“The last image of that troubled heap”: From chaos to coherence in Pope'sEpistle to Cobham

Modern Isms and the Lovejovian Universe

“…3 Until very recently, the response of both our major reviewing magazines has been to dismiss the newer trends either with scorn or with cheerful insouciance, whether these trends seemed outrageous or just a little in advance of our times. Yet one finds, upon examining any group of modern criticism in our period that, whether outrageous or restrained, all share certain characteristics which would seem to contradict certain of our formalist assumptions, and to challenge the 'traditional' attitudes of the eighteenth century, in cosmology and thence in morality, epistemology, and metaphysics.…”