October 1, 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 […]
October 1, 1942
Virginia Woolf: The Last Phase
Mrs. Woolf, we all know, is a Poet in Prose; or rather she had—at least up to the time of Orlando—a range of sensuous impressions which would have stood a […]
October 1, 1942
Notes on Art and War
Lieutenant Commander Edward Steichen seems to have solved the problem of the “American Scene.” The exhibition this photographer designed for the New York Museum of Modern Art is called “The […]
April 1, 1942
The Elizabethan Art of Our Movies
The excuse for this paper is not any expert knowledge of the movies but a feeling that the movies are a testing case for our criticism; or perhaps I should say, […]
April 1, 1942
Poetry’s Dark Night¹
The very career of the word “poetry” seems to me highly instructive. Only at a comparatively recent time has this word come to designate the poetry: previously it signified the […]
April 1, 1942
E. M. Forster
… the word BARACH, say the learned, is both to bless and curse. —Dryden. M. Forster is for me the only living novelist who can be read again and again […]
April 1, 1942
Religion and Social Grammar
There is no more ironic illusion than to suppose that one has escaped from illusions. So subtly do the real and the illusory interpenetrate that their difference is never finally […]
April 1, 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 […]
April 1, 1942
Broadway Letter
Barring some major turn of events during the remainder of the theater season, the year will go down on the record as the least productive since American playwriting got under […]
January 1, 1942
Greatness with One Fault in It
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans. Houghton Mifflin. $3.50 I feel sure that this is a great book. To its greatness both […]
January 1, 1942
Russian Music
Russia began her musical flowering when the subjective factor in the person of Glinka met with the impetus of an answering milieu. Glinka epitomized the rising of the Russian Bourgeoisie. […]
January 1, 1942
Poet on Horseback
I was only English writer who, before the war, predicted JL a victorious popular rising against the Left,” Roy Campbell boasted in a letter dated February 1939 from Toledo, which […]