[What] disturbs me in reading Mr. Blackmur is the feeling I so frequently get that he is deliberately refusing to reduce his meaning to simple terms—that, on the contrary, he is inflating it, surrounding it with a nimbus of uncaught and uncatchable meaning, rather than let any possible nuance escape him. It would be altogether too crude, of course, to suggest that this is done merely to impress the less intelligent reader, that it is an 'act', as we say, put on because the reader will not think he is reading first-rate criticism unless he finds it hard to understand. It is deeper than that; it is really, at a profound level of sincerity, a dislike of too overt statement, of a subject-matter that jumps too blithely from one skull into another; it is our modern odi profanum vulgius.

The labour, for the lover of simplicity, of...