R. P. Blackmur Summary

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. ... Read more

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... Read more

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... Read more

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... Read more

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... Read more

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... Read more

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... Read more

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... Read more