The South Central Modern Language Association

Review: [untitled]
Author(s): J. S. Borck
Reviewed work(s):
Prophecy and the Philosophy of Mind: Traditions of Blake and Shelley by Terence
Hoagwood
Source: South Central Review, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Winter, 1987), pp. 110-112
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of The South Central Modern
Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3189033
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South Central Review South Central Review
mains. But of course one must see that the wall between these domains was
erected
simultaneously
with the definitions of terms
conjured by
the
interpreter.
Hunt at one
point
observes,
"the stance of the theorist determines the context
of his vision." Here we come to the heart of the
matter,
the reason this issue
can never be resolved.
Following
the line of
contemporary epistemologists,
Hunt
argues
that we can never know
things
in themselves.
Interpreters
must form
constructs or "fictions"
by
which
they interpret reality.
"Man exists
by
the webs
of belief he
spins"
she writes. Hunt
freely
admits that her
interpretation
is
"fictional,"
though
a "true fiction" -true because it leads to moments of
insight
that are useful and "worthwhile." Such a road is wide and
capable
of
carrying
travelers of different
persuasions.
Milton,
for
example, thought
he was recon-
stituting
classical
epic
and
tragedy
into
new,
Christian artforms. Milton's "fiction"
of Christian
tragedy
and
epic
has also been "worthwhile" to countless readers
and critics. Whose "fiction" is better, Hunt's or Milton's? Hunt offers us no basis
for
arbitrating
between her fiction and other "true fictions."
The Paradox
of
Christian
Tragedy (which ought
to have been called The
Impossibility
of
Christian
Tragedy)
is
stimulating.
It introduces central issues in a
perennial
debate. It reviews an
impressive array
of critics on a
significant
theme. It
provides
excellent notes and a
helpful bibliography.
The final
chapter, though disappoint-
ingly
brief,
describes a
promising "theory
of Christian
drama,"
built on
insights
drawn from
Frye
and
Kierkegaard.
But the work lacks a
sympathetic
understand-
ing
of the
opposing point
of view. Here there is wheat and chaff. Readers
willing
to do a bit of
winnowing
will
gain insights
into a
lively
and
continuing literary
debate.
Darryl Tippens
Abilene Christian
University
Terence
Hoagwood, Prophecy
and the
Philosophy of
Mind: Traditions
of
Blake and
Shelley. University: University
of Alabama
Press,
1985.236
pp.
$23.50
(cloth).
Prophecy
and the
Philosophy of
Mind,
though
an
intelligent
and
very
ambitious
book,
seems to suffer from the
organizational strategies Hoagwood posits
for
the artists whose works he
surveys.
In a concurrent examination of Blake's
Jerusalem
and
Shelley's
Prometheus Unbound,
Hoagwood
addresses four
ques-
tions-questions
of
context,
real
subject, symbolic technique,
and
literary
form.
A
daunting
task for a
reading
of either of these two
very long poems,
and a
large
task in order to derive an answer to
any
of these four
very
difficult critical
questions. Hoagwood
further
endangers
the critical
validity
of his
study by
his
early arguments
that the
major
influences on Blake's
poetry
came from a
philosophic
tradition which Blake
consistently
denounced as
having petrified
human
imagination,
the British
empiricists.
His
prefatory
elucidation of
empirical
thought
is successful as a summation of a tradition to which Blake and
Shelley
may
have owed an artistic
debt; however,
he
subsequently
blurs his
argumenta-
tion
by
a focus on an
essentially
non-rational form,
the
"prophetic
form,"
and
mains. But of course one must see that the wall between these domains was
erected
simultaneously
with the definitions of terms
conjured by
the
interpreter.
Hunt at one
point
observes,
"the stance of the theorist determines the context
of his vision." Here we come to the heart of the
matter,
the reason this issue
can never be resolved.
Following
the line of
contemporary epistemologists,
Hunt
argues
that we can never know
things
in themselves.
Interpreters
must form
constructs or "fictions"
by
which
they interpret reality.
"Man exists
by
the webs
of belief he
spins"
she writes. Hunt
freely
admits that her
interpretation
is
"fictional,"
though
a "true fiction" -true because it leads to moments of
insight
that are useful and "worthwhile." Such a road is wide and
capable
of
carrying
travelers of different
persuasions.
