To be a Wilsonian critic, even at a junior level, calls for a lot of effort. You can imitate, say, Mr. Blackmur, simply by refusing to express yourself clearly. Even Professor Trilling, with all his fineness of insight and his swift clarity of mind, has an easily imitable style (itself largely imitated, of course, from Matthew Arnold) which makes it no difficult matter to set up in business as a Trillingite. But it would be useless to try to imitate Edmund Wilson unless one had something like his breadth of literary equipment. Unlike the 'New Critics', who proceed mainly by the elaboration of specialised skills, Wilson has kept alive the older notion of the critic as the man who, first and foremost, knows more than the reader. Whether or not one agrees with his judgments, an article by him is always informative.

This idea of the critic is not merely an old-fashioned one in general; it is also an old-fashioned American one. In the days when America was divided sharply into three strips—a cultured East, a raw and booming industrial Mid-West, and an uncharted frontier West—American literary critics and teachers appear to have accepted without question that their chief function was to instruct. They were there to act as intermediaries between their energetic countrymen and the artistic and intellectual nabobs of Europe. This ideal has now faded. When an ideal disappears, the reason generally is either that it has been fulfilled or that people have ceased to think in those particular terms…. Probably the American ideal of absorbing European 'culture' has neither exactly been fulfilled nor exactly forgotten; it may be that some of it was fulfilled and then the rest was forgotten; this, too, happens to ideals. However the case stands, one fact is clear. The old race of informing, polyglot critics vanished from the American scene as completely as the giant reptiles vanished from the earth.

Again, except for Mr. Wilson. It is as if one single dinosaur had survived; a bigger and better dinosaur than any of his ancestors, tough and adaptable enough to survive in a world which had, strictly speaking, no place for him. To drop the metaphor, Mr. Wilson is better than any of the old-style American critics because, having grown to maturity just as their age came to an end, he had to choose between abandoning the old, wide-ranging attitude of the 'man of letters', or taking it up so vigorously as to make it valid and commanding in a world that had no inclination to encourage it for its own sake. He chose, as we all know, the second. He has written nineteenth-century criticism in the twentieth century, and the result has been a triumphant success just because of that contradiction: just because, living in an alien time, he has had to be more sharply aware of what he was doing, more conscious of the rationale of his work, than the old genial ramblers-through-literature ever needed to be. (pp. 142-43)

[I like him best] when he is taking me on a conducted tour of something. Part of the pleasure comes from the intrinsic interest of the scenes we are touring through, and part from the personality of the guide. Mr. Wilson has, to put it mildly, a strong character; if he tried to keep its flavour out of his writings, he would probably find the task impossible; but he does not try. It is this constant reminder of the critic's own presence that gives character to his work; for thoroughness, copiousness of reference, and steadiness of judgment, there are probably a score of professors who could match it. In a sense, it is like reading a travel-book or even a novel with a very strongly delineated hero; by the time we have travelled with Edmund Wilson through half-a-dozen countries, imaginative or actual, we begin to look forward to the next journey, irrespective of where it will lead us, simply to have the pleasure of travelling with such a companion. (pp. 144-45)