462
JOHN HOLLANDER
the cold, waking try of Nora Joyce's name, the story closes up with
images of music, solemnizing and ritualizing farewell (the tune
Youth
Has an End
supplants a
Loth to Depart
which accompanies earlier mo–
ments), and some purged, fragmentary emblems.
It is this whole remarkable section which, more than any other,
gives a ring of imaginative conviction to the whole. Not only in looking
forward to the satiric mechanism of metamorphosis in
Circe,
but in an
illuminating glance backward at such moments as Gabriel Conroy's
epiphanic apprehension of his wife's empty boots at the end of
The
Dead,
the passage
has
great power. Not the least of this is its effect of
pulling together the trailing lyric procession of moments.
Whether this and a few other bits justify the elaborate format
is a different question; as a not unimportant item of
Nachlass,
it might
have perhaps been included in a presumably forthcoming volume of
uncollected poems. The notes are useful (there is an erroneously mis–
leading one about an Elizabethan tune) ; we can correct a tiny textual
error (apparently there should be ellipsis marks indicating interrupted
continuity between paragraphs 4 and 5 of quotation on p. 355 of
James
Joyce).
But one can only hope that the whole brief text will be made
more easily accessible than in this almost bibliophilic presentation.
John Hollander
NATURAL SELECTION
FORMS OF DISCOVERY: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms
of the Short Poem in English. By Yvor Winters. Alan Swallow. $8.95.
SELECTED ESSAYS. By William Troy. Edited, and with an introduction
by Stanley Edgar Hyman. With a memoir by Allen Tate. Rutgers Uni.
versity Press. $9.00.
"The business of survival," Ivor Winters remax:ks
in
Forms
of Discovery,
"is more precarious than the reader may think. ... Good
poems, to put it briefly, do not survive automatically." This is even
more true of good criticism, and the two books under review focus
sharply on the problem. Winters has, in a sense, ensured his own sur–
vival, at least as a paragraph in the history of criticism, by the early
adoption of a readily identifiable position from which he has never
deviated and which he spent thirty years in defending. William Troy
might only have survived in fragments buried in literary journals and
anthologies had not his wife and his present editor assembled this
posthumous volume. Winters, we are told, "completes his critical canon"
