Sir: I am flattered, if a bit bewildered, to be the object of such extended attention from Messrs Easthope and Poole ('Letters', PNR 40 and 42), almost two years after the appearance of my TLS review of Re-Reading English. Perhaps the only way to keep the memory of that otherwise forgettable book alive is to go on forever about the bad reviews it got and the good ones it didn't. I seem to remember that for several months before I even read the book, let alone reviewed it, a similar barrage of correspondence from Mr Easthope and his pals flooded the pages of the London Review of Books after Tom Paulin had been rash enough to be found wanting in his admiration.

I've known for some time that Mr Easthope greatly admires the book and his own contribution to it, and now learn that Mr Poole similarly admires a review that Mr Poole wrote. Unlike the anonymous friends on Mr Poole's samizdat list, I hadn't known he'd done this until he said so in PNR 42. But since a lot of your column-inches are likely to go on being devoted to the non-publication of his review, it may be that the most space-effective thing for you to do as Editor is to offer to print it. This procedure might run the risk of displeasing Mr Easthope, who has clearly discovered the promotional value to the book of printing endless complaints against people who don't like it. Still, it might be worth trying.

May I make two separate points? I don't know what the 'received opinion at the TLS' might be on the subject which exercises Mr Poole, but I've dug up the issue of 10 December 1982 which contains my review, and find that it also contains statements or reviews by Stephen Heath, Raymond Williams, Stanley Fish and the late Paul de Man. I don't imagine that any of these critics would think their views notably homogeneous with mine or with each others'. Received opinion must have been in a pretty schizoid state at the TLS that week.

Secondly, I should like to scotch the canard that I am in some sense hostile to New Accents. I have more than once stated my admiration for some volumes in that series, not least in the review in question, whose argument was that Re-Reading English was an untalented book which fell short of the series' best standards. A correspondent in the London Review of Books, who claimed to have some sympathy with the contributors' political views, thought the book insidiously coercive and anti-democratic in manner, as well as being for the most part written 'very badly or very boringly or both' (September-October 1982). I agree with most of that, except that to call the book 'insidious' is to credit it with more finesse than it ever shows any sign of possessing.
University of Warwick CLAUDE RAWSON

Sir: I see that Catherine Belsey has been complaining about misrepresentation ('Letters', PNR 40). But what about her own 'account' of modern criticism at the beginning of Critical Practice? I suppose the reviewers must have asked some of the obvious questions (such as why doesn't she mention Empson), and suggested some of the obvious answers (he knocks the shine off her 'Copernican revolution'). But something still needs to be done to set the record straight about Leavis. Or so it seems from Professor Bergonzi's essay in PNR 40. A brief comparison of Leavis and Ms Belsey should be enough to dispel Professor Bergonzi's feeling that Leavis no longer has anything to say to us. I won't, of course, be telling Professor Bergonzi anything he doesn't already know, but as Dr Johnson liked to say, we need reminding more often than telling.

Leavis and Ms Belsey both discuss Arnold's 'The Scholar Gypsy'. Ms Belsey thinks the scholar, who joins the gypsies in order to discover their secret power over mens' minds, is an 'emblem of the power of poetry to immortalize in art the moment of poetic vision and so to transform the world' (p.120). But, she adds, the world has obviously not been transformed. It is ruled by capital not poetic vision. The scholar-gypsy has failed in his quest and so cannot be a convincing emblem. This failure is implicitly confessed in the poem, in the scholar-gypsy's elusiveness and eventual disappearance. Arnold, then, is both affirming and denying the power of poetry. Ms Belsey generalizes this contradiction: 'affirmation is repeatedly qualified or undermined in Romantic verse'. And she refers to a number of poems by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley. The romantic poet, she says, rejects the 'alien world of industrial capitalism' created by society, and embraces the 'living world' of 'nature' created by his own 'imagination'. To do this the poet has to believe in his own 'autonomy' as 'subject' (p.122). But he discovers that he cannot sustain the imaginative vision. It dissolves and he feels betrayed. He cannot account for the betrayal because he cannot see that his belief in subjective autonomy is false.

