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PARTISAN REVIEW
sociation of sensibility" and certain vaguely metaphorical statements by
William Carlos Williams to the complex, definitive clarity of Mr. Ken–
ner's formulation. What a vista of history this sentence opens up for us:
happy John Donne with his brain full of real compasses safely wrapped
in real hair; poor, empty-headed William Blake who could only have
perilous ideas about London or Newton's atoms. Mr. Kenner handles
most ideas in this instructive fashion .
Mr. Kenner is also an editor of considerable skill, though in his
modest way he doesn't advertise it; and he is not afraid of rejecting
lines or statements which do not seem authentic to him or to his clear
sense of the writer's purpose. The opening essay in
Gnomon
is about
Yeats, and Mr. Kenner unveils Yeats's secret, hieratic intention, which
was not to write poems but to prepare a "deliberated artistic Testa–
ment," in which all things were to make sense only in relation to other
things within the volume.
The book, then, is (by a Yeatsian irony) self-contained, like the Great
Smaragdine Tablet that said, "Things below are copies," and was itself
one of the things below; a sacred book like the Apocalypse of St. John,
not like most poetry a marginal commentary on the world to be read
with one eye on the pragmatical pig of a text.
One of the poems that Mr. Kenner uses to demonstrate this assertion
is "Ego Dominus Tuus," in which the following appears in my edition:
"I seek an image not a book." Mr. Kenner neither reproduces nor re–
fers to that statement, and I conclude that he has discovered that Yeats
never wrote it: like most sacred books or apocalyptic visions it has prob–
ably passed through porcine, pragmatic and irreligious hands, and Mr.
Kenner has done us all a service by his excision.
Mr. Kenner's ideas about literary and social history are no less
curious and exciting than his editorial manipulations. For him, "Chaucer
is the last thoroughly civilized English writer." (This is, isn't it, infinitely
more accurate and useful than saying that Chaucer was the first thor–
oughly civilized English writer?) Under the impact of this remark I
returned to Layamon and Minot, reread "The Battle of Brunaburh" and
peeked into
The Pearl.
Of course Mr. Kenner is right; compared to
these,
Measure for Measure
or
King Lear,
say, are indeed the products
of a barbarous and dehumanized sensibility. But, gentle reader, let us
not despair over the ravages of history-for Fenellom has saved the
day! "What Fenellosa does is install us once again in a universe where
intelligibility does not need to be imposed by the mind...." The grasp
of philosophy and of the history of ideas that this statement indicates
is
staggering, but no more so than Mr. Kenner's remarks about Whit-
