I suppose literary history will class Wilson as a social critic, and recently there has been a tendency, mostly on the part of the younger formalist critics, to brush him aside as an extra-literary critic, who has not done enough to illuminate immediate literary texts and problems. At bottom, this attitude represents a difference in critical approach, and while it is true that Wilson's inclination has not been toward the purely textual analysis of literature, I think the criticism of him on this score has been very unfair and represents a sectarian judgment. For, if Wilson, like Parrington and other social critics, has taken literature as part of history, unlike most of them he has not dissolved literature into history. The simple fact is that whatever ideas Wilson may have about art, he is above all a man of sensibility, and it is his sensibility that lies at the center of all his criticism. (p. 106)

Despite his range of interests, however, Wilson's criticism has been built on his taste and his feeling for the spirit of an author and his work. Actually, he has always been more interested in the imaginative than in the purely theoretical side of art and of other intellectual disciplines he has touched on from time to time. His studies of the Marxist movement, for example, grasped the essence of its ideas and social effects, but they belong more to the field of literature than to social theory. Even his attitude to aesthetic questions has been "literary" rather than "philosophical." But I think he has been more illuminating in this field than most philosophers and sociologists, who may pride themselves on the cogency of their thinking, but who have usually had little feeling for either literature or for experience. It seems that the nature of art in our time is such that the most rational minds have rarely had anything intelligent to say about any of the arts, and have usually been allergic to the mysteries and irrationalities of the creative process. Anyway, as one looks back at Wilson's career, it is evident that his influence has not been as the exponent of a literary position or a set of explicit ideas, like Taine, or Parrington, or Van Wyck Brooks, or even Sartre, but rather as a kind of luminous sensibility, discriminating, dissecting, recreating—a man of the middle, mediating between extremes, and clearing the driftwood out of the literary mainstream.

On purely literary grounds, it is amazing to see how many of Wilson's judgments have stood up, which is, I am sure, the final test of a critic's accomplishment. If he has occasionally overrated some writers and underrated others, this is the occupational hazard of any critic bold enough, as Wilson has been from the beginning, to evaluate most of his contemporaries. After all, literary judgments cannot be determined in advance; on the contrary, they come out of the kind of free-swinging criticism exemplified by many of the pieces in The Shores of Light, in which Wilson is quick both to appreciate any show of talent and to expose sham and mediocrity, even if it means challenging the most sacred traditions and the most popular reputations. (pp. 106-07)

Even when I disagreed with him, I was charmed by the working of his sensibility, moving in and out of his subject, in an easy, winding prose, smooth as the purring of a well-tuned engine. And if, as I suspect, the calm surface of Wilson's writing conceals his inner contradictions and tensions, it also represents a kind of literary achievement—the mastery of one's feelings and ideas through the medium of style. (p. 107)