BOOKS
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with this book, and it contains, as well as all his previous ideas about
poetry, a guide to his early work and a survey of his best pupils. This
is nothing so commonplace as an old man's vanity: it is important to
his critical integrity that he should be
there
in the book, standing for a
whole and consistent system of values, that there should be a "canon"
and that it should be "complete." In a poem symptomatically entitled
"On Teaching the Young," he wrote: "The poet's only bliss / Is in cold
certitude": the critic's only way of transcending mere paraphrase is the
rigorous assessment of poetry in the light of clearly defined absolutes.
Troy was just as conscious of the need for the critic to measure his
understanding of the text against a coherent system of values, but, Allen
Tate tells us, when offered a contract for a book, he was unable to bring
his essays to the state of revision and expansion that he felt they needed:
his form was the essay, the experimental discourse, and the explicit
wholeness of critical vision that a book would demand he perhaps
found inhibiting. This may have made his survival more precarious,
but now that it is assured by this collection, I think it will be found
to make it less problematic than Winters'.
Forms of Discovery
rehearses a familiar argument. It emphasizes
the ethical basis of the poetic statement and insists that the connotative
wealth of language exploited by poetry is only effective if the poet ac–
cepts responsibility towards its primary denotative function, which im–
plies also that the felt experience of a poem is only communicated
if
it is related to a rational structure. This critical position now becomes
the basis of a definitive history of the short poem in English. Briefly,
this is the story of how the plain style (functional, denotative, rational)
of Wyatt and his followers is overtaken by the Petrarchan style
(or–
namental and loosely structured) of Sidney and Spenser, and how this,
in turn, evolves, under the influence of Shaftesbury and Locke, into the
uncontrolled associationism of the Romantics. English poetry is almost
dead between 1770 and 1900, and it is only rescued by the postsymbolist
method of controlled associationism created by poets liberating them–
selves from romanticism (Tuckerman, Bridges, Valery and T. Sturge
Moore are the key figures). The result of this liberation is a renaissance
of poetry which is greater even than the sixteenth century because it is
not so narrowly denotative.
It is pointless to query individual value judgments, though it is
very depressing to find that we end up with the routine verse of
Churchill and (as it seems from this book) the boring complacency of
J.
V. Cunningham, and it is worth asking whether Tuckerman, Bridges
and the other affirmed writers would really stand up to the kind of
scrutiny that Donne and Yeats get. What is really at stake here is the
