Despite his habitual doodling with other men's idioms … in the hope that something critically significant will occur, Mr. Blackmur has achieved institutional status among the company, not inconsiderable in numbers, for whom "words alone are certain good." He can pursue and isolate any subtlety provided it is sufficiently encased in language. His virtues are clearest [in Language as Gesture] in the very early essay on Cummings, where Cummings' way of turning terms into flat absolutes—"flower" isn't a flower but a cant term for anything the poet happens to hold in esteem—is subtly anatomized into twenty-four pages of scrupulous sentences in which we never lose confidence. And he is excellent—disregarding the pinnulate writing—on Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens, and pretty good on Hart Crane and Marianne Moore, all of them poets whose effects depend chiefly on closed systems of words interacting. On such subjects he is even unexpectedly epigrammatic: Marianne Moore's exiguous rhyme schemes are "part of the poem's weather"; one of Cummings' phrases has "a great suggestion of precision about it—like men going off to war." Mr. Blackmur achieves divinations of this kind by inspecting the entrails of his own formulations: the least irritating case of his habitual procedure, which is to find out what he means by exploring the words in which he is trying to say it…. Whole paragraphs … are collages of half-relevant quotations. It also causes him frequently to break loose from the subject altogether to jingle phrases…. It is as a sort of thwarted poetry, in fact, that much of his prose claims attention.

For better or worse, the Word is all. "When a word is used in a poem," Mr. Blackmur thinks, "it should be the sum of all its appropriate history made concrete and particular in the individual context; and in poetry all words act as if they were so used, because the only kind of meaning poetry can have [my italics] requires that all its words resume their full life: the full life being modified and made unique by the qualifications the words perform upon one another in the poem."… This is an excellent statement of one of Mr. Blackmur's two guiding principles—the other being that all the visible parts of a poem are conventional forms, which serve to liberate and make public what would otherwise be merely personal intentions. He harvests his insight in showing us how Stevens' words remain words and so viable, Cummings' become ideas and so opaque, while Emily Dickinson's oscillate between meaning and indicative notation. But "the only kind of meaning poetry can have…." It is the kind of meaning Wallace Stevens has: "His great labour has been to allow the reality of what he felt personally to pass into the superior impersonal reality of words." It is, one may grant, the kind of meaning Yeats has too, but the formula is treacherous: it doesn't discourage the critic from coming at Yeats' meaning the wrong way. Seeking to justify his 1935 designation of Yeats as "our one indubitable major poet," Mr. Blackmur has been driven to positing inspired "adlibbing," a sort of magnificent bluff, between the terms that bear weight. Several applauding reviewers have been grateful for this reduction—anything you don't understand can be written off as ad-libbing—but the Yeatsian Hydra won't behead that easily. (pp. 242-45)

There are critics whose exegesis is sounder. Mr. Blackmur was most nearly illuminating when, in the early thirties, he was still trying to define the mode of operation of various poets who didn't require exegesis so much as delicate commentary on their verbal procedures. Even then the appearance of a whole ramifying poetic was appearance merely; attentive rereading discloses not branches interpenetrating a space previously empty, but prose with a sort of close springy life, like moss. And now in the forties and fifties, now that he has begun to feel he knows where he is, his linguistic playfulness has run wild. Now, without discomfort, he can deal in loose trumpery counterfeits of the profundities of the poets themselves…. Now more than ever his hair-trigger pen, tickled by some homonym or cadence, is free to twitch out dozens of words at a spurt…. Mr. Blackmur's admirers refer guardedly to his "difficulty." It would be pleasant to discern a trace of irony in Mr. John Crowe Ransom's description of the book as "the official classic, in exegesis of the poetry of an age," or in Mr. Blackmur's own quotation from T. E. Lawrence, that the effort of writing is "like trying to fight a featherbed." (pp. 247-48)