As we look around the cultural landscape today, we find few causes for celebration. The sad fact is that cultural life in America has been dumbed-down, politicized, and coarsened to a degree almost unimaginable even a few decades ago. Wherever one turns, it seems, the rebarbative competes with the deadeningly simple-minded for one’s attention. There is all the more reason, then, to pay tribute to those few oases of civilization that flourish here and there in the encroaching desert of triviality and degradation. Since the spring of 1948, when its first issue appeared, The Hudson Review has been a welcome voice of urbanity and sophistication in the world of American arts and letters. Founded by the poet Frederick Morgan with the late Joseph Bennett and the late critic and translator William Arrowsmith, this distinguished quarterly has consistently provided a refuge for intelligent, unacademic criticism of literature and the arts, as well as s ...

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