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.

Evaluating the Winters Canon: Poem 7

“Content”
Thomas, Lord Vaux (1510-1556)

When all is done and said, in the end thus shall you find,
He most of all doth bathe in bliss that hath a quiet mind;
And, clear from worldly cares, to deem can be content
The sweetest time in all his life in thinking to be spent.

The body subject is to fickle Fortune's power,
And to a million of mishaps is casual every hour;
And death in time doth change it to a clod of clay;
Whenas the mind, which is divine, runs never to decay.

Companion none is like unto the mind alone,
For many have been harmed by speech; through thinking, few or none.
Fear oftentimes restraineth words, but makes not thoughts to cease;
And he speaks best that hath the skill when for to hold his peace.

Our wealth leaves us at death, our kinsmen at the grave,
But virtues of the mind unto the heavens with us we have.
Wherefore, for virtue's sake, I can be well content
The sweetest time of all my life to deem in thinking spent.

YVOR WINTERS’S EVALUATION: 4 stars, SUPERB

Winters discussed this poem only once, and only very briefly, in his career. The discussion occurs in Forms of Discovery, his last book, which concerned his radical history of English poetry. We can only guess at how highly he judged the poem and what he exactly he thought about it. My sense of things, overall, is that he thought this an exemplary poem, though perhaps not one of the very greatest of the language.

The poem is yet another written during the Renaissance about disillusionment with the world and its titivations. The speaker tells us that all the pleasurable trimmings of this world fail to last or to pay off well in the long run. But thinking provides help, comfort, and joy through all of life and into eternity. This draws on the stoic conception of life, which Winters was drawn to and highly approved. I have noticed that the poem is often quoted on “inspirational” web sites of various kinds as a comment on the supreme value of reflection. In such contexts, the poem becomes a little trite.

I note that John Fraser omits this and all of Lord Vaux’s work from his quasi-Wintersian anthology A New Book of Verse. Fraser offers no comment on this specific matter, even though Fraser told me in correspondence that one of the chief purposes of that online book was to show that Winters recommended many more poems than he anthologized in Quest for Reality. For this reason as well, it is even odder that Fraser excluded this poem in light of Winters’s short list of well-struck poems written by Lord Vaux in his famed 1939 essay on the 16th-century lyric.

Finally, the poem has received almost no critical discussion of any sort that I have been able to discover, not from Wintersians nor from scholars and critics of any sort. What does this lack of attention indicate, that Winters’s regard for the poem has not been seconded by a single critic or poet, not even by a man or woman sympathetic to his views and aims? I have been pondering that, but I have reached no conclusions yet. This issue keeps coming up, though, during this tour of the Winters Canon, as you might have noticed as I worked my way through the poems of Thomas Wyatt.

BEN KILPELA’S EVALUATION: 3 stars, solid work.

This is a sharp, beautifully rendered classical statement. It has a few mild clichés that damage it slightly. But it is controlled, restrained, emotionally true and proper. Also, it displays a strong commitment to the conceptual nature of poetic statement. Yet though the theme is certainly important, Vaux does not explore his subject matter deeply enough, all in all.

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS:

I have known this poem for a long time, but it has never played any large role in my contemplative life. There simply isn’t much in it, despite the elegance and distinction of the writing. The poem stands as a model of clear, controlled, graceful statement, but it has, simply put, little conceptual depth.

The problem might be that the poem is too abstract, too generalized, however much Winters praised and I still applaud crisp, insightful generalization as a foundation of poetic discourse. For example, from the poem we gain no insight into what having a “quiet mind” might mean. Yet the phrase feels flush with meaning ready to be coaxed to the light. Also, we no longer have the Vaux’s sturdy, cheery confidence that thinking alone can help and comfort us as nothing else in our lives. For thinking can be, at troubling times, as untrustworthy as riches or physical ability. Thought can be discouragingly, frighteningly fickle. Thought can lead, often, to “disquiet,” as J.V. Cunningham wrote of in his great epigram “In whose will is our peace.” (That poem is part of the Winters Canon, but we have more than 160 poems to go before I reach it.) By the by, I have written a book on a topic that, roughly, relates to this subject, A Journal on Doubt, which directly concerns my struggles with a life of thought that gave rise to doubts of the Christian faith to which I once adhered (the book is available my web site).

Further, we sometimes discover to our horror that our minds and thoughts are subject to Fortune as well. As much damage as postmodernism has wrought in our culture and in our philosophy, it has helped us to see that we cannot change our minds as easily as we like to believe -- or that we can find our minds changing without our bidding. Such revelations are truly spiritually, psychically disturbing, despite those blithe postmodernists who seem not the least troubled that all their thoughts are subject to whims that have no discoverable, controllable source or power. Thinking can also lead us astray from virtue (witness, to consider one example among millions, our nation’s long embrace of slavery) and from contentment (witness those who struggle to address the evil acts their own thoughts goad them into carrying out). Thinking can decay, too. And it can be overrun by fears, as often as the body at times. Vaux does not not appear to have thought through his subject carefully enough.

Yet there is a good deal to ponder in this poem. It is well struck, superbly composed. But its conception of the life of reflection is perhaps not as satisfying or re-assuring as its author hoped long ago.

The New Criterion Digs into Poetry Again

Quick Note:

The New Criterion has come out with its annual poetry issue, which has become a regular event, perhaps the only one of its kind in general publishing. The issue appears to offer a number of strong essays and some compelling poetry, particularly from Bill Coyle (winner of the journal’s 2008 poetry prize). One of the essays, by New Formalist David Yezzi (whom I have written about several times on this blog), is a review of that new anthology of the New Critics, Praising It New, which Swallow Press released a couple weeks ago. I discussed that book briefly a couple months ago, if you’d care to look up my preliminary comments. Yezzi offers a few sharp and intelligent paragraphs on Yvor Winters’s contribution to the anthology, the essay “Preliminary Problems,” which is a very important piece, one which I summarized in my post about the anthology. Yezzi takes very seriously Winters’s ideas about the control and proper adjustment of the emotions, and I hail Yezzi’s take and emphasis on this matter, as he tries, with acumen and sympathy, to cultivate Winters’s theories for a new generation.

