From Harvard last week came a muffled echo of Irving Babbitt, a scholar so querulously out of tune with his time (1865-1933) that something must have been wrong with the time. The news was a new Harvard chair, the Irving Babbitt Professorship of Comparative Literature, to be occupied by one of Babbitt's last Harvard students, Critic Harry Levin, 47 (James Joyce: A Critical Introduction). It was an honor proposed by another former Babbitt student. Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey. Countless other students, 'from Poet T. S. Eliot to Pundit Walter Lippmann, would doubtless second it. For nearly 40 years such...
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