The Poet Resigns: Now It's Out—Here's What's In It

Since I've already done an official book signing at the AWP conference in Boston, I imagine it's time to officially announce the publication of The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World, a collection of my essays on poetry, poetics, and related matters.  It's out now, available on Amazon and elsewhere, and weighs in at 323 pages.  And it's on sale right now for a mere fourteen bucks, four dollars off the regular retail price.

Here's a general guide through the table of contents, with the main sections in boldface and the individual essays briefly described:


Instead of an Introduction: Letter of Resignation

In which I discuss my evolution from poet to critic, and the issues—mostly a love of beauty in a world of troubles—that animate both my poetry and my critical writing.


Situations of Poetry

The Discursive Situation of Poetry

In this essay I go through the various arguments people have made about the decline of poetry's readership, and conclude that, despite claims for a mid-century importance of poetry, the conditions most of the people who write about poetry's decline in popularity relative to other genres yearn for are really Victorian conditions.  To restore poetry to that level of popularity, one would have to rebuild a lot of Victorian conditions of literacy, social elitism, primitive science, and expensive publishing—conditions we should be glad we don't have.

Poetry and Politics, or: Why are the Poets on the Left?

Although most of us like to think we hold our views because those views are true, there are some good reasons to believe that the place we hold in society conditions those views—and when we look at where most American poets fit in American society, some pretty solid social theory (Alvin Gouldner, Pierre Bourdieu) give us social reasons for the leftish views of most American poets.  I mean, we're no more immune to politics that go with our jobs than are most Wall Streeters.

The Aesthetic Anxiety: Avant-Garde Poetics and the Idea of Politics

This essay looks at the poetics of Surrealism, and of Language Poetry, in terms of the equation often drawn in both movements between aesthetic and political radicalism.  I suppose you could say that the essay finds the arguments for an inherent relation between these kinds of things wanting.

Public Faces in Private Places: Notes on Cambridge Poetry

This essay kicked up a lot of dust when it came out in the Cambridge Literary Review a few years ago. It argues that the social claims made by some backers of the avant-garde British poets associated with J.H. Prynne don't hold as much water as those backers might wish, and looks for explanations why such large claims get made.

Negative Legislators: Exhibiting the Post-Avant

In which I take a stab at defining the post-avant, and look at the meaning of its politics, which are largely a matter of refusing large claims and totalizing statements.  In the end, I try out a generational explanation for why the post-avant is as it is.

When Poets Dream of Power

A fast survey of the relation between poets and power over the course of several centuries, leading up to the present moment.

Can Poems Communicate?

Not the way they used to!  This essay examines what happens to poetry when there is no shared frame of symbolic reference between poet and readers.  There's a fair bit about Yeats, who worried endlessly over the issue.

The Poet in the University: Charles Bernstein's Academic Anxiety

The essay takes a look at how Bernstein defined poetic thought and academic thought as opposites, and at a huge problem with his argument: all of his poetic thinkers are academics, and big-time, much-cited ones at that.  I seek a psychological/sociological explanation for why Bernstein would make such an argument, and claim that it has to do with joining academe late in his career.

The State of the Art

I examine the meaning of "the state of the art" at various points in the history of British and American poetry, up to the present day, when I make some perhaps dangerous claims about the current state.

To Criticize the Poetry Critic

Seeing the New Criticism Again

In which it turns out that everything we've been told about the New Critics is wrong.

Poetry/Not Poetry

An examination of where the poetry-not poetry line has been drawn since the late 18th century, with reflections on the meaning of our contemporary definition of what makes a poem a poem.

The Death of the Critic

In which I ask what it means to write avant-garde literary criticism.

Marginality and Manifesto

This was a piece commissioned by Poetry as a response to a selection of manifestoes they ran on the 100th anniversary of the Futurist manifesto.  I conclude that the manifesto doesn't have much of a function under current socio-aesthetic conditions.

Poets and Poetry

A Portrait of Reginald Shepherd as Philoctetes

This surveys the entire body of Reginald Shepherd's poetry.  I predicted that he was on the verge of emerging as one of the major poets of his time.  Sadly, we'll never know if I was right: he died a few months after the essay ran in Pleiades. 

True Wit, False Wit: Harryette Mullen in the Eighteenth Century

Wow, were they mad at me when I first gave a version of this essay as a conference paper down in Louisville.  I think the crowd thought I was saying Mullen was no good.  What I meant was that the kind of wit she plays with, and that we love, is exactly the kind of wit that eighteenth century critics condemned.  I add to this some thoughts about what the difference in taste regarding wit can tell us about the role and situation of poetry in different times and places, and under different institutional conditions.

Emancipation of the Dissonance: The Poetry of C.S. Giscombe

A survey of the whole of his poetic career, in which he evolves from a kind of Black Mountain poet into something else.  I trot out some music theory from Stockhausen, Schoenberg, and Duke Ellington to get at the meaning of avant-garde form and the interrogation of race in Giscombe's poetry.

In the Haze of Pondered Vision: Yvor Winters as Poet

Where Winters is remembered at all as a poet, he's seen as an arch-formalist.  But he started off as an Imagist, publishing alongside Gertrude Stein and the like.  I try understand what happened.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Poetry

Since Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg, there's been this sense that poets need to break through inhibition into something more open and genuine.  This essay examines a tradition of reticent poets that runs counter to all that.

Power and the Poetics of Play

John Matthias has interrogated the meaning of play, and its relation to a world of power and danger, more than anyone.  It's one of the reasons I've remained drawn to his poetry for decades.  This essay introduces his work from the aspect of power and play.

