Laureate Poets and Heretic Poets in the TLS

I've always romanticized the Grand Old Literary Newsprint Journals—the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and, best of all, the Times Literary Supplement. It's not often I've encountered references to my own work when flipping through the TLS (three times, not that I'm counting), so I was delighted to run across Stephen Burt's "Laureates and Heretics" in the May 3 issue—an article that takes its name from a book of mine that came out several years ago.

Burt's essay isn't about my book: it's a review of two books of essays by contemporary poets, Alan Shapiro's The Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration and John Matthias' At Large.  But—noting that both Shapiro and Matthias studied in the considerable shadow Yvor Winters cast at Stanford (Matthias under the man himself, Shapiro under his disciples)—Burt chose to use Laureates and Heretics as a means of understanding the two poets.  My book, after all, was about Winters' last generation of students, and the poetic careers they went on to have.  Burt gives a good, quick sense of the book in his introductory paragraph:

In 2010 the Illinois-based poet and critic Robert Archambeau published Laureates and Heretics, about “six careers in American poetry”: those of Yvor Winters (1900–68) and five of Winters’s last graduate students at Stanford University. Of those, Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass became US Poet Laureates, while John Peck, John Matthias and James McMichael (the heretics) found small, loyal, contrarian audiences for their drier and more obviously learned poetry. Archambeau showed that Winters’s astringent yet charismatic pedagogy, his early modernist experiments and the severe doctrines of his later years – against raw emotion and modernist uncertainty, in favour of reason, control and inherited rules – could generate sharply divergent poetic programmes. He also showed how a particular way of reading, indebted to Winters’s poetic tastes and touchstones (including Ben Jonson, J. V. Cunningham and George Herbert’s “Church Monuments”), could persist for generations, even as its acolytes diverged.

Burt goes on to use the notion of "laureate" and "heretic" poetics to describe Shapiro and Matthias, respectively:

Shapiro’s fourth volume of prose. Most of its nine essays recommend, persuasively and movingly, what Archambeau might call a laureate programme: personal but guarded, never opaque, fiercely committed to the double notion that poetry can be read by everyone, and that it requires hard work to write. Shapiro may never become US Poet Laureate, but his moderate, democratic, inviting prescriptions fit Archambeau’s laureate frame.... John Matthias remains one of Archambeau’s heretics, and he writes for readers who have already read a great deal, or in some cases for readers who have read every issue of Notre Dame Review, the literary journal that Matthias co-edited in the 1990s and 2000s.

There's something in that critical distinction.  And there's something special in it for me: it's always good to encounter one's own paradigm put to use.

The article is available in print, and online, here, to subscribers.

Let's Hear it for the Boys, or: The Plinko Theory of Poetry

“Let’s Hear it for the Boys” is not a title I expected to find on a review of my book Laureates and Heretics, but I think I see why Brian Reed chose it for his piece on the book in the latest issue of Contemporary Literature: my book does, after all, treat a bunch of white guys as they make their way through the cultural politics of the sixties, seventies, and eighties — the very decades when the hegemonic cultural position of American white guys was starting to break apart.  There have been other bright things said about the book (notably by Henry King in the English journal PN Review) but Reed’s the first guy to make much of the way the book treats how people from the old dominant group react to the changes they live through and try to understand.

Here’s how Reed’s review opens. It had me a bit worried, really:

Robert Archambeau’s Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry begins by offering a reassessment of the irascible, archconservative poet-critic Yvor Winters. It then proceeds to discuss several poets from the“last generation of students” to work with Winters at Stanford University, all of whom “arrived in Palo Alto around 1962” and were later featured in the Carcanet Press anthology Five American Poets (1979): Robert Hass, John Matthias, James McMichael, John Peck, and Robert Pinsky. Each of these figures receives a chapter that summarizes his career, comments on his principal publications, and accounts for his reception history. Described in this manner, the book might not sound promising.

But then things warm up:

Despite these obstacles, Laureates and Heretics turns out to be a compelling meditation on the mechanics of canonization. Building on the work of David Kellogg, Alan Golding, and Jed Rasula, the study focuses on the institutional and social dynamics that produce different levels of popular and critical success among authors active during the same time period.

