Paul Elmer More Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Paul Elmer More (1864, 1937) emerged from the American Midwest with the intellectual equipment and temperament that would make him one of the most distinctive moral critics of his generation. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, he was educated at Washington University in St. Louis, where wide reading in the classics prepared him for a lifetime of reflection on Greek and Christian thought. He continued advanced study at Harvard University, pursuing Sanskrit and related philological subjects. That training, rigorous and exacting, reinforced both his stylistic austerity and his habit of testing modern ideas against ancient sources. By the time he left academic study, More had acquired a rare combination of linguistic precision, historical memory, and philosophical seriousness.

Journalism and the Making of a Critic
More first became widely known as a man of letters through journalism. In New York he wrote and edited for leading periodicals, notably the New York Evening Post and The Nation. He came to be recognized as a critic of unusual steadiness of tone, a writer who sought clarity rather than display and who judged contemporary literature by standards rooted in classical measure and moral responsibility. In these years he began publishing the sequence that secured his early reputation, the Shelburne Essays. The volumes gathered incisive essays on poets, novelists, and philosophic tendencies, and they set out a coherent view of culture: literature must discipline sensibility, check excess, and cultivate the inner check of conscience. His criticism was not an antiquarian retreat but a living argument that the present could be judged by the best that had been thought and said.

Allies, Adversaries, and the New Humanism
More's name became inseparable from the New Humanism, a movement articulated in tandem with his close friend Irving Babbitt. The two promoted a modern classicism that resisted the romantic exaltation of impulse and the naturalistic faith that human beings are merely the sum of their environments. Though their emphases differed, Babbitt working largely from literary and ethical premises and More increasingly from religious and philosophical ones, their alliance produced a formidable countercurrent in American letters. Younger critics and scholars such as Norman Foerster and Stuart P. Sherman helped spread their ideas in universities and magazines. The stance invited vigorous opposition. H. L. Mencken derided the New Humanists as regressive moralists, while progressive critics and social thinkers attacked them for distrust of historical progress. More welcomed candid debate and answered with patient, closely reasoned essays that appealed to self-knowledge rather than to fashion. The poet and critic T. S. Eliot, who gravitated toward a disciplined classicism of his own, read both More and Babbitt with sympathy and later acknowledged the depth of their influence on his thinking about literature, religion, and culture.

Scholarship, Religion, and the Greek Tradition
As his career advanced, More increasingly organized his work around large historical inquiries. The later phases of the Shelburne Essays gave way to sustained studies of Greek philosophy and its continuities with Christian thought. Under the general rubric often referred to as the Greek Tradition, he examined the moral psychology of the classical world, the discipline of the will in Plato and the Stoics, and the transmission of those habits of mind into late antiquity and the early Church. In these books he developed a distinctive Christian-Platonist outlook. He did not embrace an easy apologetic; rather, he probed the ways conscience, reason, and grace might converge to check the anarchic self and give coherence to society. His religious writings show a mind turning from the immediate polemics of magazine culture to questions of permanent concern: the reality of moral obligation, the sources of authority in a civilization, and the line where genuine freedom meets self-mastery. Even when he ranged far into theology, he remained recognizably the critic: he weighed arguments, sifted claims, and compared them with the hard-won insights of classical antiquity.

Style, Method, and Influence
More's prose is characteristically measured, lucid rather than lush, admonitory without sermonizing. He prized balance: the check against excess in art, the check against dogma in thinking, the check against sentimentality in ethics. His method combined historical learning with a steady sense that literature offers images of the inner life, and that criticism must speak to the whole person, not merely to taste. This emphasis set him apart from the belletrists who prized style for its own sake, from the naturalists who explained human behavior almost entirely by circumstance, and from the skeptics for whom standards dissolved into preference. His influence radiated along several lines. In letters, he fortified the case for a classicism that modernists like T. S. Eliot could adapt; in the academy, he encouraged scholars such as Norman Foerster to defend humane education; in public debate, he supplied a vocabulary for those uneasy with both sentimental optimism and corrosive cynicism.

Later Years and Legacy
In his later years, More withdrew from the daily bustle of editorial life and devoted himself to writing and study, sustaining friendships and correspondence with kindred spirits, notably Irving Babbitt and others in their circle. He continued to publish books that deepened the philosophical convictions implicit in his early criticism. By the time of his death in 1937, he had left a corpus that is unusually coherent across genres: journalism disciplined by principle, essays animated by history, and scholarship guided by moral reflection. His reputation, like that of many moralists, has had its cycles, but his best pages retain a bracing clarity. They offer a vision of culture as the cultivation of the inner check; they insist that literature is not an escape from life but a school for it. The controversies that surrounded him, sparring with H. L. Mencken, skeptical engagements with champions of progress, and the larger debate over the aims of education, now serve as a backdrop to a more enduring legacy. For readers, teachers, and writers who seek in the classics not a museum but a standard of judgment, Paul Elmer More remains a central American exemplar: a critic who kept faith with the ancient sources of wisdom while speaking to the needs of the modern conscience.

Our collection contains 2 quotes who is written by Paul, under the main topics: Wisdom - Humility.