Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric. Jonathan F. S. Post
are test cases for larger critical propositions. I will mention only a few. Heather Dubrow takes the country-house poem as a prime example of a genre in which formal patterning reveals social and political concerns. Paul Alpers' carefully nuanced essay "Learning from the New Criticism" takes two or three of Shakespeare's sonnets to show what some of their best readers (Yvor Winters, Stephen Booth, Helen Vendler) have been able to reveal about them by paying close attention to their language, and what they have overstated by insisting on formal coherence and unitary, motivated speakers. For him the most compelling critical model is that of Kenneth Burke, with his emphasis on rhetoric. One of the most original and suggestive contributions in the volume is that of Mark Womack on Shakespearean wordplay, and it is hard to do it justice in a short review. Through analogies with the formal elements of painting Womack argues that puns — especially those which are submerged or of which the reader/hearer is not fully aware — contribute to the pleasures of literature, the aim of which is not primarily to deliver paraphrasable messages. In one of the book's final essays, Elizabeth Harris Sagaser discusses her experiences with close reading in the classroom, showing how essential aural effects are to transmitting poetry's most basic effects in ordering temporal experience. Since "New Criticism" has become such a simplified object of scorn, it is useful to be reminded, as this collection does, how varied and sophisticated earlier textual criticism has actually been. William Empson, with his focus on multivalent meanings, is cited by several of the contributors, and there are mentions of some of the earlier "greats," such as Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, who brought the European humanistic tradition to bear on the close examination of literary styles, making them windows on the cultures that produced them. The volume's afterword by Richard Strier summarizes clearly why students and teachers of literature who are not ready to cede their discipline to "cultural studies" need to consider the issues this volume raises: without some reasoned belief in the value of close attention to texts, including their formal features, the idea of literature itself is hard to sustain. BRIDGET GELLERT LYONS Rutgers University