But the issue includes a lot more. There is a piece on Walter de la Mare that looks beneficial. Winters did not have much to say about de la Mare’s work, so far as I know. Perhaps he needs a reconsideration from Wintersian classicists. There is, furthermore, a piece on Rudyard Kipling, a poet whose reputation was never high and has fallen far, as most everyone who cares knows. It might surprise you that Yvor Winters thought rather highly of Kipling’s poetry (though he did not judge it as great). I find a lot that is highly valuable in the Kipling’s poetry, and I look forward to studying Roger Kimball’s take on him.

There is more in the issue, but any consideration of the various pieces will have to wait until I get a chance to read the issue thoroughly. I will note that William Logan, a favorite critic of mine, is going to try to resurrect the reputation of a 19th-century American poet by the name of John Townsend Trowbridge (who is pictured here). You might want to check out a few pieces of Trowbridge’s at bartleby.com before reading Logan’s attempt at resurrection. I have found Trowbridge’s writing compelling at points, though judging from what I know so far I couldn’t yet put him near to the class of Jones Very (a Winters great) or William Cullen Bryant (a Winters near-great) or even Walter Landor (a strong poet whose work Janet Lewis much admired). I think Winters -– he never mentioned Trowbridge in any writing -- would have judged his poetry to be tainted by Romantic clichés, which I also find a moderately damaging weakness in his artworks. Still, Trowbridge is not a poet to discard blithely. I want to read what Logan has to write.

Pinsky Poem Widely Discussed

I really should spend more time studying poems on this blog. Believe me, I am reading poetry constantly. But the work of criticism is laborious, working poem by poem. I do not want to be hasty in my judgments. I have posted on a few of the poems of the Winters Canon, but these are works of art that I have been contemplating for decades.

That said, let me turn, as promised, to that recent poem by Robert Pinsky that has garnered so much attention across literary culture in recent months. The attention is a remarkable occurrence for any single poem -- but more so, for me, because Pinsky was a former student of Yvor Winters near the end of his life in the 1960s. Some label Pinsky a Wintersian, but I don’t think he even comes close to qualifying as a classicist of any sort (as I argue elsewhere on this blog). Pinsky has little to do with Winters’s ideas and the style he promoted any longer, though there was a time that Pinsky made a feint or two toward the classicism that Winters stood for. With his latest collection, there is very little of anything classical left to his poetry. Reading his work has mostly become a dull chore, as has become my labors on this post.

Pinsky’s new book of poetry, Gulf Music, has been reviewed widely in literary publications, and one poem from that book, “Poem of Disconnected Parts,” has received an amazing amount of discussion. It might be the most widely discussed poem of the past two decades in American literary culture. Even writers outside poetry circles have been taking a look at it. The poem has been reprinted on many web sites, but here it is again for convenience:

Poem of Disconnected Parts

At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.
They coined the motto EACH ONE TEACH ONE.

In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners
Address them always as "PROFESOR."

Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I
Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say.

Culture the lock, culture the key. Imagination
That calls the boiled sheep heads in the market "Smileys."

The first year at Guantanamo, Abdul Rahim Dost
Incised his Pashto poems into styrofoam cups.

"THE SANGOMO SAYS IN OUR ZULU CULTURE WE DO NOT
WORSHIP OUR ANCESTORS: WE CONSULT THEM."

Becky is abandoned in 1902 and Rose dies giving
Birth in 1924 and Sylvia falls in 1951.

Still falling still dying still abandoned in 2006
Still nothing finished among the descendants.

I support the War, says the comic, it's just the Troops
I'm against: can't stand those Young People.

Proud of the fallen, proud of her son the bomber.
Ashamed of the government. Skeptical.

After the Klansman was found Not Guilty one juror
Said she just couldn't vote to convict a pastor.

Who do you write for? I write for dead people:
For Emily Dickinson, for my grandfather.

"THE ANCESTORS SAY THE PROBLEM WITH YOUR KNEES
BEGAN IN YOUR FEET. IT COULD MOVE UP YOUR BACK."

But later the Americans gave Dost not only paper
And pen but books. Hemingway, Dickens.

Old Aegyptius said, Whoever has called this Assembly,
For whatever reason -- that is a good in itself.

O thirsty shades who regard the offering, O stained earth.
THERE ARE MANY FAKE SANGOMOS. THIS ONE IS REAL.

Coloured prisoners got different meals and could wear
Long pants and underwear, Blacks got only shorts.

No he says he cannot regret the three years in prison:
Otherwise he would not have written those poems.

I have a small-town mind. Like the Greeks and Trojans.
Shame. Pride. Importance of looking bad or good.

Did he see anything like the prisoner on a leash? Yes,
In Afghanistan. In Guantanamo he was isolated.

Our enemies "disassemble" says the President.
Not that anyone at all couldn't mis-speak.

The PROFESORES created nicknames for torture devices:
The Airplane. The Frog. Burping the Baby.

Not that those who behead the helpless in the name
Of God or tradition don't also write poetry.

Guilts, metaphors, traditions. Hunger strikes.
Culture the penalty. Culture the escape.

What could your children boast about you? What
Will your father say, down among the shades?

The Sangomo told Marvin, "YOU ARE CRUSHED BY SOME
WEIGHT. ONLY YOUR OWN ANCESTORS CAN HELP YOU."

Copyright Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux

Now, how do I as a Wintersian classicist believe we should we judge this work? First, it’s not poetry. It’s prose. A slack, pretentious prose. A New York Times reviewer described this as “relentless” blank verse. Huh? Is that a joke? I try to be charitable at all times, but this comment has to be one of the most idiotic or ignorant claims I have read about poetry in my entire life. This poem is not written in blank verse by any definition of the term. It can barely be described as verse at all. I will admit that since Pinsky’s generally sloppy lines are roughly equal in length and divided into couplets, with each couplet coming to a period close, you can construe this writing as a very loose, lazy sort of verse. So loose that it amounts to prose, in my judgment. But it is at least plausible that it could be defended as verse.

