THE TYRANNY OF THE YALE CRITICS - The New York Times

THE ENGLISH department at Yale used to resemble a sort of English country estate. It included a great house of many wings and rooms (the Elizabethan Pavilion, the Metaphysical Poets Billiard Parlor, the T. S. Eliot Chapel and so forth) and, normally, one entered this house via certain well-marked paths and avenues that ran through a spacious park. The park looked as though Nature had placed it there, but it was actually quite artificial, a typical landscape a l'anglais. Now and then a dewy-eyed deer or tame peacock would walk past. Everything was in order. And despite the rival claims of such ancient estates as Oxford and Cambridge, and despite the genius of Harvard and a few other houses, Yale's English department was in many ways the envy of the English-speaking world. But a dense jungle has grown up around this house of literature, and the normal route these days into the Shelley Bedchamber isn't up the stairs but through the window, by liana. The estate is choked with new theoretic

THE ENGLISH department at Yale used to resemble a sort of English country estate. It included a great house of many wings and rooms (the Elizabethan Pavilion, the Metaphysical Poets Billiard Parlor, the T. S. Eliot Chapel and so forth) and, normally, one entered this house via certain well-marked paths and avenues that ran through a spacious park. The park looked as though Nature had placed it there, but it was actually quite artificial, a typical landscape a l'anglais. Now and then a dewy-eyed deer or tame peacock would walk past. Everything was in order. And despite the rival claims of such