Volume 43, Number 7 · April 18, 1996
A Genius of the Spiritual Life
By Alfred Kazin
In breaking away from Partisan Review to found his own journal, Politics, Dwight Macdonald did something altogether splendid and moving, in getting to clear new moral ground, away from Leninism, Trotskyism, the usual hates and polemics of the left. I owe to Politics my discovery of Simone Weil, whose essay 'The Iliad: Poem of Force' astonished and moved me at the end of 1945 by removing the stage heroics of the Trojan War and presenting the true horror of war, death by death by death, as the submission to merciless impersonal force that was the fate of innocent millions during Hitler's war:
Feature, 1952 words
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