Milton,
for
example, thought
he was recon-
stituting
classical
epic
and
tragedy
into
new,
Christian artforms. Milton's "fiction"
of Christian
tragedy
and
epic
has also been "worthwhile" to countless readers
and critics. Whose "fiction" is better, Hunt's or Milton's? Hunt offers us no basis
for
arbitrating
between her fiction and other "true fictions."
The Paradox
of
Christian
Tragedy (which ought
to have been called The
Impossibility
of
Christian
Tragedy)
is
stimulating.
It introduces central issues in a
perennial
debate. It reviews an
impressive array
of critics on a
significant
theme. It
provides
excellent notes and a
helpful bibliography.
The final
chapter, though disappoint-
ingly
brief,
describes a
promising "theory
of Christian
drama,"
built on
insights
drawn from
Frye
and
Kierkegaard.
But the work lacks a
sympathetic
understand-
ing
of the
opposing point
of view. Here there is wheat and chaff. Readers
willing
to do a bit of
winnowing
will
gain insights
into a
lively
and
continuing literary
debate.
Darryl Tippens
Abilene Christian
University
Terence
Hoagwood, Prophecy
and the
Philosophy of
Mind: Traditions
of
Blake and
Shelley. University: University
of Alabama
Press,
1985.236
pp.
$23.50
(cloth).
Prophecy
and the
Philosophy of
Mind,
though
an
intelligent
and
very
ambitious
book,
seems to suffer from the
organizational strategies Hoagwood posits
for
the artists whose works he
surveys.
In a concurrent examination of Blake's
Jerusalem
and
Shelley's
Prometheus Unbound,
Hoagwood
addresses four
ques-
tions-questions
of
context,
real
subject, symbolic technique,
and
literary
form.
A
daunting
task for a
reading
of either of these two
very long poems,
and a
large
task in order to derive an answer to
any
of these four
very
difficult critical
questions. Hoagwood
further
endangers
the critical
validity
of his
study by
his
early arguments
that the
major
influences on Blake's
poetry
came from a
philosophic
tradition which Blake
consistently
denounced as
having petrified
human
imagination,
the British
empiricists.
His
prefatory
elucidation of
empirical
thought
is successful as a summation of a tradition to which Blake and
Shelley
may
have owed an artistic
debt; however,
he
subsequently
blurs his
argumenta-
tion
by
a focus on an
essentially
non-rational form,
the
"prophetic
form,"
and
110 110
Reviews
by thematically reading
both
poems
from this ahistorical formal
point
of
view.
Additionally,
he
agrees
with
John
Howard's conclusions about Blake's
long poem
form: that Blake fuses irreconcilable
spaces
and times
together
to force the
reader
to
acquire
intellectual rather than natural
meaning.
Despite
his
finding
Blake's
Jerusalem
to have no narrative
sequence, Hoagwood's
critical
impulse
is
correct,
that
Jerusalem
and Prometheus Unbound do have a
struc-
ture. Unlike Earl Wasserman on
Shelley's epic
form,
and Morton
Paley
on
Blake's
biblical
tradition,
both of whom he finds "narrow" in their
readings
of
Prometheus
Unbound and
Jerusalem,
Hoagwood
situates his
study
within a now
popular
critical
methodology, prophetic
form as it reflects artistic
epistemology. Adopting
Jean
Hagstrum's
definition that
prophetic
form
incorporates
a
bipolar "story
of
the universe and
story
of the
age," Hoagwood
adds a third
"story,"
the
reflections
of the Romantic
ego,
all three
creating
a
synthesis
of
imagination
and
mind
which he finds
stemming
from a rather unusual source-unusual for
Blake, that
is. His
reading
of Blake does not follow
ordinary
historical source
hunting,
and
here is where
Hoagwood
has
difficulty,
for it is
dangerous
to
argue
that an
artist
incorporates
in his work an
ideology
whose tenets he abhors.
