Book Reviews
Winter 1942
Key Words for Critics
The Intent of the Critic by Edmund Wilson, Norman Foerster, John Crowe Ransom, and W. H. Auden, with an Introduction by Donald A. Stauffer. Princeton. $2.50 The New Criticism by […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1941
Four Master Tropes
I refer to metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. And my primary concern with them here will be not with their purely figurative usage, but with their role in the discovery […]
Poetry
Summer 1980
Out of Backwards Sidewise Towards Fromwards (An Attitudinizing Winter-Solstitially)
What with one thing’s doing being another’s undoing and all adding up to Universal Ing-Ing and while we cannot know all whereof is getting said about anyone by being as […]
Poetry
Winter 1979
Invocation for a Convocation
Of all SYMBOLICITY You the GROUND and over-arching PRINCIPLE, we here assembled and as it were addressing you (though your presence all about us be not given to answering) we […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1979
Theology and Logology
Foreword There is the possibility of confusion, in connection with my use of the term “logology.” Though I shall constantly be encountering occasions where theology (as “words about God”) and […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1959
Democracy of the Sick
Freud: The Mind Of The Moralist by Philip Rief. Viking. $6.00. “In the emergent democracy of the sick,” Rieff writes, near the end of his book on Freud as […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1959
On Catharsis, or Resolution
This essay is part of a Poetics. I assume that such a project should be developed with Aristotle’s Poetics in mind. Not that the extant parts of that old text […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1958
Towards a Post-Kantian Verbal Music
Since Paul Valéry’s theory of poetry1 in general is so closely associated with his speculations on the genesis of his own poems, we could properly begin by quoting a passage […]
Fiction
Autumn 1957
The Anaesthetic Revelation of Herone Liddell
I. “IN THAT MOST BODILY HOUSE” The first thing of importance that had happened to Herone Liddell following the accident of his birth was a near-fatal tumble he had taken, […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1953
The Dialectics of Imagery
Symbolism And American Literature by Charles Feidelson, Jr. University of Chicago Press. $6.50. Since symbolism means many things to many people, perhaps in seeking to place Mr. Feidelson’s interesting book […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1951
Three Definitions
The first of the definitions to be offered here is the broadest. It concerns “the lyric” in general. The second will deal with “the Platonic dialogue,” considered as a literary […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1950
Action, Passion, and Analogy
The Idea of a Theater by Francis Fergusson. Princeton University Press. $3.75 Wholly alert to the ritualistic, developmental, and consistent or repetitive aspects of dramatic form, Mr. Fergusson has written […]
Communications
Spring 1949
Communications
SIRS: I am preparing a biography of Alfred Stieglitz—American photographer and pioneer in introducing modern art to this country—and I am desirous of collecting letters from him, as well as […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1945
The Work of Regeneration
Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias by Marguerite Young. Reynal and Hitchcock. $3.00. If you happen to be at all interested in those ambiguities of […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1945
The Temporizing of Essence
Because of the pun whereby the logically prior can be expressed in terms of the temporally prior, and vice versa, the ways of transcendence, in aiming at the discovery of […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1945
Careers without Careerism
A Century Of Hero-Worship by Eric Russell Bentley. J. B. Lippincott. $3.50. This book is about a literary and artistic movement which the author has labelled “Heroic Vitalism.” Heroic […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1939
The Calling of the Tune
The complete autonomy of art could but mean its dissociation from other aspects of the social collectivity. Complete freedom to develop one’s means of communication ends as an impairment of […]