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excellence, lacks the kind of coherence that only stubborn thinking over
very many years can bring to a language and culture. This has little to
do with culture in Eliot's sense, for it concerns not an aristocracy but the
frequently turned-over soil of a whole people which is remarkable for
its fluidity and thus is constantly producing artistic schools while other
nations gaspingly eject lone individuals. Now, although any notion of a
literary tradition in France must be evaluated in terms of this graceful
flow, the coherence is none the less there and, like feminine vitality,
all the stronger for obtruding less crudely toward the casual eye.
Poetry being a daemonic, or "vertical" phenomenon, plunging to soar,
it should not be surprising that almost every important nineteenth
century French writer used or passed through some form of Neoplatonic
or occult "initiation." Better than their stiff, priggish, fellow-Western–
ers, who still gag at the suggestion, they were able to see the straw
shining in the stable, or, in a more expansile metaphor, to wrest his
secret from the spider: a gossamer so light, so transparent as to be in–
visible between the flies.
If
we are very quiet, we may observe this
dramatic web a-spinning in chapter 6, part I of Nerval's
Aurelia
or in
Mallarme's early letters to Aubanel. From utterly gratuitous paradox
to the warp and woof of syntax and thence, when the roses begin to
bind the lattice-work crosses, to the images of the text, this procession
of x's marks the only Way of poetic creation
ab ovo.
This is that
pilgrim's spiral towards truth, or poetic "adventure" Raymond had
set out to describe but not quite glimpsed, even in his remarkably sen–
sible concluding chapter. Still, on the whole, one can only be grateful
to him and to his American publishers for this book which is, far more
than my reservations would imply, illuminating, readable, successful. It,
failure is merely crucial.
Robert Greer Cohn
ROMANTICISM AND MODERN POETRY
THE CREATIVE EXPERIMENT. By C. M. Bowro. Mocmillon. $4.75.
THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION . By C. M. Bowro. Horvord University
Press. $4.50.
These two new books by C. M. Bowra have both the virtues
and limitations of his previous works. Chief among these virtues, of
course, is the range of Mr. Bowra's linguistic equipment, unmatched
among present-day critics in English. In
The Creative Experiment
he
includes essays on poets writing in modern Greek, French, Spanish and
