The title is from Virgil. The text itself is comprised of Wilson’s reviews, letters and creative writing. It was his intention to depict the literary landscape of the 1920s and 1930s.

Pause for a moment, please, and acknowledge the requisite hubris in that objective.

The tome is bracketed by large memorial pieces, one on Christian Gauss—his mentor at Princeton—and the concluding homage to Edna St. Vincent Millay. These are easily the peaks of the collection. Much like collected essays of Pound or Eliot, there is a tendency to redundancy, exacerbated, unfortunately, if the author or work has slipped into obscurity.

Wilson acknowledges that his attention to literature in the 1930s were limited by his growing interest in Marxist thought and history. Thankfully that distraction is only modestly represented. Normally an eight hundred page collection of criticism would inspire rabid pursuit of highlighted authors. That wasn’t the case here. When Bunny raved about Thornton Wilder I just valued my appreciation for Balzac and Faulkner. ( )

4334. The Shores of Light A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties, by Edmund Wilson (read 4 July 2007) This is a compilation of Wilson articles, mostly from The New Republic, for the period from 1920 to 1940, published in 1952. Some of the subjects did not interest me, but it did serve as kind of a literary history of the period. But many of the subjects were of interest, and the final item in the book is an appreciation of Edna St. Vincent Millay, written after her death, and it is very fine. So I am glad I did not quit reading the book ( )