Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press.
This is a collection of my more recent essays, most of them written since 1970. As with most such collections, there is a certain amount of repetition, much of it unavoidable because the argument is decentralized, and some things need to be stated more than once to fit into their different settings. At the same time, the book as a whole possesses a unity and can be read consecutively, and the repetitions then become like similar repetitions in music, thematic returns to the same subject after a new context has been established for it.
There are twelve essays, divided into three groups of four essays each. The first four deal with general issues related to literary criticism; the next four with general issues within literary criticism itself; the final four with more specific criticism of authors who have turned up constantly in my writing, Milton, Blake, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. Every essay was a response to a specific request and usually, also, was first orally delivered to a meeting or conference on a specific occasion. I have not tried to obliterate the sense of these occasions, and some account of them may be useful if the reader is interested in the question of why certain topics were selected.
The first and second parts both begin with articles that might be described as autobiographical, in the sense in which John Stuart Mill speaks of a “mental history”: that is, they attempt to show how certain ideas and concepts have taken shape genetically in my work. The opening essay, “The Search for Acceptable Words” (the title refers to Ecclesiastes 12:10), was contributed to an issue of Daedalus devoted to research in the modern university.1 I accepted the invitation to contribute with some misgivings, feeling that what I had done was not strictly “research,” and certainly did not illustrate how a university fostered and encouraged research. But as I went on I felt that my own experiences were more relevant than I had thought to the question, and that my work did at any rate show how the university functions as a special kind of community for a humanist. The article contains a number of obiter dicta about the contemporary university which express my own opinion but have no special knowledge behind them.
The other three papers in the first section deal with the kind of issues that are discussed a good deal in connection with literary criticism, but are still on the periphery of the subject as usually treated. “The University and Personal Life”2 was a contribution to an educational conference dealing, more or less, with the educational problems connected with what I still think of as the Age of Hysteria, the period between, roughly, 1968 and 1971. I had little sympathy with the kind of activism then going on, however much I had with its antagonism to the Vietnam war and to racism. I felt that the movement was fundamentally sick, so sick that it could really do nothing but die. It did very soon die, but its existence manifested something that seems to me still very much alive. This is the political side of what I describe in “Expanding Eyes” as the crisis of distinguishing the mythological from the empirical consciousness. I had already discussed other aspects of the same crisis in an earlier book, The Critical Path (Indiana University Press, 1970).
“The Renaissance of Books”3 deals with books as a physical element in communication, a theme brought to public awareness through the work of Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, George Steiner, and others. The article is designed mainly to make two points: first, that the book is one of the most efficient technological instruments ever devised, and second, that it is the technological instrument that makes democracy a working possibility. The latter is a principle applicable to countries that are so often said to be “not yet ready for democracy,” a phrase that seems to me to be either a pretext for tyranny or a racist euphemism. The paper was contributed to a publishers’ conference at Williamsburg in Virginia, and its publication in Visible Language appears to have brought me some new readers whom I was delighted to acquire. It was written while I was engaged on a series of lectures later delivered at Harvard on the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry, and some of its arguments run parallel to those lectures (now published as The Secular Scripture).
“The Times of the Signs”4 was written for a special conference of the Royal Society of Canada to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of Copernicus, held in Ottawa in November, 1973. My paper is an attempt to outline one of the chief assumptions of the present book, as well as of my work generally, that all literature is written within what I call a “mythological universe” constructed out of human hopes and desires and anxieties; that this mythological universe is not really a protoscientific one, even though it is often believed to have scientific validity; and that literature is written within this universe because literature continues the mythological habit of mind. The latter, being an imaginative habit, is quite as subtle, profound, and in touch with “reality” among Australian aborigines as among twentieth-century poets. All attempts to deal with mythological thinking as “primitive,” based on hazy analogies to biological evolution, are in my view totally mistaken. Copernicus is the great symbol in our culture of the beginning of the separation of the mythological from the scientific universe, a separation which has completed itself and has now to seek new ways of recombining.
This conception of a mythological universe is taken up again in the second autobiographical article, “Expanding Eyes”5 (the title is from Blake’s Four Zoas, and the passage is quoted in the body of the essay). This article was contributed to the journal Critical Inquiry, after an article on me by Angus Fletcher had appeared in the same periodical. My reasons for writing the kind of article I did instead of “replying” to Mr. Fletcher’s are given at the beginning. In a sense this article is the keystone of the book, raising most of the assumptions around which my work at present revolves. Two aspects of it, which are barely mentioned, need further development. One is the reference to structuralism, which interests me because it seems to me a movement heading in the direction of what I call interpenetration, the interrelating of different subjects in a way that preserves their own autonomy, instead of subordinating them to some grandiose program of mental imperialism. The other is a political inference from the conception of a mythological universe: the fact that without such a universe we have only the relation of man to his natural environment, and the question of human freedom (as Sartre says in Being and Nothingness) cannot be worked out within that relation alone.
