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Forgetting Edmund Wilson. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Born in 1895, Wilson lived through what the poet Randall Jarrell, in a famous essay of the 1950's, called the Age of Criticism. But when one thinks of the names of the other critics of the time—Van Wyck Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, F.R. Leavis, Northrop Frye, Yvor Winters, Newton Arvin, Philip Rahv, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin—names first fading from prominence and now beginning to fade from memory, one realizes that literary criticism is not an easy path to immortality.
Does Edmund Wilson's literary criticism figure to endure any longer than that of these others? One thing going for him was that, unlike the critics mentioned above, Wilson never had a permanent academic appointment
The best of these, in my view, is
Van Wyck Brooks, and he also did not work in the academy.
Jarrell did not mean "The Age of Criticism" as a commendation.
ReplyDeleteOf the list, I've read a certain amount of Winters and Leavis. The latter I keep thinking of as Simon Lacerous in Frederick Crews's The Pooh Perplex, yet he can be very good. The former can be very good, as in his essay on Henry Adams.