[What is] most impressive about Mr. Rahv's criticism is its urgent insistence that the mind remain engaged with the multiplex, ambiguous data of reality despite repeated temptations to slip off into the pleasures of private fantasy, the neatness of intellectual schematisms, the security of dogma, or whatever escape route the signs of the times may point to. Mr. Rahv is at his best, then, as a critic of criticism. He exercises a surgeon's fine skill in exposing the particular failed nerve that produced each of our major literary fads—the religious revival (in the late '40s), the ascendancy of myth (in the mid-'50s, but we are not out of that Sacred Wood yet), the grand sport of symbol-hunting (an intellectual pastime of the '50s, now permanently appropriated by the academic critics), and the current quest for "inner freedom" and spontaneity of consciousness in both the...