BOOKS
485
through a sequence of declines, recoveries, further declines, and pathetic
Lear-like wanderings into the quiet helplessness of his last decade. As he
traces this decline, Hilton assembles the raw materials of an argument
that he does not quite build, an argument that would connect Ruskin's
madness with the deep characteristics of his genius-in particular with
the painfully contradictory drives to simplify and to include, to submit
to the authority of vision and to assert the authority of the sage.
It
was
an essential feature of Ruskin's genius that he trusted absolutely in the
clarity of his own vision; when he could not make others see what he
saw, he was baffled and sorrowful, then maddened and enraged; when
he could see only his own obsessions, he was truly mad.
Hilton's book is long and wayward and some of its pages-particu–
larly towards the end-stagger under their load of sheer, accumulated
fact. At the same time, he has produced a crammed, magpie-inclusive
narrative that, while wisely declining to imitate Ruskin's style, is deeply
answerable to his character. For a richer and fuller account of that char–
acter, we must turn to the thirty-nine volumes of his collected works.
Timothy Peltason
Size Matters
TIME'S FooL. By Glyn Maxwell. Houghton Mifflin.
$27.00
THE BEFORELIFE. By Franz Wright. Knopf.
$22.00
AMBITION IN POETRY is a tricky thing. When it leads to excess it can
threaten poetry's natural affinity for compression. We expect poets to be
ambitious, both in what they write about and in their effort to give
unique and vivid expression to it. But when poems lose their grip on
containment and closure, it can be difficult to know why they are writ–
ten as poems at all. In fact, the great genius of a Dante or a Milton or a
Whitman is that, despite their sprawling epics, they keep us attuned to
the lyric moment. The nuance of a dramatic turn, the shifting shades of
the poet's voice, the clarity of the smallest detail and how it contains the
essence of the overriding whole, these are what make long poems great,
not just the celebrity of their reach.
