Tradition and the Individual's Urges: Notes on T.S. Eliot

The new semester is upon me, and I find myself feverishly tapping out various course documents for my students.  I'm getting a bit ambitious in terms of what I'm assigning for the seminar on modernism I'm co-teaching, so I'm writing up some general notes for students to read ahead of time.  Here's what I've come up with for a session on Eliot that will feature The Waste Land, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," some excerpts from Eliot's writings about myth, and three early satirical poems ("The Boston Evening Transcript," "Cousin Nancy," and "Aunt Helen").  Some bits of it have been adapted from the Eliot chapter of a book called Making Nothing Happen: Poetry, Autonomy, Society that I've been working on.

1. Overview

T.S. Eliot was far from alone among modern poets in perceiving a crisis in the social position of poetry and in dreaming up a solution to that crisis.  Yeats, for example, sought to bring poetry out of the aesthete’s garret by allying it with both mystic rites and nationalism; while Ezra Pound dreamed of a world in which “the damned and despised literati” would, through clarity of language, keep “the whole machinery of social and of individual thought” functional, and therefore make themselves crucial to the legislators and governors of the world.  Eliot’s particular sense of the nature of the crisis, and of its solution, was colored by the decline of his social class and of the kind of public, moralistic culture associated with that class.  Eliot had strong family connections to a Boston-based, cultivated elite that entered a phase of steep decline around the time of his birth.  Eliot’s reaction to the decline was to satirize his declining class and its culture.  Out of his satire, though, emerged a new theory of poetry, in which the energies to which popular culture speaks are harnessed to the civilizing power of a tradition of high culture and spiritual discipline in a new kind of poetry.  Eliot theorizes about the value and meaning of high culture in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and works to fuse the energies of popular culture and the civilizing influence of high culture in his great, difficult, long poem The Waste Land.

2. Eliot’s Social Situation

The mark of the old, cultivated, civic-minded Bostonian elite was indelibly inscribed in the psyche of T.S. Eliot, but his was not an uncomplicated relation to his heritage.  There was, of course, the matter of geography.  The St. Louis-bred Eliot came from the margins of a social and cultural world whose metropolitan center was located somewhere between Harvard Square and Boston Common, and he knew it.  But even more important than his marginality to his class in space was his generational marginality with respect to that class.  When Eliot was still in his childhood it became clear that the old Bostonian elite and its national offshoots were being displaced, and in many instances dispossessed. The neighborhood surrounding the Eliot family’s house at 2635 Locust Street, once eminently respectable, was already coming down in the world when the poet was born in 1888.  It had, Eliot wrote in a memoir, “become shabby to a degree approaching slumminess,” and was an apt image for the decline of the high-minded St. Louis elite of which the Eliots had been cornerstones.  “The best citizens,” wrote Lincoln Steffens of St. Louis, “used to rule the town, and they ruled it well…. But a change occurred.  Public spirit became private spirit.” Steffens dates the change as beginning around 1890, and by the turn of the century the city had fallen into the hands of a self-interested and materialistic elite.           

            The story Lincoln Steffens tells about St. Louis was true of other places as well: indeed, his 1904 book The Shame of the Cities relates the same sad tale about Minneapolis, Pittsburg, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York.  The older elites of many of these cities, including New York, had been influenced by the ideals of the Boston elite, but increasingly, in the decades after the Civil War, the old elites faced the same kind of displacement the Eliots and their circle faced in St. Louis.  As historian Richard Hofstadter puts it,

The rapid development of the big cities, the building of a great industrial plant, the construction of the railroads, the emergence of the corporation as the dominant form of enterprise, transformed the old society and revolutionized the distribution of power and prestige…. By the late 1880s this process had gone far enough to become the subject of frequent, anxious comment in the press…. The newly rich, the grandiosely or corruptly rich were bypassing…the old gentry…

In 1917 Eliot would write that a writer’s art is formed by “the accumulated sensations of his first twenty-one years”—a period that in his case covered the years 1888-1903.  These were the years in which the class to which he was born had to confront the hard fact that it had been diminished, that the new America of industry, growing immigrant diversity, and imperial ambition had covered the old America of the Brahmins like a flow of fresh lava.

3. Eliot’s Satiric Verse

In Eliot’s view, the old world of genteel culture was too disconnected from the vital energies of the new, urban, industrial America to be revived.  Indeed, genteel culture appears as a spent force in the satiric verse he wrote in the early 1910s. If the genteel, decaying elite represented is satirized for the stifling nature of its commitment to old codes of behavior, the younger generation is satirized for the primitive nature of its urges, and for the vulgarity of the new mass culture that expresses and speaks to those urges.  We see this kind of satire in poems like “The Boston Evening Transcript,” “Cousin Nancy,” and “Aunt Helen.”  

4.  Eliot on the Imagination and Tradition

Eliot came to see the mass culture of his day—jazz music, comic strips, boxing matches, and other popular entertainments—as things that engaged people at a visceral level, speaking to their inner urges, but not linking those urges to anything more spiritual or refined.  At the same time, he saw the high culture of his own social class as civilized but anemic and disconnected from the baser urges.  Eliot attempts to bridge the gap between our inner urges and a civilizing high culture through a theory of tradition and imagination that fuses the primitive urges with a mental world conditioned by long exposure to a literary and religious cultural tradition. 

            Eliot does not limit the creative process to the primitive, unprocessed urges, but he bases it there. 

            He describes the basis of the creative process as something unpremeditated, based in the unconscious, and not fully within the artist’s control.  In discussing Virgil’s Eclogues, for example, Eliot uses the idea of prophecy to describe the method of composition:

If a prophet were by definition a man who understood the full meaning of what he was saying, this would be the end of the matter.  But if the word ‘inspiration’ is to have any meaning, it must mean just this, that the speaker or writer is uttering something which he does not wholly understand—or which he may even misinterpret when the inspiration has departed from him.  This is certainly true of poetic inspiration…

Elsewhere, Eliot chastises the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold for failing, at times, to make his verse rise to the condition of true poetry.  The failure has, at root, what Eliot calls an insensitivity to the “auditory imagination”—though what is at stake in the auditory imagination is not mere sound, but a sounding of the depths of the unconscious:

What I call the ‘auditory imagination’ is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back…. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses… the most ancient, and the most civilized mentality. 