Deriving
his
conjectural premises
about how this
synthesis
is formed from
Descartes, Locke,
and
Newton,
and
relying heavily upon Berkeley
and Hume to solve
solipsistic
and
ontological problems
in the British
empiricists'
three
predecessors, Hoag-
wood concludes that for Blake and
Shelley
(and
modem
psychoanalysts
like
Piaget
and
Neisser)
"reality
is
wholly
circumscribed
by
mind;
the mind is
by
definition
active;
the result is a view of
reality
as
process." Nothing
much new
here as a conclusion for
reading
either Blake or
Shelley, though
the
terminology
may
be fresh. Yet whether it is Hazard
Adams,
E. D.
Hirsch,
or Harold Bloom
reading
Blake's
prophecies,
or Earl Wasserman and
Jean
Hall
working
their rather
different
ways carefully through
Prometheus Unbound-all
(like
Hoagwood)
ac-
knowledge
mental and
corporeal oppositions
as the centers from
which,
as
Shelley says
in "Ode to the West
Wind,"
the Romantic artist's creative
impulses
spring.
These
impulses
are
subsequently shaped by
the artist's
bodily activity
into
expression,
sometimes
quite explicitly,
and at other instances less so obvi-
ously: Shelley
asks in his "Ode" that "the incantation of this
verse,"
"through
his
lips,"
become "the
trumpet
of a
prophecy!"
But this
example,
which
Hoag-
wood does not
cite,
and which could be an instance of the
"prophetic
stance"
Bishop
Lowth,
Isaac and Thomas
Newton,
and the hundreds of other
eighteenth-
century
biblical commentators find a
characteristic of
prophetic activity,
seems
despite Shelley's terminology
a
prophecy
about
inspirational
seasons-"If Winter
comes,
can
Spring
be far
behind?", more in line with Wordsworth's
Boy
of
Windermere
blowing
mimic
hootings
to the
owls,
and Keats
making
the dreadful
pun
about the
Nightingale's
beak in the second stanza of that
ode, "Oh,
for a
beaker full of the warm South."
The Romantics'
ability
to make an instrument of the self
appears
to be the
central
argument
in the two
chapters
in which
Hoagwood specifically
examines
Jerusalem
and Prometheus
Unbound,
an
argument
which is more successful for
Blake's
prophecy
than for
Shelley's.
But even with Blake it does not seem neces-
sary, given
the nature of
Hoagwood's evidence,
to insist that we as readers shift
our critical
vocabulary
in order that "artist" becomes
"prophet":
"Blake's
prophetic
mission is
exactly
the release of his readers from the
philosophy
of
externally
imposed
matter and
morality";
"as
prophet
and as commentator on the Bible,
Ill
South Central Review South Central Review
Blake's task is to turn his readers'
eyes
inward,
opening
worlds of
thought";
"Abrams admits this formulation [his
'high
Romantic
argument']
is a 'drastic
simplification,'
and it is
that,
in
part
because the
poets
never abandoned
prophecy's
simultaneous
multiplicity
of
meaning."
The
impulse
which informs
also
forms,
but one would
hope
not in an
heuristically
restrictive manner.
Hoag-
wood is much less successful in
presenting
a case for a
biblically
informed
Shelley
as
poet/prophet, especially
in a
play
which is based
upon
a
pre-Christian tragedy.
The
reasoning
becomes at times rather strained in his efforts to show
Shelley
wearing
the same mantle as his fellow Romantic
exegetes.
Likewise,
other
parts
of the
increasingly ingenious reading
of
Shelley
falter in too numerous
qualifying
phrases:
"more
probably
[than learning prophetic
form and
symbolism
from the
Bible]
this
knowledge
was
supplemented by
his
acquaintance
with the enormous
body
of
writing
on the
prophecies
that had arisen in London."
Arguing
that
Shelley might
have
gained
this
knowledge
from
George Stanley
Faber,
Hoagwood
gives
us a
great
deal of
speculation
which is never fleshed out in a
supporting
argument
other than a sentence found in a much earlier endnote in the same
chapter:
"Faber,
with whom
Shelley engaged
in
philosophical correspondence,
differs from
Shelley primarily
on other
matters,
most
obviously
his atheism and
radicalism."
The abbreviated
arguments,
concatenated sources and historical
analogues,
and the all too brief
commentary upon
the two texts make
Hoagwood's
book a
suggestive,
but not
very helpful,
addition to the
very large
Blake critical canon.
That one-sixth of the book
(46 pages)
contains his endnotes and his
bibliography
does seem to indicate that-like Blake and
Shelley-he
has read
everything
on
his
subject.
Like them
also,
he seems a
very intelligent
reader of
history,
philosophy,
and
religion;
and I
expect
that in his later work he will
incorporate
that
reading
in a more
integrated methodology.
