Canons: Literary Criteria/Power Criteria

W. B. Yeats' poem "Politics" has as its epigraph Thomas Mann's remark, "In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms."' Yeats chose the epigraph in 1938, just before World War II, for a poem proclaiming that sexuality holds his interest more than politics. This still may be true for poets, but by the looks of things, not for many contemporary critics, who, if they do not choose one over the other, subsume one under the other. For them everything is political (no more so than when it is sexual), which is to hold that everything is reduced to questions of power. So it is, in their eyes, with canons. The first canonization of note for western culture seems to have