Leo Lowenthal
         Sociology of Literature in Retrospect
         I soon discovered that I was quite isolated in my attempts to
            pursue the sociology of literature. In any case, one searched
            almost in vain for allies if one wanted to approach a literary text
            from the perspective of a critical theory of society. To be sure,
            there were Franz Mehring's articles which I read with
            interest and profit; but despite the admirable decency and the
            uncompromising political radicalism of the author, his writings
            hardly went beyond the limits of a socialist journalist who wrote
            in essentially the same style about literature as about political
            and the economy. George Lukács had not yet published his impressive
            series of essays on Marxist aesthetics and interpretation of
            literature. Of course, I was deeply touched and influenced by his
            fine little book, The Theory of the Novel (1920), which I
            practically learned by heart. Besides Levin Schücking's small
            volume on the sociology of literary taste, the only other major
            influence I can recall was George Brandes' monumental work on
            the literary currents of the nineteenth century.
            Nonetheless, I had the courage, not to say hubris, to plan an
            ambitious, socially critical series on French, English, Spanish,
            and German literature, the beginning of which was to be formed by
            the above-mentioned studies. My attention was especially focused on
            the writes and literary schools which the German literary
            establishment either punished by total silence (for example,
            "Young Germany" and Friedrich Spielhagen) or raised up
            into the clouds of idealistic babble (Goethe and the Romantics) or
            relegated to quasi-folkloric anthropology (C. F. Meyer and
            Gottfried Keller).
            In these studies, I limited myself to the narrative forms of
            literature; for reasons which I hold to be sociologically and
            artistically valid, I believe that novels and stories represent the
            most significant aspect of German literature in the nineteenth
            century. While I in no way feel ashamed of these documents of my
            youth, I am conscious of their weaknesses. If I were to write them
            over again, I would certainly be less sure of some of the direct
            connections I drew between literature and writers on the one hand,
            and the social infrastructure on the other. In later publications I
            attempted to analyze with greater circumspection the mediation
            between substructure and superstructure, between social currents
            and ideologies; but my views on the social world and the necessity
            to combine social theory and literary analysis have not changed in
            any essential way. In the last decades the sociology of literature
            has become progressively more fashionable. The writings of my
            contemporaries have often amazed me because some frequently
            in unnecessarily complicated and esoteric language are so
            concerned with "mediation" that the connections between
            social being and social consciousness became almost obscured.
             
            Leo Lowenthal is professor emeritus of sociology at the University
            of California, Berkeley. He is also professor emeritus at the
            University of Frankfurt in West Germany. His collected works have
            been published in five volumes in German (1980-87) and in a
            parallel English edition. Lowenthal's autobiographical
            writings, edited by Martin jay, will appear in the fall of 1987
            under the title An Unmastered Past.Lowenthal's present
            studies deal with German postmodernism. Ted. R. Weeksis a graduate
            student at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in
            imperial Russian history.
Arnold I. Davidson
         Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality
         Some years ago a collection of historical and philosophical essays
            on sex was advertised under the slogan: Philosophers are interested
            in sex again. Since that time the history of sexuality has become
            an almost unexceptionable topic, occasioning as many books and
            articles as anyone would ever care to read. Yet there are still
            fundamental conceptual problems that get passed over imperceptibly
            when this topic is discussed, passed over, at least in part,
            because they seem so basic or obvious that it would be time badly
            spent to worry too much about them. However, without backtracking
            toweard this set of problems, one will quite literally not know
            what one is writing the history of when one writes a history of
            sexuality.
            An excellent example of some of the most sophisticated current
            writing in this field can be found in Western Sexuality,a
            collection of essays that resulted from a seminar conducted by
            Philippe Ariès at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
            in 1979-80.1 As one would expect, Western Sexualityis characterized
            by a diversity of methodological and historiographical
            approaches social history, intellectual history, cultural
            history (which one historian I know refers to as the history of bad
            ideas), historical sociology, the analysis of literary texts, and
            that distinctive kind of history practiced by Michel Foucault and
            also in evidence in the short essay by Paul Veyne. One perspective
            virtually absent from this collection is the history of science,
            and since I believe that the history of science has a decisive and
            irreducible contribution to make to the history of sexuality, it is
            not accident that I am going to focus on that connection. But the
            history of sexuality is also an area in which one's
            historiography or implicit epistemology will stamp, virtually
            irrevocably, one's first-order historical writing. It is an
            arena in which philosophical and historical concerns inevitably run
            into one another.
             
