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MORE, Paul Elmer

  • Paul Elmer More
  • Date of Birth: December 12, 1864
  • Born City: St. Louis
  • Born State/Country: MO
  • Parents: Enoch Anson, a businessman, and Katherine Hay Elmer M.
  • Date of Death: March 9, 1937
  • Death City: Princeton
  • Death State/Country: NJ
  • Married: Henrietta Beck, June 12, 1900
  • Education:

    B.A., Washington U. (St. Louis), 1887; M.A., 1892; A.M. Harvard, 1893.
  • Professional Experience:

    Teacher, Latin, Smith Academy (St. Louis) 1887-1892; asst. in Sanskrit to Charles Lanman, 1894-5; instr. classical lit. and Sanskrit, Bryn Mawr, 1895-7; staff member, The Independent, 1901-3; lit. editor, New York Evening Post, 1903-1909; literary editor, The Nation, 1906-1913; editor in chief, 1909-14; advisory editor, 1914-17; part-time lectr. Philosophy, Princeton, 1918-26; part-time lectr. Classics, Princeton 1926-33; lectr. Classics, Harvard, spring 1926.
  • Publications:

    Books:

    Helena, and Occasional Poems (1890); The Great Refusal, Being Letters of a Dreamer in Gotham (1894); A Century of Indian Epigrams: Chiefly from the Sanskrit of Bhartrihari (1898); The Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus (1899); Benjamin Franklin (1900); The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance (1904); Shelburne Essays; First Series (1904); Shelburne Essays; Second Series (1906); Shelburne Essays; Third Series (1906); Shelburne Essays; Fourth Series (1906); Shelburne Essays; Fifth Series (1908); Studies of Religious Dualism: Shelburne Essays; Sixth Series (1909); Shelburne Essays; Seventh Series (1910); Nietzsche (1912); The Drift of Romanticism: Shelburne Essays; Eighth Series(1913); Aristocracy and Justice: Shelburne Essays; Ninth Series(1915); The Greek Tradition from the Death of Socrates to the Council of Chalcedon, 399 B.C.-A.D. 451 (Princeton: University Press, 1917–27, 5 vols.) includes: Platonism (1917); The Religion of Plato (1921); Hellenistic Philosophies (1923); The Christ of the New Testament (1924); Christ the Word (1927); With the Wits: Shelburne Essays; Tenth Series (1919); A New England Group and Others: Shelburne Essays; Eleventh Series (1921); The Demon of the Absolute; New Shelburne Essays (1928); The Catholic Faith (1931; rep. as Christian Mysticism: A Critique, 1932); The Skeptical Approach to Religion; New Shelburne Essays (1934); Anglicanism, with Frank Leslie Cross (1935); On Being Human; New Shelbourne Essays (1936); Pages from an Oxford Diary (1937, memoir).

    Selected essays on classical subjects: 

    “Two Famous Maxims of Greece,” The New World 7 (March, 1898) 18-35; “Nemesis, or the Divine Envy,” The New World 8 (December, 1899) 625-44; "What Are Our Classical Men Doing?," The Independent, 55 (January 21, 1903) 216-18; "Pedantry and Dilettantism in the Classics," The Independent, 55 (February 5, 1903) 338-40; "Classical Teachers and the Public," The Independent, 55 (February 26, 1903) 511-13; "Translation," [The Persians] The Independent, 55 (April 9, 1903) 826-8; "The Agamemnon at Harvard," The Harvard Graduates' Magazine, 15 (1906) 31-3; "The Value of Academic Degrees," The Bookman, 23 (March-August 1906) 650-3; "The Teaching of the Classics," The Independent, 65 (August 6, 1908) 327-9; “The Dualism of St. Augustine,” The Hibbert Journal (April, 1908) 606-22; “The Loeb Classical Library,” The Nation 93 (November 9) 438-39; “The Classics,” The Nation 95 (November 21, 1912) 484-85; “Academic Leadership,” The Unpopular Review 2 (July, 1914) 132-51; "The Parmenides of Plato," The Philosophical Review, 25 (March 1916) 121-42.

    Bibliography: M. Young, Paul Elmer More: A Bibliography (Princeton, 1941); see also A.H. Dakin, A Paul Elmer More Miscellany (Portland, ME, 1950).
  • Notes:

    Paul Elmer More, a classically trained writer, editor, and academic, was one of the most influential American literary critics of his generation. Upon meeting the future French professor Irving Babbitt (1865-1933) as a fellow student of Sanskrit, Pali, and Indian philosophy in graduate school at Harvard University, More became a convert to Babbitt’s “New Humanism,” an informal movement of literary and social criticism that received widespread attention in the United States, Europe, and China in the 1920s and early 1930s. Although hesitant to deem himself a participant in any particular intellectual movement, More penned classically inspired criticism that embraced many ideas—e.g., philosophical dualism, the championing of the classical spirit in opposition to scientific and sentimental naturalism—key to Babbitt’s Humanism. Disenchanted with the scientific approach to philology dominant in his era, More departed from Harvard with an M.A. and taught Sanskrit and classical literature briefly at Bryn Mawr College. More left Bryn Mawr for a cabin in remote Shelburne, NH, where he decided to embark on a career as a critic. Soon a prolific contributor to outlets such as the Atlantic Monthly and the New World, More became an editor in New York City, ultimately serving as the editor-in-chief of the Nation. Upon his retirement from editorial work, More moved with his family to Princeton, NJ, where he was soon courted to join Princeton University’s Department of Philosophy—and, later, its Department of Classics—as a lecturer in ancient philosophy and early Christianity. Having converted back to Christianity in the late 1910s, More spent much of his post-journalism career on a series of volumes called The Greek Tradition, which were devoted to ancient Greek philosophy and Christian apologetics. Twice a serious candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, More was a critic whose lyrical prose style, capacious knowledge of Eastern and Western literature, and forceful literary judgements cemented him as a major force in American intellectual life.
  • Sources:

    Humanistic Letters: The Irving Babbitt – Paul Elmer More Correspondence, ed. E. Adler (Columbia, MO, 2023); A.H. Dakin, Paul Elmer More (Princeton, 1960). 
  • Author: Eric Adler