And soon thereafter Reed turns to the business of the effect of identity politics on “the boys”:

No longer could white men speak unreflectively “of, for, and to a presumably general community.” A comparative study of Winters’s students proves to be a new and inventive means of supporting this last proposition. Hass, Matthias, McMichael, Peck, and Pinsky all came of age in an era of intense ideological demystification. They did not, however, respond to that challenge in the same way. Just as the counter- cultural poetries of the period were internally diverse and mounted a variety of critiques of entrenched authority, so too the elite-educated individuals with easier access to prominent venues for publication, employment, and promotion likewise exhibited a range of behaviors. To understand the literary system of the later twentieth century, Archambeau contends, one has to set aside reductive accusations of sexism, homophobia, and racism and understand that the establishment, too, was a mercurial, complex, self-contradictory entity, fitfully and unpredictably responsive to shifts in the larger poetry field.

Reed's got it, dead-on.  After the rise of identity politics and feminism, you really couldn't go around acting like "Robert Lowell, National Voice of Poetry" or even "Allen Ginsberg, National Voice of Rebellious Poetry."  Things were different, and you had to figure out how, and why, and what to do, not from above or after the event, but during the changes as they happened.

Soon after this part comes my favorite image in the review: the depiction of The Plinko Theory of Poetic Reputation, which is actually a pretty good way to hold in one’s mind the nature of poetic reputation-making, which isn’t primarily about the quality of the work, but about how your trajectory happens to intersect with the various forces at work in the cultural field (this does not mean that bad work gets rewarded, or good work shunted aside, only that one’s work will be popular if it has affinities with cultural imperatives, and finds its way to light through channels that happen to serve large or powerful or coherent constituencies):

Laureates and Heretics offers a theory of canonization that resembles the game Plinko on the television show The Price Is Right. A contestant drops disks from different possible starting points and then watches how initial conditions affect their paths as they descend toward more or less lucrative possible outcomes. Pinsky and Hass could never have predicted that their specific swerves away from Winters would lead plink-plink-plink to their selection as poets laureate. In retrospect, however, one can see that the “poetry field” of the 1970s and 1980s tended to reward certain moves while penalizing others. This kind of experiment could easily be repeated, perhaps with a more eclectic group. What would it be like to read a book that devotes a chapter each to the likes of Agha Shahid Ali, Mary Jo Bang, Charles Bernstein, Rick Kenney, Dana Levin, Eileen Myles, and Tupac Shakur? Would it be chaos, or a way of gaining a more comprehensive overview of poetic production in the late twen- tieth century? Archambeau has shown that there is now enough historical distance on the post–Vietnam War era that one can fruitfully approach its poetry with the cool gaze of a sociologist.

From now on, I’m going to refer to the Archambeau-Reed Plinko Theorem as if it were the General Theory of Relativity or something.

Anyway, here’s the grand finale, which I think gets me exactly right, depicting me as a man aiming at disinterested objectivity and almost but not quite getting there:

One senses that Pinsky and Hass interest him primarily as literary-historical riddles (how did they come out on top?).  He writes well about McMichael, but Peck appears to intrigue him more, and his admiration for Matthias is patent. One suspects that, if pressed, he would admit that his money is on modernist ambition and seriousness as the true route to lasting achievement. The beauty of Laureates and Heretics is Archambeau’s ability to restrain himself from making such pronouncements. He takes the tools of practical criticism and puts them in the service of a relatively unbiased literary history. No matter who their favorite poets might be, others will be able to build on his arguments. The field needs more books like Laureates and Heretics.

And I can't resist ending with this, a celebration of Brian Reed's title (I couldn't quite bring myself to post Deneice Williams' "Let's Hear it for the Boy"):

Oppositional Poetry vs. Oppositional Poetry

So, while Sunday morning isn't exactly a matter of Wallace Stevens' "complacencies of the peignoir" chez Archambeau, I do generally manage to sprawl around with a few cups of freshly-ground-Sumatra coffee and the New York Times while I let the Saturday night haze drift out of my mind on the gently floating caffeine breeeze. Today I added the latest issue of Pleiades to the mix, which helped jazz me out of my torpor, including as it did John Matthias' new poem "Poetics," my own piece on poetic difficulty (which I scanned for typos, spotting one humiliating one, left in due to my own proofreaderly negligence), and Reginald Shepherd's very sharp essay "One State of the Art." It was Shepherd's essay that mixed itself into a heady brew with a piece by Jim Harrison in the Times Book Review, and that, with truly first rate coffee as a catalyst, had me thinking about the beast that hulks wherever poets gather nowadays: the idea of oppositional poetry.