            1. Philippe Ariès and Adnré Béjin, eds., Western Sexuality:
            Practice and Percept in Past and Present Times(Oxford, 1985).
             
            Arnold I. Davidson,a coeditor of ,is assistant
            professor of philosophy and member of the Committees on General
            Studies in the Humanities and on the Conceptual Foundations of
            Science at the University of Chicago. His previous contribution to
            ,"How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A
            Reading of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of
            Sexuality," appeared in the Winter 1987 issue.
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels
         Against Theory 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction
         In "Against Theory" we argued that a text means what
            its author intends it to mean. We argued further that all attempts
            to found a method of interpretation on a general account of
            language involve imagining that a text can mean something other
            than what its author intends. Therefore, we concluded, all such
            attempts are bound to fail; there can be no method of
            interpretation. But the attempt to imagine that a text can mean
            something other than what its author intends is not restricted to
            writers interested in interpretive method. In fact, the denial that
            meaning is determined by intention is central to projects as
            indifferent to method as hermeneutics and deconstruction. For
            hermeneutics, a text means that its author intends but also
            necessarily means more, acquiring new meanings as readers apply it
            to new situations. For deconstruction, an author can never succeed
            in determining the meaning of a text; every text participates in a
            code that necessarily eludes authorial control. Since both these
            projects are committed to the view that a text from mean something
            other than what its author intends, they are also committed to the
            view that a text derives its identity from something other than
            authorial intention. The text is what it is, no matter what meaning
            is assigned to it by its author and no matter how that meaning is
            revised by its readers.
            What gives a text its autonomous identity? On most accounts, the
            answer is linguistic conventions the semantic and syntactic
            rules of the language in which the text is written. One of our aims
            in the present essay is to criticize the particular notions of
            textual identity advanced by hermeneutics and deconstruction, but
            our more general target is the notion that there can be any
            plausible criteria of textual identity that can function
            independent of authorial intention. Because there can be no such
            criteria, nonmethodological versions of interpretive theory are as
            incoherent as methodological ones and, like the methodological
            ones, should be abandoned.
             
            Steven Knapp is associate professor of English at the University of
            California, Berkeley, and is the author of Personification and the
            Sublime: Milton to Coleridge.Walter Benn Michaels,professor of
            English at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of
            The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism.
Robert Zaller
         Philip Guston and the Crisis of the Image
         The twentieth century began with the deconstruction of the image,
            as it is ending with the effort to restore it. Cubism, dada, and
            abstract expressionism took apart what, in their various ways, pop
            art, magic realism, and neoexpressionism have tried to put back
            together. Tonality in music and narrative in literature have
            undergone similar change.1 What has been at stake in each case has
            been the redefinition of a center, a normative or ordering
            principle as such. Yeats intuited this general phenomenon in his
            famous observation that "the center cannot hold," and
            though whether one applauds or, with Yeats, condemns the result, it
            is undeniable that the crisis of contemporary culture has been in
            large part experienced as a deprivation of norms.
            This sense of deprivation has been most apparent in the plastic
            arts. The fashioning of images has been one of the primary impulses
            of human art. It has been the basis of most systems of visual
            representation and constitutes the earliest record we have off art
            itself. Its loss or abandonment has been in good part responsible
            for the bewilderment and hostility much of the general public
            continues to express toward modern art.
            The experience of this loss, however, has not been confined to the
            public alone. For many artists, the sense of modern art's
            expressive potential has been tempered by an anxiety about its
            ultimate direction.2 For these artists, the image had not been
            transcended but rather rendered inaccessible, and implicitly or
            explicitly they sought its restoration. At the same time, they were
            keenly aware that there could be no return to exhausted modes of
            representation, no looking back except as parody or quotation.3
             
