Critic
He reviewed for the Westminster Gazatte and then the Times Literary Supplement, from 1912. Initially he was much influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, which he disavowed in 1913.
He was one of an identified group of post-World War I critics that included Richard Aldington, Robert Graves, Aldous Huxley, Herbert Read, and Edgell Rickword. Murry gave Huxley an editorial job at The Athenaeum.
Murry led the charge against Georgian poetry. A leader in the 16 May 1919 edition of The Athenaeum was an early example of a reasoned attack against the Georgian style of verse; and Murry coupled this with an adversarial attitude to the London Mercury edited by J. C. Squire. He reviewed quite harshly Siegfried Sassoon's Counter-Attack in 1918, despite having helped him in 1917 to draft an anti-war piece for H. W. Massingham's The Nation. In-house, however, he was not master enough to award an essay competition prize to the then-unknown Herbert Read, over the wishes of George Saintsbury and Robert Bridges, who preferred the poet William Orton.
F. R. Leavis admired and was influenced by Murry's early criticism. Later he was to attack Murry viciously, in the pages of Scrutiny.
Read more about this topic: John Middleton Murry
Famous quotes containing the word critic:
“The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.”
—Clive James (b. 1939)
“The nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress of the world.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)