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318 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 throughout to what he calls Stevens=s >aggregating metonymy= provides a welcome alternative to previous critical emphasis on metaphor and symbol in the poetry. But Cleghorn=s conviction that Stevens=s metonymic organization serves as a weapon against the totalizing tendencies of synecdoche also provides the basis for criticism of his own study. Occasionally Cleghorn offers glimpses of a Stevens who does not conform to the book=s dominant interpretation: he ascribes to Stevens, for example, a >modernist optimism that something else could rise from the ashes= of his decreations, and is disappointed that >Life on a Battleship= >ends by repeating the synecdochic power of one part for the whole.= Besides suggesting that the latter gesture could disappoint only those who believe that Stevens=s poetry must be postmodern if it is to remain valuable, these comments point towards another rhetoric in Stevens=s poetry, a rhetoric of centres, of genealogical continuities, of heroes, masters, and major men, and towards a complex affective stance on Stevens=s part towards these figures that does not quite support Cleghorn=s reading. But neither of these countervailing tendencies is explored in any detail. The book itself, in other words, falters when it too resolutely employs the synecdochic logic it opposes B taking one part of >The complicate, the amassing harmony= for the whole. (MALCOLM WOODLAND) Angela T. McAuliffe. Between the Temple and the Cave: The Religious Dimensions of the Poetry of E.J. Pratt McGill-Queen=s University Press. xiv, 250. $65.00 Between the Temple and the Cave: The Religious Dimensions of the Poetry of E.J. Pratt offers a strong argument for a greater consideration of the Christian elements in Pratt=s thought and poetry. In some ways this book is a response to issues raised in my early study, E.J. Pratt: The Evolutionary Vision, (1974), reviewed by Angela T. McAuliffe, where I suggest that evolutionary thinking provided a framework for Pratt=s poetry, that the poet experienced a post-war >crisis in belief,= and that he accepted the human Christ of early twentieth-century theology. This direction is suggested, in part, by the preface to Between the Temple and the Cave, where McAuliffe summarizes her primary concerns: >What was the nature and the extent of the religious crisis that Pratt was said to have undergone? How much was he influenced by scientific and philosophic and theologic works of the nineteenth and early twentieth century? To what degree are his biblical and theological studies reflected in his poetry? What is the image of God that appears?= McAuliffe maintains that Methodist thought at Victoria College by Pratt=s day had accommodated science to theology (consequently evolution raised no disturbing issues for his essentially religious vision) and that the HUMANITIES 319 image of God which appears in his Studies in Pauline Eschatology (1917) and in his Brébeuf and His Brethren is incarnational and transcendental rather than human-centred. Nonetheless, she concludes that other than for Brébeuf, Pratt did not resolve the breach between the God of the Old Testament and the Christ of the New Testament: >There is a sense in which throughout his life he continued to search for humanity behind the divine log, for the human face of God.= Like a number of Pratt=s critics, McAuliffe ultimately finds that the >ironic vision= best characterizes his religious attitude. The great strength of this book is the original research which McAuliffe brings to her analysis of turn-of-the-century Methodism coupled with the careful application of these concepts to Pratt=s poems. Her first premise is that any dualism that we may find in Pratt=s theological views is generic rather than personal: it was >inherent in the religious and cultural atmosphere in which Pratt was raised, in the particular spiritual tradition which he inherited, and in the theological school in which he was trained.= Thus her focus moves from the poet to his context, and provides an important complement to contemporary Pratt scholarship. McAuliffe=s discussion of the probable tenets of Newfoundland Methodism, her survey of Charles Wesley=s evangelical Methodism, and a discussion of the contributions of Egerton Ryerson, Nathanael Burwash...

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