The Birds Begin to Sing

Have you taken any interest in Roger Scruton's new book, Beauty, which came out with some fanfare last year? One short essay among several that were published to promote the book drew my attention some time back, the piece on the desecration of the beautiful in the City Journal (spring, 2009). I had wanted to write about this short essay when it came out, but was distracted by other matters. The piece was entitled "Beauty and Desecration: We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness."

It's a hard-nosed look at the desire of artists to "throw dirt" on everything normally considered beautiful in life and thought, past and present. Scruton exagerrates quite a bit about how much dirt is being thrown and how often it's being thrown, but he appears to have at least a somewhat valid point. As we all know, a number of avant-garde artists have taken to desecrating anything and everything they can get their paint on (to mention just one artistic medium getting rather dirty nowadays). Scruton's answer to the problem, since the human desire to sense beauty remains strong, is not to return to the masters of the past who cherished the truly beautiful, however that might be determined, but to look anew for beauty in our lives, at least the kinds of beauty Scruton thinks are truly beautiful.

I have my doubts about Scruton's idea, however, since as laid out in the essay, and the book itself, the idea plays right into the hands of the romanticism that led to the break down in traditional conceptions of beauty in the first place — that led to the desire to make everything new, to break apart every trustworthy and trusted convention, to show that everything people thought was beautiful is dying or dead. Such general topics came up frequently, if obliquely, in the criticism of Yvor Winters. But before we get to Winters, though, here's Scruton on the ordinary beauties that have become commonplace in criticism in our age:

At the same time, philosophers like Shaftesbury, Burke, Adam Smith, and Kant recognized that we do not look on the world only with the eyes of science. Another attitude exists — one not of scientific inquiry but of disinterested contemplation — that we direct toward our world in search of its meaning. When we take this attitude, we set our interests aside; we are no longer occupied with the goals and projects that propel us through time; we are no longer engaged in explaining things or enhancing our power. We are letting the world present itself and taking comfort in its presentation. This is the origin of the experience of beauty. There may be no way of accounting for that experience as part of our ordinary search for power and knowledge. It may be impossible to assimilate it to the day-to-day uses of our faculties. But it is an experience that self-evidently exists, and it is of the greatest value to those who receive it.

When does this experience occur, and what does it mean? Here is an example: suppose you are walking home in the rain, your thoughts occupied with your work. The streets and the houses pass by unnoticed; the people, too, pass you by; nothing invades your thinking save your interests and anxieties. Then suddenly the sun emerges from the clouds, and a ray of sunlight alights on an old stone wall beside the road and trembles there. You glance up at the sky where the clouds are parting, and a bird bursts into song in a garden behind the wall. Your heart fills with joy, and your selfish thoughts are scattered. The world stands before you, and you are content simply to look at it and let it be.

Is this not tripe? A band of sunlight "trembles there"? A bird "bursts into song"? Can a man as thoughtful and learned as Roger Scruton be serious? As nice and sweet as all this sounds, I believe that Winters would have thought Scruton's now commonplace distinction between concept and feeling, which arose from romanticism, too wide and sharp. Winters didn't think there is any unbrigeable chasm between sensing something to be beautiful and gaining insight into it, or even putting it to use (putting aside my longstanding puzzlement, which I have oft discussed, at why in our age critics and artists consider the usefulness of art so horrible). Winters seemed to combine thought and feeling nicely in his artworks and criticism, both of which are deeply powerful. Winters believed that the final cause of the literary arts is understanding, in what we now call a holistic sense — that is, embracing both concept and feeling, thought and emotion. (That is a "use," by the way, and I don't think there is anything the least ugly or dirty about being useful in such a manner.) Scruton's defense against dirt, as tremblingly admirable as it might appear on the surface, gives far too much ground to the romanticism that helped breed, in our late decadence, the desire to exalt ugliness, the unending obession with breaking all traditions, which Emerson, Winters's one-time bête noire, did so much to help make, in the early days of American culture, the shibboleth of modern culture.

Incongruously, the ugly dirt-throwing art often seems stronger as art than the trivial, trembling, mostly decorative "thereness" or "thisness" that recent poetry has sought to express. At least the dirt throwing is trying to say something, to help us understand some subject, rather then to wallow in trivial experiences like birds singing in trees and sun-rays falling. Winters was sharp on this point, once again in the long-ignored essay on John Crowe Ransom from In Defense of Reason. (Let me pause to note that this wonderfully insightful essay has occasioned almost no comment at all from other critics, even those directly engaged with or inspired by Winters, in the past 70 years).

At this point I must interrupt again [concerning Ransom's comment that Winters thought the only kind of poetic experience is ethical experience] to comment. I believe, to be sure, that ethical interest is the only poetic interest, for the reason that all poetry deals with one kind or another of human experience and is valuable in proportion to the justice with which it evaluates that experience; but I do not believe that a descriptive poem is negligible or off the real line of poetry. A descriptive poem deals with a certain kind of experience, an extremely simple kind, but one of real value; namely, the contemplation of some fragment of the sensible universe. This is a moral experience, like any other, and the task of the poet is to evaluate it for what it is worth.

Roger Scruton believes that artists should once again adopt the goal of art as pure descriptive beauty (in his manifestly shallow sense). But this idea has slowly wrought the damage that has led to the greater and greater loss of beauty in the literary arts, down to the dirt-throwing desecrations of the present age, as ever more artists have refused to seek understanding as the final cause of their art — the evaluation of experience, as Yvor Winters put it.

Nonetheless, Scruton's piece is worth reading. What is the role of beauty in a classical, moral theory of art as Yvor Winters roughly sketched it in his criticism? Winters didn't have enough to say on that important topic — in fact, he sometimes irritably dismissed the whole matter, as in the opening paragraphs of the "Preliminary Statement" to Forms of Discovery. I believe that the subject of beauty, however, needs much deeper study among classicists as the field of aesthetics has become prominent once again.

Nabokov the Trickster

I’ve been getting a big kick out of all the ruminations upon the meaning and importance of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita lately, all attendant upon the 50th anniversary of its American publication. This novel’s reputation as great seems to be rising ever higher and stronger at the same time so many critics claim that it has no purpose beyond the pleasures of its prose and the panache of its narrative. The latest group of essayists have been gnashing their teeth over the problem of Lolita’s subject (as opposed to theme), the seduction of an adolescent girl by a lustful middle-aged man. Is Lolita encouraging or approving such behavior? Almost uniformly, the critics are claiming that the novel’s subject is out of bounds, as they defend the novel from the view of aestheticism, of some more or less vague notion of art for art’s sake. Lolita, so go these new apologies, is about the beautiful way Nabokov tells the story, not about any moral or social or political ideas.

Nabokov, of course, is mostly to blame. Endeavoring to be the contrarian in most things, and as well to play along with the aestheticist theories and practices of many a modernist, he said in a 1962 interview for the BBC that he had only aesthetic pleasure in mind when writing Lolita:

Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.

This, of course, is obvious nonsense, a playful tall tale (though there is the possibility that it’s self-delusion). I can’t say for sure what Nabokov intended by such inane comments, but I take them as funny, and it has always surprised and amused me that critics have been weeping and gnashing their teeth ever since to force themselves to believe in Nabokov’s rascally ruse. Lolita is -- obviously! -- a deeply moral book, as every essayist I have read in the recent round has been forced to admit by the unambiguous nature of the case.

My favorite among the recent essays that have come out is “Reading Lolita in Alabama” by Allen Barra on Salon, which can be found at:

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2005/12/22/nabokov/print.html

Baara thinks Nabokov's masterpiece is still dangerous -- but not for reasons we usually think. Like hundreds who have already joined this endless queue of the self-deceived, Barra tries to force himself to believe Nabokov’s stunt:

This is the nicest way I can think of to tell Nafisi [author of Reading Lolita in Tehran] that Nabokov didn't give a damn about anything -- politics, feminism, humanism -- that she [Nafisi] does, at least not in any of his fiction.

Ah, such have been the tired and tiresome claims from many critics, claims that are so evidently false that they read as ludicrous. But, of course, Barra is simply paraphrasing Nabokov’s own words:

I don't give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth... there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.

That’s from an interview in Playboy magazine in 1964, in which he went on, “I have neither the intent nor the temperament to be a moralist or satirist.” Mediocrity, Nabokov thought, thrives on ideas, by which, as he told Time magazine in 1969, he meant "general ideas, the big, sincere ideas which permeate a so-called great novel, and which, in the inevitable long run, amount to bloated topicalities stranded like dead whales."

Putting all this together, you wind up with the confusions and hare-brained theories like those described in Gerald Graff’s fine 1979 book, Literature Against Itself, which I will discuss below and encourage my readers to find and read. But was Nabokov confused or joking? Nabokov said he was intent on writing a “serious” book, as he told his French publisher in a well-known letter. So he must have been very serious about this beautiful telling of a story, whose content is incidental to the manner of the telling. Perhaps Jacques Barzun, in From Dawn to Decadence, makes the most sense of such ideas in his discussion of the concept of art for art’s sake. Barzun’s sharp insight is that the concept of art for art’s sake is better expressed by the phrase “art for life’s sake.” That is, the aestheticist writer endeavors to seal himself off from ordinary reality, as it were, because his writing reveals or creates a higher reality of some sort, a reality of almost religious importance.

