by Harte, claiming it never existed outside of his imagination. Twain accused Harte of borrowing money from his friends with no intent to repay and of financially abandoning his wife and children. He referred repeatedly to Harte as "The Immortal Bilk."
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Good criticism is very rare and always precious.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)