PARTISAN REVIEW
demonstration, and it ought to
be
accompanied by a lively sense of his
immense achievement.
A lively sense. It must be confessed that the unrelievedly pious ex–
egetical studies that cluster towards the end of the book do not make
very lively re-reading. They quote Eliot's other verse and his prose
appositely and endlessly, they make much plain, they deserve all our
thanks, but even when they have important thematic subjects (as
Mr. Unger's second paper and Louis L. Martz's) they clutter the sub–
jects and wear them out and will not select or compare or jump. Eliot
is found "unified" and "impersonal" everywhere, unutterably "tra–
ditional," and so on, all his favorite commendations. I found more to
think about in Ferner Nuhn's three pages on
The Waste Lan·d
than in
Mr. Brooks's thirty, worthy as the thirty are. Mr. Nuhn says the poem
is mock-heroic. This is no frivolous suggestion, nor is Yeats's kindred
remark that "He is an Alexander Pope"-it wants thinking about.
Was
an Alexander Pope, let us say. For Eliot's ·mind is grievous and
profound beyond a single poet's; "I must move on," like Sweeney and
Harry
"I must move on." And critics will have to follow, wherever,
wherever. "He had left the procession," Yeats says further-the good
traditional Eliot-and, who knows yet, possibly he had. Mr. Eliot, who
knows some things about himself, knew from the beginning he would
be
hard to follow.
C'est
a
gr(J)nds pas et en sueur
Que vous suivrez
a
peine ma piste.
Not grubbing, but: with grand strides, sweating, you hardly will pick
up my trail. Perhaps we have not got it yet. Perhaps in the end this
poetry which the commentators are so eager to prove impersonal will
prove to
be
personal, and will also appear then more terrible and more
pitiful even than it does now. The all but incredible truth, I believe, is
that we have seen in our own time two of the staggering individual de–
velopments in all poetry, first Yeats's and then Eliot's.
John Berryman
PREFABRICATED CRITICISM
THE ARMED VISION. By Stanley Edgar Hyman. Knopf. $5.00.
Like William Y. Tindall's
Forces
Vn.
Modern British Literature
and Frederick Hoffman's
Freudianism and the Literary Mind,
Stanley
Hyman's
The Armed Vision, A Study in the Method of Modern Literary
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