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 d...

A sorry fate is overtaking the reputation of Edmund Wilson. Since his death … there has been an increasing tendency to portray Wilson as the Grand Cham of American letters, a venerable sage whose most impromptu and trivial scribbles must be embalmed in print and enshrined for all eternity. Ironically, Wilson had himself initiated this reverential salvage operation with the publication of A Prelude, in 1967; it began with the precocious diary, "My Trip Abroad," written when he was thirte...

In the years since [the publication of A Piece of My Mind], while his productivity has remained amazingly high and at least one book—Patriotic Gore—is a testament to sustained powers of scholarship and intellectual conviction, Wilson has become increasingly detached from the central life of culture in this country, a life he once helped shape and color. And yet it does not seem to me to be the comfortable detachment of old fogyism—nothing so placid, unremarkable and unembattled as that&...

Wilson is at his best as an "introductory critic," a term that John Macy defined as "one who by his own skill and charm summons strangers to make the acquaintance of a great man." The introductory critic suffers the handicap, however, that his value decreases in direct proportion to the literacy of his audience and its familiarity with the work he is discussing, until it becomes almost nil for the relatively informed reader. Wilson is fully aware of this, has always consciously s...

In his introduction to [Letters on Literature and Politics] Daniel Aaron states that Wilson "professed literature." It would be as accurate to say that he spent a lifetime defending literature, at least what he saw as its true practice, against the forces he saw threatening it, and all of civilization, in the twentieth century: the social irresponsibility of the symbolists and their followers, the political dogmatism of the Marxists, the phony professionalism of the academy and collective powe...

[Mr. Edmund Wilson's] achievement as a critic springs in a large measure from … his refusal to swallow any political faith or literary formula, his innate skepticism, his scientific temper. That is why no labels will fit him, why no party can command his allegiance; he cannot consent to a simple solution—a form of wish-fulfillment—for problems that are highly complex. (p. 467) Axel's Castle [is] a strikingly original contribution to literary criticism. It is soundly reason...

Wilson's literary criticism, almost from the beginning, has been marked by a double attention to art (the techniques of the artist, the narrower implications of the material) and to ideas (the moral, economic, social aspects of the work and of the environment in which it was brought forth); and that double attention has not often been encountered in American criticism with the particular emphasis that he has put upon it or with the approach that he has used. While in a sense any literary critic of de...

In common with other notable creators, Edmund Wilson possessed a sensibility that at its intensest achieved a fusion of time and place so that a particular period took on the architectures of an edifice—had corridors, chambers, and neglected corners—and a particular locale breathed forth a history, manifested itself temporally. At the end of his career he sought to embody the fusion in his life as well as in his writing. (p. 44) The fusion that he acted out as well as rendered in prose at the ...

The view of the artist and of the genesis of literary works which has become a method for Wilson in The Wound and the Bow is stated [in his novel, I Thought of Daisy (1929)] in terms of personal experience…. The Wound and the Bow rests upon the thesis that the artist is strong and weak at the same time; his great virtue as an artist inseparable from his weakness; his weakness perhaps (Wilson is not too clear on this point) the cause or one of the causes of his strength; or, to use Wilson's sen...

The literary chronicles, especially The Shores of Light, are commonly valued above Wilson's more integrated books, and although it seems likely that the people doing the valuing have not correctly judged the importance of the latter, the evaluation nevertheless seems just at first glance. As has often been pointed out, there is nothing in criticism to beat the thrill of hearing Wilson produce the first descriptions and definitions of the strong new American literature that was coming up in the 1920s&...

In Wilson's scheme …, psychoanalysis is a part of the historical method; its value in his criticism, presumably, lies not in what it is itself but in the contribution it can make to an understanding of the larger view. The chief formulation of this portion of his theory occurs in "Philoctetes: The Wound and the Bow," an exposition of the idea that artistic ability is necessarily related to illness. (p. 162)

A Window on Russia uses the very language of the Russian classics as a mirror of the national character, one Wilson finds both attractive and impractical. He combines the assumptions of Michelet and Taine about national cultures with the role of gentleman-amateur guide. No master of Russian—as the Nabokov-Wilson controversy showed—he can make learning the verbs and intellectual pleasure, from the time sense involved in their irregularities to the weakness of the verbs for "get" t...

Edmund Wilson is not like any other critic: some critics are boring even when they are original; he fascinates even when he is wrong. [The Shores of Light] is unusual, to begin with, because not since Randolph Bourne and H. L. Mencken have we had another critic whose back pieces could so naturally and still so vibrantly bring forth a vanished age. (p. 93) This is a book of many deaths, it seems; it is, in fact, its own retrospect. He brings us up to a period whose basic conviction is that no man is any long...

Mr. Wilson is a very productive author; I don't know if he would call Axel's Castle his best book, though he might agree that it is his most influential. If one wanted to get a complete view of his work on the authors discussed in it, one would need to consider later essays as well; but it is more to the present purpose to see Axel's Castle as it stands, unrevised, a testimony to the author's flexibility and diagnostic power at a time when his subject as a whole was considerably ...

To be a Wilsonian critic, even at a junior level, calls for a lot of effort. You can imitate, say, Mr. Blackmur, simply by refusing to express yourself clearly. Even Professor Trilling, with all his fineness of insight and his swift clarity of mind, has an easily imitable style (itself largely imitated, of course, from Matthew Arnold) which makes it no difficult matter to set up in business as a Trillingite. But it would be useless to try to imitate Edmund Wilson unless one had something like his breadth of...

I suppose literary history will class Wilson as a social critic, and recently there has been a tendency, mostly on the part of the younger formalist critics, to brush him aside as an extra-literary critic, who has not done enough to illuminate immediate literary texts and problems. At bottom, this attitude represents a difference in critical approach, and while it is true that Wilson's inclination has not been toward the purely textual analysis of literature, I think the criticism of him on this scor...

Almost everyone looked up to him. Writers and critics looked up to him, both those for whom he served as mentor and those ambitious enough to take him as model. So, too, did a company of cultivated readers who knew that regularly Edmund Wilson would come bearing gifts: Read Kipling, even if you detest his politics; read Ulysses Grant's memoirs, even though he was a brute of a general and a dolt of a President; read Agnon, read Dawn Powell, read Pushkin (hopeless as he sounds in English translation), ...

Edmund Wilson is that rare sort of American writer, a master of prose style. (p. 99) Poe, De Quincy, Shaw, Balzac, France, Dickens, Joyce, and to some extent Huneker and Mencken, have been his chief models. They are all vigorous creative writers with acutely independent styles. Thus Wilson has learned not only that forthrightness is the best critical policy, but also that a personal code, a sensitive social conscience, and a willingness to go out on a limb are all aspects of intellectual courage without whi...