ABSTRACT
THE sixties were a trying period for me, for Partisan Review, for those of us who had our roots in earlier eras and traditions. It was also full of contradictions, crosscurrents, dead ends, new starts, fake avant-gardism, real talent, genuine liberation trends, and their reductio ad absurdum into crackpot movements. The period seemed to be dominated by the new left and the new conservatism, and by a polarization between these two. What was actually going on, however, was a reshuffling of cultural forms on the surface that both reflected and concealed the basic shifts of consciousness that had been developing for decades. But these shifts were not fully visible until the seventies.
