112
JAMES GILBERT
procedure hardens and rigidifies. Why is the last stanza of "Among
School Children" memorable? Because it
is
Yeats's "protest against his
own Gnostic dualism," and Bloom goes on to nag the reader with the
possibility that the poem may be esteemed for the wrong reasons or
"over-esteemed," as he thinks it is. (Leavis's admiration of the last stanza
of "Among School Children" is similarly hedged round with grimaces:
"There is nothing else like that in the collected poems. So far from its
being the proof of an achieved stability and wholeness in the poet, the
ugliest and most disturbing expression of inner discord and rebellion or
despair to be found in his
oeuvre
mark his final phase.") Why does
"Easter 1916" receive only a half-page treatment in a five hundred
page book? Because it is a "puzzling" poem whose "excellences are
uncharacteristic of Yeats" and because it is a "model of sanity and
proportion," therefore in telling contrast to some later poems Bloom
then proceeds to name and execrate. You have the sense then that
"Easter 1916" is positively an embarrassment to the critic; Bloom's
grudging admission of its fineness can be understood only in the context
of his whole elaborate attempt to insist on Yeats's "descent" from the
Romantics in a second sense: oh, what a falling-off was there! Does
the road of excess lead to the palace of wisdom? A non-Blakean, I
would have to say yes and no, which I found myself often saying as
I read and resisted this invigorating, excessive book.
William H. Pritchard
2001
BETWEEN TWO
AGES;
AMERICA'S ROLE IN THE TECHNETRONIC
ERA. By
Zbigniew Brzezinski. New York: Viking,
1970.
One of the characteristics of utopian literature is its lack of
dramatic possibility. The quantification of human problems, the settle–
ment of conflict by proxy and above all, the absense of political
in–
volvement makes the future a haven of sloth. The classic technique
IS
a
traveler's account of an unexpected voyage to a strange land, whose
