The displacement of Van Wyck Brooks from the center to the farthest margins of literary influence today is surely a stunning shift of taste. In 1920 Brooks was regarded as the undisputed heir of the great tradition in American thought—the radical, reformist, prophetic, "organic" tradition which adopted Emerson as its source of inspiration, took The American Scholar as its point of departure, and envisioned as its point of terminus a civilization in which the creative spirit, in all its social and imaginative forms, might flourish. To this old enterprise Brooks had brought intransigent zeal and incomparable flair—a genius for clarifying thought, said his comrade-at-arms on The Seven Arts, James Oppenheim. Today, Brooks's sovereign role in the transmission of this classic American tradition, his oeuvre of inquiry into its bearing on modern letters in America, is either ignored or disdained. (p. 5)
[Brooks eventually] came to think that America, by virtue of its history and ideology, was not only itself the very emblem of the creative life but was, too, the best place on earth to locate the republic of letters. And he composed a series of books which monumentalized Emerson's Orphic vision. Suddenly, when his art had achieved certain marvels of transformation, he lost voice, heart, taste, courage for the task. Somehow he lost the thread of his own passion and found himself in an abyss of his own devising. A really major figure in the seedtime of modern thought, he became a minor figure in the time of efflorescence—victim of the very forces he had discerned, named, and condemned. Although he turned out to be a critic of divided mind, a man whose life was broken in half, in one respect his career was all of a piece: from first to last he sought to transform America from an industrial jungle into a place fit for the realization of Emerson's Romantic dream. (pp. 5-6)
