SOURCE: Kirsch, Adam. “Unphantasmal Peace.” New Republic 217, no. 24 (15 December 1997): 42–45.

In the following review, Kirsch evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of The Bounty, complimenting Walcott for addressing “the largest themes without self-consciousness or hesitation.”

In 1759, Edward Young offered some “Conjectures on Original Composition” in a letter to his friend Samuel Richardson. Young recognized that his contemporaries often suffered from a sense of having come too late—after history, as it were—and thus being incapable of rivaling the classical writers, who wrote when history was young and vital. But he denied that modern men really had come too late for greatness:

But why are originals so few [today]? Not because the writer's harvest is over, the great reapers of antiquity having left nothing to be gleaned after them; nor because the human mind's teeming time is past. … Tread in [Homer's] steps to the sole fountain of immortality; drink where...