Irving Babbitt

The New Laokoon: an Essay on the Confusion of the Arts Irving Babbitt

The title I have taken for this book expresses my sense of what needs doing rather than what I myself would claim to have done. I have suffered, both in selecting a title and in treating my subject itself, from a certain poverty in our English critical vocabulary. The word genre seems to be gaining some currency in English. The same can scarcely be said of the melange des genres ;and yet it is around the melange des genres and allied topics that my main argument revolves. Napoleon is reported to have said to Goethe in the course of a conversation on a problem very similar to the one I have attempted, Je m6tonne qu un aussi grand esprit que vous naime pas les genres tranches. I have often been forced to borrow Napoleon sterm and speak of the genre tranche for lack of a suitable English equivalent. Lessing published his Laokoon in 1766, toward the very end of the neo-classical movement.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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