Abstract

No one would deny that Mr. Fish is an acutely perceptive and provocative reader; nor, probably, would anyone deny his formidable prolixity, here as, on a large scale, in Self-Consuming Artifacts. A main reason seems to be that, while he charges formalists with "primarily sins of omission" , he does not recognize his own sins of commission. Formalists assume a degree of intelligence in readers; Mr. Fish seems to assume that they are mentally retarded and must have every idea laboriously spelled out, as if their minds moved in unison with their lips. Whatever the occasional rewards, this assumption and procedure are not altogether winning. Douglas Bush, Gurney Professor of English literature emeritus at Harvard University, responds in this essay to Stanley E. Fish's "Interpreting the Variorum" . In addition to the Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, Professor Bush's many influential contributions include English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, John Milton, John Keats, and Jane Austen