Like Henry Adams, R.P. Blackmur was largely a self-taught man of letters. Unlike Adams, Harvard class of 1858, Blackmur did not go to college. I mention this biographical detail only because it may have something to do with the reason why [Henry Adams] is so personal rather than conventionally academic. It testifies to an extraordinary affinity with Adams, also evident elsewhere in Blackmur's criticism.

In Blackmur's essays, especially those on modern poetry collected in The Expense of Greatness (1940), Language as Gesture (1952), and The Lion and the Honeycomb (1955), he updates Adams's social themes. More significantly, he found in Adams reinforcement for his innate sense of the elusiveness of knowledge. To encompass meanings beyond meanings, he wrote in a style that often echoes his other mentor and major subject, Henry James….

Blackmur's paradoxical observation that "for a man relentlessly honest, there is no failure like success" foretells the nature and...