Abstract
Mankind has reached the end of the road and is about to die: that is the despairing diagnosis pronounced by many of the leading creative spokesmen of our age. God is dead and man too is dead, and it little matters now whether the world will go out with a whimper or a bang. Whether or not there are sufficient warranted grounds for such a philosophy of doom is beside the point; the fact remains that many writers believe Western civilization may soon be wiped out in an atomic holocaust when Armageddon is fought.
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The social world of today is on the edge of chaos. The most habitual wearer of rose-colored glasses must admit it. A man who sings with Browning’s Pippa God’s in his heaven — All’s right with the world. is not an optimist; he is a fool. God died on November 24, 1859, and every day since the mound of earth above His grave has been piled higher.
Harvey Eagleson, “The Beginning of Modern Literature,” in Hardin Craig (ed.), Stanford Studies in Language and Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1941, p. 338.
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References
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1948, p. 122.
Everett W. Knight, Literature Considered as Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957, p. 30.
Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1954, p. 52.
Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1948, p. xv.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving. New York: Harper & Bros., 1956, p. 72.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick. New York: The Modern Library, 1926, p. 565.
Murray Krieger, The Tragic Viston. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960, p. 265.
For a study of archetypal images of God in modern poetry see Maud Bodkin, Studies of Type-Images in Poetry, Religion, and Philosophy. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1951.
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© 1966 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Glicksberg, C.I. (1966). Conclusion. In: Modern Literature and the Death of God. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-0770-7_11
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