Turning to its structure, the poem does have a rather disheveled sort of organization, though it is nearly haphazard. The prose couplets of roughly equal length make a series of discreet declarative statements of various kinds that touch repeatedly on a set of broad themes. Beyond this, there is no structural principle. Such an approach is a severe weakness in any poem.

Now, I am aware that Pinsky is interested in jazz. He has even said in interviews and essays that he is trying to do with poetic language what jazz has done in music. The experiment has had some interesting results. But the experiment is mostly failing badly, as it has in this poem. Pinsky’s riffs are wholly inappropriate to serious poetic discourse, which Pinsky clearly wants to engage in. He writes as though he found a few brightly colored beans in a big jar and tossed them on a table for us. We readers are left to do the poet’s real work, the real writing, the real thinking -- making sense of the beans of life that might chance to catch a poet’s roving, rummaging eye. Nothing in this poem clearly indicates the way the beans are to be taken, which means we can take them in just about any way we like, which means that the exercise is just about pointless -- which means that this work of art, if such we agree (charitably) to call it, is just a scattering of beans. As you will see when I discuss themes, each bean stands as an observation or aside on a variety of notions, tossed on the table without evident order or structural purpose other than that they touch on certain broad themes almost at random. I find this structure very weak, truly almost insipid.

By the way, Pinsky mentions various people and situations without explanation. Some of these are perfect examples of a poetic weakness that Yvor Winters called pseudo-reference, which means talking about things that the writer doesn’t explain in enough detail to make sense of. For example, the people Becky, Rose, Sylvia, the comic, Dost, Marvin of the final couplet, and others are all pseudo-references. That’s fine. Sometimes scatterings of beans are mildly interesting or lightly pleasing for one reason or another. But let’s not confuse such scatterings with great or good or satisfying art.

As to style, Pinsky’s writing here and most everywhere else nowadays is quite slack and even pockmarked with clichés, which, as I will discuss below, has become his standard practice. Ignoring the clichés for the moment, I see nothing in the least distinguished about this writing. It reads like bland conversation, the lifeless prattling of someone who thinks far too much of himself. Pinsky has been writing in this limp, slovenly style for more than a decade now. I find it tedious. It certainly offers nothing eloquent or moving. Since readers of poetry usually love language, it is downright sad that there is nothing in Pinsky’s writing that might draw us in. He offers no formal coherence, no music, no eloquence. There are a couple mildly pleasing turns of phrase, I’ll admit, but so few that the poem mostly reads like the work of an average high school student.

Now, as to theme, the poem is wide open to interpretation, nearly infinitely open. That appears to be Pinsky’s intent, though we can only guess at intent. I could, anyone could, take a merry stab or two at what Pinsky is trying to say to us, but our varied guesses would amount to each of us telling himself what he thinks about these nearly haphazard remarks rather than coming to an understanding of what Robert Pinsky might be trying to tell us (presuming that he knows himself, which is questionable). For there is no clear indication in the poem of what Pinsky wants us to see or know or think about the themes.

Yet from what we can discern, the subject matter is serious. For this I applaud Pinsky. He appears, at the least, to be trying to say something important about social and political life. The misty subject matter of several of the couplets leads us to believe that Pinsky is trying to say something morally and politically serious about a handful of themes. These themes stand out because they are repeated, in Pinsky’s insufferable jazz-like manner. Unjust imprisonment is one such theme. Pinsky gives a few couplets on that subject, especially in the emphatic opening couplet that alludes to the lengthy imprisonment of Nelson Mandela. We guess (all we can do is guess) that Pinsky wants us to consider this imprisonment to be unjust and that, thus, one of the themes of this poem is governmental injustice. (The photo that accompanies this post is a shot of Mandela’s Robben Island cell.) Another implied central theme is shame. Pinsky indiscriminately plops in several couplets that seem, roughly, to concern shame, including the emphatic final couplet. But, at the end, when we try to fuse these jumbled, annoyingly jazzy observations on shame with the random comments on imprisonment, can we come up with anything thematically, conceptually solid? Just barely. Here’s my guess: Pinksy appears to be telling us that he is, and we should be, ashamed about unjust imprisonments and, presumably, other immoral methods of governmental control. For our society to get its governmental practices right, he appears to be saying, we need to tap into and act upon our feelings of shame, which can be rediscovered by trusting the wisdom of our ancestors. But the various comments on these themes do not properly cohere. We can only resort to guesswork.

You have my guess, but there are probably a thousand others just as valid. My main point is that whatever Pinsky is trying to say in this poem can only be guessed at. Indeed, he appears to have intended to make us guess, guess all we wish, make up our own meaning, rather than to make it clear what HE as author means. The reader is put in the situation of having to come up with what he or she thinks, reflecting on what “shame” or “ancestors” happens to mean to him or her in this woolly context. You do get the exceedingly vague sense that Pinsky disapproves and is ashamed of the practices of unjust imprisonment. But he offers no insight into this idea through this treatment of the notion. If a poet is going to make a statement so trite as that, he or she had better offer it in language that strongly adjusts the emotions to the proverbial statement. But, as I have argued, the writing is messy and insipid.

Pinsky appears to try to make a few aphoristic statements, as though he is interested in conceptual generalities, in moral principles. But his aphorisms have no bite because they are loose, vague, and slackly written. Consider for example the line “Culture the penalty. Culture the escape.” This seems to carry some weight. It is a generalized comment that we think might sum up an important turn in the argument. But when we reach the end, we realize that this statement about culture is so trivial that is saying almost nothing at all.

David Orr, a regular at the New York Times on poetry, has had little good to say about Yvor Winters (not that he is entirely negative), but Orr was on the mark about the common compositional mode of most poetry nowadays, which Robert Pinsky seems to be employing as a ritual:

[A certain poet’s] technique is a variation on the trendiest contemporary style, which relies heavily on disconnected phrases, abrupt syntactical shifts, attention-begging titles (“The Gem Is on Page Sixty-Four”), quirky diction (“orangery,” “aigrettes”), flickering italics, oddball openings (“The scent of pig is faint tonight”) and a tone ranging from daffy to plangent -- basically, two scoops of John Ashbery and a sprinkling of Gertrude Stein. It’s not hard to write acceptable poetry in this mode, which is one of the reasons so many people make use of it. After all, poets need jobs, and for those, they need books -- and for those, well, they need poems.

