Here from Adam Kirsch is an eloquent review of Professor Denis Donoghue’s book, On Eloquence, which eloquently disdains rhetoric – designed “’to move people to done thing rather than another’” – from eloquence, whose “classic pleasures” include aesthetic bliss and power, invention, copiousness, facility, and much more.

This work sounds like must-reading for, in Kirsch’s words, the “generations of students and professors [who] have been trained to read suspiciously, as though literature were an instrument of domination instead of an escape from it.”