The standard account of R. P. Blackmur's career that few readers have questioned has him beginning as a New Critic producing his best essays, including those on Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, D. H. Lawrence, and other poets, in the 1920s and 1930s....

AJCongress focuses on fighting 'human shields' It happened repeatedly during the 2006 Lebanon War: A terrorist launches a missile from a civilian neighborhood in southern Lebanon. When Israel retaliates, the terrorist is gone, but civilians are killed or injured. The Jewish state is...

Den svenske filmfotografen, mediefilosofen, forfatteren og professoren Lasse Svanberg dÃ'de 3. oktober etter en tids sykdom, 69 Ã¥r gammel. I Norge er han kanskje mest kjent som grunnlegger og redaktÃ'r av Tidskrifien TM (Teknik och Menniska), og som hovedmann bak de Ã¥rlige TM-seminarene...

The American Classics: A Personal Essay, by Denis Donoghue. Yale University Press, 295 pages, $27.Rapping the knuckles of the American classics is good fun-especially if it's done with a light, sharp touch. And nobody gets hurt, certainly not the great dead white males themselves, who...

Once we have grasped the nature of Mr. Blackmur's dialectic, the function and the value that he attributes to the symbolic imagination becomes almost self-explanatory. What Mr. Blackmur wants, what the internal logic of his sensibility impels him to postulate, is a dialectical balance that maintains the proper relationship between his two terms [unity and chaos]; and in the essay on Babbitt he defines "the religious imagination" in a manner that explains what this relationship must be. ...

With a critic like Richard P. Blackmur, who tends to use on each work the special techniques it seems to call for and who at one time or another has used almost every type of criticism …, the difficulty of placing any single way of operating as his "method" is obvious. What he has is not so much a unique method as a unique habit of mind, a capacity for painstaking investigation that is essential for contemporary criticism, and that might properly be isolated as his major contribution to...

The Lion and the Honeycomb, for its insights, its omissions, and its rejections, is one of the most significant literary studies since John Crowe Ransom's God without Thunder (1930). (p. 537) Mr Blackmur is exceptional in as much as he has gone to the bother of pondering and describing the context in which he performs his act of critique. He has even included this scenic element in his subtitle: Essays in Critique and Solicitude. The object of this solicitude is the common human enterprise (describe ...