Everybody’s a critic, but in the past hundred years, few have reached the heights of Lionel Trilling. When he died in 1975, his obituary ran on the front page of the New York Times—a rarity for those in the thankless field of criticism. Through his essays for the Partisan Review and his books—including The Liberal Imagination—Trilling shaped and prodded the currents of American thought in a time of great social change. As Trilling himself once put it, his writing lies at “the bloody crossroads” of literature and politics, and this devotion to grounding literary criticism in real-world concerns made him one of the premier intellectuals of the twentieth century. Trilling was also a prolific writer of letters. By his own estimation, he wrote at least six hundred every year. In September, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling, edited by Adam Kirsch. Below, we present a selection of Trilling’s choicest opinions, which show that even in his correspondence, the critic was always at work.

On Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems

Dear Allen:

I’m afraid I have to tell you that I don’t like the poems at all. I hesitate before saying that they seem to me quite dull, for to say of a work which undertakes to be violent and shocking that it is dull is, I am aware, a well-known and all too-easy device. But perhaps you will believe that I am being sincere when I say they are dull. They are not like Whitman—they are all prose, all rhetoric, without any music. What I used to like in your poems, whether I thought they were good or bad, was the voice I heard in them, true and natural and interesting. There is no real voice here. As for the doctrinal element of the poems, apart from the fact that I of course reject it, it seems to me that I heard it very long ago and that you give it to me in all its orthodoxy, with nothing new added.  Read More