BOOKS
THE SHORES OF CRITICISM
LANGUAGE AS GESTU RE. By R. P. Blockmur. Harcourt, Bra ce . $5.75.
Richard Blackmur's choicest papers on poetry, coming clear
down to 1951, are now in one book. That is an event. There has been
in general circulation already a pretty firm conviction as to the quality
of individual essays; but now the size of his achievement can be sensed,
and a pattern can be made out for the whole. Whoever opens this
book-we must assume that he can read it; we understand that this
writer like his subject matter invites the prepared reader, repels the
unprepared-will be quickly aware that he has under his eyes a series
of key-pieces on important modem poets. He will not have read half
of them before he knows that he is being furnished with a consistently
lucid exposition of an art in its most difficult period. And when he
has read them all, when he has finished off with "Lord Tennyson's
Scissors," the one where Blackmur at last puts all the poe>ts in their
right places-what then? I believe it will be his impression then that
the book may as well be acknowledged at once as a classic; as the of–
ficial classic, in exegesis of the poetry of an age.
That is how I think Blackmur's book will rate, and ought to rate.
This critic has the gift for getting at once into any comer of a poem
and out again, with brilliant creations from that mysterious world to
show. More than any other critic, he has
copia,
in this case a well
of brlight half-technical talk, which never goes stale; he can keep talking,
keep pointing, till the poem is overwhelmingly actual in the reader's
consciousness, and there can be no doubt about its reception. How
does he figure that the poem is organized? Not differently from the
way many other critics figure it. A powerful sensibility is recording
in
it, and the result might be a tropical wilderness of dense figurations,
therefore humanly a waste, a nothing; but an equally powerful scheme
of order is working there too, to shape and manage the riches of sense.
The poem is conceived under the familiar figure of sensibility and in–
telligence acting in opposed parts and continually inter-acting; like :.
parties in a drama, or a dance; like a musical counterpoint. Blackmur
can isolate the interactions in every degree of magnitude. I do not
know what is meant nowadays by a "new" critic, and I will not call
him
that; I will call him a close critic, or an intensive one, by all
