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  • The Paris Review

    The Sentence That Folds Neatly in Half

    by Jeff Dolven Dec 07, 2017 3 minutes

    In our eight-part series Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses.

    ©Tom Toro

    W. H. Auden was a compulsive aphorist. His poems and prose are heavily salted with wise maxims; here’s one from a notebook he kept when he arrived in America, in 1939, published much later as The Prolific and the Devourer:

    The image of myself that I try

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