Burnshaw, Stanley 1906–

Burnshaw is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 9-12, rev. ed.)

The Seamless Web probably does as much as it could possibly do, given its spinner's exquisite manners. What leaves me rather disconcerted is that the reading of it took me longer and required a considerably greater effort of will than the reading of any of Dickens's longer novels or a sizable portion of Paradise Lost. For this looks like another paradox…. Art is already long—should talk about art, however intelligent, be longer? At all events, Mr. Burnshaw's readers will want to associate themselves with his estimate of the continuing importance of art for mankind. In his closing remarks on the conflict in the mind between 'diencephalon' and 'cerebral cortex', or between primal forces and civilised forces, he proposes that one truce between them is art, when 'certain innermost needs of the organism fulfil themselves through imaginative creations'. The mystery—of the needs and how they are fulfilled—remains. Perhaps it is meant to.

In "The Seamless Web" Stanley Burnshaw made a courageously original statement about the physical basis of art, a work which I quite firmly believe to be the most exciting, releasing book on the nature of poetry since "Biographia Literaria." His central thesis is that "poetry begins and ends with the body," and maintains that "even Mallarmé's symbols of abstract essence lead back to the bones, flesh and nerves." With massive, strange documentation, Mr. Burnshaw shows how the poet and the long-jumper in the air are engaged in the same gesture of exaltation. One is sedentary as he writes, the other in violent motion as he suspends himself by his muscles above the earth. But in both the body is paramount: the fluids are running, and the deepest center of animality is engaged. The words of the poet come from that center.

Mr. Burnshaw has now collected his own poetry; and when I got it ["In the Terrified Radiance"], I was afraid to open the book. Liké most writers, I had seen too many theories exploded by the theorist's practice, too many statements-of-policy come to a sickening nothingness in the writer's attempt to give them a habitation and a name.

But not this time. Mr. Burnshaw is not only as good as his word; he is as good as his body. And what is even better, he is not enslaved by his own theories; he goes around them, above them, inside them—and, above all, beyond them. His refreshing openness results in a kind of all-embracing nature-mystique, an adventurous sharing of the earth with … well, with the others….

This is creature-poetry, and the human imagination, in its desperate latter-day effort to get back its animal inheritance, needs it now more than it needs any other kind of communication….

Burnshaw has plenty of mind—"The Seamless Web" is surely one of the most learned literary works of our time—but his mind is in a tremendously exciting kind of balance with his body: both can feed each other, and consequently both can speak as one.

And there is also Burnshaw's intense caring for the literature of other languages. He is a master of tongues and he has done a remarkable thing for all of us in "The Poem Itself" and "The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself" by showing us how to come into the spirit of poems in other languages than our own which we, in our linguistic laziness, don't and will never know, and to come into that spirit with little pain and much delight.

And so we have it here: a remarkable man's life, and the best of it. "In the Terrified Radiance" is a poetry of the "whole creature," all languages, all cultures contributing, mind and body leaping and singing, writing like a beast.

[In his collection In the Terrified Radiance,] Stanley Burnshaw … writes from an inner fire he sees no need to put out. In fact, although the repetition of theme and image in his short lyrics suggests something deliberate and even contrived, Burnshaw's goal is to create pure intensity, to proclaim "terrified radiance" for its own sake. He is as uninterested as Roethke in the outside world and chooses to ignore the problem of perspective in favor of commiting himself to the single creative moment of beauty and awe. Is it because Burnshaw is an established aesthetician that one finds these poems very theoretical? In any case, they are best taken a few at a time. They would read like a developing inner spiritual diary were it not that they so lack outer context and variety. Burnshaw always looks for the same demon and finds and faces up to it only once or twice….

The problem in reading Burnshaw's finest poems is that they make the majority of his poems seem, not inadequate, but unnecessary. One assumes that writing them was good exercise for his metaphoric muscles, but they are not very important to the reader who can see his best creations.

From cover to cover in short order is not the ideal way to read Burnshaw. Even as I recognized the power of individual pieces [in In the Terrified Radiance] I found myself eventually chilled by the absolute humorlessness of the book, by what comes to seem a constant portentousness of tone. The same words turn up as if by ritual repetition: flesh, blood, bone, flame. The book is undeniably impressive but, at least to my taste, forbidding. I would have to admit that its demands on patience are recompensed not infrequently by passages of great eloquence. One may admire something without being charmed by it, and that is how I feel about Burnshaw's poetry.