328
PARTISAN REVIEW
Ode" are given close, exemplary, and elegant readings. Keats's valedictory
tone, his high aesthetic response to experience, floating among its plan–
gencies, has its apogee in "To Autumn." "The aesthetic state-watching
and seeing-is the end of both action and inaction," writes Spiegelman.
"Autumn herself embodies what we may ambiguously call the
work
of
art.
She is a laborer who, in the completion of her tasks,
has metamorphosed into
an image
if
elegant stasis, leisure, and ornament"-the
moody season now almost
an urn.
His survey of this symbiosis between work and play among the
Romantics leads naturally to a final chapter on the true heirs of this tradi–
tion: the American poets. Along with Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom,
Spiegehnan is one of the few critics who can write with authority about
both nineteenth-century and contemporary poetry, and in this coda he puts
his ear to the native ground: "Throughout American poetry, in spite of its
strongly puritanical and doggedly didactic streak, there flows another cur–
rent, one that asks us to see the extraneous, the peripheral, the ornamental as
the equivalents as well as the opposites of the essential, the central, the nec–
essary." Whitman's loafing and Frost's gamesmanship are his instances. My
understanding of both poets has been refreshed by Spiegelman's brilliant
regard for their maneuvers, the phantom soul of the one, the shimmering
bondage of the other. I should say, instead, that all of
Majestic Indolence
has
changed my sense of Romantic poetry precisely because it clarifies instincts
one has had about the way poems are dreamt up-instincts like stalks of grass
in one's mouth as he lies back in a summer meadow, or like the thoughts one
has as he closes the book and turns out the light.
The word "title" (from the Latin
titulus,
meaning label) is generally
understood to refer to something above or
over
a text, like an umbrella or
ceiling. In fact, by its Indo-European roots, the word is related to the ur–
word for ground or floor. And in a crucial sense, of course, titles do
ground
(electrically speaking) and
underlie
poems. A title can relieve the poem of
doling out narrative or descriptive information; it can highlight themes, or a
layering of themes; it can establish a symbol, allude to a formal tradition,
guide the reader toward obvious or occult matters. It is the poem's first
attempt to read itself.
To date, only John Hollander's exhilarating essay "Haddock's Eyes: A
Note on the Theory of Titles," included in his
Vision and R esonance (1975) ,
has brought speculative attention to titles. But there hasn't been an adequate
history of the business of poetic titling until this new book by Anne Ferry,
and it is a stimulating and welcome study. Not until printing advances
in
the
late seventeenth century did titling become standard, but the fact goes back
to ancient times, when readers (copyists, translators, scholars, monks, etc.), not
writers, entitled manuscripts. All along, a title has presupposed a reader, and
