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as one sought to give strangeness to the familiar and the other to
domesticate the wonderful. Each more recent "movement" in
poetry has had the same design: to clear away all automatic
response, to promote a renewal of language (a "Revolution of
the Word"), and a sharpened realization. The Romantic movement
exalted the child for his unjaded, fresh perception. Matisse
labored to learn to paint as a five-year-old sees. The aesthetic
discipline, urged Pater, forbids habits as failures in perception.
Novelty is the criterion, but novelty, we must remember, for
the sake of the disinterested perception of quality. 9
How far can this criterion carry us? As applied by the Rus-
sians, it is admittedly relativist. There is no aesthetic norm, says
Mukafovsky, for it is the essence of the aesthetic norm to be
broken. 10 No poetic style stays strange. Hence, Mukafovsky
argues, works can lose their aesthetic function and then later, per-
haps, regain it—after the too familiar becomes again unfamiliar.
In the case of specific poems, we all know what it is to "use them
up," temporarily. Sometimes we later come back to them, again
and again ; sometimes we appear to have exhausted them. So, as
literary history moves on, some poets grow strange again, others
remain "familiar." 1X
In speaking of personal returns to a work, however, we seem
already to have passed, in effect, to another criterion. When we
return again and again to a work, saying that we "see new things
in it each time," we ordinarily mean not more things of the same
kind, but new levels of meaning, new patterns of association: we
find the poem or novel manifoldly organized. The literary work
which, like Homer or Shakespeare, continues to be admired,
must possess, we conclude with George Boas, a "multivalence"
its aesthetic value must be so rich and comprehensive as to in-
clude among its structures one or more which gives high satis-
faction to each later period. 12 But such work, even in its author's
time, must be conceived of as so rich that rather a community
than a single individual can realize all its strata and systems. In a
play by Shakespeare, "For the simplest auditors there is the plot,
for the more thoughtful the character and conflict of character,
for the more literary the words and phrasing, for the more
musically sensitive the rhythm, and for auditors of greater
understanding and sensitiveness a meaning which reveals itself
: