The Poetry of Restraint

ELT: VOLUME35:1 1992 homogenized in one group and totemized as The Other—at times by Caucasian and heterosexual zealots. Of course, such dichotomizing does a disservice to the infinite variety of women, gay, and minorities, not only because it polarizes thinking, but because it historically reverses with a vengeance the very kind of bigotry which homogenized and totemized the minorities as Other. As Wilde noted, nothing succeeds like excess. Even in the guise of "politically correct," distinctions which belie reality are intolerable. Daniel R. Schwarz Cornell University The Poetry of Restraint Richard Hoffpauir. The Art of Restraint: English Poetry from Hardy to Larkin. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991. 332 pp. $45.00 ONE OF Richard Hoffpauir's primary aims is to assert, and to demonstrate in the context of the English poetry of this century, the moral necessity of conserving one's inheritance, especially one's inheritance of rationality. Hoffpauir places himself firmly and without apology in the tradition of evaluative and moral criticism that one associates with Cambridge University in general, and F. R. Leavis in particular, and also that of Ivor Winters. This is not to imply that the familiar judgments of his critical ancestors are merely reiterated. Leavis believed , after all, that critical discussion took the form "yes, but . . .", where "yes" registers understanding and assent, and "but" qualification and adjustment. That, I think, is precisely the form this book's argument takes, engaging as it does in a reasoned process of vigorous debate. The immediate point of departure for Hoffpauir is Donald Davie's Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1972). Davie had argued that the fountainhead of modern British (as distinct from American) poetry was not Yeats or Eliot or Pound, but Thomas Hardy. For Davie, the Hardy line is one characterized by limitation and weakness. Davie argued that Hardy sold the poetic vocation short by limiting his poetic aspirations in the light of Victorian rationalism (where "rationalism" may be glossed as "scientific humanism"). Hardy was thus forced to dispense with the transcendent and to embrace commonplace, day-to-day reality as the only reality. For Davie, Hardy was the laureate of industrial engineering who initiated a tradition issuing in the likes of Philip Larkin, whom Davie's student and friend, the poet Charles Tomlinson, reviewed in an essay "The Middlebrow Muse," the title encapsulating the judgment. If Hoffpauir's project begins with Davie, the two soon part company; 116 BOOK REVIEWS Leavis's "but..." is sounded early in the book. Hoffpauir agrees with Davie that there is a line of poetry that may be called "the Hardy tradition," but where Davie sees this as the dominant tradition in England, Hoffpauir sees it as very much a minority one. What Davie sees as limitation and weakness, Hoffpauir sees as restraint and strength. Hoffpauir's task, then, is to trace in greater detail than Davie did the heirs of Hardy with a view to showing the poetic and moral value that line of poets embodies. At the risk of absurd simplification, the argument proceeds like this: Yeats and Hardy can be taken as two poets, roughly contemporary, whose work embodies two different approaches to poetry. Yeats's poetry is Romantic: prophetic, extreme, melodramatic, illogical, unreasonable, irrational, anti-social and amoral. It is, Hoffpauir argues, a poetry held in high regard by critics who, although they do not share Yeats's eccentric beliefs about the supernatural, do share his fundamental romanticism. The sort of incomplete thought and crude emotion Hoffpauir sees in Yeats, he sees also as characteristic of modernism and the disdain of modernism for rationality. (Eliot's praise of Pound's Cantos is cited: "I know that Pound has a scheme and a kind of philosophy behind it; it is quite enough for me that he thinks he knows what he is doing; I'm glad the philosophy is there, but I am not interested in it.") Yeats, that is, is seen as a poet whose work displays much of what Hoffpauir finds objectionable in modernist poetry and criticism, modernism , for Hoffpauir, being a late manifestation of Romanticism. In rejecting Yeats and modernism and in identifying their characteristic vices as Romantic, Hoffpauir is, of course...