Word: babbittism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. Irving Babbitt, 67, famed Humanist, professor of French & Comparative Literature at Harvard; after long illness; in Cambridge, Mass. Hating modernism, romanticism, the "Machine Age," he went back to the Greek and Roman classics for an austere doctrine which, with Princeton's Paul Elmer More, he fervently preached. In his lectures he loved to excoriate Jean Jacques Rousseau, No. 1 French romanticist; two years ago his students ran lotteries based on the number of writers Professor Babbitt mentioned in a 60-min. lecture (TIME, March...
...Among the members of the Harvard faculty who devoted themselves to the study of letters no man so full a knowledge of the literature of different countries than Professor Babbitt." C. B. Gulick '90, Eliot Professor of Greek, said on Sunday, voicing his deep regret. "His reading was extraordinarily wide and penetrating and he has done much to present his students with the continuity of literature from the days of the Greeks to our own. He was a devoted friend of the classics and he made the ideas of classical literature the standard of reference for his wise and acute...
...death of Professor Babbitt is a grievous event which will shock those who have loved or envied Harvard for its handful of truly great thinkers. But the student of Professor Babbitt who has studied the details of his life-long fight against the drifting artificial culture with which many so-called "moderns" annoint themselves, will realize the two-fold significance of his death. For the world has lost a remarkable man; at once a brilliant teacher and a great warrior...
...hard to believe that history will find the true measure of Professor Babbitt. Grief, especially for an intellectual enemy, is likely to be brief, and the world of letters will not pause long to honor one who was heard but not heeded. With the loss of his penetrating criticism, there will undoubtedly be a new flow of shallow carping by the second-rate "genius" which has long been embarrassed by the dam of sound appraisal he so carefully built up. It may be that what he took for senile decadence in the political and literary life of world, especially...
...lecture throughout the last eight months, nor did he let his illness impair his amazing tolerance and accessibility. Now that death has swept away one of the strongest bulwarks against the rising tide of sentimentality, political immorality, literary quackery, and artistic affection, Harvard men can only hope that Professor Babbitt, through his books, may yet bring the world's creative effort into those fruitful channels pointed out by his philosophy...