In Language as Gesture, two years ago, R. P. Blackmur brought together a number of those invaluable essays on modern poetry which he had been writing for various literary journals since the late twenties. Language as Gesture represents Mr. Blackmur's major performance as a purely literary critic. It was a performance unmatched in its way, crucial for the literary taste of our generation and exemplary in any generation—even that of Dryden, for example, or of Edgar Allan Poe. As much as any one critic could, Mr. Blackmur was the man who established the genre of poetic English literature in his century, and who identified its chief exponents (Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stevens and the others). Now Mr. Blackmur has given us a new volume of essays…. But few of the items in The Lion and the Honeycomb are exercises in textual analysis, and none of them deal...