Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Literary Middlemen

Literary Middlemen

It is hard to see why the first book is priced so high; it is long (over four hundred pages) and well-printed, with plates, but not on gold leaf. Furthermore, Mr Lehmann has not been able to conceal that Saint-Beuve as well as being an eminent man of letters was also a bore. This is unfortunate. The literary factions of France in the early nineteenth-century; the liaisons; the quarrels; Saint Beuve’s own study of Jansenism, that extraordinary sect one of whose leaders claimed to know omnisciently that ‘out of a thousand souls, not so many as one returns to God’ – these matters could all be enthralling, but the style of Saint-Beuve (like cold rice pudding in translation) forbids it. He was a commentator, never a catalyst; and Mr Lehmann has not managed to thaw him out.

Mr Bloom’s book has real enthusiasm and many insights; though he does tend arbitrarily to interpret Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keatspage 529 and Beddoes, by the use of skeleton keys borrowed from William Blake. Personally I found his study of Shelley most valuable.

Professor Staples’s book on the modern American poet, Robert Lowell, is that rarest thing in literature: a critical study entirely just, informed, witty, profound and generous, which sheds enormous light on the texts of a difficult though excellent poet. How lucky Lowell is to have a perfect critic, a middleman with a mind as broad as the Golden Gate Bridge! One sees through Professor Staples’s lens not only Lowell but a comprehensible New England: layer upon layer of social conditioning, from the hellfire preaching of Jonathan Edwards to the frozen upper crust of modern Boston that Lowell consistently rebels against. And Professor Staples has provided for his readers, from love, one must think, in an appendix, Lowell’s remarkable narrative poem, ‘The Mills of the Kavanaughs’, not otherwise procurable in this country.

1962 (279)