Kipling, Auden & Co.
Taylor, Mark
favorable, but most are, most had to be, In search of the white blackbird because most poetry isn't very good. He r ltlPLIlI|, AUKll & C0. Randall Jarrell Farrar, Straus, Giroux,...
...Jarrell, to the contrary, doubtless owed his critical excellence and negative capability to the fact that he was primarily a poeI, only secondarily a critic, so that when he functioned as the latter he had need neither to show off the gifts of the former nor to apologize for their lack...
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...Jarrell does all this so effortlessly, and with such abundance of grace and wit, that one can overlook how very much extraordinarily good taste and the whole history of poetry inform his judgments...
...And how gratifying to one's faith, how rewarding of one's patience, after noting all the black blackbirds, to be able to write (in 1955) of Robert Graves's Collected Poems and Elizabeth Bishop's Poems, "I can say about them, as an advertisement would: 'If you want to read some of the poems your great-great-grandchildren will be reading, these are the books for you to buy.' " (Jarrell could change his mind...
...Fifteen years earlier he had written that Graves, though "pleasant," "is not a good poet.., even his best poems just miss...
...The need to locate the holy is experienced in all religions...
...Such a quality is, surely, the first that a critic should have...
...He wrote of two poets that they "are traditional in the sense that an appendix is traditional...
...That Christianity should provide new ways of locating it would seem to be implied in the very notion of an incarnation...
...Jarrell died in 1965...
...I ~ spent tens of thousands of dollars de-TO ORDER, JUST CLIP THIS AD and veloping this course...
...Kipling, Auden & Co...
...There are sixty or seventy pieces here, all eminently deserving of one's attention, even where the issue is long s6ttled, the poet or poem long forgotten...
...And the good, in poetry, is always a white blackbird, an abnormal and unlikely excellence...
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...His criticism, particularly the reviews of his contemporaries that appeared regularly in The Nation, The New Republic, and elsewhere, is remarkable for appearing so often to have been correct -- rarely has work he didn't care for remained visible, and rarely, thus far, have the subjects of his greatest enthusiasm disappeared from sight --and also for discussing the work at hand so accurately and precisely: noting the exact quality of its diction and images, for example, the extent to which it is traditional or not, of Whom and to what degree it is derivative...
...The two books now reviewed reflect quite different points of view, which in part correspond to these two levels of inquiry...
...Augustine, who devoted to its defense and promotion the last book of his famous City of God...
...Jarrell's figures of speech are wonderful...
...Not all of Jarrell's judgments are unacknowledges this cheerless certainty: "Whether we live in the Athens of Pericles or the England of Elizabeth I, there is one law we can be sure of: there are only a few good poets alive...
...Lawrence Cunningham, who has previously written about St...
...Bonaventure's Mind's Journey to God, tries to be both scientific and popular, with the foreseeable result ten and what he has not yet written...
...Thus, two levels are immediately open to research into what makes the saint and what saints have been like, a technical-scientific one and a descriptive-popular one...
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...These reflections are followed by a commentary on eleven new books of poetry...
...I in every situation...
...What he writes proves it...
...but compared to the good ones.., he is a nap after dinner...
...but the jelly is as soft as ever...
...Write us ,a~ 9 9 method, you set your own pace-[] testing yourself, correcting errors, rein-Audio-Forum I i forcing accurate responses...
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...echoing Keats, "of his ability to lose what self he has in the many selves, the great self of the world...
...TIlE NEAmNG 0F SAINTS Lawrence Cunningham Harper and Row, $9.95, 186 pp...
...George H. Tavard WHILE sainthood belongs inseparably to the Christian theology of grace, saints seem to belong rather to folklore and, at least in Catholicism and Orthodoxy, to liturgy and prayer...
...Into the shining little jelly molds that constitute the poet's repertory of forms, they pour a quaking and formless gelatin --and when the molding is finished, they are satisfied to be deceived by the illusion of form...
...If 9 By the end of the course, you'll find you're not convinced it's the fastest, iI yourself learning and speaking entirely easiest, most painless way to learn in Spanisht Spanish, return it and we'll refund This course turns your cassette every pennyyoupaid...
...How wondrous, then, how positively renewing, to see in Robert Lowell's first book, Land of Unlikeness, the potential for greatness that most reviewers sensed only with his second book, Lord Weary's Castle, if then: "At his best Mr...
...Augustine, belongs in the scientific category...
...capability' of the artist," wrote Randall Jarrell some twenty years ago...
...Your cassettes are shipped to you in The U.S...
...He has written an important study of the historical origin of the cult of saints, one that cannot be neglected in any investigation of the Christian world and of Christian thought in a period that goes from the time of persecution (second-third centuries) to the"late antique"roeriod of the sixth-seventh centuries...
...Though the collection under review includes essays on music, painting, novels, popular culture, and figures like Ernie Pyle, it was inevitably into discussions of poetry that most of the poet Jarrell's critical energies were channeled...