The confusions and incoherence of aestheticism frustrated Yvor Winters. Perhaps his most trenchant discussion of the matter, among several occasions he wrote on it, is in the essay “John Crowe Ransom, or God Without Thunder,” from the Anatomy of Nonsense (1943), which was reprinted in In Defense of Reason, which remains in print. In that essay he chided Ransom for believing that a serious work of literature like “The Tragedy of Macbeth” was about Shakespeare’s “love” of the subject matter, rather than an effort to communicate a full understanding of that dire subject matter, the commission of the crime of regicide.

As I say, one of the finest works on the issue of aestheticism I have come across is Literature Against Itself, especially in Graff’s first chapter, “Criticism, Culture, and Unreality.” Graff was a student of Winters’s at Stanford in the mid-’60s. He went on to do some original critical work that has bearing on modern classicism, and I recommend him highly. (In recent years later, I pause to note, Graff has sought to find ways to learn from and find affinities with postmodernism and literary politics -- efforts that I find laudable, if difficult.) Believing that aestheticism and related theories trivialize literature, Graff incisively delineated the twin concepts of the artist as a “hypersensitive weakling” and a “revolutionary prophet.” Graff found this, naturally, in Wilde, who talked like Nabokov’s prophet:

Oscar Wilde uses formalist rhetoric when he says in the Decay of Lying that “art never expresses anything but itself,” and that “art finds her own perfection with, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil rather than a mirror.” He switches to visionary rhetoric when says in the same essay that “life imitates art far more than art imitates life,” a view which defines art neither as a veil nor a mirror but as a mode of seeing which reorganizes life in its own terms.

Note the strong similarities of Wilde’s theorizing to Nabokov’s. Graff’s book, as the title makes plain, is an important, if long overlooked, effort to show that such views played a significant role in literature coming to be “against itself,” striving to undo its own purposes.

The critics battling to cram Nabokov’s novel into the art-for-art’s-sake box need to look at Winters and Graff to make much better sense of Lolita. Just as Shakespeare’s portrayal of Macbeth, as Winters argued long ago, is not intended to express “love” for regicide -- or even for the telling of a story about regicide -- so Nabokov’s portrayal of Humbert Humbert’s grisly yet titillating seduction of a girl is not intended to make us “love” the seduction of adolescent girls or the mere telling of a story of such seduction.

Perhaps it’s time to take Nabokov for what he showed himself to be when he theorized on his own art, a trickster. Yeah, I know the idea of the trickster has become a new high-brow cliché, arising from the interesting work of mythologist Joseph Campbell, but I am going to use the idea because it’s useful. Nabokov wrote one of the most moral novels of the modernist movement, a scathing indictment of ethical confusion and egoism. Let’s enjoy a good laugh at his playful deceits, but then let’s use Winters to get down to the business of understanding what Nabokov achieved.

By the way, is anyone interested in what Winters thought or might have thought of Lolita? He never wrote a single word about Nabokov that I am aware of, though they both taught at Stanford for a short while in 1941. I think Winters would have found Nabokov’s style fragmented and wasteful and his theme improperly developed. More importantly, he would have had very serious doubts about the use of an unreliable narrator. This matter is related to the issues discussed in the essay “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature.” Using a narrator like Humbert, I believe Winters would have said, forced Nabokov to write less well than he could have and provided him with no sound way to generalize his theme or fix what he wished to communicate about the complex experience of lust. In general, I think Winters would have said, the author who uses an unreliable narrator has no means to reach a final judgment of his subject matter, which amounts to an abdication of the writer’s primary responsibility and a short-circuiting of the chief source of literature’s power.

Do any classicists out there think Lolita is a great novel? I’ll hold off on revealing my own judgment for now.

On the Beauty of Puddles

Did you happen to notice and read the graduation speech of David Foster Wallace’s published by the Wall Street Journal upon the news of his suicide? The main point of his talk to the graduates, which you can find at the WSJ web site, was to find spiritual strength and perhaps happiness in recognizing that water is WATER. Twice he told the grads to say to themselves, “this is water, this is water” when they come upon a spill or a puddle or a pool or a pond. By cultivating amazement at the recognition of the magical, mysterious existence of water, Wallace believed they will be able to get through the tiresome, nettlesome days of their humdrum lives to come. (The photo is one of mine, of a pond in a garden here at Michigan State University.)

It doesn’t surprise me that a literary, or High-Cult, writer came up with this idea in this chatty, witty talk to students (and I think fairly highly of Wallace’s writing, I must add as disclaimer). Writers and critics by the hundreds have proffered marvel and wonder as the highest purposes of literature, particularly poetry. My view is that this idea, as insipid as it is, has become a leading cliché in our dominant literary culture, as I have pointed out and discussed a couple times on this blog already. I believe it stems from Romanticism, this hyper-concern with knowing small, commonplace things to be amazing. We see the idea everywhere. One of the most idiotic manifestations I can think of off the top of the head is from the somewhat recent Oscar-winning film American Beauty, in which a main character marvels at his videotape of a plastic shopping bag being blown about an empty sidewalk (by the way, I’d love to see some more examples). Is this the best and most important work poetry and literature can perform, to help us marvel and wonder at small things? Yvor Winters would have wretched at the thought. The idea reached one summit in Oscar Wilde’s discussion of beauty in “The Critic as Artist,” in which he proclaims his belief that finding beauty is the essence of all things:

Æsthetics are higher than ethics. They belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can arrive. Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong. Æsthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilisation, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Æsthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change. And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, we attain to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those to whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciations of the ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being an entity so divine that it is able to transform into elements of a richer experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thought, acts or passions that with the common would be commonplace, or with the uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful vile. Is this dangerous? Yes; it is dangerous -- all ideas, as I told you, are so.

This sort of talk is a cross between what Winters called the Hedonistic and Romantic theories of literature, as deliberated in the “Foreword” to In Defense of Reason. The overt hedonism of such thinking about literature did not so much morally trouble Winters as overwhelm him with the pointlessness of the idea:

The chief disadvantage [of the Hedonistic theory] is that it renders intelligible discussion of art impossible, and it relegates art to the position of an esoteric indulgence, possibly though not certainly harmless, but hardly of sufficient importance to merit a high position among other human activities. Art, however, has always been accorded a high position, and a true theory of art should be able to account for this fact.

Is Wilde’s brand of emotionally indulgent, antinomian thinking dangerous (Wilde, by the way, gleefully admitted that it IS antinomian), as Yvor Winters might have thought, or is it just trite? Or is it dangerous because it’s so trite? Any views? And how are the Hedonistic theories and the Romantic theories of literature interrelated, as I believe they are?

The British Debate the Question of What a Poem Is

The matter bubbled up some months ago, a debate that began in Britain about what poetry is, which led to a number of articles and responses in British magazines. This debate started when the Queen's English Society, through a representative by the name of Michael George Gibson, decided to publically announce the judgment of the QES that certain prize winners in a recent British poetry competition are not poetry because the winners -- and all the finalists, for that matter -– were written in free verse. On behalf of the QES, Gibson claimed that “true poems” are written in some discernible measure and most often in rhyme. True poetry, said Gibson, gives the reader or listener a “special pleasure.”

Gibson, however, made a colossal blunder in defense of the position of the QES, for he foolishly chose to illustrate the claim with a supposed non-poem by English Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, “The Golden Rule” (recently commissioned for Elizabeth II’s 80th birthday). Despite Gibson’s confident pronouncements for the QES that “The Golden Rule” is written in prose, it is a formalist poem in every way. It’s written in a clear and very regular blank verse, which shows that even the well-meaning folks of the QES are as ignorant as that reviewer in the New York Times who said that Robert Pinsky’s recent, much-discussed piece “Poem of Disconnected Parts” is written in blank verse, which obviously it is NOT (see my earlier post on that matter). Anyway, take a gander at Motion’s fine work in an obviously and highly formal meter:

The Golden Rule

The waves unfurl and change the shape of coasts,
The shrinking woods fall backwards through their leaves,
The night-horizons twist in chains of light:
The golden rule, your constancy, survives.

The language bursts its bounds and breaks new ground,
The fledgling words lay down a treasure-trove,
The speed of heart-to-heart accelerates:
The golden rule, your constancy, survives.

The sun unwinds its heat through threadbare sky
The lakes and rivers map their stony graves,
The stars still shine although their names grow faint:
The golden rule, your constancy, survives.

The black-and-white of certainty dissolves,
The single mind insists on several lives,
The ways to measure truth elaborate:
The golden rule, your constancy, survives.

Motion’s iambic pentameter seems stodgy, almost wooden, to those who have lost or have never had the taste for meter. There is hardly any variation whatsoever. The only major departure I see is in the phrase “their names grow faint,” which ends its line in a near spondee. And yet Motion handles the rigid meter** very well. The final stanza, in particular, reaches a powerful moment of insight, the idea of certainty dissolving expressed in a methodical and conventional meter. Gibson, for the QES, said of the poem, “It is in pairs of lines and I will assume they are measured out in a formal way, but beyond that there is no other formal principle. It falls short of being a poem.”

Dead wrong, Mr. Gibson.