Eliot finds the greatest force in poems that, unlike Arnold’s weaker productions, use words that have “a network of tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires” and the spring from “a kind of power” that “comes from below the intellect.” In a short critical note appended to The Collected Poems of Harold Monro Eliot is quite explicit about the basis of the creative process, saying that for the poet the poem “is dictated, not by the idea—for there is no idea—but by the dark embryo within him.”

            There is another element to Eliot’s theory of poetic creation, though, one just as important.  Indeed, if we turn to the most famous of Eliot’s critical essays, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” we find Eliot advocating a rigorous preparation of the poet’s mind, so that the urges of the imagination will be received in particular ways.  The preparation involves the acquisition of the “historical sense,” which comes from much deliberate study, and results in a conditioning of the imagination such that the poet writes “not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling for the whole literature of Europe.” This literary tradition is “the mind of Europe,” and the poet must understand that what it offers is “more important than his own mind.”  Indeed, it is in absorbing this tradition into his bones that the poet has his “self-sacrifice” and his “extinction of personality.” As Frank Lentricchia notes, the extinction of personality Eliot describes is not an extinction into “no-self” but into “self-in-historical-community.” That is: the poet’s imagination becomes not just a theater of individual urges, fears, and desires: it becomes a place in which those urges and desires take on meanings derived from a tradition larger and wiser than the individual.  The imagination’s reception of the dictates of the dark embryo within is tempered by the tradition’s teachings about the meaning and value of those dictates, teachings that have been wholly absorbed by the poet.

            For Eliot, the artist who does not fully absorb tradition, or who fails to connect the dark embryo of urges, fears, and desires to the teachings of that tradition fails, in some significant sense, as an artist.

5. The Waste Land

In reading The Waste Land, it is easy to become paralyzed by the fear that one needs to look up every obscure phrase and locate every reference.  Much can be gained from giving the poem that kind of attention, but there is also something to be said for reading through without too much hesitation, allowing the language and images to wash over you as if you were watching a film montage.   One thing one might keep in mind during this second, less anxious kind of reading is Eliot’s emphasis on both primal urges (often associated with popular culture) and high culture (often seen as anemic or remote from everyday life as lived in the twentieth century).

The Waste Land offers both abundant examples of language reduced to the bare expression of emotion, and instances of the transformation of emotion into spiritual wisdom based on the absorption of tradition.  As the critic William Harmon has pointed out, The Waste Land is full of “animal utterances” that are “below articulate language.”  These utterances are often connected with sexual desire, as in the “Weialala leia/Wallala leilala” of the Thames maidens; or with the consequences of violent sexual encounters, as in the lament of Philomela, a figure from Greek mythology who is turned into a nightingale after being brutally raped, and who is invoked in Eliot’s poem in these lines:

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc’d.

Tereu

Lust, sorrow, and other simple emotions, expressed in preverbal sounds: this is the traditionless condition, where “farmyard noises” (to use a phrase Eliot used in an interview) are the only vehicle for expression, and where what is expressed are merely crude emotions without much intellectual content.

            The repeated syllable we encounter at the very end of the poem, “DA,” seems, initially, to be yet another instance of preverbal noise, expression without meaning.   But we see, near the end of The Waste Land, the transformation of sound into language, and, in fact, into language redolent of the deep historical roots of spiritual tradition. “DA/Datta” speaks to us of the need to give, as articulated in the Sanskrit of the Upanishads; while “DA/Dayadhvam” and “DA/Damyata” speak to us of the spiritual need to sympathize and to control oneself as articulated in the same text.  Giving, controlling, and sympathizing are all matters of the disciplining of one’s more basic urges.  Eliot is dramatizing the transformation of primitive urges, of speech as a series of yelps, howls, and shouts, into the beginnings of a spiritual tradition.  The poem enacts a kind of re-creation of a spiritual and intellectual tradition that can connect with human urges. 

Fooling a Butterfly: Poetry and (Kinda, Sorta) Belief

Nabokov hoping to fool some butterflies

A few days ago, over on Facebook, Barry Schwabsky responded to my recent post about Robert Duncan's belief in mythology by saying that he's never fully understood the distinction between really believing something and only "kinda sorta" believing in it.  I was intrigued: what, after all, does it mean to only sort of believe in something?  Is there a stark belief/unbelief dichotomy?  If so, why do I refuse to blink during a Notre Dame field goal attempt, even though I tell myself I don't believe in anything so supernatural as the kind of sympathetic magic such an action entails?

The question of semi-belief came to me again today as I was reading Michael Benedikt's 1970 poetry collection Sky.  There's much to admire in that book: it's where Benedikt leaves off the Ashberyesque ellipses and Mark Strand-ish soft surrealism of his earlier work and starts to sound more like himself, or at any rate more like the poet he'll become (more talky, more anaphoric, longer-lined).  One of the poems, an elegy for Benedikt's father called "This Morning I Fooled  Butterfly," seems to capture exactly what it's like to "sorta, kinda" believe in something.  Here's the poem:

It was not real, finding an unmarked envelope of old seeds left by dead dad
It was not real, finding them acting as a place-marker in one of the armaments catalogues of
     the electronics industry for which he worked
It was not real, that there was a place left clear for planting among the weeds that had ensued
     in the six weeks since his decease
It was not real that these seeds sprouted
It was not real that that happened after three months, during which I could hardly find the time
     to return for a visit to the garden beside which my mother lived in a cottage
It was not real that they were not tended but came anyway to maturity
It was not real that, as I lay there in the garden, an insect came (some damned dumb butterfly)
     &, proceeding straight to the spot, sat on the product of all this accident, the issue of so much
     deflection & misunderstanding
& sat there on the tangle of unknown yellow & blue flowers, & roses, for a full fifteen minutes,
     as if all this were real.