Neruda's Earth, Heidegger's Earth

It turns out there are strong parallels between Neruda's poetry and poetics and some of Heidegger's darker moments.  I worry the issue a bit here.

The Decadent of Moyvane

The sad fate of the Irish nationalist poetic tradition in post-nationalist times.

Modernist Current: On Michael Anania

James Joyce was born in Omaha in 1939.  At least that's what I say here.  And I'm pretty sure I'm right, despite what you may have read on the internet.

Laforgue/Bolaño: The Poet as Bohemian

What does it mean for poetry when the poet lives as a bohemian, as opposed to a professor of creative writing?  The editor of an earlier version of this essay found the conclusion so irksome he had it changed.  But it's back to its original form here.

Oppen/Rimbaud: The Poet as Quitter

The question of the poet who leaves poetry means something to me.  Looking at Oppen and Rimbaud helped me feel better about the whole issue.

Remembering Robert Kroetsch

Robert Kroetsch was one of the grand old men of Canadian poetry, and one of the progenitors of a movement virtually unknown outside his country.

Myself I Sing

Nothing in this Life

A meditation on Nick Cave, which is really about what it means to come from the provinces and to care about literary culture.

My Laureates

What poets have meant to me, and how they've helped me live.

*

I'm very glad to see this book come out.  I hope you'll check it out.

Aesthetics as Ethics: One and a Half Theses on the New Criticism

Great news!  You can now pre-order ReReading the New Criticism, a book edited by Miranda Hickman and John D. McIntyre, to which I contributed a chapter called "Aesthetics as Ethics: One and a Half Theses on the New Criticism."  

Other essays include:

“Eliot, The Agrarians, and the Political Subtext of New Critical Formalism” by Alastair Morrison

“Androgyny And Social Upheaval: The Gendered Pretext of John Crowe Ransom’s New Critical Approach” by Aaron Shaheen        

“The Fugitive and the Exile: Theodor W. Adorno, John Crowe Ransom, And The Kenyon Review” by James Matthew Wilson (my fellow Notre Dame alumnus)

“No Two Ways About It: William Empson’s Enabling Modernist Ambiguities” by Bradley D. Clissold

“In Pursuit Of Understanding: Louis Untermeyer, Brooks and Warren, And ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’” by Connor Byrne

“Through Fields of Cacophonous Modern Masters: James Baldwin And New Critical Modernism” by Adam Hammond

 “Disagreeable Intellectual Distance”: Theory And Politics in the Old Regionalism of The New Critics” by Alexander Macleod (fellow Canadian and Notre Dame alumnus)

“Teaching with Style: Brooks and Warren’s Literary Pedagogy” by Tara Lockhart

“A Kind Of Dual Attentiveness”: Close Reading After The New Criticism” by Cecily Devereux

        

“Toward a New Close Reading” by the volume’s editors, John Mcintyre And Miranda Hickman

Here are the first two paragraphs of my contribution:

If I had believed everything that I was told about the New Critics when I was in graduate school, I suppose I would have been more or less prepared to conclude that they were a nefarious crowd of reactionaries, yearning for the good old days of a slaveholding American South while tuning out the wailings of the oppressed in order to relish a particularly convoluted irony, paradox, or poetic ambiguity. Among other things, I was told that the New Critics disdained Romanticism in favor of the complex ironies of the Metaphysical poets; that they were aesthetes, concerned with form but not with ethics; and that they had nothing in common with Continental literary theory, which spoke to our current condition in a way the New Critics simply could not. Such representations were not without an element of truth to them, of course: Eliot’s downgrading of the Romantics in favor of Donne & Co. was real enough, as was the turn to text over context in W. K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon, and no one would confuse the political dreams of the Fugitives with those of the Frankfurt School (or, for that matter, the prose of Robert Penn Warren with that of Theodor Adorno).

Contrary to what I was told, though, it turns out that the New Criticism is in fact part of a long tradition of ethical thinking, a tradition that, in an apparent paradox, is ethical not despite, but because of, its insistence on aestheticism. Moreover, in an irony of a different kind than that so savored by the authors of Understanding Poetry, this tradition is fundamentally Romantic in its origins and characteristic gestures of thought. So my first thesis here is that the New Criticism, contrary to received opinion, is an ethically based criticism. My second thesis, which is really only a half a thesis, deeply provisional in recognition of how much further work needs to be done before it could be fully embraced, is that New Critical thinking may prove to be an important kind of ethical thought for our time.


*


[*I should add that while I claim in the essay that no one would confuse the political dreams of the Fugitives and the Frankfurt School, I have in fact deliberately done exactly that elsewhere.]

Poetry/Not Poetry

Where do we draw the line between what is poetry and what isn't poetry? Or, more specifically, what makes a poem a poem? Ask a poet like Howard Nemerov, and you'll get a beautiful answer, in the form of a poem called "Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry":

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

It's nice (especially since it compliments poetry, making it fly, while prose merely falls), but in the end Nemerov's answer about the nature of poetry is evasive, offering little more than the "I'll know it when I see it" argument that people used to invoke in debates about pornography.

I don't really have a better way to answer the question, except to say that the only real way to answer anything is to quit looking for trans-historical, absolute truths and start rooting around in contexts, in the history of how a question has been answered, and the reasons those old answers made sense at the time. If we do this, I think we can say that something changed in the way we answered the question "how is poetry different from prose" right around the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that, with some small modification, the new answer poets came up with at that time is still with us. This is Romanticism, people, nor are we out of it.

