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PARTISAN REVIEW
withdrawn, sounding the "superficial" depths of its own "atonement"
only in how it speaks subtly of that other. In the end, the relation of
Hill's work to what he presents, through Peguy, as the "inexorable toil
of morality" remains undeclared and ambiguous:
... though I choose to regard that vision of "the unmoral nature
suddenly trapped in the inexorable toils of morality" as an oblique
yet penetrating insight into the nature of the creative act, the
resemblance is imperfect, and in that imperfection lies our ambiguous
hope.
Hill's "standing by" what he has written can exist only as a func–
tion of his having turned away from Peguy's more radical sacrifice. The
poem finally can only "stand by" itself, as Pcguy did, "on guard/ among
the
Cahiers,"
standing by his camp beds and wounded soldiers. But when
Hill writes: "we are constrained/ to leave you sleeping," we may hear in
one sense of "constrained" (,to bind together') something of the tension
between Peguy's fatal act and Hill's poetic exertions that characterizes
the scene of this homage, hence something of its ambiguous hope. As
Theodor Adorno writes:
Distance is not a safety-zone but a field of tension . It is manifested
not in relaxing the claim of ideas to truth, but in delicacy and
fragility of thinking.
H ill leaves us on this field of tension that frames a delicate balance
between mutually circumscribing "descents." The cadence, the physical
weight, of poetry's own vigil is constrained in its distance, shaping, and
shaped by, the scene of the "charity" from which it recedes, as Hill might
say, "clear calling as it fades."
HEARNE PARDEE
A Distant Vision: Charles Tomlinson and
American Art
Nothing seems more old-fashioned in painting today than the
observation of nature. In our culture of mass communication and
