SOURCE: "Milk, Mud, and Mountain Cottages: Ruskin's Poetry of Architecture," in PMLA, Vol. 100, No, 3, May, 1985, pp. 328-41.

In the following essay, Stein offers a critique of Ruskin's idealized view of nature and of rural life as expressed in The Poetry of Architecture.

Ruskin teaches us how to see, Charlotte Bronte remarked. He also teaches us how to read, particularly his own works and certainly the forbidding collection of early essays called The Poetry of Architecture. The standard approach to this series follows a path laid out in Ruskin's autobiography, which scans the past for the dawning of his genius. "Now, looking back from 1886 to that brook shore of 1837, whence I could see the whole of my youth, I find myself in nothing whatsoever changed." In the shimmering haze of biographical hindsight, those early essays glow with promise: "though deformed by assumption, and shallow in contents, they are curiously...