I feel almost incredulous that such a mistake could be made -- and then followed up with wide publication. By using a search engine, you can easily find lots of commentary on the QES challenge on the definition of poetry.

Naturally, the British Poetry Society, which put on the competition responded to Gibson’s criticisms. One trustee said: “There is poetry in everything we say or do, and if something is presented to me as a poem by its creator, or by an observer, I accept that something as a poem.” That is a position that is simply unacceptable to me, that anything anyone says is a poem is one. Such a view leads, and has led, to a lot of nonsense in the world of poetry and to a significant diminishment of poetry’s importance and beauty. Ruth Padel, a prize-winning poet (unknown to me) and former chair of the Poetry Society, added, “As for ‘what poetry is’: in The Use of Poetry T.S. Eliot said, ‘We learn what poetry is -- if we ever learn -- by reading it.’” I would also disagree with that, for it also leads to the incoherent position of accepting as poetry anything that anyone says is poetry.

Another British poet, by the name of Michael Schmidt, claimed that the campaign of the QES is similar to a movement in the U.S. labeled "New Formalism." Followers of that movement, Schmidt claimed, “set up a magazine” (just one?) that included any poem as long as it “rhymed and scanned.” The comment about rhyme is incorrect. I don’t know what single magazine Schmidt was speaking of, but there have been several U.S. journals devoted to formal verse in recent years, and none of them made rhyme a requirement and many of the meters employed have been highly experimental. Schmidt was quoted further as saying, “But the bankruptcy of that [the use of meter and rhyme, that is] has been recognized.” The “bankruptcy” of formalist poetics?!

Dead wrong, Mr. Schmidt.

Even in British publishing “new formalism” has had a vibrant life, thanks in part to the work of Janet Lewis’s longtime friend, the late Donald Davie (who was, by the way, editor of Yvor Winters’s Collected Poems).

Interesting to many might be to discover that Yvor Winters, who has so often been chided and derided for his conversion to formalist poetics early in his career, had little to say against free verse in and of itself. In fact, his letters discuss free verse very seldom, as it might be astonishing to realize, and he never railed against free verse in his letters or published essays. In fact, he wrote fondly and insightfully of free verse even after his conversion away from the Imagist poetics that he subscribed to at the beginning of his career. Winters’s views are made more complex because he believed that the best free-verse poetry was not truly “free,” but followed patterns of continual variation. We get some insight into this knotty concept in a letter to John Crowe Ransom in May of 1928 (when Winters was 28 and in the midst of leaving free-verse Imagism behind), in which he wrote informally of his belief that free verse can be scanned:

The question of meter is again too complicated for this letter, but if you are interested, I will send you some specimens of scansion some time in the next year or so. Specimens of “free” verse, that is. My own, {William Carlos] Williams’s, Miss [Marianne] Moore, perhaps [Ezra] Pound’s. I believe that, allowing for irregularities (as in much blank verse) most of the good free verse -– and there is quite a bit of it -– is based on a line of primary and secondary stresses, the first being normally of a fixed number and the second and unstressed syllables varying. Sometimes the line is deformed for various reason, but can usually be straightened out if one has a counting-complex. At any rate I will fight for what pleases me, not for what can be measured by a footrule, and I believe that the above-named poets write verse whether it can be measured or not. I can, incidentally, scan most of my own verse of the last five years on this principle, having done it.

Winters’s formal writings on the scanning of free verse are of great interest (if mostly unconvincing to me). You can find them in his first book Primitivism and Decadence, which can be found as the first part of In Defense of Reason, his most famous work.

** Footnote: I should explain that I do not use the word “rigid” here as a pejorative , as it has been so used in many comments about formalists and Yvor Winters’s own verse, in particular (even among those who admire his work). Rigidity can be beautiful, as beautiful as or even more beautiful than looseness. Andrew Motion’s lines have great character and a certain strong beauty. Of course, I am aware of the current general bias in literary culture against regular meters in our time. But the continuing popularity of old formal verse (Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, et. al.) promises that some day a new and perhaps even large cadre of poets will devote themselves to the use of meter.

The beauty of rigidity, I think, needs a defense for our time.

Eloquence Receives the Attention It's Due in a New Book

Professor and literary critic Denis Donoghue has come out with an engaging and important book, in which he endeavors to understand and foster the appreciation and study of eloquence. What he appears to mean by the concept of eloquence, in my judgment, is intrinsically beautiful writing of some sort, and the book makes a valiant attempt to define beauty in literature and illustrate the truly beautiful. I think the book, On Eloquence, is well worth study, for it not only presents an enlightening case for the importance of eloquence but also suggests ways forward in augmenting the literary ideas of Yvor Winters. I hope to find time for a deeper look at the book some time in the near future. (The photo is a shot of someone kissing Ireland’s Blarney Stone, the so-called “Stone of Eloquence.”)

To offer a few summary comments, Donoghue makes a nearly absolute distinction in the book -- questionably absolute, in my view -- between the practical, persuasive discipline of rhetoric and the elevated aesthetic value of eloquence. I think the distinction is useful, to a degree. But I don’t think Donoghue makes a sound case for setting a hard line between the two. In fact, I believe a hard line can lead to a lot of nonsense and the continuing marginalization of literature, especially poetry, and to the uncertainty and desperation about what literature actually accomplishes or can accomplish in our lives. Eloquence, for Donoghue, comes in our time not from the realm of what he calls public speech but from that of literary writing. But the difference between such speech -- what is often called “communication” nowadays -- and literature is not so great as Donoghue thinks. Literary writing, as Yvor Winters opined, is a form of communication. It is a making of statements that seek a deeper or broader understanding of vital human experiences. In Winters’s stronger conception, literature endeavors to employ all aspects of language to enrich our understanding and our emotional alignment to that understanding. Yet a detailed comparison of Donoghue’s theory of eloquence with that of Winters’s theory of literature will have to wait for another post.

In the opening section of the book, Donoghue summarizes the aspects of literature that he cares about as a reader and teacher: "aesthetic finesse, beauty, eloquence, style, form, imagination, fiction, the architecture of a sentence, the bearing of rhyme, pleasure, 'how to do things with words.'" As a professor, he says that it has become more difficult nowadays to get students to see that these aspects are interesting and valuable. Donoghue believes passionately that literature is too often read, and expected to be read, in our age as a reflection of writers’ prejudices and the historical and political currents of the world in which it was written. Something vital, something truly life-enhancing risks, being lost in this view, in Donoghue’s mind. The truly vital, the truly life-enhancing, are found, for Donoghue, in the idea that literary eloquence is like dancing:

The dancing of speech is eloquence: the aim of a dance is not to get from one part of the village green or the stage to another, it is to create and embody yet another form of life beyond the already known forms of it. In dancing, the dancers enjoy the certitude of being alive in their bodies. That is eloquence.

What does this analogy amount to? What is the literal activity involved with the making of literature that writers “enjoy”? And what do readers literally enjoy in reading literature? Donoghue doesn’t make this clear. As such, this clichéd analogy is inapt and pretentious (as common as it has become). Donoghue thinks that literature is eloquent when it is at its “most irreducible, when it is most utterly itself.” Unwilling to define such blather, it is at this point that Donoghue goes further and asserts an absolute distinction between the “merely” practical business of rhetoric and the aesthetic charm of eloquence:

Eloquence has no aim: it is a play of words or other expressive means. It is a gift to be enjoyed in appreciation and practice. The main attribute of eloquence is gratuitousness: its place in the world is to be without place or function, its mode is to be intrinsic. Like beauty, it claims only the privilege of being a grace note in the culture that permits it.

There is something distinctly unsettling, wrongheaded, and perhaps even dangerous to literature in the implications of that word “gratuitous.” The common fear of art having a purpose seems quite overblown, even paranoid, as I have written on this blog many times. Donoghue, impassioned on the point, even claims that eloquence isn't “even a distant cousin of rhetoric,” which

... comes from a different family and has different eyes, hair, and gait. Long thought to be a subset of rhetoric's devices, eloquence has declared its independence: It has no designs on readers or audiences. Its aim is pleasure; it thrives on freedom among the words. Unlike rhetoric, it has not sent any soldier to be killed in foreign countries.

I disagree with these comments almost entirely, and the last comment is downright silly. Donoghue fails to make his case -– actually, he doesn’t even try to make a case. He simply states and restates and restates yet again that rhetoric and eloquence are unrelated (whatever that might mean). You can accept the idea, but Donoghue gives no sound reason for doing do so, and nothing Donoghue says persuades me. He doesn’t seem to realize how long eloquence (“beautiful” writing and speaking) and killing have strode together through history. Consider Caesar and his masterly chronicle of Rome's Gallic Wars. The dictator’s iron-sharp eloquence has inspired the military-minded for millennia. Consider Lincoln and his "Gettysburg Address." His exhortation for the nation to give “the last full measure” was an unmistakably direct reference to killing and dying on behalf of the ideals Lincoln and millions more believed were at stake in the American Civil War. Also, there’s Lincoln dizzyingly eloquent "Second Inaugural," in which he sees the myriad deaths in the war as payment for sins. Consider Churchill during the blitz saying that his country shall not yield. Consider FDR’s eloquence, too, upon the attack at Pearl Harbor. Consider Kennedy’s eloquence in 1961, asking us not to ask what we can do for ourselves, but what we can do for our country. Did this eloquent call to devotion not include, in Kennedy’s mind, military conflicts like tha one he would soon expand step by step, the low-level military conflict we came to call the Vietnam War? Was Kennedy’s stirring line any less eloquent because it was intended to -- and almost surely did -- contribute to killing and to many being killed? Donoghue doesn’t seem well suited to deep reasoning, at least not on this direly crucial point. But I can’t overlook such a large blunder. Nonetheless, as I say, a deeper look at Donoghue’s rigid distinction between rhetoric and eloquence will have to wait.

