Edmund Wilson is not like any other critic: some critics are boring even when they are original; he fascinates even when he is wrong. [The Shores of Light] is unusual, to begin with, because not since Randolph Bourne and H. L. Mencken have we had another critic whose back pieces could so naturally and still so vibrantly bring forth a vanished age. (p. 93)

This is a book of many deaths, it seems; it is, in fact, its own retrospect. He brings us up to a period whose basic conviction is that no man is any longer his own master; it reaches back to those Vergilian shores of light—"in luminis oras"—to which every living form aspires, and which a remarkable generation of writers once identified with the personal liberation of every chafed, suppressed, and rebellious human being under the American sky.

Reading these pieces thus involves us in a web of recollection—the usual Proustian setting that puts Wilson's criticism in motion. There are deeper critics, more modest critics, critics less hidebound by indifference to abstract thought; there is no other critic who so evenly and so hauntingly writes criticism as a work of art. Should anyone try to create criticism as an art? The answer is that Wilson cannot help it. The key words of fashionable criticism today are "form," "sensibility," "difficult," "proper," "tact"; his are "grasp," "solid," "vivid," "focus," "lens"; he is a writer among writers, the writer who has taken on the job of explaining them to the world. Writing always from that other shore of memory and good English usage, where the great novelists were still on the parlor table and there were Americans still detached enough from our "commercial ideals" to see the country in focus, he has always to grasp out of time lost, out of the books misread by other critics, the whole figure of the writer in his age, and to present this subject as a new creation. He has to show his subject as a character in a story and each book as an action; he has to find what is most permanent about a writer yet may be not so much in the writer as behind him, in the force of the age that is backing him up; he has to make a point each step of the way and to show a case all around; he has to do it solidly, in his own style, gathering up all the details into one finally compact and lucid argument, like a man whose life hangs on the rightness of each sentence.

Even in these old pieces—so unexpectedly genial yet already prim in their effort to see behind every writer to the proper standards—all the fascination of Wilson's writing starts from this tensely balanced effort to seize, to control, to portray, to consummate. What he does not put under his lens—he allows you to infer—is perhaps not worth making clear at all, and so absorbed do we get in Wilson's compulsion to make order that it may not immediately occur to us, unless we are cooler to such writing than we should be, that there may be another side to the story—that verse is not "a dying technique" and Edna Millay not a great poet; that his theoretical formulations are often gross; that books may be entirely as unique as authors are, and so are not always to be compared with the books on which Wilson formed his taste. How hard it is, indeed, to remember that any judgment of a book based too dynamically on the character of the author is unsure, for our notions of character are set to fixed horizons; a real book revises all the conditions by which we judge it.

Yet these lapses and limitations do not matter, not while we read; we are taken up, we have been involved, by one of the greatest of living writers, in man's enduring effort to gain a meaning and to control his experience. (pp. 94-5)

Were Wilson another kind of critic, we might even lose his disposition—it is at the very center of his criticism—to picture intelligence as a hero struggling against an age that threatens the humanity of all. When one turns from the Wilson who in 1931 insisted that "American radicals and progressives … must take Communism away from the Communists" to those intellectuals who now exploit the names of two famous libertarian magazines of the 'twenties in order to push the most reactionary men and causes in America, it is frightening to see how far we have come—under cover of the literary charades and academic triviality which our criticism has become—from the democratic affections that once held our writers together. For Wilson—who years ago was quick to see a peculiarly amoral historian as "a symptom of the decay of Great Britain," who in a literary article published in the Soviet press reminded the Russians that there are "moral obligations that make themselves felt in spite of everything," who in 1937 saw how much Auden gives us a sense "of the slackening of the social organism and the falling apart of its cells," who said that Lytton Strachey's portrait of Elizabeth was "slightly disgusting; it marks so definitely the final surrender of Elizabethan to Bloomsbury England"—a literary critic is first of all a man and a citizen, a man who would be as ashamed to take the side of power as to write a bad sentence. (pp. 96-7)