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31:3 Book Reviews For Silkin, the poetry is sufficiently alive, and war sufficiently important, to elicit an intense personal response. His approach recaUs early war poetry criticism by Edmund Gosse, Arthur Waugh, and Frank Swinnerton because Silkin refuses to separate the poetry from the war or to cloak his subjective reactions in neutral or timid phrases. Silkin's book considers the poetry of the Great War as a social force, adding to its importance to the present age. Even when Silkin strikes one as woefully wrong-headed, his sincerity provokes his readers to reassess their own views. Although the book is far from being a reliable model of objective critical analysis, it can remind us of the intensely passionate responses to literature that justify literary criticism in the first place. Fred D. Crawford Central Michigan University G. M. HOPKINS Gerald Roberts, ed. Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Critical Heritage. New York and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. $47.50 Margaret R. EUsberg. Created To Praise: The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. $15.95 Now that The Critical Heritage Series contains almost ninety volumes dealing with writers from Chaucer to Nabokov, there can be few scholars and critics who are not familiar with it. As the General Editor, B. C. Southam, points out in his preface, the purpose of the series is to chronicle the reception given an author by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries with a view to providing insight into "the state of criticism at large" at a given time and "the development of critical attitudes towards a single writer." For serious scholars of any of the particular authors dealt with, no doubt the individual volumes are useful only as a starting point for further researches, or as a handy reference tool. But the main audience to which the series ought to appeal is that made up of serious readers who are not, or not yet, experts on a given author. If the excerpts from letters, reviews, articles and studies that the series provide cannot be ultimately satisfying for scholarly research, they can and do give the committed reader a sense of the historical critical milieu of and initial reception given a particular writer. Such, at any rate, is the case with Gerald Roberts's excellent new addition to the series: Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the case of Hopkins, of course, the generally applied criteria for admission and exclusion have had to be adjusted. Hopkins died of typhus in Dublin in 1889, at the age of forty-four, and the great majority of his poems, including almost all that he is now remembered for, were not published for nearly twenty years, with the result that his contemporaries did not, generally speaking, have an opportunity to respond to him one way or the other. Thus, although Roberts includes extracts from contemporary conespondence, from early essays by readers with at best partial 361 31:3 Book Reviews access to the poetry, and a few passing references to Hopkins in reviews of other works and other writers, the bulk of the material here presented was written after the pubhcation of Hopkins's poems in 1918. The terminus ad quern that Roberts has chosen is 1940. This, it is admitted, is in many ways an arbitrary date, although, as Roberts also points out, all of Hopkins's major work had been published by 1940, with the exception of the Sermons (1959). The volume is divided into sections conesponding to the appearance of Hopkins writings (the first edition of the Poems in 1918 and second in 1930, the conespondence to Bridges and Dixon in 1935, and the Note-Books and Papers in 1937), but the book concentrates, wisely, on responses to the poetry. The coverage is representative and engaging. The excerpts reprinted give the reader not only a sense of the remarkable growth of Hopkins's reputation, but also insight into the ways different readers dealt with his singular poems. We are given characteristic passages from most of the critics and scholars we might expect: I. A. Richards, William Empson, Yvor Winters, J. Middleton Murry, Father Keating, Christopher Devlin, Humphry House, Herbert Read, F. R. Leavis and...

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