PARTISAN REVIEW
b05
I think that James is too sound a criti c eyer to write such a sentence
about Robert Lowell, in general. But one m ight think that the scathing
and destructive phrase "routine agony" might impl y that he would feel
it fair about at least a number of the
Notebook
sonnets and their still
uncollected sequels. Cooper and Cosgrave supply a case for the defense.
Cooper's book is written out of love, as I think all good studies of a poet
should be written; it is not undiscriminating love, but
it
is love rather
in McTaggart's sense. When we truly love a poet or a person, we feel a
certain complacency about the loved one's faults and weaknesses (Words–
worth's circumstantialities and prosiness, Hardy's c1umsinesses and ped–
antries) and do not want to alter the loved one's character, even for the
better. Love is not benevolence. Cosgrave's book, on the other hand, is
written in a mood of severe benevolence. He would like Lowell to be a
better poet than he is, and to concentrate more consistently on the
poetry of judgment, rather than the poetry of expression.
Cosgrave is a disciple of Yvor Winters, but with a far wider, more
catholic, and sounder
taste
in poetry than Winters. He sees, for in–
stance, as Winters failed
to
see, that Yeats in his poems on Irish politics
and history
is
a great public poet. He quotes, on the other hand, what
most readers, what probably he himself, would consider a very great
piece of writing from T .S. Eliot, the long passage about sea noises
from the beginning of
The
Dry
Salvages,
and agrees with Helen Gardner
that here "the form is the perfect expression of the subject; so much so
that in the end one can hardly distinguish subject from form." Yes,
Cosgraye says, but Eliot was doing the wrong thing:
But poetry is not an instrument of expression ; it is an instrument of
judgment. Eliot reflects experience; he demonstrates not principles,
but attachment to principles; and his sense of tragedy is diffuse
and indulgent, a matter of mood rather than thought.
Lowell, for Cosgrave, approaches or achieves greatness when his
poetry is an " instrument of judgement," when he can be seen in yet
another "great tradition," which for Cosgrave is the tradition of Dryden,
Pope, Dr. Johnson , Yeats when he is properly public (no poet earlier
than the Restoration gets mentioned and, very surprisingly, there is
nothing about Marvell's "Horatian Ode'.' or about Auden or Empson,
both very consciously public poets at times ; or about Graves, very much
a poet of judgment, however indifferent he is, most of the time, to
public social and political themes, but a judge, in a way, of human
history as a whole).
Like Matthew Arnold, I am very suspicious of logic as a critical
instrument, partly because I know something about logic, and critics
