50b
PAUL ZIETLOW
summed up by Mrs. Watts-Dunton: "Swinburne deliberately puts mean-
ing beyond the grasp of the cognitive faculties by creating immensely
difficult poetic systems or relations.... he simultaneously presents those
systems as perfected closures which, though they do not define a com–
prehensive meaning, represent the fact and the idea of wholeness." Mrs.
Watts-Dunton goes on to present another kind of defense, not as an
alternative, but as a supplement: Swinburne "offers not a compen–
satory but a transformed experience.... What is gained ... is open–
ness, figured as sleep-trance and often experienced in reading as 'dif-
ficulty,' 'vagueness,' and a recurring sense of abstraction." That Mur-
(
doch remains unsatisfied may demonstrate the limitations of analysis;
there will always be people who can't be convinced. But this episode
does not show that the limitations of analysis are
absurd.
Kernahan and
Mrs. Watts-Dunton have found clear ways to formulate in words the
sources of that strange power so many people have experienced from
Swinburne's language, and there is no question but that McGann ex–
pects us to recognize the force of their statements. As the dialogue pro–
gresses, such insights proliferate, and their validity is substantiated by
concrete analysis of individual works. Layer upon layer of interpreta-
tion adds dimension to an expandi ng view of Swinburne's achievement,
and McGann provides perspectives in which to see apparently disparate
parts - Swinburne's indebtedness, for example, to writers as diverse as
Baudelaire and Victor Hugo, his writing of works as different as imita–
tions of classical tragedies and naughty little mock epics about school-
boy flagellations - as elements of a complicated whole. This is not
merely the first serious critical book on Swinburne to appear in years;
McGann is one of the few critics ever to respond adequately to this
very great poet.
Hoffman and McGann offer comprehensive perspectives on their
subjects and commit themselves to certain lines of interpretation, but
they don't argue for specific theses. In contrast, Morris Dickstein, author
of
Keats and his Poetry,
attempts to define a specific and original view
of Keats, and to distinguish it from other interpretations - no easy
task, for the massive and various attention Keats has received in the
twentieth century would seem to have exhausted critical possibilities. In
Dickstein's view, Keats's career culminates not in poetry of vision, in
which the integrated imagination produces self-contained works of art
uniting in new syntheses the diversities of experience - not in "natural–
istic" poetry, expressing realistic acceptance of actuali ty - but in "poetry
of self-confrontation." To summarize in very rough terms, Keats's early
