rich background, a something excellent carefully offstage, a fund of prompting, a hidden source of admirable sententiae. On its negative side it may be the secret of his incompleteness, its deficiencies the source of the gap of darkness in his illumination. Perhaps he is too keenly aware of the ephemeral parts of a poet.
Mr. Aiken's faiths seem in a sense as much the product of disillusionment as his skepticisms. He is peculiarly intrigued, and his papers are sometimes impeded by divagations into Freudian psychology and preoccupations with psychoanalysis, in the immediate application of which to poetic discussion he appears to have more confidence than their present achievements would justify. I quote as an example this disillusioned paragraph from page 132:
"Shall we never learn that there is nothing mysterious or supernatural about poetry; that it is a natural, organic product, with discoverable functions, clearly open to analysis? It would be a pity if our critics and poets were to leave this to the scientists instead of doing it themselves."
There might be debate as to whether describing poetry as the product of a subconscious complex any more abolishes its mystery than to describe it as the product of the divine afflatus. Mr. Aiken, however, devotes a fairly robust chapter with plentiful quotation from the psychologist, Kostyleff, to the mechanism of poetic inspiration. And he further transfers deftly some of the principles and data of Kostyleff, Freud, Pavlov to his own field, and secures considerable extension of illumination from their application to the cases, for instance, of John Gould Fletcher and Edgar Lee Masters. He is convinced that further work in this direction would reduce to notation the entire poetic process, and indicates that such is, in his view, the fruitful direction for criticism to follow. And no doubt were he to do so, his powers of description and particularization would be still further enriched and extended—as much again as they now are by his present holdings in Freudian data. But that it would bring him any nearer to the rounding out of his essential incompleteness is doubtful. Criticism does not end with description.
One's quarrel with Mr. Aiken will be with his limits, not with his accomplishment within his limits. What in most instances he sets out to do, namely, to particularize (he says illuminate) with a
