In this age of specialization, this era in which the Ph.D. degree is the required union card for admittance to any English department worthy of the name, the career of R.P. Blackmur seems more extraordinary than ever. Here was a New Englander who never got past his junior year in high school becoming a professor at one of the country's finest educational institutions, Princeton University. Here, too, was the dean of the New Critics whose essays set a standard to which American criticism adheres to this day. Alien Tate, no slouch as a critic himself, thought Blackmur was this nation's best critic. Russell Fraser explains why in his VQR essay, as he does at greater length in his volume on Blackmur for the Scribner's series, American Writers, Supplement II. Like Tate, Mr. Fraser was personally aquainted with Blackmur, having been a member of the English faculty at Princeton from 1956 to 1965. Besides Princeton, Mr. Fraser has taught at Duke, Vanderbilt, and Michigan, where he teaches today, having come to Ann Arbor in 1968 as English department chairman.