Tom Andrews: Is Disinterestedness Possible? (January 2001)

What do we lose when we only read those writers we love easily, passing over those we initially dislike? In this lecture, Tom Andrews looks at Eliot’s gradual appreciation of Hopkins and Yeats, and at his own experience with a Miroslav Holub poem he at first resisted, to argue for the benefit of reading “disinterestedly” or with “passionate detachment.” Such a reading, Andrews suggests, can over time enable “the self”—and the reader/writer—“to be changed and enlarged.”