That’s fairly close to a summary of the style and substance of “Poem of Disconnected Parts.” As you see, the poem is actually anti-communicative. It is not striving to communicate anything, any vision or theory or idea about injustice or imprisonment or shame or culture. It expects YOU, the reader, to communicate to yourself, to put together a puzzle of your own making, since the edges of the pieces are so uniform that they will fit together in any of a thousand arrangements. And it appears that Pinsky is smugly proud of what his poem is, as announced in the title. He appears to want his ideas and musings to be disconnected, so that we readers are forced to connect them in any way we wish. But this is an abdication of a writer’s central responsibility and opportunity, as Yvor Winters argued frequently about experimental poetry. The title is, moreover, obviously, tastelessly ironic. Yet the irony doubles back on Pinsky. For though Pinsky is being ironic in that he pompously thinks that his clumsy, sloppy observations CAN be indeed connected, though he obviously desires us to make up some connections on our own, his bland ideas truly are disconnected. They are just beans on a table. A blooming buzzing confusion.

Thus, the poem traduces one of the central principles of classicism -- order. If I spent time trying to impose what I think these couplets signify on the poem, I would find it to have been a waste of time, which might not be bad all in all. Sometimes you just waste time in life for the sake of diversion. The problem is that I don’t usually read literature in order to waste time. At the end of reading, say, George Herbert “Church Monuments,” I want to arrive at some deeper, powerful understanding, significantly deeper, and to feel my emotions aligned properly to that understanding. Herbert’s poem, for a great example, pays on the effort it takes to fathom the poet’s understanding. But I suspect strongly that “Poem of Disconnected Parts,” as with much of Pinsky’s poetry, is just a waste of time. There will never be a payoff, other than filling some time with idle reflection.

Now, is this a bad thing? Should this poem not exist? Should it not be read? Of course not, in answer to all three questions. But this doesn’t mean that the poem is good. I don’t think this poem deserved to be published, but somebody thought otherwise. It’s puzzling, even sad, but it has happened, and the classicist must live with it.

Before closing, I want to come back to Pinsky’s style. Is there anything in his diction or syntax that could be seen as rewarding, beans of particularly attractive hue or shape? I see almost nothing in this poem worth bothering with, worth trying to enjoy deeply or contemplate with care or meditate on with earnestness. But there is worse. What, for goodness sake, has been Pinsky’s purpose in turning to the strange and icky practice of using gobs of clichés and puns? When did Pinksy wander so far from a basic knowledge of good writing that he became enamored of the cliché in the way of the poseur. Look at me, he seems to be saying, I can use a cliché because when I use it, it isn’t one. Oh, puh-leassssse! Another nauseating example of this from Pinsky’s work is a poem published recently in the New Yorker, “The Saws,” in the February 11, 2008, issue. Here Pinsky uses clichés and puns to... what?... well, to bolster the use of clichés and puns:

The saying dead as a doornail is still dead as a doornail:
Whatever a doornail might be or was, long lost in the dark,

The dark, the dark -— not always deepest before dawn, Pal.
Back then, passing a graveyard you might actually whistle:

No walk in the park, a black back street back in the day.
Zombie expressions, Buddy, as thin as a spare dime.

Generated by generations they still stagger the castle,
Wan, rife. Benighted or bedazed by the March of Time,

Time, time. The old saws hardly ever anymore called saws:
Kiss the cat and you kiss the fleas. And That’s the story of my life.

Copyright The New Yorker

This is worse than lazy writing. It’s dopey, unworthy of a high school creative writing class. Pinsky appears to think (you can’t tell, obviously) that this shows intelligence -- a bit of the ol’ wit and wisdom. It shows exactly the opposite. The man has arrived at a point at which he has next to nothing to say. It’s a sad end for a student of Yvor Winters in near vapidity.

I conclude my long remarks with a quotation from William Logan, the poetry critic who writes often for the New Criterion. Logan recently reviewed Pinsky’s Gulf Music, in which “Poem of Disconnected Parts” appears. He received a letter objecting to his review and then made these sharp comments in his reply:

My complaint [about Robert Pinsky’s poetry] is that even in the poems that are deadly serious, like the “Poem of Disconnected Parts,” it may not be enough merely to invoke Mandela’s imprisonment on Robben Island or the murder of the desaparecidos. Such shallow references underestimate the poet’s labor and condescend to what he means to honor. It’s as if Shakespeare had just said, “Agincourt!” and left it at that. Context is all....

Amen and Amen. As much as I like to see a poem achieve wide attention in our culture, as much as I could have been pleased that the author of that poem was a student of Yvor Winters, we must move on from this sorry episode in contemporary poetry.

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.

Roundup 1

Let me be honest. I just can’t find enough time outside work and family and assorted other fun (reading, writing, photography, serious golf, more serious tennis, marital romance, etc.) to write on nearly the number of topics I have been pondering for this blog. In this first of yet another recurring series (I’ve got a couple going already), here are brief notes on extraneous discoveries and ideas:

1. We’re all tangled in pop culture nowadays:

I ran across an article in the Independent (U.K.) on a study that proposes that cultural elites do not exist as we tend to conceive of them. The web site of the British council that funded this study is:

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfos0006/status.html

The Independent’s article says that the researchers found that the "cultural elite," people brought up on the so-called higher arts (such as opera, symphonic performance, and theater), people who supposedly disdain “vulgar” pop songs or mainstream television shows, that such an elite does not exist. This topic has bearing on Yvor Winters’s work because of the alleged elitism of his theories and the literature he championed. Are such high-brow theories applicable to objects of so-called popular culture (assuming we can make clear distinctions between artworks of pop culture, Mid-Cult, and High-Cult [to employ Dwight McDonald’s useful terms)? I think there is no fundamental reason they couldn’t be. What the study shows is that even those who prize highfalutin literature (the kind featured regularly on this blog) still appreciate and find edification in artworks of popular culture. This reminded of the philosopher Alexander Nehemas, whose book on aesthetics from last year, Only a Promise of Happiness, revealed that he values, in some serious sense, episodes of the TV show Frazier as much as Shakespeare’s plays. Though they are few, Wintersian classicists, I would guess, drink often at the well of pop culture, too. Winters himself didn’t seem to. He didn’t watch much television that I am aware of. He didn’t go to the movies. I have been working on a study of film using Winters’s critical theories, but Winters probably did not consider film a serious art form. In any case, is it important for classicists to admit their knowledge and appreciation of art from pop culture? What pop culture do my readers prize as much or nearly as much as great literature? I think this issue needs some deeper study.

