GERMAINE BRÉE

"Although everyone knows that humanity is only one strand in the web of creation, one can rarely speak about man's condition as a creature without eliciting defensiveness and confusion." It is to man's condition as a creature, his need and indeed drive to regain his primary organic unity with the rest of creation, that Stanley Burnshaw's title [The Seamless Web] refers. It is to that particular drive that he connects the work of the artist—all artists, but more particularly the poet, whom Stanley Burnshaw considers to be the archetype of the artist. And it is to an elucidation of the nature of the poet's activity that The Seamless Web addresses itself…. In [Burnshaw's] investigation he considers a wide variety of approaches to art: Freud and the various brands of psychoanalysis; structuralism and the "new critics," exploring the limits of their approach with great clarity and intellectual precision. The discretion with which he uses his vast knowledge is a measure of his mastery over it….

Besides being himself a poet, willing dispassionately to examine his own activity as poet, Burnshaw is a man with a wide knowledge of his fellow craftsmen, past and present, writing in different languages from within different cultures…. But, beyond the whole range of testimony concerning the creative act gathered from the artists themselves, the volume brings to the reader a wealth of examples, a rich harvest of verse in an analytic context that illuminates and appeals simultaneously to the reader's imagination and understanding. Stanley Burnshaw is a man who can range far and wide in the world of poetry itself, a critic with an acute sense of the precise techniques and the imponderables that make up the poet's craft and of the many traps his use of words will set a reader bent on some single explanation of a poet's meaning. He is as nondogmatic in his approach to poetry as he is unpedantic in the formulation of his ideas. (p. 522)

The book progresses with great honesty and thoughtfulness, opening up new avenues for speculation along the way. The poet is always present, throughout the book, which is most certainly, as Hiram Haydn has said, a "pivotal book," and a much needed book, which may well influence the general approach to literature, and perhaps, to some degree, the poets' own understanding of their art. It requires careful reading if one is to come to grips with the "common and uncommon" sense it makes, with Burnshaw's deep concern with the human sensibility and his unerring aesthetic sense. (p. 524)