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JOHN KINNAI RD
English cntIc with the best record of judgment; with very few ex–
ceptions, his estimates of the writers of the past, and even of his con–
temporaries-which is saying a lot-are still ours. But the fact that
Hazlitt's criticism meets the test of time simply doesn't interest us;
and that it doesn't suggests to me the rather terrible irony that for us
the word "criticism" has ceased to mean judgment at all. Today we
"interpret" a writer, we "place" him in a "tradition," we decide why,
or why he isn't, "important for our time"-but all this judiciousness
is
not really judgment; for it is never a praise that is also willing to
damn. We no longer conceive of literature as inviting a judgment on
its "values," especially our fashionable values of "irony" and "paradox";
indeed, I suspect that all our celebration of the "autonomy" of the work
of art means no more than that, an exemption from criticism in the old
sense--from a public estimate of the author's character. And if Hazlitt.
can still faintly "exasperate" all of us, it is, I believe, because he reminds
us that criticism cannot escape the risk of a personal judgment of
another's mind in its personality. Hazlitt's voice will always be there
telling us that literature, whatever else it is, ends in the act of reading,
in a dialogue between a self that has actually written and a self that
actually reads; and he reminds us that both these selves have brought
themselves to write and read in order to know and judge, not finally
"art" or "life" or "the modern self," but themselves. "He is your only
good damner," said Keats of Hazlitt, "and if ever I am damned-damn
me if I shouldn't like him to damn me."
John Kinnaird
POETRY AND FASHION
SELECTED POEMS.
By
Denis Devlin. Holt, Rinehort ond Winston. $3.95.
STAND UP, FRIEND, WITH ME.
By
Edword Field. Grove Press. $2.50.
By the time of his death in 1958 at the age of fifty-one,
Denis Devlin had been Irish Minister to Turkey and Ambassador to
Italy.
In
1946, he published a volume in this country,
Lough Derg
and Other Poems,
that received some critical recognition which was
not, however, sustained. This collection, with a preface by Allen
Tate and Robert Penn Warren, largely repeats the earlier volume with