2. 10 dangerous poems:

I stumbled upon a book entitled Ten Poems to Change Your Life, by some fellow named Roger Housden. This author seems to think his ten poems are “dangerous,” which seems a nonsensical and pretentious claim to make about these ten fairly recent poems, except for the excerpt from the “Dark Night” of St. John of the Cross. None of the poetry has classical roots. Each is a free-verse prosetic musing. Most of it is hardly poetry at all. You might want to find reviews of the book through a search engine and give it a look. Let me know if you think anything in Housden’s list is truly worth attending to. I didn’t find any of his dangerous poetry particularly edifying. Also, I’d like to hear from my readers about how important the poems that Yvor Winters thought supremely great have been in people‘s lives. Has anyone’s life changed because of the poetry of the Winters Canon? Anonymous comments are welcome, too, as always. By the way, since I first jotted this note down, I have learned that Housden has several similar "inspirational" books of poems that can purportedly change your life in one way or another. I haven’t had a chance to look at all of them.

3. What’s a good use for self-help books:

There was a very funny yet disturbing animated cartoon published online at the New Yorker a couple months ago. The animation starts with a close up of a stack of books with titles like these: Affirmation Therapy, More Joy, Self-Helping, Every Day - Every Which Way. As the imaginary camera backs up for a wider view, you see that someone is standing on the stack of books. As the view becomes wider still, you see that the man standing on the book is putting a noose around his neck. It’s funny but thoroughly discouraging. For don’t we writers and readers hope that our books and our readings will help make people better and stronger? Don’t we want what we read to be on a list of “poems to change your life”? Of course most serious readers do, as Yvor Winters argued (though he was certainly not alone in measuring literature by some kind of moral standard). But this cartoon draws attention to the nagging problem that all our efforts are sometimes, perhaps oftentimes, for naught, completely for naught. Winters believed that the way poems were written, their formal properties, their diction and meter and stanza structure, were vital to their meaning and power. Has anyone’s life changed because of the formal properties of any poem or one of the great poems of the Winters Canon? Winters seemed to argue that Baudelaire’s work had had such an effect on him. But there is very little personal reflection in any of his writings, not even in his letters, which are filled with shop-talk on composing poetry, but next to nothing on what poetry did to him. You get very little sense from any of his writings of what poetry really meant in his life. His students have repeatedly testified to the intensity of his classroom poetry readings. But few have commented on what the poems he loved and judged to be our greatest works of art meant to him, how they might have changed his life. What do they mean to my readers? I am slowly working on describing what many of them have meant to me as I work my way through the Winters Canon.

4. Filling in some blanks with Blank Verse:

Robert Shaw’s strong critical work certainly deserves more than a spot in a roundup. I didn’t learn until recently of the 2006 publication of his new book on blank verse, which looks to be excellent upon a thorough skimming. Most pertinently, the book covers a number of poets who are important in the study of Yvor Winters: Wallace Stevens (who wrote, in Winters’s view, some of the greatest blank verse of all time), Edgar Bowers, J.V. Cunningham, Helen Pinkerton Trimpi, and others -- including Yvor Winters briefly. The book has no discussion of Winters’s criticism, unfortunately, even though it seems that Shaw is aware of Winters. But Winters didn’t conduct a deep study of blank verse, strange to say. This book and the subject of blank verse are issues that I hope to get back to in greater detail. The book is certainly something to get energized about if you are one of those interested in seeing a lot more poetry written in traditional forms, not to mention rational structures (which Shaw does not discuss). Shaw gives wide, sensitive readings in a loose tradition -- perhaps a formal practice that has been much too loose. Shaw’s work offers technical precision and clear exposition. I hope to take an in-depth look at Blank Verse some time soon.

5. A glass of Gallo burgundy:

Did you see this amusing quotation from art critic Robert M. Parker in Forbes some months back in their “Thoughts on the Business of Life” column:

I know collectors with 40,000 bottles who if you poured them a glass of Gallo Hearty Burgundy wouldn’t know the difference.

I sometimes feel something similar about Winters’s evaluations and the Winters Canon. If I were given an unknown poem, could I discern it’s excellence? For example, would I have thought, say, J.V. Cunningham’s “The Phoenix” is one of great artworks of the language or have discovered myself as such without Winters’s assistance? If not, how can I presume to evaluate the poetry of the Winters Canon, which I have said is something that must be done and which I have begun doing? Who is qualified, who possesses the needed skills, who can set the criteria, to judge such matters? Such considerations and questions hold almost all of us all back from speaking boldly about what’s great and what is less than great. But such qualms didn’t deter Winters, no sir. That’s why he often seems arrogant, almost ridiculously so. Whence came his supreme confidence in his powers and skills? Should any of us trust him? Or anyone else? Even ourselves? It seems, even among quasi-Wintersians, that few do. He has often been treated in the way David Levin, the Stanford University historian, once wrote of his specific evaluations: that they weren’t the main point in learning from him. Yet Winters thought the work of precise evaluation stood at the center of his critical enterprise. The discerning between the glass of Gallo and the so-called finest wines was crucial to all he thought and wrote and felt about literature.

Evaluating the Winters Canon: Conclusions on Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry

We have finished considering each of the six poems by Thomas Wyatt that Yvor Winters chose for Quest for Reality (which reprints the poems in chronological order). Before moving on to the next poem in the “Winters Canon,” it’s a good time to ask whether we can reach any conclusions about Wyatt’s work? More broadly, can we reach any early conclusions about this study of the Winters Canon?

