The Achievement of Irving Babbitt

by | Dec 5, 2011

To define Irving Babbitt’s central view of life, from which radiate all his other views—of letters, of education, of society—I commence by quoting not his own words, but those of a different writer—one whom he would not have approved. For in reading Bertrand Russell’s...

Appealing to Burke’s Moral Imagination

by | Nov 27, 2011

Edmund Burke For Our Time: Moral Imagination, Meaning, and Politics by William F. Byrne Northern Illinois University Press (DeKalb, Illinois). 227 pages, $40.00, cloth, 2011.Does the world need yet one more book on the social and political thought of Edmund Burke...

Hemingway in Perspective

by | Nov 25, 2011

Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961 by Paul Hendrickson. Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, 531 pp.Ernest Hemingway is to twentieth-century literature what Humphrey Bogart was to the same century’s cinema. More than any other actor, one need not...

Herbert Hoover, Revisionist

by | Nov 21, 2011

Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath. Edited and with an introduction by George H. Nash. Hoover Institution Press, 2011. 957 pp. $40.95. Herbert Hoover has always been in danger of falling down the memory hole. He...

Lewis’s Aeneid, Labor Amoris

by | Nov 20, 2011

C. S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile translated by C. S. Lewis; edited by A. T. Reyes. Yale University Press, 2011. Hardcover, 184 pages, $28.Every poetic translator worth our attention is, as it were, a secondary artist, one who attempts to employ his own...

Herrick and Donne and the Problems of Modernist Poetics

by | Nov 13, 2011

Occasionally, we are brought up short in our reading by a claim that is made with great confidence—even audacity—by its author, upon a point that seems to us rather dubious. Thus, F. R. Leavis, in his book New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), states: “My suggestion...

A Literary Patrimony

by | Nov 13, 2011

“Bread” came alive one afternoon in our nursery. Having just read Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird together, my father, my sisters, and I created a dramatization of it in which the character “Bread” assumed a life of his own. In this play, two children wander...

Fortunate Friendships

by | Nov 9, 2011

Below is an excerpt from Tim Goeglein’s new memoir, The Man in the Middle, featuring his recollections of friendship with Russell Kirk. Dr. A. W. R. Hawkins offers a brief introduction. When I read Timothy Goeglein’s The Man in the Middle: An Inside Account of Faith...

Santayana’s Standing

by | Nov 6, 2011

A response to David Dilworth.David Dilworth’s review in the Spring 2011 University Bookman of George Santayana’s The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States (Yale UP, 2009) raises important questions about the permanent...

The Youthful Writings of Russell Kirk

by | Nov 6, 2011

The scribblings of Russell Kirk, as teenager and pre-teen, reveal a widely read, precocious and imaginative young man. Among the remnants of youth which are preserved one may find vastly detailed drawings of Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and all sorts of adventure...