In short, Hollander and Mandelbaum feel obliged to provide commentaries to their new Scriptures. The sense of achieved form remains problematic; the enactment of triumphant will that one often associates today with successful poetry in rhyme and meter is ridden with doubt. The dialectic of verse and prose upon which the poems' trajectories depend also reminds us of the central absence around which the poems are built. However, not only structure and prosody, but rhetoric too, the texts' quality of language or mode of discourse, signifies the poems' awareness of lack, their self-consciousness of loss. Spectral Emanations and Chelmaxioms are scholarly poems; their authors are, as Wallace Stevens (who stands behind them) says, "dark rabbi[s]" who observe "the nature of mankind, / In lordly study." 10 But as we have seen, they are insecure in such a role, which may account not only for their stupendous poetic erudition (Mandelbaum's "talk of talk and talk of text" [xvi]), but their nervously joking attitude toward such scholarly discourse as well.
What do You think about The Ritual Of New Creation?