Long story short, I suppose my thesis here is this: a lot of poets are driven by the idea that they should be in opposition to both the dominant aesthetic ideas and the dominant political forces of their time — but when you open the hood and poke around among its innards, this idea doesn't turn out to have much to do with politics at all. And its relation to aesthetics turns out to be of secondary importance: if you were feeling generous you could call the real driving force community; if you were feeling ungenerous, you could call it conformity. (I'm sure there are exceptions). Let me explain...


Jim Harrison's piece in the New York Times, "Don't Feed the Poets," was occasioned by Harrison's rediscovery of Karl Shapiro's 1964 book of prose poems, Bourgeois Poet lying around his study. Here's what Harrison says about the genesis of Shapiro's book:

Shapiro (1913-2000) had gotten the title for his book at a party, after giving a reading in Seattle, when Theodore Roethke called him a "bourgeois poet." The question is why it caused Shapiro such severe unrest that he poured heart and soul into what is really one very long poem?

The answer, says Harrison, lies in Shapiro's not-unusual "heroic notion of the poet," a notion formed early on and persistenting throughout his life. And when Shapiro wrote Bourgeois Poet, he was obsessed with the French Symbolists. "This explains a lot," says Harrison,

...since Shapiro's notion of what a poet was implies the outsider, the outcast, the outlier, one who purposefully deranges his mind to write poems like Rimbaud, or one who could not walk, so borne down was he by his giant wings, to paraphrase Baudelaire.

So this was the image of the poet, but how do you maintain it if, like Shapiro, you're tenured and respectable, and your concerns revolve (as Kenneth Koch used to say of the poet-professor) around "the myth, the midterms, and the missus"? As Harrison puts it, "How can you be raffiné ... on a campus in Nebraska?" What's interesting here isn't really the answer to that conundrum (if in fact there is one), but the persistence of the question, and the way Shapiro experienced it with a terrible urgency. It really ate him up, this charge of respectabilty. To be a poet, he had learned from the Symbolist tradition, meant to be an outsider — or better yet, to be part of a brotherhood of outsiders — or even better still, to be a part of a brotherhood of outsiders intent on defying the aesthetics and politics of the establishment. But all of this inherited sense of What A Poet Ought To Be was very different from the reality of what Shapiro was (and, I suppose, most poets in America since Shapiro's day, actually are). So it tore Shapiro up, as a perusal of the self-hating pages of Bourgeois Poet makes clear.

What's extrordinary here is this: it somehow isn't enough for the poet to embrace oppositional politics. To conform to the norms of the oppositional poet he actually has to assert some kind of equation between his formal practice and his oppositional politics. Consider Yvor Winters: as Reginald Shepherd recently pointed out in his blog, Winters is almost always dismissed as a reactionary, even though his political positions throughout his life were impressively progressive, and even courageus. He was a member of the ACLU in the McCarthy era, and joined the NAACP before civil rights became a respectable position among white guys. But he never drew an equation between an oppositional politics and formal experiment in poetry, and, having avoided this equation, he doesn't fit the inherited idea of an oppositional poet, who must combine the two, and see them as somehow the same thing. (Why does a commitment to old-school metrical poetry trump the whole anti-McCarthy, anti-Jim Crow business? It's an interesting question worth investigating properly sometime...)

