R. P. Blackmur

The World's Body. By John Crowe Ransom. New York: Charles Scrib-ner's Sons. $2.75. The Triple Thinkers. By Edmund Wilson. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.75. One difference between Edmund Wilson and John Crowe Ransom is easy to put. Mr. [...]

This essay proposes to approach Herman Melville altogether gingerly and from behind the safe bulwark of his assured position—whatever that is—in American literature—whatever that may be. The tacit assumption all along will be that Melville is a [...]

The Note-Books and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Edited with Notes and a Preface by Humphry House. New York: The Oxford University Press. $8.50. This volume contains a hundred pages of extracts from early notebooks, including forty-four poe [...]

The American Language. By H. L. Mencken. Fourth Edition. Corrected, Enlarged, and Rewritten. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $5.00. It is perhaps unfair to consider H. L. Mencken's compendium of the American language from the point of view of wha [...]

Where your small man is a knoll to be smoothed away, Henry Adams is a mountain to be mined on all flanks for pure samples of human imagination without loss of size or value. That is the double test of greatness, that it show an attractive force, mass [...]

I I in my stillness cried aloud, keep that man blind, leave him his slavery, who from brooding on his kind memory out of mind presides a sightless effigy upon the night-dark streaming crowd; have mercy on that mole whose darkness is his soul. II [...]

The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams. 1865-1883. Edited by Ward Thoron. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. $5.00. The interest of these letters is triple without being anywhere divided. There is the historical interest of the letters from Washin [...]