[Rahv's] criticism has strength rather than ingenuity, eloquence rather than wit. He mimics nobody, preferring his own voice with its certainty of timbre and its dynamic range (loud but controlled in polemic). Consequently he collects well, keeps well. To me, a critic with virtually nothing in common with him …, the weight of [Literature and the Sixth Sense], its clarity and certainty, are extremely impressive. Apart from anything else, it was no small achievement to go on doing unfashionable things, to follow one's own road, when American criticism, for virtually a generation, was headed in a quite different direction. It called for sobriety and patience, for a sense of vocation and a sense of history.

"The Sixth Sense" is a sense of history; Nietzsche said that the development of historical insight in the modern epoch constituted what was virtually a new faculty of the mind, a sixth sense. Rahv...