Spring 1997
New Series · Volume XIX Number 2

about the cover

Our cover design by Nanette Black is from Columbus, Ohio, artist A Hamilton's Tropos. an installation at the DIA Center for the Arts. A theme of the installation, Hamilton says, is "efforts to come to speech.” Photo of the installation in progress is by Thibault Jeanson of New York a is provided courtesv of the gallery Sean Kelly, New York.

editor's notes

The Kenyon Review has a new Board of Trustees. The names of its members appear on our masthead. This is more revolutionary than may leap out at first blush.

Let me point out immediately that this new group is separate from our Advisory Editors, distinguished authors who offer counsel on the editorial direction of the magazine, as well as point talented writers, young and established, in our direction. The Trustees, however, play no direct editorial role. Rather, they have taken responsibility for the well-being— financial, operational, promotional—of The Kenyon Review.

Given that government agencies have drastically slashed or reconfigured the support available to literary endeavors; that both private and public institutions are struggling to defend their budgets or are cutting them as well; that a number of magazines have recently gone out of business or are currently under threat; and that the Review itself suffered a brush with death only three years ago and a mandate to cut its college subsidy to zero, we've taken a dramatic—and creative—approach to financial survival. I suspect that others will follow.

For the first time KR now has its own distinct nonprofit corporate status. Our Trustees, talented and diverse folk who care about the arts, about literature, about this magazine, have taken on a burden and translated it into an opportunity for developing different kinds of support. (Until we actually sat down together at our first business meeting in New York last July, I had no idea what to expect, nor any assurance that such a Board would take responsibility for itself or for the Review. Their enthusiasm dazzled me.) We are only beginning to glimpse a range of creative programs—readings around the country, sponsorship of individual issues of KR, perhaps even an endowment campaign—that The Kenyan Review Trustees will launch in the months and years ahead. It will be an exciting time.

William Empson's "The Verbal Analysis" appears as this issue's Kenyon Review Classic. First published in 1950 as one in a series of responses by distinguished critics to a specific invitation from John Crowe Ransom, this essav represents an articulation by Empson—tentative, playful. probing — of a personal critical "credo." Perhaps we are coming to this a bit belatedly, for this is the first instance of literary criticism in our new Classic series. Belated because criticism was so much a part of Ransom's Review. Not merely did he publish the great critics of the era, Empson among them: together they changed the way the world read.

In his revaluation. "Criticism Untrammeled," Christopher Ricks reminds us of the qualities of great criticism. He illustrates Empson's care and precision, his wit and irony, his supple intellectual powers. And Ricks demonstrates these qualities in his own prose. How rare they are today, when arcane jargon becomes coin of the realm of an ever smaller, more precious critical and theoretical world. (I was about to write community, but that won't do.)

I am not for a moment suggesting we blithely return to an "old-fashioned" criticism, either in theory or method. It will be for you, for each reader, to judge how well Empson wears, for example. (This obviously is a different sort of question—though a fair one still—when we reprint Classics of fiction or poetry.) Rather, my own credo affirms that, whatever the critical purpose, jargon is both noxious and unnecessary. Care, clarity, precision matter. And if criticism, cultural, literary or otherwise, is to reach beyond the narrowest of audiences—is to matter as well— it must use a language comprehensible beyond the pews of the elect.

What role can The Kenyon Review play? My hope is that KR will resist the fragmentations besetting us. My intention is that it will continue gladly to straddle a fence between the creative communities of poets and fiction writers and playwrights and the academy where criticism and theory have increasingly grown inward gazing. That, in fact, has been a traditional stance of the Review: offering lively, challenging writing to a generally well-educated reader, not merely the specialist in creative writing on the one hand or in post-post-modernisms on the other.

—DHL