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torian judgments passed upon a man who in his youth had taken Byron
for his model and, like his hero, resolved to live dangerously and for
glory alone: the only immortality in which he believed. It was his good
fortune that circumstances permitted him to play a role which in a dif–
ferent age would have led to disaster. As it was, he infused that streak of
romantic recklessness into the Tory personality which at a later day
e~abled
Churchill to bring the curtain down upon the scene with a final
gesture of defiance.
George Lichtheim
CRITICISM, EUROPEAN STYLE
POETS OF REALITY. By
J.
Hillis Miller. Harvard.
$7.95.
Mr. Miller is schooled in the best European practice. It is a
pleasure to watch him as he charts, in a series of learned and intricate
essays on Conrad, Yeats, Eliot, Thomas, Stevens and Williams, the
emergence of a new "poetry of reality" out of the nihilism of the late
nineteenth century. For all but Williams the journey is long and arduous:
the poets spend most of their careers in the wilderness, translating the
nineteenth century's dichotomy between subject and object into Heideg–
gerian ideas about the contradiction between the ground-of-being and its
specific form. But finally, all dualisms transcended, they all arrive in the
promised land:
Yeats by his affirmation of the infinite richness of the finite moment;
Eliot by his discovery that the Incarnation is here and now; Thomas
by his acceptance of death which makes the poet an ark rescuing all
things; Stevens by his identification of imagination and reality in
the poetry of being; Williams by his plunge into the "filthy Passaic."
The story begins, as do many good melodramas, in the murky, late-
Cartesian world of Victorian England. The once immanent God is fast
disappearing, and with him the common authority for man and the
world. In their efforts to reunite "the 'poor fragments of a broken
world,' " the Victorians succeeded only in assimilating the world, turning
it inside out into the mind. The resulting solipsism makes man, in Mil–
ler's heady adaptation of Nietzsche, "the murderer of God and the drinker
of the sea of creation," a Nihilist who "wanders through the infinite noth–
ingness of his own ego."
