The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

On the other hand, I have never written a line of criticism except in response to a demand by others for a lecture, an introduction, a review, etc.; though I hope that some love went into their writing, I wrote them because I needed the money. I should like to thank the various publishers, editors, college authorities and, not least, the ladies and gentlemen who voted me into the Chair of Poetry at Oxford University, but for whose generosity and support I should never have been able to pay my bills.

The trouble about writing commissioned criticism is that the relation between form and content is arbitrary; a lecture must take fifty-five minutes to deliver, an introduction must be so and so many thousand, a review so and so many hundred words long. Only rarely do the conditions set down conform exactly with one's thought. Sometimes one feels cramped, forced to omit or oversimplify arguments; more often, all one really has to say could be put down in half the allotted space, and one can only try to pad as inconspicuously as possible.

Moreover, in a number of articles which were not planned as a series but written for diverse occasions, it is inevitable that one will often repeat oneself.

A poem must be a closed system, but there is something, in my opinion, lifeless, even false, about systematic criticism. In going over my critical pieces, I have reduced them, when possible, to sets of notes because, as a reader, I prefer a critic's notebooks to his treatises. The order of the chapters, however, is deliberate, and I would like them to be read in sequence.

w. H. A.

CONTENTS

Foreword xi

i

PROLOGUE

Reading 3

Writing 13

n

THE DYER'S HAND

Making, Knowing and Judging 31

The Virgin & The Dynamo 61

The Poet & The City 72

m

THE WELL OF NARCISSUS

Hie et llle 93

Balaam and His .Ass 107

The Guilty Vicarage 146

The I Without a Self 159

THE SHAKESPEARIAN CITY

The Globe 171

The Prince's Dog 182,

Interlude: The Wish Game 209

Brothers &■ Others 2,18

Interlude: West's Disease 238

The Joker in the Pack 246

Postscript: Infernal Science 273

v

TWO BESTIARIES

D. H. Lawrence277

Marianne Moore 296

vi

AMERICANA

The American Scene 309

Postscript: Rome v. Monticello 32,4

Red Ribbon on a White Horse 327

Postscript: The Almighty Dollar 335

Robert Frost 327

American Poetry 354

vn

THE SHIELD OF PERSEUS

Notes on the Comic 371

Don Juan 386

Dingley Dell & The Fleet 407

Postscript: The Frivolous & The Earnest 429

Genius & Apostle 433

Postscript: Christianity & Art 456

VIII

HOMAGE TO IGOR STRAVINSKY

Notes on Music and Opera 465

Cav & Pag 475 Translating Opera Libretti (Written in collaboration

with Chester Kallman) 483

Music in Shakespeare 500

ue

PART ONE

Prolog

READING

A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

c. g. uchtenberg

One only reads well that which one reads with some quite personal purpose. It may he to acquire some power. It can be out of hatred for the author.

paul valery

The interests of a writer and the interests of his readers are never the same and if, on occasion, they happen to coincide, this is a lucky accident.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally. In learning to read well, scholar­ship, valuable as it is, is less important than instinct; some great scholars have been poor translators.

We often derive much profit from reading a book in a differ­ent way from that which its author intended but only (once childhood is over) if we know that we are doing so.