On the simplest and most literal level, this is, of course, a statement of non-belief.  There was no packet of seeds, there was no fortuitous place to plant them, they didn't grow in the absence of care, and no butterfly came and perched on them.  The butterfly most certainly wasn't connected in some mysterious way to the poet's dead father, and its long stay on the flower while the poet lay nearby was in no way to be confused with the return of the poet's father, and some kind of reconciliation between living son and late father.  No sirree: that would all be a matter of "deflection and misunderstanding."  But convention indicates that we don't limit ourselves to reading poems literally, and Benedikt knows that.  Each of those things that "was not real" is implied.  Indeed, the whole scene that the poem invokes—a scene of the fortuitous recovery of the relic of a dead father, and a kind of reconciliation with the spirit of the departed—is painted quite vividly, and a reader of the poem isn't likely to discard that vivid depiction just because the repeated statement "It was not real" asks her to.  Indeed, the real effect of the repeated negation is to make us weigh the statement of the scene (that there was a spirit-visit and a reconciliation) against the assertion of that scene's unreality.  The very repetition of "it was not real" becomes less a confirmation of unreality, and more like a weakening of the assertion, the effect is to make it as if the poet were trying to convince himself that the reconciliation could not have been real.

There's a fairly strong case to be made that the poem works via Keatsian negative capability—that it leaves us, and the poet, in "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."  In fact, the case becomes quite strong when we consider how the poem's ending balances out the poem's title.

Consider the title. What are we to make of the statement "This Morning I Fooled a Butterfly"?  I suppose the most likely interpretation is that the poet fooled the butterfly into playing the role of his dead father.  Read that way, we can take the title as a confirmation of all of those "it was not real" statements: the whole experience of the father's spirit returning was a matter of the poet projecting what he needed to believe onto a scene that did not in itself support such an interpretation.  Of course, since the butterfly would have been oblivious to all this, a more accurate statement would have been "This Morning I Fooled Myself (Into Thinking a Butterfly Embodied the Spirit of my Dead Father)"—so we can see the title as Benedikt's way of dramatizing himself almost, but not quite, admitting to the kind of self-deception he would need to undergo to believe in the father's return.  It's a nice hesitancy, but in the end the title seems to argue against the reality of the spirit's return.

But consider, too, the end of the poem.  In that final, long line we're not just told that the butterfly sitting there for fifteen minutes wasn't real: we're told something like "it was not real that the butterfly sat there as if all this were real."  This last bit is interesting, because there is a kind of redundancy of doubt.  That is, if Benedikt had only wanted us to think "oh, the butterfly sat there as if it was the spirit of his father, but it couldn't really have been the spirit of his father" he'd only have needed to begin the line with "It wasn't real"—he didn't need to add "as if all this were real" at the end.  So the statement is really more like "It wasn't really the case that the butterfly sat there just pretending to be the spirit of my dead father."  This muddles things considerably, with the result that the line could conceivably be read as the kind of double negative that produces a positive—in which case this line, unlike the rest of the poem, effectively becomes a claim that the butterfly did somehow embody the spirit of the father.

So we have a title—a statement about the poem as a whole—that seems to deny the butterfly-as-spirit hypothesis, and a final line that could possibly taken as a confirmation of that hypothesis.  The two most powerful positions, title and ending, point in different directions, underlining the kind of undecidability, or negative capability, that we get in the body of the poem, where rich description is played off against repeated denial.  We have Benedikt depicting himself as desperately wanting, even needing, the butterfly incident to be a reconciliation with the spirit of his father—but we have, just as powerfully, Benedikt's modern, secular denial of that kind of need.  The end result isn't a poem of belief or of nonbelief, but of a kind of tension between the two.  It is, at the level of tragic emotion, exactly what not blinking during a field goal attempt is at the level of game day farce: a moment of kinda, sorta belief.

The present humble blogger in his Notre Dame rally beanie, in whose football-influencing powers he kinda, sorta believes.

“That’s a Real Angel You’re Talking To”: Robert Duncan and Mythological Consciousness

“You know, that’s a real angel you’re talking to.” It was a couple of years ago, at a reception in Chicago’s Green Lantern Gallery, that I overheard that comment. I was sipping cheap wine and talking to an old friend in the crowd that had gathered at an after-party held in the wake of the Chicago Poetry Project’s symposium on Robert Duncan, and someone behind me was recalling the remark as something Duncan had said to Nathaniel Mackey after reading some of the letters to the “Angel of Dust” collected in Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Given the provenance, the remark may be apocryphal, but it’s certainly plausible, since one of the things about which Duncan was most insistent was the reality of myth, and of the figures found in myth. Indeed, the thing about Duncan that’s most challenging to (and most often discounted by) contemporary audiences is just this: that he had, or at least tried very hard to have, a truly mythological consciousness—something utterly alien to most people in our time, even those who see myth sympathetically.

What it means to have a mythological consciousness is perhaps best understood with reference to Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume Two: Mythological Thought. Cassirer, who goes largely unappreciated in literary circles nowadays, has a lot to offer us: after all, he was to neo-Kantian thought what Adorno was to Marxism, in that he wedded the rigors of his particular discipline to a belief that all of the humanities had something important to contribute to understanding, and took a strong interest in cultural forms. In his work on mythological thinking, he is at pains to distinguish between forms of thought that merely value mythology, and a true mythological form of consciousness, something he finds primarily in pre-modern contexts (though, as his chilling study of Nazi ideology, The Myth of the State, makes plain, it can enter the modern world, sometimes in dangerous ways).

