Wring Out the Old: Squeezing the Text, 1951–2001

I began writing this essay at the turn of the century, just a half century after I had begun reading Spenser.¹ By the early 1950s World War II had turned cold while the intellectual climate of the universities was warming up in the glow of the magisterial studies that lit a fire under all of us in my generation, studies that drove us beyond wartorn Europe, beyond the balkanized precincts of academic disciplines, toward relatively more integrated and global approaches to culture that presaged the future of humanistic curricula. There were the translations of Auerbach, Curtius, and Beauvoir that appeared