            1. Among the studies comparing changes across the arts in the early
            twentieth century are Georges Edouard Lemaître, From Cubism to
            Surrealism in French Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), and Bram
            Dijkstra, The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism, Stieglitz, and
            the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Princeton, N.J.,
            1969). More recently, visualization in cubist art and relativity
            theory has been compared in Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth
            Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art(Princeton, N.J.,
            1983). For a general overview, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of
            Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983). Marxist
            critics, notably Walter Benjamin, have long insisted on the
            relationship between modernism in the arts and the crisis of the
            traditional order.
            2. This is clearly visible in the work and writing of pioneers such
            as Kandinsky and Klee or, to take a later case, Adolph Gottlieb.
            The correspondence between Kandinsky and Schönberg is illuminating
            as well.
            3. Much of the neoimagistic art of the past twenty-five years falls
            into these categories, and thus signals a prolongation rather than
            a resolution of the crisis. Pop art was clearly an art of parody,
            while work of an artist such as Malcolm Morley might almost be
            taken as an illustration of Benjamin's thesis about the work
            of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. His
            "imitations," like those of Robert Lowell in verse,
            betray a deep anxiety about mastery and tradition. Much the same
            can be said for such musical compositions as Lukas Foss'
            "Baroque Variations" and "Phorion" or
            Luciano Berio's "Sinfonia," to name but a random
            few among many.
             
            Robert Zaller is professor of history and head of the department of
            history and politics at Drexel University. He was formerly on the
            faculties of Queens College (CUNY), the University of California at
            Santa Barbara, and the University of Miami. His books include The
            Parliament of 1621: A Study in Constitutional Conflictand The
            Cliffs of Solitude: A Reading of Robinson Jeffers.
James Lawler
         Daemons of the Intellect: The Symbolists and Poe
         Poe's influence on the Symbolists has been traced on many
            occasions, though not in detail. The classical study in English is
            Eliot's "From Poe to Valéry," a Library of
            Congress lecture delivered three years after Valéry's death.2
            Eliot defines Poe as irresponsible and immature irresponsible
            in style, immature in vision. He had, Eliot comments, "the
            intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty";
            "all of his ideas seem to be entertained rather than
            believed" ("FPV," p. 335). How, then, we ask, did
            he hoax the sophisticated French? Although Eliot raises the issue
            of their relative ignorance of English, he prudently does not make
            much of it: after all, we know that Baudelaire spent seventeen
            years on the tales, Mallarmé still longer on the poems thirty
            years for the definitive text; while Valéry, to whom Baudelaire and
            Mallarmé left little to translate, managed a version of the
            Marginalia.Each might have said, as Mallarmé did in 1885, that he
            had learned English for one sole reason: "to read Poe
            better."3 In the matter of linguistic competence, then, Eliot
            is content to remark that the French poets "were not
            disturbed by weaknesses of which we are very much aware"
            ("FPV," p. 336). He underlines, however, that Poe
            showed different facets of himself to each of his readers who
            adopted him in various ways: Baudelaire focused on the Poète
            maudit,Mallarmé on the prosodist, and Valéry on the theoretician in
            whom he discovered "a method and an occupation that of
            observing himself write" ("FPV," p. 341). So Poe
            had a diverse effect, which Eliot accepts more readily in respect
            of Baudelaire and Mallarmé than he does of Valéry. To explain this
            last case which intrigues him especially, he introduces a paradox:
            "with Poe and Valéry, extremes meet," he writes,
            "the immature mind playing with ideas because it had not
            developed to the point of convictions, and the very adult mind
            playing with ideas because it was too skeptical to hold
            convictions" ("FPV," p. 341).
            Thus Eliot damns Poe with faint praise. The distance between cause
            and effect, master and disciples is so vast that it can only be
            thought the product of monstrous error. And yet "from Poet to
            Valéry" and the complementary studies in English or French of
            the past thirty-five years neglect some deeper factors that drew
            the Symbolists. Misreadings there were no doubt since such are in
            the nature of things, but these authors were sensitive to currents
            that others overlooked. They attempted to go to first principles,
            not only because Poe was "ce poète incomparable, ce
            philosophe non refute" (Baudelaire)4 and, therefore, worthy
            of scrutiny, but because they held him to be vital to their future
            thought. In a period of great social and aesthetic change they
            found a figure of radical independence classicist, visionary,
            logician supreme whom they explained by convergent tropes of
            daemonic power. In this regard the newly published correspondence
            of Mallarmé and the massive Valéry notebooks have added to our
            knowledge. I would like, then, to consider the nature of
            Poe's action, this submerged dialogue in time and successive
            rewriting by which "à l'égal de nos maître les
            plus chers ou vénérés," as Mallarmé put it5 he entered
            the mainstream of French poetry.
             
