ABSTRACT

When censorship tries to step between serious writer and serious reader, as Mr. Ciardi points out, it cannot be tolerated. Writer and reader must both push it aside, first because art exists for an audience, even if that audience isn't there yet; secondly because people without art lose insight and judgment. Besides restraints against obscenity, the modern writer is often restrained by political influence. Sceptical Ketman is widely disseminated throughout intellectual circles. One argues that humanity does not know how to handle its knowledge or how to resolve the problems of production and division of goods. In Communist literature the attack on intellectual liberty is usually masked by oratory about "petty-bourgeois individualism", "the illusions of nineteenth-century liberalism", etc., and backed up by words of abuse such as "romantic" and "sentimental", which, since they do not have any agreed meaning, are difficult to answer.