By heritage and inclination, I am not a Platonist. That is clear. I am forced to say it thus negatively, however, because I can define myself—to the extent possible at all—only against the Platonic and Romantic aspirations that still hold out to me a powerful, though I think false, allure.

I come from the western and northern hills of New England. Not the sunny arbors of Concord, the salons of Cambridge, nor even the dark, briny, death-haunted dockside of Ishmael's New Bedford; all unknown to me. My hills are sparse and rocky ground. John Dewey came from a town not far from mine in Vermont, and the James family, tough people in spite of their exoticism, from just over the border in Albany. I was raised a radical agnostic and relativist. Yet my father saw an angel in a tree and loved Blake beyond all other poets but Shakespeare. I myself have often heard angels, or at any rate soprano voices, singing in the treetops, and just as often have heard my name clearly and loudly called and have looked around, only to find no caller. And because the caller is not there, I have somewhat suspicioned the absence of the called.

Relativism was easy to abandon when I saw how it induces a hierarchical cast of mind, tending toward either intractable dualism or perturbing monism. I believe one's mind can go no farther than to acknowledge the equivalence of all things, including all values. For this reason I never had more than a working mechanic's interest in causality, and I loathed all concepts of determinism. I loathed the ego, that sick and changeable object created by refraction from the other objects of the determined world. My own was at best a collapsing kaleidoscopic image, at worst a cloud seen through a telescope. And so I caught the transcending fever, and I sought ways to rise above the objective ego and become a self in pure subjectivity, free and undetermined, an authentic existential independency. Yet at the same time my back-country hardheadedness made me vehemently disclaim any Transcendentalism in my transcension, and made me equally aware of the need for responsibility not only to the self but to others. I saw how in its moments of transcendent freedom the self is, in fact, a communion with the other, though how to define that other still escapes me. I think it may be the transcendent selves of all human imaginations not irreparably maimed by the life of machines in the objective world. I call it love.

At every step along the way I found how in books from the past my own thoughts, which had derived from the necessity of my own impairment, were written more clearly than I could write them. Camus, Kafka, Kant, Pope, Locke, Spenser, Dante, and many others. A writer whom I admire, Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote: "Genius, then, consists, according to our explanation, in the capacity for knowing, independently of the principle of sufficient reason, not individual things, which have their existence in their relations, but the ideas of such things, and of being oneself the correlative of the idea, and thus no longer an individual, but the pure subject of knowledge." How that struck me! Hadn't I known all along that what my Yankee forebears had called individualism was only the other side of corporatism, the two blind, sick egos of the objective world? Independence became in its true signification not the blustery, blowzy conceitedness of Ethan Allen but the sweetness of Piotr Kropotkin.

Another writer, the one whom maybe I admire most of all, Longinus, that hardheaded person from the classical world who still believed in sublimity and who had no historical identity (because no one has been able to discover who he—or she—was), this Longinus wrote: "Similarly from the great natures of the men of old there are borne in upon the souls of those who emulate them (as from sacred caves) what we may describe as effluences, so that even those who seem little likely to be possessed are thereby inspired and succumb to the spell of the others' greatness." This is the inspiration that comes not as "originality," which in any case is a delusion, but as confirmation, the best and only reliable inspiration one may hope for.

When I was a young writer, just after World War II, I read and respected the works of the critics whose ideas were then still new: Pound and Eliot, of course, and Ransom, Tate, Winters, Burke, Warren, Richards, Blackmur, and others. Most of them were poets too, although of very differing accomplishments. I thought that since I was a poet, I would eventually also write full-scale essays and books in which I would develop a systematic view of art and experience. But then my life degenerated quickly into illness of the psychogenic kind, and I was forced to make my living at home as a hack reviewer and editor. At the time I resented this necessity very bitterly. But now, looking back, I wonder if I could have written such essays and books anyway. Hermann Hesse wrote that the born critic works "from grace, from innate acuity of mind and analytical powers of thought, from serious cultural responsibility." Far from grace, acuity, and power, my mind had not even enough ordinary assuredness to permit the act of sitting down to write an essay. Only "serious cultural responsibility" was left to me, left in bountiful measure by my Yankee ancestors, and I do not think it belongs to critics alone; it is as much the requisite quality of reviewers, not to mention everyone else. So for years I was a reviewer, working on assignment, and even the essays I wrote, all but two or three, came from the prompting of editors. Whatever ideas I had concerning art and experience were set down piecemeal, often in reviews of books I would not have chosen, myself, to read, much less to write about. In consequence this book of selected pieces [Effluences From the Sacred Caves] is miscellaneous and more repetitious than it should be, even though the things reprinted in it have been chosen quite rigorously from the total mess.

