From the definitive, mid-'80s study Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic
to last year's Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s, Yale's Bromwich has carefully mapped the relations between poetry, criticism and public life in the Romantic period. He has brought those same concerns to his essays on modernist poetry for the TLS, New Republic, Raritan
and other venues over the last 15 years. Some of these 16 pieces were occasioned by new editions of the poetry and letters of Auden and Crane and the criticism of Marianne Moore, and Bromwich's decision not to tamper with his original essays makes for some minor obsolescences among many luminous observations. Book reviews from the mid-'80s and early '90s of then-new collections from Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, James Merrill and Adrienne Rich give insight into the books at hand, but suffer for not having the last 10 or 15 years of works and lives at their disposal. The chapter on Hemingway seems an odd non sequitur. But Bromwich's readings of particular poems and spins on career trajectories are well worth the price of admission, and his larger-scale pieces are nothing short of brilliant. "Stevens and the Idea of the Hero" superbly explicates the poet's negotiations of what "philosophy and poetry may share in imagining and justifying a way of life." "How Moral is Taste?" begins by asking "Why do we want to be spectators?" and quickly moves from Frost to Burke to Hazlitt to the band Judas Priest's U.S. trial (and acquittal) for incitement to suicide. Chapters on Moore and Elizabeth Bishop (alone and together) find further resonances in this already much-explored relationship, while a piece on Eliot and Crane will have readers re-reading both. Whatever one thinks of Bromwich's particular aesthetic lens (pitched toward "posterity" as "the name of a power of resistance"), any reader of modernism will want the chance to argue with him. (Apr.)
