by D. G. Myers

Criticism, says Diana Trilling in her recent autobiography The Beginning of the Journey, was born in New York in the 1920s. "There is a certain defiance of history in fixing the place and date as I do," she says. But she feels justified in doing so, because she has a specific variety of criticism in mind--a criticism that is more concerned with ideas (especially political ideas) than with genre, form, or style; a criticism that was originally the stock in trade of the Partisan Review and now is best represented by Commentary. Even so, Trilling does not defy history as much as first appears. Although New York cannot claim to be its birthplace, a new style of critical-mindedness that was neither journalistic nor strictly learned did see light around 1920. T. S. Eliot published "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in 1917 and The Sacred Wood in 1920. Ezra Pound issued his first volume of critical essays, Pavannes and Divisions, in 1918; a second followed two years later. In 1918 the Dial moved from Chicago to New York and two years after that Scofield Thayer took over the editorship, converting the magazine into an organ of modernism. In 1922 the Fugitive was founded and John Crowe Ransom began to devote most of his time to criticism. Mark Van Doren became literary editor of the Nation in 1924 while still remaining a professor at Columbia. According to Trilling, Van Doren was an important figure to a younger generation of writers: "He represented the possibility of being a teacher, yet also a writer; you could earn your living as a teacher without sacrifice of the ‘creative impulse,’ as it would then have been honorifically described." Along with his Vanderbilt colleague Donald Davidson, Ransom had a similar effect upon a generation of Southern writers (and, after he had gone on to Kenyon, not only Southern writers).

For a time poetry, criticism, and teaching were nearly synonymous. What is now called creative writing, in fact, was originally a plan for bringing the three skills into one job description. The first generation of poets to earn a living as teachers--Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Penn Warren, Stanley Kunitz, Theodore Roethke, Charles Olson, Josephine Miles, J. V. Cunningham, Karl Shapiro, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell--was also a generation of critics. It is an open question whether some of them might not have been better critics than poets (more memorable, more fun to read). Some who were primarily critics, like R. P. Blackmur and Kenneth Burke, also wrote poetry; even some publishers like Alan Swallow and James Laughlin doubled as poets. Indeed when an important new critic like Cleanth Brooks appeared on the scene it was a bit unsettling if he was not a poet. Criticism and the writing of poetry were two aspects of the same activity, just as eating and conversation are two aspects of having dinner with someone. Blackmur spoke for his entire generation in declaring that "the composition of a great poem is a labor of unrelenting criticism, and the full reading of it only less so; . . . the critical act is what is called a ‘creative’ act, and whether by poet, critic, or serious reader, since there is an alteration, a stretching, of the sensibility as the act is done."

Much has changed since creative writing became a separate profession, which it largely had by 1976 when the American Philosophical Society reclassified "creative arts" as being distinct from the criticism of them. Five years later, in the first issue of a new magazine called The Reaper, Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell--two poets trained in creative writing workshops--pondered the relationship between poetry and criticism, and offered four conclusions:

The true function of criticism has been lost sight of. "After all," said The Reaper, "the poet creates and the critic analyzes that creation." In conceiving criticism in these terms Jarman and McDowell were acknowledging their debt to their teachers. I can say this with some confidence, because all three of us were at Santa Cruz together in the early Seventies. Pretty much without exception our teachers were students of the New Critics; they taught us in turn that the criticism of poetry was identical with the analysis of it. No wonder we felt that criticism was arrogant and even neurotic. Only someone who hated poems and considered them beneath him would want to spend a life taking them to pieces. The poets we read--Richard Hugo, John Haines, Alan Dugan, Donald Justice, Robert Creeley, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, John Ashbery, Galway Kinnell, James Wright, Philip Levine, Gary Snyder, Charles Wright--wrote little or no criticism. When a group including Raymond Carver and me founded Quarry (later Quarry West), it never dawned on us to leave space for criticism; a literary magazine and a critical journal were two different things. It never dawned on any of us that criticism might just be another way of enlarging a capacity for poetry or that confining it to analysis instead was a surefire method for subordinating poetry to it.

