The Lion and the Honeycomb, for its insights, its omissions, and its rejections, is one of the most significant literary studies since John Crowe Ransom's God without Thunder (1930). (p. 537)

Mr Blackmur is exceptional in as much as he has gone to the bother of pondering and describing the context in which he performs his act of critique. He has even included this scenic element in his subtitle: Essays in Critique and Solicitude. The object of this solicitude is the common human enterprise (describe it as you will, providing that each of the three words gets its due). The cause or source of the solicitude is 'the new illiteracy'.

The phrase is belligerent. It recognizes that we have to-day a condition of approximate universal literacy. New physical energies are available which sweep us along at a rate and with consequences beyond our intellectual power to grasp. The new literacy...