Just as important to the sense of Winters as reactionary is another factor: Winters' refusal to be identified with a band of brother-outsiders. I always knew Winters was a loner-curmudgeon type, but I never got to see the stubborness with which he protected his solitude until the latest issue of the Chicago Review clunked into my mailbox a month or so ago. The issue features an astonishingly cool and very large selection of Kenneth Rexroth's correspondence (edited by John Beer and Max Blechman, who totally deserve a shout-out for this). There's a fascinating exchange between Rexroth and Winters, in which Rexroth tries to wrangle Winters into attending the 1936 Western Writers Conference, which was to be a big oppositional-writers love fest. Winters voices some radical opinions (especially about Communism), and hints at his political activities, but is absolutely averse to the "let's get together and speak truth, not to power, but to ourselves" ethos of the radical writers congress. So Winters wasn't one of the boys, and he didn't write in the approved style of the bien-pensants, and, as far as his reputation goes, that seems to have meant more than the gutsy stands for the left that he actually did take. (Lest we think this kind of thinking dead, I might mention a big argument I got into after the Chicago MSA a few years ago, in which some people ganged up on Stephen Burt in his absence, calling him a right-winger. Some of Steve's poems rhyme, and he hangs with Helen Vendler, but I'm not inclined to the belief that this makes for right-wingery in politics — Steve was out there knocking on doors and holding placards for the good guys during the '04 elections, I recall, while I was curled up with my Mallarmé and my self-righteousness).

So this idea of the oppositional poet isn't entirely about political beliefs: it's about belonging as much as it is about believing. And one belongs, in no small measure, by displaying the appropriate formal plumage. Politics takes a back seat.

Anyway. Reginald Shepherd's Pleiades piece gets to the core of these issues by pointing out that there's kind of a disconnect between the things we think we mean when we speak of "oppositional poetry" and the what we actually mean. Shepherd begins by smacking both the poetry of "earnestly mundane anecdote" and the poetry of "blank-eyed, knee-jerk irony" upside their respective heads. He then goes on to say:

I am particularly disturbed by the self-righteous complacency of what Ron Slate calls the avant-gardeners, so smugly convinced that the grass on their side of the fence is not only greener but more virtuous. Their willful blindness to work by anyone who isn't a member of their club is especially problematic in light of their project's justification by its spirit of exploration and openness to the unknown. When it comes to the work of anyone they label a member of the "School of Quietude," all is already known, and there is never any doubt as to who is a member of this so-called school. If you're not one of us, you're one of them, and it is you who (by definition) are guilty of complacency and self-satisfaction. Such unnuanced either/or thinking is the opposite of openness and exploration, though it could be termed "oppositional" in a pejorative sense.

Zing! I mean, there it is: a lot of poets who think they're "oppositional" in the sense of opposing the (mysteriously linked) dominant aesthetic and political forces, are really "oppositional" in a very different sense: their most cherished belief is that there are two opposing forces in the world, and they yearn to be clearly identified with one side, and to condemn the other side. Much more than actual politics, this will to brand-identity motivates the thinking of such poets. (Memo to those who think formal experiment is political opposition: maybe it is, sometimes, but Dick Cheney does not fear your disjunction). Shepherd drives the point home with a great quote from Anne Lauterbach:

The aspiring young poet begins to write in such a way as to invite a certain critical attention, to 'fit' her work into one or another critical category. This is the main function of being identified with a group or school, to draw critical attention that individual poets, not affiliated with a movement or group, cannot easily attract. "New York School" or "Language Poetry" are given brand-name status, commidifying and homogenizing, so that critics (and poets) can make general identifications and totalizing critiques without having to actually contend with the specific differences between so-called members of the group.

I don't think it's really any coincidence that the biggest pusher of the us-vs-them version of oppositionality, Ron Silliman, is also the biggest pusher of the catchphrase "poetry is community." Yeah, I know, Ron says he likes some non-langpo types, like Robert Hass (whom everyone has always liked, by the way, all through the theory wars of the 80s and 90s — for reasons I tried to investigate in the Hass chapter in Laureates and Heretics which I am promising not to talk about any more, though it is coming out this fall and will make an excellent gift for the whole family...). But unless Ron drops the whole "School of Quietude vs. Post-Avant" distinction, his protestations of bipartisanship ring about as hollow as George W. Bush's. The "oppositional" thing seems less about politics than about belonging (or, if you're in a bad mood, you could say conforming) to a community. Remember that old Who movie Quadrophenia? You can only tell you're a rocker by showing that you're not a mod. And the ruthless class structure goes on unperturbed while the two groups bash away at each other. I demand someone remake this movie, setting it at the 2006 MLA and casting Charles Bernstein in the lead!

Anyway. This bourgeois poet needs to get back to his fabulous Sumatran coffee. And to his poetic community: Stephen Collis just sent me his new chapbook, which is formally audacious in all kinds of ways. I'm hoping to blog about it later this week...

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.