Counterpoints: Twenty-five Years of the
New Criterion on Culture and the Arts
edited with an Introduction by Roger
Kimball (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007).
xii + 500 pp.

MARK ROYDEN WINCHELL (1948-2007) was Professor of English at Clemson Univeristy and director of the Great Works of Western Civilization program. Author of numerous critical biographies and scholarly studies in literary criticism, his most recent book is God, Man, & Hollywood (ISI Books)

From 1922-39, T. S. Eliot edited a magazine
from London, which he called the
Criterion. Reflecting Eliot’s own predilections,
this periodical espoused a kind of abstract
“classicism” while publishing contemporary
writing that was anything but classical
in form. The first issue contained the editor’s
own poetic masterpiece, The Waste Land,
which many highly intelligent readers found
nearly incomprehensible. Other undeniably
modernist contributors to the Criterion included
Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, William
Butler Yeats, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence,
Aldous Huxley, and (in translation) Paul
Valery, Thomas Mann, and Luigi Pirandello.
Nor did the paradox end here. Although
Eliot considered himself a “royalist” (and was
even accused of proto-fascism), he regularly
published the work of Marxist poets and
declared that “in times like ours we need
ideas, not only our own, but antagonistic
ideas against which our ideas keep themselves
sharp.” Interestingly enough, the primary
American venue for Eliot’s own work was
the Trotskyite Partisan Review.

When the New Criterion was founded in
1982, its very title indicated a desire to pick
up where Eliot had left off. Like Eliot, publisher
Samuel Lipman and editor Hilton
Kramer saw the function of criticism as “correcting
taste.” Although Lipman’s specialty
was music and Kramer wrote primarily about
the fine arts, the greatest need for the correction
of taste probably lay in literary criticism.
The problem was the result of two seemingly
opposite, but equally destructive trends. On
the one hand, deconstructionists denied that
literature had relevance, or even objective
reference, to anything outside of a closed
system of linguistic signs. At the other extreme,
left-wing ideologues were intent on
reducing that same literature to its political
implications. For the past quarter century, the
New Criterion has trained its sights on the
second of these two tendencies. As testimony
to this effort, we have a 500-page volume
called Counterpoints: Twenty-five Years of the
New Criterion on Culture and the Arts.

This book finds much to rail against: low
birth rates in the West, Third World immigration,
“Christophobia,” Islamic radicals,
the Turkish dictator Mustafa Kemal, the Soviet
Gulag, Eric Hobsbawm, Thomas Kuhn,
Edward Bellamy, adversary jurisprudence,
Frantz Fanon, the Natural History Museum
of the Smithsonian Institution, and the quality
of education on today’s campuses—to
name just a few. And that only takes us up to
page 209. In reading these attacks on lunacy
(and those that follow), I experience what my
favorite neoconservative Joseph Epstein calls
“shared antipathies.” The New Criterion has
proven itself to be a courageous and necessary
publication.

It should be noted that the contributors to
this volume also find much to admire in
Anglo-American culture. These include the
work of: John Buchan, Yvor Winters, F. R.
Leavis, Paul Valery, Patrick Leigh Fermor,
Lord Acton, Robert Surtees, Donald Francis
Tovey, George Abbott, Robert Frost, Aldous
Huxley, and Russell Kirk. One thing that this
diverse pantheon of culture heroes has in
common is that (with the exception of Fermor,
who is now in his nineties) they are all dead.
Consequently, the proverbial man from Mars,
who knew the present situation only from
reading Counterpoints, would conclude that
our culture was dead as well. Although one
can sympathize with such a judgment, it
strikes me as too pessimistic. Righteous indignation
is a virtue; despair is not.

The late M. E. Bradford often commented
on the cultural myopia of critics who knew
only what was of interest to those who lived in
Manhattan. Although this indictment was directed
primarily at the leftists who dominate
elite culture, there is always the danger that
their conservative adversaries will think that
what they themselves are attacking is the only
culture worth mentioning. If the enemy is
constantly defining the fields of battle, even
our victories can seem pyrrhic.

In the opening essay of this volume, Roger
Kimball argues eloquently for preserving a
sense of permanence in our culture and objective
standards in our criticism. Unfortunately,
this is easier said than done. Because it
is less difficult to identify what is inane and
meretricious than it is to know what will last,
the natural impulse for a principled conservative
is to go on the attack. This is particularly
tempting for a publication such as the New
Criterion, which pretty much confines its
focus to elite culture. In our time, there is
precious little high art that is not connected to
some degree with the academy, which is itself
a hotbed of political correctness and multicultural
nonsense. (Kimball dissects this phenomenon
in his aptly titled book Tenured
Radicals.) And yet, the very distinction between
elite and popular culture is anything
but permanent and objective. It was invented
in the early decades of the twentieth century
by self-proclaimed modernists who, in Ezra
Pound’s celebrated formulation, were intent
on “making it new.”