By and large, says Cassier, even those of us who value myths as a source of knowledge engage in some fancy footwork to make those myths compatible with our own, non-mythological worldviews. “We are accustomed to view these contents as ‘symbolic,’ to seek behind them another, hidden sense to which they mediately refer,” he writes. “Thus, myth becomes mystery: its true significance and depth lie not in what its configurations reveal but in what they conceal…. From this result the various types and trends of myth interpretation—the attempts to disclose the meaning, whether metaphysical or ethical, that is concealed in myths.” Those who do not truly believe in mythology as fundamentally real find the value of myth in the way myths can be translated into some other kind of knowledge. Such attempts can be quite elaborate: “Medieval philosophers,” writes Cassirer, “distinguished three levels of interpretation, a sensus allegoricus, a sensus anagogicus, and a sensus mysticus.” Even those with a great deal of sympathy for myth and a strong dose of skepticism for modern rationality tend to need some kind of allegorical or symbolic interpretive method to make sense of mythology. Even the Romantics, says Cassirer, “though they strove… to understand the basic phenomena of mythology in themselves and not through their relationship to something else, did not fundamentally overcome ‘allegorisis.’”

If one truly embodies a mythological consciousness—if one thinks not about mythology, but within it—things look different. Apollo the god, and the ideas represented by the figure of Apollo are distinct to most of us (who may be sympathetic to those ideas, but who don’t expect to wake and see Apollo outside the window), but, as Cassirer points out, “only observers who no longer live in it but reflect on it read such distinctions into myth.” For those whose consciousness is truly formed by mythology, the mythical figure doesn’t stand for a thing: “it is the thing… it has the same actuality”—ideas are “transpose[d] into a material substance or being.” One way to grasp this is to think of what Cassirer calls the “mythical action,” when a “true substantiation is effected” and “the subject of the action is transformed into a god or demon.” That is: if you go to a Catholic mass and experience the transformation of the Eucharistic wafer as a metaphor or a symbol, you may be sympathetic to the meaning of the event, but you do not experience it with a truly mythological consciousness. Only if, in your true and deepest and most fundamental understanding, you actually experience the transformation of the wafer as a real, actual, literal transformation of the object into the body of Christ, into something divine, do you really experience the event with mythological consciousness. That kind of thinking represents a challenge for most of us: but if we want to understand Robert Duncan’s poetry, it’s important to take up that challenge. He wants very much to experience the world with just such a consciousness.

Consider Duncan’s comments on Milton’s Areopagitica in The Truth and Life of Myth. Attempting to explain his own relation to mythology, Duncan quotes this passage:

Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and his Apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb, still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall do, till her Master's second coming; he shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection.... The light which we have gained was given us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge.

Most of us would read “Truth,” with a capital “T,” as an allegorical figure, and indeed as a figure of speech. But, says Duncan, “the mythological mind—and mine… is mythological—hears this not as fable or parable but as the actual drama or meaning of history, the plot and intention of Reality.” For Duncan, “Truth was a Power, and, in this, a Person in history.” To be absolutely clear: Truth, for Duncan, is not a personification—she is a person. There’s a literalism here that is alien to the modern mind, and native to truly mythological consciousness.

It’s not easy, though, for Duncan to maintain this mythological consciousness in a modern world that looks askance at such consciousness. Indeed, Duncan makes an admission of doubt, saying that poets who attempt mythological consciousness “must ever be troubled by the play of their genius, of true things in fictions and of fictions in true things.” What is more, we find Duncan making what can seem like very willful readings, or misreadings, of other poets, in defense of mythological consciousness. We see this, for example, when Duncan discussed Dante’s famous encounter with “the angel Amor” in the Vita Nuova (given here in D.G. Rossetti’s translation, the version Duncan favored): "I felt a spirit of Love begin to stir/ Within my heart, long time unfelt till then;/And saw Love coming towards me, fair and fain.../Saying “Be now indeed my worshipper!” Dante "is speaking literally here, not figuratively," says Duncan, he “is not illustrating some thought of his but telling us of an actual presentation in the crux of the reality of the poem.” Dante’s poetry, says Duncan, “insists upon the primal reality of the angel Amor” as actually real—as far as Duncan is concerned, that’s a real angel Dante’s talking to.

Those familiar with the medieval modes of interpretation might object that the spirit of love is no real angel, here, no record of a literal seraphic vision, but a figure of speech that fits neatly into the allegorical and anagogical modes of literary composition and interpretation with which Dante was familiar, and around which his Divine Comedy is structured. They may even cite no less an authority than Dante himself, who describes the angel as figurative. But Duncan will not have it. Even though Duncan admits that “Dante pleads poetic license, that this is no more than a figure of speech,” he chooses not to accept this part of Dante as sincere. Rather, Duncan decides that Dante’s description of the angel as figurative is merely a self-protecting lie. “Joan [of Arc] will be tried by ecclesiastic court and burned at the stake for talking with such demonic powers as Dante’s angels in the Vita Nuova are,” says Duncan, and “Ficino and Pico della Mirandola will come to trial for their practices of a theurgic magic to call up such personifications.” In light of this climate of fear, Duncan decides that we must see Dante’s denial of literalism in a new light, as a “pleading of insincerity [about] just what in the poem has to be sincere.”

The willfulness of this reading is hard to ignore. Not only does Duncan ignore Dante’s extensive use of allegorical and anagogical figures throughout his work, but he cites as evidence of a climate of fear and intimidation events that won’t occur for 130 or even 150 years (the Vita Nuova was written in 1295; Joan of Arc went to trial in 1431; Ficino and Pico della Mirandola had their run-ins with Papal authority in the 1480s, and merely endured exile, a punishment we know from history that Dante was quite willing to undergo for his beliefs). But my point isn’t to say that Duncan was right or wrong: my point is to say that his desire for a mythological consciousness put him on the defensive, and could even lead him to make claims that were more emotionally satisfying and philosophically authorizing than they were defensible. We might not learn much about Dante from Duncan’s comments, but we learn something about Duncan: that he badly needed allies in his battle to maintain mythological consciousness in a milieu resistant to such consciousness, and may even have invented some of those allies out of his need.

Ted Schaefer, Poet and Colleague, R.I.P.

