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.

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.