Criticism in Paperbacks

...He distinguishes carefully between personality—which he finds to be dynamic, flexible, and spontaneous—and character—which he finds to be static, inflexible, and socially determined...

...Expanding Jung's discussion of unconscious "primordial images" which, hit by bit, have accumulated over the centuries as part of our mental inheritance, she evolves a whole theory of literature to account for the peculiar fascination of such diverse work as the Greek tragedies, Dante's Divine Comedy, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Goethe's Faust, Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Eliot's Waste Land...

...Maud Bodkin, on the other hand, regards Freud's esthetic theory as more limiting than valuable and constructs her Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination (Vintage, $1.25) along strictly Jungian lines...

...Herbert Read, in The Nature of Literature (Evergreen, $1.95), looks to the individual author and finds literary excellence to reside in that author's faithfulness to his own personality...

...manages on almost every page to perpetrate one or the other of those fallacies, the affective and the intentional, so neatly defined by Monroe Beardsley and W. K. Wimsatt Jr...

...But we must, I suppose, live in our analytic world...

...He really understands the creative process...

...Though one can object to his heavy-handed use of psychology (he feels the psychoanalyst should help the critic in "the verification of the reality of the sublimation of any given neurotic tendency" on the part of the artist) and though one finds astonishing some of his strange notions (religion he declares outmoded as poetic subject matter and recommends that the work of modern physicists be used instead "to provide a whole system of thought and imagery ready for fertilization in the mind of the poet"), his studies of particular authors, especially those of the Bronte sisters and of Henry James, are both perceptive and sound...

...By asking such peripheral questions, our critics, Wimsatt contends, lead us astray...

...this is more nightmare...

...It is, therefore, with something of a feeling of the irony of things that I prepare to launch into a critical discussion of the paperback republication of some major works by five of our most important critics—each of whom spends a good deal of time JOHN UNTERECKER is an instructor of English at City College of New York...

...Though her theory is very attractive, her analysis of literature—particularly poetry—leaves a great deal to be desired...

...Read, whose bias is Freudian, finds Jung a useful ally...

...The objective critic, Wimsatt argues, should recognize that his function is "by approximate descriptions of poems, or multiple restatements of their meaning, to aid other readers to come to an intuitive and full realization of poems themselves and hence to know good poems and distinguish them from bad ones...

...As Brooks himself pointed out in bis 1934 preface, the essays — filled with overstatement—are a young man's work, but they are also uniquely a product of their times...

...In spite of the fact that the dangers of the social coherence Brooks advocated may now seem quite as real as the dangers of the social incoherence which 40 years ago he so fiercely attacked, his central insight—that the quality of a literature is closely bound up with the quality of the society which produces it— remains the debatable brilliant proposition it has always been...

...Catalysts all, they help open our eyes to excellence in art...

...but rather "What does the work of art reveal about its creator...

...Though I exaggerate, the fact of the matter is that frequently we do find literary criticism considerably easier to take than literature...

...Brooks assumed in America's Coming-of-Age that literature is both the product and the record of a culture...

...for we know nothing unless we know ourselves") both in formulating the "nature" of literature and examining individual works...

...I was reading Tindall's book on my way back from Boston," a friend of mine, a very good young novelist, reported, "and I often found myself just sitting there staring out of the train window thinking about what he was saying...

...Wimsatt points out in his set of "studies in the meaning of poetry," The Verbal Icon (Noonday, $1.65), these are fallacies because, though the questions "What did the poet intend to do...

...At its best, literature is for Read the free expression of personality...

...And we rush to the experts to discover what those startling images portend...

...The first of the five, Van Wyck Brooks's America's Coming-of-Age (Anchor, $.95), is considerably more useful as a historical document than as literary criticism (which it never really was), for it shows us what we bad been in those painful years just before and just after the First World War...

...This high praise is deserved...

...He relies, therefore, very heavily on psychology ("the science of the individual psyche, where all science culminates...