It's been a couple of weeks since I heard the sad news that my former colleague, the poet Ted Schaefer,  had left us.  He was a good and generous teacher, and he always indulged me when I'd drop by his office unannounced and hang out, leaning in his doorway and asking him about his time in the army, his work as a former cartoonist, and, of course, about poetry.  I learned a lot from him, including a thing or two about patience.

He wrote two books—After Drought and The Summer People—and published poems everywhere from the the old Saturday Review to the Village Voice.  But the poem that came to mind when I heard of his passing was a little one I'd run across in a 1974 issue of Intro back when I was a grad student and worked in Chicago's great, much missed Aspidistra Bookshop.  It was a journal associated with the AWP and published by Anchor Books, and it took me a while to get my hands on another copy: 

Ed's Cafe: He's Dead

I

The coffee
Perks in the urns.
The forktips sing away.
A dawn hits
Ed's widow.
I hear 
The breadman, and

II

"I want a red casket.
With blue flowers,"
I hear the woman say.
"I want to be buried
On a real bright
Shiny day..."

I'm sure Ted will be remembered with affection and gratitude by many, including his former students—among whom, in a way informal but real, I number.

The Plonsker Prize: $10,000, Your Book Published, and Two Months to Write at Lake Forest College

In A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf famously said that a writer who hoped to succeed needed £500 a year and private room in which to write.  A Room of One's Own came out in 1929, when £500 would get you $807.  If the most easily Google-able online inflation calculator is any guide, that $807 translates into just over $10,000 in today's currency—a handy sum for any aspiring writer, to be sure, and a sum that just happens to equal the prize money given out by Lake Forest College in our annual Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Residency Prize.  In a turn Woolf would surely appreciate, the prize also comes with a room of one's own in which to write—several of them, in fact, in the form of a suite at the Glen Rowan House, where the winning poet is bound to run into some interesting people visiting the college (here's the actual suite). 

The prize is open to writers under 40 who have yet to publish a first book (chapbooks and other small publications don't disqualify an applicant).  The residency includes meals and comes with no teaching or other duties—it's just time to write.  The prize alternates between poets and fiction writers—and the winner will read as part of the Lake Forest Literary Festival.

The residency takes place during the spring semester.  Applications for the 2014 residency begin on January first of 2013.  There is no fee to apply.

The judging panel consists of myself, Davis Schneiderman, and Joshua Corey, along with a guest judge.  Guidelines and a link to an online submission form are available here.  If you and your work fit the criteria outlined on the site, I do hope you'll apply.

What I Read While They Were Writing

Lake Forest College, where I’ve been teaching for something like sixteen years, minus sabbaticals and a visiting year in Sweden, prides itself on its warm and fuzzy, get to know you by the name, scale model of an ordinary university, liberal arts college intimacy.  Generally, I think this is a great thing.  I used to get a bit miffed about the fact that professors proctor their own exams, though: shouldn’t we be out pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge in our research,” I’d  grumble to myself, “rather than looking at the parts in fifteen students’ hair as they hunch over their blue exam books, scribbling furiously?”  But that was all before my daughter was born.  Now that I have a small kid around (delight though she is), I find the three hours of silence less of a bore and more of a respite.  It’s a great chance to haul a pile of books, journals, and electronic reading gizmos into a room and browse around aimlessly, like I used to do for an hour or two every morning.

I’ve had two exams to proctor this semester.  Here are the highlights from six hours of desultory reading.  Some are things I agree with, some are things I just found striking or provocative or admired as feats of style.  For whatever reason, they’re the passages I felt drawn to enough to copy them out in my Moleskine while my students sweated out their answers about Virginia Woolf or Thomas DeQuincey.

One of the things I’ve been focused on is the state of American higher education, particularly the advent of what I’ve called the ‘post-welfare-state university’ and its protocols of privatization, which have extracted greater profit from research under the trust of universities, greater labor from the teaching force, and a greater pound of flesh from students, especially in the form of student debt.

     —Jeffrey J. Williams, “Long Island Intellectual”

If one had no acquaintance with other poetry than Mr. Ashbery’s, one would believe there were nothing more to the art than a vague, somewhat precious and connoisseurish liking for words and the puzzle interest of working them into difficult patterns.

     —from James Dickey’s 1957 review of Some Trees

On parent knees, a naked new-born child,

Weeping thou sat'st, while all around thee smil'd:

So live, that sinking to thy life's last sleep,

Calm thou may'st smile, while all around thee weep.

     —Sir William Jones, “Epigram”

The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness one is… a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces.

     —from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks

The story of St. Wystan is recorded in a Little Guide to Shropshire, under the entry of Wistanow, the place in the county where he was martyred.  The author of the Little Guide was Wystan Auden’s uncle, the Rev. J.E. Auden, and Wystan carefully preserved his own copy of it.  He was very possessive about his first name; he said he would be “furious” if he ever met another Wystan.

     —from Humphrey Carpenter’s W.H. Auden: A Biography

Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart.

     —from Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture. Ancient Romans justified the destruction of Carthage by noting that children were sacrificed to Moloch there….The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily…

     —Gary Wills, “Our Moloch”

James Bond is no longer a Greek God, he’s Jesus: Notes on Skyfall

The first thing to notice about James Bond is that he’s a god.  I’m not talking about the James Bond of Ian Fleming’s novels, and I’m not talking about the James Bond of the most recent film, Skyfall—a film that makes the most significant departure from the cinematic tradition of James Bond in the history of the franchise.  I’m talking about the James Bond most of us know: the Bond we watched in the movie theaters, on video tape, on DVD, on late night television and in any of a thousand forms of streaming video, from Dr. No in 1962 to Quantum of Solace in 2008.  This is a Bond who doesn’t stumble around like a mere mortal, growing from inadequacy to adequacy, learning new things both true and false, fumbling to make a path for himself in the world, to find a place where he fits, to build something like a family or a life’s work that can itself start to grow and falter.  In fact, a good part of this Bond’s appeal is that he doesn’t have to do any of that messy stuff. 

