R. P. Blackmur's "Lord Tennyson's Scissors:
1912-1950," the final essay in Praising It New: the best of the New
Criticism, is a classic. It begins with a commonplace:
Poetry is a game we play with reality...
Of course, in 1951, when the essay was first published, this
was not a commonplace at all. It has become one because the thought is so rich
with implication that it became a part of our shared way of thinking about
poetry.
Like all of our games poetry is fun to talk about. From such
talk entire industries of commentary have sprung up around other of our
favorite games. The teams and/or individual players shop for and hire the
better private analysts, as well. By virtue of this critical machinery, the
quality of the games and players rapidly improves. Athletes, for example, come
to have less body fat, greater size and astonishing agility. Rules of the game
are updated to provide the most entertainment and impact possible to the
spectator.
This being the case, it might do well to remember, the next
time some natural wit from among our poetry acquaintance rediscovers Blackmur's
observation, that without analysis and commentary the game tends to reach its
limited potential quickly and to settle into mediocrity if not perish
altogether. It begins to become popular not because of its excellence but
because pretty much everyone has the necessary talents to play. The audience
drifts away and the players begin to "play for themselves".
For his part, Blackmur goes on to explore some of the
implications of his deceptively simple observation for sixteen closely reasoned
pages:
and it is the game and the play—the game by history and
training, the play by instinct and need—which make it possible to catch hold of
reality at all.
He first establishes why the game is vitally important and
then analyses recent play: which plays offered entertainment and impact, which
did not, and what specifically separated the two cases. Judgments as to the
appropriateness of the content of a poem could be permitted in only the most
extreme instances. He was a critic, not a politician or a philosopher. Or, for
that matter, a poet: while he had on his critic's cap the poets did the
creating, he did the commentating.
In Blackmur's day the commentary industry around this game
of playing with reality was called the New Criticism. In his forward to Praising
It New, William Logan provides the standard history in a nutshell:
New Criticism was created by a divided and often embattled
group of American poets (they were almost all poets) born between 1888 and 1907—John
Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanthe Brookes, W. K. Wimsatt,
R. P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters and Kenneth Burke, less a close knit family than a
quarrel of cousins and perfect strangers. To them may be added their precursors
and influences, the expatriate poets Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the English
literary critic I. A. Richards, and Richards's brilliant student William
Empson.
The most fruitful years of the movement, Logan goes on to
inform us, fell between 1913 and 1963, an age dominated by science and
modernist literature.
In his introduction, Garrick Davis, the editor of Praising
It New, places at the beginning of his own version of that history a slim
volume published in 1920 by the then minor poet T. S. Eliot. The volume was
entitled The Sacred Wood and the author's forward to the second edition
would advocate for critical standards with a (for him) unaccustomed directness:
...when we are considering poetry we must consider it
primarily as poetry and not another thing.
Poetry was to be defined as "excellent words in
excellent arrangement and excellent meter." These pronouncements were
quite radical for the time, and would remain so, over a decade later, when they
served as a point of departure for the New Criticism. Davis quite appropriately
sees Eliot's influence as crucial. Two selections from The Sacred Wood
begin the anthology.
Eliot had his influences, in turn, and one is mentioned in
passing in Praising It New: his professor, at Harvard, Irving Babbitt.
Garrick Davis tips his hat to Babbitt as an innovator in his own right and
indeed he was. More importantly, however, the radical pronouncements found in The
Sacred Wood mark a partial but definite break with the then greatest
American literary critic. In a later chapter, Eliot would point out that
Babbitt had never been "primarily occupied with art" though he
credited him with being "on the side of the artist." It is this
break, then, that would influence the New Critics to come.
While Babbitt's anti-Rouseau-ism would remain with Eliot for
life, it would not hijack his critical or creative work as it had his mentor's.
The Sacred Wood was intended to establish him upon an independent
footing. Babbitt and his allies, he suggested, were too intent upon determining
the effect of an author's moral development upon the text. Eliot would be a
literary critic. He would evaluate poems rather than biography.
