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PARTISAN REVIEW
his paradoxes straight, and he accepted
this
idea of Eliot's at face value.
There is an excellent study of Eliot's criticism in
The Lion and the
Honeycomb,
and, though this passage is not cited, Mr. Blackmur offers
a gloss on it just the same. Eliot, he writes, "excluded thought
as such
from poetry and said that poetry dealt with the experience or feeling
of the thought which might or might not-probably
not-have
been the
poet's thought." Poetry, in other words, deals with the actual because
it deals with thought so far as it comes alive as experience or feeling;
critical prose can express abstract ideas as ideals, independently of
their emotional actuality.
How seriously Mr. Blackmur took this notion is revealed all through
the essays in
Language as Gesture.
Time and again he reiterates that
he is not interested in the ideas contained in poetry for their own sake;
he
is
only concerned with the amount of experience and feeling that the
poet is able to actualize
through
these ideas. To make this point clearer,
Mr. Blackmur distinguished between a literal and an imaginative ap–
proach to ideas-much in the manner of Santayana, whose benignly
skeptical tolerance of dogmatism pervasively colors the mood of Mr.
Blackmur's mind. Whether or not a writer like Eliot accepted the doc–
trines in
his
work (i.e., Christianity) as literally true, Mr. Blackmur
never had to bother about discussing these doctrines in abstract terms;
his
focus was always on the imaginative use of doctrine in the work
of art. "Our labor," he wrote, speaking of literary critics, "is to recapture
the imaginative burden and avoid the literal like death."
In
Language as Gesture,
this imaginative approach to doctrine is
still used largely as a critical working principle. Its chief function was
to
make clear Mr. Blackmur's determination not to fall into the error
of various kinds of ideological critics, who analyzed and evaluated
literature in terms of their agreement or disagreement with the ideas
that could be abstracted from the work. But it is revealing to see Mr.
Blackmur generalizing this imaginative approach, and applying it, not
only to literature, but to all attempts to interpret the meaning of ex–
perience. In "A Critic's Job of Work," he praises the skepticism and
dramatic irony of the early Plato and Montaigne because neither wishes
to be fixed in any doctrine; and Mr. Blackmur's sympathy, it is clear,
stems from his own facility in imaginatively entering any framework
of ideas without feeling obliged
to
come to terms with it literally as
doctrine. Even more, Mr. Blackmur begins to feel the tendency of
thought to take
itself
seriously, its insistence on being literal rather than
imaginative, as a tragic limitation inherent in all doctrine. "Thought
is a beacon not a life-raft," he writes somewhat fancifully, "and to
