February 10, 2024
Reading and the Liberal Arts
Most of us will acknowledge wisdom only when her children have justified her. Recently in the pages of the Kenyon Review Mr. R. P. Blackmur in a review of Mr. […]
February 10, 2024
T.S. Eliot: The Illusion of Reaction (I)
T. S. Eliot is probably the most widely respected literary figure of our time; he is known primarily as the leader of the intellectual reaction against the romanticism of which […]
February 3, 2024
Ambivalent Heritage
Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage by Jacques Barzun. Little, Brown. $2.15 Blitzkrieg days bring forth blitzkrieg books. Jacques Barzun, whose preceding volumes were not exempt from a […]
February 3, 2024
Good-Bad Novels
The Hermit Place by Mark Schorer. Random House. $2.50 So It Doesn’t Whistle by Robert Paul Smith. Harcourt Brace. $2.50 In The Hermit Place, the landscape of treachery, weakness, […]
February 3, 2024
Cooperative Criticism: A Letter from the Critical Front
Literary criticism is not the contemplation of general principles. It is a practice: the responsible application of principles to specific art. And if we are to have a healthy aesthetic […]
February 3, 2024
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 […]
February 3, 2024
Poets of New Direction
Poets of the Month. Issued monthly, and including: The Broken Span by William Carlos Williams; The End of a Decade by Harry Brown; A Letter from the Country by Howard […]
February 3, 2024
Nineteen Gothic Tales
Look At All Those Roses by Elizabeth Bowen. Knopf. $2.50 Certainly Miss Bowen’s books glow while you read them; certainly they tend to fade when you have finished. What […]
February 3, 2024
The Lonely Philosopher
What Nietzsche Means by George Allen Morgan, Jr. Harvard. $4.00 Nietzsche by Crane Brinton. Harvard. $2.50 The obstacles to a full and just understanding of Nietzsche are different in […]
February 3, 2024
The White Shelley
Shelley by Newman Ivey White. 2 Vols. Knopf. $12.50 Professor White’s life of Shelley is justified not only by its use of materials unavailable to previous biographers but also […]
February 3, 2024
Walpurgis Nacht, 1940
The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen. Mt. Vernon, New York: Walpole Printing Office. $5.00 The reader, expecting a journal or Great Britain, will find himself lost in […]
February 3, 2024
Parrington Plus
American Renaissance by F. O. Matthiessen. Oxford. $5.00 American Renaissance is the first full length critical treatment of perhaps the most distinguished decades in our literary history. It marks, […]