[Mr. Fiedler is a] dedicated and insistent "nay-sayer," [and] the very title of his present collection of essays [No! In Thunder] … tells us that he is embarking on a voyage of destruction; that he is intent on demolishing the "household gods" of both popular ignorance and the academic credo of the "new critics."
The material in the present volume covers an almost fantastic range of interests: from Hamlet to Jack Kerouac; from Oedipus Rex to the Leopold-Loeb trial; from Huckleberry Finn to the present role of the Negro in American society. If the range in subject matter is unbelievable so is the range of the book's style: the most incomprehensible academic jargon of the mythic school of critics cheek by jowl with pungent, direct statements of the author's personal likes and dislikes. For an example of Mr. Fiedler at his worst, try the following sentence: "There is something beyond symbolism in the sense that the ritual act or its story does not stand for but is the archetypal fact; and as this ambivalence of the durative-punctual persists in poetry it has been recognized as the Concrete Universal." There is a happier Fiedler, however. One frequently finds something as felicitous and right as this (he is talking of the Southern agrarian critics: Brooks, Warren, Tate, et al., breaking out of the cane brakes in the thirties): "They clutched not Marx in one hand and a 'proletarian novel' in the other, but a volume of neometaphysical poetry in one and of 'close' criticism in the other—only to disappear into the colleges to the North, still crying the slogans of agrarianism to their students, who were, alas, only interested in John Donne." This is wonderful stuff; the book is full of it.
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