Word: krutch
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Professor Joseph Wood Krutch has outlined one of the main causes of our moral, spiritual and cultural deterioration [TIME, Jan. 19]. The Common Man is becoming all too "common" in both senses of the word. If education does not return to its basic function of "leading out" the Uncommon Man from the mass of anonymous mediocrity, we shall soon be complaining with Ortega y Gasset of the ausenda de los mejores [literally, the absence of the better ones...
Professor Joseph Wood Krutch of Columbia University is willing to agree that this is the Age of the Common Man. But that does not mean that he approves. The trouble is, says Krutch in the current Saturday Review, the Age of the Common Man is rapidly becoming the Age of the Common Denominator...
...When we make ourselves the champion of any particular group," says Krutch, "we almost inevitably begin to idealize that group. From defending the common man we pass on to exalting him, and we find ourselves beginning to imply, not merely that he is as good as anybody else, but that he is actually better. Instead of demanding only that the common man be given an opportunity to become as uncommon as possible, we make his commonness a virtue...
...SELECTED LETTERS OF THOMAS GRAY (170 pp.)-Edited by Joseph Wood Krutch-Farrar, Sfraus & Young...
...Dread of Poetry. Thereafter, Gray spent much of his time escaping honors. He rejected the post of poet laureate with horror ("I would rather be Serjeant Trumpeter"). To the day of his death (in 1771), he lived in the dread that his poetry would make him look "ridiculous." Editor Krutch considers Gray's letters "deservedly among the most famous which have come down to us"; but this is strictly a scholar's opinion. On the few occasions when Gray kicked up his heels his letters brightened, but for the most part they reflect exactly the noiseless tenor...