... brief but intense.

Ms. Eisendrath works partly to illuminate Sidney’s famous but rarely read 16th-century romance, and partly to examine what retrospection is and what it (and also literature) might be for. Her title speaks to the floating, mutable quality of thought ('clouds,' she notes, 'are always in the process of becoming something else'), but also to the sense of grandeur and magic that works like Sidney’s can convey.

Part of the dream of immersion means recognizing that it is just a dream, always destined to end. But in highlighting that tension, Eisendrath makes us recognize how much of our reading lives puts us in a conflicted state.

Eisendrath (Poetry in a World of Things), a scholar of English Renaissance poetry, combines criticism and memoir in these immersive meditations on Philip Sidney’s 16th-century pastoral romance, Arcadia.

A writer smitten with the interplay of language and meaning discourses on art, literature, and the joys of reading.