they were the new criticism which was going to 
spread all over the United States and Canada. And 
when he came to his first job in St. Louis, I think, 
he realized his students did not understand what 
he was talking about, and they had no interest at 
all in Matthew Arnold. That’s what he told me. They 
were not interested. They were interested in the 
folklore of the industrial life-which became The  
Mechanical Bride . I think he went for the rhetorical 
end of the trivium. He realized that with philosophy 
and logic there would be endless discussions 
around the interpretations of things. Grammar 
was important, it was the storehouse of the 
notions and understandings, it was all the