March 2, 2024
Music Chronicle: The Alceste
Touching, through its tragic pathos attained by chaste means, pure and shapely as an antique statue, Alceste by Gluck received its first New York performance the evening of January 24th. […]
March 2, 2024
The Classicism of Yvor Winters
Poems by Yvor Winters. Los Altos, California: The Gyroscope Press. $2.00 Yvor Winters has issued his selected poems privately printed on his own press. He has included all the verse […]
March 2, 2024
The Snopes World
The Hamlet by William Faulkner. Random House. $2.50 The Hamlet is William Faulkner’s fourteenth published book of prose fiction. With its opening sentence it proclaims itself a part of that […]
March 2, 2024
The Naturalism of Santayana
The Realm of Spirit by George Santayana. Scribner. $3.00 The Philosophy of George Santayana. Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. II. Edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp. Northwestern University Press. $4.00 Unperturbed […]
March 2, 2024
The Monster, Marriage
Costals and the Hippogriff by Henry De Montherlani. Knopf. $2.75 Henry De Montherlants’s early writings—La Relève du Matin (1920), Le Songe (1922), Les Olympiques (1924), etc.—are intensely personal and reveal […]
March 2, 2024
Musical Analysis at Its Best
Essays in Musical Analysis, in Six Volumes by Donald Francis Tovey. Oxford University Press. $21.00 Nearly all the 254 essays included in these volumes were originally program notes written for […]
March 2, 2024
Muses and Amazons
We welcome Decision, the monthly “review of free culture” that was launched with a good deal of ceremony in January from New York. Its editor, some of its editorial advisors, […]
March 2, 2024
T.S. Eliot: The Illusion of Reaction (II)
6. Determinism We have seen that the entire tendency of Eliot’s thought is toward a deterministic view of literature. Yet Eliot is very severe in his comments upon deterministic views […]
March 2, 2024
The Isolation of Modern Poetry
The characteristic of modern poetry which is most discussed is of course its difficulty, its famous obscurity. Certain discussions, usually by contemporary poets, have done much to illuminate the new […]
March 2, 2024
Vergil
Since Vergil wrote of empire, the parallel has been drawn between public issues in his time and in ours. But it was perhaps his most endearing characteristic that in discussing […]
March 2, 2024
At Chinese Checkers
I Again—but other faces bend with mineUpon the board—I settle to this gameAnd drive my marbles leaping or in lineToward the goal, the triangular blue aimOf all my red ones, […]
March 2, 2024
The Arts
To speak on the future of anything whatsoever is to take on, not only the prerogatives of a prophet, but the risks. And the risk of a prophet is always […]