The Idea of the Humanities has been designed to do justice to Crane as a humanist—a scholar not limited to any particular subject matter or set of problems. The range of the book is immense. First of all, it spans three (or four) separate fields: the humanities, the history of ideas, and literary criticism and literary history. Its essays (themselves written over a third of a century) travel in time from ancient Greece to the immediate past…. We see Crane in many fields, in many moods, in many...

[The Idea of the Humanities] is perhaps the best argument in support of dogmatism (I would prefer another word) as a natural force in humanistic pursuits. Take, for instance, [Crane's] case against its most virulent form—"dialectical criticism," or any criticism which sets up a "more or less elaborate pattern of logically contrary terms unified by a single principle of classification," such things as poetic versus logical discourse, the symbolic versus the realistic...

[In The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry] Mr. Crane speaks as though he were presenting a distinctive kind of criticism, recoverable from Aristotle, which has been submerged, practically since Aristotle's day, by the domination of rhetorical values. We are thus led to expect a fairly specific methodology in the last lecture; yet, on the other hand, we wonder how this can be consistent with his argument that all methodologies can find in poetry only what they have previously determin...

[Crane's main subjects of inquiry are suggested by the title of his book, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry.] In the phrase "the languages of criticism" he refers to the different methods of critical investigation, which (as he insists) are necessarily limited in their usefulness and their results by the terms in which they work. He begins by proclaiming himself a "pluralist" in this matter: it is not his view that any one sort of criticism is right, o...

[The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry consists of] lectures about the two most influential sorts of contemporary criticism, and about a very different kind, an Aristotelian kind, which would supplement and counteract these. This word Aristotelian will make some of us grunt, some of us beam, and some of us exclaim, "Oh yes, now I remember—Crane's the man that's been starting that neo-Aristotelian school of criticism." So far as most of us are concerned, to...