...For Wimsatt, therefore, the job of the critic is strictly to confine himself to the work at hand, to examine the intersections of the words of the poem and so display for the reader the structure of the poem itself: "The modern interpretation of poetry is fully concrete — reading the poet's words not within his limits as intender but in the fullness of his responsibility as public performer in a complex and treacherous medium...

...That's a very helpful book he's written—from the writer's point of view, I mean...

...The three essays which comprise the book were published in 1915, 1913 and 1921...

...Because we had never really worked together for anything, Brooks felt, our culture was a shallow one, our writers incapable of any genuinely valuable social analysis: "While European literature grows ever closer and denser and grapples to life more and more, American literature grows only windier and windier...

...They are just wrong enough (and just right enough) to force us, as we read them, to define both those times and our own...

...Though most readers will, I suspect, be entertained by his wit or enlightened by his brilliant analysis of such difficult works as Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium," Henry Green's strange novel Party Going, and Faulkner's complex Absalom, Absalom, writers themselves will perhaps value his work most highly...

...As Mr...

...Free is perhaps the crucial word, for Read is the great champion of free verse, and a good deal of his book is devoted to its celebration...

...and, equally timid in things literary, we buy studies of the significant writers whose works we seldom buy and hardly ever read, the ones who—as Shakespeare had it—hold the mirror up to nature...

...Though this second group could never be described as easy reading, it does contain a great deal of information that the rare person who reads poetry certainly ought to, and almost certainly doesn't, know...

...Since Wimsatt is a teacher, and a good one, he manages to make this difficult material available to those readers industrious enough really to learn it...

...and "How does the poem affect me...

...Nature, we think, was never like this...

...Hopkins, therefore, whose sprung rhythm was "an impregnating breath, breathed into the ear of every poet open to the rhythms of contemporary life, the music of our existence," is for him the supreme poet of our time...

...Like Wimsatt, William York Tindall, whose elegantly written The Literary Symbol (Midland, $1.75) is a major accomplishment in modern criticism, believes the critic's only legitimate project is somehow to reveal to the reader the literary object itself: "Not more nor less than what the object is but only that must be the critic's end, however vain his hope of reaching it...

...Tindall, who practices what he preaches, explores the functions of symbols in poems, plays and novels and considers, finally, some of the ways in which poems, plays and novels can themselves be taken as symbols...

...In this book, Wimsatt limits himself almost exclusively to two main areas of study: He tries to define the proper territory of the criticism of poetry, and, in a group of very useful essays, he carefully explores the structure and technique of poetry itself...

...For one thing, she has a tendency to reduce almost every poem to plot and theme alone, and her method of locating poetic themes (by going into a sort of trance state shortly after reading a poem and then recording the memories and fantasies called up by its imagery) is exactly the kind of reader-reaction that leads poets to abandon their profession...

...The villain of the piece is the Puritan spirit with its emphasis on individualism and the pursuit of the dollar...

...Criticism in Paperbacks By John Unterecker WE ARE, as every one knows, in an age of analysis, both psycho and literary...

...In our time, alas, we find that mirror cracked, warped, or clouded...

...discussing the work of other critics...

...do provoke interesting answers, the answers themselves reveal little if anything about particular poems...

...Though I find Tindall's book and Wimsatt's most useful, each of these five books is, in its own way, valuable...

...Brooks, then a very young man, took as his theme the thinness of American literature and tried to explain it in historical terms: "Those of our writers who have possessed a vivid personal talent have been paralyzed by the want of a social background, while those who have possessed a vivid social talent have been equally unable to develop their personalities...

...These works, by incorporating in their plots the archetypes of Woman, of the Devil, of Heaven and Hell, and of Rebirth, are able, Miss Bodkin feels, to objectify our most deeply buried psychological patterns and so to give us moments of spiritual peace...

...His question is most frequently not "What is the work of art...

...Miss Bodkin, whose favorite question is "What did the poet intend us to feel...