1Formalist criticism wants to make itself unnecessary; historicist criticism, to make itself indispensable.
To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get noticed, explain what makes it typical.
One can demonstrate to skeptics the explicit rules which govern a skill, or a game, but not those which govern an art. Skeptics thus suspect art forms of possessing rules which are trade secrets, or rules which are really table manners (Bourdieu).
Snobbery in the arts is reverse snobbery.
‘A poem is either worth everything, or worth nothing.’ So say Romantics, equating a life with a poem.
Why value the appearance of effort in poetry? Why value apparent (or actual) effortlessness? The first appears to demonstrate the mastery of a craft: the second, to demonstrate that poetry is not a craft at all.
‘I stop somewhere waiting for you’ (Whitman): the poet as teacher, or leader, who promises that we will catch up to him later, and knows that we never will. (Though certain exceptionally confident poets — Ginsberg, for example — would later claim to have done just that.)
Writers in difficult, or ‘innovative,’ modes appear more likely than others to make large claims for the (political or intellectual) importance of their art: to justify greater effort on our part, we may require the promise or hope of a correspondingly greater reward.
Not song vs. speech but song vs. speech vs. writing. (See John Miles Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem.) Medieval manuscript poets say, Chaucer to Skelton cared less for the last of those oppositions, perhaps because less alert to it: harder, therefore, for us — who type and cut and paste and duplicate files — to think in terms appropriate to their craft.
The supposed requirement that a poem justify its existence during political or ethical emergencies (and there is always an emergency) is not the same as the demand that poets take action during such emergencies: we could apply the latter demand to carpenters, but not the former to tables or chairs.
Poems, as such, defend the private life.
What if the ways in which we think (or have been taught to think) about lyric poetry do not depend on our tacit acceptance of a liberal individualism, but instead support (provide evidence for) it?
‘Modern critics... have become oddly resistant to admitting that there is more than one code of morals in the world, whereas the central purpose of reading imaginative literature is to accustom yourself to this basic fact’; ‘to understand codes other than your own is likely to make your judgments better.’ William Empson’s formulation, as he seems to have recognized, places the central ethical work of literature largely in prose fiction (and perhaps in the feature film). Modern poetry, unless it rejects Empson’s liberalism entirely, then gets to answer the question: what else can imaginative writing do?
The difference between representing (in poetry) an ethical, political or psychological desideratum and contributing to its achievement.
‘Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’ (Yeats). But rhetoric and poetry are not distinct; each of us bears ‘others’ in ourselves, and hears or speaks for them in all our quarrels.
Paratext as poetic material (Kent Johnson). Not ‘How do we get beyond the name of the poet, the name of the press, the context of discovery, to the actual poem?’ but ‘How can we know if and when we have ever done so?’
‘If I am an unknown man, and publish a wonderful book, it will make its way very slowly, or not at all. If I, become a known man, publish that very same book, its praise will echo over both hemispheres... You have to obtain reputation before you can get a fair hearing for that which would justify your reputation... If a man can’t hit upon any other way of attracting attention, let him dance on his head in the middle of the street; after that he may hope to get consideration for his volume of poems.’ George Gissing’s Jasper Milvain will earn our contempt but is he wrong?
‘Fame, the being known, though in itself one of the most dangerous things to man, is nevertheless the true and appointed air, element, and setting of genius and its works’ (Gerard Manley Hopkins). But ‘Publication is the auction/ Of the mind of man’ (Dickinson). |
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