ABSTRACT
When I was an undergraduate at Yale, I was very aware of the ethnic and religious backgrounds of the men and (few) women who taught me literature. Complaining about the gods of the English Department who had shot down our most recent arguments, my friends and I spoke of Father Wimsatt and Father Brooks, Rabbi Bloom and Rabbi Hartman. We did so, as I recall, out of a profound sense of respect for what we saw as the connections these men had made between their various traditions and their work as critics. If we didn't agree with, say, Wimsatt in The Verbal Icon, "that the greater poetry will be morally right"3 and that, consequently, Antony and Cleopatra is demonstrably inferior to King Lear, we at least knew where he was coming from. Some of us saw him at Mass on Sundays. It never occurred to us to think of criticism as a neutral enterprise in which personality is effaced; we had too many great examples to the contrary at hand.
