The second edition of The State of the Language, published ten years on from the first, contains 53 essays and nine poems, each by a different author. The dust-jackets of both editions are almost wholly taken up, front and back, with a well-spaced parade of contributing writers' names, and this provides a visual counterpart to something that emerges very clearly from the essays themselves: the 'state of the language' is a notional concept, impossible to separate out from the myriad (famous) voices who contribute to it.

LRB 25 January 1990 | PDF Download