Critics of Our Age
Woodring, Carl R.
Critics of Our Age The Responsibilities of the Critic: essays and reviews, by F. O. Matthiessen, selected by John Rackliffe. Oxford. 282 pp. $5. The Shores of Light: a literary chronicle of the...
...Both seem best at the literary portraiture which has descended by various routes from Sainte-Beuve...
...He has lessened slightly the fidelity of his panorama by altering some of his original judgments...
...They agreed that Van Wyck Brooks, in his anecdotal impressionism, turned too soft...
...Yet an air of spiritual autobiography rather than of literary chronicling is sustained, no less by the chance selection of reviews on classical authors like Swift and Lewis Carroll than by the memoir of Edna St...
...Read Wilson on Fitzgerald of Princeton, Matthiessen on Phelps Putnam of Yale...
...He writes on Houdini, Woodrow Wilson, Greenwich Village, and the crash of 1929...
...Only they have held the sympathy as well as the respect of the middle-sized, upper middlebrow audience that once read belles-lettres, now reads criticism, and hovers for new flight...
...reviews of Yeats, Mac-Neice, and some 15 contemporary American poets...
...His subjects are less narrow...
...Amidst the exclusive and excessive sects, only the genial eclectics like Trilling, Matthiessen, and Wilson have avoided frequent caricature of themselves...
...The Shores of Light: a literary chronicle of the twenties and thirties, by Edmund Wilson...
...they found the "will to restraint" of the New Humanists and the grammatical "tensions" of the New Critics too chilled and chilling...
...Ours is an age of criticism...
...Reviewed by Carl Woodring KINSHIP of both subject and approach draws together the latest collection of reviews and miscellaneous pieces by Edmund Wilson and a posthumous selection from reviews and critical articles by F. O. Matthiessen...
...appreciations of other critics (including Wilson), and counterstatements against some with whom he had more imperfect sympathies...
...possibly, alas, The Age of Criticism...
...Critical sensitivity, personal sentiment, and public concern characterize both Wilson and Matthiessen...
...Both provide a socially minded credo for authors and a list of duties for critics and reviewers...
...Through "dialogues, satires,, short sketches, and personal letters," he calls up the private lives and public milieu of the twenties...
...814 pp...
...Wilson's is a bigger book...
...Faced with a literary work, Matthiessen excelled Wilson in the evaluation and description of its forma) qualities...
...Wilson's literary interests ran increasingly, throughout the pro-Marxist thirties, toward economics, sociology, and politics...
...Vincent Millay, because of whom Wilson reached "toward the shores of light...
...In the novel, at least, his tastes are catholic...
...In style, he has frequently changed the literary patter of the twenties to the paler phraseology of the fifties...
...he is the more ebullient, relaxed, and journalistic in style...
...6.50...
...he used Freudian and Marxist techniques less complacently...
...with Matthiessen we watch this inclination continuing through the forties...
...After a foreword, Rackliffe presents under rather arty headings three or four of Matthiessen's general essays...
...and notes on current books about 19th Century American authors...
...six pages on the American painters Mount, Homer, and Cheney...
...If the little magazines have not yet returned to stories and poems, they have at least been weighted of late with critical articles calling for a moratorium on critical articles...
...Autobiographic or not, Wilson better conveys the spirit of his times...
...Both men portray the mood of the twenties not as thin disillusion or frantic despair, but as reckless curiosity and tireless experiment...
...Since most of these papers had chiefly the transient aims of a reviewer, the volume lacks the coherent strength of Matthiessen's books on Eliot, James, Dreiser, and the "American Renaissance...
...Farrar, Straus & Young...
Vol. 17 • March 1953 • No. 3
