Volume 22, Number 6 · April 17, 1975
In the Literary Jungle
By Michael Wood
A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers
by Hugh Kenner
Knopf, 221 pp., $8.95
In Radical Pursuit: Critical Essays and Lectures
by W.D. Snodgrass
Harper & Row, 364 pp., $10.00
A Map of Misreading
by Harold Bloom
Oxford, 206 pp., $8.95
'An act of attention'; 'a minute obligation to fact'; 'the witty transit through minute predilections'; 'through cluttered tidiness, the reader must move like a cat.' The phrases are Hugh Kenner's and they describe and characterize the poems of Marianne Moore. But they also describe, and even enact, the criticism of Hugh Kenner, and they do something to explain why his chapter on Marianne Moore should be the best thing in his new book. Kenner combs the world like a critical Sherlock Holmes, isolating details, making distinctions, collecting verbal and technological specimens. Recalling Miss Moore's comparison of the feel of a snake to the feel of rose petals, he registers both the pose and the precision in that conceit: 'It was perhaps too poetic a remark to make its point, but she never allowed a fear of being thought poetic to deter her from accuracy…. In her poems, things utter puns to the senses.'
Review, 3428 words
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