What one admires most in Philip Rahv's essays [in "Image and Idea"] is the determination to search among our modern cultural closures and total ideologies for "the cultural forms of dissidence and experiment." And what one admires about Rahv's critical method is his abundant ability to use such techniques as Marxism, Freudian psychology, anthropology, and existentialism toward his critical ends without shackling himself to any of them…. The characteristic success of these essays is a success of reclamation: the appropriation toward humanist ends and by methodical means of the irrationality, apocalypticism, and chaos of the modern mind.

Mr. Rahv affirms that modern literature "bristles with anxiety and ideas of alienation," that its frequent informing image is the depersonalized, homeless man of the city, and that the proper task of modern creative writers has been to give the quality of "felt life" to the inner tensions and contradictions imposed...