BOOKS
EDMUND WILSON'S CRITICISM
THE TRIPLE THINKERS: Ten Essays on Literature.
By Edmund
Wilson. Harcourt, Brace. $2.75.
The apotheosis of poetry in our time seems to have been part of the
great post-war revCllt against pre-war cosmopolitanism. The effort was
made, notably by T. S. Eliot and his followers, to impress a homogeneous
culture on the contemporary welter; and the past had accordingly to be
simplified so that the newly-ordered present might seem to rest on a
congenial and orderly tradition. Now the culture that sprang, as though
by decree, from the writings of Eliot was predominantly a poetic one;
the tradition became therewith a poetic tradition; and literary criticism,
largely a coefficient of the creative movement, chiefly an exercise in taste
and sensibility-though colored, it is true, by a quest for the higher
moralities-became a medium for the linear and verbal appreciation of
poetry. Prose-unless it were the prose of theologians-was systematically
snubbed, along with the whole tradition of science and historical research
which is bound up with prose. Eliot handles fiction with a gingerly con–
descension. Paul Valery has admitted that to him "the art of the novel
is an almost inconceivable art." And Allen Tate, who always ventures a
step farther than anyone else, has professed to find poetry a refuge from
the "literature of the will" ; by which he means, one gathers, the literature
of ideas, the modern novel.
The Triple Thinkers
embodies a modest though effective criticism
of the post-war school, and one of its essays, "Is Verse a Dying Tech–
nique?," is directed at the cult of poetry in particular. This essay is by
way of being a shocker. When it first came out, in embryo, in
The New
Republic,
there was much alarm. And since its publication in final form
in
The Triple Thinkers,
the alarm has increased. Yet the idea is not new
with Mr. Wilson. It first emerged, if I remember, in
Axel's Castle.
And
how many have observed that the essay is aimed as much at modern
criticism as at modern verse? We have to distinguish among the things
the essay tries to do, and decide its merits accordingly. And insofar as
Mr. Wilson means to assail the cherished distinction between verse and
prose, to assert the historical relativity of the two forms, to show that
ideology transcends literary techniques, and to lay bare the process by
which, under the sway of poet-critics from Coleridge to Eliot, verse has
gradually become the norm of literature, and the lyric the norm of verse,
his effort is masterly and far-reaching. But the essay goes farther: it
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