Turning from definitions to illustrations, Donoghue finds eloquence in small lines and phrases, just as Yvor Winters did (though Winters was tiresomely and wrongly vilified for the practice again and again and again by critics of all stripes and colors). In discussing these one-liners, one reviewer has written that Donoghue looks “where others might never think to look.” But that’s hardly so. It is a regular practice among professors and critics to offer opinions about both eloquent and poorly turned or garbled lines and sentences and short passages in books and writings of all sorts. Take John Updike for just one example. I have read hundreds of his reviews, and hundreds are the one-liners or short passages that he has singled out as beautiful writing in one way or another.

But back to Donoghue’s examples. He lays out many bits and pieces of literature that he considers eloquent. For example, he points to a sudden switch by Dante into Provençal in the Divine Comedy. Not bad. Later, he claims that the knocking at the gate in "Macbeth" is particularly eloquent. I’d have little trouble agreeing with that. Yet later, he says he likes the eloquence of the ambiguities in Donne's poem "The Extasie." Here I begin to part ways. But like Winters, Donoghue even draws attention to single words, such as the word "indignant" from Yeats’s famous and over-praised poem "The Second Coming." I have my doubts about any of these samples being especially eloquent, no matter the definition settled upon.

Donoghue even says that for him the contexts of eloquent writings often recede, that he is content even to ignore contexts, in favor of their isolated eloquence. For example, he claims that George Herbert’s line "Then shall the fall further the flight in me" is truly eloquent, even though he can’t name or describe the context of the poem it stands in. He thinks Milton’s line "Love without end, and without measure Grace," found somewhere in Paradise Lost, is very fine. Yet out of context, I can’t see either line as particularly eloquent. "That mine own precipice I go" is Donoghue’s choice of an eloquent line from Marvell, but he admits that he has entirely forgotten the poem. That’s downright sad. In one early passage in the book, Donoghue goes on at length with examples of eloquence:

"Christ, that my love were in my arms, / And I in my bed again" is perennial poetry, exempt from contextual limitation. "The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times" is from a psalm, which one I forget. "Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke; the ashes shame and scorns" is the only line I recall from Southwell's "The Burning Babe." "From you have I been absent in the spring" is from a minor sonnet of Shakespeare's, not minor to me. "There is in God (some say) / A deep, but dazzling darkness" is from Vaughan's "The Night," which I can't further recite.

Donoghue is proud of remembering bits and pieces. Winters, too, paid very close attention to other bits and pieces in like manner. But in the classical, Wintersian view, it is the total poem that engenders the greatest eloquence in individual lines and sentences. My case for that view will have to wait for later, though Donoghue’s book gives us many useful concepts and illustrations to work from in making and refining such a case. Overall, I find many of his examples witty, but not especially eloquent.

For Donoghue’s judgment becomes suspicious at times. For instance, he discusses with rapturous praise a rather mediocre passage from Walt Whitman on death. I find the passage less than eloquent and not a match for, say, Frederick Godard Tuckerman in “The Cricket.” Can we trust Donoghue? The passage from Whitman includes not one, but two lines repeating a single word: “death, death, death, death.” Donoghue sees such pretensions, such obvious weaknesses, as examples of supreme eloquence. All too often, his take on the bits and pieces he finds so eloquent can seem jejune, in my judgment.

But such comments raise the central and thorny issues of what beautiful writing actually is and who gets to decide. Taste, it would seem. But who decides what is truly tasteful? That obvious, weighty, problematic question is left hanging. Donoghue, as far as I have studied his book so far, seems to have no clear notion of what taste is or how it is acquired or judged. He seems to think that we all know what beautiful writing is already -- and if we don’t, all we need do is trust to him or the group of professors he approves of. But classical Wintersians have distinct problems with the tastes of modern writers and critics, even ones as solid as Denis Donoghue. Our classical tastes are very different, and we can and do defend them, as few as we are. But Donoghue must see that the matter comes down to taste, as Janet Lewis once said to her own husband. I forget where I read this, but Lewis said to Winters that his sharp and profound disagreements with modern literary critics and poets came down to matters of taste. Winters gruffly agreed. For taste is a powerful, underlying aspect of Winters’s ideas. He sought a revolution in taste, a revolution that would bring us back to the classical spirit. (It has brought some few of us back, and this blog is intended to invite others back.)

In light of Donoghue’s illustrations, I should spend more time on this blog putting on display and letting my readers put on display the truly great, truly eloquent lines from the classical tradition that gather dust in almost complete obscurity in our time. Quickly, here’s one off the top of the head, Winters’s own opening lines from “Time and the Garden”:

The spring has darkened with activity,
The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree.

There is true, if unrecognized, eloquence -- in context (of necessity, contra Donoghue). There are many, many other examples of supreme eloquence throughout the Winters Canon and in other poems of the poets he championed. But acknowledging this raises many difficult questions. Is Adelaide Crapsey, whose work appears in the Winters Canon, more eloquent than Walt Whitman, whose work does not so appear? How about Frederick Godard Tuckerman than Thomas Gray -- or, say, Tennyson? Was that line of Wordsworth’s that Winters put down in Forms of Discovery truly ineloquent? I say, Yes, to all these questions and many similar ones. Yes, we need to focus on eloquence. The problem is that Denis Donoghue doesn’t appear to know what truly great eloquence is in many, many cases.

As a last classical example, let me put before you one of the supremely eloquent poems of the English language, J.V. Cunningham’s modern epigram “In whose will.” It is truly eloquent, however much its eloquence remains veiled in obscurity:

In whose will is our peace? Thou happiness,
Thou ghostly promise, to thee I confess,
Neither in thine nor love’s nor in that form
Disquiet hints at have I yet been warm.
And if I rest not till I rest in thee,
Cold as thy grace, whose hand shall comfort me?

Yes, we need to herald more writing of such inestimable eloquence on this blog. Send me your examples, and I will post them.

I hope to come back to Denis Donoghue’s On Eloquence some time for a deeper examination of its insights and arguments.

Roundup 2

1. John Milton turns 400:

Born in 1608, Milton is a difficult case for Wintersians. Winters slowly downgraded his canonical short poetry decade by decade. Late in his career, Winters even severely downgraded his estimation of Paradise Lost (and all epic poetry, for that matter) in the essay that vexed not a few critics in its day, “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature.” At the last, he tried to poke some even larger holes in the standing of Milton’s short poems, including the much praised, beloved, and widely taught “Lycidas” (the discussion occurs in Forms of Discovery, published in 1967, Winters’s last book). Winters’s main complaint about Paradise Lost was that the style was far too lofty for the material. For this reason, he judged that the emotions evoked are inappropriate to much of the conceptual subject matter, the paraphraseable content, to employ the still-useful term common among the New Critics. I’ve been thinking about that charge against Paradise Lost for 30 years, and it seems about right to me. O the heresy of it! Here’s what’s interesting: no Wintersian scholar or defender of Winters has endeavored to reassess Winters’s judgment of Milton at any length to determine whether and how much Winters might have been right, first about Milton’s epic and second about the short poems. Further, no Wintersian ever has hinted that he or she might agree with Winters.

But is this unusual? Consider the “Problems” essay. It seems to have made even Wintersians intellectually quite uncomfortable, judging from the fact that not a single scholar, critic, or poet has sought to study that essay sympathetically (an approach which, as I imply, I think it deserves). Yet Winters was hardly uniformly or severely negative about Paradise Lost. Winters made a comment in the “Problems” essay that he believed that certain sections of the epic should be judged great lyric poetry. Winters mentioned Book XI as containing several passages of great poetry. (The etching, by Gustave Dore, is of Adam and Eve learning from Gabriel.) But, like all else concerning Winters’s judgments on Milton, no one has followed up on that fascinating suggestion and tried to determine which sections might be judged so highly. Winters chose none of Milton’s verse for the Winters Canon. The time has been ripe for 50 years and more for someone with a classical bent to reassess Milton’s short poetry, his epic, and his poetic dramas in light of Winters’s judgments of them.

*****

2. A new book on Romanticism in Germany:

The subtitle tells us what the author takes to be the main doctrine of early German Romanticism, “The Enchantment of the World.” This new book is the work of the German scholar Rüdiger Safranski. I have read a couple reviews, which find the book an exciting account of a pivotal period in German intellectual history. One review, from Ulrich Greiner, can be found on line at:

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1558.html

Greiner’s review offers a number of insights, such as this one on Romanticism’s desire to break down all inhibitions:

According to [Isaiah] Berlin, in the subjectivity of its aesthetic imagination and the joy in ironic play, Romanticism allowed for an uninhibited profundity, and a subversion of the conventional moral order. [Eric] Voegelin makes a similar argument, but identifies the subverted order as 'theomorph' and extends the criticism of subjectivity to accuse Romanticism of deifying its subject.

