What We’re Reading

Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare in Bloomsbury. The Bloomsbury Group is a famous collection of English professors, intellectuals, and writers who rivaled The Inklings among the great communities of English thinkers and artists in the first half of the twentieth century. Although the Bloomsbury Group was diverse, one figure brought them all together as friends and lovers: William Shakespeare. Marjorie Garber’s book tells the tale of how Shakespeare came to Bloomsbury, principally through Virginia Woolf, but also through the other “apostles” of the organization. The work is a great history into how Shakespeare became the immortal bard we know him as, and how Shakespeare can bring together diverse people in friendship. “Shakespeare would have loved us” is definitely true, mostly because the members of the Bloomsbury Group loved him. Through their love of Shakespeare, the most unlikely of friendships formed.

~ Paul Krause

Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership. First published in 1924, Irving Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership remains pertinent one hundred years after it was written. Babbitt was the leader of an intellectual movement called the New Humanism and was a professor of French literature at Harvard. As a defender of “humanism,” Babbitt was a critic of what he called “humanitarianism.” The goal of this book, then, was to defend humanism and humanistic standards against both utilitarian and sentimental humanitarianism — that is, against the prevailing intellectual currents of the modern world and of Babbitt’s own lifetime. If utilitarian humanitarianism was exemplified by Francis Bacon, then sentimental humanitarianism was exemplified by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the 1979 edition republished by Liberty Fund, Russell Kirk writes in his introduction that humanitarians believe in “outer working and inner laissez faire” as well as “material gain and emancipation from moral obligations.” The humanist, in contrast, is governed by what Babbitt calls an “inner check” or the “will to refrain.” Within this book, Babbitt also gives priority to the centrality of imagination in human life and society. Thus, Babbitt contrasts two types of imagination that have been in competition with each other in the modern world: the radical and “idyllic” imagination of Rousseau, as well as the disciplined and “moral” imagination of Edmund Burke. Taken as a whole, Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership is a criticism of unchecked majoritarianism and an exploration for why our modern age needs a body of leaders with real moral character and moral imagination.

~ Darrell Falconburg

T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Eliot’s essay is arguably the most impactful and influential essay on criticism written during the twentieth-century; it challenges classical conventions regarding the literary production of a work. Published in 1919, Eliot’s essay appeared in two issues of a small London-based magazine, The Egoist. Eliot’s initial reason for writing “Tradition” was to walk critics and readers through a heart posture they must enter to appreciate the essence of poetry. Another reason was to reveal its poetic power to communicate with the natural world (which Romantic writers like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed was achievable.) To Eliot, poetic power is inherently biased, primarily resulting from the varying types of readers. Power, as Eliot projects in his essay, is a reader’s literary ego, but its underlying message is granting those reading poetry the power to not take it at face value, rather exert its beauty far beyond its capacity. He writes, “honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.” To Eliot, poetry is derivative upon the author’s end-product, and then it is dependent on audience/reader participation. Eliot then describes, “the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.” Eliot ultimately enforces that once the author completes their writing, they must remove themselves; meaning, the author must step aside, prompting the reader to determine the theme(s) or message(s) from the passage with no additional help from the author. As a result, Eliot presents a new definition of poetic analysis: giving readers full interpretative reign to produce their own thoughts, criticism, and feelings regarding literature. In T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” he writes “tradition, poetic impersonality, and historical sensibility” are produced to heighten the past, present, and future nature of poetry through new critical and classical fashions of interpretation.

~ Sarah Tillard

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