The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco (review)

Book Reviews101 Timms is not very successful in capturing the essence of Austrian culture, and he fails to dojustice to the Habsburg Empire at war. In the face of a multifarious cultural and religious tradition, and a bewildering array of local, national, and ethnic issues, Timms takes recourse to inadequate British models. In several instances he puts on a certain air of insular superiority. Since he does not seem to be able to penetrate to the core of an all-pervading Baroque tradition with its metaphysical dimensions (of which even theatricality is an integral component), he views Vienna all from below. But to indicate on the basis of an anecdote that the English were far more hygienically minded than the Viennese is doing more than one's patriotic duty. Timms seems to bewail the fact that Austrian officers were underpaid; yet he forgets that only a Colonial power could have an officers corps that enjoyed servants, special privileges, and a certain degree of luxury. Ironically, the bitter ethnic strife at the turn of the century was the outcome of a rather tolerant attitude of the Crown toward ethnic manifestations in contrast to the forced denationalization of, for example, the English as regards the Scottish and Welsh, not to mention London's policy toward the Irish. To talk about "medieval" conditions prevailing in Austria begs the question in view of the fact that even today a Catholic may not aspire to the throne of the United Kingdom. In reading about Kraus' castigation of Austro-Hungarian brutalities during the war I wondered which country of the Entente would have tolerated such protests from one of its own citizens; brutalities during World War I were not a one-way affair. The chauvinist Vladimir Matijevic developed the following scenario for conquered Southern Hungary: as part of the program to slavicise the region some of the villages were to be set ablaze, and the native populations were to be, in part, executed, and, in part, allowed to flee. To understand the post-war social and political radicalization that took place in Austria (and Germany) one needs to know that a million persons starved to death in the senseless post-war blockade (until July 1919) imposed by the Entente. Since Timms does not distinguish between "ecclesiastic," "clerical," "christian-socialist," "papal," etc., he is unable to convey the complexity of certain issues: he totally overlooks the fact that the Austrian bishops condemned in the 1890s anti-Semitism and waged a bitter struggle behind the scene with Lueger on account of his Jew-baiting. All in all, this study comes close to being a definitive one in regard to Kraus' life, personality, and works. What this book lacks is the capacity to see the truth of the other side: its author has failed to project himself into a mental, emotional, and visual world so different from his own. Perhaps reading Victor Bibl and an immersion into the great cultural histories of Friedrich Heer would have made the difference. PETER HORWATH Arizona State University LEWIS TURCO. The New Book ofForms: A Handbook ofPoetics. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1986. 280 p. Lewis Turco's The Book ofForms, first published by Dutton in 1968, was a bargain for those bent on ascending or just admiring Parnassus. It was not only handy (its 160 pages formed a slim book 41Zi ? 71Zi ? %"), but also cheap 102Rocky Mountain Review (initially, $1.65) and encyclopedic (over 175 verse forms were described). Appropriately enough, about the year of Big Brother, The Book ofForms was allowed to go out of print. Until recently, then, professional or tyro poets, teachers, and scholars who wished to discover the nature of, say, a cywydd Uosgyrnog (a Welsh syllabic form) had to scour through the scree of valuable but cywydd llosgyrnog-less hardbound and paperback books for concise descriptions of poetic forms. Among hardbound books they might refer to Shapiro and Beum's A Prosody Handbook (Harper and Row, 1965), Sara deFord and Clarinda Harriss Lott's Forms of Verse: British and American (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971), Josef Malof's Manual of English Meters (rpt., Greenwood Press, 1978) and T V. F. Brogan's English Versification, 1570-1980...