Word: criticism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Alexander Roper Vidler, 64. A goateed, beekeeping bachelor, Vidler is dean of King's College. As editor of both Theology and Soundings, he regards himself as the "midwife" of much of the new Cambridge thought. His specialty is ecclesiastical history, and Vidler is a trenchant critic of the "legalisms" and archaic institutions that have be come fossilized within the Church of England. He believes that most Anglican theologians have been "lethargic, dealing with secondary questions." To him, the merit of Cambridge theology is that, right or wrong, it has attempted to tackle basic issues concerning church, faith...
...Harrington is not just a social critic, he is a constructive and imaginative thinker. The most heartening aspect of his influence on Johnson's "War on Poverty" is that he has succeeded outside the political structure. He is a one-man crusade, conveying an absolute command over every fact, every idea even distantly related to the question of poverty. He can quote statistic after statistic, book after book, and yet always exude his devotion to solving the problem. In the discussion period after his speech, Harrington answered questions knowledgeably and realistically. At the same time he displayed his unmistakable conviction...
...Spears book cannot be classified with the kind of critical biography Richard Ellman achieved in his brilliant "Yeats--the Man and the Masks," it equally fails to react with the alive sensitivity to the poetry itself that Reuben Brower demonstrates in "The Poetry of Robert Frost--Constellations of Intention." Spears has just as many cross-references as Brower, and he seems to know the poetry, just as well. But criticism of poetry, if it isn't dynamic and fascinating, makes some of the stickiest, dullest reading on the shelf. His cataloguing approach to Auden overwhelms Spears' writing from time...
...Auden remarked once that he was "suspicious of criticism as the literary genre which, more than any other, recruits epigones, pedants without insight, intellectuals without love." A prolific reviewer himself, Auden identified four varieties of critic: the prig, "for whom no actual poem is good enough since the only one that would be is the poem he would like to write himself but cannot." Second, the critic's critic--"on the surface he appears to idolize the poet...but his critical analysis of his idol's work is so much more complicated and difficult than the work itself...
Classified in Auden's terms, Monroe K. Spears, author of Disenchanted Island, mixes the qualities of the critic's critic and the maniac. As critic's critic, Spears approaches Auden through close textual study, drawing information from all of Auden's work, from the writers and musicians that influenced him, and from the poet's life. As maniac be is intensely concerned with Auden's language and symbolism. Yet Spear's study of Auden, while exhaustive, intelligent, and scholarly, is also unsatisfactory --unsatisfactory for people who read criticism of poetry in order to understand the poetry's appeal more fully...