Krieger - The Poet and His Work--And the Role of Criticism (College English, 1964)

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The Poet and His Work - And the Role of CriticismAuthor(s): Murray KriegerReviewed work(s):Source: College English, Vol. 25, No. 6 (Mar., 1964), pp. 405-412Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/373717 .

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IS POETRY AN AMERICAN ART? 405world, will simply not consume poetry.Spoon-feed it as we teachers will, it re-fuses to go down the body politic.Pediatrically, I would advise this-we'dbetter change the formula.I hope I have not offended anyone anymore than necessary. In our colleges anduniversities today there are vested in-terests in the poem. A whole subcultureof the poetic has grown up under ournoses. It is an articulate and insidious sub-culture, spreading all through the teach-ing profession and infecting the youngwith the superstitions of Old Worldvalues. There should be a simple pre-scription to stop this blight. Perhaps we

should teach our children that once upona time there was a thing called poetry;and that it was very beautiful and thatpeople tried to bring it to our shoresin boats, but it died. And a few peoplecouldn't live without it, so they wentback to the Old World to see it. Andothers built elaborate greenhouses calledEnglish Departments where they kept itbreathing. And they watered it with themost expensive electricity, but it didn'tlike it here and died anyhow. And somefractious students lost their tempers andbegan to smash the greenhouse windows.And then everybody started readingprose.

The Poet and His Work--and theRole of CriticismMURRAY KRIEGER

A WORD ABOUT THE CHOICE Of our subjectfor this Section meeting may help justifymy paper and the angle of its approach.Originally, out of an interest in the role,of literary criticism, our title was tobe "A Critical Vision for the CollegeTeacher of Literature." I was to justifythe role of the critic among the collegeteacher's several trying roles, and theneed to prepare for this role in his uni-versity training. But, perhaps out of anawareness that literary criticism has theselast years received more than its dueof attention and justification, we choseto retreat to return the poem to itscreator more than has often been doneof late. Hence our subject now is to be

"The Poet's Voice and the Critic's Voicein the Teaching of Literature," and, asI understand it, my two fellow speakersare to represent the biographer's interestand the poet's. Still, in this newer con-text, I must, while recognizing theirclaims-in some quarters becoming alltoo neglected, perhaps-try to keep thewheel from turning too far in the de-scent in criticism's fortunes, to keep thecritic's warning voice still with us as wereturn to the creator who not only pre-cedes him but in fact makes his ex-istence possible.Let me take as my text and my defini-tion of the critic's role, as it is juxtaposedto the poet's, this brilliantly concisestatement by Leo Spitzer, who here dig-nifies the critic with the name of"philologist": Poetry, he tells us,consists of words, with their meaning

preserved,which, through the magic ofthe poet who works within a "prosodic"whole, arrive at a sense-beyond-sense;and . . . it is the task of the philologist

Murray Krieger, author of The New Apolo-gists for Poetry and The Tragic Vision, is theM. F. Carpenter Professor of Literary Criti-cism at the University of Iowa. His A Win-dow to Criticism: Shakespeare'sSonnets andModern Poetics is to be published in Spring1964 by Princeton University Press.

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406 COLLEGE ENGLISHto point out the manner in which thetransfiguration ust mentioned has beenachieved. The irrationalityof the poemneed not lose anything at the hands of adiscreetlinguisticcritic; on the contrary,he will work in accord with the poet(although with no regard to his ap-proval), insofar as he will patiently andanalytically retrace the way from therational to the irrational: a distancewhich the poet may have covered in onebold leap.1

In this statement are all the issues con-cerning how the critic can try to raisehis voice in unison with the poet's. Spit-zer is here answering Karl Shapiro who,in his "A Farewell to Criticism" (Poetry,1948), makes the language of poetry sototally sui generis that it comes to bemade up of "not-words," utterly dif-ferent from the same words used inprose. These not-words, according toShapiro, "in their retreat from meanings,arrive at a prosodic sense-beyond-sense."Hence the impossibility of the very en-terprise of criticism and the need forShapiro's blithe farewell to it, in theinterest of the uniqueness of each poem'slanguage system. From this position wecan see the force of Spitzer's counter-statement: It insists upon "words" "withtheir meaning preserved," rather than"not-words" in a "retreat from mean-ing," as the materials of poetry; and itinsists upon the tracing of the immediate"transfiguration" in the "prosodic"whole from words with their meaningpreserved to the "sense-beyond-sense"as a feasible function of criticism insteadof denying any proper function forcriticism at all. Seeing the intimate rela-tion between the materials of the poemand the surrounding world which pro-vides them, Spitzer refuses to engage inthe mystique that cuts them off as "not-words." He does acknowledge, withShapiro, that the prosodic whole of the

