Living in Language

“David Bosworth contends that ‘the history we are living is best understood as . . . a complex, interactive, ongoing novel.’ Note his response to a trendy commentator’s claim that language is about nothing but itself: ‘Our speaker didn’t seem to know that, beneath the precious mask his theory wove, the very sounds he spoke were pulsing with the passions of past events.’ We must rejoice that Bosworth, both erudite and humane, feels that pulsing more acutely than any other contemporary.”


—Sydney Lea, Vermont poet laureate (2011–15)





“Capacious and precise, critical and sympathetic, deeply cultured and thoroughly down-to-earth, David Bosworth’s Living in Language engages the reader with free-ranging enthusiasm: whether elaborating on James Fenimore Cooper, Wallace Stevens, or Patricia Lockwood, his prose is distinguished by originality and vividness. Even as he laments the instrumental rationalism of our age, Bosworth offers a glimpse of a present that contains “so many riches to assay here, so much pain to parse and beauty to acclaim.” This book is to be acclaimed.”


—Peter Campion, author of Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry





“In "What Calls for Thinking," Martin Heidegger avows that mythos and logos "become separated and opposed only at the point where neither can keep to its pristine essence." It is the heartening accomplishment of Bosworth's beautiful essays to advocate successfully for the pristine and for the essential in human tellings. Those canons which culminate in ourselves, whether we honor them or not, forecast the future life of our words and of the myths we might yet make of them. There is more than reassurance in these essays. There is a thrill of futurity.”


—Donald Revell, emeritus professor of English, UNLV, and author of Canadaigua