Humanism Ten Years After

Humanism and Imagination. By G. R. Elliott. University of North Carolina Press. $2.50

The chronicle of the movement known as the New Humanism remains to be written; and when that happens it will be apparent that, like its 19th Century analogue, known as Transcendentalism, its common creed was vague and its persons were temperamentally diverse. I speak of it in the past tense, but it is not defunct: in some respects, its most significant developments, among them Collins’ American Review and Foerster’s School of Letters, at Iowa, have come in the decade since 1930, when, for a moment, it engaged Carnegie Hall and drew a cartoon from the New Yorker.