The Yale Review

v F R O M T H E E D I T O R This year we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of The Yale Review. It was in 1911 that Yale professor (and later governor of Connecticut) Wilbur Cross set about transforming the old Yale Review into a journal with a world-wide reach and more vigorous standards. When, in 1942, he looked back on what he had created, he described it as ‘‘a kind of weather report, aiming to record both outer and inner weather: the world around us and the world within. . . . It has to interpret as well as record, proposing direction for action and thought. In so far as contributors and editors perform their work well, each issue analyzes the inter-relations of the main pressure areas, high or low, public or private; and each relates, in the light of its principles, the time we feel slipping through our fingers to time gone and time to come.’’ To mark this auspicious anniversary, the editors decided that all of this year’s issues would be devoted to work by stars of the Yale faculty. Our purpose was to demonstrate the range of interests and intellectual prowess of the minds Yale has gathered together here in New Haven. Our January and April issues have done just that, and the October issue promises even more. But from the start, we had decided to reserve this July issue for a look back to work by v i M C C L A T C H Y Y deceased Yale professors whose work, across the span of the century , had appeared in our pages. The new series of The Yale Review was launched at a crucial time in Yale’s history. Yale’s extreme educational conservatism during the eighteenth century was replaced by a palpable antiintellectualism – except in the sciences and divinity – that in the twilight of the nineteenth century made the term ‘‘Yale man’’ synonymous with the sort of bully scamp who grew up to be a robber baron – or preacher or university president or lawyer or statesman. Not until 1870 was a professor of English named to the faculty. Until then ‘‘English’’ referred to rhetoric, not literature . But soon a younger set of brilliant teachers – William Lyon Phelps, Henry Seidel Canby, Wilbur Cross, and Chauncey Brewster Tinker – began to change things dramatically. In 1899, a course in the American novel was o√ered, and things were never the same again. The ferment had started. Living authors were invited to the campus to read their work. In 1908, Yale University Press was founded, and in the same year Wilbur Cross transformed The Yale Review into an international quarterly, the Elizabethan Club was formed. The drama department started up. And by coincidence , some exceptional undergraduates – Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder, Archibald MacLeish, Stephen Vincent Benét, and Cole Porter – were part of the broad literary renaissance occurring at Yale. In the remarks by Cross I quoted earlier a reader can sense that, for its first half-century, The Yale Review often had a di√erent tone than what is found here today. Articles like Hiram Bingham’s 1914 attack on the Monroe Doctrine have the immediacy of today’s op-ed pieces. In an earlier age, the process of publication was faster. Nowadays – and for reasons still a mystery to me – it takes about six months for a manuscript to see the light of day in this journal. And that is an ideal that ignores the usual mitigating circumstances: the backlog, the queue. Issues of the early twentieth century are filled with passionate commentary on urgent matters of the day. (At the same time, many of these essays will seem merely historical curiosities or painful ironies. In view of Bingham’s dealings with Peru and its artifacts, for instance, his defense of South American sovereignty may induce a wince today, F R O M T H E E D I T O R v i i R especially after Yale’s own recent legal struggles with the Peruvian government.) When Horatio Parker, the teacher of Charles Ives and a most influential figure in Yale musical history, remarks in 1918 that Richard Strauss...