theoryofliteratu00inwell

Image, Metaphor, Symbol, Myth 21
of an "enthusiast" are palpable. Knight's exegesis of Pope's
Essays on Criticism and on Man blithely disregards the question
of what the "ideas" in those poems could historically have
meant to Pope and his contemporaries. Deficient in historical
perspective, Knight suffers also from a desire to "philosophize."
The "philosophy" he draws from Shakespeare and others is
neither original, clear, nor complex: it amounts to the reconcilia-
tion of Eros and Agape, of order with energy, and so on with
other pairs of contraries. As all the "real" poets bring essentially
the same "message," one is left, after the decoding of each, with
a feeling of futility. Poetry is a "revelation," but what does it
reveal?
Quite as perceptive as Knight's work and much better bal-
anced is that of Wolfgang Clemen, whose Shakesfeares Bilder 60
carries out the promise of its subtitle that it will study the development
and functioning of the imagery. Contrasting the im-
agery of lyrics and even epics, he insists on the dramatic nature
of Shakespeare's plays: in his mature work, it is not Shakespeare
"the man" but Troilus who metaphorically in the play thinks in
terms of rancid food. In a play, "Each image is used by a specific
person." Clemen has a real sense for the right methodo-
logical questions to put. In analyzing Titus Andronicus, for ex-
ample, he asks, "On what occasions in the play does Shakespeare
use images? Does there exist a connection between the use of
imagery and the occasion? What function have the images?"
to which questions for Titus he has only negative answers. In
Titus, the imagery is spasmodic and ornamental, but from that
we can trace Shakespeare's development to the use of metaphor
and as a
as ustimmungsmassige Untermalung des Geschehens* y
"ganz ursfriingliche Form der Wahrnehmung," i.e., to meta-
phorical thinking. He makes admirable comments on the "ab-
strakte Metaphorik" of Shakespeare's Middle Period (with its
"unbildliche Bildlichkeit"—corresponding to Wells' Sunken,
Radical, and Expansive types of imagery) ; but, writing a mono-
graph on a specific poet, he introduces his type only when, in
Shakespeare's "development," it appears ; and, though his monograph
studies a development, and the "periods" of Shakespeare's
work, Clemen remembers that he is studying the "periods" of
the poetry, not those of the author's largely hypothetical life.
— 7