Editor's Notes
Autumn 1940
Concerning the Symposium
Papers for the symposium, “Literature and the Professors,’’ appearing in the current issues of this Review and the Southern Review, were received in greater numbers than it was possible to […]
Editor's Notes
Spring 1941
Muses and Amazons
We welcome Decision, the monthly “review of free culture” that was launched with a good deal of ceremony in January from New York. Its editor, some of its editorial advisors, […]
Editor's Notes
Winter 1941
Ubiquitous Moralists
Few if any critics live who write better criticism than Mr. R. P. Blackmur; I mean subtler and deeper criticism, and sounder. He probes the poem with a keen instrument, […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1946
Short Notice: The Rebirth of Liberal Education
The Rebirth Of Liberal Education by Fred B. Millett. Harcourt Brace. $2.00. Professor Millett of Wesleyan University belongs to a minority group now much exercised over a policy of higher […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1946
Short Notice: Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer
Memoirs Of A Shy Pornographer by Kenneth Patchen. New Directions. $3.00. Purchasers attracted by the last word in the title will be pretty sure to feel sold, like movie-goers who […]
The Henry James Number
Autumn 1943
E. M. Forster
The Forster revival is good for us, especially in a time when everybody is planning a new world. The only one of the five novels that was sufficiently known to […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1941
Indefatigable Tommy
Barrie by Denis Mackail. Scribner’s. $3.75 In 1890 Barrie was 30 years old and his biographer can imagine him taking stock of his achievement as follows: That he came to […]
Editor's Notes
Autumn 1941
The Aesthetics of Music
In this issue Mr. W. H. Mellers, the very able English critic, discusses the difficulty of writing about music. As he sees it, the trouble is that music expresses emotional […]
Editor's Notes
Autumn 1941
The Younger Poets
The “Younger Poets,” as we should describe those who appear in this issue within the poetry section of that title, are the ones who have not yet published whole books […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1941
Constellation of Five Young Poets
5 YOUNG AMERICAN POETS George Marion O’Donnell, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Mary Barnard, W. R. Moses. New Directions. $2.50 The serious publisher owes a great obligation to the new poets, […]
Editor's Notes
Summer 1941
Moholy-Nagy’s New Arts
When Mr. Moholy-Nagy came to the United States, it meant, evidently, that here would develop the abstract and “constructivist” arts for which he is famous. That such arts are possible […]
Editor's Notes
Winter 1940
Editorial Notes
The Cover The cover for the 1940 volume, beginning with this number, is designed by Mr. Norris Rahming. The symbol it carries is an adapted photograph of one of the […]
Editor's Notes
Winter 1939
The Teaching of Poetry
Editorial Notes One of the pleasantries of Renaissance poets was to assert that verse is immortal. One of the modern evidences is certainly this, that the good verse in English […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1946
Brief Notices: 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other One Act Plays
27 Wagons Full Of Cotton and Other One Act Plays by Tennessee Williams. New Directions. $3.50. The jacket says: “To young actors and directors in the little theatres of America […]
Editor's Notes
Spring 1944
Announcement to Contributors
We are happy to announce that this Review has now received a considerable three-year benefaction from a new source, greatly relieving the strain of financing in war time. The budgetary […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1946
Delta Fiction
Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty. Harcourt, Brace. $2.75. Miss Welty’s stature as an artist increases continually. We knew her last as the author of “The Wide Net” and its companion […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1945
Brief Comment: Mission of the University
Mission Of The University by José Ortega y Gasset. Translation and introduction by Howard Lee Nostrand. Princeton University Press. $2.00 This is a book I am hardly prepared to […]
Special Anniversary Feature: Excerpts from the War Years
Winter 1989
War and Publication
From the Spring 1942 issue. The announcement in the Southern Review’s winter issue of the suspension of that quarterly need not be mentioned in the same breath with Pearl Harbor, […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1945
Brief Comment: Cannery Row