Such ideas, which the book appears to cover thoroughly, are germane to the study of Yvor Winters for two reasons. First, that phrase “uninhibited profundity” suggests the course that Romanticism would take on the continent and in the new United States, a course which is still being pushed farther into the hinterlands. Of course I don’t know what that phrase means to Safranski yet, not having read his book, but it points to the ol’ Romantic objection to classicism, that it is somehow inhibiting, somehow unable to reach the heights and depths of emotion or experience. Wintersians say, Nonsense.

Second, the “subversion of the moral order,” as is illustrated daily in our culture, continues to be a central objective of Romantic artists and thinkers, an objective which arose partly from and within Romanticism. By the way, Eric Vogelin was the object of much study in the Southern Review, Second Series, while it was under the editorship of Donald Stanford, one-time student of Winters and perhaps his greatest adherent. Winters focused on literary matters when discussing Romanticism, but his ideas about the movement are germane to Vogelin’s discussion of deification.

So what was Romanticism? According to Safranski, it was, among other things, an "extension of religion by aesthetic means.” To which he adds, “One could also say, a surpassing of religion through the release of the powers of imagination, which reinvented the world in a playful way.” Under the enduringly powerful sway of Romanticism, such ideas common to conceptions of art to this day, which, please note, I discuss in oblique ways in items 5 and 6 of this roundup. Yvor Winters, however, focused almost wholly on Romanticism’s emphasis on the power of art to elicit emotion. Yet the spirituality of the movement was important to those powers and to the vast influences it has had on our general culture and literary culture. These notions shaped the way in which modern poetry and fiction developed in momentous ways, in the work of Mallarme to Pound to Williams to Stevens to Joyce to many, many more and on to many writers of the present. Safranski’s book looks as though it could help us a great deal in enriching Winters’s understanding of Romanticism.

Romanticism remains as powerful today as it was 150 years ago and more. And it was central to the critical thought of Yvor Winters, though he never discussed the European roots of the movement. I think this book might be well worth studying closely.

*****

3. Graff’s work re-emerges:

Professing Literature, Gerald Graff’s 1988 history of American academic criticism, has drawn renewed attention lately, even garnering an overview in The Nation, which will be easy to find with a search engine. The occasion is the book’s 20th anniversary, though I must say I was surprised that this book was deserving of such notice. It was the object of some discussion back in the ‘80s, yes, but it hardly rocked the literary world. The book was once considered the standard history of the profession of American literary studies. It begins its story back in America’s colonial days and moves quickly forward, unearthing along the way lots of dimly-remembered ideas and debates that created the literature department as, roughly, it has become today. Of course, Yvor Winters’s career was part of this history, and Graff, who was once Winters’s student at Stanford in the ‘60s, writes of Winters here and there in the book. It’s an enjoyable story, sometimes even funny, as Graff tells it. Graff shows that the heated conflicts of the recent so-called culture wars are similar to controversies over the teaching of literature that began in the 19th century.

I have not read Graff’s new preface yet, but he supposedly addresses many of the challenging arguments that have been made against his work since 1988. Some have said that Professing Literature remains an essential history of literary pedagogy and a critical classic. How Winters fits in with the development of American literary studies, how his ideas might help us break through the impasses that have been created, are certainly matters for further study, even though Graff gives no weight to Winters’s views in the present ideological battles of the day. I believe, nonetheless, that those views are profoundly germane and could be highly productive in improving the course of literature and literary study in our time. No critic or scholar sympathetic to Winters to any degree has sought to use Winters’s ideas to study such matters. The time has come for that.

I have been meaning to get to Graff more broadly on this blog, but I have not yet found time to examine some of his recent writings. But Professing Literature might deserve a close look in the near future.

*****

4. The Hyper Texts: http://thehypertexts.com/

Have you heard of this web site (rather poorly named in my opinion), which once a month publishes selections of modern formalist poetry and essays on formalist poetry of various kinds? I’ve been following it for a time and have made some discoveries of particularly well-turned poetry. I hope I can post some reviews of the poets who are being published on the Hyper Texts. A monthly issue of poems and articles usually highlights the work of one or two recent poets, including a featured poet called the “Spotlight Poet.” Check the site out. I think you’ll find some of the poetry worth your time. For example, I was deeply moved by the second poem, a sharp and powerful sonnet from Spotlight poet Judith Werner “Why I Do Not Write Sonnets” in the February 2008 issue, which appears on the web only:

When to my meditations over art’s
place I summon up tsunamis from the news,
I sigh at nature’s—and the human heart’s—
evils that find no help and no excuse.
Then I despair of using brush or pen,
which just reflect cosmic chaos unfurled:
my inner ugliness mirrored again
in death and entropy, body and world.
Much easier to make ears deaf, eyes blind
with hate, love, sex, fame, wealth, pursuit of power
flickering on a screen than face the mind’s
need for order in grief’s helpless hour;
But when I see things formed and elegant,
I pick up my pen, I suffer, I relent.

Copyright, Judith Werner

In March, Joseph Salemi, the author of some sharp, satirical poems, was the poet in the Hyper Text Spotlight. Take a look at the poem on modern sexuality entitled “The Missionary's Position” to see a fine example of his work. He was followed as poet in the spotlight in April by Charles Martin, a frequent and skillful translator of the ancient Romans. He also offered a poem on modern sexuality that is worth your time: "Victoria's Secret." Let me know what you think of these poem or anything else you discover on the Hyper Texts.

*****

5. Describing a memory of the colors of paving stones:

I found beneficial and enjoyable a recent essay by Craig Raine, “Look Back in Wonder,” in the Guardian (U.K.) on the work of writers to remember as fully, as accurately, and as meaningfully as possible. I don’t have the address to hand, but I would encourage you to look for the essay using a search engine. Raine claims that there is great meaning and pleasure for readers in seeing how authors endeavor to remember through their novels and stories and poems, even in trying to “resurrect” experience in some deep sense in the recording and transforming of memories into literary art. There is little doubt that this is one of the high, though secondary, purposes of literature. Remembering is not what Winters called its “final cause” (a concept which I have discussed at length recently on this blog).

Raine gets a little overheated about Proust’s exhibitions of memory: “I suggest that the pleasure, the joy really experienced by Marcel, and by the rest of us, is bound up with the sensation of imminence, suspense and arrival -- common to sex and simile.” Well, my O my! I can just hear myself saying tonight: “Honey, I can do without the sex tonight; I had a big helping of the ol' simile down at the library.” Though some of Raine's comments are quite overeager, I see his underlying point. To wrest important, telling details from the helter-skelter of private experience is important work for art, though Raine doesn’t seem to understand the difference between experience and art’s descriptions of experience -- that is, the differences between text and gloss, as J.V. Cunningham, longtime friend of Yvor Winters, so brilliantly explored in his poetry and criticism. Raine appears to have no notion of how a reader takes pleasure from an author’s recounting of memories. He doesn’t even realize, it seems, that our finest literary artworks achieve much, much more than the restoration of past experiences, as Yvor Winters argued forcefully in several seminal essays (which, I have said time and again, have received too little attention). Works of art achieve more than resurrected memories, but true understanding and precise emotional fitness, as Winters aptly and powerfully theorized. Still, Raine’s essay is worth reading -- in tandem with a knowledge of Winters’s critical principles.

*****

6. Adam Kirsch in Poetry on Heidegger and his conception of art.

It is with unease that I recommend Kirsch’s short essay on Heidegger that came out in Poetry in January of this year. I would like to have the time to examine the piece in detail, but there is simply too much else to do. The essay gives you a clear sense of where the claptrap about poets seeing things “in themselves” has come from, or at least one of its many sources, Heidegger (though all such aesthetic theorists are probably merely riding the same swift and powerful current of Romanticism). Emily Dickinson stood in thrall at times to this conception of poetry:

Eden is that old-fashioned House
We dwell in every day
Without suspecting our abode
Until we drive away.

Well, yes and no. It hasn’t quite been Eden, and it hasn’t been Eden at all for many, many millions (though we of such riches in the West can hardly complain). This quatrain expresses Kirsch’s sense of Heidegger’s conception of art, which he apparently approves strongly. This leads to works of art that Kirsch calls the “poetry of earth,” the finding of extraordinariness in the ordinary, a notion that has become a rampant cliché of our times. How lost our writers, especially our poets, have become in such fancies. Take a look at my earlier comments on Adrienne Rich on this puerile take on art. It will take a long time to undo, simply put, all the damage that continues to be done under their mesmerizing sway. In any case, I think Kirsch’s discussion is worth studying for the purpose of refining the classical ideas and ideals that stand in opposition to these Romantic notions.

The Usefulness of Art and a Fourth Hunger

British physician and thinker Raymond Tallis thinks that art can help us satisfy a “fourth hunger,” what he defines as an intense human need and desire to experience deeply and fully our experiences. Tallis published an essay on “spiked online” on this matter recently, last November to be exact.

