Inside Orpheus

Art and Psychoanalysis, edited with an introduction by William Phillips. 552 pp. New York: Criterion Books. $8.50.

Once a play was a play, pure and simple; an entertainment, a token of civilization, as detached from its creator as a cloak from a tailor. Whether he produced poems, songs, or pictures, Orpheus was regarded as a maker, not as a hero; his private life, his love affairs, his neuroses, were irrelevant. But by 1920, a frenzy of biographical revelation was under way. Everyone from Shakespeare to poor D. H. Lawrence was shaken down, until an inevitable reaction, calling itself the “new criticism,” went to the opposite extreme of reading a poem as though it were only a verbal toy.

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Roger Becket

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Art and Psychoanalysis, edited with an introduction by William Phillips. 552 pp. New York: Criterion Books. $8.50.

Once a play was a play, pure and simple; an entertainment, a token of civilization, as detached from its creator as a cloak from a tailor. Whether he produced poems, songs, or pictures, Orpheus was regarded as a maker, not as a hero; his private life, his love affairs, his neuroses, were irrelevant. But by 1920, a frenzy of biographical revelation was under way. Everyone from Shakespeare to poor D. H. Lawrence was shaken down, until an inevitable reaction, calling itself the “new criticism,” went to the opposite extreme of reading a poem as though it were only a verbal toy.