This departure from Babbitt is likely to have taken on the
particular character it did due, at least in part, to another influence. In
1910 Professor Joel E. Spingarn delivered an address, at Columbia University,
entitled "The New Criticism." (Ironically, a book by the same title,
published some thirty years later, by John Crowe Ransom, would be credited with
officially launching the New Criticism.) The 35-page address was published in
the following year. Sociological and psychological criticism only take one away
from appreciating the poem itself, the author averred. It was an open attack
upon English departments throughout academia:
We have done with the race, the time, the environment
of a poet's work as an element of criticism. To study these phases of a work of
art is to treat it as an historic or social document, and the result is a
contribution to the history of culture or civilization, without primary
interest for the history of art.
Regarding living poets, as well as historical, they were to
be freed from the strictures of "abstract classifications of poetry":
Every poet re-expresses the universe in his own way,
and every poem is a new and independent expression.
The measure of a poem was how much the reader enjoyed
reading it. In the place of the old critical apparatus, Spingarn offered up a
single critical standard quoted from Goethe:
What has the writer proposed to himself to do? And how far
has he succeeded in carrying out his own plan?
Somehow, for all Spingarn is not supposed to be a genuine
forefather of the New Criticism, the Goethe quote would be cited again and
again, over the decades, as one of its first principles. The Columbia
professor's rejection of the critical methods associated with Hippolyte Taine,
in particular, and his rejection of Irving Babbitt's New Humanism would prove
to be shared by the New Critics as well.
"The New Criticism" was republished in Spingarn's Creative
Criticism: Essays on the Unity of Genius and Taste (1917). Babbitt panned
the book in a review in The Nation. The ensuing dust-up between the supporters
of Spingarn and of Eliot's mentor became a cause célèbre provoking comment throughout
the literary world. A selection of essays bearing upon the controversy features
yet another reprinting of Spingarn's "The New Criticism": the 1924
volume Criticism in America, Its Functions and Status. Also among those
essays are Babbitt's review and two selections from The Sacred Wood.
When Eliot reissued The Sacred Wood, in 1928, his
preface to the second edition amplified and expanded upon the differences with
Babbitt that he had so diplomatically worded in the first edition—the preface,
that is to say, which contains the quotes so influential for the later New
Critics. Although he could only disagree with most of Spingarn's
"expressionist" tract, he did agree that criticism should address the
poem itself—not the poet or his or her contexts.
The history Garrick Davis provides in his introduction to Praising
It New shares the same names as Logan's. Add representative names from the
later generations of the New Critics (Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Hugh
Kenner), and a single surprise (J. V. Cunningham), and they are the names of
the authors of the 27 essays which appear in Praising It New. "It
has often been remarked," Davis informs his reader,
that the New Critics do not hold together as a group,
sharing as they do such disparate aims. Yet they were all united against
certain deplorable tendencies in their time: principally, the use of
extra-literary criteria in the judgment of poetry.
They shared one more trait with Eliot and Spingarn, as well:
a tendency toward widely divergent views as to the implications of the first
principles of the New Criticism. The best of the New Critics were independent
thinkers. It was that independence that kept the movement vital for so many
years and that eventually caused it to come apart into multiple disciplines
some of which survived to compose the first fragments of today's still
incongruently fragmented Contemporary Theory.
Richards was among the first prominent figures in England to
forward T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" as the exceptional poem of its
times. In his Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) he declares that
"Mr. Eliot is one of the very few poets that current conditions have not
overcome". The "current conditions" referred to are those which
accompanied the growing domination of modern life by the methods of science. For
some years, Richards' volume was perhaps as famous as the poem it praised.
In light of this, Eliot felt it necessary also to assert, in
his 1928 preface, that "certainly poetry is something over and above, and
something quite different from, a collection of psychological data about the
minds of poets, or about the history of an epoch". This can only be
construed as a direct reply to Richards. The New Criticism, it is clear, was
shot through with deep fissures even before it officially existed.
In spite of this, the 27 essays collected together in Praising
It New: The Best of the New Criticism display little evidence of
in-fighting. Each New Critic writes as something of a lone voice. When one or
another takes issue with the prevailing state of things the "they" he
takes issue with is vaguely understood to be an unconverted majority of
academia.
