William Troy’s Work

In 1948, in a book called The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism, I announced the birth of a great age of literary criticism, for which a handful of brilliant pioneers had prepared the way. In retrospect, that book turns out to be the tombstone erected over the grave of a great age of literary criticism. The distinguished generation of critics I celebrated—chief among them Richards and Empson, Burke and Blackmur—has done little of significance since 1948, and their successors have done little more. R. W. B. Lewis is less than F. 0. Matthiessen, Norman Podhoretz is less than Lionel Trilling, Hugh Kenner is less than Ezra Pound—I need hardly add that I am less than Kenneth Burke. We live in the Age of the Epigones, and we sing sad songs of the death of criticism. Our critics today inherit the methods of their great predecessors, but not their genius, their sensibility, or their full commitment to literature. It was the fault of The Armed Vision to underemphasize these qualities, as though method were sufficient in itself.

Of all that distinguished generation of critics, William Troy is the most neglected, since he alone did not publish a book. (A postumous volume of Selected Essays is finally in preparation.) In his lifetime he published 70-odd articles and reviews, many of great distinction. He could not bring himself to gather them into a book because of a mad Irish perfectionism: they were not good enough, his mind had changed on that matter, he could see more clearly now, he would rewrite them better. Troy never did. It was all that he could do to write them in his later years, since writing came hard for him—he was so purely a talker, an actor or performer. Troy was the finest lecturer on literature that I have ever heard. His essays were endlessly reprinted in anthologies, where they invariably stood out: it did not matter who had written on the subject, Troy’s piece was always the best.