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poignant. Here, at the penultimate moment, as it were, Donoghue's
book-long tracking of the seductions and meanings of Eliot's music, with
its comprehensive dependence on language and its equallv comprehen–
sive straining against language, pays off. The charge that the
QII17rtets
are abstract is refuted by the intense sensuousness of the language, a
quality whose characteristics and meanings Donoghue has schooled us
in for the whole book. And the charge, made by no less formidable a fig–
ure than Geoffrey Hill, that Eliot condescends to his readers in these
poems is refuted by the palpable emotional cost of Eliot's ultimate aban–
donment of language, which for him is all. In the end, Donoghue dwells
on Eliot's Christianity not for the sake of ideas, but for the sake of
poetry. For those readers who do not share Eliot's beliefs, the poems
"live," Donoghue says, alluding to a passage in William .lames, "bv giv–
ing the sense of an existence with character and texture and power." In
this way Donoghue ends strongly where he began, with the assertion
that "submitting" to a writer is not a matter of agreeing with some line
of argument or being overtaken by a particular philosophical statement,
although these matter. Rather, he says the poems should be read as such.
The point is far from trivial, and its significance is the animating motif
of the book, carefully titled
Words A/olle.
Igor Webb
Advice from an Elder Statesman
DOES AMERICA NEED A FOREIGN POLICY?: TOWARD A DII'LOJ\lACY fOR
THE
21
ST CENTURY. By Henry Kissinger. Si mon
&
Sch uster. $.10.00.
No FORMER AMERICAN STATESMAN alive today receives as much abuse
as Henry Kissinger. Radical critics of the historical thrust of American
foreign policy pronounce him guilty of all sorts of "war crimes" and
"crimes against humanity" during his stint as National Security Advisor
and, later, as Secretary of State, as if he is personally accountable for all
of the alleged damage wrought by American foreign policy, particularl\'
in Southeast Asia and Central America, from the late '';l()os through the
middle '970s. Smarmy gas bags like Christopher Hitchens, who has
written a recent book in precisely this vein, seem utterly obsessed with
"proving" that Kissinger is evil incarnate. Their "scho\arship"-indeed,
in Hitchens's case, it is possible to read a great deal about the history of
