“No other critic approaches [Sheed’s] ability to synthesize the vast literature on a subject or to illuminate a writer’s oeuvre in a short starburst of words.” It’s those starbursts that led fellow critic Jonathan Yardley to call him “irresistibly quotable.” Barra’s tribute was almost entirely a list of “Sheedisms,” and I can’t blame him. It’s almost impossible to write about Sheed without simply offering a buffet of his epigrammatic genius:
[Edward] Albee can no longer wait to tell us what’s on his mind: his plays are coming perilously close to his interviews . . .
It seems [Robert Lowell] was strictly a line poet, string them as you will, so that his poems are like all-star teams that haven’t practiced together.
I have never seen (or joined in) such drinking as the Lit set could contrive in those days. So what would have seemed like a personal drinking problem elsewhere was lost in the crowd, and Berryman drifted into alcoholism without noticing. He and Schwartz had once talked with contempt of writers who drown their talent in booze, but both would now proceed to do so themselves, having badly misjudged the undertow.
