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PARTISAN REVIEW
an accidental situation, but the result of a deliberate editorial policy sys–
tematically pursued by William Phillips and Edith Kurzweil.
Maybe it is right to say that
Partisan Review
is not what it used to be
fifty or forty years ago, but the same can be said about any other publi–
cation with such an enviable longevity. Times have changed and other
journals have emerged
(The New York Review of Books
is clearly the
continuation of a certain stage in the evolution of
Partisan Review).
However, none has surpassed the formidable performance of
Partisan
Review,
under William Phillips's editorship, in placing itself, with courage
and dignity, at the very center of the Western world's intellectual life.
ROSANNA WARREN
In coming to praise, to remember, and to honor William, I speak not only
for myself, but also for my parents, especially for my mother, Eleanor
Clark, who wrote for
Partisan
in its eafly years and in her own early
years. This accident of biography-that two generations of my family
have found friendship with William and with
Partisan Review
sustaining
and intrinsic to intellectual life-points, impersonally,
to
something
extraordinary about William himself. From the thirties until his death–
that is, for almost seventy years-William'S lucidity, learning, curiosity,
wit, disputatious energy, and intellectual generosity have helped to shape
the life of ideas in our country.
It
has been a changing life, requiring
changing ideas, and the enduring liveliness of
Partisan Review
has every–
thing to do with the combination of clarity and realism with which
William responded to the jolts and shifts in the world around him.
Since I helped to choose poetry at
Partisan
for thirteen years, it is
about poetry I will speak. In a massively careless, distracted, and glut–
ted culture such as ours, in which even supposedly educated people
sometimes relegate the arts, with patronizing unconsciousness,
to
the
realms of entertainment and decoration,
Partisan Review
has stood out
as a valiant counterexample. In
Partisan,
right from the inception, the
arts have been respected as modes of thought, of inquiry into reality, as
serious as the discursive disciplines of history, philosophy, and social
and political science. It is no surprise to see, over the years, the most
probing discussion of contemporary painting and sculpture in the pages
of
Partisan Review;
and in these same pages we find some of the most
significant poetry of the twentieth century. Auden, Berryman, Lowell,
Rosanna Warren teaches Comparative Literature at Boston University.