One of my touchstones, when I want to think about pre-Romantic poetry in French or in English is a statement by Roland Barthes in his great, early study Writing Degree Zero. Here, he argues that for poets of the pre-Romantic period, there was a fundamental similarity between good poetry and good prose. “Poetry is always different from prose,” writes Barthes, but in the classical period “this difference is not one of essence, it is one of quantity. It does not, therefore, jeopardize the unity of language, which is an article of classical dogma.” In other words, the classical or Augustan writer doesn’t grant poetry one of the rights that we moderns and postmoderns grant it: the right to follow rules significantly different from those governing discursive prose. It is more or less the same stuff, but with the added use of particular literary devices such as rhyme and meter. Think about it: Alexander Pope's poem Essay on Man is more or less what it sounds like — a discursive, explanatory essay — it just happens to add versification. Even the title indicates a fundamental continuity between prose and poetry. Prose and poetry are more or less up to the same sort of things: explaining, talking, arguing, narrating.

And why did people write poems? Many reasons, of course: but they tended to be the same sorts of reasons one writes prose: utilitarian ones. Often poetry was a courtly game, but all games have some purpose. In this case, it was to show one's wit and cleverness — sort of a peacock's tail thing, in that verse may have seemed useless, but it was a sign of health and desirability, therefore useful in securing a mate or some sort of payoff or privilege. Not that there weren't critics of the rewarding of such displays, like Lord Burleigh, who objected to Queen Elizabeth giving Edmund Spenser a hundred pounds in recognition of a poem, shouting "All for a song?!?" Sometimes there were market motives (remember Johnson's comment that no one but a blockhead ever wrote for any reason other than money?). Sometimes there were more elevated, socially concerned ideas — think of Sir Philip Sidney's argument that poetry presents us with ideal worlds and characters we can try to emulate, since the poet "goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done... Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden." The old John Donne wrote to save souls ("batter my heart, three-personed God!"), the young John Donne wrote to get laid ("For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love!"). So: personal advancement, money, getting the girl, social improvement, didacticism: there were a host of good, utilitarian, reasons to write a poem, just as there were a host of good, utilitarian reasons to write a piece of prose. Prose and poetry were close cousins formally (one just had extra verse elements), and close cousins in terms of their telos or purpose.

Then things got weird.

They got weird right around the time the Romantics hit the stage (not that this is a bad thing: indeed, it's the beginning of everything I most love in poetry). Suddenly, poetry wasn't more-or-less continuous with prose, or prose-plus-special-effects: there was what Barthes calls a "discontinuity of language." Poetry was reborn as something very different from prose, and different from verse, too.


Consider Coleridge's famous definition of poetry in the Biographia Literaria. Here, we learn that poetry, unlike prose, generates its own rules. We learn that the poem, unlike prose, looks inward upon itself, seeking a co-ordination of all parts to the whole. And we learn that the statement or use-value or telos of the poem is secondary to its formal composition. Poetry is strangely autonomous, being all about its formal wholeness, rather than any specific external purpose. Poetry, says Coleridge, is a kind of communication “opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species… it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part." The organic harmony of the “legitimate poem,” Coleridge continues, necessitates that the parts

… support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement. The philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the ultimate judgment of all countries, in equally denying the praises of a just poem, on the one hand, to a series of striking lines or distiches, each of which, absorbing the whole attention of the reader to itself, becomes disjoined from its context, and forms a separate whole, instead of a harmonizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained composition, from which the reader collects rapidly the general result unattracted by the component parts.

It is the fusing of all elements that is essential to the poetic work— so much so that Coleridge comes to include within the category of poetry all works, including those in prose, that reconcile all their diverse elements.

It almost doesn’t matter to Coleridge how such fusing is accomplished. Or, rather, it does matter, in that a particular form of the fusing must not be prescribed: “could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry” says Coleridge. This does not mean the work is arbitrary, though, merely that it must generate its own rules from within. Coleridge’s most elegant formulation of this principle comes in the essay “Shakespeare’s Judgment Equal to His Genius,” where we read that “No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither is there any danger of this,” because “genius cannot be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes genius — the power of acting creatively under laws of its own creation." Such self-generated rules are, in fact, Coleridge’s famous “organic form,” arising from within each true aesthetic or poetic work.

This business of the poem’s autonomy, its inner, organic wholeness, and its fusing of disparate elements is familiar enough stuff to students of Romanticism. But it’s worth rehearsing in the present context because of what it implies for the meaning of poetry. Because of its intense organic fusing-together of all of its parts, the poem has what Coleridge, in his essay on Shakespeare’s genius, calls “untranslatableness.” In a true poem, the meaning cannot be paraphrased: “it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand,” says Coleridge, “than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare… without making the author say something else, or something worse." Indeed, the meaning, in the sense we usually reserve for that word as something comprehensible and cognizable, is irrelevant to the work’s status as a poem: the poem’s deepest meaning lies in its activity of bringing together apparently disparate elements.

One refraction of all this is the idea of the symbol. “Symbol” is a term that Coleridge uses inconsistently over the course of his career, but the important sense for the present context comes in a passage of The Statesman’s Manual where Coleridge tells us that, unlike the allegorical figure, the symbol is characterized “above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal." Unlike the allegory, with its one-to-one relation of sign and meaning, the symbol offers polyvalence and endless suggestive possibilities. Interpreting the symbolic work is an ongoing coming-toward and escaping-of full apprehension (think of Coleridge's own "Kubla Khan" here: it is pregnant with meaning, but you can't pin it down to any particular meaning). The symbolic work is certainly at a far remove from the simple, discursive statement of a particular meaning. As Coleridge states in an appendix to The Statesman’s Manual, “discursive understanding, which forms for itself general notions and terms of classification” can only give us “Clearness without Depth." Poetry, when it is symbolic, gives us depth without clarity. We can never quite say what it means, or what it proposes to accomplish in the world.

