Marianne Boruch: The Cult of Development (January 2003)

Questioning a contemporary assumption that writers must “transform themselves” over the course of their careers, Marianne Boruch asks what other kind of change artists might strive for. Boruch examines how the music of Brahms and the poems of Roethke, Hopkins, and Bishop changed—and didn’t—throughout their lives, proposing an alternative model of artistic development: rather than changing in a linear way, artists can delve more deeply into their given subjects, and in doing so become “more humane.”