Now Poe held a special place for the new critics in a series of respects. The friendship with Brooks was closer on a personal level and would lead to a very frequent correspondence and an exchange of students between the two in the 1940s and 50s. The association with Tate, then the editor of Sewanee Review, provided McLuhan with an outlet for the majority of his early publications. Marshall McLuhan has written of seeing you and the pleasant time that he had at Sewanee. 8 As Brooks recorded to Tate (June 27, 1945): On both counts, McLuhan sought out intellectual and personal association with the new critics 7 and by the middle 1940s was close enough with Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate that he visited them at their homes in Baton Rouge and in Sewanee (Tennessee) in 1945 from Windsor. 5 On the other hand, the distinguished southern poets and so-called ‘new critics’ who participated in the Agrarian movement and who attended this convention (like Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate) saw themselves as allied with the Cambridge English school and especially (though not without reservations similar to those of McLuhan) with the work of I.A. On the one hand, the American distributist movement led by John Rawe, SJ, a colleague of McLuhan at SLU in 1937 (but soon to be assigned elsewhere, apparently on account of a serious illness which would eventually claim his life), had sought common cause with the Agrarians at a combined convention in Nashville in 1936. 4īoth of these commitments led him to seek out association with the American ‘new critics’. Both of these attachments were anchored in his conviction that rigorous thought necessarily enacts (or re-enacts) a bond with the social and cultural tradition. Leavis- Scrutiny line of the Cambridge English school. When McLuhan left Cambridge in 1936 to begin teaching English, first as a graduate assistant at the University of Wisconsin and then in a faculty position at St Louis University, he was a dedicated distributist 3 and a follower of the F.R. ( Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954) 2Īlthough nothing is more common in McLuhan research than to suggest Poe’s Descent into the Maelstrom as a, or even the key to his work, there is general ignorance about just when and just how this story came to his particular notice and about the place it was to have in his project. …the poetic process as revealed by Poe and the symbolists was the unexpected and unintentional means of reestablishing the basis of Catholic humanism. (Allen Tate to Cleanth Brooks, September 17, 1944) 1 It would be the phoenix of modern poetry. ….even if you never wrote another I should still be in favor of publishing it.
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