First, it is striking how little very little poetry or criticism the artworks of Thomas Wyatt appears to have inspired among those with interests in Yvor Winters. None of the poetry from the past few decades that I know works with or out from the methods Wyatt employed. Not even Winters seems to have built out from Wyatt’s favored techniques. As I mentioned in my last post in this series, only J.V. Cunningham in the modern age has tried to use a plainly and overtly logical manner in modern poetry, though Cunningham’s methods betray little influence from Wyatt. It might be time for renewed efforts to study, learn from, and re-employ the techniques of Thomas Wyatt.

Second, Wintersian critics, if there truly are any, have not concerned themselves with Wyatt at all since Yvor Winters championed his work during his career. I wonder why this is. There is much to discuss, as I believe I showed in some of my personal reflections on the six Wyatt poems that Winters chose for the his canon. And there is much more in Wyatt’s classical body of work worth careful study. It appears, however, that Wyatt has not “endured” even among those tempted to agree with Winters that he wrote great poetry. Wyatt has been left to scholars. He doesn’t seem to have any influence or significance any longer. Indeed, his work doesn’t seem to have had influence for a long, long time. This is far from true of some other lyric poets from his era, generally speaking. Shakespeare is one obvious example, Donne the other. There is no reason why Thomas Wyatt’s poetry could not have drawn the same level of attention and generate the same personal interest that Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence draws. My guess is that Wyatt simply hasn’t inspired enough poets, critics, general readers, or even scholars in such a way as to generate some kind of momentum that would bring him a wider readership. Why is that so? That’s a matter for reflection and discussion.

The logical method, of course, is very, very little used in our times. Yet if you are drawn to and see the great value in poetry that is written in an overtly logical manner, J.V. Cunningham’s essay “Logic and Lyric” can help you study some of the possibilities of that kind of poetry. The essay can be found in Cunningham’s truly great critical collection Tradition and Poetic Structure: Essays in Literary History and Criticism. After briefly and generally laying out Romantic ideas about literary structure, which routed logical poetry from the field as much as 200 years ago, Cunningham studies a fine poem that exhibits such a structure:

But may the chain of propositions and reasonings [in a poem] be not merely plausible and specious but even sufficiently just and exact? May the poem be not merely subject to logical analysis but logical in form? May, to return to our point, the subject and structure of a poem be conceived and expressed syllogistically? Anyone at all acquainted with modern criticism and the poems that are currently in fashion will think in this connection of Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” The apparent structure of that poem is an argumentative syllogism, explicitly stated. "Had we but world enough and time," the poet says, “This coyness, lady, were no crime....”

Later, at the conclusion of the essay, Cunningham suggests that the logical method might be much more valuable than recognized in our times. Consider these comments on Thomas Nashe’s “Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss” from Summer’s Last Will and Testament:

The experience of [Nashe’s] poem is the experience of syllogistic thinking with its consequences for feeling, attitude, and action. It is a mode of experience that the Renaissance practiced and cherished, and expressed with power, dignity, and precision. It is a poetical experience and a logical one, and it is both at once.

Though Cunningham doesn’t quite say so in this essay, he implies quite strongly, quite obviously, that the time was ripe (30 years ago) for some poets to adopt overtly logical methods once again, even to the point of poetic syllogisms.

On the broader question, I have received only one comment about any of Wyatt’s poems, and that was only a comment saying that someone would comment elsewhere on one Wyatt’s poems. I do not know how many people are reading this blog. It is probably not many. I know very little about how anyone perceives this blog. I do not have any answer why Wyatt has generated no comment, other than that less than a handful of people are reading these posts.

And so we move on in the Winters Canon from Thomas Wyatt to one poem by Thomas Lord Vaux, Winters’s next selection in Quest. I will get to that soon.

Evaluating the Winters Canon: Poem 6

“It Was My Choice”
By Thomas Wyatt

It was my choice, it was no chance
That brought my heart in others' hold,
Whereby it hath had sufferance
Longer, perdie, than Reason would;
Since I it bound where it was free,
Methinks, iwis, of right it should
Accepted be.

Accepted be without refuse,
Unless that Fortune have the power
All right of love for to abuse;
For, as they say, one happy hour
May more prevail than right or might;
If fortune then list for to lour,
What vaileth right?

What vaileth right if this be true?
Then trust to chance and go by guess;
Then who so loveth may well go sue
Uncertain Hope for his redress.
Yet some would say assuredly
Thou mayst appeal for thy release
to fantasy.

To fantasy pertains to choose:
All this I know, for fantasy
First unto love did me induce;
But yet I know as steadfastly
That if love have no faster knot,
So nice a choice slips suddenly:
It lasteth not.

It lasteth not that stands by change.
Fancy doth change; fortune is frail;
Both these to please the way is strange.
Therefore me thinks best to prevail:
There is no way that is so just
As truth to lead, through t'other fail,
And thereto trust.

NOTES:

in other's hold = under the rule of another

sufferance = suffering

perdie = par Dieu (by God)

than reason would = than is reasonable

I wis (or iwis) = surely

For as they say etc. - The meaning of these three lines seems to be "For, as it is said, an hour of good fortune is worth more than all the rights and obligations in the world. Hence when fortune is bad (lours) one's rights count for nothing."

go by guess = play it by ear

So nice a choice = so delicate and whimsical a choice (of lover), i.e. one that
is based only on fantasy

the way is strange = the means (of satisfying both fortune and fancy) is irrational and fickle

As truth to lead = as to lead by truth

thereto = in addition

WINTERS’S EVALUATION: 5 stars, or GREAT

“It was my choice” is seldom found in anthologies and can be hard to find. Winters drew more attention to this poem than any critic or scholar ever has, that I am aware of. He appears to have judged it a great poem, one of the finest ever composed in the English language, though his views are by no means certain. It is one of those judgments that when Winters was alive seemed and still seems a little perverse. Every other expert or scholar has missed it. How could that have been or still be so? If it is indeed great, critics and scholars would not have missed it to that degree, would they? (These questions come up time and again, like bells tolling, in any consideration of Winters’s career.) Yet it is one of those poems that is so expertly written that it can markedly increase your confidence in Yvor Winters’s judgment. For it was he who found it and properly discerned its excellence. Rather than thinking him perverse, you might, like me, think him brilliant for championing this poem. If his system yields judgments like this, your reasoning might go -- as mine has gone -- he must have known something other critics do not, had skills that others do not possess.

