PARTISAN REVIEW
(though there are many illuminating occasional remarks on all of these).
For the most part their subjects are relatively minor poets, whether good
or bad of their rank. This is, I think, surprising in the case of a critic
and poet wholly devoted to poetry, who stands for and knows the best.
I believe that the partial vacuum may be related to the theoretical gap
which I have just mentioned.
Tate's aesthetics, or any like
his,
is most at ease with minor poets.
It can do very well
in
pointing out the excellences of some of Emily
Dickinson's poems (surely he overrates her), or the excellences and de–
fects of Hardy's. But it will lead
him
to place Landor at the top of
the nineteenth century. Landor has written well, better than
is
ordinarily
noticed; and some of his poetry is perfect by Tate's definitions and cri–
teria. None of Coleridge's is; and yet an aesthetic system which rates
Landor over Coleridge must at least be questioned closely. But what of
the very great?
Can it be that Tate is led to shy away from a full-dress criticism of,
say, Homer or Shakespeare by an intuition that his closed aesthetics
would be broken open by the impact? Tate is insisting on "the limits
of poetry." His critical writing
is
a sharp correction to that muddling of
art and "life" which has as its effect the degradation of style and the
debasement of values. It remains nevertheless true that art is part of
life, and that men, as creators and as audience, will persist in violating
any defined limits placed around the part.
It
is wrong, we can agree,
to read a poem as if it were a theological essay or a communist tract
or a psychological treatise. But it
is
illusory to suppose that he who made
the poem or we who read it are not beings with theological passions
and social hopes and powerful convictions about the nature of our
fellow-men, or that these can be held back from our knowledge and
judgment of the poem. Without these, without "life," there would
be
no poem at all.
James Burnham
THE COLONIAL
VS.
THE NATIONAL
JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY. By Jomes Thomos Flexner. Houghton Mifflin
Compony. $7.50.
WASHINGTON ALLSTON : A Study of the Romonti c Artist in Americo.
by Edgor Preston Richordson. The University of Chicogo Press. $10.00.
The pictures of John Singleton Copley and Washington
Allston offer an interesting comment on the dilemma that has always
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