Once again, as so often nowadays, someone is trying to explain to us exactly what art is for, to describe art’s “final cause,” to use the phrase Yvor Winters favored when discussing these matters late in his career. Why has art’s purpose been of such widespread concern lately? I have read of many books and articles and essays across the world addressing the topic, in general readership magazines of wide circulation, web sites, and many scholarly journals. We appear to have arrived at a crucial moment in the future of the arts. Change might be in the offing. Is a return to classicism in it, too? That’s hardly likely, I’ll admit. But all the discussion of art’s purpose and its general tone suggests that thinkers and readers are feeling a good deal of uncertainty about the arts. Beyond its commercial value, is poetry important? How about fiction? The new journalism? Painting? Music? In general, the arts culture seems a little desperate to find compelling answers to these questions that will create a sound and solid consensus.

Into this cultural moment has stepped Raymond Tallis, whom spiked describes as a British gerontologist, philosopher, poet, novelist, and cultural critic. Tallis has written lots of spirited essays on the web about all sorts of philosophical and scientific issues. I have found him learned and insightful on varied topics. His recent essay on the purpose of the arts, “Art, humanity and the ‘fourth hunger’,” is still available at:

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/4132/

I applaud all the theorizing about art’s final cause. But I recommend that the world’s thinkers interested in aesthetics turn back to Yvor Winters if they wish to comprehend this issue more fully and clearly -- though I would add that Wintersians should have long ago put some effort to fill in and strengthen Winters’s provisional ideas about the final cause of literature. Setting the indifference of the Wintersians aside, I want to look at some of what Raymond Tallis gets right and wrong, with the implication, as you have surely guessed, that Tallis’s work on the subject is worth attending to.

The fourth hunger Tallis defines as 1) the seeking of experiences for their own sake, which means 1a) truly experiencing our experiences. (By the way, the photo above is a shot of my son reading Homer while we were taking an evening walk through a patch of woods on the Michigan State campus a couple weeks ago. Was he satisfying a fourth hunger? Read on.) Now, both of these defining phrases are left quite vague, too vague. You can’t quite understand what Tallis is driving at because the language he employs is far too loose. Nowhere does Tallis make it clear what either of these phrases mean, except negatively. When we don’t fully experience our experiences, Tallis explains, we feel a little bit cheated. This feeling of being cheated tells us that we haven’t gotten all that we hunger for (the fourth hunger, you no doubt see), which are deep or full experiences. I know this sort of thing sounds ridiculously vague. But there is some hint of truth in this misty mist. The kind of example Tallis repeats is a vacation activity, like climbing a mountain or rafting a river or parasailing. When we feel a little less than a full and deep satisfaction by such vacation experiences, we know that we have not fed the fourth hunger, to truly experience. My example would be a backpacking trip to a national park (my brothers and I run a passenger ferry that sails to Isle Royale, Michigan’s wilderness national park on Lake Superior).

Again negatively, Tallis adds that we know that deep or truly true or full experience has eluded us because we feel “a mismatch between experience and the idea we had of it when we sought it out.” The fourth hunger, simply put, is met when experience equals expectation. Tallis admits it’s more complicated than that (certainly, it must be), but nowhere does he say exactly how it’s more complicated or in what way. (Nor, making a crucial error, does he explain how we will know what a deep or full experience is when we can’t seem ever to have one.) But his main point is that we fail so often “to experience our experiences.”

Now, before getting to art, which you have guessed by now will have the primary function of addressing the fourth hunger in some way (he actually implies that it is the sole function of art by not discussing any other function), Tallis pauses again to add that our experiences in general, on vacation and otherwise, feel disconnected. The events of our lives almost always fail to amount to wholes. Yet again, Tallis fails to define what a “whole” experience is. The best he can do is to explain that its lack is the feeling of moving from one thing to another, taste-testing from our the world and from our inner psychic states without putting them all together somehow. We almost always fail to gain an overview of ourselves, says Tallis. But his language is, again, much too loose. The words and phrases can mean just6 about anything. He says that we are stuck in what he calls “The Dominion of And” or “The Kingdom of And Then, And Then.” In these dominions, these mental states, we drift from one event to another, without ever fully experiencing any of them as a whole -- even our big experiences, such as, say, a wilderness backpacking trek or a visit to Chartres Cathedral. Tallis’s adjunct attempt at defining wholes and how we experience them is far too brief and vague. Yet he does have an earlier and longer essay on this particular aspect of our problem satisfying the fourth hunger, “The Difficulty of Arrival,” which looks worth reading and might help. (Some of this essay can be found at Google Books.)

To summarize so far, Raymond Tallis believes that many of us often (usually?) die without having been “fully there or never having fully grasped our being there.” This is because “we cannot close the gap between what we are and what we know, between our ideas and our experiences, our experiences and the life and world of which they are a part.” Once again, art presumably will somehow enable us to achieve this mental state. Let’s translate it into a thesis (which Tallis never clearly states):

Art will enable us to close the gap between what we are and what we know.

That infinitive phrase encapsulates, with yet even greater vagueness, the ethereal fourth hunger. Tallis believes that art is generated by the need to satisfy that hunger, which no vacation, apparently, can -- or at least hardly ever can. Arrival always eludes us:

... our need for art is rooted in the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of arrival in the Kingdom of Ends and there experiencing our experiences. If it is better to journey hopefully than to arrive, it is because arrival is not actually possible.

Here again, Tallis errs in failing to explain how we can know when we have arrived in a mental state of fourth-hunger satisfaction if we have never experienced it and without any clear definition of its indications. But putting that sticky weakness aside, Tallis states that the central purpose of art is to satisfy this need for arrival:

For the great work of art is an inselberg [German for a lone, high mountain standing in a flatland] in the plain of everyday life. From its elevated viewpoint, created when so much is brought together between a single cover, our greatly extended view gathers together what we have known, suspected, thought of, imagined, with a consequent mitigation of And; a ‘de-scattering’ of our scattered, tatty, messy, lives, calling back diffuseness to concentration.

Let’s try to get this straight, if we can. Tallis’s main idea is so thoroughly twisted in a strong of metaphors that it might have almost no meaning. We have a hunger to close the gap between experience and really, truly experiencing. Art closes the gap. By doing what? How does experiencing art close the gap of our individual experiences, make them really true and deep? Tallis explains how too briefly, as you will see in a moment. But this idea of “de-scattering” hints at something Winters understood, that art’s purpose is not only to produce emotion or to give us vicarious experiences. Art gives experience and something more, something richer and deeper: it gives us an understanding of experience. This is not exactly what Raymond Tallis opines, but he seems to have an inkling of Winters’s theory in this discussion of the fourth hunger. Winters discussed art’s final causes a number of times in his essays, but his theory comes out in concentrated form in his essay “John Crowe Ransom, or God Without Thunder” from In Defense of Reason. This is because Ransom theorized, to put it very simply, that art mimics experience (though Ransom certainly had many nuances to his aesthetic theories). In an important section of his essay on Ransom, Winters first describes to Ransom’s theory of art as imitation:

... Ransom regards... the work of art as an imitation, purely and simply, of some aspect of objective nature, an imitation made for love of the original object; and he takes elaborate pains to eliminate from the entire process all emotions on the part of the artist except love of the object.... [I]n God without Thunder he writes: “The esthetic attitude is the most objective and the most innocent attitude in which we can look upon the world, and it is possible only when we neither desire the world nor pretend to control it. Our pleasure in this attitude probably lies in a feeling of communion or rapport with environment which is fundamental in our human requirements -- but which is sternly discouraged in the mind that has the scientific habit.”

Now this is a common theory, going back to Aristotle and even before. But Winters quickly pushes this theory to its limits:

I should say the esthetic attitude [Ransom defends] is definable with fair accuracy in the simple and almost sentimental terms: the love of nature. This statement, if taken in the narrowest possible sense, would appear to limit poetry to the description of landscape; but we discover as we read farther in the three books, that this is intended as a formula for the treatment of almost any subject.

Then Winters immediately counters his interpretation of Ransom with an incisive description of his own theory of final cause:

But how applicable is [imitation] to the subject of Macbeth or of Othello? Were these plays written because of the love which Shakespeare felt, either for their actions as wholes or for any major part of their actions? Did Shakespeare love the spectacle of ambition culminating in murder, or of jealousy culminating in murder? Did he write of Iago because he loved him so sentimentally that he wished to render him in all his aspects? To ask the questions is to render the theory ridiculous.

Next comes one of the most important statements of aesthetic theory in Winters’s career, one of the seminal moments in literary thought in the past couple centuries (if wholly unrecognized as such):

Shakespeare wrote the plays in order to evaluate the actions truly; and our admiration is for the truth of the evaluations, not for the beauty of the original objects as we see them imitated. And how, one may wonder, can Shakespeare evaluate these actions truly except from the position of a moralist? To evaluate a particular sin, one must understand the nature of sin; and to fix in language the feeling, detailed and total, appropriate to the action portrayed, one must have a profound understanding not only of language, for language cannot be understood without reference to that which it represents, not only of the characters depicted, but of one's own feelings as well; and such understanding will not be cultivated very far without a real grasp of theoretic morality.