Winters discussed this poem a couple times in his writings. But he did not discuss it early, not even in the early essay “The 16th Century Lyric in England,” which was published in Poetry in 1939. This became his single most influential essay, I and many others believe. Judging from all his writings, I believe that he considered this a great poem, one of the summit works in English poetic literature. Yet he never clearly stated his specific reasons. His brief discussion of the poem came late in his career, in his extensive revision and expansion of the “16th Century Lyric” essay, which was published 28 years later as the first chapter in his final book, Forms of Discovery, and entitled “Aspects of Poetry in the English Renaissance.” My informed guess is that Winters considered this poem to be a supreme example of a rational statement under precise emotional control, which was the classical ideal that he strove to foster in his own work and in literary culture in general. The poem certainly exhibits a rational structure. It moves from proposition to proposition, in an obviously logical and rhetorical manner. Winters is clear that he thought the final stanza raised the poem to a level of profundity and greatness.

In the “Aspects” essays, he pointed to a couple lines that he considered especially important and well composed. The first line was one:

It was my choice, it was no chance....

This line struck him, it appears, as a powerful example of the aphoristic power of poetry, the summary statement charged with deep, general meaning. The other line is the second line of the third stanza:

Then trust to chance and go by guess;...

Winters apparently believed that this line carries an intellectual profundity and a sharp, condensed moral import of the kind that Winters valued very highly. As a meditation on the morality of making a decision of commitment in courtship (putting aside the specific circumstances found in the poem), the poem in its movement to these lines, and toward the powerful final stanza, becomes a weighty and insightful meditation on morality and its relations to truth, chance, and desire.

Some scholars have thought of “It was my choice” as probably written as a song for lute accompaniment. One can hardly imagine this densely argued, metrically complex poem working well as a song. It is often seen as a companion piece to the more familiar song “Blame not my lute,” which we have considered earlier in this series. It plays on many of the conventional courtly themes of early Renaissance poetry in England, themes that were prevalent across European high culture. The persona, a young lover wooing a mistress who, it seems, has first accepted and then rejected him, faces the continuing rejection of his love. He tries to persuade her to favor his suit with a logical argument and raises his reflections, as Winters believed and as seems quite evident, to a much higher plane of moral thought.

Finally, I must take note that John Fraser chose not to include this poem in his quasi-Wintersian New Book of Verse, which I have been discussing off and on. Fraser offers no explanation for his decision. I think the exclusion a mistake, however we might interpret the purpose of that book -- which I am still not sure of. (No one is pressing me for an examination of Fraser’s Preface, so I will let that broad, tangled subject wait for later study.)

BEN KILPELA’S EVALUATION: 4 stars, or SUPERB

There are not many poems like this in all English literature -- in any literature, in fact. I have run across few poems that resemble it, a love poem that considers love and courtship it as a matter of logical moral inquiry. Perhaps only Marvel’s “To His Coy Mistress” in English approximates the structure, though Marvel’s poem is much more playful. (I would be glad to be reminded of other similar poems from my readers.) We have come so far in modern literature from poetry that is written in any manner like this that it is almost impossible to believe that poetry like this could be written again. Think of even the finest work of the Wintersian classicists. Very little of the poetry they have written has this linear style or takes this kind of baldly logical approach to human experience. Only the work of J.V. Cunningham seems to be truly comparable. (Yet, I hasten to note, there have been several interesting overtly logical poems similar in manner that have been written in response to Marvel’s “To His Coy Mistress,” such as Archibald MacLeish’s “To You, Andrew Marvel.” Such poems have shown that some modern poets can think like a classicist, even with heavy modern irony, when they have a mind to.)

My judgment is that the poem is one of the greats of our language, but has several small, peculiar faults that damage it. Clearly, the premise that leads the poet into his examination of reason and truth is shaky -- that anyone is obliged to return love and intimate allegiance to another just because the other desires the same of her or him. Winters mentions this fault, but I believe it to be more serious than he does, though not ruinous. Also, the poem takes its persona, the speaker, to be of stronger character than is creditable. That the speaker of this poem is in some sense above fantasy or chance shows Wyatt to be distinctly unaware of his own predilections and limitations as a man. These two faults weaken the poem, though I still consider it very fine work, as my rating is intended to show. But I have little difficulty saying that it is a beautiful exploration of a broad human experience, expertly rendered and profoundly thought. It calls us to a life of intellectual meditation, a posture of great value to life. The poem exhibits supreme craft -- certainly it is one of the most skilled poems in the history of English.

Nonetheless, the profound themes are treated very generally. We gain little from it that could help us live day to day other than to inspire us to set aside fancy and fortune as motives for our actions and seek truth alone. I have known the poem for a very long time and consider it worth the study of a lifetime.

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS:

As an exhortation to leading one’s life by reason and shunning fantasy and fancy, the poem is a profound and moving statement. But it can only go so far to help us fathom and properly address the specific issues and decisions we face in our personal lives. For we sense, nowadays, that we are not quite free to follow reason and truth as faithfully as we might hope -- and even not quite fully able to discern where truth lies or what reason might be urging us to follow. Our powers of choice are not wholly free, most of us accept nowadays. We are not fully in control of our choices. Those are commonplaces in our postmodern times, which seem vastly truer than they ever could have seemed to Thomas Wyatt. Chance is one powerful external force in our lives. But there are other external AND internal forces as well that Wyatt was unaware of or did not credit: genetics, environment, past experiences, and more. It is good to be called to commit oneself to living according to reason, to the truth, but we always face much work in discovering where reason is properly leading us, choice to choice and day to day.

