The Shaping Powers at Work: Fifteen Essays on Poetic Transmutation by Rudolf Stamm (review)

212 MODERN DRAMA September pages for the reader. I shall nol. attempt here to summarize these two introductory chapters. They are essential to the further reading of the book, if it is to bring about the kind of literary experience that then unfolds. Mr. Falk applies his method of analysis to three well-known novels, all three brief and so more easily manageable-Gide's La Symphonie pastorale, Camus' L'Etranger and Sartre's La Nausee. He uncovers in them three modes of thematic structure, major modes in his eyes. The efficacy of his method is quite clearly mirrored in the richness and accuracy of the characteristics uncovered and the consequent clarity thus thrown on 'the three texts. Yet one feels a little let down perhaps by the brief conclusion which seems in no way to encompass the richness of the anlysis that preceded it or to rise to the level of the opening pages. It is perhaps where formal criticism leaves off that more specula'Live or interpre· tative modes of approach should begin. However that may be, Mr. Falk's book is a most useful, careful and sensitive one, a model of its kind within the methodological limits it defines. GERMAINE BREE University of Wisconsin Institute for Research in the Humanities THE SHAPING POWERS AT WORK: FIFTEEN ESSAYS ON POETIC TRANSMUTATION , by Rudolf Stamm. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1967. The essays in this volume, written betwen 1936 and 1965, all deal with what Coleridge, in Chapter XIII of Biographia Literaria, calls the "esemplastic power" of the imagination, the poet'S power to create totally new, unified works of art from random perceptions of the world. Each essay seeks to define the dynamic principles in the artist's imagination that give a particular shape or order to his work. The basic criticism of the book is that hs essays, covering a dozen figures and nearly thirty years' time, do not form a unity, despite their common theme. Besides discussing the dramaturgy of Shakespeare, Shaw, O'Neill, Eliot, Sartre, and others, Professor Stamm also treats Defoe's poetry and prose, Yeats's poetic method, and the German translation of Hamlet by Flatter. In addition, some of the essays, like the one on Defoe, were written before the publication of significant recent criticism and are now out of date. Yet the author's views are amply supported by textual evidence, and they are invariably sound. The sections on Shakespeare and O'Neill are the most interesting and contain the most useful essays. "Word-Scenery in Macbeth and Some Other Plays," for example, displays remarkable insights into the way in which the imagery of Shakespeare 's speeches effectively transcends the limitations of the Elizabethan stage to create the illusion of physical vastness and universal importance. The world of the play is as much conjured up in the imaginations of the audience as it is represented before them: Shakespeare's word-pictures not only reveal a character's thoughts, but they also communicate off-stage action, locate his scenes in space and time, and evoke a mood that permeates the entire drama. Thus the shaping powers of the audience too are invoked in the complex theatrical experience that constitutes the play. The three essays called "The Achievement of Eugene O'Neill" deal with this dramatist's search for a form that will accommodate his deterministic view of 1969 BOOK REVIEWS 213 man. Many of the early plays are unable to bear the burden of O'Neill's philosophical preoccupation and therefore fail as drama. But by the time he wrote The Iceman Cometh, 1939, the playwright's realistic style had fully matured and become the perfect vehicle for expressing both his extreme skepticism and his complex notions of human personality. With Long Day's Journey into Night this style achieves the highest level of dramatic art. These conclusions are obvious enough to anyone acquainted with O'Neill's plays and recent critical treatments of them, but it mU5t be renrembered that these essays first appeared in English Studies from 1947 to 1959 and can be faulted only for appearing old-fashioned at the present time. Moreover, they do examine those imperatives of O...