Many of the essays are now quite famous. Ezra Pound's
"How to Read" was seed-work to two generations that would still be
able to wield words like "great" and "canon" with an ease
that is reflected in Praising It New. Each of the selections from Eliot
is a classic of the genre. His "Hamlet and His Problems" introduced a
new term into our literary vocabulary that is still both quietly powerful and
provocative:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by
finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects,
a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular
emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory
experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
From the titles of Wimsatt and Beardsley's two contributions
to this volume critical theory received both "The Affective Fallacy"
and "The Intentional Fallacy".
These terms are not historical artifacts. Wimsatt's and
Beardsley's are still points of departure for many of the signature issues of
Contemporary Theory. The fierce contemporary reaction against Eliot, his
objective correlative, and all that either stands for, has kept them more vivid
still. The persistent demonization of them attests to the enormous potential
they retain to affect readers and dominate discourse.
Words such as "beauty" and
"inspiration," on the other hand, went out of use as the New
Criticism emerged. (The strongest argument against Spingarn as forefather is
that he freely used many such "romantic" words against which the New
Critics recoiled.) Beginning with Ezra Pound's call (in "How to
Read") to "apply to the study of literature a little of the common
sense that we currently apply to physics or to biology," science suggested
the proper methods and ends of literary criticism. The terms of the New
Criticism are more "terms" in the sense of a physics equation than
any that went before. The critic's personal predilections and emotional
responses were valid only insomuch as dispassionate analysis bore them out.
As a group, however, the New Critics could only be
ambivalent toward the omnipresent influence of science upon the English
speaking world and its cultural products. When T. S. Eliot wrote (in "The
Waste Land"),
A crowd flowed over the London Bridge,
so many,
I had not thought death had undone
so many.
...he was describing industrial laborers on their way to
work. They are "dead" because science (in the forms of
industrialization, urbanization) has taken the quality of their inner lives
from them. Science had wounded the Fisher King and the land had been laid waste
for it. As in the Grail legends, the questing knight—the poet—must first
survive the great waste land before, emerging on the far side, he is fit to
begin his journey to heal the king thus healing the once fruitful land over
which he rules.
I. A. Richards freely admitted, in Principles of Literary
Criticism, that, for all he found the poem compelling, the overall point of
"The Waste Land" eluded him. Eliot's blunt rebuke of his methods must
have confused him still more. From the poet's point of view, Richards'
scientific approach to poetry criticism was just one more symptom of the desacralization
of the soul. Men such as Richards had failed to cross the waste land, they had
succumbed.
Being a much larger and younger country than England, the
two great wars being fought on the other side of vast protective oceans, and
the New Criticism being dominated at first by Southern Agrarians, the crisis
portrayed in Eliot's early poems was not ratified in America with the same
sense of determination as his critical pronouncements. As a result, the
selection from Delmore Schwartz, in Praising It New, seems shockingly
out of place in the volume. In Schwartz's "The Isolation of Modern
Poetry," written in 1941 (the same year that the New Criticism officially
took its name), the reader finds all the seeds of a new poetry and a new
criticism that will inevitably replace Modernism and the New Criticism.
Schwartz was resoundingly an urban poet and critic.
(Definitions must be stretched just a bit in order to find in him a New
Critic.) While he did not actively seek, he certainly accepted the end of
Modernism and the New Criticism and looked forward expectantly to what would
replace them. "On the one hand," he informs the reader:
...there was no room in the increasing industrialization of
society for such a monster as the cultivated man; a man's taste for literature
had at best nothing to do with most of the activities which constituted daily
life in an industrial society. On the other hand, culture, since it could not
find a place in modern life, has fed upon itself increasingly and has created
its own autonomous satisfactions, removing itself further all the time from any
essential part in the organic life of society.
As an American urban critic, he does not find the rush and
clangor of industrial society an imposition. He is already announcing the
inevitability of the decoupling of poetry from all tradition prior to
Baudelaire (and most since), already deriving the causes of the reader's
shortened attention span, rejecting the idea of difficulty.