There are vast regions of American life and
genres of American culture that seem invisible
to the New Criterion. In its 500 pages,
Counterpoints contains no discussion of film,
although that medium has done more to
shape the American consciousness than some
obscure exhibition at the Museum of Modern
Art. One looks in vain for so much as a
reference to a creative writer living west of
the Hudson River or south of the New Jersey
Turnpike. Although there is much trash in
the provinces, there are also vibrant pockets
of regional culture—especially in the South.
Even on the Left Coast, one can find contrarian
filmmakers such as Ron Maxwell, Mel Gibson,
and Whit Stillman. If Eliot himself could
frequent the London music halls and correspond
with Groucho Marx, his successors
could also broaden their cultural horizons
without lowering their tastes.

The one respect in which the New Criterion
best resembles its namesake is in the
poetry it has published since 1984. At a time
when free and confessional verse began to
seem as tired as Romanticism and Victorianism
had to Eliot and the early modernists, a new
generation of poets discovered the ancient
resources of formal prosody. Although the
New Criterion has done much to promote the
new formalism, the only discussion of verse in
Counterpoints is John Simon’s devastating critique
of the New York School poets.

It would be pointless to list, much less
comment on, all forty-two essays in this
volume. Two that I found of particular interest,
however, were William Logan’s meditation
on Robert Frost and David Frum’s
eulogy to Russell Kirk. Both Frost and Kirk
were American provincials in the best sense
of that term, and the essays in question pay
appropriate homage to their achievement.
Still, one can quarrel with certain specific
observations.

Although Logan comes nowhere near
Lionel Trilling’s extravagant claim that Frost
was a poet of “Sophoclean terror,” he does try
to give us a revisionist reading of the New
England bard. In the process, he calls welcome
attention to some of Frost’s lesser known
poems. At the same time, he seriously undervalues
such familiar works as “After Apple-
Picking,” “The Gift Outright,” “Directive,”
and “Provide, Provide.” Frost wrote some
mediocre poems, but these are not among
them. Also, Logan’s claim that “The Silken
Tent” belongs to Frost’s neglected canon
seems dubious. It is contained in most standard
anthologies of American literature, and
I have taught it myself for over twenty-five
years. While Eliot praised the metaphysical
poets in principle, this one magnificent sonnet
by Frost fully matches their mastery of the
extended metaphor.

One minor but telling lapse is Logan’s
misreading of Frost’s politics. He calls Frost’s
“Yankee landscape the agrarian fantasy of a
Southern Democrat—not John Crowe Ransom
or Allen Tate but Andrew Jackson.”
Actually, as a life-long advocate of states’
rights, Frost had more in common with John
C. Calhoun than with Jackson. Even more to
the point, he was indeed a soul-mate of the
Nashville Agrarians. In 1919, Henry Holt
published Ransom’s first book of poems on
Frost’s recommendation. Two decades later,
when he turned down the opportunity to edit
the newly formed Kenyon Review, Frost sponsored
Ransom for the position. The New
England poet was even closer to Donald
Davidson, the most conservative of the Fugitive-
Agrarians. For nearly thirty summers,
Frost and Davidson were neighbors at the
Bread Loaf School of English in Middlebury,
Vermont. Peter Stanlis, who knew both men
well, said that it was difficult to determine
which of them was farther to the right politically.
Frost supported Strom Thurmond for
president in 1948 and would have voted for
him had the Dixiecrat been on the ballot up
north.

The most pleasant surprise in Counterpoints
is David Frum’s memorial tribute to Russell
Kirk. Frum is best known as the Canadian
neoconservative who supplied George W.
Bush with the phrase “axis of evil” in reference
to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. He is also
the author of a lengthy screed in National
Review, which characterized right-wing critics
of the Iraq War as “unpatriotic conservatives.”
Although it would be difficult to think
of two individuals more different than Frum
and Kirk, Frum’s essay is a balanced and
generous assessment of a great man’s legacy.

When Eliot finally tired of publishing the
original Criterion in 1939, other important
magazines in England and America were
correcting taste in their own way. Among
them were the Southern Review in Baton
Rouge, Louisiana, the Kenyon Review, in
Gambier, Ohio, the Partisan Review, in New
York City, and Scrutiny, in Cambridge, England.
At that time, there was such a vigorous
exchange of ideas that many of the same
critics could be found in the pages of these
very different periodicals. The loss of such
healthy eclecticism is one of the casualties of
the culture war that has raged since the late
sixties. This is the environment in which
magazines such as the New Criterion have had
to take their stand. If this can sometimes lead
to a stance of embattlement, it is well to recall
Eliot’s admonition that there are no lost
causes because there are no gained ones.