BOOKS
IDEAS OF ORDER
THE LION AND THE HONEYCOMB. By R. P. Blockmur. Horcourt,
Broce. $5.00.
R. P. Blackmur's new volume of essays,
The Lion and the
Honeycomb,
provides a welcome opportunity to check on an impression
derived from a somewhat haphazard reading of the literary magazines.
This impression is that the American "New Criticism," now that it has
begun to ossify into an intransigent dogma at the hands of the epigones,
is undergoing an admirable revision in the writings of some of its original
proponents. And this impression
is
reinforced, not only by Mr. Black–
mur's book, but also by the recent essays of John Crowe Ransom col–
lected in the Knopf paperback devoted to Ransom's work
(Poems and
Essays)
.
1
Indeed,
if
we compare these two books, we become aware of
a charming and amusing mock-ballet of mutual eyebrow-raising and
mildly astonished admonition on the part of these two pioneers of the
New Criticism.
The title essay of Mr. Blackmur's book, dated 1951, mentions Mr.
Ransom's well-known essay on Milton's
Lycidas-and
does so to point
out a limitation of Mr. Ransom's critical approach. Mr. Ransom dealt
excellently with the rhetoric (the formal values) of Milton's poem, Mr.
Blackmur says, but did not touch those matters in the poem that the
rhetoric dealt with-"the theology and politics and personal experience
which are the intellectual and poetic subject of the poem." Now in Mr.
Ransom's volume we have a review of Mr. Blackmur's earlier collection
of essays,
Language as Gesture,
which appeared in 1953. Mr. Ransom
rightly praises these essays as the strongest, sharpest and most perceptive
criticism yet written on the major modern poets; if any modern criticism
stands a chance of becoming classical, certainly it is these essays of
Mr. Blackmur. But then Mr. Ransom gently reproaches his friend Mr.
Blackmur with a regrettable limitation of his critical approach. What
is this limitation? Why, a too exclusive concentration on formal values
and a neglect of .the "substantive" ones which, Mr. Ransom reminds
Mr. Blackmur, are contained not only in the novel but also in poetry.
1 Vintage
Books.
$.95.
