Trials of the Word [antikvár]

Most of these essays were written in the last five or six years, and most of them—the long concluding essay is the exception— were written at the suggestion of an editor or the chairman of some literary symposium. I hope I may be forgiven for taking as my title a phrase I have used before, though in a less conspicuous place (as the title of a subsection in another book). Like the benighted fellow in Frost's poem, I like having thought of it so well, I cannot resist saying it again. But it is, I think, apt for my intentions here. For these are in fact trials—that is, attempts or essays, efforts to come to terms with certain phenomena made up of words, to explore certain phases of the language of literature. They are also tests of certain hypotheses about the nature of poetry and fiction (the essays on Whitman and Conrad, for example) and about the relation between the available forms of literature and the observable forms of life (as in the discussions of Hawthorne and James and of Edith Wharton). But they do not derive, so far as I can retrospectively make out, from any very stringent theory about literature itself; and, in any case, I prefer to move toward theory by exemplifying it rather than by elaborating it as it were in cold blood. But just as one has temperamental preferences, so one has congenital and recurring interests; one is drawn all helplessly, time and again, to the same center of imaginative attraction. What attracts me, more often than not, is the tug of the transcendent: or, rather, the fertile tug-of-war between the transcendent and the concrete. I am drawn to testing the energy of the Word within the word—to watching any imaginative attempt to body forth "the imaged Word," in Hart Crane's phrase—in order to