[In the following review, Freer contrasts Historical Evidence and the Reading of Seventeenth-Century Poetry with earlier writings by Brooks, asserting that "one of the chief subjects of this book is actually the evolution of Brooks's thought."]

A collection of readings of ten poems by eight seventeenth-century poets, this volume [Historical Evidence and the Reading of Seventeenth-Century Poetry] brings together a number of essays that have appeared in various other collections and journals. Essays on King's "The Exequy," Corbett's "The Faeryes Farewell," Shirley's lyric beginning "The glories of our blood and state," Townshend's "To the Countess of Salisbury," Fanshawe's "The Fall," Herbert of Cherbury's "Ode upon a Question Moved," Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and "The Garden," Lovelace's "The Grasse-Hopper," and Marvell's "Horatian Ode" make up the body of the book; a brief Introduction and Epilogue tie these together.

Unfortunately there is no preface or acknowledgement page to indicate where and when the essays first appeared, and this is of more importance than it might seem at first. The book treats some familiar lyric poems that respond particularly well to the kind of close study that Brooks and others made the dominant form of analysis in the 1940s and 1950s, and the many essays that these ten poems inspired might comprise an index of the strengths and limitations of close reading. Further, styles in close reading have changed, for Brooks as for others, and knowing the original publication data, one could make comparisons that might illuminate this phase of modern criticism.

In the book at hand, Brooks had made many subtle but significant revisions in his original essays, responding to criticism (or defending himself more closely), and updating some of the readings. Most of the revisions are stylistic, but many go well beyond merely editorial changes, and the way the larger revisions change the rhetorical form of the essays can tell us almost as much about Brooks's attitude toward historical evidence as the argument he advances in the introductory and closing remarks. In other words, one of the chief subjects of this book is actually the evolution of Brooks's thought.

One illustration. One the Horatian Ode, much of what we have in the present volume is recast from Brooks's seminal English Institute lecture of 1946, published in 1947; that essay prompted a spirited exchange with Douglas Bush in the Sewanee Review in 1952 and 1953. The present essay makes a better defense against Bush (while not mentioning him) and deletes most of the paragraphs of throat-clearing that seemed to mark much criticism from that period. But some other more important changes reposition the essay as a study in literary history. The 1946 version of the essay ended with an afterthought: "Since completing this essay, I have come upon a further item which would suggest that the 'Horatian Ode' was circulating among Royalists—not Puritans—in the early 1650's." The evidence then offered (by correspondents to the [Times Literary Supplement]) concerns the stanza form adapted from Fanshawe and Tom May's translation of Lucan. Placed at the end of the essay as it is, with no comments following it, these historical notes convey only the sense that there was quite a curious collocation of minds there, a point well worth musing on. In the essay as revised for the present volume, these paragraphs of historical evidence are moved to the front of the essay and presented as necessary matter for reading the poem, even though the main outlines of the essay remain the same and the conclusion is essentially unchanged. Along the way, Brooks inserts references to Christopher Hill, John Wallace, Antonia Fraser, and others to reinforce the essentially unchanged thesis; a postscript returns to Hill, but with the primary purpose of reaffirming Brooks's familiar emphasis on the role of tension in poetry.

By this rearrangement in rhetorical structure and the more up-to-date citations, Brooks seems to concede more to history than he has before, but again his basic conclusions and above all his primary method of supporting his arguments remain unchanged. His chief source of historical evidence is linguistic—etymologies, derivations, and above all shifts in usage: the OED [Oxford English Dictionary] receives probably as many citations as all other sources together. But there is nothing wrong with that: Brooks was one of the first to insist on the importance of this kind of lexical play, and many of his revisions in these essays tease out still more latent and apt meanings in familiar words and phrases.

As for the other kinds of historical evidence appearing in the collection, most of it has a curious stumbled-over quality that distinguishes Brooks's work from that of the new historicists. In part this is simply a matter of presentation and organization. For example, after he has plugged in the Tom May material in his discussion of Marvell's ode, he signals a big shift we would never expect to see in the modern historicist idiom: "It is now time to turn more directly to the poem itself, and the poetic mode of expressing matters" (p. 137). That sentence does not appear in the first version of the essay, and it shows that Brooks remains unreconstructed in his critical values. Most of the time he will (in so many words) happen upon a curious woodcut, or puzzle over Strafford's burial site, or notice an odd anecdote or fragment. There is a certain accidental or casual quality with which the historical element is introduced into the argument, and this distinguishes the rhetoric of these essays from more recent historicist readings, in which the historical centerpiece—often an incident or artistic representation that is grotesque or outlandish—is presented up front, its significances peeled apart and then applied to the literary work. This is not to say that these critics have not found their evidence the same way Brooks does; they just display it differently. Brooks's diffidence in the way he handles what he calls extrinsic evidence is one element of the voice we hear speaking in these essays, which remains urbane, gracious, and tactful. While he is doubtless aware of new historicist readings of the poems he treats, he does not adopt either their rhetoric or manner of proceeding.

Indeed Brooks's self-conception seems on his mind, and occasionally he alludes to his reputation as a reader interested only in the text, referring to himself as "a literary critic reputed to be careless of, even hostile to, the biographical and historical background of a poem" (p. 122), and asserting "my own regard for the importance of establishing authorship, datings, biographical and historical references, and the specific and sometimes archaic uses of words that make up the poet's text" (p. 157). It is amusing that at a number of points in the book there surfaces that old bugbear of the poet's intention, but as the Epilogue says, "What finally counts are the achieved intentions, not prospective intentions…. The shaping impulses are indeed important, but as manifest in the work" (p. 158; Brooks's emphasis). Clearly this can apply to a critic as well as a poet.

The achievement of the book thus lies first in its often brilliant readings of poems that vary considerably in subject and complexity, and second in its demonstration of a method that remains central to our criticism. It should be instructive for readers who have assumed the primacy of literary theory and have neglected attention to the history of English grammar and the English lexicon: as Brooks shows, only through this attention can we understand the subtleties of a poem's tone. If he wants now to assert a stronger concern for historical fact than was sometimes imputed to him, that is his prerogative, although anyone familiar with his later work, particularly on Faulkner, would never have thought the matter in question.