606
G.
s.
F R AS E
R
like Winters and Cosgrave, with a great flourish of logical method, are
not logical en:lugh. How would you se t out, for instance, to "demon·
strate a principle," even in prose? A principle is something in its nature
undemonstrable, an assumption, a postulate, or an axiom, and you use
it to demonstrate
something else.
Can you really think
in
verse - is the
thought of the poet not mainly ab:lut the process of composition, and
is the "thought" in a poem not just a n element of composition as much
as the "mood"? You could judge th a t the judgments of a great poet
of judgment, like Pope, are often flat wrong : modern historians would
say that he absurdly overestimated the consistency and integrity o[
Harley and Bolingbroke and was grossly unfair not to the capacity •
(which he recognized) but to the good sense and public spirit of Sir
I
Robert Walpole. When Dr. Johnson attempts to adapt what Juvenal
said, with some truth, of Imperial Rome to eighteenth-century London,
Here falling houses thunder on your head,
And here a female atheist talks yo!/. dead,
he has turned a neat couplet, but is he not, from the point of view o[
the social and cu ltural historian of eighteenth-century England, talking
nonsense?
What Cosgrave calls the poetry of judgment is the poetry of effec–
tive rhetorical persuasion: I dQn' t see how you could possibly "demon–
strate the principle" that this is the only permissible kind of poetry,
though it might be quite true that it was the kind of poetry that you,
personally, specially liked. (There are some public poems that do strike
me as not only rhetorically persuasive but
right
about what they are
talking about: most notably in English, Yeats's "Easter 1916" and
Marvell's "Horatian Ode." But I think , and indeed know, that they
still work as great poems of persuasive rhetoric to readers who haven't
done as much historical homework in their respective areas as I have. )
What is odd, and interesting, and reassuring, is that starting from
sl1ch different grounds, Cooper and Cosgrave arrive at similar results.
They agree with each other (and, for what that is worth, I agree with
them) that Lowell's most complete achievements so far are "Waking
Early Sunday Morning" and some of the other poems in
Near the
Ocean,
though except for "Waking Early Sunday Morning" Cosgrave
thinks the other poems in that volume, like "Central Park," in which
he finds much to praise, partially flawed. He is the examiner, Cooper
the lover.
It
is Cooper who, using more biographical detail , more
flexibly and frankly, than Hugh Staples could in his fine pioneer study,
gives us indirectly the case against Clive James. Lowell's agonies are not
really "routine," any more than the agonies of America are: by ancestry,
by involvement, by being a New England poet who went to school in
