SOURCE: Schwartz, Sanford. Review of Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State, by Tom Paulin. Comparative Literature Studies 32, no. 4 (1995): 539-42.

In the following review, Schwartz commends Paulin's historicized literary criticism in Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State but finds his extreme rage against state and aesthetic ideologies potentially counterproductive.

The mythical minotaur, half man/half bull, was caged in a labyrinth designed by Dædalus, the artificer whose dramatic flight out of the labyrinth provided a later artificer, James Joyce, with a symbol for the transcendent power of art. In the introduction to his new book, [Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State,] the prominent poet-editor-critic Tom Paulin recalls the scene in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist where Stephen Dedalus resolves to fashion Dædalian wings and escape the labyrinth of his own troubled heritage: “When the soul of a man is born in this country,” Dedalus tells his Irish...