Volume 8, Number 10 · June 1, 1967
A Civilized Man
By W.H. Auden
Theodore Spencer: Selected Essays
edited by Alan C. Purves
Rutgers University Press, 368 pp., $10.00
In a civilized society, nobody under the age of thirty would be permitted to publish any literary criticism. (Bibliographies might be allowed.) In our own, alas, the young are not only permitted but economically compelled to perform in a field for which they have, as yet, neither the scholarship, judgment, wisdom, nor good manners it requires. The result is only too visible in journals like the PMLA, where one is confronted by article after article which nobody could possibly read and its wretched author had obviously no desire to write. Tenure, however, insists that he get his name into print.
Review, 1985 words
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