Word: matthiessen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...assumption than a review is simply a short piece of criticism," wrote F. O. Matthiessen in the midforties, when he was professor of History and Literature at Harvard, "and that it should be as good criticism as its writer can make it. This means a declaration of war on all literary supplements in which you can't tell the review from the publisher's agent. . . I think that we ought to pay attention to the kind of letter I received recently from a younger creative writer. 'In books we have dignity enough,' he said, 'but the incalculable force...
...this posthumous collection of some forty of Matthiessen's best reviews, the 'soft drip' of the blurb writer has been replaced by the professional literary critic's persistent hammering at values. There is also enough 'gritty detail' to drive many an author to the wall on the merits...
...selections, somewhat arbitrarily grouped by the editor, are almost all directed at the area of Matthiessen's greatest interest, American literature, and a large proportion of them discuss modern American poetry. From his vantage point as reviewer, he is able not only to treat the authors in question on his own terms but also to estimate the contributions of his fellow critics on the same subjects. For instance, his review of Van Wyck Brooks' The Flowering of New England gives him the opportunity to denounce what he considers a cardinal sin--concentration by the critic on a writer's life...
...reviews are successfully focused by the title piece, which was given as the Hopwood lecture at the University of Michigan in 1948, and contains a full statement of the premises which guided Matthiessen's own work. In this lecture he summarized his belief in the critic's duty to live in his own time, rather than in the "closed garden" of isolation from his society; his appreciation of the dangers and possibilities of mass media of communication; and his conviction that the artist "by perceiving what his country is and is not in comparison with other countries . . . can help contribute...
...Conant's opposition at the time came from students. Members of the faculty, especially the late Professor F. O. Matthiessen, violently criticized what they though was the president's "war-mongering" philosophy. The alumni again made a lot of commotion about his activities in behalf of the Committee to Help America by Aiding the Allies, but Conant still feels that "probably most of the alumni and surely the majority of the faculty felt as I did on the subject of intervention." Conant's stand was no matter of purely academic importance; he, Wendell Willkie, and Fiorello LaGuardia were the last...