poem ends in a sense-beyond-sense; buthe denies that it begins this way, claim-ing rather that the prosodic whole exer-cises a transfiguring force that allowswhat goes in as words with their mean-ing preserved to come out as sense-beyond-sense. So Spitzer may be claim-ing a mystique of his own, but-since it isa movement "from the rational to theirrational"-it is one which the critic ispermitted to make it his business to trace.The critic for Spitzer, then, is seenas a mediator between the unique lan-guage of the poetic context and thecommon language of the rest of us. Thatis, he provides a mediate discourse thatfollows upon-indeed creeps after-theimmediate phenomenon of transfigura-tion. Spitzer falls between two extremeviews of the relation of poetic discourseto nonpoetic discourse. At the one ex-treme, as a kind of inevitable conse-quence of Crocean purity, is Shapiro'sview of the poem's organization of "not-words"; but at the other extreme is therefusal to see anything at all uniqueabout the poem, to see it as an untrans-figured collection of words with theirmeanings preserved. The latter view seespoetry itself as mediate so that criticismfinds the poem comfortably available toitself and can end up just another formof philosophic discourse about a some-what more disordered form of discourseno different in kind from itself or fromany other discourse. Spitzer seeks tokeep the workings of the poetic context(the prosodic whole) immediate whileallowing it to remain available to themediating discourse of the critic; in-deed he seeks to keep the poem itselfopen at the front end (words with theirmeaning preserved) even as the systemqua system miraculously transfigures itsmaterials so as to seal itself off in itssense-beyond-sense. And the criticstruggles in his painfully analytic wayto account for the poet's linguistic leapsmade by words that multiply their in-ternal dimensions. But the critic can do

1Leo Spitzer, Essays on English and AmericanLiterature, ed. Anna Hatcher (Princeton,1962), pp. 141-142.

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THE POET AND HIS WORK 407it, according to Spitzer. A poet like St.John of the Cross, "content with thestock of words already given by the lan-guage," "multiplies, by repetition, vari-ation, and syntactical disposition, thedensity of the web of semantic interre-lations," until "these words have becomeendowed with a mystical depth whichmakes them appear as new words(though they are, pace Mr. Shapiro, theold words."2 And Spitzer the philologistmust help show us how this phenomenoncan occur, moving step by perceptivestep to trace a movement that no stepscould have managed.Although the critic in this mannerdogs the poet's steps-imposing themeven where the poet has leapt and notstepped-and will to this extent "work inaccord with the poet," still Spitzer tellsus he will do so with no regard for thepoet's approval. The critic apparentlycan be true to the poem and not to thepoet, indeed can be true to the poem bydenying its parentage. Elsewhere Spitzertells us a poem must have "vision" to be"poetic," and he concerns himself withthe peculiarity of a poet's vision, thespecial way he conceives "a world radi-cally different from our everyday andworkaday world of ratiocination andpracticality.""3 ndeed recent critics havebecome increasingly occupied with suchvisions and the poets they characterize.But is this not a way of turning to thepoet from his work? to the poet as seerfrom his work as object? to the humanprime-mover from his artifact, which isonly metaphorically his child? Not sofor Spitzer who, in the manner of thecontextualist critic, is finally concerned,not with the vision behind the work, butwith the vision that is formed as thework, is defined by the new word that isthe work, is identical with the work as

