ABSTRACT
Pearce clearly believes that he is at his best as a philosopher of literary history. The essay on Roethke is good because it stems from affection. The essay on Stevens, too, reveals affection, as well as close and just readings of the poet's total work. Pearce again reveals his necessity for an intellectual framework which, one supposes, relieves him from the need for aesthetic judgment that a more literary method would require. Pearce's book may render a cautionary service to much American scholarship, for he is guilty of an abuse comparative scholars are sometimes accused of: a tendency to make too little butter cover too much bread; what one might also think of as Casaubonitis, or Steinerismus. In Pearce's essays on American writers, the reasons for most of his difficulties become apparent. On the "alienation" of American writers, Pearce refers to "writers of the first rank like Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville".