Well, I won't apologize for my life or work, because apologies are futile. [In a footnote, Carruth adds: "Nevertheless I do wish to apologize for, or at least explain, the omission of so many important poets from consideration in this book. It is precisely because my work has been done on assignment. Adrienne Rich is a good example. I have admired her work since the late 1950s, and have learned from it. I have reviewed many of her books. But the reviews have always been brief and most have been parts of larger reviews dealing with numbers of other poets. I tried to patch together some of these for this book, but the result was fragmentary, disconnected, and confused; it did justice neither to Rich nor to me. I have removed it. This means that a poet who is—I do not exaggerate—extremely important to me, far more important than many poets discussed here, has been left out, and that to this extent the book misrepresents what I really feel. I can say the same about several others: Jim Harrison, Tom McGrath, Hilda Morley, Robert Duncan, etc."] Moreover I did take my responsibility seriously. I was a reviewer, not a critic, but considered myself nevertheless a needed person in the confederation. I did my best, and I was honest.

I cannot recommend such a life as a good one for writers, but since I cannot recommend any other life either, I'm not sure it matters. I worked. Don't think I didn't do everything, because I did: ghosting, rewriting, inventing blurbage, reading, proofing—once I typed manuscripts for a vanity publisher in New York for a dollar an hour. For a long time the number of books I put out that did not contain my name exceeded the number that did. Maybe this is still true, though I have lost count. It was hard. The pay was low. Many a month my family and I subsisted on a couple of checks from the Nation or the quarterlies. I wonder how we did it. As the inflation of the 1970s became acute, I found myself working long spates, twice around the clock often enough, especially when deadlines conflicted—and of course I never dared turn down an assignment. I remember many times when I walked from my writing-shack to put finished manuscripts in my mailbox at the hour when most of my neighbors, the farmers, were just getting up; the rosiness of summer dawn, the brilliant starry quiet of a winter morning with the temperature thirty below. Those were good moments, feeling alone in the world, tired but gratified. I miss them. Often I used to walk a half-mile up the road and back with my dog Locky, listening to the birds in their morning song or the trees creaking with frost.

I kept it up as long as I could. But I found myself working eighty or ninety hours a week and still not earning enough. When my illness abated sufficiently to permit it, I took a job as a professor in the city. It is very different, as thorough a change, almost, as I could imagine. Some aspects of my new life are welcome, but nothing replaces those peaceful early mornings.

A word is in order, I think, about the art of the reviewer. For if he or she is the humblest laborer in the vineyard, nevertheless the form in which the reviewer works is as exacting as those of the loftiest. Usually he is assigned a limit of length, often no more than five hundred or six hundred words, that makes the job fundamentally impossible to do. Many compromises are required. Even so, he must remember that he is first of all a journalist; he must report to his readers what kind of book, in substance as well as in structure, style, and mode, is under consideration. He must open with a "lead" that will hook the reader's attention. He must give some indication, though usually slight, of his own judgment of the book's success or failure, and he must do this not in terms of his own tastes but in terms of the author's intention. Finally he must hit upon some thematic figure or problem by means of which his review may acquire the same unity and integrity that any written work should posses. All this is not easy.

In fact, it is damned hard. It is too hard, and the rewards are never enough to recompense the labor; in this sense a review, though as demanding formally as a poem, is a useless effort. Moreover a good review happens, like good poems, only by luck; everything must come together in a fortuitous stroke of the imagination. One produces many failures, but unlike failed poems, which can be thrown away, failed reviews must be sent off in time to meet their deadlines, and usually they are published as they are, i.e., failures—except when officious undereditors pounce on them and make them even worse. Sometimes I have been lucky. Sometimes I have put down on the page four hundred words so apt and lucid that they meet all the demands I have spoken of. It is like writing a good sonnet with that marvelous victory in the concluding couplet. But a good sonnet can keep me going for six months, while a good review gives no more than an instant's satisfaction.

That reviewing is truly an art may be negatively demonstrated not only in small literary magazines and local newspapers but equally in the flossiest quarterlies and the biggest mass-circulation weeklies. I see a hundred clumsy and obtuse attempts for every one that succeeds. Even the finest writers sometimes cannot turn out a readable, honest, useful, brief review. The best I know is Hesse's review of Sigmund Freud's General Introduction to Psychoanalysis in 1919, and it pleases me that Hesse for many years made his living, too, as a hack reviewer and editor, until finally his novels became popular enough to let him slack off. Another superb reviewer was Conrad Aiken. A third was Edmund Wilson, though only in his early work for such magazines as the New Republic, before the New Yorker spoiled him, and only when he was writing about fiction or literary theory, never about poetry. For reviews of poetry, read Louise Bogan.

And in spite of all I have said about its drawbacks, reviewing still can be a needed support for young writers and good training as well. If they wish to do it properly, I suggest they begin by acknowledging the review as a distinct literary genre, and then by reading and studying the reviews of the comparatively few great reviewers we have had since the introduction of the daily press. Remember, brevity is not merely a commercial, practical requirement, it is intrinsic to good reviewing, for a good short review is worth any number of prolix disquisitions. (Some of the worst reviews I have read are the pompous, long-winded self-indulgences published in the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, or the even worse Macaulayesque maunderings in the "great" quarterlies of the nineteenth century.) Finally, never forget the reviewer's place, namely, the least. Author, publisher, editor, reader, all come first. Reviewers who use the space assigned them primarily for slopping out their own temperamentalities or for buttering up editors and readers by displaying their own cleverness at the expense of the authors whose works they are supposed to be considering, have no place—I emphasize, no place at all—in a responsible culture.