This crucial passage, which I find to be the soundest statement of artistic purpose in modern times, has been long ignored or forgotten. The Ransom essay has drawn little comment or meditation, even among Wintersians. Yet these paragraphs stand as a central defense of understanding and emotional adjustment as the final cause of literature. This idea was a chief concern of Winters’s middle years as a critic, which culminated in his wide-ranging and oft-vilified essay on literary genres “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature.”

Now, returning to Raymond Tallis, he opines that art is an idealization of experience and that this idealization satisfies the human being’s fourth hunger for truly experiencing experience:

And so we see in a work of art an ideal life in miniature. As an exemplar it addresses the wound in consciousness; it acknowledges and consoles us for our customary lack of thereness and lack of connectedness. But a great work of art is a lens as well as a jewel, and through it we may continue the process of widening our consciousness. It invites us to view our own lives with the eyes of an artist. It says: this is how the world might be experienced; now go forth and experience it thus.

This doesn’t quite attain soundness. It also seems trite. Our gaining an “ideal” of deep and true experience makes us, what? -- better able?, immediately able? -- to truly experience our experiences. Again, I’m trying to wade through the metaphors to find something conceptually substantial to make sense of Tallis’s idea. The chief problem with it is that art can leave us feeling just as cold and empty about our own experiences as we did without art. Once we have left an artwork behind, people can and do still feel that they aren’t really experiencing our experience. The lens of art often doesn’t work any better than just giving it the old college try with your own eyes. But I will say this, in the earlier passage about art providing a higher view and connectedness, Tallis at least comes close to thinking of art as a mode of understanding that will help us live better. He doesn’t quite see through the Romantic fog he blows around, but at least he’s exploring at the edges of crucial ideas. It might be worth tinkering with such a theory. It is tangled in Romanticism, of course, but it has elements that suggest and could strengthen Winters’s much stronger, sounder conceptions of art’s final cause. While Tallis’s concepts need a lot of work -- and a lot less metaphor -- what they most need is a telling example or two of how this lens of art works in a person’s life, how an artwork cleared the way for him or someone else to experience his experiences.

Near his conclusion, Tallis feels compelled to explain that under his conception art is useless. But why does he insist on this, when his theory of the purpose of art makes it blatantly clear what he think the use of art is? What is the cause of the general fear among critics and artists of the words “use” and “useful” concerning art and literature? To me the whole issue has never made much sense. But let’s leave that for some future post and rather turn to Tallis’s next concern, art’s rivals for teaching us to experience experiences fully. Like so many, even like Winters, Tallis says that art is better than philosophy or religion for satisfying the fourth hunger:

[Art] is our path to experiencing, with appropriate awe, the extraordinary world which we have in part found (nature) and in part created (culture).

Maybe so. But does art accomplish this or more as no other psychic activity can? Some examples would definitely help make such a case. Nonetheless, this goes too far for me. Religion can order and bring deep meaning to our lives, too, though Tallis thinks religion socially dangerous (he trots out this hackneyed charge without make any case for it at all). He’s even weaker on what distinguishes art from philosophy. He doesn’t say what makes art special. But I don’t think art needs to be special, standing above every other human intellectual pursuit. It is enough for me to see that it is one of the central and most effective ways we can meet our psychic needs.

Finally, like Winters, Tallis discusses the need to find the “very best” artworks, the works that can best satisfy the fourth hunger. Tallis states clearly, as you will see and as Winters believed, that such works are few in number. He implies that only those few can do an adequate job of showing us ideal lives that will enable us, somehow, to experience our experiences fully. For him, these few great or supreme artworks give us the best mean to satisfy our need to truly and deeply experience:

We need to live within, live inside, a small number of definitive works of art that will give us a true image of the human world, equal to its variousness, its depth, its mystery and its grandeur. As Gide said, ‘I write not to be read but to be re-read’. There then remains the unsolved problem of picking the needle out of the haystack; of building a personal library of truly great works.

Those words express something close to Winters’s central critical project, the development of what I call, playfully, the Winters Canon. But Tallis doesn’t offer any examples of the needles he has discovered in the haystack, the great works. This is a major blunder. He ought to have told us what he thinks these few crucial works are, since he considers them so important to the satisfaction of such a difficult hunger to fulfill. Winters told us what artworks of English literature he thought lead to true and deep understanding. I roughly agree with Winters, but I am always open to new and other ideas about greatness. I recently heard from John Fraser about my own work in defining and re-examining the Winters Canon, Winters’s “best” artworks of literature. Fraser wrote that he thought people, especially young people, cannot often live with the best. But Raymond Tallis appears to be saying that this is exactly what’s needed: to know and immerse oneself in the very, very best, which will be few in number. I agree. I think Winters would have agreed. That doesn’t mean that the best is all we can or should study or take in. But I must stop on this subject. It’s a large one that I must come back to. For now, I would agree with Tallis that it’s crucial that we look at the world through the lens of the best.

It hardly seems needed to talk of art’s uselessness again, but Tallis concludes by yet again claiming that art is useless, despite giving one vague, metaphoric use for art after another. He even offers at the end of his essay yet one more use for it:

Useless and necessary, art -- like holidays -- is about experience for its own sake but -- unlike holidays -- such experience perfected. So let there be art, extending and deepening, if not rounding off, the sense of the world, celebrating the wonderful and beautiful uselessness of our half-awakened state.

Such acts are not useless. Tallis just can’t think, it seems, caught up in our culture’s general phobia about art having uses. How are all these actions not uses? Even practical uses in some significant sense? Once again, whence has arisen the general dread in our culture of those words “use” or “useful”? Some day I shall have to come back to that topic.

But before I end, I must note that Tallis still fails to make it clear how seeing art rounding off or deepening experience, perfecting it, idealizing it, enables us to truly experience our experiences, his fourth hunger. But his vague notion that it is in conceptually connecting our experiences that we complete or can fulfill experience, I think he begins to draw close to the critical theories of Yvor Winters.

Does a Fish Have Utility?

Quick Note:

A lengthy, twisting, and turning discussion of whether humanities have any “utilitarian” purpose has erupted at the New York Times. The discussion among Times readers, which circles around widely varying definitions of the word “utility,” followed upon the publication of a short opinion piece by Stanley Fish, that famous, erudite, genially argumentative, and endlessly inventive literary theorist. Much of the discussion has direct bearing on the writings and ideas of Yvor Winters, who defended a theory of literature that was in some wide, generous sense one of utility (depending on the definition of that term, of course), which Fish opines the humanities do not have:

The premise of secular humanism (or of just old-fashioned humanism) is that the examples of action and thought portrayed in the enduring works of literature, philosophy and history can create in readers the desire to emulate them. Philip Sydney put it as well as anyone ever has when he asks (in “The Defense of Poesy,” 1595), “Who reads Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back that wishes not it was his fortune to perform such an excellent act?” Thrill to this picture of filial piety in the Aeneid and you will yourself become devoted to your father. Admire the selfless act with which Sidney Carton ends his life in “A Tale of Two Cities” and you will be moved to prefer the happiness of others to your own. Watch with horror what happens to Faust and you will be less likely to sell your soul. Understand Kant’s categorical imperative and you will not impose restrictions on others that you would resist if they were imposed on you. [¶] It’s a pretty idea, but there is no evidence to support it and a lot of evidence against it. If it were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so.

And yet, Fish, strangely, goes on to talk about how the humanities increase knowledge, without admitting that increasing knowledge is a “utility” of some sort. The piece and the discussion can be found at:

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/will-the-humanities-save-us/

Winters wrote extensively, even repetitively, about the purpose of art and literature, the art’s final cause as he put it (employing the terminology of Thomistic philosophy). He wrote a good deal about literature’s final cause in a long essay entitled “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature” (found in The Function of Criticism). It’s one his best but most difficult and bothersome essays, since its overall objective was to demonstrate the superiority of poetry over other forms of literature as a means of communication (a conjecture which has never been properly reconsidered by anyone in the Stanford School, either in defense or approval). Here are a few of Winters’s comments on the “utility” of literature, which stand as some of the most profound words he wrote:

For what, after all, is a poem, if we approach it in my own innocent state of mind? It is a statement about an experience, real or imagined. The statement must follow the experience in time: Donne, for example, could not have written "The Ecstasy" while engaged in the experience described. The poem is a commentary upon something that has happened or that has been imagined as having happened; it is an act of meditation. The poem is more valuable than the event by virtue of its being an act of meditation: it is the event plus the understanding of the event. Why then should the poet be required to produce the illusion of the immediate experience without the intervention of the understanding? Perhaps the understanding is supposed to occur surreptitiously, while the poet is pretending that something else is occurring. But what is the value of such deception? Is it assumed that understanding itself is not a "real" form of experience?

The rhetorical question that ends the passage had an answer so obvious in Winters’s mind that no further comment on final cause was required at this point. But this passage is only a brief sample of Winters’s thoughts on the central topic. This “Problems” essay has much more on final cause (and by extension “utility”), in addition to all you can find in countless other essays of varied occasion and purpose. Check out Stan Fish’s very short opinion piece and sample the massive reader comment. The discussion brings about an opportunity to reflect deeply on one of the fundamental ideas of Yvor Winters.

