Word: criticizing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...vital enlargement of the world's most famous play. Shakespeare's tragedy, smudgily superimposed on centuries of older material, muddied by contradictory First Quartos and Folios, bristling with controversial motivations, above all dealing with a chief character as baffling as he is baffled, is truly-in Critic T.S. Eliot's phrase-"the Mona Lisa of literature." Its elucidation requires not so much scholars as detectives.* When seen on the stage in its full proportions, Hamlet is possibly more of a riddle than ever; but at least, by offering the spectator all the clues, it gives...
...third visiting poet will be Mark Van Doren who is speaking sometime in December, or January; the specific dates for Frost and Van Doren have not yet been established. Van Doren is the brother of Carl Van Doren, the literary critic of the New York Herald-Tribune...
Last fortnight prepscholars scuffing the first fallen elm leaves around Andover, Mass, held an enviable artistic privilege- or so thought William Germain Dooley, art critic of the immortal Boston Evening Transcript. Just opened at Andover's starchy, Georgian, richly-endowed Addison Gallery of American Art was the first comprehensive exhibition in New England of paintings by the late Maurice Prendergast and his brother, Charles, now 70. The Prendergasts were Boston boys whom Boston never bothered to honor. But since Impressionist Maurice has been dead for 14 years with an international reputation, home-town honors seemed at least timely...
That Elizabeth Madox Roberts was lost in one of these treacherous literary culs-de-sac became painfully clear to most critics three years ago, when she published her obscure, mystical novel, He Sent Forth a Raven. A difficult, humorless book, it had nothing of the earthiness and quiet backwoods simplicity that made her first novel, The Time of Man, a best-seller and a critic's favorite. Instead of plain Kentucky hill folks, its characters were strange, unreal philosophers who explained at great length, in highly polished sentences, that they did not know what it was all about...
Distaste for the literary classics is an inhibition commonly traced to English teachers. Cures are rare. On the contrary, the psychosis is likely to be aggravated by stuffed-shirt critics, lecturers, anthologists, Five Foot Shelves. An accidental cure sometimes occurs when a reader stumbles on to a first-rate modern critic, who illuminates the classics with insight and imagination while advising the reader to follow his own reason, draw his own conclusions. An honest reader, if he believes that Shakespeare is junk, and can say why, does the cause of great literature less harm than the snobbish or timid...