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AMERICAN LETTER
and not that his characters are all doleful or half-witted. If our modern novelists are creating beautiful things, let our critics define for us their beauty or at least make it possible for us to see it, instead of trying to make us believe that the chief interest in a man like Lawrence is in his "sexology"—a word we do not use here. We are, as foreigners have observed, eager for culture, but we are a little afraid that our critics are giving us something else. Mr Eliot says that the important critic is absorbed in the present problems of art and wishes to bring the forces of the past to bear upon the solution of these problems. Perhaps that is the kind of importance we are looking for.[1]
- ↑ The recent books alluded to in the American Letter are Contemporary American Novelists, by Carl Van Doren (Macmillan) On Contemporary Literature, by Stuart P. Sherman (Holt) and Definitions, by H. S. Canby (Harcourt, Brace). Letters and Leadership, by Van Wyck Brooks (Heubsch) The Sacred Wood, by T. S. Eliot (Knopf) and Rousseau and Romanticism, by Irving Babbitt (Houghton Mifflin) are the other, somewhat older volumes.
