[What] disturbs me in reading Mr. Blackmur is the feeling I so frequently get that he is deliberately refusing to reduce his meaning to simple terms—that, on the contrary, he is inflating it, surrounding it with a nimbus of uncaught and uncatchable meaning, rather than let any possible nuance escape him. It would be altogether too crude, of course, to suggest that this is done merely to impress the less intelligent reader, that it is an 'act', as we say, put on because the reader will not think he is reading first-rate criticism unless he finds it hard to understand. It is deeper than that; it is really, at a profound level of sincerity, a dislike of too overt statement, of a subject-matter that jumps too blithely from one skull into another; it is our modern odi profanum vulgius.

The labour, for the lover of simplicity, of reducing Mr. Blackmur's matter to a more tractable manner could be illustrated from any one of [the essays in Language as Gesture]. The title essay in particular is a riot of proliferation from a simple basic idea, and even that idea is never quite clearly present as an idea; it is, rather, set shining like a ray to be split prismatically. Gesture means what we do to convey meaning instead of using words; but just as gesture can have its own language—can be language, metaphorically (a shake of the fist or a blown kiss are both acts of communication), so language can have its own gesture, its emphasis and overtones which are the result of grouping and choice; metaphorically, language can be gesture. That is the subject-matter of Mr. Blackmur's nineteen-page essay. The rest is illustration and urbanity; both good things, but here present in excess. It is fun, of course, to puzzle out the sense of a jingle such as 'if metre as motion brings meaning to gesture, then motion as metre moors gesture to meaning'. But the trouble is that when one has puzzled it out, and found it not so very abstruse, there is nothing to protect Mr. Blackmur's argument against the deflating cry of 'Is that all?'

Having waded so far in impertinence to this fine and famous critic that to go on is no worse than to go back, let me look closely for a moment at his essay on 'The Later Poetry of W. B. Yeats'. This essay begins by arguing as follows: a coherent structure of beliefs is necessary to a poet, and the modern poet, who, unlike (for instance) Dante, has no such structure which he shares with his readers, has to find or invent one himself. So far, plain sailing; though there is a hint that we shall shortly be coming upon some hard sayings, for Mr. Blackmur plainly regards a poet's beliefs as tools for a special and unique purpose, that of allowing him to write poetry, and does not care a rap whether the beliefs in themselves are beautiful, probable, or likely, in their non-literary formulation, to be shared by others; to him they are just beliefs, something the poet has to have, like a pen and a bottle of ink…. It does not matter what a poet believes in so long as he believes in something.

This seems true; but matter to whom? To the poet, one belief may be as good as another in helping him to find a framework for his imaginings; but to the reader, surely, it matters a great deal whether he can accept the beliefs out of which a poem is made. No, answers Mr. Blackmur, because if we make the effort to enter imaginatively into the belief, we shall find it a key that unlocks the poem, helping us to penetrate to its centre and inhabit it; after that the key can be left to rust away. (pp. 146-48)

[Mr. Blackmur tells us that Yeats's 'The Second Coming'] is a good poem because it is in the most fitting words and could not be paraphrased without losing a lot of its value; but that, nevertheless, it is hard to see exactly what it means. He does not say it as simply as that, of course; his exact words … are worth looking at.

The ground is now prepared and we await the critic's onslaught on the question. Unhappily, Mr. Blackmur is not quite ready. We have to wait while he clears his throat again.

'… The question is whether the general, the readily available senses of the words are adequate to supply the specific sense wanted by the poem.'

Exactly, that is the question. And now?

'Put another way, can the poet's own arbitrary meaning be made, merely by discovering it, to participate in and enrich what the "normal" meanings of the words in their limiting context provide?

By this time we are really leaning forward to hear the answer. But suddenly Mr. Blackmur spins round on his heel. His next sentence is a sad disappointment.

'The critic can only supply the facts; the poem will in the end provide its own answer.'

