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HUMANITIES 123 indulges in another, that of the critic imposing a simplistic argument on a complex poet. Taking his cue from MacDiarmid's self-criticism, he sets out to prove that MacDiarmid failed to establish his 'self' through his poetry. He goes through the canon chronologically to show how every approach MacDiarmid tried proved inadequate. Any praise he offers merely qualifies this condemnation. Thoughtful readers cannot help but take issue with his poorly substantiated verdicts, having their own opinions on MacDiarmid's strengths and weaknesses. As Robert Graves writes in Poetic Unreason, 'the goodness of a poem is, for the reader, a relative quantity dependent ... on the degree of perception by the reader for the various phases of experience reconciled in terms of each other by the poet' (36). Judgments of success and failure in themselves are a weak basis for critical argument, yet Baglow moves on to make similar judgments about MacDiarmid's contemporaries with virtually no detailed substantiation. He treats richly and diversely productive individuals as a flock of unhappy ostriches, burying their heads in inadequate poetry because they 'crave certainty' (187). Baglow's book reaus like the initial draft of a thesis, not only because of its sloppy writing and organization, but because in its last chapter he seems to get a glimmer of the onerous demands of the rich subject he has chosen. He excuses himself, admitting defensively, for example, that his picture of modern culture is 'necessarily and yet perhaps unsatisfactorily sketchy' (192) and that a more detailed comparison of the poets he has discussed would be useful (212). Indeed, he makes scant reference to lines or even titles from poets other than MacDiarmid. His bleak picture is educed, not from their writings, but predominantly from critics like Irving Howe, George Steiner, and Marshall McLuhan and then from modem philosophers. I would counter that, as poets, MacDiarmid, Yeats, and the rest delighted in and utilized as powerful subject matter the widely held perception that profound changes were working through our global culture. When MacDiarmid complains or casts about for better ways to contain the energy that perception generated, he is, primarily, drawing the reader's attention to its vast power. Failure did not stop MacDiarmid, who rebuked his culture for being 'Greedy for productivity and neglecting fertility' (Complete Poems, 766), a rebuke that should ring in Baglow's ears as he pursues his research. (ERICA RIGGS) Anthony Jenkins. The Theatre of Tom Stoppard Cambridge University Press. 189. $29.95 Stoppard has always had good friends among academics. More than twenty years have passed since Ronald Bryden, then reviewing for the London Observer, demonstrated his acumen by detecting on the Edin- 124 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 burgh fringe the 'brilliant' new talent of Torn Stoppard. There have been contrary murmurs, it is true. Sir Alfred Ayer, when called upon to review Jumpers (1972), did not find the playa thoroughly serious challenge to lOgical positivism; however, the late Richard Ellmann, the literary biographer, wrote enthusiastically and warmly of Travesties (1974) with its outrageous parodies and pastiches of Joyce and Wilde. It has been those two plays which have been most fondly regarded - by virtue of their allusive, literate wit. Stoppard has moved away from that early bravura. The authors of the flock of critical monographs which have appeared since 1977 have had to record a changed course, towards a more serious statement of political views and a quieter manner. Keeping up with Stoppard and his varied, shifting output has been enough for some critics. (Ronald Hayman's Tom Stoppard, for instance, went through four revisions between 1977 and 1982.) But this change has raised the question of an accompanying diminishment of quality. Anthony Jenkins has two claims to distinctiveness: he is a theatre man and makes performance the basis for his analyses of the plays; he also argues for an overall view in which Stoppard's career is to be seen as 'all of a piece. Though the style has become more reticent and the statements more direct ...' (xi). No diminishing here: The Real Thing (1982), to some a noticeably smaller play, appears to Jenkins to be a 'major achievement' (171). Jenkins's sensitivity to the work...

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