A New Philosophy Book on the Subject of Beauty

I am going to have to start putting up teasers about various articles I can’t find time to study in detail right away. This teaser concerns a book review that I thought might be worth a close reading but have been unable to find the time yet to consider closely. The book is a non-technical work on the subject of beauty, or aesthetics, by a philosopher who has written some moderately popular books for general audiences, Alexander Nehamas. It’s suggestively, puzzlingly entitled Only a Promise of Happiness. A short review came out in the New York Sun in its February 16, 2007 edition. The brief but insightful piece, entitled “The Uncertainty Principle of Beauty” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, whom I know nothing about, is full of suggestive ideas about the philosophy of beauty. It can be found at:

http://www.nysun.com/article/48781

The reviewer, Lewis-Kraus, writes that though beauty has been a chief concern of philosophy from Plato to Kant, the subject has nowadays been almost entirely dropped as a philosophical topic and is now left to fine arts and English departments. I don’t think this is quite so, since I know of major philosophy departments that offer courses in aesthetics and of a few philosophy journals devoted to the topic. But it does seem roughly true that the heavyweight philosophers of our times seldom bother with beauty. With his new book, Nehemas tries to tow the subject back into the mainstream of philosophy. Since Nehamas writes general philosophy, concerning what he calls "the art of living," his interest in the project makes some sense.

Lewis-Kraus pithily explains that Nehamas reaches back in this book to Plato for his concept of beauty’s being inseparable from eros, or desire. That concept has been lost, according to Nehamas, because Kant and other major philosophers of the past 300 years or so began to mistrust “passion" -- for its sordidness, its fickleness, the emotional imbalances it brings about. According to Nehamas, Kant’s ideas damaged the study of beauty because it tried to replace passion with a model of “disinterested contemplation.”

Now, you might be wondering, how might this book and its central concept bear upon the work of Yvor Winters? To put the matter briefly, though he had little to say about aesthetic theory in his writings, Winters, as so many literary critics have being doing over hundreds of years, bandied about the words “beautiful” and its near synonyms throughout his career without ever clearly defining those terms in any way or to any depth -- also as so many critics have been doing. In particular, Winters kept referring to certain passages of poems and prose, often oddly short passages -- sometimes no more than a line or a even a phrase (a practice for which he was often ridiculed) -- as possessing exceptional beauty, as well as certain whole works as beautiful, without circumscribing what beauty meant to him or should mean to us all. This is an obvious, even a vexing deficiency in Winters’s criticism, an area in which a Wintersian could do some very good work in keeping Winters’s critical theory alive and developing it for a new generation. It would seem, speaking offhandedly, that Yvor Winters would side with Kant on this issue, at least as Lewis-Kraus portrays Nehamas’s take on it. I intend to give the book some study. Though I cannot say I know Nehamas’s thought on beauty well enough to make any final judgment, I tend to think that theories of beauty like Nehamas’s, as Lewis-Kraus characterizes it, continue to do a lot of damage in literature and all the arts. I hope to get to this subject some time soon.

Adrienne Rich on What Poetry Can Do

Adrienne Rich made a feeble, supremely vague, yet weirdly grandiose attempt at telling the world why poetry matters during the hardest of times in the Guardian (UK) last weekend. The short essay can be found here:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1950812,00.html

After reading the piece I came away even less convinced that poetry matters much to living in a world of strife and troubles. Though Rich seems to have meant well, to be brave in showing the world that poetry can help us deal with such massive tribulations as genocide, she fails to make a sound case for poetry’s importance and offers not a single poem that could conceivably make any difference to genocide or to any currently serious, important, and collective issue in politics, society, or philosophy. Rather, near the end of her fogbound discussion, she wanders around to the suggestion that poetry is crucial to the development of a rich emotional life in men and women:

There's actually an odd correlation between these ideas: poetry is either inadequate, even immoral, in the face of human suffering, or it's unprofitable, hence useless. Either way, poets are advised to hang our heads or fold our tents. Yet in fact, throughout the world, transfusions of poetic language can and do quite literally keep bodies and souls together -- and more.

Critical discourse about poetry has said little about the daily conditions of our material existence, past and present: how they imprint the life of the feelings, of involuntary human responses -- how we glimpse a blur of smoke in the air, look at a pair of shoes in a shop window, or a group of men on a street-corner, how we hear rain on the roof or music on the radio upstairs, how we meet or avoid the eyes of a neighbour or a stranger. That pressure bends our angle of vision whether we recognise it or not. A great many well-wrought, banal poems, like a great many essays on poetry and poetics, are written as if such pressures didn't exist. But this only reveals their existence.

But when poetry lays its hand on our shoulder we are, to an almost physical degree, touched and moved. The imagination's roads open before us, giving the lie to that brute dictum, "There is no alternative".

This is little more than blather, special pleading as vague as it is confused. Perhaps Rich, as Yvor Winters would have recommended, could have offered a telling example or two that would have helped us understand her. She should have given us a passage of “poetic language” or a whole poem that “quite literally” keeps “bodies and souls together,” since what those portentous phrases mean is just about nothing without a concrete example or two -- or a dozen -- to give them conceptual solidity. And she should have showed how poetic language can give us even “more,” since it’s impossible to guess what might constitute this “more” she’s talking about. She should have given us, too, a strong example of how poetry “imprints the life of the feelings” in some vitally important way that addresses an issue as daunting and colossal as genocide -- and perhaps an explanation of some kind for what she means by saying that poetry “imprints” feelings.

I’m just guessing (because one can do little more than guess about prose this nebulous) but what Rich seems to be saying is that the very best poetry can do when helping us through genocide and war and massive suffering is make us see the beauty or emotional resonance of the little details of our lives, as is shown in the appallingly vapid and trivial examples she gives of what poetry accomplishes: “how we glimpse a blur of smoke in the air, look at a pair of shoes in a shop window, or a group of men on a street-corner, how we hear rain on the roof or music on the radio upstairs, how we meet or avoid the eyes of a neighbour or a stranger.” These are her examples of the best poetry can do in this world?!! Is this a summation of the best that can be said for poetry from one of modernity’s most decorated and applauded poets: that poetry shows us the beauty of little things. (To repeat, I’ll admit that I’m guessing that this is what she means, for she nowhere says what this affected drivel precisely signifies). This is pure Romanticism, friends, icky right to the bottom.

Rich’s examples of poetry’s best offerings to a world of woe reminds me of a widespread cliché found in many, many modern poems (to my mind, not a few of William Carlos Williams’s poems qualify) and of countless movies of all kinds -- especially so-called art films. To take one perhaps better known example that popped into my mind is from the film “American Beauty,” in which to show how magnificently sensitive the main character is, the film shows that character, a young drug dealer, showing his girlfriend the most brilliant piece of video he has taken in his short life: that of a colorful little garbage bag being blown about a sidewalk on a swirling wind. Now there’s a sight to meet the troubles of life -- something to get you through genocide! Have a friend dying miserably of cancer? Go out and watch a trash bag tumble on a breeze. Why wouldn’t watching a sewage spill spread in an alleyway work as well? That scene is the trite, icky equivalent of Rich’s “blur of smoke in the air.” Yet one more example -- there are hundreds of them -- I take from Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry,” an Iranian film: a man contemplating suicide is convinced not to do it by a fellow who reminds him of just that, the taste of cherries. Oh, please!

Rich pops in a little comment about imagination in the third quoted paragraph, but that doesn’t make sense or help in context, since all she appears to be saying is that you need imagination to see the beauty in shoes for sale or discarded garbage bags or the exquisite patterns sewage can make on the ground.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think the sound of the rain and the look of many a shop window are nice and sweet. I do enjoy nice and sweet things, as most people do. But is the enjoyment of nice, sweet things what gives us strength or understanding to meet the great issues of life? Is this all poetry can do to aid us in finding the meaning of life and addressing the vast evils that confront us? Is this the most that poetry can say -- the best poetry can say?

Compare Rich’s puerile vision for poetry to what, say, Edgar Bowers accomplished in his great “The Virgin Mary,” from the Winters Canon, to see how truly great poetry can rise far beyond such foolish trivialities.

If Adrienne Rich in this piece says all that can be said for poetry, it’s probably inevitable and right that poetry plays no role in world affairs and has receded so far from public importance. Yet this belief that poetry at its best is the hyper-appreciation of details is spreading ever farther and wider in literary culture. It’s a cliché, my friends. Winters discussed this matter often, especially in his early writings, such as found in Primitivism and Decadence, in which he drew attention to the hyper-sensitivity to detail as a hallmark of the modern associationist writing style, which stems from Romanticism. Judging from Rich’s piece, it appears that those writing techniques are widely believed to be ALL that poetry can do in the face of the Big Issues: charmingly describe little things.

All this can make a Wintersian sigh with annoyance that so many writers think that all literature can give us in the face of the evil and suffering in modern times is a few winks of beauty or a swirl or two of sweet emotions. Of course, I think turning to Winters’s theory of literature is much more profitable, for poetry, for literature, for life. According to Winters, writers and poets make rational statements about human experiences and endeavor to conform the emotions properly to the rational understanding achieved. The proper adjustment of the emotions, unified with intellectual comprehension, is what separates poetry and fiction from prose discourse. We can only hope that more poets will take up the serious work that Winters believed poetry can do, as opposed to the insipid purposes poets like Adrienne Rich have for poetry.