ABSTRACT
Yet such forms continue to assume that there was an inescapable relationship between art and order. Admittedly, when the forms of the past grew 'rigid and a bit absurd' you undertook a new research and produced modern forms. They might indeed be extremely researched, as Wallace Stevens suggests when he says we can't have the old 'romantic tenements' and that what will now suffice may be much less palpable: merely, perhaps
a woman dancing, a woman Combing. The poem of the act of the mind-
but the act of the mind is still a form-creating act, and the form it creates provides satisfactions of the rage for order that cannot be had in life not so organized, so that art is different from life at least in this respect. And this view of the matter is still in many ways standard. Its various implications-'autonomy', anti-didacticism, everything that attracts, both for the arts and the criticism that attends them, the epithet 'formalist'-are. whether we like it or not, still in the minds of most of us when we consider a work of art. The first thing we think about is that this is a poem or a painting, and if it were not we should find another way of speaking than the one we choose. 'Art is not life and cannot belA midwife to society', as Mr Auden pedagogically explained. It may be somewhat illiberal, even untruthful, and reactionary by its very nature, as Mr Trilling thinks; he is supported in his opmion by the theorist of the
Kermode Objects, jokes, and art
formal nouveau roman, 1 and also, as we will see, by the Apollinairea of the New York renaissance, Harold Rosenberg.
