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PARTISAN REVIEW
of letters. It is not unfair to say of Niebuhr that he is a fine Christian
journalist, for this democratic confusion of public and private, of
leaders and led, is of the essence of modern journalism, just as journal–
ism - from the
Encyclopedistes
to our day - is the characteristic
vehicle of modern thought. This may explain why, when Niebuhr gets
down to cases, his "Christian realism" culminates in a series of con–
ventional (if amiable) platitudes, and why his irony appears perpetu–
ally to be on the verge of becoming his innocence.
Irving Kristol
DEATH AND THE MAIDEN
EMILY DICKINSON .
By
Richerd Chese. The Americen Men of Letters
Series. Williem Sloenil Associetes. $4.00
I am not an Emily Dickinson scholar-better say it straight
out at the beginning!-and so altogether unprepared for those prob–
lems of background, biography, and manuscript which in the case of
this poet can be so perplexing; but the absence of such nice scholar–
ship may not be too great a disadvantage in dealing with a book dis–
tinguished, as Mr. Chase's is, by breadth and flexibility of intelligence.
The book has both scope and detail, and its great usefulness is precisely
to have put together the materials for a mature appreciation of Emily
Dickinson. It is in such a spirit that I have been grateful to Mr.
Chase while reading the book, and in such a spirit that I venture re–
viewing it.
Mr. Chase begins with the "Origins" of the poetry, planting Emily
Dickinson very neatly in the New England background of Amherst ;
the biography is competently and modestly handled, with no oracular
pretensions of final insight into this poet's strange life; and there are
two big chapters in the middle of the book-"A Poetry of Ideas" and
"The Idea of Poetry"-which subject the poems to a thorough and
scrupulously balanced attempt at textual analysis. Mr. Chase is not
one of those writers who become so passionately inflamed by their
subject that they puff it up beyond all proportions, and he is quite
candidly insistent in calling attention to Emily Dickinson's limitations.
Indeed, I had the suspicion almost that his enthusiasm for the poetry
had somewhere cooled in the process of writing his book: though I
agreed with his eventual estimate of Emily Dickinson's rank, I couldn't
help but wish that he had shown a more fiery enthusiasm here and
there for the poetry. Sometimes Mr. Chase's logic threatens to grind
