From 1936 to 1940, he attended Newtown High School where in 1939 he met Francesca, who with her family immigrated from Italy after the Fascist government began persecuting Jews.
After America’s entry into World War II, he left at the end of his sophomore year to study Japanese at New York University.
In 1942 he enlisted in the US Army Military Intelligence to be trained as a Japanese translator and interrogator, achieving the rank of 1st Lieutenant.
He then, with the help of the GI bill, began studies at Columbia University for his M. A. and PhD in English Literature, where he was influenced by Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun.
[3] Langbaum’s first book, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (1957), takes issue with T. S. Eliot whom he admires as poet and critic.
Langbaum uses the developing dramatic monologue as an example of what he calls in his first chapter, “Romanticism as a Modern Tradition.” The Poetry of Experience has been reprinted in several paperback editions, in a Spanish translation (1996), and is now an e-book.
Since The Tempest is Shakespeare’s last play, Langbaum in his introduction sees it as “the appropriate statement of age, of the writer who having seen it all and mastered all techniques can teach us that the profoundest statement is the lightest and that life, when you see through it, is gay, tragicomically gay.” In that same year Langbaum published The Gayety of Vision: Isak Dinesen’s Art.
She was 49 when in 1934 she published her first volume of stories, Seven Gothic Tales, which in its lightness of surface covering serious content demonstrates the tragicomic vision.
Out of Africa, the book for which she is best known, was also published in 1934, though it recollects a much earlier period, the many years in which she managed a coffee farm in Kenya.
It connects our mind and culture to the primeval ooze.” This explains the effort of twentieth century poets try to be as nonanthropomorphic as possible, using animals rather than Wordsworthian landscapes for their symbols of nature.
Langbaum argues that in his fiction, Thomas Hardy encapsulates Victorian accomplishments, but he carries them a step farther into the twentieth century.
Jude at the beginning is an intelligent, idealistic working-class young man who studies at home for admission to the University of Christminster (Oxford).
At Christminster he meets there Sue Bridehead, a “modern” woman, intelligent, independent and therefore, according to the bias of the time, low in sexual energy.
As a Darwinian Hardy ironically has to admire Arabella’s brash sexuality, unblinking realism, as contrasted to the idealism of Jude and Sue, and fitness for survival.
In his several volumes of verse, Hardy encapsulates Victorian poetry but passes on a plain diction and irony that has influenced many twentieth-century poets.