BOOKS
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of systole and diastole around Proposition 4." The basic points are therefore
in the 4.0's, which include the insight Wittgenstein himself identified as the
crux: that "logical constants" do not refer. We get here some feeling for
Wittgenstein's remark in his
Notebooks
that his work had broadened out from
the foundations of mathematics to the essence of life (the world), and thereby
some dim illumination of his insistence on the inseparability of logic and ethics.
McGuinness's brief orientation to these ideas is brilliant.
If
the ideas
themselves seem as unsettling and unsatisfactory as they are ingenious, we
should remember that they were substantially revised in Wittgenstein's later
writings. McGuinness's achievement here makes one look forward to learn–
ing in the next volume how Wittgenstein's later career, in a very different
world, was connected with these revisions.
NEWTON GARVER
JAMES SCHUYLER OF NEW YORK
SELECTED POEMS. By James Schuyler. Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux.
$25.00.
The poetry of the so-called New York School presents a reader
with many attractions.
It
is open, ample, generous. It is disarmingly direct and
charmingly casual.
It
speaks to us in the language of our everyday transac–
tions, and its practitioners believe, as surely as Whitman and Williams be–
lieved before them, that the
details
matter in this
life,
and that no
detail,
be it
public or private, urban or
rural, "pretty"
or
"ugly,"
is
out
of
place
in a poem.
The leading poet pursuing the aesthetic of the New York School is
probably James Schuyler. Oohn Ashbery is usually nominated for this honor,
but it has become increasingly clear that he does not belong to the school at
all. The New York poets are committed abo e all to translucency and a light
touch, and Ashbery's work is plainly too burdened and hermetic to fit the
category.) The appearance of Schuyler's Selected Poems is an especially
welcome event, one that affords the opportunity not only to assess the work
of one poet, but to put an entire literary movement into some sort of per–
spective.
"We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the
end despondency and madness." Wordsworth could not have asked for a
better example than the career of James Schuyler. In fact, one of the fIrst
things a reader notices in Schuyler's poetry is that the author has plenty of
what blues singers call "trouble in mind":
