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PARTISAN REVIEW
Russia imminent, the Irish in the House of Commons more dis–
agreeable than ever, the dynamiters more active, the income tax
threatening to rise to its maximum, the muddle, in short of
the densest and darkest."
The letters may provide less than a biographer would wish of a
narrative of some aspects of the hidden ego. But that Jamesian con–
sciousness which received so much, so tirelessly, from what sur–
rounded it is well represented.
If
the personal or private was sub–
merged or sublimated, art itself seems, in James's case, to have
become
life. "I hope during the next ten years to do some things of a
certain importance; ifI don't it won't be that I haven't tried hard or
that I am wanting in an extreme ambition. I am able to work better,
and more, than I have ever been in my life before; it isn't much, but
it's enough," he wrote William in 1887.
MILLICENT BELL
PLAIN ABSTRACTIONS
Robert Penn Warren,
Being Here: Poetry 1977-1980.
Random House. $8.95.
Some modern
poets
wanted the lyric to include more than
the anxious, fixated self. The history of Pound, and the ersatz sociol–
ogy of Williams, could be read as the self writ large , but these con–
cerns were undeniably subject
matter,
facts hard and soft, that gave
the poems a special ballast. Formalist critics tended to allegorize and
psychologize this subject matter, excusing political and historical
views and often turning the work into an exercise in technique or
"poetics." However, many contemporary poets, as diverse as Olson
and Merrill, Bly and Rich, explored this modernist strategy as they
incorporated transpersonal concerns into their poetry. They dared,
as it were, to pollute the intimacies of the lyric with the detritus of
the world. But other poets, although thoroughly modern or contem–
porary in some matters, just as insistently kept the lyric focused on
its traditional concern: the melodious but intimate act of self–
revelation.
Robert Penn Warren engages in his self-revelation with a lan-