So poetry becomes a bit of an embarasment in a utilitarian society (and nineteenth century society was getting more and more utilitarian by the day). Poets were meant to chase mysterious symbols, and create organic wholes. The old laureate job or writing odes to the monarch became something of a joke, out of step with the new notion of what poems were all about. The poet isn't supposed to answer to any patron, or, for that matter, to try to make things happen (there were exceptions — consider Shelley's political rabble-rousing poems, but the general trend was toward organic form, symbol, autonomy of imagination, and all the rest). The poet became, in some sense, a figure outside of society. The poet's work was either a quiet withdrawal from bourgeois utilitarian society, or an angry rejection of it. Take your pick. Either way, poetry was different from prose in two respects: it played by different rules, and it was written for different reasons. All of this was new with Romanticism.

While these things may have started with Romanticism, they continued after the Romantic movement in new permutations and combinations. The French Symboliste movement (Mallarmé and company) was in some ways an intensification of the idea that the poem was beyond paraphrase (it should be like music), beyond utility, beyond the logic of means-and-ends. And, despite some of their anti-Romantic rhetoric, the American New Critics in the 20th century made huge intellectual investments in Coleridge's ideas: "The Heresy of Paraphrase" is a rehashing of Coleridge, and the New Critical ideas of irony and balance are just Coleridge's organic form revisited. The poem was about itself, about form, and not subordinate to anything else. (If the Romantics turned to the autonomy of art because they were critical of utilitarian values, the New Critics were a bit different: there's a real story to be told about how they saw the autonomous poem as an essential component of the autonomy of English as an academic discipline: if poems were essentially different from prose statements, they needed a special academic department. If they were like prose, they could be absorbed into history or sociology or whatever — this actually comes up in their correspondence with one another).

But we're past all that now, right? Well, no. In many ways, I think some of the most thoughtful poets of the last few decades have been practicing a kind of modified or inverted version of Romanticism. Think about elliptical poetry: so much of it is all about the lack of formal coherence that you think it'd be the farthest thing from Coleridge's organic form or its New Critical offshoot, the well-wrought urn. But the deliberate incoherence of elliptical poetry is really out to accomplish the same sorts of things Coleridge outlined. First of all, elliptical techniques are all about differentiating poetry from prose, about upholding what Barthes called "the discontinuity of lanuage." Poetry is different, we see, because it doesn't try for prose coherence. And in the deep ambiguities and incoherencies of elliptical verse, we're looking at effects similar to those Coleridge saw as belonging to the symbol: we avoid paraphrasable meaning, we escape the utilitatian logic of means-and-ends. Some see this as purely a matter of beauty, some see it as a critique of a society that relies on a logic of language to support its logic of power. Again, all of this is vey much in line with the general trend of thinking that runs from Coleridge through Mallarmé, and even through the New Critics.

So: where do we draw the line between poetry and not-poetry? Well, it seems that we've been doing it by insisting on poetry's autonomy, its freedom from use-value, its freedom from specific meaning. Poetry is poetry because it is unlike prose: it is more free, and stands somehow (we like to think) outside of the utilitarian world. That seems to be the best answer we've come up with in the two centuries since the poets left off praising popes and princes in exchange for patronage. I wonder: how long it will last? For now the old answer flies, but someday it, too, will fall.

The New New Criticism

I've yet to see a copy, but judging from the email I've been getting from people who've read my contribution to the issue, the latest Pleiades is out. My piece is an essay called "The New New Criticism," which takes the occasion of the appearance of Garrick Davis' anthology Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism as an opportunity to reflect on the nature of that oft-maligned, generally misunderstood movement. One of the things that happened when I sat down to read through Davis' anthology (and, after he got me hooked, a host of the main New Critical documents) was that I realized most of what I'd learned in grad school about the NC was wrong. The New Critics weren't, for example, all about formalism, nor were they, for the most part, ahistorical, nor were they particularly apolitical. I've heard people blast them for these qualities at the MLA convention, and heard people praise them for the same qualities at the ALSC convention. But they merit neither praise nor blame for qualities they don't really possess. The piece in Pleiades trots out some examples to show this, but here's the basic thesis (an edited-down version of the first couple of paragraphs):

*

I’m not sure who’s done more damage to the New Critics: their detractors or their defenders. Detractors condemn the New Criticism as a formalist movement, ahistorical and unconcerned with ethics or politics. Defenders generally don’t disagree with this depiction of the New Criticism—they just value it differently, hoisting it high as a tattered banner under which to rally the scattered remnants of the pre-identity-politics, pre-continental-theory literary intelligentsia. As in so many fiercely fought debates, though, beneath the clamor the two sides really agree more than they differ: both, after all, see the New Critics as formalists, and set them up against a set of politicized, post- 1960s approaches to literature. But does the consensus lying beneath the squabble offer an accurate view of the New Criticism? The challenge in reading the New Critics again is to try to see them without any of the preconceptions that underlie the debate between their detractors and their defenders. When we meet this challenge, we see in the New Critics a more diverse, less strictly formalist movement than we find in the distorted version so often invoked by both sides of the debate.

