We Must March My Darlings [antikvár]

Introduction I N publishing a collection of essays, it has been the custom for their author to supply an introduction in which a theme or "position" is identified which unites the volume, and gives reason for the essays to be read in conjunction with one another. This was not always so: as literary criticism was traditionally practiced, the fact that a single voice, that of the writer, made itself heard in a group of essays, and that a single mind and sensibility had been directed to the works that were being discussed, was all that was demanded in justification of their being brought together in a book. This situation has been altered by the commanding presence on the literary scene of writers whom we speak of as "literary intellectuals," who venture into many more areas of their culture than v/ere once thought to fall within the literary domain. With this broadening of the critic's range, it is now virtually a requirement of publication that in any collection of essays a unifying principle be located or contrived for it. The introduction to a volume of essays is no longer merely iconographie of its author's intention of seriousness; it has the practical purpose of indicating what is presumably the chief path that the reader should keep in view as he moves through the scattered territory that lies before him. The foreword to my own previous volume, Claremont Essays, which was indeed a collection of disparate pieces,