Our age is so advanced that angelism has largely displaced the angels. Angelism is a doctrine suited to Modernism for which Milton supplies an epigraph, put in the mouth of Satan: The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. C.S. Lewis, in his Preface … Read more
It is in relation to Percy as Southerner that we may look at his Last Gentleman (1966) as the most directly autobiographical of his novels. It is autobiographical in respect to family events, but more importantly to his own intellectual development in response to those events. Seen from this perspective, it is as if Percy’s … Read more
Since the invention of moveable type, the precision of voice in the printed sign—the suggestions of gesture and tone accompanying voice—has been increasingly a challenge to the poet. The critic has enlarged his office largely in this ambiguous ground, appropriating to himself increasingly an authority whose culmination has been the establishment of ambiguity in the … Read more