It may be of some service to us, as we attempt to wipe several decades worth of preconceptions off our critical lenses, to remember that the New Critics never actually saw themselves as locked in battle with the nascent forces of deconstruction, cultural studies, and identity politics... New Critics weren’t a rearguard action, but an advance force, launching raids against a host of other critical movements. Although the New Critics are often taught at the beginning of the literary theory seminar, as a kind of point of origin for modern literary theory, they didn’t emerge in a vacuum, but in a battlefield. The New Critics turned their critical artillery, first and foremost, on early-twentieth century academic scholarship, which they saw as a dull and dutiful business of the establishment of context: all dusty philology and dry bibliography. The New Critics fought, too, against the impressionistic criticism found in the journalistic world.... But it wasn’t just against the practices of the academics and the journalists that the New Critics struggled. Although all-but-forgotten now, colossi of literary theory like Max Eastman and Irving Babbitt towered over the literary scene in the early twentieth century, their tomes promulgating psychological and moralistic approaches to literary study, respectively. And the 1930s wasn’t only the period in which the John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and company, their Vanderbilt apprenticeships behind them, set out to reinvent criticism: it was also time haunted by the specter of Marxist criticism, the decade of Christopher Caudwell and the young George Orwell, voices heard on both sides of the Atlantic. Emerging as it did in the context of more established, competing theories, it’s understandable that the New Criticism put polemical emphasis on its differences from historical, impressionistic, moralistic, and political approaches to literature. But we do a disservice to the New Criticism if we see it as turning its back on the insights offered by these approaches. Indeed, the goal of the New Criticism, more often than not, wasn’t to spurn history, politics, ethics, or psychology, but to bring these things back into contact with the specific formal qualities of the literary work. Synthesis, rather than aesthetic separatism, was the main project, a fact too often overlooked by both the defenders and the detractors of the New Criticism.

*

In other stuff-I-wrote-appearing news, the British journal Tears in the Fence features a dialogue between the present humble blogger and rising literary impressario Adam Fieled.

Archambeau World Tour November 2008

I'm about to jet down to Nashville to speak on a panel about the New Criticism at the Modernist Studies Association's annual conference, held this year at Vanderbilt University. For those of you who haven't been to one of the MSA's conferences, I'll just say this: it's a good place to check out the latest styles of black turtlenecks, rimless glasses, and nervous grad-student hook-up rituals. It's also got some good speakers: this year Frederic Jameson will be there, along with T.S. Eliot guy David Chinitz, big-wheel Canadian scholar Melba Cuddy-Keane, Kevin Dettmar (who knows his way around vinyl records), Molly Hite (whom I met in Sweden about a decade ago, when she wanted to talk about Virginia Woolf, and all I wanted to do was tell her how much I liked her campus novel Class Porn), Erich Hertz (whom I remember from grad school as an heavy-hitter on Adorno), poetry scene stalwarts Aldon Nielson, Robert Zamsky & Tom Orange, John Paul-Riquelme (who gets it about how Romanticism is still with us), British modernism guru Vince Sherry, and the ever-fantastic Barrett Watten. Also the not-to-be-missed Per Backstrom, and the blogsophere's very own Johannes Goransson. I want to check out all of their papers, but my usual conference modus operandi involves getting too caught up in conversation at a nearby bar to make it to more than a few panels a day.

My own part of the show is called "Formalism and Ethics" — a preview, of sorts, of two forthcoming pieces of writing: a longish take on Garrick Davis' anthology of the New Criticism in the next issue of Pleiades, and a chapter of a book called Re-Reading the New Criticism, edited by Miranda Hickman and John McIntyre. I'll be saying something along the lines of this: the New Criticism has long been dismissed as mere formalism, and is now in danger of being revived as... mere formalism. In fact (certain claims by people in the movement notwithstanding) it was a lot more than that. In many instances, New Critics even presented their work as a kind of ethics. If this is the kind of thing that gets your pulse pounding (and why wouldn't it? I mean, what? you have a life now?) meet me in Nashville. If I'm not at the conference when you get there, look for me in one of the bars on West End Avenue.

Beyond Close Reading and the G.I. Bill: A Secret History of the New Criticism

What's that you say? You can't make it down to Tulsa, Oklamoma next week to hear me talk about the New Criticism and read my poems at the eighth annual Modernist Studies Association Conference? You're kidding! What are we going to do about this terrible state of affairs? Oh, come on. No whining. Okay, fine. But only since you insist. Here's the paper I'm giving.

If any of you ever want to cite it in some dusty academic article, or perhaps attack it in a firey editorial, you can pretend you were in Tulsa and give it the full treatment:

Archambeau, Robert. "Beyond Close Reading and the G.I. Bill: A Secret History of the New Criticism," Modernist Studies Association Convention, Tulsa Oklahoma, October 22, 2006.

The essay is based on some material I was asked to eject, as irrelevant to my main argument, from the Laureates and Heretics manuscript. I did so at the behest of the very sharp and well-informed anonymous reader evaluating it for the press, a reader I'm increasingly convinced has to be Keith Tuma (J'accuse, Keith!).

Oosh. I just realized that I'll have to come back to this post and fix all the formatting errors my cut-and-paste job is sure to introduce. No italics, and no footnotes will appear (and some of the "works cited," will seem irrelevant, as the works were cited in the footnotes).If you're reading this in 2008 and the italics still haven't reformatted, odds are I've given up on actually getting around to the task.

