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  • Secrets of the Oracle: A History of Wisdom from Zeno to Yeats
  • Joseph Adamson (bio)
W. David Shaw. Secrets of the Oracle: A History of Wisdom from Zeno to Yeats. University of Toronto Press. 2009. xx, 390. $65.00

The title of Shaw’s study is somewhat deceiving and will certainly disappoint readers hoping for a discussion of the esoteric and the occult. It is more concerned with the conservative aspect of wisdom, the understanding and acceptance of loss, suffering, and death. Shaw does not engage the more oracular underworld of dream and visionary consciousness. Yeats is often referenced, but it is not the visionary side of Yeats that concerns Shaw.

The title is deceiving in another sense. One expects from a history of wisdom from Zeno to Yeats an overview of a range of texts well beyond the book’s predominantly Anglocentric focus on Victorian and modernist British poets. It is true that beyond Zeno the author makes sporadic forays into Shakespeare and American writers such as Dickinson, Frost, Lincoln, and Norman Maclean. But these selections seem random and suited primarily to the author’s personal tastes. The strength of the book lies in its knowledgeable readings of individual authors and writers, primarily English poets and poems: Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins, Yeats, and Eliot.

Shaw acknowledges Northrop Frye’s influence on his work and quotes him extensively throughout. However, more use might have been made of the perspicuity with which the great Canadian critic drew so many distinctions that make a difference. Shaw stops short of a systematic elucidation of many of the terms used throughout: oracle, proverb, aphorism, wit, paradox, and riddle. He is more interested [End Page 663] in texture and nuance than theoretical clarity. One difficulty is that the same writers are discussed at many different points in the book, creating a diffusiveness of focus. A more thoroughgoing treatment of each author individually would have provided a greater conclusiveness in the readings.

Appropriately, Shaw devotes part of a chapter to Frye’s use of wit and oracle. Unfortunately, it is cursory at best. His analysis is quickly abandoned for a gratuitous challenge to the validity of Frye’s disagreement with McLuhan and the latter’s exaggerated distinction between the linearity of the printed book and the simultaneous nature of modern electronic media. McLuhan’s contrast, Shaw pronounces, ‘has stood the test of time.’ His reasons for drawing such a conclusion are not stated: the inference, however, is that since McLuhan wrote on the subject of modern media and we now have even more astonishing and ever expanding modes of digital media, then McLuhan, regardless of the validity of what he argues, carries the day. This is an odd way of thinking and simply avoids addressing Frye’s critique.

Shaw also cannot resist weighing in on Frye’s polemic against the misuse of value judgments. This familiar outcry is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. Frye does not say anywhere that we should not make value judgments. What he does say is that value judgments should not be the basis or aim of any systematic criticism. That Shaw misses this important distinction suggests that Frye’s influence may not have been as deep as he suggests.

There is, indeed, at times an old-fashioned prudishness about Shaw’s own value judgments. He contests, for example, Frye’s conception of criticism and literature as one in which even the Marquis de Sade is a valuable addition to our imaginative and hypothetical universe. Sade, Shaw protests, ‘is hardly a “positive contribution to man’s body of vision.”’ This is an astonishing statement from a nineteenth-century scholar. To settle the argument, one need only turn to Mario Praz’s Romantic Agony.

Shaw acknowledges another colleague at Victoria College as an influence on his work, Eleanor Cook, whose Riddles and Enigma in Literature is a model of the sort of book that Shaw set out to write. Cook draws on the same general area of Frye’s treatment of lyric poetry in Anatomy and elsewhere and reveals the strengths of a gifted critic who has picked up a number of highly suggestive insights from the lumber-room of Frye...

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