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. Viking. $2.00. Cannery Row is a section of Steinbeck’s Monterey, like Tortilla Flats. The life there seems as quaint, though its population is not […]
Special Anniversary Feature: Excerpts from the War Years
Winter 1989
Artists, Soldiers, Positivists
From the Spring 1944 issue. Remembering our Winter discussion, I return to those great difficulties which disturb Mr. Ames, or any other man interested in art’s good name. Let us […]
Editor's Notes
Summer 1940
Mr. Tate and the Professors
The Princeton Alumni Weekly of March 8 published an article by Mr. Allen Tate describing his way of handling the Creative Arts Program for the Princeton student writers, who are […]
Special Anniversary Feature: Excerpts from the War Years
Winter 1989
Muses and Amazons
From the Spring 1941 issue. We welcome Decision, the monthly “review of free culture” that was launched with a good deal of ceremony in January from New York. Its editor, […]
Editor's Notes
Summer 1940
Old Age of a Poet
Yeats had as fine a personal endowment as a poet requires, and sometimes his successes were complete. Perhaps he was as great a lyric poet as our time permitted, and […]
Special Anniversary Feature: Excerpts from the War Years
Winter 1989
Ubiquitous Moralists
From the Winter 1941 issue. Few if any critics live who write better criticism than Mr. R. P. Blackmur; I mean subtler and deeper criticism, and sounder. He probes the […]
Editor's Notes
Winter 1939
Was Shakespeare a Philosopher?
Mr. W. C. Curry’s book, Shakespeare’s Philosophical Patterns,1 does not seem to have received yet the study it deserves, but there is plenty of time. It is a bold and […]
Selected Prose
Spring 1984
John Crowe Ransom: A Gathering of Sentences
[On the occasion of the one-hundred-fiftieth issue of The Kenyon Review we recall its founder. Reflecting on his character and interests has brought to mind the following passages from his […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1946
Brief Notices: William Ernest Henley: A Study in the “Counter-Decadence” of the ‘Nineties
William Ernest Henley: A Study in the “Counter-Decadence” of the ‘Nineties by Jerome Hamilton Buckley. Princeton. $2.75 Henley was not an editor of the sort that Matthew Arnold would have […]
Poetry
Winter 1969
Two Gentlemen Scholars (A Pastoral)
The scene is a private library in late evening. FRIEND Tell the whole history which I crave And I’ll go, secret as the grave. HUSBAND Neighbors, in woodland half-begirt With […]
Department KR: A Section of Briefer Comment
Autumn/ September 1968
A Postscript on Shakespeare’s Sonnets
The occasion of this brief piece requires a little introduction. A new edition of my book of essays, The World’s Body, will shortly appear from the Louisiana State University Press; […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1964
The Planetary Poet
I. ONE AMPLE MAN CAN SUPPORT TWO LIVES AND APPOINT TWO CALENDARS FOR THEM Congratulations to The Kenyon Review for keeping the course, even with augmented bravery, and now after […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1963
Prelude to an Evening: A Poem Revised and Explicated
Do not enforce the tired wolf Dragging his infected wound homeward To sit tonight with the warm children Saying the pretty Kings of France. The images of the invaded mind […]
Poetry
Summer 1962
Master’s in the Garden Again
to the memory of Thomas Hardy iEvening comes early, and soon discovers Exchange between these conjugate lovers. “Conrad! dear man, surprise! aren’t you bold To be sitting so late in […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1960
Thomas Hardy’s Poems, and the Religious Difficulties of a Naturalist
By the end of the second decade of our century we had become agitated over the beginnings of several fresh kinds of American verse; we had the feeling that some […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1959
The Idea of a Literary Anthropologist And What He Might Say of the “Paradise Lost” of Milton: A Speech with a Prologue
(The Prologue) In May of last year there was dedicated a new Phi Beta Kappa Hall at the College of William and Mary, where the Society was founded, in Williamsburg. […]
Editor's Notes
Summer 1958
Edgar Collins Bogardus
A few weeks ago Edgar Bogardus died of asphyxiation from a defective gas flue in his old home at Mount Vernon, Ohio. He had only a few months earlier assumed […]
English Verse and What It Sounds Like
Summer 1956
The Strange Music of English Verse
It is strange that a generation of critics so sensitive and ingenious as ours should have turned out very backward, indeed phlegmatic, when it comes to hearing the music of […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1955
