Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism [First Series]

The author wishes to acknowledge the courtesy of _The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, The Century Magazine, The Literary Review of The New York Evening Post, The Bookman, T...

At first glance the flood of moral literature now upon us--social- conscience stories, scientific plays, platitudinous "moralities" that tell us how to live--may seem to be anot...

The ultimate responsibility for its present position must fall, I suppose, upon our American taste, which, when taken by and large, is unquestionably crude, easily satisfied, an...

And in all this the college professor is profoundly justified by tradition, if not always by common sense. To him belongs that custody of the classical in literature which his p...

Many sex stories are popular simply because they satisfy curiosity, but curiosity in a broader sense is a human craving which deserves a separate category. Popular novels seldom...

The foreigner, it is true, has modified the English language precisely as he has modified the American tradition. Continental Europe is audible in the American tongue, as it is...

It was never so with the European traditions that we brought to America with us. That is why no one reads early American books. They are pallid, ill-nourished, because their tra...

This explanation is easy to understand, and is therefore plausible, but I do not believe that it is accurate. It is not true that American energy has been absorbed by business....

In the meantime, there is only one road which is clear--the road of material progress, and whether its end lies in the new barbarism of a mechanistic state where the mental and...

We have talked about the younger generation as if youth were a new phenomenon that had to be named and described, like a strange animal in the Garden of Eden. No wonder that our...

I am not an uncritical admirer of the Puritan, although I believe he is more nearly on the side of the angels than is his opposite. I deprecate the smug virtuosity which his kin...

Liberalism in politics is sulking just now, like Achilles in his tent, its aid having been invited too early, or too late. But the liberal spirit can never rest, and we solicit...

And, again as an editor, the perfect marriage of well attuned minds is well enough as an ideal, but as a practicable achievement I find myself more often drawn toward what I sho...

In the '70's the poor innocents of society believed their code of honor impregnable against sex. They dressed against sex, talked against sex, kept sex below the surface. The su...

Somewhere in poetry, and best in poetry because there most concentrated and most penetrative, lies crystallized experience at hand for all who need it. It is not difficult to fi...

For this is the sort of thing we are bound to get if the lid is kept down on the stylists much longer. Repression has always bred revolt. Revolt breeds extravagance. And extrava...

What was _his_ end? Not mechanical, scientific theories, that was clear. Not mere realistic description of life. He told me he had little faith in mere observation, except for c...

Only a prophet dares say that we are at the beginning of a great creative period in the United States, but any open-eyed observer can see that an era of American literary critic...