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Foreword Aaron Kramer Dedicating Heroic Imagination to his students was, of course, a most gracious act on the part of the author, but utterly in keeping, since it was to us, after all, that he had dedicated—through a shining life-span—his energies and his genius. At the time, however, we hardly realized the uniqueness of our situation, assuming that every campus must have at least one Frederic Ewen. As for me, it was only later that the blessed subversiveness of my five Ewen semesters grew clear. America’s English departments had long since fallen under the sway of the New Criticism—a tyranny from which they have even now not quite shaken loose. Cleanth Brooks, high priest of that sect, had made it his life’s crusade“to stress the poem rather than the poet”: So long as the emphasis is on the poet’s personality rather than on his craftsmanship, on his sincerity rather than on his solution of an artistic problem, on the intensity of his emotions or his commitment to a cause rather than on the structure of meanings that he has realized in the poem, there is not likely to be much “close reading” as we now know it—though there may be a minute and even pedantic searching of his letters or autobiography . Others subsequently trained me, and mostly I trained myself, in the areas of “craftsmanship, ... solution of an artistic problem, ... the structure of meanings,” which are, of course, indispensable for a poet and a teacher of poetry. But if that had to be my total focus, as Cleanth Brooks and his apostles decreed, I would long ago have fled the sterile parishes of their aestheticist worship. More than anything else, the lessons of Frederic Ewen were vivifying; not only did he give life to every literary work by making it leap from the context of the author’s epoch and personal situation, but—most remarkable of all—he made us forget we were in a classroom, exploring curricular materials. Whatever we studied, no matter its place or time of origin, spoke to our own turbulent place and time, illuminated our own developing young lives, and helped us live. What we received was a “close reading” of the human condition. Opening the first volume in 1984 was like stepping into our professor’s room again and, half a century later, renewing the grand experience of our youth, when each day’s lecture whetted the appetite for more. Shakespeare said as much of Cleopatra: “she makes hungry Where most she satisfies.” In reviewing “this massive work and nearly unparalleled erudition,” Lothar Kahn describes precisely the nature of our master’s teaching, which into his eighties had lost none of its purity and vigor: xv Ewen moves with remarkable facility from one national culture to another, from one genre to the next, one distinctive personality to a different one that was equally distinctive : tomes of vast scholarship often manage—without effort—to be quite dull. It appears that, just as effortlessly, Prof. Ewen has produced an extremely lively, colorful, even exciting account that is truly scholarship at its best. And D.D. Murdoch, in his review, accurately characterizes the Ewen approach: It is not statistical social science; it is narrative history with an emphasis on the personal lives and contributions of individual men and women of literary, artistic, and musical genius ... Although essentially a “history of the spirit,” the narrative documents the artists’ involvement in social movements and their awareness of revolutionary economic and political developments ... The book is written in a very personal style, with enthusiasm for its subject ... The reader receives a sense of the ferment of the times. Unswervingly defiant of the New Critics, Ewen had declared in an eloquent prologue what readers should expect: a “close reading” not so much of the poem as of its epoch. “This is a time when national genius transcends national boundaries, and spirits communicate across vast distances, affecting or being affected by those of other lands.” His “close reading” was “concerned with the fruits of the interaction of the public ‘collective consciousness’ with the creative consciousness of the individual, the private creator.” The same two-fold synergy continues to be demonstrated in the period covered by the present volume, A Half-Century of Greatness, and it is cause for celebration that this astounding segment should at last be made available. Focused on the social and philosophic upsurges leading to 1848, and the...

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