A Revolution in Taste

...This is temptation, and a man needs a drink or two to deal with it . . . This is fine intuitive writing--incorporating imagery as Thomas no doubt would conceive it (the allusions to his own poem, "The Hand That Signed the Paper," as well as the six- pence and the tits...

...In Jesus Christ, the God-man, the il-luminating and saving word has been spoken...

...In spite of his dislike of the whole idea Ted accepted a teaching job at the University of Massachusetts...

...Simpson is also good in explaining why Ginsberg's "Kaddish" is Modernist and "Howl" is post-Modernist, and in describing what he perceives as the evils of the old New Criticism...

...And Grandmother, blue hair and white cheeks, a hectic spot the size of a six- pence in each...

...II and often daring articulation of a new philosophical and theological language, even a system...

...How did Sylvia react to hospital work...

...Why did they both suddenly give up teaching...

...Instead, Rahner achieves an original Commonweal: 693...

...I just wish there were more passages like it...

...That Sylvia Hath, Anne Sexton, and G~orge Starbuck used to drink together at the Ritz...

...For the authentic human inquirer is driven by the very dynamism of questioning to the recognition that the human being as human always stands in the presence of radical mystery...

...He is adequate at perceiving the elements of autobiography and myth in Plath's writing, but not so good on Lowell-- perhaps because he seems to resent the ele- ments of the spoiled child and the pathologi- cal adult in Lowell's personality (as he sees it...

...Then they both gave up teaching and moved into Boston...

...Simpson, for a while, becomes Thomas: You enter, preceded by the puppymen, one carrying your bag, the other your coat, a big room where people sit Exploring the horizon of absoluteness in chairs and sofas pretending not to have been kept waiting...

...Simpson reaches some questionable con- clusions on Lowell's History...

...Why bother to fuss with it...

...Why did Ted object to teaching...

...Indeed we are the hearers of a possible word of revela- tion...

...Human experience will now involve the social and, above all, the historical charac- ter of all experience...

...That Ginsberg's use of the word "beat" meant exhausted, out of it, and therefore "bles- sed...

...Sylvia had a job at the Massachusetts General Hospital, writ- ing up case histories...

...Here is a work worthy of its subject matter: the idea (more exactly, the concept) of Christianity in its own self- understanding...

...As theologians, we know this holy and gracious mystery to be the God of Pure, Self-Communicating Love decisively expressed in Jesus Christ...

...Three on a Tower, in which Simpson looked at the lives and works of Pound, Eliot, and Williams, also seemed to me very generalized--popularized biography...

...After all, the business about' equality and rights were self-evident...

...There is, after all, an impor- tant truth in Alfred North Whitehead's fa- mous dictum: /'Christianity is a religion in search of metaphysics.'/ In Karl Rahner's case, he accepts this challenge by developing a metaphysical theology through the appro- priation of two demanding philosophical tra- ditions: the Thomism of the "Schools" and the ontology of the German tradition from Kant through Hegel to Heidegger...

...A splendid example occurs in the last three pages of his Thomas chapter...

...Simpson gives us a sketch, but no portrait...

...For the most part, A Revolu- tion in Taste offers the informed reader few surprises...

...Later in the book he writes, "In 1940 Lowell underwent a reli- gious conversion and entered the Roman Catholic Church" in the same paragraph that deals with Lowell's marriage to Jean Staf- ford, his graduation from Kenyon and his teaching at Kenyon...

...While he leans heavily upon John Malcolm Brinnin's account of Thomas in America, he goes directly to Sylvia Plath's own letters home in his chapter on her...

...Indeed, rather than attempting to provide new facts (as did Donald Hall in his surprisingly fresh new book, Remembering Poets), Simpson contents himself with repeating what already is in print...

...And, may Heaven pre- serve a poet, their daughter who has come all the way from Wellesley Col- lege in the East, just for the occasion...

...Given the reception of his last critical-biographical I II study, not everyone will agree...

...Incidentally, the opening paragraphs of the Declaration, the parts so dearly loved today, were not nearly so important to the men who signed it...

...I The end of the Age of Auden I I I I I II I A REVOLUTION IN TASTE: STUBIES OF BYLAN THOMAS, ALLEN GINSBERG, SYLVIA PLATH, AND ROBERT LOWELL Louis Simpson Macmillan, $12.95 ~198 pp.] Robert Pbi!!ips CANNOT help but wonder who Simpson intends the readers of this book to be...

...This tie Jefferson se- Vered...

...The Declaration in its original form renounced their brethren across the seas...

...Not all ref- erences are to other biographies, interviews, critical studies and book jacket blurbs...

...What kind of teacher was he once he began...

...We have just been studying yourPortrait of the Artist as a Young Dog," she whimpers, shoving her tits-in your face...

...Rather in Jesus Christ God has spoken the "final," "irretrievable" word on just who God is and who we are...

...How well you know them: the rich woman's hus- band, smirking and offering the hand that decides men's fate down at the office, but here lies dead as wax...

...Yet Simpson too often remains on the outside of his subjects...

...The signers concerned themselves with the list of grievances-- that was the important part-- the very sections we normally skip when we read the instrument today...

...This penetrating, original and exciting book, written at times with a Jeffersonian felicity, only begins to uncover the lost world Much more remains to be revealed...

...This is not to say the entire book is cursory...

...We find that this God has not left us merely striving, simply cognizant of our creatureliness and our real guilt...

...1167!17 ) So many questions are left unanswered-- even unraised--by such writing...

...The authentic inquirer now becomes no longer a philosopher analyzing a horizon of radical mystery, but a theologian articulating the reality of that mystery as both holy and gracious...

...Was their moving an act to please Ted, or a joint decision...

