BOO KS
367
content is the poetry's substance, warning us, on the other hand,
against certain "epigoni" who might conclude from this example, and
the parallel cases of Hawthorne and Melville, that a dogmatic religion
is necesssary for the continuation of significant literature. I have my
own quarrel with the epigoni, but perhaps Mr. Chase has not ex–
hausted the alternatives. The mention of Melville, for example, brings
to mind the current best-seller,
The Caine Mutiny,
which has stolen
the idea of
Billy Budd,
but where Melville's work turns on the ques–
tions of good and evil, grace and nature, the modern work shifts its
center to the purely psychiatric question of one man's insanity; and I
could not help feeling (while reading Mr. Chase) the impoverishment
here in a literature that has lost the religious grasp of life; and I
am afraid that Mr. Chase's emotional distance, generally throughout
his book, from the center of Emily Dickinson's poetry has not
weakened this feeling.
William Barrett
(jallery (jroup
•
1952
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