            2. The lecture was later published in Hudson Review2 (Autumn 1949):
            335; all further references to this work, abbreviated
            "FPV," will be included in the text.
            3. Mallarmé, "Autobiographie," Oeuvres completes,p.
            662.
            4. Baudelaire, "Le Poème du hachisch," Oeuvres
            complètes,1:427.
            5. Mallarmé, "Scolies," Oeuvres completes,p. 223.
             
            James Lawler,Edward arson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of
            French at the University of Chicago, has written extensively on
            nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry. Among his books
            are Lecture de Valéry, The Language of French Symbolism, The Poet
            as Analyst,and René Char: The Myth and the Poem.He is currently
            completing a study of Buadelaire's Les Fleurs du mal.
Conrad L. Rushing
         "Mere Words": The Trial of Ezra Pound
         The charge of treason and the judgment of insanity have left
            questions that invariably intrude on an assessment of Pound's
            life and work. Critics frequently adopt a strategy of separating
            the life and the work, but tactical review is often necessary.
            There is a lightness in Pound's writing that speaks of a
            being detached from the concerns of the world. Yet with his
            economic theory of social credit, his political and racial views,
            as well as his concern for other writers, he is of the
            world inthe world and part of it. He was decidedly not tied
            to geography. He had no region or period, and he was as comfortable
            in Confucian China as in Dante's Florence or twentieth-
            century Rome. He could work anywhere. He wrote The Pisan
            Cantoswhile jailed in Italy. The Cantos were published while he was
            in a mental wart at St. Elizabeths, yet a court found that he could
            not understandthe charges against him. Can such an impairment and
            such achievement occur at the same time? If you say no, then what
            of the treason? Did he feign madness to escape punishment? Could
            Pound have been convicted of treason?
            In this paper, I intend to examine what has been loosely referred
            to as "the trial of Ezra Pound" and to show that
            Pound's case should have been brought to trial within one or
            two years after his commitment to St. Elizabeths because he had a
            reasonable chance of being found not guilty of treason; even if
            found guilty, the circumstances in mitigation of a long prison term
            would have been so evident that he would have likely spent
            considerably less time in prison than he spent locked up at the
            mental institution. I will do this, in part, by reviewing the
            similarities and differences between Pound's case and three
            other treason cases that came to trial within the first years after
            World War II. The English case, Rex v. Joyce,was tried shortly
            after the close of the war and well before Pound's competency
            hearing on 13 February 1945.3 The law applied in Joyce would have
            led Pound's lawyer to seek some postponement of trial until
            the American courts decided whether to follow the English lead. The
            other two cases involve the Americans, Douglas Chandler and Robert
            Best, employees of German radio, who were indicted with Pound in
            1943.
             
            3. William Joyce was an American who came to be known as
            "Lord Haw Haw." He was hanged at Wandsworth, England, 3
            Jan. 1946. He was the best known of the "radio
            traitors." He began his programs, "This is Jairmany
            calling," and would then prophesy the destruction of English
            towns and cities. The name "Lord Haw Haw" was created
            by the English journalist, Jonah Barrington, to ridicule Joyce and
            to make him appear idiotic.
             
