Volume 8, Number 4 · March 9, 1967
Balloons
By Denis Donoghue
Nil: Episodes in the Literary Conquest of Void during the Nineteenth Century
by Robert Martin Adams
Oxford, 249 pp., $6.00
A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature
by Richard Poirier
Oxford, 257 pp., $5.75
In the Human Grain: Technological Culture and Its Effect on Man, Literature and Religion
by Walter J. Ong, by S.J.
Macmillan, 207 pp., $5.95
'We are but critics, or but half create,' Yeats wrote in a rueful poem, lamenting the death of the old nonchalance. In the meantime critics have come to wear their rue with a difference. If Swift were now at work on A Tale of a Tub, he might still put the critic under the table, 'like a dog at a feast, whose thoughts and stomach are wholly set upon what the guests fling away.' But his victim would continue to smile. It is comfortable nowadays to be the middleman, the retail grocer buying cheap and selling dear. But this, a common figure for many years, is no longer adequate. If you hate critics, there is no point in calling them parasites, because increasingly they depend upon themselves, their own imaginations. Bacon's figure of the spider is nearer the mark. Critics are now almost poets, planetary poets, making notes toward their supreme fictions. The critic is happy to comment upon literature, but only on the understanding that the interest of the commentary is intrinsic, 'self creating, self delighting.' Few critics are content to say helpful things about hard poems. The critical essay, traditionally a modest genre, aspires beyond its old station: it hopes to become a handsome body of knowledge, a rival form of poetry with the advantage of a richer mixture of ideas.
Review, 3961 words
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