I think Edmund had an insight into books, into writers, and into social circumstances, the effect of both education and environment, and had ethical, critical views on writers deeper than those of any other contemporary critic....Wilson was a very good writer. And he was serious. It's difficult to convey what the word serious means, but he was serious. He was the opposite of smart, the opposite of frivolous, the opposite of amusing, the opposite of brilliant. He was none of those things, simply a serious critic, of the first order. And of them, there are not many in the history of literature.