a prosodic whole. For beyond the needfor a poetic vision, as a mere raw ma-terial, is the need for the work to trans-form the merely "poetic" to the "artis-tic," that is, to transform the differentvision of a world to a "work of art . . .characterized by its self-sufficiency andorganic perfection which allow it tostand out as an independent whole." Soif the poet has vision, as critics we mustcenter our interest on how it speaks, notin the poem but as the poem. As a poetspeaking, he speaks the immediacy of hissubjective vision in the immediate ob-jectivity that the poetic system encloses.And his is the only discourse that canunite immediacy with objectivity-though at an enormous discursive price.In view of this unique conjunction, wecan hardly restrict the poem in its work-ings to what the man or his life can tellus in languages other than that of thispoem. Only it can allow us total accessto the vision-and its world-which heas poet creates, and thereby objectivelystructures, for himself and for us all.This view of the poem and its visionas irreducible to its author and his visionleads to our viewing literary criticism asa distinct, analytic, and thus rationallyordered set of disciplines, irreducible tothe disciplines governing the use of bi-ographical and other historical data. Andwe would accordingly justify the needto find a separate place for criticism inthe training of the teacher of literature,who would necessarily find himself in-curring the profound obligations andpleasures of the critic's role as Spitzerconceives of it. But we must not inflateour expectations about what even thebest criticism can accomplish, if itsprimary objective is to make its voice ahigh-fidelity account of the poet's. Interming criticism a rational pursuit, wemay, like Spitzer, too easily assume thatits orderly manner will not inhibit it asit tries to trace the baffling machinationsof the fully activated poetic context.

2Essays on English and American Literature,p. 169.3Essays on English and American Literature,pp. 218-219, for quotations and discussion inthis paragraph.

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408 COLLEGE ENGLISHSpitzer, it will be remembered, sawthat the critic must "patiently and ana-lytically retrace the way from therational to the irrational: a distancewhich the poet may have covered in onebold leap." Thus from sense (the oldwords with their meaning preserved) tothe sense-beyond-sense of the trans-figured new word. What precisely is ir-rational about the operation of poems,if "irrational" is really the proper word?Clearly what Spitzer must mean is thatthe multiple and simultaneous ways inwhich words-their sounds, their mean-

ings, their extension into metaphor,archetype, character, and action-interactwithin the poetic context defy the ra-tional operations of our critical discourse,which after all owes the same obliga-tions to the semantic, syntactic, and logi-cal operations of language as all othernonpoetic discourse does. But to claimthat poetry has ways that resist anyexhaustive explanation by more orderlydiscourse is not really to argue thatpoetry itself is either rational or irra-tional in its nature but that it is of an-other order to which the terms rationaland irrational really do not apply, mayeven be irrelevant. Language can bemanipulated in our best poems in waysthat do serious violence to the ways inwhich we are accustomed to find se-mantics, syntax, and logic operating. Andyet, as the word "manipulated"suggests,it is language whose behavior is finallycontrolled and directed-perhaps morecompletely and efficiently so than anyother form of discourse. But it is an orderof control utterly alien to what we ex-pect to find except in poetry. It is lan-guage in rebellion against the ways inwhich we normally use it as a counterfor things; it is language that subvertsits normal auxiliary function of denyingit own terminal existence in order, in-strumentally, to lead us to the world;language that proclaims itself as sub-stance and its own world of multiplying

meanings as sovereign.4 If we find thatthe law of noncontradiction does notappear to apply to this sovereign worldof language, the fault is not with thatworld but with our too rational insist-ence upon being propositional about it,with our insistence upon measuring aunique discourse by the yardsticks ofour common discourse, which we as-sume is the only kind going. And if weare sensitive enough to find that a dis-course eludes these measuring instru-ments, we charge it with behaving"irrationally," although its behavior isproper, indeed is perfectly proper, toits poetic order as the behavior of ourdiscourse probably never is to its non-

'I wish there were time on this occasion toobserve more precisely this kind of operationin the poetic context. But examples of this sortof movement in language cannot be traced ina moment. My entire study of Shakespeare'sSonnets in my forthcoming volume, A Windowto Criticism:Shakespeare'sSonnets and ModernPoetics, stems from just these miraculous ma-nipulations of language. The Sonnets, of course,are full of them. To cite at random, one cannottry to justify the full sense of "image" in Son-net 3 ("Look in thy glass and tell the face thouviewest") or the juxtaposition of "used" and"lives" in Sonnet 4 ("Unthrifty loveliness, whydost thou spend") or the rumination over thestately ruin that is "mortal" in Sonnet 64("When I have seen by Time's fell hand de-faced") or the bitter "wise world" compoundedof "vile world" and "vilest worms" in Sonnet71 ("No longer mourn for me when I amdead") or the multiplication of those eloquentdemonstrative pronouns in Sonnet 74 ("But becontented. When that fell arrest") or the mag-nificent "hugely politic" as the culmination ofthe anti-political imagery of Sonnet 124 ("Ifmy dear love were but the child of state")without being astounded with all that seems tohappen at a stroke. The way in which thesemovements are earned is hardly logical, thoughthey are indeed earned. And the meanings fi-nally arrived at can hardly be reduced to whatbiography or conventions can tell us any morethan they can be reduced to what a dictionarycan tell us, no matter how sound its historicalprinciples. But neither, alas, can they even bereduced totally to what the language of acritic can tell us as he tries to keep up withall that happens to words as the context newlyrefines and defines itself.