The Concrete Universal: Observations on the Understanding of Poetry II
My title employs a famous working-phrase of Hegel’s, and in the first of these papers I made some lay observations about that philosopher’s understanding of poetry. But Hegel’s thought is […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1954
The Concrete Universal: Observations on the Understanding of Poetry
I have been reading the new book by Professor W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., entitled The Verbal Icon (University of Kentucky Press, $4.00). It is a collection of essays about critical […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1953
Empirics in Politics
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana by Russell Kirk. Regnery. $6.50. Thirty or so statesmen and political theorists figure in Mr. Kirk’s big book; he picked them as the […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1953
Alienation a Century Ago
The Alien Vision Of Victorian Poetry by E. D. H. Johnson. Princeton University Press. $4.00. There is much writing now about Victorianism, and Professor Johnson has here a provocative book, […]
Communications
Spring 1953
Reply by the Author
I had thought, and still think, that my report on the Chicago critics was reasonably honest. Only twice, so far as I know, did I make a representation of them […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1952
Humanism at Chicago
The American University works with both hands, and the right hand hardly knows what the left hand is doing. The right hand discharges its obvious duty, directing the strenuous and […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1952
Why Critics Don’t Go Mad
It gives me a mild astonishment when I discover that critics of poetry do not really go mad. That seems to be the honorable prerogative of the poets, in whose […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1952
Poets and Flatworms
The Enjoyment Of Poetry, With Anthology For The Enjoyment Of Poetry by Max Eastman. Scribners. $4.50 This is not the first printing of the prose Enjoyment of Poetry, nor […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1951
The Poetry of 1900-1950¹
The first half of our century has gone. But between 1 December 31 last and April 6 today, I do not know what is the special event which permits us […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1950
William Wordsworth: Notes toward an Understanding of Poetry
[The 100th anniversary of Wordsworth’s death was observed by Princeton and Cornell Universities during the days of April 21-23. Mr. Trilling’s paper was delivered at Princeton, and Mr. Ransom’s at […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1950
The Understanding of Fiction
Philip Rahv’s book on modern fiction, Image and Idea1, has been instructive to me in the breadth of its critical ideas. Whatever the critical ideas, they have produced an estimate of […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1948
The New Criticism
The Armed Vision by Stanley Edgar Hyman, Knopf, $5.00. The Hudson Review, Summer 1948, containing “A Burden for Critics” by R. P. Blackmur, and “The Imagery of Killing” by Kenneth […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1948
The Literary Criticism of Aristotle¹ (Reconsiderations, No. 10)
If there were a subtitle, I should like it as follows: The literary criticism of a man of letters who had become a pedagogue, and of an idealist who had […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1947
Poetry: II, the Final Cause
1. Sentiments of All Sizes In Antony’s speech there is quite a cluster of substantival objects for affections; the well-known mantle, the vision of Caesar resting after his battle with the […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1947
Poetry: I. The Formal Analysis
For twenty or twenty-five years we have lived with a kind of literary criticism more intensive than a language has ever known. But a revulsion is setting in against it. […]
Speculation
Autumn 1945
Art and the Human Economy
The two preceding papers were furnished independently, and there is some editorial presumption in having collated them, and now in commenting them together. Special disservice is done to Mr. Southard, […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1945
Beating the Naturalists with the Stick of Drama
Shakespeare And The Popular Dramatic Tradition by S. C. Bethell. Duke University Press. $3.00. Mr. Bethell pursued literary and theological studies at Cambridge, and soon after, in 1935, was […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1945
Brief Comment: The Power House
