Arts and Letters

The death of Richard Palmer Blackmur is a loss to everybody concerned with serious literary criticism, and a personal loss to his old and close friends, among whom I count myself. I first saw the name R. P. Blackmur in The Hound & Horn in 1928, and from then on I read everything by him that I could find. In 1935 appeared his first volume of essays, The Double Agent. This book marked the beginning of a new era in American criticism, for it was the first example of what has become known as the New Criticism: two essays, "E. E. Cummings' Language" and "Examples of Wallace Stevens" are critical landmarks. They directed our attention to the poet's language, away from historical background and biography. Something similar was being done in England by William Empson; but Empson had gone to school to I. A. Richards, while Blackmur had educated himself by assimilating the philosophy of Santayana and the "Prefaces" of Henry James. After The Double Agent a succession of brilliant volumes of essays appeared: The Expense of Greatness (1940), Language as Gesture (1952), The Lion and the Honeycomb (1955), Anni Mirabiles (1956), and Form and Value in Modern Poetry (1957).

In the twenty-two years from the first book of criticism to the last, Blackmur widened immensely his range of interest to include speculation on the nature of literature, its relation to politics, history, and philosophy, and the limits of the creative imagination. His style became increasingly idiosyncratic and difficult: his critical terms were never systematic, but rather improvisations of great flexibility and sensitivity, always responsive to the matter in hand, whether the occasion were a poem by Hart Crane or the ideal form that Madame Bovary might have achieved. The avoidance of academic stereotypes was deliberate: R. P. Blackmur never strayed far from his early description of literary criticism as the "passionate discourse of an amateur."

But the distinction and influence of his criticism should not blind us to the value of the small but irreplaceable body of poetry that was his chief interest up to about 1940. He published three books of poetry: From Jordan's Delight (1937), The Second World (1942), and The Good European (1947). A close reader of Pound and Eliot, he was never influenced by them as a poet. He was a formalist, a master of traditional versification. When the literary history of our period is written From Jordan's Delight will take its due place as one of the most distinguished volumes of verse in the first half of the century. The two other books encroach a little upon the critical domain; or perhaps one should say that the poetic sensibility seems a little thinner as the master of ideas, returning to the medium of verse, takes it up in his left hand.

R. P. Blackmur will undoubtedly have a permanent place in American literature, both as critic and as poet. He had no predecessors in the English language. His nearest counterpart is the Frenchman Remy de Gourmont, but he was a greater critic than Gourmont. Yet back of, or alongside of, or inside, was the man who was the same as, yet different from Richard Palmer Blackmur: I mean "Dick" Blackmur, our friend, a cold, passionate, and whimsical man, both withdrawn and gregarious, loyal to his friends, but indifferent to the persons who might have been his enemies had he not ignored them. I am sure Dick and I became friends the first time we met. The occasion was a bibulous party given for me by Ted Spencer when I went to Harvard to give a lecture in 1938. The next year I went to Princeton to do something in Dean Gauss's Creative Arts Program; and the year after that, the number of students having increased, Dean Gauss asked me whether we ought to have another man. I said yes, and that the man to get was Dick Blackmur. It made as little difference to Gauss as it did to me that Dick had not gone to college. Whether I did Dick a favor I have never been able to decide. It was the best thing I did while I was at Princeton.