CRITICISM, REVIEWS, AND ESSAYS

Hilbert has published essays and reviews on a variety of literary topics and authors, including 18th-century reading habits, mass market horror novels, the history of illustrated dust jackets, hobo literature, The Library of Congress, literary relics, Edward Gorey, illuminated Armenian Gospels, librarian spies in the Second World War, Kevin Young, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Richard Wilbur, Helen Vendler, Geoffrey Hill, H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bogan, Muriel Rukeyser, Thom Gunn, Jay Parini, Kathleen Jamie, Peter Davison, Louis MacNeice, Frederick Seidel, John Updike, Anne Carson, W.H. Auden, Randall Jarrell, Donald Hall, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell, Willard Spiegelman, Michael Dirda, Anne Sexton, Recorded Poetry in Diverse Media, Alberto Manguel, Billy Collins, Stephen Spender, James Merrill, Poetry and Internet Technology, Brooks Haxton, Kenneth Koch, Franz Wright, Mark Strand, Michael Schmidt, and Anne Carson. He has also supplied introductions to popular editions in the Canterbury Classics series (Baker and Taylor) for Tolstoy’s War and Peace (2011), four Charles Dickens novels (2012), four Jules Verne novels (2013), and Classic Tales of Horror (2015).

Click on any title below to read.

Newspapers

• • “Witches Brew, The Tragedy of Macbeth” (film) reviewed in The Spectator, February 20th, 2022
  • “Manuscripts and Medicis,” review of Ross King’s The Bookseller of Florence, April 23, 2021
  • “Burning the Books: Murdering Knowledge,” review of Richard Ovenden’s Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge, in The Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2021
  • “Inky Fingers” Review: Everyman’s Type, in The Wall Street Journal, Saturday, July 31, 2020
  • “Information Hunters”: Librarians at War, in The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 21, 2020
  • “‘The Missing Pages’ Review: From Genocide to Justice,” in The Wall Street Journal, Saturday, November 23^rd, 2019
  • “In ‘Surfacing,’ Kathleen Jamie ponders the natural world and our place in it,” in The Washington Post, October 3rd, 2019
  • “The Mirage of a Perfect Library: Christopher Columbus’s son attempted to organize the whole world’s knowledge” in The Wall Street Journal, March 8th, 2019
  • “A peek inside Edward Gorey’s modern Gothic world” in The Washington Post, November 26, 2018, reprinted in The Cape Cod Times
  • “The grit and adventure of hobo life comes into focus in ‘On the Fly’” in The Washington Post, Sunday July 29th, reprinted Twin Cities Pioneer Press

• • “Putting Your Self on a Shelf,” review of Packing My Library, The Book: An Homage, and Unpacking My Library in The Wall Street Journal
  • “The Library of Congress: ‘The book Palace of the American People’,” review of America’s Greatest Library John Y. Cole in The Washington Post
  • “A colorful history of judging books by their covers,” review of The Illustrated Dust Jacket, 1920-1970 by Martin Salisbury in The Washington Post
  • “Our Monotonous Sublime: Robert Lowell’s Notebook Poems,” Literary Matters, Fall 2017
  • “The shocking novels that scared the hell out of America,” review of Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction by Grady Hendrix in The Washington Post, October 23rd, 2017
  • “How Books Left the Library and Became a Group Activity,” review of The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home by Abigail Williams in The Washington Post, July 16th, 2017

Other magazines and journals, online and print

• “Saving What We Didn’t Even Know Needed Saving”: Profile of Kevin Young, Author, Scholar, Professor, and Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Fine Books & Collections magazine
• “In Love with Language”: Profile of Dana Gioia, Poet, Critic, Former California Poet Laureate and NEA Chair, in Fine Books & Collections magazine
• Poet in the Pit: Slayer, Heavy Metal, and the Limits of Poetry
• The Muse and the Auctioneer’s Gavel: Learning About Poetry from First Editions
• Austen’s Ring and Shelley’s Heart: Our Fascination with Literary Relics
• Review of Donald Hall’s Selected Poems
• A Life of Writing: Donald Hall’s Essays After Eighty
• Flying Off the Screen: Observations from the Golden Age of the American Video Game Arcade
• Final Solutions: Ernest Hilbert Discusses Frederick Seidel’s Troubled First Collection
• A Strange and Beautiful Noise: Ernest Hilbert on Late Ashbery Syndrome, or, Listening without Hearing
• The First American Modernist: Edwin Arlington Robinson
• A Voice That Stands Alone: Richard Wilbur Collected Poems
• Helen Vendler’s Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats
• Alberto Manguel’s A Reading Diary
•  Three Types of Uniformity (ALSC Talk)
• Introduction to Four Charles Dickens Novels
• Introduction to Four Jules Verne Novels
• Introduction to the Maude Translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace
• John Richardson’s Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters
• Without a Net: Ernest Hilbert on Optic, Graphic, Acoustic, and Other Formations in Free Verse
• Geoffrey Hill: The Corpus of Absolution
• In Memoriam: Thom Gunn
• Jay Parini’s Apprentice Lover
• Peter Davison In Memoriam
• Joan Silber’s In My Other Life
• Comic Poems
• Introduction to the Louis MacNeice Edition of Contemporary Poetry Review
• I Sense Your Disdain, Darling: Frederick Seidel
• Wages of Fame: The Case of Billy Collins
• Artificer of Americana: Americana by John Updike
• On and Off of Parnassus: Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
• The Voice of the Poet: A Series on Recorded Poetry
• The Voice of the Poet: Part 1: W.H. Auden
• The Voice of the Poet Part 2: Randall Jarrell
• The Voice of the Poet Part 3: Sylvia Plath
• The Voice of the Poet Part 4: Elizabeth Bishop
• The Voice of the Poet Part 5: John Ashbery
• The Voice of the Poet Part 6: James Merrill
• The Voice of the Poet Part 7: Five American Women Poets
• The Voice of the Poet Part 8: Robert Lowell
• The Voice of the Poet Part 9: Anne Sexton
• Beatnik Bohemia: The Beat Hotel by Barry Miles
• The Sound of the Future
• Mother’s Milk: Ernest Hilbert Reviews Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins
• Ernest Hilbert Visits Stephen Spender’s World
• Reviving James Merrill
• The Pages of the Future
• Brooks Haxton’s Nakedness, Death, and the Number Zero
• Kenneth Koch’s New Addresses
• Franz Wright’s The Beforelife
• Mark Strand’s Blizzard of One
• Michael Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets
• Anne Carson’s Sappho