Yeats, with his grand style, his "artifice of eternity," his "singing masters" (Blake and Shelley and the ancient bards), his heroic soul "fastened to a dying animal," has always seemed the sort of superman the modern age either must instinctively distrust or deliriously admire. Full of contradictions, a youthful admirer of Madame Blavatsky, a towering, austere, passionate mythmaker, a crosspatch metaphysician (see A Vision), his poems, nevertheless, are generally regarded as the major ones of our century. While not actually dissenting from this evaluation, Harold Bloom does ask us to turn a very cold eye indeed, not only upon Yeats the man, as does the usual left-wing critic with his proto-fascist labeling, but, more decisively, on Yeats the poet, so we may better understand what the glorious rhetoric's all about. "The Higher Criticism of Yeats, when it is more fully developed, will have to engage the radical issue of his subjectivity, particularly as it is expressed in his myth of the antithetical man." Yeats' dialogues of self and soul which suggest monologues, his phases of the moon and Gnostic wheel-turnings, his frequently insupportable images of History or Unity of Being, often seem, to Professor Bloom, solipsistic, or worse: a poet "does not cease to be a sentimentalist and rhetorician merely by declaring himself to be the possessor of a vision of reality, and there is much self-deception in Meditations." These are fighting words, but Bloom's a brilliant scholar. His argument, though perhaps built on rationalist or unimaginative premises, will clearly, as Bloom no doubt intended, cause a stir among the Yeats factions here and elsewhere.
Pub Date: April 30, 1970
ISBN: 0195016033
Page Count: 518
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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