BOOKS
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generous and valuable affirmations of poets who do not get enough
admiration (in this book especially Wyatt, Jonson, Fulke Greville and,
on a minor level, Edgar Bowers and N. Scott Momaday); they also
enable him to ask radically challenging questions about poems too com–
fortably sanctified (Shakespeare's sonnets, and the poems of Donne and
Yeats). But the survival of good criticism is not automatic, and I fear
that it will be the "importance" which the "canon" ensures rather than
the good criticism. Either the baby will go with the bathwater, or the
bathwater's murky reflection will be taken for the baby. In a very
special sense, Winters had too much integrity to be a great critic: the
certitude is frigid.
William Troy is also a writer to be admired for individual insights,
and, like Winters, he achieves them through the application of ethical
values to the writers he discusses. However, he is a greater critic than
Winters because he understands that projection, the imaginative grasp
of the sensibility controlling the literary text, is not immersion. Some
of the judgments, to be sure, look archaic now (most of the essays here
were written in the thirties). For example, he claims that Lawrence
didn't care about his art, and that Stendhal can be explained in terms
of the Oedipus Complex. But even in essays such as these, where the
starting point is so inadequate, he is able to enter so fully into the
writer's predicament that he reaches central issues: thus he brings out
·'d"e.
L,.
(NEW YORKER)
Broadway and 88th Street
TR 4-9189
