Word: criticizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
During the '20s and '30s, Critic Van Wyck Brooks pondered a theory and a project. His project was to write a synthesis of U. S. culture in terms of the New England mind. The theory, used chiefly as a literary framework for the project, was German Philosopher Oswald Spengler's theory of cultural cycles: that cultures, like individuals, pass through youth and maturity to old age and death. Cultures are born in the countryside among "a homogeneous people, living close to the soil, intensely religious. . . . There is a springtime feeling in the air . . . a mo ment...
Heirs of Revolution. The great men of The Flowering of New England had been Emerson, Thoreau, Lowell, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Holmes. In a prose stanza with the roll of an epic, Critic Brooks described their significance: "As heirs of the Revolution, they spoke for the liberal world-community. As men who loved the land and rural customs, they shared the popular life in its roots, at its source. As readers and students of the classics, they followed great patterns of behavior, those that Europeans followed also. In short, as magnanimous men, well seasoned, they wrote with a certain authority...
Because in speaking for themselves they spoke for most Americans, their countrymen revered the New England giants, even when age had left them like a range of extinct peaks on a receding horizon. Critic William Winter walked in the moonlight to touch the latch of Longfellow's gate. Others traveled to Concord to gaze at Emerson's woodpile. Young William Dean Howells walked up Lowell's path with palpitating heart...
...these people moved through landscapes that Critic Brooks sees empathically as if through their eyes. "The wild flowers set the note of Whittier's country. . . . The pastoral stretches along the rivers, with their long lines of barns and sheds, blossomed with shadbush, the 'shad-blow,' for April in these valleys was the time of shadding, and the fish gave its name to flower and bird...
With such pictures of the countryside Critic Brooks heightens the dismal drama of New England's slow decline to which the book always returns. Bit by bit the great tradition ran down like the clocks that "had gone dead in many hamlets that had hummed with life." In the '80s "society had lost its vital interests. . . . In the absence of motives its mind was becalmed." The 'gos were "a day of little faith, the day of the epigoni, the successors, in whom the nineteenth century went to seed." Soon it was time for Poet Edwin Arlington Robinson...