At Home in Time: Forms of Neo-Augustanism in Modern English Poetry by Patrick Deane (review)

200 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 'hack/ or as a more professionally committed architect. At this time also he gave up any thought of taking orders. Nevertheless, the notebook is largely given over to vocabulary-building exercises, quotations of recognized masters of language (the editors note, in a piquant phrase, that Palgrave's The Golden Treasury became 'a supremely canonical source'), and experimental phrasings. Many of Hardy's coinages indicated an interest in rendering sexual language acceptable to Victorian sensibilities, including his own. It becomes evident fairly soon that Leslie Stephen's later concern about Hardy'S potential for making trouble in this regard was justified. This is less a book for casual readers interested in Hardy than a document illustrating both the range of Hardy's readings during years in London that otherwise remain largely mysterious, and in specific ways, and within circumscribed limits, the uses to which he put his carefully transcribed quotations. It is fair to say that he was thinking most of the time as a poet. The excerpts come most often from Spenser, Shakespeare, the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, Scott, and other recognized masters of the medium in which he hoped to excel; we are not surprised to run across quotations from William Barnes, the Dorset poet who specialized in dialect; but there are some odd and entirely unexpected quotations, many of which must have required diligent research to identify (Hardy felt under no obligation to credit all the sources he was using). H. Charlton Bastian, Jean Ingelow, Isa Craig, andGoldwin Smith are cited along with Lucretius, Charles Reade, and Swinburne. The editors even note, wryly, that 'it was magnanimous despair alone' that led to the discovery of the unorthodox use to which Hardy put Thomas Rickman's 'classic work of architectural history,' An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles ofArchitecture in England, from the Conquest to the Reformation, 6th edition (1862); Rickman, if\he had known that Hardy's paraphrases originated from an imaginative reading of his text, would surely have objected. Altogether, a notable contribution to Hardy scholarship, definitively edited. (HAROLD OREL) Patrick Deane. At Home in Time: Forms ofNeo-Augustanism in Modern English Poetry McGill-Queen's University Press. X, 256. $44.95 cloth Patrick Deane has assembled evidence of a neoclassical, or 'neoAugustan ,' movement in twentieth-century British and Commonwealth poetry - (the Commonwealth, however, has been allowed only one, Australian representativ-e). He has selected for detailed discussion the poetries of T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, A.D Hope, and Donald Davie, limiting himself to a consideration of one long poem each, for convenience of exposition, and because the long poem, often a poetic HUMANITIES 201 sequence, is, in the words of M.L. Rosenthal and Sally Gall, 'the modern poetic form from within which all the tendencies of more than a century of experiment define themselves and find their aesthetic purpose.' The first chapter examines the encounter of Eliot's classicism with Pound's symbolism in the drafts of The Waste Land. Auden's New Year Letter, MacNeice 's Autumn Journal, Hope's Dunciad Minor, and Davie's Six-Epistles to Eva Hesse are examined in the succeeding four chapters. In the Introduction, he points to the remarkable agreement among intellectual historians and historians of art, architecture, and literature that there exists a strong neoclassical current throughout the creative thinking of this century. Specifically, he cites the assurances of Robert Pinsky (The Situation of Poetry) and Willard Spiegelman (The Didactic Muse) that the neoclassical impulse is prominent in contemporary American poetry, but then claims, and amply demonstrates, that it has been a more vital and continuous presence in British than in American culture. Deane's is the first attempt to analyse the phenomenon in modern British poetry and to trace its history. In the Conclusion, he samples the classical affiliations of otherwise very different British poets active in the 1970s and 1980s chiefly , Charles Tomlinson, C.H. Sisson, Geoffrey Hill, and Tony Harrison . Deane wants to draw attention to a component of modernity sufficiently distinctive and persistent to count as a cultural and historical tradition in order that its recognition may counterbalance a bias...