We can get a good sense of the Bond of cinematic tradition if we think of him as less like the protagonist of a novel, and more like a figure out of mythology.  In its classic manifestations, the novel offers us protagonists who grow and change.  Sometimes they change externally, seeking and finding a place for themselves in the world, Horatio Alger style (all of those orphans traipsing around the nineteenth century novel are placeless people seeking some kind of belonging).  Often, especially in the bildungsroman, we get to watch the characters’ ethical growth: Huck Finn has his great “All right then, I’ll go to hell” moment, rejecting the ideology of shore-based society for a dream of friendship conceived on his river journeys with Jim; Jane Eyre learns to balance her fiery, passionate desires with her self-possession.  Sometimes we get to watch the slow, faltering development of some skill or social ability, as we do when we see James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus slowly learn the art of language (from his lisping childhood to his pretentious display of literary theory) and the way to relate to women (from a full-on case of pathological virgin/whore dichotomy to a somewhat less virulent case of the same, perhaps in remission).  In any case, the real action of a great many novels is to be found in watching the protagonist learn, grow, and change.  All of this is in contradistinction to the way certain characters—the gods—tend to operate in mythology.  If the classic protagonist of a novel is a creature of becoming, the gods in mythology are creatures of pure being.  That is, they are what they are, and will be for eternity.  Ares doesn’t grow and learn and change, nor does he seek his true home, nor does Dionysus, nor does Athena : they embody certain traits: indeed, they represent those traits, and it wouldn’t make sense for them to lose or modify their warlikeness, their indulgentness, or their rationality.  How could we speak of a Dionysian experience if Dionysus went to A.A. and learned the twelve steps of self-reinvention?  This seems to be true of mythology across cultures: Loki never changes in the tales Norse mythology; nor does Tiki in the Polynesian mythological cycles.

Like the gods of mythology, the classic film Bond never has to grow or learn or seek out a place.  When we see him engaged in training exercises during the opening sequences of several of the films, he’s never really in the process of acquiring new skills: he’s merely performing feats of the sort we already know he can perform: there are no surprises—instead, there’s an affirmation of the traits we already attribute to Bond: awesomeness in physical combat; cleverness in improvisation; coolheaded aloofness; and a propensity to collect the women who fall, swooningly, into his arms.  It’s great.  And we’d feel betrayed if he actually had to pick up new ideas and master new things: the whole point of him, like the whole point of, say, Zeus, is that he’s already the perfect master of what he does and who he is.  We’d also feel very strange if he was in any significant way haunted by a past he needs to overcome, unable to allow himself the pleasures of Pussy Galore because of some hang-ups about Honey Rider.  The film Bond does not carry any real wounds from one film to another, physical or psychological.  With only very minor exceptions, he’s an episodic figure, the film Bond, not a cumulative one: more at home in a cycle of mythological tales than in the cohesive, ends-oriented narrative of a novel.

It is significant, I think, that the James Bond familiar to readers of Ian Fleming’s novels is much more like a classic novelistic hero than is the mythological Bond of the films.  Judith Roof, the sharpest writer on Bond to have trod this earth, puts it succinctly.  In the novels, she says, “Ian Fleming’s Bond character does evolve; he reacts, learns, carries with him the lessons of his own traumatic history.  The Dr. No Bond remembers painfully Diamonds Are Forever’s Tiffany Case.  Bond’s body and mind become increasingly scarred…. The literary character James Bond, however, is not coterminous with the cultural Bond figure…” In contrast, we have the cinematic Bond, whom Roof describes as “a creature of almost pathological consistency.”  Unlike in the novels, the Bond of film “appears as if it [Roof uses “it” rather than “he,” to emphasize the semiotic nature of the Bond figure] always knew everything — as if it was spawned with skills intact and little memory of past tortures which have no cumulative effect on him.”  Spawned with skills intact and little memory—one could say this of Aphrodite as easily as of the cinematic Bond.

But we can’t really make this kind of statement about the Bond of Skyfall, the film that marks the fiftieth anniversary of Bond as a cinematic phenomenon.  As Bond himself puts it early in the movie, the character is all about resurrection. 

Skyfall’s beginning sequence already gives us something different from the typical Bond opening.  Where we’re used to seeing a kind of set-piece or overture in which Bond’s immutable awesomeness is, once again, made plain, this time we see Bond falter and, more significantly, die.  His fellow agent (we later learn she’s Moneypenny) is ordered to shoot at Bond’s opponent even as he wrestles with Bond on top of a moving train.  She hesitates, saying she has no good shot, but on orders from M, who feels there is too much at stake to risk not shooting, she fires, hitting Bond and knocking him off the train.  He falls a great distance into a river, is washed down a waterfall, and disappears.  He fails for to reappear, and back in England, he is assumed dead, his obituary written, his flat and belongings sold off.  When we see him again, we’re not told how he survived—and this is significant, because in some sense he did not survive, he was resurrected.

Much in the film makes Bond out to be human and frail, in ways alien to the Bond of cinematic tradition.  We see Bond accumulate new scars that do not heal; we see him fail his tests in marksmanship, physical fitness, and psychological readiness for duty; we hear of the early death of his parents, and of unspecified, unresolved psychological wounds stemming from that loss.  We often see him from behind as he stands in a posture much like that of Caspar David Freidrich’s Wanderer Among the Clouds: a figure part defiance, part inwardness, and part vulnerability, not the clear-eyed, swaggering man Sean Connery played.

