Vol. 17 No. 6 1950 - page 634

PARTISAN REVIEW
modern literature, should not even be a name to American ears.
If
Mr. Bowra is looking for a subject for his next book, he could find
little better use for his gifts than giving us a rounded picture of the
rich flowering of modern Spanish poetry-the greatest since that coun–
try's Golden Age, and the equal of anything produced elsewhere in
modern times.
In
turning from the most advanced poetry of the moderns to the
English Romantics, it would seem that Mr. Bowra-given the qualities
as a critic that we have described-would be at a particular disad–
vantage. Certainly, it might be thought, while we need an introduction
to Cavafy and Pasternak, we hardly need one to Keats and Words–
worth! Yet this, in essence, is what Mr. Bowra has given us in
The
Romantic Imagination-and
with gratifying results. The Romantics
have for so long been the whipping boys of the most influential modem
critics, and have been held responsible for so many and so varied
cultural evils, that it is almost like meeting new poets to have Mr. Bowra
-without glossing over their defects-attempt a sympathetic presen–
tation of their greatest works. And one must salute Mr. Bowra's tem–
erity in even daring to talk about such poets as Swinburne and the two
Rossettis in the face of F. R. Leavis' formidable excommunication.
Writing in the preface to
Revaluations,
Mr. Leavis explains that he re–
fused to sully his pages with any Victorian poets because "they do
not, in fact, lend themselves readily to the critical method of this book;
and that it should be so is, I will risk suggesting, a reflection upon
them rather than upon the method." (Whatever Mr. Leavis' other
claims to fame, certainly this sentence should become immortal as the
most arrant bit of critical insolence since Francis Jeffrey and the Quar–
terly Reviewers). Luckily, Mr. Bowra has more critical methods at his
disposal than Mr. Leavis, and his chapters on Swinburne and the
Rossettis are not the least interesting portions of his book.
Following his usual practice, Mr. Bowra has an introduct;ry-chap–
ter on the Romantic view of imagination, which, as he makes clear,
differed considerably from the insignificant status accorded this faculty
by eighteenth-century aesthetics. A good deal more precise than its
counterpart in
The Creative Experiment,
this chapter is an excellent
summary of the Romantic reaction against neo-classicism in literature
and, concurrently, against Newton's scientific deism as a conclusive
answer to ultimate metaphysical problems. With Coleridge, who was
their theoretical spokesman, the English Romantics revered the "primary
imagination" as "a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of
527...,624,625,626,627,628,629,630,631,632,633 635,636,637,638,639,640,641,642
Powered by FlippingBook