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Jeff Dolven's Senses of Style describes itself as an experiment and an essaying. Made up of 396 differently sized 'sections' within ten larger chapters, it is a book which wrangles far-flung, vast-scale theoretical enquiries–of formalism, grammatology, stylistics, biography, intentionality–into thoughtful, close-read literary focus, by testing the edges of a double question: Why did Frank O'Hara like Thomas Wyatt– and how is Thomas Wyatt like Frank O'Hara? Storying between them a line of liking and likening, carefully strange and marvellous, Dolven hums poetry of the English Tudor court into the listening ear of whistling strollers through the New York School, and all along the way– and over the top, and underneath, and all at once–meddles curiously in hard, simple questions. How to define a minor art? What's in a name? How much knowledge is there in beauty? Why is a voice commanding? What counts as connection?

Senses of Style is incredibly stylish. Its central project is the cultivation of a state of mind where nothing seems not subject to noticing– and to noticing ourselves noticing it, and wondering why. 'Given any whole', Dolven writes, 'there would seem to be parts that count for its style, and parts that don't. So, the lapels of the jacket are style, the weight of the fabric that warms the wearer, not' (p. 42). Notwithstanding, Senses of Style has French flaps. It is printed on alkaline paper (preferred by designers and archivists because it is brighter, whiter, and more opaque; it lasts for several hundred years) and set in Harriet Text and Attleboro Gothic, typefaces whose bracketed serifs and italic swashes–not to mention their spurs and spines, ears, finials, and apertures–find their match in the trippings of phrase they serve to convey. Often, Dolven shows, getting to grips with style is about coming to terms with terms, agreeing to delight in jargonish lexicons, the technical aspects of art about which 'O'Hara was always cagey' (p. 13). This book's matt-laminated cover, designed by Lauren Michelle Smith, floats colour-blocks nostalgic for sixties Poets in sixties Pockets, fleetingly–just enough–reminiscent of the City Lights series Howl and Lunch Poems. Its black, white, green, yellow, pink sit companionably alongside those on the front of Donald Allen's 1971 Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. Style, Dolven teaches, has much to do with likeness, and much to do with keeping company. Everything–but everything–he reminds us over and over, in a refrain which rings throughout the book, has a style.

Though echoing with the voices of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Barthes, Hegel, Heidegger, Horace, Hermogenes, it is, for the most part, a friendly, approachable, responsive, and conversational book. 'How easy, and how not wrong', Dolven remarks irresistibly, some things are to say about the things we read (p. 55). 'Friendly, approachable, responsive, and conversational': what is it about this book, Dolven wants us to ask, that makes us want to say so? One answer, I think, lies in Dolven's own recent history with early modern literary pedagogies. His 2007 Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance¹ thought keenly and variously about the way certain forms of words–particularly aphorisms, axioms, and sententiae–go about effecting good teaching and learning in their readers, and, here, you can tell. No surprise, either, that Dolven is a published poet.

The next time you and I are talking, pay attention to the traffic in gesture and expression between us. You smile. I likely smile, too, at least a little. And if I don't?

(p. 119)

You might long for this, to get past style by closing in.

(p. 28)

Like O'Hara, for whom 'you is flexible instrument' (p. 19), his is a very particular and prepossessing second person. It looks back.

In tracing the pedagogical journeying of Sidney's Arcadia and Spenser's Faerie Queene, Dolven described books and forms for learning which take, for example, 'the shape of a bow tie...