BOOKS
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gency air; nor does his stylize<l, sybilline manner of presentation clear up
the waters in which anthropology, social democracy and Original Sin are
thrashing around as in Original Chaos. Does he too want to he a national
librarian!
With Ransom and Wilson we leave the general critic for the critic
who is only a literary specialist. Indeed neither of these writers even
considers the distinction; both seem to assume that methodology alone is
the issue in any discussion of criticism. Wilson thus writes of the histori·
cal method and its uses, and demonstrates the method by giving a short
history of it. Then he shows how ideologies such as that derived from
Freud may be made to work together with the historical principle; and
finally he shows how, by reference to that principle, literature may be not
only analyzed but evaluated. The tentativeness of this final discussion
suggests Wilson's weakness on the philosophical side-which is not to say
that he is not sounder in this respect than his fellow-lecturers. But the
primary limitation comes out, I think, in connection with the problem of
giving historical criticism a literary concreteness; that is of relating it to
the specifically structural, or "aesthetic," properties of writing. And this
is where Ransom, with his program of intensive structural analysis, comes
in. Wilson year by year keeps bringing more and more ideology to bear
on the interpretation of the content of literature; whereas Ransom keeps
mulling over, as in this elaborate essay, the implications of the internal
or, as he calls it, "textural" approach. But from the point of view of
"ideal" criticism, this method, as Mr. Ransom practises and defines it, has
its limitations too.
It
works to atomize literature, reducing it to a collec·
tion of fragments, an anthology of lyric poems. And perhaps it is only by
reference to the historical situation in which literary works are produced
that you
can
interpret them as wholes.
F. W.
DUPEE
Shorts
OEDIPUS AT COLONUS; an English verswn. By Robert Fitzgerald.
Harcourt, Brace and Co.
$1.50.
A distinguished translation of this most extraordinary of Greek
dramas would be welcome at any time and seems particularly appropriate
to the present.
Oedipus
at
Colonus,
the greatest of all "refugee-pieces,"
ranks with
King Lear
as a supreme expression of the horror and pathos of
old age. Even more absorbing perhaps are the new fields of psychology
and abstract poetical structure which the talents of Sophocles began to
unearth at the age of 89.
We concede in advance that no translation will ever reproduce the
strong structural intricacies that only the Greek language seems able to
sustain. We only hope for some English verse that will suggest a little of
the toughness and dignity of the original. Fitzgerald goes to the opposite
