David Rosen

T. S. Eliot and the Lost Youth of Modern Poetry

Modern poetry was never young. In 1913 or thereabouts W. B. Yeats, fifty years a youth, declared himself an old man, and thereupon was recognized as a kindred spirit by Ezra Pound. In that same year Robert Frost published his first book of verse at the advanced age of thirty-nine. Within the next twelve months T. S. Eliot arrived in England from America, still in his mid-twenties yet toting a manuscript of poems, many begun much earlier, about fading old ladies and anxious aesthetes. This is one of the earliest:

School Surveillance and Privacy

Because their populations are inherently vulnerable and unformed, schools cannot help but be test cases for the relation between surveillance and privacy. In this essay, we suggest that many current debates on the topic are ultimately semantic in nature, as vastly different practices—some empathetic, some coercive, some altruistic, some disciplinary—are all lumped together under a single term: surveillance. Our systems of education reflect many often conflicting ambitions (pedagogical, political, medical), each aligned with particular surveillance strategies and mechanisms. We argue that studies of educational surveillance must begin to draw distinctions between diverse surveillance practices and the motives that lie behind them, in order to better understand how students experience and appreciate privacy.

Inviolate Personality and the Literary Roots of the Right to Privacy

Abstract Despite the formative influence of Warren and Brandeis’s article “The Right to Privacy” (1890) on subsequent U.S. law, few assertions have caused more confusion and dismay than their claim that privacy is protected fundamentally by the individual’s right to “an inviolate personality.” Troubled by the evidently spiritual nature of this claim, commentators have attempted to locate privacy rights in narrower, more easily definable tort protections, like freedom from intrusion. This article makes the claim that, to be properly understood, Warren and Brandeis’s emphasis on “inviolate personality” must be read as the culmination of a two-centuries-old debate about the nature of the individual—a debate that was conducted primarily in literature, and especially in poetry. During the course of the eighteenth century, poets mounted an increasingly sophisticated attack on the dominant social-constructionist psychology of the age. In opposition to contemporary views that a person was the product of his or her environment, poets came to see the individual as self-generated—through a process requiring solitude. The pivotal figure in this history is Wordsworth, whose argument and language Warren and Brandeis echo. Although some present-day scholars have attempted to recoup Warren and Brandeis’s emphasis on inviolability, they have tended to do so through recourse to social-constructionist arguments. In so doing, they have missed the spirit of Warren and Brandeis’s original claims.