Word: babbittism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...read this morning of the death of Professor leving Babbitt with regret and with the confirmed conviction that the great must always be misunderstood. I was surprised to find in the obituary which appeared in your columns so much that was unsympathetic to the personality of the great teacher and so much that was false to his teaching...
...Babbitt's students never to may knowledge regarded him as a crotchety old man. In person and in speech he exhibited a gustiness which was always youthful and a sense of humor which always tempered his bitterest jibe...
Your obituary states that although Babbitt's courses were well attended, no one claimed to get anything out of them. This is the most extravagant and most untrue reflection of all. Neither I nor my friends became humanists when we were under Babbitt, nor did we become more conversant with the great literary masterpieces because of the course than we were before. But all of us, whether we wanted to or not, took up a critical attitude toward literature and life which we were willing to and did defend. Babbitt made us ask ourselves why we were here and what...
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...
...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...