It’s not only a humanized Bond we see in Skyfall: it’s quite explicitly a Christ figure.  Not only does he die and rise: one of the main themes of Skyfall is Bond’s ability to love and forgive those who have sinned against him.  There’s a foil to Bond in Skyfall, a villain named Silva.  Silva, like Bond, was sacrificed by M in the name of a greater goal for the agency, and he lives to wreak vengeance on her.  His elaborate scheme involves making M feel afraid, and repeatedly urging her to “think on her sins,” including, of course, the sin of sacrificing him.  Silva refers to M as “mother,” and there’s a parent-hate here a little like that of Milton’s Satan, and a lot like that of Mary Shelley’s creature in Frankenstein.  But the main thing is his refusal to forgive the woman he clearly loved as a mother.  Bond has a similar relationship to M: deep affection, even love, and anger at having been betrayed and sacrificed for a mission.  But unlike Silva, Bond forgives those who have sinned against him, and is ready to sacrifice himself again to save them.  When M finally does die, the Christ parallels are underlined by the posture in which Bond holds her: it is a reversed Pietà, with Bond in the Mary position and M in the position of the agony-wracked, dead Christ.  He embodies pity and love and compassion for someone who, in her human frailty and uncertainty, ordered violence against him.

The name of the film refers to the Bond family estate, the scene of the trauma to which he returns (it was where Bond’s parents were murdered).  But it’s also a symbolic name, since the Bond that we see in Skyfall is a Bond taken from the realm of the gods and brought down into the human world, with human frailties.  He is now, for the first time in the history of Bond film, not a god per se but a god made flesh, and vulnerable, and capable of loving and forgiving those who caused him pain.  No longer a Greek God, and certainly not a bearded father-God from the old testament tradition, this Bond is a Christ.  And he may just resurrect the franchise.

Us vs. Them: Poetry and the Limits of Binary Thinking

Experimental vs. formalist; formalist vs. free verse; post-avant vs. quietude; lyric vs. language-based — you know the old binaries that people drag around when they write and talk about poetry.  They're like the weather as described by Mark Twain: everybody talks about them, but nobody does anything about them.  Until now! The good people at Boston Review (Timothy Donnelly, B.K. Fischer, and David Johnson) have put together a great forum on binary thinking in contemporary poetics, now available online.

Back in May, Boston Review ran a Marjorie Perloff essay called "Poetry on the Brink," which sparked some lively and contentious conversation.  Since much of the conversation involved the question of just how useful (or harmful) our old critical binaries were, the editors asked a group of poets and critics to write short essays addressing the question "what is the most significant, troubling, relevant, recalcitrant, misunderstood, or egregious set of opposing terms in discussions about poetics today, and, by extension, what are the limits of binary thinking about poetry?"

Responses came in various forms.

Maureen McLane and Ange Mlinko replied with poems, Mlinko's consisting of a series of rhyming couplets, beginning with: "M.P. is right: much free verse exists to give a pass/to naïfs who only learned of poems from a glass..."

Annie Finch waved the proud banner of poetic meter.

Stephen Burt struck the note of the expert overwhelmed by the plenitude of poetry and poetry-talk (which you may remember from an earlier essay of his).  This time he tells us "So many binaries circulate in and around contemporary poems that I find myself running out of Ibuprofen as I pursue the most useful."

DeSales Harrison comes out swinging, saying that Perloff's essay is at times mired in "self-regarding sludge" (I would advise Harrison to shy away from Orono, Buffalo, Louisville, and other stomping grounds of the Perloff enthusiasts for a while).  

Matthew Zapruder and Lytton Smith stand up for music, with Zapruder defending song lyrics as poetry and Smith taking issue with the visual/auditory divide.

Sandra Lim reminds us of Matvei Yankelevich's contribution to this discussion.

Katie Degentesh wins the Wicked Wit award for the line "If it’s not a legitimate poem, your body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

Dan Beachy-Quick seeks a middle ground between lyricism and the dissolved self; while Noah Eli Gordon notes the conundrum of the poet-professor, drawn to both indeterminacy and clarities more readily adaptable to a pedagogical context.  Dorothea Lasky works with a similar division, claiming that "a young poet today, finding his or her own way, must decide to be either a mystic or a scientist."

Samuel Amadon notes that labels tend to be imposed on poets from without, saying "American poetry is littered with schools and movements that no one claims to be a member of."


Cathy Park Hong accuses Perloff of being "disingenuous" in her treatment of poets of color (look out!).


Anthony Madrid, who has a strong claim as the possessor of Best Head of Hair in American Poetry (men's division) decries the insistence that irony and feeling must be at odds with one another.

Rebecca Wolff notes that her journal, Fence, has been interested in the binary question for years.

Evie Shockley dislikes the very idea of binaries, while some guy named Archambeau doesn't want to go without them even though he advises treating them with suspicion and getting promiscuous with the things.

Marjorie Perloff writes a reply in which she addresses various contributions, and manages an answer to DeSales Harrison that deftly sidesteps the issue of sludge.

Sublime Knowledge: Bertrand Russell and the Intellectual as Hero

I find myself compelled, from time to time, to gorge myself on the work of a particular writer, for reasons that often remain opaque to me until much later. For the last month or so I've been tearing through the works of Bertrand Russell — philosophical essays, memoirs, polemics, and even a little of his work on mathematics. I think, now that I'm coming to the end of this fit of Russellmania, that the whole thing has been a powered by an unconscious need to provide some kind of counter-weight to my other reading for the month, a series of investigations into Gnosticism, undertaken in preparation for the panel on American Gnostic poetics on which I'll be speaking at the Louisville conference this coming February. What better way to clear one's mind of the eight heavens, the archons, and the emanations of early Christian heresy than by turning to Russell, the village atheist to end all village atheists? 

Russell's atheism, though, turns out to be the least interesting thing about him. Much more fascinating, at least to me, is his notion of the intellectual. For Russell, the intellectual isn't just a heroic figure, he's something grander altogether: he's sublime. And not just sublime in some general sense of being grand. The intellectual is sublime in the Kantian sense of that word.

