The Press: End of the Kenyon?

Perhaps no other publication has had such a romantic genesis. Two American students at Oxford, Gordon K. Chalmers and Roberta T. Swartz, fell in love. He proposed in 1929, promising to try to establish a literary review in the United States. She accepted. In 1937, he became president of tiny Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. In 1939, the Kenyon Review was born.

Few brides have received such a glittering dowry. For the Kenyon, under the editorship of Critic-Poet John Crowe Ransom for 20 years, became an inspired and inspiring instrument of criticism, offering the work of R.P. Blackmur, Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks and William Empson.

Though its emphasis was on criticism—what Ransom christened the "New Criticism," with a stress on close textual analysis—the Kenyon also published fine poetry. Its first issue carried the work of a 22-year-old student at Kenyon College named Robert Lowell. Other issues ran a lot of early Dylan Thomas, much of Wallace Stevens and, later, some James Dickey. Its four issues a year, published in paperback format, were a delight to discriminating readers around the world, from Nehru to Ernest Hemingway.

Middlebrow Raid. The Kenyon changed direction in the '60s. Under Novelist Robie Macauley, chosen by Ransom to succeed him as editor, it paid more attention to fiction and broad essays on contemporary culture. Macauley may have been right to de-emphasize criticism. The nation's new crop of critics were more scholastic and often imitative. But the lure of little literary journals meant nothing to the new writers of the decade, who could find big money and broader fame in relatively large-circulation magazines like Esquire, Harper's and Atlantic. As Macauley, now fiction editor of Playboy, remarked last week: "The middlebrow magazines caught up with the highbrow magazines—and raided."

Admirers remained loyal, but the Kenyon declined. Publication costs rose. Last week the college told the review's 6,000 subscribers that the next issue will likely be the last. Kenyon College trustees, who paid a $40,000 subsidy last year, have decided to pay no more. The only hope for the Kenyon's survival, it seems, is some new outside benefactor.

If none materializes, the journal's epitaph could be a paraphrase of a sentiment expressed by Ransom about a poet in the Kenyon in 1964: Having achieved all the wisdom that was available to it, the Kenyon was ready to subside, happy but used up, into the annihilation of death.