634
PARTISAN REVIEW
bUl hardly any lWO exaclly alike in size or measure, never having lhe
sense of somelhing finished or fixed, always suggesling somelhing
beyond.
In our own time, which confronts the full secularization of " nature,"
the proliferation of open forms in poetry evidently reflects abandon–
ment of faith in divinely prior order, and the embracing of a large
measure of randomness as possibly the central experience in our lives.
In the group of essays which composes
Vision and Resonance,
Hollander explores questions of poetic form as it were aher the fall.
"Music" can no longer be trusted to explain anything, but must itself
be explained. The critic must try to clarify a hazy relationship between
the sister arts, as well as both the aural and spatial dimensions of poetic
form.
Hollander's tastes are eclectic, which enables him to write cogently
on poets as disparate as Donne, Jonson and Campion, Marvell, Milton
and Pope, Wordsworth and Blake, Whitman, Pound, and William
Carlos Williams. Since his cultural range includes European music
and graphic art, classical literature and literary theory, and contempo–
rary linguistics, the rifts of this volume are quite filled with ore. And
his ear and eye are fine, so that his readings are usually reliable, which
is more than one can say for many critics who attempt to write on
prosody. He has excellent chapters dealing with contrastive stress, with
enjambment, with rhyme. Each, if applied historically, would yield
discoveries about ideas of order in English poetry over the last four
centuries. The question of line-break has particular significance for
modern poetry, where it serves as the single most important formal
I
signal for a great number of poets (go back to Pound and Cummings,
~
move up to Creeley), opening doors in hitherto plain blank walls. Here
t.
Hollander makes some brilliant observations about how the relations
between line-break and syntactic juncture in the twentieth century
consistently direct attention, create drama, produce meaning. There are
also good chapters on the role of meter as frame, and on formal
experimentation, both theory and practice, in Romantic and modern
American poetry.
Hollander's consideration of " the poem in the eye," the poem as
shape-on-page rather than sound-in-ear, undertakes an essential criti–
cal task, since the decline of traditional meter leaves the mantle of
poetic form very much on the figure a poem makes visually. As
background, he gives a capsule history of "patterned" poems from
Alexandrian Greece through the Renaissance, along with some mod-