Ms Belsey's analysis resembles that published by Leavis in the 1930s. Ms Belsey would no doubt here remark that I am blatantly 'recuperating her for common-sense'. I will later suggest that she is already a profound victim of her own common-sense. But let's look at Leavis's account first.

Leavis of course sees 'The Scholar Gypsy' as an expression of Victorian poeticality. His general diagnosis is that Arnold's poetry 'comes between Wordsworth and the Georgian weekenders; for all its dilute distinction, it belongs in ethos with them' (Revaluation, p.191). Leavis doesn't dwell on the 'distinction', which no doubt resides in its charming images of the country-side around Oxford. He sees its 'dilute' quality as essentially related to Arnold's poetical conception of the 'soul', which the scholar-gypsy in fact symbolises. The soul; that beautiful, serene and elusive refuge from the strains and complexities of 'modern life'. Leavis sketches economically but precisely what that conception owes to certain elements in Wordsworth, Keats and the classics-or in Arnold's response to the classics. A debt can be largely summarized in Arnold's own phrase 'the freshness of the early world', which can equally well suggest the dawn of Europe and the spontaneity of childhood. The soul is the place where these unsullied springs can be visited for refreshment.

But Leavis reminds us that Arnold has another side: 'Arnold was not a philosophic gentleman-gypsy, but a pamphleteer, critic, school-inspector, professor and (as Hopkins protested to Bridges) great man' (p.191). And as a critic Arnold clearly saw that what mattered in Wordsworth's poetry was not simply 'the freshness of the early world'. Wordsworth, says Arnold, 'deals with life because he deals with that in which life really consists'. And Leavis goes on to connect that particular judgement with Arnold's general insistence that the modern poet must confront the complexities of modern life. By his own finer standard, then, Arnold places the conception of the soul that pervades 'The Scholar Gypsy'. In the poem itself this makes itself felt in the vague and negative terms with which Arnold presents the central figure (Revaluation, p.191).

So, Leavis and Ms Belsey both find self-defeating escapism and contradiction in Arnold's poem. But Leavis's account is far more precise and subtle. In Revaluation he fully distinguishes strengths from weaknesses not only in Arnold but in Wordsworth and Keats, who so profoundly influenced Arnold and the Victorian poetic tradition. If Arnold valued Wordsworth's 'philosophy of nature' too highly, he was in part following Wordsworth's own example (p. 174). And there is that in Keats which positively invited the attentions of the Victorian aesthetes (p.255). But Wordsworth and Keats are also pre-eminently capable of close poetic engagement with the most urgent problems of their experience. The shaping of a poetic tradition, Leavis always implies, is a matter of complex possibilities and choices.

Ms Belsey places Arnold in a poetic tradition which she broadly describes as 'romantic'. She bundles together Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge and Arnold, making none of Leavis's distinctions. It might be argued that thus to generalise is her intention and her strength. It is clear what she gains: apparent confirmation of a large and doubtless satisfying view of literature and society in the nineteenth century. But what is really gained by, for example, equating Wordsworth's 'Fallings from us, vanishings;/Blank misgivings of a Creature/Moving about in worlds unrealised', with Arnold's poetic musings (Critical Practice, p.121)? Or by failing, to begin with, to note the difference between those lines and the bulk of the 'Immortality Ode'? What intelligent purpose can be served by generalities that depend in such suppressions?

