Words for Music Perhaps

ELT 44 : 2 2001 cism may resemble art itself, which, as a great writer proclaimed, consists largely in laying it on thick. If there is a region in which the work may be found wanting, it is its audacious foray into art history. For the author is not content to trace his idea in European literature but feels called on to display the mess in painters from Turner to Degas. It is always risky to set down the first of anything under the sun, but Trotter takes the qualified plunge: "If the modern aesthetic whose history I am attempting to reconstruct can be thought to have had a beginning (a mythical origin), this was it: the interest taken [in Ruskin's Modern Painters V (I860)] in the way things have of lying about in the foregrounds of some of [Turner's] most luminous paintings and sketches." Nor is chapter 1, "Turner's Litter," devoid of attention to what came before: the artist's own pronouncements on the "vulgarisms" of Dutch landscape painting and the resemblance of a Turner figure to one in a Teniers genre scene are given due attention. But the entire history of landscape and townscape painting stands behind Turner: how can one discuss his Covent Garden cabbage leaves without mentioning their continuity with and deviation from the copious productions of the eighteenth-century Covent Garden group? Is the seriousness of mess in Canaletto's scenes of work (the Stonemason's Yard, of course, but even better, his San Nicolo di Castello) to be ignored? And for illusion-destroying messes, painters have long believed that fires and their aftermaths—as well as ruins both classical and contemporary —make for poignant illustration: what mess more noble than Bellotto's Ruins of Old Kreuzkirche, Dresden? It would be footless to protest that one is dealing specifically with the "modern aesthetic" of mess, since what distinguishes the modern type is precisely the desideratum to be explored. In some book that remains to be written, loving attention will be given to Rembrandt's etchings and Hobbema's paintings of organic farmhouses, Brueghel's and Steen's cluttered tabletops, Chardin's odorous kitchens, and yes, Hogarth's London rubbish. For the later story, we can move here through Courbet, Manet and Cézanne to the fine closing chapter, "Degas's Studio." Avrom Fleishman Johns Hopkins University Retired Words for Music Perhaps W. B. Yeats. Words for Music Perhaps: Manuscript Materials. David R. Clark, ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. xlviii + 626 pp. $72.50 228 BOOK REVIEWS W. B. YEATS'S Words for Music Perhaps was published in 1932 by the Cuala Press. It included 22 independent poems and a further set of 24 poems collected under the title "Words for Music Perhaps." Some of the poems had seen previous publication in the years 1929-1931. The drafts of these 46 poems are the subject of the volume under review. David R. Clark, the editor, has added two other poems; one is "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop," which became part of the "Words for Music Perhaps" section when the whole collection was merged with the poems in The Winding Stair (1929) to become The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933). The drafts and manuscripts of the poems in the 1929 Winding Stair volume are published in a separate volume of the Cornell Yeats series, also edited by David R. Clark (1995). The second additional poem is "Crazy Jane on the King," which exists only in form of several drafts and was not published during Yeats's lifetime. Clark reproduces almost all manuscript and several typescript versions in photo-facsimile; facing these are the results of his heroic labors, the transcriptions. The transcriptions do not always render faithfully what one can see in the facsimiles; Clark points out that often he had to employ what he calls "interpretive 'translation'" because of Yeats's difficult and abbreviated handwriting. Of every poem, the several versions (or more precisely, the different versions in various manuscripts) are given in the chronological order of the manuscripts, the last being the one closest to the Cuala version of 1932. In some cases Clark prints the collected galley proofs. The...