Blackmur R.P., Form And Value

Part I of Essay
in Modern Poetry, Doubleday, 1957. This critique was first published as a journal article in The Southern Review, 1936 and later reprinted in the text entitled “Form and Value in Modern Poetry.” The author of the critique describes the meaning behind Yates’ poetry. He al ....

Part II of Essay
.... the language itself. It is, on the poet’s plane, the labor of bringing the representative forms of knowledge home to the experience which stirred them: the labor of keeping in mind what our knowledge is of: the labor of craft. With the poetry of Yates this labor is, as I say, doubly hard, because the forms of knowledge, being magical, do not fit naturally with the forms of knowledge that ordinarily preoccupy us.” What Blackmur is arguing, is that magic and the interpretation of this, is dependent on the reader’s knowledge of magic. ....