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. ...
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Critical Essay by Delmore Schwartz
In The Double Agent, R. P. Blackmur characterizes his method as primarily technical, and states, with a humility which is insistent, that this method "does n...
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Critical Essay by Joseph Frank
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-explan...
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Critical Essay by Viola Hopkins Winner
Like Henry Adams, R.P. Blackmur was largely a self-taught man of letters. Unlike Adams, Harvard class of 1858, Blackmur did not go to college. I mention this bi...
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Critical Essay by Denis Donoghue
[R. P. Blackmur's] themes were grand, and he worked his language hard in their service, but if all else failed or was felt as failure he still loved words for ...
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Critical Essay by Gerald J. Pannick
It may be said that Blackmur started his career in the ideological climate of the eighteenth century and ended it in that of the nineteenth. In other words, he beg...
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Critical Essay by H. J. Muller
[Most] readers will agree that Mr. Blackmur's practice in The Expense of Greatness is not dangerously moralistic. He does state that "the material of the ...
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Critical Essay by Alfred Kazin
[The] special quality of a critic like R. P. Blackmur … can be understood only when one realizes that [in The Expense of Greatness] he writes the kind of critici...
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Critical Essay by Stanley Edgar Hyman
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 ...
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Critical Essay by R.w.b. Lewis
In Language as Gesture, two years ago, R. P. Blackmur brought together a number of those invaluable essays on modern poetry which he had been writing for various litera...
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Critical Essay by Denis Donoghue
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 ...
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Critical Essay by Hugh Kenner
Despite his habitual doodling with other men's idioms … in the hope that something critically significant will occur, Mr. Blackmur has achieved institution...
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Critical Essay by Richard Foster
[It is with] style that one naturally begins in talking about [Blackmur's] work. Style is the data of a writer's sensibility; and though there is a nota...
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Critical Essay by John Wain
[What] disturbs me in reading Mr. Blackmur is the feeling I so frequently get that he is deliberately refusing to reduce his meaning to simple terms—that, on the co...
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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, sha...
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