I first came to know Erich Heller through his sometimes dark and always majestic es says—the essays in. The Disinherited Mind and in The Artist’s Journey into the Interior. One had only to read a few of these essays to recognize that he, Erich Heller, was one of those critics who was himself something of an artist. In his criticism he wrote a species of poetry—poetry in the sense in which, in his preface to his Lord Northcliffe Lectures, he himself defined poetry, as “any configuration of words such as have been written by Nietzsche or Thomas Mann, verbal composi tions that, even without their aspiring to verse or rhyme, bear witness to the poetic faculty of man.”

I first read those essays of Erich’s roughly thirty years ago and was immensely im pressed by them: by their elegance, by their learning, by their power, by the excitement with which he was able to imbue his dramatization of the ideas that stirred and shaped the writers who most interested him: Goethe, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Thomas Mann as well as Schopenhauer, Karl Kraus, Wittgenstein, and T. S. Eliot. It is perhaps only criticism of the kind Erich wrote, criti cism that itself tells a story and is done in the spirit of the artist, that has any chance of at taining the standing of literature. Thirty years later, these essays of Erich’s still seem immensely impressive.

Soon after I began teaching at Northwest ern, in 1974, whenever a