Poetry
Winter 1941
Before Sentence Is Passed
I have this to say, if I can say it.Things are undone, your Honor. We are the same.You also, Gentlemen: bench, box, and bar—the same, with different vantages. This is […]
The Henry James Number
Autumn 1943
In the Country of the Blue
We are now about to assay the deep bias, the controlling, characteristic tension in the fiction of Henry James as it erupts in those tales where the theme is that […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1980
The Revival: Henry Adams’ Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
Est ergo animae vita veritas, sensus charitas. —Bernard, Sermones de Diversis, 10, 1 The youngest stars are heaviest and generate most energy, irrespective of temperature and pressure. This would not […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1964
The Charterhouse of Parma
One remembers that Stendhal ends this novel with its dedication: TO THE HAPPY FEW, a phrase which some think was borrowed from Shakespeare. Perhaps. The meaning is at any rate […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1961
A Poetics for Infatuation
There will never be, I hope, by some chance of scholarship, any more authoritative order for Shakespeare’s sonnets than that so dubiously supplied by the 1609 quarto. It is rather […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1959
Homo Ludens
The Literary Works Of Matthew Prior. Two volumes. Edited by H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. £6. 6s. So far as a combination of […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1959
Edwin Muir: Between the Tiger’s Paws
Young Englishmen when asked how they felt about the poetry of Edwin Muir answered by and large that they had not troubled to make an opinion about it because it […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1959
The Logos in the Catacomb: The Role of the Intellectual
One of the resources of the American intellectual abroad is to meditate on the uses of the American intellectual at home, with the result that he questions a little whether […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1958
Ara Coeli and Campidoglio
It may be that Rome is no longer a capital city, but for an American abroad looking to see where he started from and also where he is, there is […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1958
Obscuris Vera Involvens
W. B. Yeats And Tradition by F. A. C. Wilson. Gollancz, London. 25s. Literature, which has always wanted to be itself and also, when ambitious, something bigger than itself, has […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1956
Emily Dickinson’s Notation
The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Three volumes. $25.00. Emily […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1955
Adams Goes to School
I. The Problem Laid Out Dans certains états dâme presque surnaturels, la profondeur de la vie se révèle tout entière dans le spectacle, si ordinaire qu’il soit, qu’on a sous […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1955
Reflections of Toynbee
Toynbee’s ten volumes do not seem at this moment of thought to have made a masterpiece; neither do they make, as one reviewer said, an obsession to be examined and […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1955
The Substance That Prevails¹
It is sometimes said that a man turns his thoughts into clichés in order to get rid of the words that erode the movement of thought into contortions of their […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1952
A Plea for the Essay
Emily Dickinson. A biography by Richard Chase. Sloane. $4.00 The Riddle of Emily Dickinson by Rebecca Patterson. Houghton, Mifflin. $4.50 To these books this review intends to be unfair, but […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1952
Dante’s Ten Terms for the Treatment of the Treatise
It would seem likely that anything written on Dante as a critic could only echo, and echo imperfectly, what has been written before, and especially if written in English and […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1952
Lord Tennyson’s Scissors: 1912-1950
I hope these reflections on the mother tongue of poetry during the last 40 years may be, like their subject, inescapably frivolous and indestructibly serious. Poetry is a game we […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1951
Madame Bovary: Beauty out of Place
Whatever Madame Bovary may be in the history of the development of the European Novel, or of French sensibility, or of Flaubert’s genius, it has as the author says m […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1951
In the Hope of Straightening Things Out
If you think of the body of Eliot’s criticism1 as if it were completed you will see several things more or less clearly, especially if you use your official eye. […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1950
The Politics of Human Power
Part of the pleasure of seeing Mr. Trilling’s essays1 brought together surely consists in finding what he has been up to all along. As they came out in periodicals, or […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1950
Anna Karenina: The Dialectic of Incarnation
If there is one notion which represents what Tolstoi is up to in his novels—emphatically in Anna Karenina and War and Peace—it is this. He exposes his created men and […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1950
Parody and Critique: Notes on Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus
In this country, at this time, our way of looking at our culture makes it difficult for us to look at a work of literary art which announces itself in […]
The Critic's Business: By Four of the Critics
Winter 1949
For a Second Look
I should like to begin by asking you to re-read Mr. Tate’s first paragraph, which I have been privileged to see, partly because what is said there is just to […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1948
Judgment, Form, Sensibility
The James Family by F. O. Matthiessen. Knopf. $6.75 The Notesbooks of Henry James. Edited by F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock. Oxford. $6.00 It appears to me […]
Poetry
Winter 1947
XII Scarabs for the Living
I. TOO MUCH FOR ONE: NOT ENOUGH TO GO ROUND There are too many heart-shaped words for oneto seem enough or two to offer choice; and yet the heart offers the […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1946
Tolstoi’s Flight
Tolstoi And His Wife by Tikhon Polner. Norton. $2.75 This book might well be a volume of discursive notes for a novel about Tolstoi to be written by Dostoevsky; it […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1945
Notes on Eleven Poets
Five Young American Poets. Eve Merriam, John Frederick Nims, Jean Garrigue, Tennessee Williams, and Alejandro Carrión. New Directions, Third Series. 1944. $3.00. Land of Unlikeness by Robert Lowell. Cummington Press. […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1943
Commentary by Ghosts
Genesis: Book One by Delmore Schwartz. New Directions. $3.00. I remember remarking of Mr. Schwartz’s earlier book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, that he was perhaps too spontaneous, that to his […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1942
The Sacred Fount
Henry James had from the middle of his writing life to its end an increasing reputation for being difficult beyond reason: obscure in style, tenuous in theme, and subtle to […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1940
Anterior and Posterior Conviction
How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler. Simon & Schuster. $2.50 The book deals with what is I suppose the primary, though perhaps not the final problem of […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1940
It Is Later than He Thinks
The Idea of a Christian Society by T. S. Eliot. Harcourt Brace. $1.50Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. Harcourt Brace. $1.25 Old Possum had other things […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1940
Henry Adams: Three Late Moments
1. Richard’s Prison Song When Henry Adams left South Lincoln, Massachusetts, for Washington in the late fall of 1912, he had recovered as much as he was likely to do […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1939
Mature Intelligence of an Artist
FURTHER LETTERS OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, Edited with Notes and an Introduction by Claude Colleer Abbott. Oxford University Press. $6.00 Professor Abbott’s present volume completes the publication of all Hopkins’ […]