lEWIS P. SIMPSON
31
of America-he had been living out the question put by Tate, "What
is a poet's culture?" That, enmeshed in a detritus of pieties, he had
been living his own version of the "crossing of the ways," participat–
ing in the repetitive experience of writers since Donne and discover–
ing his own way what Tate says Poe and Hawthorne discovered a
hundred years before, the essential modern subject, "the isolation
and frustration of personality"?
By 1949, when he wrote "The Meaning of a Literary Idea" for a
conference on American literature at the University of Rochester,
Trilling had, I think, formulated a poetic, dramatic, and dynamic
idea about the nature of literary ideas that would provide the founda–
tion for a poetics of cultural criticism.
What comes into being when two contradictory emotions
are made to confront each other and are required to have a rela–
tionship with each other is . . . quite properly called an idea.
Ideas may also be said to be generated in the opposition of ideals,
and in the felt awareness of the impact of new circumstances
upon old forms of feeling and estimation, in the response to the
conflict between new exigencies and old pieties. And it can be
said that a work will have what I have been calling cogency in the
degree that the confronting emotions go deep, or in the degree
that the old pieties are firmly held and the new exigencies
strongly apprehended.
At the end of the essay in which this definition of the "literary
idea" is made ("The Meaning of a Literary Idea," which appears in
The Liberal Imagination)
Trilling says that when we learn to "think of
ideas as living things, inescapably connected with our wills and
desires, as suspectible of growth and development by their very
nature, as showing their life by their tendency to change, as being
liable, by this very tendency, to deteriorate and become corrupt and
to work harm, then we shall stand in a relation to ideas which makes
an active literature possible." During the years following the essay
on "The Meaning of a Literary Idea," Trilling composed the series of
compelling meditations on the idea of the modern self that consti–
tutes his major achievement and - although he himself may never
have quite known this - fulfills, as far as he could do so, his desire to
be the author of works of the imagination. Significantly these medi–
tations were composed in nearly all instances as occasional pieces–
being written in response to an invitation to give a paper some–
where, provide an introductory comment for a new edition of a