Anyway Here it is:

Beyond Close Reading and the G.I. Bill: A Secret History of the New Criticism

As I hope my attempt at a sexy title makes clear, I want to talk a little about some of the less-frequently-discussed elements of the rise of the New Criticism. The story of that rise has been told countless times in many a graduate seminar, and tends to go something like this:

Once upon a time there was a small group of men who cared about poems, but not much else. They wanted to discuss poems in terms of their form, and such was their love for poetry they wanted these poems to be perfect, for every detail to balance out every other, and for the poems to come together in wonderfully ironic wholes. They worked hard reading those poems, searching for unities and ironies and balances, and they called this hard work “close reading.” This was all a terrible mistake, but they didn’t know it, because Derrida had yet to come down from his mountain with the ten commandments of deconstruction. And the men so loved poems that they didn’t want the messiness of the world to enter into the poems, so they read the poems they loved without reference to context. They worked hard to avoid looking at history and ethics and politics, and they called this hard work “formalism.” This too was a terrible mistake, but they didn’t know it because Greenblatt had yet to come down from his mountain with the ten commandments of the New Historicism. But these men, misguided as they were, came to dominate our English Departments, because something called the G.I. Bill came along, leading behind it a long line of eager and ambitious people, a new generation of students who hadn’t been prepared for college at fancy prep schools. Someone had to find a new way to teach them, a way that didn’t depend on the students having prepped for college at Groton or Choate or some provincial equivalent. And the New Critics came forward and said they didn’t need for their students to do anything but closely read a few short poems and all would be well. But all was not well until the New Critics were driven from the land by Derrida and Greenblatt, for whom we should all give grateful thanks.

Anyone likely to be reading this — that is, anyone attending a seminar called “New Approaches to the New Criticism” — is likely to be dissatisfied with stories of this ilk. My own dissatisfactions with such stories are legion, but for the present context let me concentrate on just one: the insistence on unity where there is none to be found, really. In an oddly ironic way, those who tell stories like the one above are doing to the story of the New Critics exactly the sort of thing they are likely to condemn the New Critics for doing to a poem: taking a contradictory and dissonant thing and hammering it into something coherent, where all the parts are subordinated to an interpretive whole. What I’d like to do here, by way of chipping away at the dominant story of the New Criticism is this: I’d like to point out how the institutional imperatives that gave rise to the New Criticism within our universities also helped to exacerbate divisions that were latent in the movement from the beginning. The important institutional imperative, for my purposes, is not the need to serve a new generation of returning G.I.’s: it is the need to establish English as an autonomous discipline, a need created by the Germanic model of the university that became dominant in America in the twentieth century. My case study will be that of Yvor Winters, a New Critic who came to seem a marginal figure in the movement because his poetic and critical practices were at odds with this institutional imperative. Since I’ve indulged myself in this elaborate introduction, my demonstrations will of necessity be brief, but fret not: should you be so sadly addicted to this arcane topic that you hunger for more, I’ll be happy to inflict large chunks of my manuscript on you via email.

Autonomous Disciplines: Legitimating the Midcentury English Department

While the common story of the rise of the New Criticism isn’t wrong in emphasizing the democratizing of higher education in postwar America, there is another factor to be considered in understanding that rise. This second factor in the success of the New Critics is the emphasis of many — but, as we shall see, not all — such critics on the autonomy of literary study, and their accompanying emphasis on the autonomy of the literary object. The American university, like its German model, is predicated on the assumption of discrete and autonomous areas of knowledge, and was therefore receptive to New Critical ideas of literary study as an autonomous endeavor.

In addition to the need for a pedagogy that would suit the postwar student body, the American university turned to the New Criticism because it seemed that movement shared the universities’ amenability to an autonomous view of literature. The division-and-department administrative model of the university was one that favored the idea of autonomous areas of inquiry . This idea of clearly divided and administered knowledge-areas implies, as Gerald Graff puts it in Professing Literature, “the isolation of literature as its own autonomous mode of discourse with its own autonomous ‘mode of existence.’” Moreover, as Graff points out, the English Department’s mode of discourse and existence must, in this view, be “distinct from that of philosophy, politics, and history” and put a premium on “methods that seemed systematic and could easily be replicated” (145).

This predisposition of the American university to autonomous rather than heteronomous views of knowledge predates the New Criticism considerably, having its origins as far as the founding of Johns Hopkins University on German educational models in 1867. By and large, though, literature departments lagged behind the sciences and social sciences in developing autonomous principles for the study of their subject matter. But by the mid-1930s (just as New Critics like Brooks and Warren were launching their fledgling academic careers) the institutions were ready for change. R.S. Crane of the University of Chicago, for instance, looked to reform his own department on the autonomous principle, calling, in 1935, for a faculty that did not subordinate formal to political or moral concerns: “…men of the type of the older impressionists we could hardly use, and as for the remnants of the Humanists, there is little to be hoped for from the kind of principles — essentially political and ethical rather than esthetic in character — for which they mainly stood” (4).

Crane may not have known exactly what he wanted, but he knew what he didn’t want: heteronomous principles of literature, the prevalence of which seemed to threaten to subordinate literature to politics and ethics. It should come as no surprise that three years later, in the year of Understanding Poetry’s first edition, John Crowe Ransom would look back on Crane as a visionary, and praise him as a great reformer in the famous essay “Criticism, Inc.”. By 1950, many proponents of heteronomous principles of literature and literary study in the academy had come to feel that the reformers had them up against the ropes. MLA president and Harvard professor Douglas Bush’s address to the MLA two years earlier (“The New Criticism: Some Old Fashioned Queries”) had been less an act of resistance than an angry surrender to an enemy that dismissed his own ethical and humanistic views as nothing more than “the didactic heresy” (19-20). Then, as at many an MLA conference since, the desperate pleas of the president were ignored by the eager young assistant professors, ready to make names for themselves by following the next new thing.

