January 1, 1949
Shakespeare’s Amazing Words
It is my thesis in this paper that in Shakespeare’s verse we can distinguish in kind between the simple felicity of diction, the mot juste, and the strange, wonderful, inevitable […]
January 1, 1949
A Communication
Sirs: I was indeed grateful for Mr. Stanley Hyman’s generous remarks concerning my Shakespearian interpretations in The Kenyon Review (Winter 1948). May I nevertheless offer a rejoinder? Mr. Hyman considers […]
January 1, 1949
Phelps Putnam (1894-1948)
Although Phelps Putnam did not die until near the end of the nineteen-forties, he was essentially a poet of the nineteen-twenties. He belonged to the generation that came of age […]
October 1, 1948
Hobgoblin or Apollo
“Five lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.” —Joyce, Ulysses […]
October 1, 1948
Criticism in Italy
From the Italian. Criticism of poetry and art has had a very important history in Italy since the time in the Renaissance when Aristotle’s Poetics and other treatises of the […]
October 1, 1948
Emotions in Words Again
The question how Sense and Feeling are related in a piece of literature is one that critics need to come back to at intervals; perhaps in the abstract it is […]
October 1, 1948
Monsieur Verdoux as “Theatre”
“His great forte has been purely theatrical.” —Parker Tyler. What an achievement this film is! We don’t have to compare it with other films: we don’t have to compare it with […]
October 1, 1948
Wilde, Goodman, and Roditi
Sirs: I chanced to read Paul Goodman’s review of my Oscar Wilde, in your Spring issue, in the American Information Library of Kassel, a German city of ruins where I […]
October 1, 1948
The American Ballet
Toward the end of the war, during several seasons, ballet in the United States had a bright moment of eagerness and glory. A number of strikingly original choreographies appeared; and […]
October 1, 1948
A Note on “The World’s Fair”
Fitzgerald’s story, “The World’s Fair,” belongs to the period following the completion of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald sent Maxwell Perkins the manuscript of The Great Gatsby late in the fall […]
October 1, 1948
Faulkner: Technique of “The Sound and the Fury”
Although Faulkner’s critics are frequently at variance on many issues, they all concur on one point—that his narrative technique is extremely intricate and perplexing. Having agreed upon this, however, they […]
October 1, 1948
The Stone and the Crucifixion: Faulkner’s “Light in August”
Without ado I wish to direct attention to the symbolic texture of Light in August. This texture is very much a matter of mechanics and dynamics—a poetry of physics. Repeatedly […]