Edmund Wilson summary

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Edmund Wilson, (born May 8, 1895, Red Bank, N.J., U.S.—died June 12, 1972, Talcottville, N.Y.), U.S. critic and essayist. He attended Princeton University and initially worked as a reporter and magazine editor. Much of his writing, in which he probed diverse subjects with scholarship and common sense in clear and precise prose, was published in The New Republic and The New Yorker. Among his influential critical works are Axel’s Castle (1931), a survey of the Symbolist poets; To the Finland Station (1940), a study of the thinkers who set the stage for the Russian Revolution; and Patriotic Gore (1962), analyzing American Civil War literature. His other writings include plays, poetry, the short-story collection Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), and five volumes of posthumously published journals. He was widely regarded as the leading critic of his time.

The Poor Fisherman, oil on canvas by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, 1881; in the Louvre, Paris.

Symbolism Summary

Symbolism, a loosely organized literary and artistic movement that originated with a group of French poets in the late 19th century, spread to painting and the theatre, and influenced the European and American literatures of the 20th century to varying degrees. Symbolist artists sought to express

poetry Summary

Poetry, literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm. (Read Britannica’s biography of this author, Howard Nemerov.) Poetry is a vast subject, as old as history and

novel Summary

Novel, an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an

essay Summary

Essay, an analytic, interpretative, or critical literary composition usually much shorter and less systematic and formal than a dissertation or thesis and usually dealing with its subject from a limited and often personal point of view. Some early treatises—such as those of Cicero on the