On Literature, Culture, and Religion: Irving Babbitt

On Literature, Culture, and Religion is an ideal introduction to a seminal American thinker. Irving Babbitt’s opinions were uncompromising, and his vocal allies and opponents included almost every name in American literature and scholarship: T. S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, Paul Elmer More, H. L. Mencken, and Sinclair Lewis. A founder of New Humanism, Babbitt was best known for his indictment of Romanticism and his insistence that the modern age had gone wrong. Babbitt argued for a renewal of humanistic values and standards- which he found best articulated in classical Greece, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The selections cover topics central to Babbitt: criticism, Romanticism, classical literature, French literature, education, democracy, and Buddhism. The original annotation is retained. Brief introductions to the essays place them in the Babbitt canon.