...For Karl Rahner, moreover, there is no doubt that this revelation has occurred...

...This latter segment Congress deleted...

...Rahner's German tradition leads him to develop these two presuppositions of the "Schools" in a distinct and controversial fashion...

...She has auburn hair and legs made for long hours afield and abed...

...But it is an important statement of Jefferson's political faith, for he believed that the primary political connection between England and America was the tie between the American colonists and the British people...

...One instance occurs when he proclaims, "No skill is needed to write fourteen lines without rhyme...

...Do we really need to be told once again that "Dylan" means "seal" and that Thomas once lifted Katherine Anne Porter up to the ceiling at a party...

...Did Ted have no job at all thereafter...

...And that is saying something a whole lot different than simply rejecting the monarch or the par- liament...

...This was in the winter of 1958-1959...

...Above all, these are his ontological commitment to the intrinsic relationship of being and intelligibility and his epistemologi- cal commitment to the grounding of even our most abstract ideas in human experience...

...He argues that human ex- perience drives every serious inquirer to rec- ognize the presence of a horizon of absolute- ness, indeed of mystery...

...If for some Simpson closes gaps between the lives of his poets and their works of art, and if some readers still need convinc- ing that in a modern bureaucratic state there is value in poetry that expresses the life of an individual, then the book was worth doing...

...But because of Congress's deletions the intention and thrust of these words are not as sharp as in the original...

...His methOd varies...

...He is reasonably convincing when he claims Thomas was the icebreaker who ended the Age of Auden...

...The confines of any mere common sense emphasis upon sensation is left far behind...

...This self-communication, this "revelation," is not, as Karl Barth believed, merely "hurled at man like a stone...

...27 October 1978:692 Simpson is good on Thomas's romantic vis- ion of himself, and in portraying that poet's increasing sense of failure...

...In either case, I feel a need for more Simpson and fewer secondary references...

...As philosophers, we name this holy mystery with the personal name, God...

...Or that the young Robert Lowell pitched a tent on Allen Tate's lawn and stayed for two months...

...This is familiar material, already discussed in full-length biographies of the four poets...

...The book's best parts occur when Simpson--an excellent poet himself, and one whose poetry continues to strengthen (his re- cent collection, Searching for the Ox, is his finest)--abandons the role of biographer and emotionally empathizes with his subjects...

...We know that Jefferson was sorely grieved by these changes and it has always been assumed that his pique was the understandable an-noyance of an author who cannot abide any tampering with his creation...

...At the very end of the document, after the catalogue of grie- vances, the paragraph begins "We therefore the representatives of the United States of America" etc...

...by William V. Dych Seabury, $19.50 [470 pp.] David Tracy K ARL RAHNER has written a masterful work...

...One example will suffice...

...De- spite its title and brief 4-.89 Foreword, in which he attempts to posit a thesis for the book (the advent of Dylan Thomas and Allen Ginsberg brought an end to passionless poems which were exercises in reason...

...Take this paragraph from his Plath chapter: Sylvia's teaching went well--too well, for she found that she had not time to write...

...They lived in a rented apartment in Beacon Hill and did their writing...

...With systematic talent unequaled in contemporary theology, he lays out the basic concepts and development of his own remarkable forty-year intellectual journey...

...As his earliest works (Spirit in World andHearers of the Word) demonstrate at length, and as the first two sections of this book show with re, markable clarity, Rahner's commitments to certain main line Thomist positions remains firm...

...Why did they chose Boston as destination...

...Nevertheless, traces of Jefferson's intent remained in the document, especially in the preamble when he talked about the politi- cal bands that connect one people with another...

...etc.--and then Jefferson goes on to say that they reject and renounce all allegiance and subjection to the kings of Great Britain and dissolve all political connections which "have subsisted between us& the people or parliament of Great Britain...

...Actually, as Wills explains, Jefferson had good reason to resent the changes because they struck at the very heart of his intention...

...It is also agreed that the changes improved the document...

...taste shifted to poetry which expresses the individual), Simpson's book largely is a rehash of biog- raphical fact and quotations from letters al- ready well-known to those who would pay over thirteen dollars (with tax) for a small book on modern poets...

...Perhaps of Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries, in the future Wills will help provide it...

...Despite the modesty of its subtitle, "An In- troduction to the Ideas of Christianity," Foundations of Christian Faith is difficult and demanding reading from beginning to end...

...The result in Rahner's case is never some uneasy set of eclectic compromises among divergent posi- tions...

...Theological language, as distinct from its originating religious language and experi- ence, must include this drive to the concept, even to system...

...It also was cited by The New York Times as one of the most important books published in 1975...

...How can Lowell's con- version, which so affected and informed his poetry, be dismissed so briefly...

...On the contrary Christian revelation meets and responds to the deepest needs of the authentic inquirer, the honest searcher for a cause FOUNDATIONS OF CHRISTIAN FAITH Karl Rahner Trans...

...In both books Simpson subscribes to the statement by Proust which appears as epig- raph to A Revolution in Taste: "There can be no interpreting the masterpieces of the past unless one judges them from the standpdint of those who wrote them, and not from the out- side, from a respectful distance, and with all academic deference...

...One of the important ways Wills ap- proaches the task of reading the Declaration within the context of eighteenth century meaning, not its later interpretation, is to examine the deletions and additions Congress insisted upon before adopting the document...

...Yet its very difficulty--the complexity of the concepts and the sheer drive of Rahner's thought--is precisely the book's power and attraction...

...That achievement is usually named transcendental Thomism...

...It contained a whop- ping 1,232 footnotes to primary and secon- dary sources...

...The reason for this somewhat curious name--a seeming oxymoron--is clear in Rahner's case...

...his 179 pages of text bear the weight of 448 footnotes...

...No skill...