628
eDWARD W. SAID
him associate this remark made about the end of a critic's logical job
of work with Heidegger writing about Holderlin. For his essays on the
poet are, Heidegger says, his method of showing how Holderlin is a
"necessity of thought," a series of actions that are necessary for the mind
to perform. Hirsch might characteristically demand validation for such
a project, yet when we read Poulet or Blackmur validation is simply in
the necessary beauty of their understanding of literature, which to them
is the crux of thought. Criticism is notorious for its imperialism, carried
out in the name of understanding: method swallowing work, argument
dividing to conquer and variety colonized into periods and "ages."
By contrast, Poulet's wish is to
prolong
literature in his criticism, Black–
mur's to reveal literature taking, in Henry James's phrase, from "the
enormous lap of the actual." Criticism is therefore a way of living up to
and living with literature. Inner conversion rather than public quarrel.
We may say that such criticism flies too close to art, yet both are the
more interesting for it, I think, and doubtless criticism is less concerned
with accuracy as a result. Fiction makes its own canon of accuracy,
however, to which Hirsch is too impervious, for even in criticism there
are two cultures.
I
One can solicit Heidegger only at the beginning of any appreciation
of the work of Blackmur and Poulet; their work is too richly distinctive,
each in its own way, each now almost an institution (without enough
acclaim though), to herd under a general rubric. That their criticism
requires the attention we give art is of course very debatable. Certainly
except for a handful of fine essays, notably by
J.
Hillis Miller on Poulet
and by Joseph Frank and John Crowe Ransom on Blackmur, most
critics have not been convinced that such criticism requires much atten–
tion. Furthermore, the idioms Blackmur and Poulet employ are notori–
ously problematic. Neither man is given to strident polemic, nor to
"pieces" written with the left hand. Poulet's criticism, and, even though
it is misleadingly dumped in with New Criticism understood as explica–
tion, Blackmur's seem intensely to play to the reader's imaginative
awareness. For theirs is an enterprise whose aim is nothing less than
the reconstruction of experience apprehended from the point of its origin
to its incarnation in form, or literature. So delicate an undertaking, which
Blackmur has called bringing literature to performance, supposes an
ultimate talent for closeness to the animating experience that goes into
literature. Hillis Miller has spoken of Poulet's "quietistic" explorations
into a writer's consciousness, and Joseph Frank of Blackmur's sentences
as "ideated sensations": both styles reflect the care taken in preserving
a sense of literature as highly nuanced and as intimate as possible. (In-
