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PA RTISAN REVIEW
This question comes close to the view of literary history that Geoffrey
Hartman takes. He wonders if there might be possible a preservation of
tradition that
is
defensive neither toward the "masses" nor toward tradition
itself. Hartman's ambition, I think, is to recover the possibility of writing
literary history after the devastating gain of consciousness and self–
consciousness brought about by formalism. The days are gone when a poem
reduced itself to a few brisk commonplaces that could be catalogued in a
score of texts, ancient and modern. After formalism , any decent poem
seems an abyss of complication . Equally , literary history can no longer
content itself with external narrative patterns unthinking ly borrowed from
Darwin or Hegel. Hartman's solution to the difficulty is to transfer histori–
cal consciousness from the literary historian to the poets themselves .
Hartman may have the most acute consciousness of form in modern
criticism. But the form he studies is itself a rise or intensification of the
poet's consciousness as it confronts literary tradition, including the state or
spirit of the language. Form is a delicate balance between individuated
self-consciousness and a medium preserved by the saving acknowledgement
of its objectivity. The readings of Keats in this volume trace with moving
subtlety his search for something " to set a bottom for inwardness, to limit
an endless and corrosive self-concern. " The ode "To Autumn" is Keats's
triumphant discovery of the answer. Hartman's uncanny talent is to make
literary history rise out of the poet's own effort to focus the revel of inherited
forms and conventional topics . Literary history does not go on behind the
poet's back , but precisely through the thoughtful labor of his creation .
Form is not fixed beyond history; nor is it the organic economy of the
unique poem . Form
is
history-or at least it is so in literary history. The
tension between literary historian and critic dissolves; for the critic reading
the poem's form has to see that form as the shadow cast by the poet's own
historical consciousness.
Despite the differences, Hartman in a sense complements Bloom .
While Bloom strides across the bridge of tradition from strong poem to
strong poem, Hartman is willing to work more patiently through the
smaller fry, the Grays and Collinses . His reward is a more varied and less
anxious sense of the poem's relation to tradition. Our reward as readers is to
find in
Beyond Formalism
and
The Fate
0/
Reading
a few anticipatory sketches
for that history of the "spirit of romance" from Milton through the English
romantics that Geoffrey Hartman -and , I believe, only he of all living
scholars -has it in him to write . That history could triumphantly disclose
in poetry and testify by its own existence to the power of a rememorative
word . Such a word would augment us all.
DONALD MARSHALL
