Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland by Deborah A. Symonds (review)

Abstract

aesthetic communication" (328). Unlike Wotdswotth, Eliot in his "fotays across 'frontiets of consciousness'" (321) sensed die mysterious and unpataphtasable meaning inherent in poetry's primitive dtumbeat. Matks clarifies Eliot's telling idea that a wotd's music rises out ofcrossed colotations—one from the odiet wotds in its immediate context, the othet from meanings and associations of the wotd in othet contexts. In the "musical" possibilities ofShakespeare's dramatic vetse, Eliot envisioned "one of the most dating conceptions ofpoetic language ever proposed" (329). Unlike Enlightenment Know-It-Alls and Postmodern Know-Nothings, Marks resides firmly in the camp of the Know-Somethings. Though he cannot espouse poststtuctutal excesses—Derrida's deconsttuctive hetmeneutics, nihilism, the death ofaesthetics, die authot, referentialiry, and the test—Matks in his Epilogue neithet ignores not distorts its innovations, as do some of its strongest suppottets, both English and American. Ofpatticulat interest ate Matks' insights into Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman, celebtatots of poetic expressionism, "repelled by the dehumanizing tendencies of poststtuctutalism" (350). While litetary ideas become ever more subtle, poetic language temains a mystery. This paradox tantalizes not only poetry-lovers but egalitarian textualists who yearn to conflate undet the same linguistic laws the poetry of John Keats and die pattet of John Doe. During the great Anglophone debate, most disputants, Matks notes emphatically, sensed "that in poetry language is employed in a manner, and widi an effect, that sets it apart from all othet kinds of speech ot writing" (13). That no dieory has ever captured fully poetry's "unique essence" or the teadet's experience of its "wondrous ways" is fot Matks axiomatic. To feel poetry's "magic," however, in no way "relegates to an exercise in futility die centuries of effort to discovet, and to fotmulate in tational tetms, the means by which that powet is activated" (21). Taming the Chaos is a mastetpiece of evaluative histoty, the refined teal thing that quickens the serious student once again to the discipline, beauty, and worth of litetary scholarship—itself no mean tarnet of the chaos, ^r