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greatness of a handful of great lyr–
ics by a dozen great lyric poets;
and this greatness is placed against
the failures of T. S. Eliot and
James Joyce. He says of Eliot that
his poems "display charming or ex–
cellent lines here and there," and
his references to
Finnegans Wake
have little relation to its actual
qualities. That the work of Eliot
~nd
Joyce in particular might re–
present a profound search of con–
sciousness, and an effort to illumi–
nate depths of the human mind,
thereby liberating human beings
from compulsions and fears that
prevent their functioning as free
moral beings-this possibility is not
ex'amined by Winters.
In his essay on Emerson, Henry
James remarked that the New
England conscience was often a
clue without a labyrinth. This
witty statement not only is an ex–
cellent description of James' prob–
lem as a novelist, namely, to find
adequate labyrinths, but it leads us
forward to Winters' California ver–
sion of the New England con–
science. Winters has clues and he
plunges into labyrinths. But the
clues do not apply to the labyrinths
in which he searches, as can be seen
by examining Winters' attack on
Eliot's poetry and criticism. He
writes of Eliot as if he were deal–
ing with Prince Hamlet; the clue
to Eliot's literary theory is his de–
nial of the freedom of the will; the
clue to Eliot's versification is Ezra
Pound.
Winters' basic fallacy is the con–
fusion of an act of evaluation with
an act of moral choice. He supposes
that the act of apprehending the
PARTISAN REVIEW
nature of any experience must in–
volve the act of evaluating it and
the act of making a moral choice
with regard to it. By this triple
confusion, Winters arrives at the
conviction that the real test of a
work of art is the degree of moral
judgment which it manifests either
implicitly in its feeling and tone, or
explicitly in the author's attitude
toward his subject. The number of
leaps involved so far are difficult
to count, but an analogy might be
of some use: it is as if one could
not write a treatise on metaphysics
without also writing one on ethics
at the very same time; and as if
one could not recognize a given
tree as an elm without at the same
time evaluating it with respect to
other trees and other human beings
and also making a moral choice
in which one decided how the ex–
perience of looking at a tree was
to be regarded in the ordering of
our lives. This moral doctrine is
supported by a good many quick
solutions to what Winters entitles
"Preliminary Problems"; the chief
solution is the one in which Win–
ters passes quickly from connota–
tion to feeling to motive, all invol–
ved in the poetic use of language.
Since the three occur together for
Winters, poetry always deals with
a motive and thus is always moral
or immoral, mostly immoral.
On this moral basis, a deductive
system erects itself with ease. Cer–
tain literary forms are inherently
better than others because they are
more susceptible to the expression
of moral feeling. Thus meter is a
more sensitive register for moral
feeling than prose and the heroic
