The article by Patrick MacGuiness in LRB is basically a gentle promotional
job, in the "don't be frightened" tradition of which there have been
several before re JHP. As such it's perfectly well done and it's very good
to see such exposure and recognition in places where poetry is not normally
taken seriously at all.
So of course it glosses over all problems -- "predictable accusations of
élitism, difficulty etc" brushed aside without further ado, and it focusses
very much on the earlier work, emphasising continuities of emblem through
to the later work without tackling the great changes that have taken place
in the mode of writing, as if the presence of the same imagery in early and
late Prynne, "persistence of themes", showed that it is all one coherent
body of work. (Like the archetypal twins business lately mentioned
hereabouts, of which you get a great deal more in Finnegans Wake than you
do in JHP and has never meant anything much to me. Perhaps I don't want to
be persuaded that the world is a duality.)
It doesn't,( and nobody ever has, I keep thinking Sr Bircumshaw is going
to but he doesn't; Mme Ward does in a very arguable light which MacGuiness
dismisses--- he says, quite rightly I think "[the poetry] does not promise,
at some culminating stage, to fall open like a cracked code in the hands of
the expert reader) / It doesn't actually demonstrate how the value issues
in detail from the text. As usual the commentary floats above the text,
indicating its contours but not treading a single footpath.
Probably it has to be like this in such an organ and MacGuinness copes with
that necessity with great tact. It's a thing to be glad of anyway. What
usually happens next is that someone writes in to complain angrily about
the poetry being praised, which is inevitable, and the periodical prints
the letter, which it doesn't need to. All these journals get masses of
letters which they don't print, as everyone knows who has ever complained
about TLS's brutal reviewing. We shall see, but that's what usually
happens next.
Signing off for weeks in order to examine the shadow between sun and stone.
/PR
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|