R. V. Young

More than any other writer, Shakespeare embodies the distinctive principles of Western Civilization. Men and women of the West are drawn to Shakespeare because his plays and poems continue to express their aspirations, to articulate their concerns, and to confront the tensions and contradictions in . . . . Continue Reading »

Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism By Mark Royden Winchell University Press of Virginia, 510 pages, $34.95 I still own and still make frequent use of my paperback copy of Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn , which I purchased for $1.35 more than thirty years ago. What is more, . . . . Continue Reading »

Among the pugnacious practitioners of academic literary studies, who agree among themselves on almost nothing, there is one consensus: the New Criticism”that is, the old New Criticism associated with the names of T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks” that New . . . . Continue Reading »