Concerning the issues of choice and chance, I have enjoyed studying “The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website,” a strong and challenging collection of essays edited by the philosopher Ted Honderich. The site has many writings on the philosophical question of freedom and determinism, and the complex modern theories of compatibilism and incompatibilism, and the implications of various views on these abstruse matters:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwIntroIndex.htm

Judging generally from the writings on Honderich’s fascinating site and elsewhere, I believe that determinism has become widely accepted among philosophers, and that near-total determinism has become popularly believed among the generally educated. (A sizable number of thinkers, judging from my reading, still hold out a small portion of life from complete submission to external and internal forces that are beyond a person’s direct control.) What does this mean to Wyatt’s exhortation? The question of how free we might be can haunt us, much more than it did the writers and thinkers of the English Renaissance -- though some of them struggled with it as well in other ways. For a very recent example of how it troubles and fascinates us, consider the American film that plays with an idea of fate and chance and choice, No Country for Old Men, directed by the Coen brothers (winner of the Academy Award last night). I do not consider this a good film, but it is pertinent to my discussion here in that a killer twice flips a coin to see whether someone will live or die.

Even more bothersome on these matters, the opening line of the poem, “It was my choice, it was no chance,” seems slightly facile. For even in Wyatt’s age it was recognized that courtship, sexual desire (passion), and love were somehow outside the complete control of a person experiencing them. It seems mildly foolish for Wyatt or his persona to claim that, unconstrained by any internal or external forces, he chose freely to desire and court the fictional woman of the poem. But we know that we do not fully or even mostly control our desires in many areas of life, though perhaps in some cases we do seek to and sometimes gain a measure of control over them. This is a fascinating subject worth pondering through this poem.

Further, Wyatt claims that “Fancy doth change; fortune is frail....” His case is that fancy and fortune are uncertain and, therefore, untrustworthy. They don’t last. They wander and waver. They’re downright fickle. So, Wyatt concludes, trust to truth, to reason. Sounds good. But reason and truth waver as well, do they not? Deciding how truth shall lead is often no less difficult and uncertain than acting upon fancies or trusting to the turns of fortune’s wheel. Reason can be fickle, too. My views on many momentous issues have changed dramatically over my lifetime. I was once a “born-again” Christian but left that faith, coming to believe it as doctrinally false (though mythically compelling in many ways). If we should distrust fancy and fortune because they do not endure and waver, then what better reason do we have to trust to “truth,” that star we believe to be fixed but that wanders in our sight and often seems to guide lonely barks far out on the sea so very differently? This issue, in my judgment, is one of the crucial challenges facing any classical conception of life and art.

To conclude, this poem has considerable emotional power, in the very expression of its moral concepts. This kind of writing was what Winters was talking about when he wrote of the power of meter and diction to deliver and adjust the emotion. It is difficult to describe the overall effect, as Winters himself said. I will surely return in time to try to define it more rigorously. Of course, all views on these matters are welcome.

Elitism and Dana Gioia

Quick Note:

Dana Gioia was the subject of an article in the Wall Street Journal a weekend ago. Gioia is a New Formalist poet who has been the director of the National Endowment for the Arts for several years. Gioia has had interests in the work of Yvor Winters. He was even one of the presenters at the Winters Centennial held at Stanford University in 2000. Nonetheless, Gioia has not written extensively on Winters -- if at all -- nor would I classify him as a Wintersian. The recent article was one in the WSJ's "Cultural Conversation" series and was entitled "Great Art for the Greatest Numbers." I believe it is available online, but I do not have the web address at hand. It is worth reading. The central point of the article comes out in a quotation from Gioia:

See, I don't believe that artistic quality and democracy are irreconcilable. I don't believe you either have to have mediocre art or elitist art.... And so I'm trying to reach the broadest number of people possible with the best art possible.

This comment brings us back to the issue of the elitism of Yvor Winters's theories and the purposes of this blog. I am in the business here of popularizing Winters's ideas, under the obvious assumption that such ideas can be beneficial (in a broad spiritual sense) to a wide, generally educated audience. Winters wrote little about this assumption and, to the contrary, wrote several times in his letters that he believed his literary ideas and theories would be mostly incomprehensible to those "masses" whom I am trying to reach with his ideas (and among which I classify myself). What hope could there be for masses, Winters seems to have believed, if even the finest scholars of modern times and almost all lovers of high art in the modern age have actually favored art that Winters judged clearly to be mediocre. I am fairly certain that Winters would find Gioia's judgment of the "best art" to be mediocre as well. But I don't have any idea of what Gioia thinks of what Winters probably would have thought of him.

Is it possible for Winters's notions of "artistic quality," so lofty and unusual as they are, to find favor in a country devoted to pop culture (Low-Cult)? Even among those devoted to Mid-Cult or High-Cult art (to use Dwight McDonald's highly useful terms). To be honest, almost certainly not W I D E favor. But SOME marginal favor is possible, if unlikely. I labor on in hope that others who need Winters will find him, as I need him and as I believed he is needed by many others, whether those others have yet recognized their need of him or not.

Mina Loy

Quick Note:

This week, poets.org put up a short overview of the early 20th century American poet Mina Loy. If you are interested in the study of Yvor Winters, you will want to check out this short article and read the two poems that poets.org has on its web site by this very obscure poet. Loy was a writer of a very dense, abstract, non-syntactical short-line free verse that Winters thought very highly of. Two of her poems (neither of which can be found on the web, so far as I know) made it into the Winters Canon, as published in the anthology Quest for Reality.

Winters judged Mina Loy's poetry highly even from his earliest days. He mentioned her in a letter written when he was 19 years old. He first wrote at length of her work far back in 1927, which was the time when he was beginning to change his literary direction from free-verse imagism to modern "formalist" classicism. To the puzzlement of many, he thought Loy had achieved some of the finest work in the modernist movement. He listed her work among all the other modernist poets who remain so well known, Pound, Eliot, W.C. Williams, Stevens, and the rest. Notably, Donald Stanford also considered Loy a fine imagist poet, though he judged her work to be as minor as Pound's and Eliot's. It will take some time to get to Mina Loy's poetry in my reconsideration of the Winters Canon, but some day we shall get there. I will probably take a look at Donald Stanford's judgments of her at that time as well.

I am highly interested in whether any of my readers have been reading Mina Loy and what they have discovered in reading her. Please write with any comments on her work.