The article by Hilton Kramer entitled “Cynthia Ozick’s Farewell to T. S. Eliot—and High Culture,” in the February issue of The New Criterion, was written in response to a very long essay, “T. S. Eliot at 101,” which Cynthia Ozick published in The New Yorker on November 20, 1989. In the following exchange of letters, Miss Ozick and Mr. Kramer further amplify their views on the questions raised by both the original essay and Mr. Kramer’s response to it.
—The Editors

Letter from Cynthia Ozick

Dear Hilton Kramer:
The February New Criterion is in my hands and I am aghast and agape. How can Hilton Kramer, a critic both principled and nuanced, have fallen into so spectacular an error?

You quote me accurately: “The wall that divided serious high culture from the popular arts is breached,” and (about the pedestrian quality of so much contemporary verse) “music is not wanted, history is not wanted, idea is not wanted. Even literature is not much wanted”—whereupon you conclude that the essay you deplore weighs in on the side of “supporting the Kulturkampf that is now upon us.”

You have taken a lament for an assault, analysis for advocacy. You have mistaken a plaint on behalf of serious art for an attack on serious art. How can it have been possible for so subtle an intelligence as Hilton Kramer’s to have made so massive a mistake?

You are familiar with some of the things I’ve written; do you