In an institutional environment that called out for a method of study based on autonomous principles of literature, critics like Tate and Ransom were there to supply what was needed. This is not to say that the they were nothing more than opportunists, merely that the ideas they produced happened to fit the demands of the academic/literary marketplace of the time. Then again, one can sometimes detect a whiff of opportunism in private correspondence, as when Ransom writes to Tate in 1937, saying that “I have an idea that we could really found criticism if we got together on it” and that “the professors are in an awful dither trying to reform themselves and there’s a big stroke possible for a small group that knows what it wants in giving them ideas and definitions and showing the way” (Young, John Crowe Ransom 85).

Regardless of how deliberate any particular New Critics may have been in exploiting the universities’ need for a theory of literature as an autonomous object of study, those who prospered most seemed to embrace the idea that both the method and object of literary study were autonomous. Ransom’s “Criticism, Inc.,” for example, echoes R.S. Crane’s criticism of non-autonomous methods of literary study in claiming that the unreformed English department could “almost as well announce that it does not regard itself as autonomous, but as a branch of the department of history, with the option of declaring itself occasionally a branch of ethics” (Graff 148). A year later, in 1939, Cleanth Brooks would write in The Well-Wrought Urn that, without an insistence on formalist methods, professors of literature would wake up one day to find that they had been “quietly relegated to a comparatively obscure corner of the history division” or were being “treated as sociologists, though perhaps not as a very important kind of sociologist” (235). Against these dire consequences, Brooks held up a strictly formal method of literary study. By 1951, he felt able to codify the method in a number of “articles of faith” published in The Kenyon Review under the title “The Formalist Critic.” No minor sociologist he, but a professional practitioner in a proper field of inquiry.

The literary object of New Critical literary study, too, was to be an autonomous. When W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley wrote, in “The Intentional Fallacy,” that “poetry is a feat of style,” (The Verbal Icon 4) they were codifying a position at a far pole from any notions of the poem as, say, a moral statement, an intervention in (or product of) history, an establishment of identity, or the like. This sense of the autonomy of the poem-as-poem was central to the idea of English as an autonomous discipline, and of great importance to the rise of critics like Wimsatt and Beardsley. But the triumph of this idea, fostered by an institutional structure with which it was eminently compatible, also created, or at any rate exacerbated, schisms within the New Criticism. One of these, to which we will now turn, involved the marginalization of one poet-critic associated with the movement: Yvor Winters.

The Heretic of Paraphrase

In 1951 Randall Jarrell wrote:

Is Clarity the handmaiden of Popularity, as everybody automatically assumes? How much does it help to be immediately plain? In England today few poets are as popular as Dylan Thomas — his magical poems have corrupted a whole generation of English poets, yet he is surely one of the most obscure poets who ever lived. Or take an opposite example: the poems of the students of Yvor Winters are quite as easy to understand as those which Longfellow used to read during the Children’s Hour; yet they are about as popular as those other poems (of their own composition) which grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, And Edith with golden hair used to read to Longfellow during the Poet’s Hour. If Dylan Thomas is obscurely famous, such poets as these are clearly unknown. (18-19).

These comments, published four years later in Poetry and the Age are flippant but telling, in that they encapsulate much of the New Critical critique of Wintersian poetry and poetics. That critique, in most instances, boiled down to a preference for the interestingly obscure over the plainspoken or easily paraphrasable. While Winters, in one of his less tolerant moods, could write that “many poems cannot be paraphrased and are therefore defective” (see Von Hallberg, “Yvor Winters” 804), it would only be stretching things a little to say that the standard New Critical assessment of Winters was that his later poems were defective because they could be too readily paraphrased.

This was the basic substance of John Crowe Ransom’s quarrel with Winters, and the substance of the critique that his student, Cleanth Brooks, would level at Winters. Both Ransom and Brooks objected to the statement-oriented, paraphrasable side of Winters’ poetics, and for the same reason: Winters’ work violated the autonomous principle of poetry. Two other New Critics, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, would also object to Winters’ work on the same grounds. The repeated rejections were strong enough to sting even the thick-skinned Winters, who remarked in 1953 that the young Turks of Ivy League thought of him as “lower than the carpet” (Hall 224).

Ransom explicity objects to Winters’ heteronomous principles of poetry — his subordination of formal concerns to moral concerns — in the 1941 volume that became the namesake of a movement, The New Criticism. Here he maintains that “Winters believes that ethical interest is the only poetic interest” (214). This is a problem, Ransom argues, because it looks to poetry for reasons other than “poetical interest” itself (that is, the autonomous principle of poetry):

Now I suppose [Winters] would not disparage the integrity of a science like mathematics, or physics, by saying that it offers discourse whose intention is some sort of moral perfectionism. It is motivated by an interest in mathematics, or in physics. But if mathematics is for mathematical interest, why is not poetry for poetical interest? A true-blue critic like Eliot would certainly say that it is, though he would be unwilling to explain what he meant. I think I know why all critics do not answer as Eliot would: because criticism, a dilettante and ambiguous study, has not produced the terms in which poetic interest can be stated. Consequently Winters is obliged to think that mathematics is for mathematical interest — or so I suppose he thinks — but that poetry, in order that there may be an interest, must be for ethical interest. And why ethical? Looking around among the stereotyped sorts of interest, he discovers, very likely, that ethical interest is as frequent in poetry any other one. (214).