Cut my lace! Is this where we were tending all the while? To whom will the poem provide the answer? To the critic who has given the facts?—and will he, in turn, tell the rest of us? But wait, the demonstration is going on.

Through a mist of tears we see Mr. Blackmur assembling the apparatus: Spiritus Mundi, The Great Year, The Great Wheel. Tears of sheer disappointment at realising that, like the rest of us, Mr. Blackmur just does not know the answer. Some of the words and phrases in the poem, he tells us again, flow 'from private doctrine and some from Yeats's direct sense of the world about him and some from both at once'. And so?

And so, 'Whether the special symbolism has actually been incorporated in the poem, and in which form, or whether it is private debris merely, will take a generation of readers to decide. In the meantime, it must be taken provisionally for whatever its ambiguity may seem to be worth'.

I want to be understood over this; I do not blame Mr. Blackmur, or think anyone should blame him, for not finding a solution to this perhaps insoluble problem. My complaint is simply that too much air of being about to say something is made to accompany the saying of too little. After all, this is the central problem in the criticism of Yeats; unimportant and obscure people like myself have been perfectly willing, for years, to admit that we do not know the solution; but what would happen to us if we wrote long and elaborate essays for the purpose of saying merely that—that we do not know? (pp. 152-53)

To be fair, this is not all Mr. Blackmur says in this essay. He ends by giving us some practical advice. There are two possible ways of approaching Yeats's 'magic'. One, which Mr. Blackmur does not really recommend, is to translate it into the terms of psychology—which, being scientific, we all believe in and think of as something quite different from horrid old magic even when the two are saying the same thing…. The other way, which Mr. Blackmur thinks preferable, is to swallow the magic and then excrete it when it is no more use to us: 'to accept Yeats's magic literally as a machinery of meaning, to search out the prose parallels and reconstruct the symbols he uses on their own terms in order to come on the emotional reality, if it is there, actually in the poems—when the machinery may be dispensed with'. This is preferable partly because the emotions connected with magic, not being scientific and generalised, are closer to the emotions connected with poetry; and partly because we all believe in magic in the primitive depths of our minds: 'We are all, without conscience, magicians in the dark'.

That last sentence is such a good illustration of Mr. Blackmur's manner that I might sum up my whole argument with reference to it. For this is what he calls in another connection, quoting from Wallace Stevens, 'the prose that wears the poem's guise at last'. 'Conscience' means 'consciousness'; it is at the level below rationality that we believe in magic; it also means conscience in the ordinary sense, the part of us that worries over good and evil; when we believe in magic we are not troubling about whether it is right to do so. So we are 'in the dark' in two senses: not knowing (in the dark about) whether magic is good or bad, and also literally in the dark; the moment when the candle blows out is the moment when you see the ghost. Your own non-rational inner darkness takes over; you are 'without' conscience because you are 'outside' it as well as not having it. 'Magicians' practise magic as well as believing in it, and so do we when we allow magical ideas to direct us. It is a perfect little snatch of prose-poetry in the modern manner; but I am afraid Mr. Blackmur is in the dark, without conscience, when he turns on this kind of thing. Modern analytical English prose is a subtle precision instrument; it took many men and many events to bring it to birth, and in a sense the execution of Charles I is as much a part of its essential history as the publication of Dryden's essays. Mr. Eliot says somewhere that Milton's prose is too much like poetry to be good prose. But the same is true of pretty well every English writer before 1660. Then at last, with enormous pains, we forged ourselves a prose that could say one thing at a time—which is, in fact, the last refinement of subtlety—and we have kept it for three hundred years. That is why so much of Mr. Blackmur's critical writing (remembering, of course, that he is enormously respected and capable of inspiring widespread imitation) seems to me like a deliberate attempt to put the clock back. That one's prose should 'wear the poem's guise at last' is not a thing to be proud of; it will come, soon enough, when English prose has been finally wrecked by being tampered with beyond the point it can stand. (pp. 154-55)