The last conservative critic?
The death of Terry Teachout has put me in a funk. In 2019, we lost Clive James and John Simon. In 2020, we lost Roger Scruton and George Steiner. In 2021, Adam Zagajewski, Denis Donoghue, and Joan Didion all passed. Now we start 2022 with the sudden death of Terry Teachout. Most of these critics (though not Teachout) came of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s during one of the great periods of literary criticism in the last two hundred years. Consider some of the works that were published between 1947 and 1957. We have Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn in 1947 and F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition in 1948. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren published their influential Theory of Literature in 1949.