            Conrad L. Rushing is a Superior Court Judge in California and an
            occasional lecturer in law at the University of California,
            Berkeley. He teaches a course in law and literature at the
            California Judges College and is a founder of the Sane Jose Poetry
            Center.
William M. Chace
         Ezra Pound: "Insanity," "Treason," and Care
         The British journalist Christopher Hitchens has recently noted that
            the extraordinary excitement created by l'affaire Pound,an
            excitement sustained for now some forty years, is partly the result
            of having no fewer than three debates going on whenever the
            poet's legal situation and his consequent hospitalization are
            discussed. As Hitchens says, those questions are: "First, was
            Pound guilty of treason? If not, or even if so, was he mad? Third,
            was he given privileged treatment for either condition?"1
             
            I propose to discuss all three issues in a way that fairly reflects
            the fact that I am neither a physician nor a lawyer. What I know of
            the state of medical expertise, both today and in the period of
            time from 1943 (when Pound was indicted on nineteen counts of
            treason) to 1958 (when he left St. Elizabeths), leads me, as a
            layman, to believe that there is an enormous latitude of
            understanding among medical professionals as to the precise meaning
            of "insanity." At one extreme, for some distinguished
            physicians, the term means almost nothing. They see it as a legal
            term and as therefore irrelevant to them; some of them follow the
            line of reasoning developed by Thomas Szasz over his long writing
            career, namely that "mental illness" if not illness in
            any ordinary sense of the term.2 For other medical practitioners,
            it does mean something, but only when it is redefined into much
            smaller subcategories and enriched with much more precise
            terminology, and when the given patient and his full range of
            circumstances are considered.
            What I know of the legal understanding of insanity (and here I
            speak as a Californian who has seen some of the most unusual kinds
            of terrible crime explained away as "madness" while
            other, apparently similar, crimes have not been eligible for that
            designation) is that there has been and is now little firm
            agreement about "insanity" or "madness."
            Equally competent juries and courts have been able to set down
            findings that are more or less plausible on their face but do not
            seem to comport at all with each other. I tentatively conclude that
            whatever "insanity" now is in the United States, and
            whatever it was when Pound was found unfit to stand trial in 1945,
            the standard is not the lucid simplicity of the M'Naghten
            test, namely, the ability of the accused to understand the
            difference between "right" and "wrong."
            Human mind, self-awareness, and motivations are vastly more
            complicated than such a test would imply.
             
            1. Christopher Hitchins, "American Notes," Times
            Literary Supplement,21 Oct. 1983, p. 1160.
            2. See Thomas Szasz, Insanity (New York, 1987) for a synthesis of
            his ideas as formulated in some eighteen books.
             
            William M. Chace is professor of English and Vice Provost for
            Academic Planning and Development at Stanford University. He is
            author of The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
            (1973), Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics(1980), and
            scholarly essays on writers including Wyndham Lewis, D. H.
            Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, and James Joyce. He is now working on a
            study of the ways in which American culture in this century has
            been subjected to critical analysis.
Richard Sieburth
         In Pound We Trust: The Economy of Poetry/The_Poetry_of_Economics
         … Pound's Imagist economy often mixes metaphors of
            capitalization with metaphors of expenditure. Words, he writes in
            an early essay, are like cones filled with energy, laden with the
            accumulated (or capitalized?) "power of tradition."
            When correctly juxtaposed, these words "radiate" or
            "discharge" or spend this energy (SP,p. 34), just as
            the Image (in one of Pound's most famous formulations)
            releases "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant
            of time" (LE,p. 4). The precise relation of accumulation to
            expenditure in Pound's Imagism is never really elaborated.
            For clarification one would probably have to look toward his
            theories of sexuality, which hint at a proportion between spermatic
            retention and intensity of ejaculation. "The liquid solution
            [of sperm and/or thought]," he writes in his 1921
            "Postscript" to Gourmont's Natural Philosophy of
            Love,"must be kept at right consistency; one would say the
            due proportion of liquid to viscous particles, a good circulation;
            the actual quality of the sieve or separator, counting perhaps most
            of all; the balance of ejector and retentive media" (PD,p.
            214).13 Similar physiological metaphors will shape Pound's
            later economic writings of the thirties and forties. Money will
            function as a kind of "sieve" or
            "separator" (depending on how porous its mediation is),
            and usury will be described as malevolent form of retention, an
            "obstruction" to the proper circulation of money and
            goods. Economic justice will therefore involve the institution of a
            correct "balance" or "measure" between
            accumulation and expenditure, between "ejector" and
            "retentive media." From Pound's later Confucian
            perspective, excess in either direction whether it take the
            form of "smeary hoarding" or extravagant
            squandering always leads to evil and disorder.14
            Excess is of course what Pound's Imagist economy most
            militantly seeks to eliminate from contemporary poetry. Pound
            writes in 1912, "As to Twentieth-century poetry … it will be
            harder and saner … &lsquo;nearer the bone.' It will be as
            much like granite as it can be … It will not try to seem forcible
            by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have fewer painted
            adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it…. I want it austere,
            direct, free from emotional slither" (LE,p. 12). The
            vocabulary of this passage combines a discernibly American,
            puritanical suspicion of ornament with a functionalist asceticism
            that we have come to recognize as a characteristic feature of the
            international style of high modernism.15 From a postmodernist
            vantage point, however, we might well question just why the
            category of excess or surplus represented by "rhetorical
            din," "luxurious riot," or "emotional
            slither" should be so inevitably construed as negative or
            uneconomic. Georges Bataille, for one, provides a provocative
            refutation of this ideology in La Part maudite.The economics he
            there seeks to define (which is at the same time a linguistics, an
            erotics, and an anthropology) would instead be based on the
            valorization of excess, or of what he terms "la dépense
            improductive," nonproductive expenditure. Bataille's
            "economy of excess" turns on "la perte du
            proper," that is, the loss of the literal (or
            "proper") to the figurative, the loss of purity (or
            propriety) to scatological defilement, and the loss of personal
            identity (one's "proper" self) to a sacred
            expropriation by the Other.
             
