A Response to D. Vance Smith “The Labors of Reward”, “The Labors of Reward”

In response to D. Vance Smith, “The Labors of Reward: Meed, Mercede, and the Beginning of Salvation,” YLS 8 (1994): 127-54 [see also YLS 9 (1995): 231], it is noted that the claim PPl interrogates the category of relation in a philosophically serious way is undermined by WL’s frequent use of playful and arbitrary puns; that the poet’s realism and belief in the incarnate Christ put his epistemology at odds with Althusser’s critique of the essence in existence; and that the grammatical analogy aims not to distinguish meeds from mercedes, but good rewards from bad ones according to whether they occur in relationships of treuthe.