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means a linguistic one. There is no poem for Blackmur which is not
good to the last drop; that is, to the minutest verbal animation. But
there is more: Blackmur understands another interaction, involving a
third part in the poem.
It
is the meter, and the musical phrasing.
Here the relation is between the prose rhythms of the language and
the imposed meters, and that opposition is fruitful too. The resultant
language has an access of authority which is almost miraculous. But
it is easier to find it in action, under Blackmur's pointer, than in the
present abstract statement. The great consequence of his book will
be to advance enormously the technical reception of poetry.
And that is my tribute to the critic, paid at the start. I worked
at the book faithfully, though I liked the job, to make sure that I
had come by my tribute honestly. Now I will be at my ease. Which
makes me no better than the boy who earned the money to buy the
present for his host at the birthday party, but having delivered it at
the door returned to quotidian behaviors. I will do a little quarreling
now. Perhaps I can afford to raise some questions about his book, which
it can afford to have raised about it, being so strong.
I want to know if the passion which Blackmur receives from the
poem is engendered in the legerdemain of the poetic technique, and
did not simply come over from the original human situation with the
objects to which it has been attached all along. Is it born of humanism
or aestheticism? Perhaps in the human situation it was a great passion
but a despairing one, thinking it might be vain; whereas in the poem
it is exhibited so firmly and with such a perfect propriety that it be–
comes confirmed, and confident; I do not know. Now Blackmur es–
capes from the jargon of technique as well as any man can who talks
about it. But it is remarkable how technical all his studies are; the
poems are examined along linguistic lines, procedural lines, strategical
lines; whatever may be the gravity of the content. There is no ideolog–
ical emphasis; the social or religious ideas are looked at shrewdly, but
they are appraised for their function within the work; even though
they may be ideas from which, at the very moment, out in the world
of action, the issues of life and death are hung. In "The Later Poetry
of Yeats" there is a passage where sentence after sentence builds up
this impression:
He worked into his poetry the substance of Irish mythology and Irish
politics and gave them a symbolism, and he developed his experiences
with Theosophy and Rosicruceanism into a body of conventions ade–
quate, for him, to animate the concrete poetry of the soul that he
wished to write. He did not do these things separately; the mythology,
