BOOKS
351
and Beddoes. from the university libraries to which such volumes are
consigned. His quotations persuade you tha t Beddoes' poetry is worth
reviving; his commentary at least suggests the neurotic involvement of
tradition and temperament and politics which fertilized one strain in
the Romantic imagination.
If
the essay does not thoroughly develop the
historical generalizations, it does what is probably a better thing: it leads
you b ack to the poetry itself.
On the other hand, the purpose of the comparative essays is to pro–
vide not information or recommendation but insights; perhaps for that
reason the most successful are the least likely if you insist on any pedes–
trian exactitude. The value of such a comparison as that between George
Moore and Sherwood Anderson is not that it shows an exact correspon–
dence at all points, but rather that it amuses and startles, and so can
emphasize effectively some of the sources of strength and of temptation
in all regional writers, however diverse their cultures and their individual
natures. On the other hand the assertion that Yeats in his latter days
wore consciously the mask of Swift is certainly sounder and more obvious;
but its measure of originality hardly deserves the panoply with which it
marches in Mr. Gregory's essay. Much better, it seems to me, is a con–
sciously whimsical device like the comparison of the child in Words–
worth's
Ode
with
Alice in W onderland.
Mr. Gre.gory is not exactly
clear himself as to whether he puts them together in order to make a
parallel of similarity, a perpendicular of parody, or just a locus of points
for departure. But I doubt that any particular consistency of relation–
ship is of much importance; the excuse for the device is that it makes
a lively gambit, that it strikes off in its erra tic justification a number of
insights and perceptions about the growing up (like Alice) of the Vic–
torian age from the earlier Romantic worship both for childhood in
particular, and for natural simplicity and purity in general.
It is from the same essay, however, that Mr. Gregory takes the sym–
bol he uses to describe the attitude of the book he says he is writing.
Somewhere between Wordsworth and Alice he finds it necessary to
explain- ! could not be sure quite why-"what we mean when we speak
of poetry at all." It is here that the Shield of Achilles-or rather Homer's
account of it- becomes " an analogy to and a criterion for the art of
writing poetry." About that shield we are told three things: that it was
"an extremely cunning work of art" ; that it "seemed a mirror of the
very world Achilles and his enemies had known" ; and that, since Achilles
wore it to protect his body from a deadly wound, it may have meant
self-knowledge. In exactly what combinations or relations these three
enter into the art of writing poetry Mr. Gregory does not attempt to tell
us. H ence the possibilities for ambiguity are enchanting: Mr. Empson,
I am sure, could produce at least three cubed, or twenty-seven. Is the
self•knowledge of the poet (to take only one possibility) a sense of the
way the world seems to both him
and
his enemies? I suspect that Mr.