Equally suggestive is what Schwartz does not offer his reader.
He sees a brilliant future after Modernism:
If the enforced isolation of the poet has made dramatic and
narrative poetry almost impossible, it has, on the other hand, increased the
uses and powers of languages [sic] in the most amazing and the most valuable
directions.
What these "uses and powers of language" are he
does not so much as hint. More to the point, his thesis implies that the end of
that "enforced isolation" (of that "monster," the
cultivated man—whatever precisely that might mean) brings an end to that kind
of remarkable progress.
In the following paragraph he does at least provide an
example of one of his alleged "valuable directions". He finds a new
school of poetry quite promising:
...a new school of poets has attempted to free itself from
the isolation of poetry by taking society itself as the dominant subject.
This "school" can only refer to W. H. Auden and
his circle or to a handful of New York Trotskyite hangers-on who had managed,
during the 1930s, to publish a few forgettable poems in the Partisan Review.
More likely he is expediently conflating the two.
But Auden's reputed Marxism exhibited all the ferocity and
dedication of an invigorating tea-table conversation and had ended, such as it
was, well before Schwartz's essay. And Schwartz's point put more bluntly (in
private but never in his published work) was that Trotskyite poets would be
replacing Modernist, Marxist theory replacing the New Criticism. A decidedly
Modernist Auden, however, dominated English language poetry for the 20 years
following (years during which, incidentally, Schwartz descended into drug and
alcohol addiction and paranoia).
Nevertheless, all that Delmore Schwartz leaves unsaid in
"The Isolation of Modern Poetry," it turns out, rises near to the
level of prophecy. Those Trotskyite hangers-on did, in fact, constitute the
initial expeditionary force of Post-Modernism. Meanwhile, the Marxist
university professors who had taught them were patiently writing the books and
the course prospectuses that would eventually arrive at Contemporary Theory. As
for Post-Modern poetry, itself, it has gone in every direction and no
direction: Beat, Confessional, Aquarian populist, Black Mountain, Writing
Program, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, late-Beat, neo-Dada, Open-Mic populist, neo-Formal,
Internet populist, Performance Poetry, Rap, and so on. It is arguable that,
outside of compelling cries of psychotic suffering (Plath, Sexton, et alii),
however, and of a miniscule portion of the flood of alternative-lifestyle
poetry ("Howl"), the only evidence of a general growth in the powers
of language have been an enormous increase in the use of bad-boy shock-effects
and the power of political injunction.
It would not be unreasonable to say (if we may back up just
a bit) that I. A. Richards is as much a forefather of Contemporary Theory as
the New Criticism. As work days grew shorter, conditions better and world wars
a thing of the past, the sense of cultural crisis expressed in Eliot's
"The Waste Land," and the Agrarians' vague sense of unease at their
genteel rural existence fading into history, were swept aside for the
enticements of urbanization. Delmore Schwartz's "The Isolation of Modern
Poetry" appearing as it did (as if out of nowhere the facts had suddenly
become inescapable) belies just how inevitable it had been that the New
Critics' ambivalence toward the scientific method, and its vast cultural
implications, would meet with an overwhelming reaction.
While this can only gratify us as small-d democrats, the
side effects are only too predictable. Everyone is a poet. Each poet's
politically correct poem is inherently equal and sacred. More and more poetry
has become jejune and ephemeral. All of this, and more, constitutes a sign that
a golden age of proletarian poetry is well underway.
The critical apparatus of Contemporary Theory has less and
less creative material to explore in part because it has never been about
creativity. Its feedback to the poetry community has been proscriptive far more
than prescriptive. Theory doesn't exist to support poetry, poetry exists to
support theory. A poem under study is an artifact, a datum, a symptom, perhaps
even a "crime," but rarely a poem. The recipe for the successful poem
contains step by step instructions on what ingredients not to include and what
consistency not to beat them to.