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THE POET AND HIS WORK 409poetic order. For us to judge this way"is like trying a man by the laws ofone country, who acted under those ofanother," if I may borrow from Pope'sdefense of Shakespeareagainst those whowould impose rational, neoclassical rulesupon him.But how, then, should the critic treatthe meaning of this poetic context, pro-vided he can think of the word "mean-ing" without automatically reducing itto the sort of meaning yielded by non-poetic discourse? He may see that, justas the language has interrelations withinit that function in terms of a uniquesystem of controls, so its world reflectsunique interrelations among those ten-sions, even contradictions, that char-acterize our experience at its mostimmediate, felt level. This level we mayterm the existential in its unique fullnessthat denies those generalizing conceptsand propositions that our limited dis-course forces us to impose upon it. Inits dynamics the existential must resistthe fixity that all discourse requires asa condition for its very being. Only thepoetic context can claim the dynamics,the multiple and contradictory tensionswithin its own interrelations, that matchthose of the existential level of ourreality. Yet it also has those elements oforder and control-its own elements, re-sponsive to its own needs-that can fixthis fluid existential level for the per-ception of us all, though without thin-ning its density. The poetic context can,

however, claim freedom from any moregenerally imposed elements of orderand thus from the frozen discourse oflogically marshalled propositions which,however much they may intend to speakof the unique person in the uniquenessof his existence, can finally speak onlya generic tongue addressed to universalinstances, not to instantaneous ones. Allthis is to echo the earlier notion thatonly poetry can be a discourse that unitesthe immediate with the objective, thatmatches the immediacy of subjectiveexperience with the objectivity of thefixed, formal precision that gives poetryits aesthetic nature. Other discourse,necessarily and purposefully mediate,must restrict itself only to the mediatingrational framework imposed upon ex-perience to rob it of its baffling im-mediacy that teases us and our discourseout of thought. But what, then, of thecritic with his mediate discourse andhis immediate poetic object-immediateprecisely because it resists both transla-tion and abstraction? Unless he wishesto compete with the poem by writinga poem of his own-which is probablya way only of producing second-ratecriticism as well as second-rate poetry-how is he to frame his dialect even toapproach his object?5

Perhaps the following oversimplifieddiagram will help frame his problem,even if it only shows his plight as themore desperate. (The arrows apply onlyto the critic's movements.)role mode of language level of

experiencephilosopher/uses propositionaldiscourse /to illuminate/generic, conceptual, mediate

criticpoet /uses/contextual poetic /to illuminate unique, existential, immediate

discourse

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410 COLLEGE ENGLISHAt least this diagram ndicates what thecritic may most want to do, though hismaterialsprevent him from doing so.The critic, borrowing something fromeach, somehow is to work his way backand forth between the languageused bythe poet and that usedby the philosopherand between the experienceseach is toilluminate.Grantedthat the philosopheralso may wish to illuminate he unique,existential level of experience;but hislanguage, nfluencedas it is by its logicalobligations,reduceswhateveraspectsofthe existentialhe means to treat to thecommonly universal evel permitted-in-deedinvented-by the coherentorganiza-tion of his propositional tructure.Whatis being claimed,then, is that the pre-analyticlevel at which we most immedi-ately exist can be fixed or objectifiedonly in the self-complicatingdynamicsof the poetic context; and that any at-tempt to objectify it in a more commonlanguage,responsive o moregeneralde-mands,will-as it trims away the manydivertingdimensionsof poetic discourse-lose the mysteriousuniquenessat theheart of our existence.The critic mustbe awareof these dangers-anddisheart-ened by them since his own languageis so limitedin its dimensions.He alonetakes upon himself the futile, self-de-feating task of using propositionaldis-course in order to reveal its limitations,to shameit before the poetic, exposing

