Progresses of Poetry

[...]it's perfectly in keeping that even though the two boys plainly want to row he takes the oars without much embarrassment when he's offered them. Reflecting a commitment to feeling and custom and a curious indifference to his companions' need for definitive and transcendent truth, the Poet in The Excursion is a personality that has shone through a great many of Wordsworth's poems from the beginning.4 Despite the successive forms of moral and even political utility to which his vocation was prudently yoked over the years, each in turn wholly inadequate to explain his revolutionary position in literary history, he always knew and intermittently found ways of revealing the special niche from which poetry cannot be dislodged by any sort of cognitive or fideistic counter-claim. Wholly in keeping with this deliberate drawing back from vision, (he Poet's concluding lines speak movingly of a diminished thing, what is lost being precisely the transmission of Eastern sublimities into the soberer skies of the Western evening-land described so brilliantly by Hartman in the essays of Beyond Formalism and The Fate of Reading.5 This vesper-service closed, without delay, From that exalted station to the plain Descending, we pursued our homeward course, In mute composure, o'er the shadowy lake, Under a faded sky. An early Malraux title that Hartman as far as I know has not discussed in print is The Metamorphosis of the Gods, an account of the secularization of Early Modern art comparable to Hartman's account, in the "westering" essays of 1970 and 1975, of a somewhat later "progress" from divinity to presiding spirit to the spirit of dailiness in poetry. [...]Malraux offers yet another salvific allegory of weakening light.