Endangered species …

… The Faith of Men of Letters - The Imaginative Conservative.

We are not hectored here by the pedantries and claptrap that easily identify the sham criticism that is written large in the academy and that eats away at the foundations of paideia. Rather, we are reminded of the central function of the man of letters in the modern world and that what he must do first is what he has always done: to “recreate for his age the image of man . . . [and] propagate standards by which other men may test that image, and distinguish the false from the true,” to use Allen Tate’s salient injunction. This injunction, it is sad to say, has been contravened by alien bands of critics—gang movements of the worst character and conduct—that have charged recklessly beyond the frontiers of criticism and have aspired to a decadence and nihilism of the most dangerous extreme. Such has been the arrogance and impiety of these anti-critics that the critical function has been severely abrogated. The results are dismal to an incalculable degree as we survey our literary and cultural scene, to find there the increasing absence of the man of letters. Intellectual and spiritual blight boldly proclaims the proliferation of the hollow men in the realm of what Eliot terms “leadership and letters.”