On Sympathy by Sophie Ratcliffe

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850 Reviews that the terms of the enquiry be clearly defined and explained to the reader. The discussion falls short of this in places, and tends to sway among related terms and concepts?time, temporality, the past, present, and future, history, narrative, memory, recollection?without always clearly relating them to each other or ad equately differentiating among them. The study begins appropriately enough with William Wordsworth, going on to devote chapter sections to Christina Rossetti, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (twice), Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot (twice), Seamus Heaney, Evan Boland, J. H. Prynne, and Alice Oswald. The author is a strong close reader of the poems, and there aremany readings here that are valuably illuminating. For instance, his relation ofWordsworth's description of 'spots of time' to occurrences of spot' in Hardy's 'Poems of 1912-13' is attentive and judicious, even ifHardy's poem 'A Spot'?the firstline ofwhich is a tantalizing comment onmemory failure?remains curiously absent from thediscussion. However, these promising readings are yoked togetherwith a theoretical apparatus constructed of uninterrogated philosophical fragments. It is not sufficient, once Augustine is invoked, to refer generally to 'philosophers such as Augustine' (p. 3), nor should one forgo extensive elaboration in claiming thatWordsworth anticipates Emmanuel Levinas's account of time's conditioning of totality and alterity (p. 15). The spatial element alluded to in the title is introduced in three sentences via thework of Pierre Nora (p. 5), but in the section on place and the past inHardy (pp. 67-85) Nora is not discussed at all (nor does he reappear elsewhere). Similarly, the studymight have made much more of Paul Ricceur's extensive work on memory and narrative than the two brief mentions he receives (pp. 4, 67). Alternatively, the author might have excluded these and several other philosophical and theoretical references, building instead on the terms and concepts invoked by the poets. But once a philosophy is adduced, its complex system of ideas should be thoroughly discussed if the argument is to be persuasive. For this reader, the conceptual and methodological problems of thework are compounded by the uneven quality of the prose. The publisher and editor or editors must bear some of the responsibility for all these shortcomings. They could have given the author more time and more support to better define, develop, and express his ideas. His firstmonograph on Romantic organicism was a model of plain-spoken but painstaking literary-philosophical investigation. This book, by contrast, displays some perplexing weaknesses. Hertford College, Oxford David-Antoine Williams On Sympathy. By Sophie Ratcliffe. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2008. xi+266 pp. ?53. ISBN 978-0-19-923987-0. Sophie Ratcliffe's dense and earnest book is about relating and relationships'; in it 'the tracing of literary connections is central' (p. 3), specifically those that Browning, Auden, and Beckett apparently establish with Shakespeare's The Tem pest through their 'dramatic monologues'. These are treated to a series of 'tactful MLR, 105.3, 2010 851 readings' characterized by a consciousness of one's own limits in understanding or influencing others' (p. 5). This summarizes the ambition and the execution of On Sympathy: itpursues the elusive stresses and strains that betray how we come to understand (or fail to understand) others, whether that be through creating characters, becoming creatures, ventriloquizing other voices, or the imaginative act of attempting to reconstruct the voice and intentions of an absent person' (p. 3)? Ratcliffe's characterization of the act of reading. Methodologically, the study is loosely predicated on the assertion that allusion [is] an active dialogue with the past?a "lifeline", connecting past and present minds by analogical means, away of understanding otherminds' (p. 144). Hence thebook seeks echoes of Shakespeare's Romance in a later series of texts.Yet the book's ambition feels a little curbed by its 'tactful' limits. When Ratcliffe allows herself to become discursive (most confidently in the epi logue, dealing with modern celebrity) one glimpses the potential for a compelling thesis. Here she attempts to draw together Browning's shifting scepticism, Auden's discomfort at being a poet, and Beckett's allusive yet isolating grammar together with more modern debates about thepurpose and transformative potential of read...