The Power House by Alex Comfort. Viking. $3.00. The publisher tells us that Alex Comfort has written two earlier novels, as well as plays and books of verse, though […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1945
Art Worries the Naturalists: Who in Turn Worry the Arts with Organism, Fusion, Funding
The apologist of the arts cannot do otherwise than refer the question of their strange kind of activity to the current philosophies; therefore, in these days, to naturalism. I have […]
Editor's Notes
Winter 1945
The Severity of Mr. Savage
Mr. D. S. Savage, the English poet and critic, has kindly allowed us to see some essays of a forthcoming book, and we cannot but appreciate the unusual consistency of […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1944
The Essays of Horace Gregory
The Shield Of Achilles by Horace Gregory. Harcourt Brace. $2.50. Here is a most knowing critic. But let us ask what a critic is; or, first, what happens when a […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1944
Artists, Soldiers, Positivists
Remembering our Winter discussion, I return to those great difficulties which disturb Mr. Ames, or any other man interested in art’s good name. Let us call them the moral difficulties, […]
Discussion
Winter 1944
Art Needs a Little Separating
Mr. Ames has given me permission to follow him with some comment upon the general state of aesthetic studies, in the light of his essay. It seems to me an […]
Discussion
Summer 1943
Positive and Near-Positive Aesthetics
I don’t so very much mind this being chided by Miss Herschberger for not speaking handsomely enough about poetry. In the remarks of mine to which she refers I was […]
Editor's Notes
Spring 1943
Editorial Comment: The Inorganic Muses
For some time I had planned to prepare an essay, as soon as I could rely better upon my feelings in the matter, about the radical innovation I seemed to […]
Editor's Notes
Autumn 1942
Mr. Russell and Mr. Schorer
“A myth is a large, controlling image which gives philosophical meaning to the facts of ordinary life,” says Mr. Schorer. And then: “Without such images, experience is chaotic and fragmentary, […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1942
Bright Disorder
James Joyce: A Critical Introduction by Harry Levin. The first volume in the Makers of Modern Literature Series. New Directions. $1.50 Mr Levin’s book about Joyce is most valuable, […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1942
An Address to Kenneth Burke
I have read several times the long title-essay of Kenneth Burke’s latest book, The Philosophy of Literary Form, and still with the sense of an adventure. It is like following […]
Editor's Notes
Spring 1942
War and Publication
The announcement in the Southern Review’s winter issue of the suspension of that quarterly need not be mentioned in the same breath with Pearl Harbor, yet in the total perspective […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1940
Apologia for Modernism
Modern Poetry and the Tradition by Cleanth Brooks. University of North Carolina Press. $3.00 Consistently during its lifetime, the Southern Review has been the organ of the most powerful critical […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1940
The Pragmatics of Art
Mr. Morris, the author of a semantic system, though we may suppose that his interest was originally in the language of scientific discourse, was also clearly destined to offer a […]
Poetry
Autumn 1939
Address to the Scholars of New England (Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Poem, June 23, 1939)
When Sarah Pierrepont let her spirit rage, Her love and scorn refused the bauble earth (Which took bloom even here, under the Bear) And groped for the Essence sitting in […]
Editor's Notes
Autumn 1939
The Aesthetic of Finnegans Wake
Critics who have found nothing to say for this book, and critics who have found nothing to say against it, are both uncritical. The first understand only that Joyce disdains […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1939
Yeats and His Symbols
Before I become involved in some local studies in the poetry of Yeats, and some theory which it suggests, I had better record my general tribute to the poet. I […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1939
One Thousand Sonnets
M: One Thousand Autobiographical Sonnets. By Merrill Moore. Harcourt Brace and Co. $5.00 Dr. Merrill Moore’s variant on the sonnet has pleased many choice readers. One of them is Dr. […]
Editor's Notes
Spring 1939
The Arts and the Philosophers
Clearyly the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science is to be a philosophical enterprise, not a scientific one: scientia scientiarum. The editor of a literary journal follows it principally with this […]