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PARTISAN REVIEW
histories to establish its authority, and thus to anesthetize the reader's
critical sense. The title, unlike modern poetry, is reassuringly conven–
tional. How could one object to "A History of Modern Poetry"? The
table of contents, unlike
The Waste Land
or the
Cantos,
adheres strictly
to a chronological conception of history. There is a disturbing irony
latent here, one which is fundamental to the limits of this narrative. All
the terms of the title, "History," "Modern," and "Poetry," are concepts
that the writing of this century has taken special pains to interrogate.
The ideology implicit in each of these words has been rendered
problematic at best by the very literature Perkins hopes to chronicle.
The book often seems documentary and encyclopedic in intent
rather than interpretive. It is a fine work for reference, concisely
introducing the careers of over one hundred poets, and providing
thumbnail sketches of every literary movement from the Celtic twilight
to the New York avant-garde with commendable precision. In the
preface we are told, however, that "One fundamenta l purpose of this
book is to go behind the interpretation of modern literary history that
has been current for the last forty years." Exactly what this interpreta–
tion is we are never told. Perkins's alternative is hardly subversive. In
his second sentence he accepts the view that modernism was "the
formative period during which the romantic traditions of the past were
abandoned or transformed and a major new literature created." Aside
from being commonplace, this generalization implies the critical
method governing the whole book. That method is to envision poetry
as an autonomous development whose history can be told apart from
other contexts. To borrow Michel Foucault's nomenclature, poetry is
for Perkins a distinct "discursive formation. " Unlike Foucault, how–
ever, Perkins stubbornly resists analyzing the interplay of poetry's
discourse with those of politics, economics, history , culture. These
fields are touched upon tangentially; he is especia lly aware of how the
economics of publication, about which Pound complained so loudly,
affect the production of literature and the values it can disseminate.
Whenever accounting (or a change
in
poetic practice, however, Perkins
almost invariably invokes a theory of poetic history which gives
primary analytic prestige to the poet's relations with his precursors.
Perkins has dedicated his book to Walter Jackson Bate, whose
Burden of the Past and the English Poet
was dedicated to Perkins.
Bate's thesis has been elaborated notoriously by Harold Bloom, whose
work is wonderfully inspired by a Freudian Muse. But Perkins's use of
the Bate/ Bloom reading of poetic history fails
to
satisfy, for it restricts
poetic genesis to a malter of internecine literary warfare, conducted in a