its utter inadequacy o the experience tclaims to talk about. Still propositionaldiscourse s all he hasto use to grasptheuniquenessof contextualdiscourse,evenas the latter is the only discoursethatcan grasp the uniquely existential.Thecritic must try to grasp the contextualwithin the terms of the propositionalwhile trying to avoid the generic, con-ceptual world of experienceto whichthisdiscourse,aspropositional,must lead.Finally,of course,he can no more man-age this feat than the philosophercan,so that the arrow toward the right ofmy diagram-suggestingthat the criticcan move, with his limited discourse,throughthepoeticcontext to the unique-ly existentialn experience-ismisleadingabout his accomplishmentseven if itproperly representshis ambition.He toofinds himself,with all mediators, n theconceptualand generic.But there is al-ways his primary act of faith towardthe object as uniqueand the experienceit illuminates sunique,evenif hisneces-saryobligation o his languagemakesthegesturesomewhatquixotic.So the pro-cedureis muddy and self-defeating;butit does proceed-doggedly and with aclumsy pragmatism hat is his responseto what is theoretically denied him.What he producesmust,within its ownorderlyframework,be rationallyclearerthan the poem in order to justify itsexistence as criticism; yet it must bemuddier than the conceptual order inorder to justify the existenceof poetry.The critic must fail: he must end ina hopelessmiddlegroundof a would-beexistentialphilosophyeven as he recog-nizes that very phraseas an oxymoron.He may haveto soundlike a philosopherobsessed with the unreconcilable con-tradictions n the humancondition,withits irrationality, o that he would differfrom the too rational philosophizerupon poetry only in that his paraphraseswouldbe moretortuous,ormore double-faced and resistant to system. Not thatthe world of the poem is really a chaotic,

'Throughout this essay I am of course as-suming an ideal poem, that is, the perfectionof the poetic context in its workings-a per-fection that in fact rarely if ever occurs. Tothe extent that it does not occur, the critic'sjudgmental function requires him to point outas deficiencies in the poem those places whereits unique language-system fails, where itopens too easily and immediately to his com-mon language, and ours. To the extent thatthe critic must struggle-as, in this essay, I havehim struggling-with a unique language-systemin the totality of its operations, using only hisown inadequate language, he is acknowledgingthe aesthetic perfection of the poem, so thathis strugglescarry an implied evaluation of thehighest sort.

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THE POET AND HIS WORK 411self-contradictory propositional worldthat-through poetic economy and ra-tional waywardness-manages to makeseveral incompatible assertions at once.It merely seems contradictory when thecritic, using the only discourse at hisdisposal, tries to talk rationally about it.The poem, as contextual, no more assertscontradictions than it can assert anythingelse. But through its very being the poemprovokes its enraptured critic to use hislanguage of limited rapture to talk aboutthe poem as if it were making suchassertions, although its meaning cannotbe reduced to them, as the critic wellknows. As with its vision, there is onlythe assertion that the poem struggles inits manifold ways to create by creatingitself as poem. This assertion, again likethe vision, is inaccessible to all criticallanguages though so accessible to thecritic's experience as to make him puthis language to the trial.The contextualist view of poetry hasalways had to make the distinction wehave seen in Spitzer between the oldwords, which the words of the poemwere before this poem and which theyseem to be in this poem until it worksits systematic magic, and the new wordwhich this poem becomes, with its sys-tem working to provide its unique defi-nition. Accordingly, the contextualist hasalso had constantly to worry about howthe mediating critic, with his old words,could hope to approach the new wordthat is the poem any more successfullythan could any other non-poet. Withthis worry we are back to the post-Crocean cul de sac that we found withShapiro leads to the temptation of pur-ism: the declaration of the total inac-cessibility of the poem to criticism. Ofcourse, this is a more comforting viewfor poets than it is for critics, who mustsave what they can, turning from despairin their task even as they resist vainglori-ous pretensions for it.So we may have to be less optimisticthan Spitzer about the power of criti-

