Countries of the Mind

In these literary explorations of British, French and American writers, Monroe Spears investigates not other geographical countries, but countries of the mind - the different cultural worlds that have shaped these writers and from which their art sprang. In the first section of this collection of new and recent essays, Spears examines relations between the worlds of past and present, communications between the worlds of science and the humanities and interchanges between America and France. His topics range from Montaigne and Toqueville to cosmology and the historical novel. Here, as in the rest of this book, Spears expands the discussion of a particular book or author into larger questions of cultural themes. Beginning with T.S. Eliot and continuing with W.H. Auden, the other great "transplant" who put down new roots in his adopted country, the second section deals with literary relations between Britain and the United States and between poetry and criticism. Spears considers other modern poets and critics, including Richard Wilbur, Howard Nemerov, Robert Graves, Stephen Spender and Frank Kermode, as well as other questions of literary criticism and history.
The third section focuses on the American South, real and fictional, and the extent to which it should be regarded as a separate world or a system of separate worlds. Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Mary Lee Settle and Katherine Anne Porter are among the writers discussed. Spear's own occasional reminiscences of meeting a number of his subjects during his years as editor of the "Sewanee Review" add to the immediacy of reading this lively collection. "Countries of the Mind" should have broad appeal for lovers of literature everywhere.