American Poets: Stevens, Eberhart, Roethke, et al

Abstract

Frank Doggett and Robert Buttel, eds. Wallace Stevens: A Celebration. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 361 pp. Richard Eberhart. Of Poetry and Poets (Foreword by James Dickey). Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1979,312 pp. Jay Parini. Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. 203 pp. Helen Vendler. Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1980. 376 pp. It may be no more than the irremediable slide into middle age being experi- enced by this reviewer, but it seems to him that the academic study of letters is undergoing a similar malaise. In the 1950s—before Sputnik, ecological awareness and the energy crisis; before xerography, electronic tape and computers; before McLuhan, Lévi-Strauss and Derrida—the study of letters seemed to be a serious occupation addressing important moral, philosophical and social issues through well-grounded and autonomous techniques proper to humane studies. We were heirs of the brilliant critical formulations of the 1930s by such men as Richards, Empson, Brooks and Warren. It seemed then that the study of letters was the last bastion of humane studies, but one that was secure, protected by scholar critics of unquestioned intellect who could address any issue and bring to it wisdom, penetration and illumination. This sense of the centrality of the study of letters may have been merely an illusion in the 1950s, but it was an illusion that was abroad. That illusion— if such it was—is no longer with us.