cism,with its analytic,unilinearlanguagecreepingin its petty pace,to capturethemultiplelevelsof simultaneitywhich theacrobatic poetic context displays. Andthese limitationsof the power of criti-cism the critic and his readersmustneverforget: we must alwaysremainawareofour need to turn again and again fromthe critic to the poet and his voice,since the critic's total faithfulness-letme repeat-must be to them, providedby the poet's voice we mean only theone thatspeaks n andthroughthe work,as the work. The more remarkablehepoetic context, the more marked thecritic's limitations;but also the moreprivileged his task and the less he canresistit. Though he should know that acommonness of language dictates thatonly a difference of degree, sometimesbarely measurable, eparates he criticalreductionsof a message-hunterrom hisown attemptsto wrestle with his termsto torturethantoward a faithfulrender-ing of the untranslatable,till he strug-gles to prove that failurescan be partialand that proof of their partialityconsti-tutes also a partialvictory over the un-avoidable incapacitiesof his materials.This gives him courage to be the prag-matistwho cantry to come closerratherthan farther even as he sees the all-or-none in his situation:the theoretical m-possibility of his forcing his discourseto be, like himself,morethan the poem'svictim. But he is a better,a more victori-ous critic as he understandshat he is sovictimizedby the poem and by himselfbecause t is the critic'srole to be victim-ized. He is requiredto use the proposi-tional dialect that non-poets and lesserpoets must settle for as he tries tocapture for the rest of us the uniquedialectof the language-systemwhose in-exhaustiblepowers dependon its powerto eludethe graspof the commontongue.

Robert Penn Warren put the matterwith incomparable brilliance in his im-proved version of the fable of Orillo at

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412 COLLEGE ENGLISHthe opening of his well known essay,"Pure and Impure Poetry":. . . the poem is like the monstrousOrillo in Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato.When the sword lops off any memberof the monster,that member is immedi-ately rejoined to the body, and themonster is as formidable as ever. But the

poem is even more formidablethan themonster, for Orillo's adversary finallygained a victory by an astonishingfeatof dexterity: he slashed off both themonster'sarmsandquickas a wink seizedthem and flung them into the river. Thecritic who vaingloriously trusts hismethod to account for the poem, toexhaust the poem, is trying to emulatethis dexterity:he thinks that he, too, canwin by throwing the lopped-off armsinto the river. But he is doomed tofailure.Neither fire nor water will sufficeto prevent the rejoiningof the mutilated

members to the monstroustorso. Thereis only one way to conquerthe monster:you must eat it, bones, blood, skin, pelt,and gristle. And even then the monsteris not dead, for it lives in you, is assimi-lated into you, andyou are different,andsomewhat monstrous yourself, for hav-ing eaten it.So the monster will always win, andthe critic knows this. He does not wantto win. He knows that he must alwaysplay stooge to the monster.All he wantsto do is to give the monster a chance toexhibit again its miraculouspower.

The critic is a critic in that his activityputs the poem to a most severe test: itmust work to make him fail. Conversely,he must knowingly fail to make it work.To the extent that he is a good criticand a faithful reader, that failure willbe a significant measure of its success.

Biography in the Interpretation of PoetryALFRED OWEN ALDRIDGE

ALL STUDENTS F ENGLISHLITERATUREare aware that some critics believe thatthe life of an artist is highly relevant tothe understanding of his literary creationand that another class of critics believesthat a rigid separation should be estab-lished between a writer and his work.In the United States, as we all know,the second point of view is consideredthe property of so-called "new critics."In Europe, the tradition of separation,there known as "formalistic criticism,"developed independently in two litera-tures, the Italian and the Slavic. Fran-cesco de Sanctis in the nineteenthcentury formulated the now familiar dis-tinction between intention and achieve-ment, and his twentieth-century discipleBenedetto Croce further developed argu-ments in favor of the autonomy of art.

In the Slavic countries, formalist criticsof the 1920's in similar fashion postulated"the autonomy rather than the separate-ness of art," particularly defining a poemas "a deflection, not a reflection, of ex-perience."INeither the Germans nor the Frenchseem to have been very receptive to theformalist method, except for a fewGerman classicists and medievalists. TheGermans have remained detached be-cause of their traditional methods ofQuelle geschichte and Entwicklung ges-chichte, and the French because of theirreliance on explication de texte, whichemphasizes biography and background.The true formalist makes no distinc-tion between panegyrical and deroga-

Mr. Aldridge is the authorof Man of Reason:The Life of Thomas Paine and of other studiesof the Enlightenment.

'Criticismn the Slavic iteraturess describedby Victor Erlich in "Limitsof BiographicalApproach," Comparative Literature,6 (1954),137. Extensive nformationon the Europeanbackground may be found in the special issueof the TLS "CriticsAbroad," 7 Sept.1963.