At the moment when Prosperity and the New Humanism were falling like twin meteors from portentous skies, Edmund Wilson published Axel's Castle. To all who could concern themselves with such matters, the arrival of a major new critic and a major literary idea was at once apparent…. Under the leadership of Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, the New Humanists had been maintaining a tight little fort of well-defended doubt against the great American tide of good intentions, self-expression, and democratic sentiment. Axel's Castle, though it evidently derived many of its formulations from these battles, stood considerably apart from them. That Edmund Wilson was no disciple of the watery Whitman scarcely needed proving; the very conception of humanity en masse was alien to the queer inward energy and obscure allusive style of the authors whom he celebrated. But still less was he in Mr. More's rather hardbitten Greek Tradition. Where he stood was in fact a matter of some doubt.
An account of the Symbolist movement in France and England, Axel's Castle was devoted neither to polemic nor to apologetics. The author was often seriously critical of the Symbolist writers whom he expounded; he struck not an overt blow at Yale or Princeton, though some of his judgments glanced pretty close to Mr. More and Professor Babbitt. But he evidently stood before the world as the interpreter, if not the advocate, of heresies. It might be surmised from his book that he believed in Progress and Change, in Individual Sensibility, Science, Democracy, and Relative rather than Absolute Values. When he criticized the Symbolists, it was not for deriving their values from men, it was for failing to look beyond themselves to the actual life of men. (pp. 272-73)