J.
S. Borck
Louisiana State
University
Agnieszka
Salska. Walt Whitman and
Emily
Dickinson:
Poetry of
the Central Conscious-
ness.
Philadelphia: University
of
Pennsylvania
Press,
1985. 220
pp.
$13.95.
The essence of a
comparative study
of two
literary figures
is the common
ground
on which each
figure
stands. Such a
study
is valuable
only
if the common-
ality
is sufficient to warrant a contrast and
only
if the contrast serves to illuminate
each
figure
more
clearly. Agnieszka
Salska,
Professor at the Institute of
English
Studies of the
University
of Lodz in
Poland, understands fully
the essence of
comparative study.
Her idea of
linking
Walt Whitman and
Emily
Dickinson is
not a new
one,
but
despite
brief observations
by
others (notably
Albert
Gelpi
and Karl
Keller),
no detailed
study
of Whitman and Dickinson has been under-
taken until the
publication
of this
excellent,
readable new book.
The common
ground
that is the basis for Salska's
comparison
is Emerson and
the
significance
of Transcendental
thought
for both Whitman and Dickinson. It
Blake's task is to turn his readers'
eyes
inward,
opening
worlds of
thought";
"Abrams admits this formulation [his
'high
Romantic
argument']
is a 'drastic
simplification,'
and it is
that,
in
part
because the
poets
never abandoned
prophecy's
simultaneous
multiplicity
of
meaning."
The
impulse
which informs
also
forms,
but one would
hope
not in an
heuristically
restrictive manner.
Hoag-
wood is much less successful in
presenting
a case for a
biblically
informed
Shelley
as
poet/prophet, especially
in a
play
which is based
upon
a
pre-Christian tragedy.
The
reasoning
becomes at times rather strained in his efforts to show
Shelley
wearing
the same mantle as his fellow Romantic
exegetes.
Likewise,
other
parts
of the
increasingly ingenious reading
of
Shelley
falter in too numerous
qualifying
phrases:
"more
probably
[than learning prophetic
form and
symbolism
from the
Bible]
this
knowledge
was
supplemented by
his
acquaintance
with the enormous
body
of
writing
on the
prophecies
that had arisen in London."
Arguing
that
Shelley might
have
gained
this
knowledge
from
George Stanley
Faber,
Hoagwood
gives
us a
great
deal of
speculation
which is never fleshed out in a
supporting
argument
other than a sentence found in a much earlier endnote in the same
chapter:
"Faber,
with whom
Shelley engaged
in
philosophical correspondence,
differs from
Shelley primarily
on other
matters,
most
obviously
his atheism and
radicalism."
The abbreviated
arguments,
concatenated sources and historical
analogues,
and the all too brief
commentary upon
the two texts make
Hoagwood's
book a
suggestive,
but not
very helpful,
addition to the
very large
Blake critical canon.
That one-sixth of the book
(46 pages)
contains his endnotes and his
bibliography
does seem to indicate that-like Blake and
Shelley-he
has read
everything
on
his
subject.
Like them
also,
he seems a
very intelligent
reader of
history,
philosophy,
and
religion;
and I
expect
that in his later work he will
incorporate
that
reading
in a more
integrated methodology.
J.
S. Borck
Louisiana State
University
Agnieszka
Salska. Walt Whitman and
Emily
Dickinson:
Poetry of
the Central Conscious-
ness.
Philadelphia: University
of
Pennsylvania
Press,
1985. 220
pp.
$13.95.
The essence of a
comparative study
of two
literary figures
is the common
ground
on which each
figure
stands. Such a
study
is valuable
only
if the common-
ality
is sufficient to warrant a contrast and
only
if the contrast serves to illuminate
each
figure
more
clearly. Agnieszka
Salska,
Professor at the Institute of
English
Studies of the
University
of Lodz in
Poland, understands fully
the essence of
comparative study.
Her idea of
linking
Walt Whitman and
Emily
Dickinson is
not a new
one,
but
despite
brief observations
by
others (notably
Albert
Gelpi
and Karl
Keller),
no detailed
study
of Whitman and Dickinson has been under-
taken until the
publication
of this
excellent,
readable new book.
The common
ground
that is the basis for Salska's
comparison
is Emerson and
the
significance
of Transcendental
thought
for both Whitman and Dickinson. It
112 112