Volume 50, Number 18 · November 20, 2003
Silent Music
By John Bayley
Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry
by Anthony Hecht
Johns Hopkins University Press, 304 pp., $24.95
Collected Later Poems
by Anthony Hecht
Knopf, 231 pp., $25.00
Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath
by Helen Vendler
Harvard University Press, 174 pp., $22.95
Speaking of Beauty
by Denis Donoghue
Yale University Press, 209 pp., $24.95
Like most other kinds of writing, literary criticism is subject to its own successive spells of fashion, styles, and movements bred by the society it is born into. It seems a long time now since the days of the ideological critic: men like George Lukács on the European continent, Lionel Trilling in America, George Orwell and F.R. Leavis in England. They coincided in part with the New Criticism of T.S. Eliot and I.A. Richards and the tutelary spirits of Kenyon College, where both Robert Lowell and Anthony Hecht studied under that fine poet and teacher John Crowe Ransom. The next wave, as it were, consisted of the philosophers of 'literary theory,' many of them French, like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Now literary theory, too, seems to have had its day. There is not much trace of it, or indeed of combative ideology, in the three admirable books of criticism under review.
Review, 3666 words
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