[Philip Rahv's break with Communism marked the real beginning of his career as a literary critic]. Starting in 1939, and then through the 1940's, he wrote some solid and really first-rate essays in literary criticism, which still remain the best memorial to his powers of mind and sensibility. One of the remarkable things about them too was the degree to which his Marxism had receded into the background. In fact, he had not given up his beliefs; when pushed in conversation, the Marxist formular...

Though he wrote mostly about literature, and often surpassingly well, Rahv's criticism can't be understood apart from a fancied relation (mostly in his head) to some ideal Marxist text. Sometimes this stood as a relation of mimesis, sometimes parody, most often allegory. His essays moved along a double track. On one track he could faithfully follow the work being examined—an obligation he took with great seriousness—while on the other he might also trace out the half-blurred foot...

Experience is Rahv's word; it turns up on virtually every page of [Essays on Literature and Politics 1932–1972]. Sometimes he uses it to mean everything in life that the mind should encounter not by chance but by purpose and an intuitive sense of what it needs. So he speaks of "a dichotomy between experience and consciousness" as the typical American disability. But sometimes he uses it to mean 'felt life' rather than 'life's total practice,' an...

[Rahv's] criticism has strength rather than ingenuity, eloquence rather than wit. He mimics nobody, preferring his own voice with its certainty of timbre and its dynamic range (loud but controlled in polemic). Consequently he collects well, keeps well. To me, a critic with virtually nothing in common with him …, the weight of [Literature and the Sixth Sense], its clarity and certainty, are extremely impressive. Apart from anything else, it was no small achievement to go on doing unfashionable ...

I am not sure that I know what the "new criticism" is, and I am not certain that Mr. Rahv is a new critic. But his essays [in "Image and Idea"] display one quality which has become tiresome. It is the habit of making dark and dogmatic statements about the American literary past, notably in relation to the American literary present, at least, that is, as interpreted by Mr. Rahv. For example, the opening essay ["Paleface and Redskin"]. This lays down the proposition t...

[Rahv] was fairly unproductive as a critic: his collected writing would scarcely total more than a thick volume of occasional essays and book reviews, a scattering of uncollected editorials and manifestoes, and an unfinished book on Dostoevsky which he labored over in desultory fashion for more than thirty years. Yet the editors of [Essays on Literature and Politics 1932–1972] are quite justified in claiming that he was, in his own right, one of the finest literary critics of his generation…. ...

[What is] most impressive about Mr. Rahv's criticism is its urgent insistence that the mind remain engaged with the multiplex, ambiguous data of reality despite repeated temptations to slip off into the pleasures of private fantasy, the neatness of intellectual schematisms, the security of dogma, or whatever escape route the signs of the times may point to. Mr. Rahv is at his best, then, as a critic of criticism. He exercises a surgeon's fine skill in exposing the particular failed nerve that ...

What one admires most in Philip Rahv's essays [in "Image and Idea"] is the determination to search among our modern cultural closures and total ideologies for "the cultural forms of dissidence and experiment." And what one admires about Rahv's critical method is his abundant ability to use such techniques as Marxism, Freudian psychology, anthropology, and existentialism toward his critical ends without shackling himself to any of them…. The characteristic suc...

Rahv is best known as an editor, since its founding in 1934, of Partisan Review. [The essays in Literature and the Sixth Sense] are very much the writings of a partisan and public man who is as much concerned about influencing cultural debate as in elucidating texts. So this is literary criticism of a special kind: the essay as position paper, as a tactical exercise in a continuing war of ideas. Rahv acknowledges the influence of psychoanalysis, existentialism and anthropology, and he uses all of these reso...

[A book like Literature and the Sixth Sense,] ranging as it does over a period in our cultural life so marked by change at all levels, could be a useful record even if its insights and judgments were no longer especially relevant. Rahv himself accedes to this record-value in his decision to reprint his essays without substantial changes, and so delivers himself to the whimsies of the Zeitgeist. But what continually struck me as I reread pieces I had not read for years was how well they stand up despite the ...

[In "The Myth and the Powerhouse," Rahv is too often] found fighting a species of rear-guard action against troops who have long since retired from the field or may never have left the barracks in the first place. For instance, he looks with suspicion upon a religious revival "current" among intellectuals in the early 1950's, yet from the perspective of the present the only real question is whether such a revival ever occurred. Similarly, he views with alarm the illiberal ...