For Kant, objects themselves are never truly sublime.  Rather, it is the effect of certain kinds of objects on us, on our consciousness, that is truly sublime, though we tend to attribute the quality of the sublime to the objects themselves.  "Volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation, the boundless ocean in a state of tumult," says Kant, are things "we willingly call... sublime," but this is only because of their effects, because "they raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height and discover in us a faculty of resistance... which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature."  That is, we look at these terrifying things and, provided we are not reduced to sheer terror, we feel not only their grandeur and fearfulness, but also our own capacity to stand in their presence, afraid but not merely reduced to fear.  We feel their grandeur, but also the capacity of our own little light to withstand their mighty winds and not be blown out.  And it's our awareness of that capacity in ourselves that is truly sublime.  "In this way nature is not judged to be sublime in our aesthetical judgments insofar as it excites fear," says Kant, "but because it calls up that power in us... of regarding as small the things about which we are solicitous (goods, health, and life), and of regarding its might... as without dominion over us..." This is why, according to Kant, so many people from so many different kinds of societies have a certain kind of respect for soldiers, those people who put self-preservation aside and, quite often willingly, put themselves up against overwhelming force. "What is that which is, even to the savage, an object of the greatest admiration?" asks Kant. "It is a man who shrinks from nothing, who fears nothing, and therefore does not yield to danger, but rather goes to face it vigorously with the fullest deliberation. Even in the most highly civilised state this peculiar veneration for the soldier remains..."

When we look at Bertrand Russell's depictions of what it means to be an intellectual, we see something remarkably like the Kantian sublime at work.  Often, this takes the form of a historical panorama in which an intellectually advanced cohort resists an overwhelming barbarism, brave despite the overwhelming odds of defeat.  Here, for example, he describes his earliest sense of intellectual heroism in the communities of Greeks left behind in what is now Afghanistan in the wake of Alexander's conquests:

Already in youth I felt an interest, which has remained with me, in solitary outposts of civilization, and men or groups who were isolated in an alien world.  I did not then have the knowledge I have since acquired about such matters but I already wished to have it.  This interest led me in later years to read about the Bactrian Greeks, separated from the mother country by deserts and alien monarchies, gradually losing their Hellenism, and finally subdued by less civilized neighbors, but passing on as they faded away some part of the cultural heritage of Greece in the Buddhist sculpture they inspired.

Here, in a passage about Ireland during a time of barbarian invasion, we get an even stronger sense of the preservation of a small, flickering flame of intellectual achievement in an ominous and darkening world:

I contemplated with vivid interest the civilization of Ireland that was destroyed by the Danes.  This civilization, which was created by refugees of from the barbarian invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries, kept alive in one corner of the extreme West the knowledge of Greek language and Greek philosophy, which elsewhere in the West had become extinct; and when at last the Danes began their destructive inroads France was ready to accept the heritage at the hands of John the Scot.

Or, to take things from the panoramic to the more personal, here is Russell on the meeting of Christian missionaries in pagan Germany:

I liked to think of St. Boniface and St. Virgilius, two holy men engaged in the endeavor to convert the Germans, meeting in the depth of the Teutonic forest, glad for a moment of each others' society but quarreling desperately on the question of whether there are inhabited worlds other than our own.

Against all those dark forests, the mind shines a small but indomitable light — that's the stuff of sublimity.  And it's what led Russell to form a belief in an enduring tradition of the life of the mind, in, as he put it, "the indestructibility of certain things which I valued above all others, the things which make up our cultural heritage, and which have as yet persisted through all the various disasters from the time when Minoan civilization was destroyed until our own day."  A "gradually increasing power of intellect and knowledge" persists, sometimes falters, but never dies, due to the efforts of heroic individuals and embattled minorities — that's Russell's position.  

When we consider Russell's own intellectual formation, it becomes clear that this sense of the sublimity of the intellectual is tied to another strain in Russell's thinking: his yearning for certainty.  Russell's first career, before he became a public intellectual, was as a kind of hybrid logician-mathematician.  He gave himself a Quixotic task: to put mathematics on logically solid foundations, without any reliance on intuition.  For most of us non-mathematicians, it probably comes as a surprise to know that there is a strong element of intuitive thinking in mathematics, but there is.  Consider geometry (the field that first inspired the young Russell).  In classical, Euclidian geometry, many of the basic axioms from which all else derives are not actually proven, but rather taken as intuitively true, in a "we hold these truths to be self-evident" kind of way.  For example, Euclid tells us that if we draw a line, and then mark a point outside that line, there's only one line we could draw through that point that will be parallel to the first line.  Euclid doesn't prove this, he just takes it as true because it is intuitively correct — it's hard to envision how it could possibly be wrong.  That was good enough for Euclid, and for a great many mathematicians and logicians of Russell's youth — Henri Poincaré, for example, argued for an intuitive basis for mathematics;But it wasn't good enough for Russell, who spent many agonizing years working on the Principia Mathematica in an attempt to prove, with complete logical certainty, the basis of mathematics.  The attempt alienated him from his field, from his wife, and quite frequently from his collaborator, Alfred North Whitehead.  But despite the overwhelming odds against him, the project did not reduce Russell to despair.  His was a sublime, and lonely, intellectual heroism during the long years of his formation, and this was certain to have an effect on his conception of the intellectual's particular virtues.

In a strange way, this desire for certainty that underlay Russell's notion of the intellectual as sublime all comes back to his status as the village atheist, the author of Why I am Not a Christian and similar tracts.  The desire for certainty, after all, comes from somewhere, and in Russell's case it came from his early loss of faith.  Since Russell lived so long, and kept his wits sharp until the very end, it's easy to forget that he was very much a Victorian.  Born in 1872, he was almost thirty when the old queen died.  What is more, after the early death of his parents he was raised in a regime of rules and devotions created and enforced by his grandmother Countess Russell, a high Victorian virago if ever one trod the earth.  She insisted upon the worship of a terrifying, vengeful God of the fork-bearded paternal punisher type — and when the very young Russell lost his faith in this monster, he was left with the kind of void only a Victorian could have.  Matthew Arnold plugged the hole with culture, but young Russell plugged it with geometry, which seemed to him to offer the very kind of absolute certainty he'd lost when he cast his grandmother's god out of the sky.  So, in a roundabout way, the sublime intellectual, defiant against an enormous, encroaching darkness, was born when Countess Russell's God died.