“Charms and Riddles”6 was a paper read to the New England Stylistics Club at Northeastern University in Boston early in 1975. It was read at the invitation of Professor Morton Bloomfield, whose PMLA article on “The Complaint of Deor” as a charm poem entered largely into its argument. The article was written out soon afterwards, but has not been published elsewhere. “Romance as Masque” was read at a conference on Shakespeare’s romances held at the University of Alabama in October, 1975.7 It is preceded by a short discussion of Old and New Comedy, a revised version of an older article of mine with that title, originally a paper read to a group meeting at Stratford, England, some years earlier.8 As will be seen, both this article and the preceding one on charms and riddles use the same “mandala,” as I call it in “Expanding Eyes,” of descending and ascending movements of imagery, a contrast which also underlies the more familiar contrast of tragedy and comedy.
The Spengler article,9 which uses material from some very early writings of mine, was contributed to another Daedalus issue on “Twentieth-Century Classics Revisited,” to which the opening paragraphs refer. Spengler, as is obvious from other references to him in this book, has always been a formative influence in my own thinking, for reasons which have often puzzled me, he being, as a creative personality, so antithetic to me. This article is, so to speak, an effort to lay a ghost to rest, along with an attempt to show where Spengler belongs in twentieth-century criticism and poetic imagery.
Of the four essays in more practical criticism, the reading of Samson Agonistes was contributed to a conference at the University of Western Ontario in 1971.10 The title of the book in which the conference essays appeared, The Prison and the Pinnacle, referred to the fact that 1971 was the tercentenary of the publication of both Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, and most of the other papers dealt with both. I had already written a long article about Paradise Regained, which is why so little is said about it in this one; I have for the present book, however, added a sentence or two which bring the two poems more closely together. Paradise Regained in its turn is a poem of testing and ordeal for which the chief model is the Book of Job. The essay on Blake’s Job illustrations11 was contributed to a Festschrift in honour of Foster Damon, to whose 1924 book on Blake I have many times recorded my considerable debt. The original article was written quickly, under the pressure of many other commitments, and has been completely rewritten for the present volume.
The article on Yeats’s A Vision12 originally appeared in a book of essays on Yeats called An Honoured Guest, edited by Denis Donoghue and J.R. Mulryne. Yeats’s Vision has baffled and exasperated me for many years: this essay is by no means completely successful in laying a second haunting ghost to rest, but it supplies some analogical context for Yeats’s schematisms which may be useful. Its relation to the rest of this book, more particularly the second part, is perhaps worth a comment. If the conception of the mythological universe is necessary, as I think it is, to any resolution of the problem of freedom, the critic is involved once again in what Milton calls the “rule of charity” in interpreting the Bible: whatever interpretation rationalizes human slavery and bondage is wrong, however unwarranted the statement that it is wrong may logically sound.
The universe I sketch out in the second part of this book contains a cyclical movement in which tragic actions descend to a low point of death and comic ones rise to a high point of vision. The association of tragic movement with descent is at least as old as the metaphor in the word “catastrophe.” In Yeats, on the other hand, comic actions descend through the “primary” gyre to an indistinguishable mass of primitive society, and tragic actions rise out of them, up the “antithetical” gyre, to the height of the heroic act. For reasons that I hope a study of my second part would make clearer, such a reversal of movement encloses the whole mythological universe in a mechanism of fatality, a closed trap. The vision of life that results is admirable for Yeats’s more ironic poems, such as “Blood and the Moon,” but grotesquely inappropriate for, say, the two Byzantium poems. A Vision keeps bringing me back to the passive state of mind in which Yeats produced it, and what seems to be its irresponsible fatalism also seems to me the inevitable result of that state of mind.
Yeats describes his instructors as being, or behaving like, disembodied intelligences, without caring much whether we take this metaphorically or descriptively. Accepting it as at least a metaphor, I should say, if the reader will detach the statement from moral disapproval or superstitious frisson, that Yeats’s instructors were obviously devils. That is, all they knew was the vision of life as hell, and hence, like other devils, they lacked a certain comprehensiveness of perspective. In Yeats himself their influence, though destructive, was not disastrous; but they were of the same family as those who have produced so much of the terror and hysteria of our time.
The Wallace Stevens essay13 was read, in a much shorter version, at a conference in Istanbul, and the longer version, the one reprinted here, was contributed to a Festschrift for W.K. Wimsatt, for whom my great affection and admiration are now saddened by the fact that he is no longer with us. It is the second of two essays I have written on Stevens, and as compared with the first, it concentrates less on the Collected Poems and more on the letters and the Opus Posthumous. Stevens seemed to me an appropriate topic for a Festschrift for Professor Wimsatt, whose point of view was basically a conservative one, and though Stevens’s conservatism was of a very different type, he is a useful counterweight to the sometimes exclusive radicalism of the tradition that is embryonic in Milton, fully developed in Blake, and, perhaps, already decadent in Yeats. Traditionally, God is the creator, man is a creature, and man’s creative power is confined to secondhand imitations of the nature which, according to Sir Thomas Browne, is the art of God. For Blake and Yeats, on the other hand, there is nothing creative except what the human imagination produces. Stevens polarizes the imagination against a “reality” which is otherness, what the imagination is not and has to struggle with. Such reality cannot ultimately be the reality of physical nature or of constituted human society, which produce only the “realism” that for Stevens is something quite different. It is rather a spiritual reality, an otherness of a creative power not ourselves; and sooner or later all theories of creative imagination have to take account of it.
The title, Spiritus Mundi, from Yeats’s “Second Coming,” was suggested by my friend Mr. William Goodman, formerly of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, as a title for the book of essays published with them which was eventually called Fables of Identity.