Containing the power of language was Wordsworth’s intention when he wrote that “words are too awful an instrument for good and evil, to be trifled with; they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts.” He was functioning here as a literary critic (the passage is from his 1810 Essay upon Epitaphs) and only incidentally as a prophet. Practiced at a certain level of intensity, literary criticism retains a verbal focus while encroaching without strain on moral, religious, philosophical, or other areas. T. S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling exemplify this tendency, as does the literary critic J. P. Stern, who was a close friend of Trilling’s.

Joseph Peter Maria Stern was born in Prague in 1920 and died in England in 1991. His father, Gustav, was an economist who fought in World War Iand later worked for the United Nations. Nicholas Boyle, a colleague of Stern’s, describes the family in his memoir as well-to-do and Jewish-Catholic. When Hitler’s armies invaded Prague in 1939, Stern’s father escaped to London with a plan to relocate the rest of the family. His mother, unwilling to leave, committed suicide. His grandparents, a half-sister, and her husband were sent to concentration camps (Theresienstadt and Lodz), and only the half-sister survived. Stern himself escaped by walking across the border to Poland. There, waiting for a boat to London, he met the Bohemian exile Erich Heller, who was ten years older. He became a lifelong friend as well as a