            13. See also Kevin Oderman's comments on the importance of
            delay and deferral to Pound's troubadour "eroticism of
            dalliance" in " &lsquo;Cavalcanti': That the Body
            Is Not Evil," Paideuma 11 (Fall 1982): 257-79. If, according
            to Pound, the "classic aesthetic" involves
            "plastic to coitus, plastic plus immediate
            satisfaction," Cavalcanti's cult of Amor instead
            privileges mental (or spermadic) reterntion, "the fine thing
            held in the mind," that is, erotic or mnemonic
            capitalization. See LE,pp. 150-53.
            14. Rabaté, Language, Sexuality, and Ideology,pp. 217-23, similarly
            links Pound's "Postscript" to Gourmont to his
            later economics.
            15. Herbert Schneidau, Ezra Pound: The Image and the Real (Baton
            Rouge, La., 1969), pp. 177-78.
             
            Richard Sieburth is associate professor of French at New York
            University. He is the author of Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy
            de Gourmont(1978) and translator of Friedrich Hölderlin's
            Hymns and Fragments(1984). He is currently preparing an edition of
            Pound's writings on France.
Mark Roskill
         Van Dyck at the English Court: The Relations_of_Portraiture_and
            Allegory
         Anthony van Dyck's period of service to the Stuart court
            stretches from 1632, when he was appointed "principalle
            Paynter in ordinary to their Majesties" and knighted, to his
            death at the end of 1641. After an earlier visit of a few months,
            beginning in December 160, van Dyck had gone to Italy to improve
            himself; there he had defected from the service of James I. On his
            return to England this was forgiven, and in the early years he was
            mainly employed in making portraits of the royal family and
            household. Later he was again absent from England, spending an
            entire year beginning in July 1634 back in Antwerp. During the last
            six years van Dyck spent in England, his clientele widened further;
            it is chiefly the portraits of this latter period that I will
            consider here.
            These portraits have been approached and evaluated in two basic
            ways. First of all, they have been taken to demonstrate the
            adaptation of van Dyck's preexisting skills, especially his
            command of the "grand style," to the requirements of a
            court and aristocracy which prized grace and elegance as hallmarks
            of breeding and quality, and which at the same time welcomed the
            trappings of grandeur and the subtleties of variation, in costume,
            post, and gesture, that the artist could build into his
            presentation for their predilection.1 Second, where critical
            considerations have come up, these paintings have been evaluated in
            terms of whether the adoption of mannered and decorative traits now
            betokens a decline from the artist's previous work, or
            whether it represents rather a different kind of achievement which
            gave rise, at its best, to equally outstanding successes in
            conveying refined and subtly enhanced distinction.2
            But both these approaches agree in finding no intellectual content
            in the works in question, either of van Dyck's own devising
            or based on interests and concerns in which his subjects partook.
            This absence of implication to the portraits is seem as fitting
            with thea rtist's tendency to make creative decisions on an
            ad hoc basis, as evidenced by his preference for rapidly made
            drawings from the life over the use of oil sketches and by the
            pentimenti that his finished works reveal.3 It is also seen as
            fitting with the whole pattern cultural as well as social and
            economic of his relationship to the Stuart aristocrazy, for
            which these images were fashioned.
             