The poetry of the canon—much of it strangely attractive to
the untrained reader—too often survives as a group of texts to be deconstructed
in order to show by what faults they do not strictly and intrinsically conform
with late-20th century progressive mores. Poems historical and contemporary
become the "texts" that William Logan stridently decries in his
forward to Praising It New:
...in the classroom what you tend to get is a professor who
counts penis symbols… To look back at the New Critics is to indulge in a
nostalgia for the days when books were books and not "texts" (when
critics natter on about "dialogic intertextuality" in Batman, my eyes
glaze over).
New cultural material does not come to us from exceptional
individual works of poetry (or other arts). That is a destructive myth created
by a cultural elite in order to maintain control of the levers of power. It
"emerges," authorless, from the great collective thought process of
the 6 billion people (more or less) who populate the planet in our contemporary
times. This admirably explains (and celebrates) the unprepossessing quality of
most poets' individual work as well as why poets don't get paid for poetry but
for teaching popularized versions of the insights garnered by Contemporary
Theory.
Yet there are other visions of democracy than Marx's and
William Logan takes the occasion of his forward to Praising It New to
reject a highly politicized Contemporary Theory in favor of "arguments
about poetry won almost a century ago, arguments worth winning once more."
Presumably he thinks that democracy will gain considerably into the deal. The
more discreet editor of the volume, Garrick Davis, for his part, muses (in a
prepublication interview) that the New Criticism will not be taught unless
there are anthologies such as his own to supply the course materials.
Few poets or critics, in any generation, under any banner,
are prepared to accept that there is no individual author, that all is
collectively owned. And that is only one of the many major fault lines running
through the territories claimed by Contemporary Theory. As Marx himself pointed
out, the proletariat will find it difficult to resist a return to the very
system that "oppressed" it. The temporary authoritarian state that he
thought essential, in order to prevent such a "regression," however,
is not available to Contemporary Theorists.
The vast majority of poets have internalized popularized
versions of Contemporary Theory's foundational work in women's and minority
(including gay and lesbian) rights. That constitutes a remarkable and permanent
achievement. Otherwise, the world of the poet barely knows that the world of the
academic theorist exists. Any seeming correspondence between them is
coincidental, reflecting the rise of a brand of populism, over the past 40
years, which Marx would have considered a gross parody upon his Communism. As
the result, Poetry goes trading across its oceans in innumerable small skiffs
and Theory across its in a great galleon empty of cargo.
Although these observations on Post-Modernity admit of more
than a few gratifying exceptions, it is disheartening to imagine the present
situation continuing indefinitely. Davis and Logan, while they do not wish to
turn back the clock per se, realize that the past is always prelude to whatever
the next stage of progress will be. In Praising It New: The Best of the New
Criticism, Garrick Davis offers poets and students an exceptionally well
chosen selection from the theoretical essays of the New Criticism in hopes that
it will remain an available influence. They are far more interesting than such
essays generally tend to be—a strength of the best of the New Critics and one
that will continue to serve them well with both an academic and a general
audience.
This essay first appeared in the online journal Eclectica.
Also from the Library of Babel:
- The American Garden. January 16, 2019. “By 1890, the Ladies' Home Journal was the most popular advertising venue in the country. There, between ads for cook books, children's clothing, stave-less corsets, indoor water-closets, refrigerators and pianos, and popular female columnists who advised the housewife about them all, were a profusion of ads for seeds.”
- Blank Verse Now and Then. January 1, 2019. “Surrey was as erratic as most young noblemen during early English history, and far more brilliant, and was imprisoned several times for temper and intemperance. In the end, he became rather impatient for the gouty, porcine, syphilis-riddled Henry VIII to die, and for the Howard faction to rule as regents to the young, fragile, son conceived of the syphilitic, Edward.”
- The Elegy and the Internet. July 1, 2005. ‘Drummond, we may remember, was the William Drummond, of Hawthornden, who Ben Jonson visited during a trip to Scotland, in 1619. The Scot took the time to jot a memorandum of Jonson's conversation, in which we learn inter alia that "he cursed Petrarch for redacting Verses to Sonnets, which he said were like the Tirrant's bed, wher some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short,"7 and "That Shakspear wanted Arte."’
- Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment