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Suspended Judgments. Essays On Books And Sensations

di John Cowper Powys

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Publisher: New York, G.A. Shaw Publication date: 1916 Subjects: French literature English literature Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.… (altro)
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Published in 1916 when the flower of Europe's youth was entrenched in Northern France in a world war with no end in sight. Powys's reflections on the art of literature concentrating overwhelmingly on French writers must have seemed particularly poignant to those reading during the war years.

Powys selected 16 authors from the western canon whom he believed were touched by greatness. In each essay Powys concentrates on an individual writer teasing out the qualities that set him/her above their contemporaries, with reference to some of their works. Powys is very much aware of his role as a critic and says:

"Criticism whether of literature or art is but a dead hand laid upon a living thing, unless it is a genuine response to the object criticised of something reciprocal in us".

It is his ability to convey his passionate responses to his selected authors that make these essays so lively and interesting. Tthey will often trigger thoughts and ideas on the precious qualities of life, which he weaves into his text in such a way that he never loses sight of the author he is criticising. With the great war in the foreground of most European peoples thoughts, it must have felt for some that civilization was coming to an end. Powys says in a final essay of summation that "the burden of humanity must not be allowed to press all joy, originality, all waywardness, all imagination out of our lives" John Cowper Powys's reading of the classics was extensive and he leaves the reader in no doubt that this has informed his views, he has no time for those critics who cannot see traditional beauty and merely acclaims the latest, newest sensation: "one begins to surmise that a person of this brand is not a rebel or a revolutionary,but quite simply a thick skin endowed with the insolence of cleverness, which is the enemy of genius and its works"

Of the sixteen selected authors ten of them are French and Powys writes about them more or less chronologically. Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire Rousseau, Balzac, Victor Hugo, Maupassant, Anatole France, Verlaine and Remy de Gourmont are all examined for their contributions to the canon. Montaigne is described as a shrewd pagan spirit, who gave palpable intellectual shape to the different spirit and temper of the classics. Pascal is admired for his ability to tear himself away from peddling and compromise and to "look the emptiness of space straight between its lidless ghastly eyes." He admires the passion of Voltaire as a living indictment of the madness of politicians and the insanity of parties and sects. Balzac is undoubtedly the greatest purely creative genius who ever dealt with the art of fiction, while Victor Hugo is the essence of pure poetic imagination. Guy de Maupassant is the greatest realist that ever lived, while Verlaine understood like no one else that the art of poetry is the art of heightening words by the magic of music. Remy de Gourmont is described as a spiritual anarchist who was the shameless advocate of pleasure as the legitimate aim of the human race.

There are only six essays left to cover the rest of the western canon and William Blake, Byron, Emily Bronte, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Oscar Wiide are selected. While Powys's writing is just as insightful and passionate on this group he is more likely to diverge from his subject and to worry about their short comings. I found his essay on Conrad particularly fascinating. He is described as a philosopher and a psychologist who writes particularly well about women. Powys launches into a critique of the opposite sex, saying that they want to posses their men body and soul.

"That they are forbidden this complete reciprocity by a profound law of nature excites their savage fury and they blindly wreak their anger upon the innocent cause of their bewildered unhappiness."

This could be Powys' view of the women in Conrad's novels, however it sounds more like something that D H Lawrence might say. Perhaps their is a bit of Powys in there too.

The final essay; suspended judgements is not an attempt to tie everything together as this would be very difficult, it is more generally a plea for the individual artists of genius not to be swept away by the unruly mob, who lack the imagination to do much else. It is not overly pessimistic as I am of the opinion that Powy's believes that great art endures. I think a true test of a book of critical essays such as this, is as to what extent the reader is persuaded to explore or explore further the authors criticised. I will certainly keep Powys's thoughts in my head as I continue my reading. ( )
10 vota baswood | Aug 21, 2011 |
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Publisher: New York, G.A. Shaw Publication date: 1916 Subjects: French literature English literature Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.

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