The passage reverberates with the energies that were to bring the New Criticism to power in the universities: the science-based emphasis on a division of knowledge into discrete, autonomous fields; the condemnation of “dilettante” critics; the call for an articulation of “terms in which poetic interest can be stated” (terms, one imagines, like irony, balance, and unity — terms that stress complex structure over moral statement). Ransom takes a position that will advance New Criticism to the center of academic and literary authority. A great deal, in fact, depends upon his ability to establish the autonomous principle of literature: “there’s a big stroke possible for a small group that knows what it wants in giving [professors of English] ideas and definitions,” as Ransom wrote to Tate four years earlier. Winters, in this process, serves as a foil: he is the poet-critic who fails to grasp the autonomous principle; the representative of an outmoded, heteronomous aesthetic.

Winters, never one to let a criticism of his own work go unanswered in print, objected to Ransom’s criticism in his scathing essay “John Crow Ransom, or Thunder without God” from The Anatomy of Nonsense. Here, he claims quite rightly that Ransom has a truncated notion of Winters’ moralism, which was never as simple a matter as demanding that a poem make an overt moral statement. Instead, the poet’s responsibility is to co-ordinate rational statements about the world with the emotional connotations appropriate to those statements (In Defense of Reason 502-507). Nevertheless, Winters still maintains that the subject matter of poetry is inevitably human experience and that “it can therefore be understood only in moral terms” (506). That is, “the act of the poet” should always be “an act of moral judgment” (503). The poet, in this view, is ultimately responsible to morality, rather than to internal or formal “poetic interest” alone. This is a profoundly heteronomous idea of literature, and it is heteronomy itself, rather than any particular definition of morality, to which Ransom objects.

Brooks’ major contribution to the anti-Wintersian argument comes in the middle section of his famous essay of 1947, “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” where Inquisitor Brooks fingers Winters as the leading heretic. Like Ransom, Brooks objects to Winters’ emphasis on statement on the grounds that it violates the autonomous nature of literature. “Mr. Winters’ position will furnish perhaps the most respectable example of the paraphrastic heresy,” intones the Inquisitor, naming Winters as a heretic because “he assigns primacy to the ‘rational meaning’ of the poem” (963). This is a violation of the autonomous principle of poetry because “to refer the structure of the poem to what is finally a paraphrase of the poem is to refer it to something outside of the poem” (964). For true believers free from heteronomous heresies, poems are to be judged in terms of structure and “internal order” (964) only. In addition, Winters’ is condemned for conceiving of the language of poetry as continuous with the language of “science or philosophy or theology” (964). Brooks, like Ransom, holds to the dogma that poetry is a special kind of language, and so is unsympathetic to Winters’ idea that poetry does not differ in essence from prose. While no dunking stools were available for use on heretics academy, the most powerful weapon available was deployed against the heretic Winters: he was derided, and worse, ignored.

One of last major attacks on Winters — or perhaps we should say, one of the last moments when Winters’ work is taken seriously enough by a New Critic to merit sustained attack — comes in W.K. Wimsatt’s 1954 study The Verbal Icon. Even here much of the material devoted to Winters comes in a which Wimsatt co-wrote with Monroe C. Beardsley in 1946. In addition to making light of Winters’ concerns about improperly motivated emotion, they repeat the standard New Critical case against Wintersian poetics when they say they will not embrace “the extreme doctrine of Winters, that if a poem cannot be paraphrased it is a poor poem” (35). While they are willing to use some of the ideas about the emotive qualities of poetry, they share neither Winters’ sense of the dangers of unmotivated or spontaneous emotion, nor his sense of the poem as statement. He is, for them, largely passé.

For critics like Ransom, Brooks, Wimsatt and Beadsley, the poems most favored were “obscurely famous,” centered on formal concerns, and consecrated because of those concerns. Had the Robert Lowell of Lord Weary’s Castle not been born, the New Critics would have had to invent him in a secret laboratory beneath Kenyon College’s biology building. But the poems of Yvor Winters, like those of his unnamed students in Jarrell’s Poetry and the Age, were “clearly unknown.” It was their clarity, in fact, that kept them that way. And it was his insistence on such clarity, and on a heteronomous poetic, that made him marginal in an movement that was riding high on the American university’s autonomous imperatives.

Works Cited

Bledstein, Burton J. The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. New York: Norton, 1978.

Bush, Douglas. “The New Criticism: Some Old-Fashioned Queries.” PMLA 64 Supplement Part 2 (March 1949): 18-21.

Brooks, Cleanth. “The Formalist Critic.” Kenyon Review 13 (1951): 72-81.

Brooks, Cleanth. “The Heresy of Paraphrase.” Critical Theory Since Plato. Revised Edition. Ed. Hazard Adams. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992:961-968.

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Dobson, 1968.

Crane, R.S. The Idea of the Humanities, vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1967.

Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Hall, Donald. “Rocks and Whirlpools: Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters.” Paris Review 121 (1991): 211-251.

Jarrell, Randall. “The Morality of Mr. Winters.” Kenyon Review 1 (1939): 211-15

Jarrell, Randall. Poetry and the Age. London: Faber and Faber, 1955.

Ransom, John Crowe. “Criticism, Inc.” Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1979.

Ransom, John Crowe, The New Criticism. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1941.

Richter , David, ed.. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1989.

Von Hallberg, Robert. “Yvor Winters.” American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies. Supplement Two, Part Two. Ed. A. Walton Litz. New York: Scribner’s, 1981: 785-816.

Wimsatt, W.K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1967.

Winters, Yvor. In Defense of Reason. Denver, Colorado: Swallow, 1947.

Young, Thomas Daniel. John Crowe Ransom: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1982.