484
PARTISAN REVIEW
sounds and colors and textures of life, more aswarm with the quick quiddity
of it all, the whole refined in perception "in a focus sharpening toward
death" as we move from "Worsening Situation" through "Foreboding"
and' 'Fear of Death"
to
those final, muted' 'whispers out of time" of the
closing lines. The book demonstrates better than his previous work Ash–
bery's ability to maneuver the richest and most contemporary diction in our
poetry-mock Milton to Sid Caesar, dumb trade to Heidegger-as the Mob–
ian strip of his mind carries us forward on the many levels of
all
our exper–
ience: the historical, the banal, the erotic, the sublime, the personal, the
bathetic, the spiritual, and the scientific-worthy of special note since our
poetry cannot remain vital unless it finds a way to include our science.
Self
Portrait in a Convex Mirror
is finally Ashbery's most accessible book and the
one that should win him the larger audience he deserves. There's no deny–
ing he is a difficult poet, as are all original poets, but his generous, fresh,
dazzling book, like the night of his opening poem, "gives more than it
takes."
ALAN HELMS
BREAKING OUT
THE ADVENTURER: THE FATE OF ADVENTURE IN THE WESTERN
WORLD.
By Paul Zweig. Basic Books. $8.95.
One way of understanding people who write about literature is
to divide them into two groups. The first is oriented toward method, con–
cerned about rigor and self-consistency, with a tendency toward the grace–
less, the abstract, and the stylistically joyless, attentive to the life cycle of
critical schools, at the moment still fascinated by the French, hoping to
derive a model by means ofwhich a played-out formalism can be supplanted
by new methods, whether revised Freud, revised Marx, or revised Levi–
Strauss. The second is uninterested
in
methodological consistency, eclectic and
broadly derivative, as bored by the question of whether the new criticism is
dead as by the question of whether structuralism is live, stylish, agile, inter-