            1. See esp. Ellis Water house, Painting in Britain, 1530-1790
            (Harmondsworth, 1953), pp. 49-50 (where the basic documentation for
            the years in England is given); and cf. more recently Christopher
            Brown, Van Dyck(Oxford, 1982 , p. 192 (on Lord John and Lord
            Bernard Stuart).
            2. See, for example, Erik Larsen, intro. to L'opera completa
            di Van Dyck 1626-1641 (Milan, 1980), p. 8 and Oliver Millar, intro.
            to exhibition catalog Van Dyck in England(National Portrait
            Gallery, London, Nov. 1982-Mar. 1983), p. 27 and esp. p. 31
            (attributing a decline, only toward the close of a long career, to
            illness and the pressure of commissions).
            3. See Millar, Van Dyck in England,p. 31, citing the miniaturist
            Richard Gibson on the "Sketches made from the life,"
            mainly lost, and cat. no. 12, on the pentimenti found in the 1633
            Charles I on Horseback.
             
            Mark Roskill is professor of the history of modern art at the
            University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His most recent book is The
            Interpretation of Cubism (1985). Previous contributions to Critical
            Inquiry include "On the Recognition and Identification of
            Objects in Paintings" (Summer 1977) and "A Reply to
            John Reichert and Stanley Fish" (Winter 1979).
Alan Shapiro
         The New Formalism
         […] Open the pages of almost any national journal or magazine, and
            where ten years ago one found only one or another kind of free
            verse lyric, one now finds well rhymed quatrains, sestinas,
            villanelles, sonnets, and blank verse dramatic monologues or
            meditations.1 In a recent issue of the New Criterion,Robert Richman
            describes this rekindled interest in formal verse among younger
            poets as a return to the high seriousness, eloquence, and technical
            fluency that characterized the best achievements of American poetry
            forty years ago.2 As Mr. Richman numbers me among the younger poets
            working in form, I ought to be as cheered by these developments as
            he is. Yet I am anything but cheered. And not because I don't
            want to belong to club that would have me as a member, though this
            may be a part of it; but because I suspect that what Mr. Richman
            hails as a development may in fact be nothing but a mechanical
            reaction, and that the new formalists, in rejecting the sins of
            their experimental fathers may end up merely repeating the sings of
            their New Critical grandfathers, resuscitating the stodgy,
            overrefined conventions of the "fifties poem,"
            conventions which were of course sufficiently narrow and
            restrictive to provoke rebellion in the first place. Any reform,
            carried to uncritical extremes by lesser talents who ignore rather
            than try to assimilate the achievements of their predecessors, will
            itself require reformation. If James Wright, say, or Robert Bly,
            produced more than their fair share of imitators, if they even
            imitate themselves much of the time, they nonetheless have written
            poems all of us can and ought to learn from. Maybe we have had too
            much of the "raw" in recent years. But the answer to
            the raw is not the overcooked. Besides, it's dangerous to
            think we have to choose exclusively between free verse and form.
            The wider the range of styles and forms that we avail ourselves of,
            the more enriched, more flexible and inclusive our expressive
            resources will be. It's as important for those who work in
            form to be familiar with the experiments and innovatins of the last
            hundred years as it is for those who work in looser measures to be
            familiar with traditional verse forms that go back beyond the
            twentieth century.
             
            Alan Shapiro's most recent book of poems, Happy Hour,was
            published this year.
