596
PARTISAN REVIEW
an effort to criticize the poem in terms of its emotional impact on the
reader and the second to criticize in terms of the poet's intention. That
is, one may say the poem is "good," or better yet, that it has a "dense
symbolic texture"-but not that it is "moving." For the latter statement
suggests that the poem is being read by a man, with all the qualifica–
tions and limitations the word "man" implies, while the former comes
with the untainted certitude of an empyreal proclamation. The poem,
that is, should be viewed as neither written by someone whose per–
formance may be checked against his purpose nor read by anyone
whose taste may be brought to play in the establishment of standards.
As Mr. Elton magnificently quotes one of his minor authorities, the
poem simply
"is."
When we read further-in
relevance, doctrine
0/–
that most of Mr. Elton's victims reject as a "positive heresy" the belief
that a literary work "must be tested . . . by observation of the world
that it 'represents,'" then the blockage is complete: the poem cannot
be related to the man who wrote it, the man who reads it or the world
in which it appears. (Mr. Elton has not, however, been sufficiently
wary: he quotes Coleridge as saying that a symbol "partakes of the
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