Consider Ms Belsey's central generalisation: 'affirmation is repeatedly qualified or undermined in romantic verse'. Or, you might add, in classical verse; or metaphysical; or in prose-of any period. To make reservations or have doubts is to be human. What theory of meaning has reduced romantic poetic meanings to that level of generality? Saussure's, of course. This is not to say that Ms Belsey derives her critical assumptions from Saussure, but it is significant that she finds him so apt for her purposes. A significance readily brought out by comparing it with Leavis's very different theory, which starts from Ogden and Richards. Ogden and Richards insisted that meaning consists not only of 'sense' but of 'tone' and 'feeling'; tone registers attitude to audience, feeling reflects attitude to subject-matter. (I discuss The Meaning of Meaning and subsequent critical developments in The Completest Mode, Edinburgh University Press, 1982). They also insisted that the physical qualities of words, such as sound and rhythm, are integral to meaning. And they were, of course, always anxious to show that language is endlessly ambiguous. Leavis grasped the implications from the start. 'Tone', 'feeling', 'attitude' and 'movement' are the elementary terms of his descriptive criticism. He always sees meaning as fluid and dramatic; rooted in the individual sensibility. Hence his endorsement of Michael Polanyi. Not that he thinks of meaning as merely individual; witness his account of Arnold's poetic tradition.

Saussurean theory sees meaning in terms of 'difference' and, ultimately, 'absence'. This emphasis rests on certain valid insights and produces others (many of them, incidentally, explored by Richards in the 1950s and 1960s); but, focussing on meaning as 'sense' and ignoring all the aspects that interested Leavis, it is singularly ill-equipped to deal with poetry. Such a theory of meaning can generate no serious interest in relations between 'thought' and 'emotional quality'-to use the terms of one of Leavis's theoretical essays; and so it cannot begin to explain why poetry matters.

The spirit in which Ms Belsey explicitly thinks about poetic language reveals itself in the course of her account of Arnold: 'The Romantic project necessitates not realist prose, of course, but poetry, in which connotative and symbolic meanings conventionally prevail over denotation and in which, therefore, the mysterious and the magical are appropriately suggested' (p.119). The brisk and summary neatness of this reflects that 'common-sense' which I mentioned earlier and which pervades Ms Belsey's thought. A common-sense more than punningly related to her emphasis on 'sense' in meaning and her corresponding neglect of 'sensibility'.

Ms Belsey's procedure is not accidental. Deconstruction has to humanize language. To make meaning disappear, you must first reduce it to a formula, a kernel of 'sense' which is then shown to be hollow. If you have an adequate conception of meaning you can't go in for that sort of reduction. Leavis's work is all about full human meanings and our capacity for faith in them. Professor Bergonzi regretfully judges it to have lost the great force it once undoubtedly had. It seems to me to speak to our need more than ever.
Massey University, Palmerston, New Zealand JOHN NEEDHAM

TRIMMERS

Sir: The tone and tendency of I.A.Liddle's review of The Merry Muses of Caledonia (PNR 41) is unfortunately typical of the deprecatory attitude to things Scottish adopted by Sassenach and Lowlands trimmer alike. The second paragraph in particular is misleading in giving the impression that there is a Burns manuscript extant from which the text could have been corrected. If Liddle had read Professor De Lancey Fergusson's introduction with attention, he would have known that the manuscript of Burns's collection of bawdy songs can no longer be found. The Merry Muses collection (published four years after the poet's death) was not, as Liddle asserts, 'made by Burns'; in fact, De Lancey Fergusson argues convincingly that it could not have been compiled from the Burns manuscript. Having made Sidney Goodsir Smith's open confession of 'overgenerosity' in ascription sound like the action of a bumbling charlatan, Liddle continues with a gibe at an item in the glossary. 'Can gied me the glaiks really be rendered jilted me?' he asks. Anyone who takes the trouble to read the poem in which this phrase appears will see that it cannot mean anything else. In Richard Stanihurst's colloquial version of Virgil his Aeneis the deserted Dido is made to exclaim: 'He hath given me the whim-wham' (or some such phrase)-more schoolboy sniggers from the Liddles of this world! I remember several years ago a selection of MacDiarmid's poems being dismissed by some snide gentleman with a sneer at the line: 'An mither fochin scones' at the end of 'Country Life'. The powerful wind of the great will, of course, blow such spittle back into the faces of the loose-lipped splutterers, but I see no reason why the columns of PN Review should serve as their spitoon.
Doris Road, Birmingham YANN LOVELOCK