...That the holy would be located by Christians, not only in Word and Sacraments, but also around the tombs of saints, relics, bones, places where saints have had a special experience (like St...
...It's by far the mall with your name and address, end a 9 ~most effective way to learn Spanish at check or money order...
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...The commonest response to the self of a work of art is the critic's assertion that he too has a self...
...Department of State has handsome library binders...
...Many of Miss Z's phrases "are meant to have an apocalyptic grandeur, but they sound as if Madame Blavatsky 9. . had written them for a Society of Latter-day Druids...
...It is unpleasant, discouraging, unnatural to have to go on saying, about each shining new blackbird: But it's black...
...Francis and is the author of a translation of St...
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...and one can think of non-poets who are terrible reviewers of poetry because of their complacent resentment of greater talents: they can't quite forgive poets for being poets...
...That the option was made in the time of the Fathers of the church is, however, a historical fact of major importance...
...favorable, but most are, most had to be, In search of the white blackbird because most poetry isn't very good...
...all that deserves our respect in ordinary life --the consistent, adequate, responsible norm of behavior -- gains only our indifference, here...
...Brown shows that this option tallied with the general sense of the religious in human. kind, and especially with the reaction of both Jews and Gentiles to the death of remarkable religious personalities...
...So-and-so's new book, he writes, "is pleasanter and a little quieter than his old, which gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter9 "Compared to our bad young poets," Jarrell writes of a young Englishman, Mr...
...Peter Brown, previously known for a major study of the life of St...
...they are the remains of something necessary under no longer existing conditions...
...is the fourth and final collection of his essays and reviews, the second to be published posthumously...
...You The Foreign Service Inetitute's simply follow the spoken and written Spanish course ie unconditionallyinstructions, listening and repeating, guaranteed...
...Lowell is a serious, objective, and extraordinary accomplished poet...
...He is a promising poet in this specific sense: some of the best poems of the next years ought to be written by him...
...Indeed, the support of the theologians was necessary to negotiate the delicate passage from the sainthood of the martyrs, who had shed their blood for It~ili HH| | |~'~ S k %I . like .a liplcan .! I !{~e y as possible...
...Yet the way of popular religion was endorsed by no less a person than St...
...The general lack of freedom of the poet is grotesquely intensified in the specific lack of freedom of the poem --in which each part is determined not only by the demands of the incomplete tentative mass of the already existing parts, but by the overriding demands of the obscurely divined, problematic, and unique whole...
...There is no mystery about the perpetual preponderance of bad poetry, but one thing Jarrell has to say on the difficulties of the poet's craft is worth quoting9 (Everything he has to say on the subject is worth quoting, but I shall content myself Commonweal: 378 with one remark...
...He praises that "criticism in which the critic takes it for granted that what he writes about "comes first, and what he writes comes second...
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...He puts the "0 critical act into perspective: "Disliking what is bad is only the other face of liking what is good...
...Mark Taylor I1~1 VERYONE speaks of the 'negative It...
...Francis at Mount Alverno) or where saints are said to have been seen (like Lourdes or Fatima in our time), does not necessarily follow from belief in the Incarnation...
...Randall Jarrell Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $17.95, 381 pp...
...X "is a controlled, civilized, attractive affair...
...However little assent these words Would generate today, when it is fashionable to insist upon the aesthethic integrity (if not the aesthetic primacy) of the critical performance, it is unquestionable that Jarrell is describing that quality that made his own one of the most trustworthy and reassuring critical voices of his time, and that allows him still to be read with admiration and delight...
...INow you can learn to speak Spanish (8 cassettes, 11Vz hours), instrucI just as these diplomatic personnel do-tot's manual and 614 page text, $98 9 with the ForelQn Service Insti-(New York residents add sales tax...
...yet who speaks of the negative capability of the critic7 How often are we able to observe it...
...Every poet, indeed every writer, knows what it is thus to be trapped between what he has writIll = A locus for the I| TEE CULT OF SAINTS ITS RISE AND FUNCTIONIN LATIN CHRISTIANITY Peter Brown Univ...
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...One can think of poets who are terrible reviewers of their contemporaries' work for the very simple reason that their judgments reflect a desire to do in all rivals...
...I've never seen it put better...
...The very existence of Protestantism shows that sainthood conceived as a locus of the divine for all generations--and not only for the saint himself--is not a necessary option...
...Members of [] Volume l Basic 9 Ameruca's oip~omatiCcorps are ass0gn-11 ' "h9 ^., ,^ ,, o...
...It is an unhappy thought ' that there will be no more, divine that his book will satisfy nobody...
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...the discerning reader will have guessed Lhe general tone of that...
...but what a dark, dank, grudging, graceless face, one endeared neither to gods nor men...
Vol. 108 • June 1981 • No. 12