Poets have not broken with criticism altogether--or what passes for criticism. Since 1978, when the University of Michigan Press launched its series Poets on Poetry edited by Donald Hall, there has even been a renewed outbreak of talk about poetry. Although such poets as Paul Breslin in The Psycho-Political Muse (1987), Timothy Steele in Missing Measures (1990), Wyatt Prunty in "Fallen from the Symboled World" (1990), and Jonathan Holden in The Fate of Poetry (1991) have recently turned to scholarship instead of criticism, a new generation of poet-critics has risen to the level of appearance, engaging in critical practices that very nearly entail a shift in critical sensibility. The new poet-critics no longer compose a De Vulgari Eloquentia or an Apologie for Poetrie; they give an interview. They are as likely to discuss their own poems--the circumstances under which something was written, where the inspiration came from, how many drafts it went through, the background and references--as to draw attention to other poets. When they do name another poet almost invariably it is to praise him or her, and in the vaguest possible language ("the poems are alive," they might say, "with rhythm and shape"). Contemporary poetry is a deluge of new books and magazine-pieces; it takes a fulltime specialist to keep up. Not to sift through the wreckage for what can be salvaged, not to submit new poetry to the test of an unrelenting reading, amounts to logrolling, a form professional irresponsibility. Among contemporary poets, criticism is only rarely a sustained act of mind. More often it is a relaxing break from the day-to-day business of writing poems, a specimen of the higher gossip. And few seem to suspect that this points to a fundamental defect in their work. The weakening of criticism among poets denotes a neglect of intelligence that will be obvious to anyone who reads much contemporary poetry.

The problem that faces the criticism of poetry today is one of evaluation, including how to develop a vocabulary for evaluation. Now and then you hear it said that all criticism is divided into two sects--that which treats a poem as something made and that which treats it as something said. This is an invidious distinction. The only way to judge how well a poem is made is to judge how coherently it says what it has to say. In the end poetry must always be evaluated in respect of its intelligence. And yet evaluation is largely without friends; in academic circles it is seen as an attempt to dominate while among poets it is rejected in favor of the code you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours. The consequence, as Dana Gioia observes in his new book of essays Can Poetry Matter?, is that the criticism of poetry has been reduced to two genres--that of professional courtesy, among poets; and unsmiling exegesis, among academics. Gioia is practically alone among recent critics of poetry in calling for a return to "the hard work of evaluation." He sees clearly (as few of his peers do) that in the decades following modernism and the New Criticism, "an era when critics made a poet’s style into his most important subject," what has gone unregarded are ideas, "big, naked, howling ideas" like those to be found in Robinson Jeffers.

Gioia is probably the best of the recent poet-critics, but he is not the only good one around. Coincidentally, in the last months several other poets have published good books of criticism. In Compulsory Figures Henry Taylor, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Flying Change (1985) and two earlier volumes of poetry, collects in-depth essays on seventeen poets ranging from Jackson Mac Low to J. V. Cunningham. In Reading Old Friends John Matthias, author of six books, most recently A Gathering of Ways (1991), throws together a gala assortment including essays on place in poetry and other poet-critics (Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky) plus three discursive poems on poetic theory. Good Measure by the North Carolina poet Robert Morgan is made up of first-rate essays on Russell Edson and A. R. Ammons, bracketed on one side by brief meditations and on the other by interviews. Mark Rudman, whose most recent book of poetry is The Nowhere Steps (1990), collects eighteen essays on a variety of subjects and writers (translation, Heidegger, notebooks, Czeslaw Milosz) in a volume whose title, Diverse Voices, belies the philosophical seriousness of its author. Gioia’s own Can Poetry Matter?, by a poet with two books of original verse and three of translations to his credit, includes the title essay (which caused a stir when it appeared in the Atlantic) along with discussions of unfortunately neglected poets like Jeffers, Ted Kooser, and Howard Moss. The coincidence of these five books’ publication is an opportunity to examine the criticism of poet-critics, to see what (if anything) makes it different.

The first thing to notice is that, while occasional poetry has disappeared into fulltime professionalism, the contemporary poet is a merely occasional critic. With the exception of Taylor (who almost never writes an essay briefer than fifteen pages) the poets have a difficult time filling out a book without including a sequence of what Gioia calls "short views"--that is, two- or three-page book reviews. Morgan can put his hands on only three essays that are full-length efforts at criticism; and, interestingly, they are placed smack in the middle of the book, to provide it with girth. Similarly, the entire second half of Matthias’s book is comprised of reviews of British poets, and many of the longer pieces in the first half are omnibus or what Randall Jarrell called four-in-hand reviews. There is nothing scandalously wrong with this. Critics have always done it; there are books that no one who loves books should be without, like Jarrell’s Poetry and the Age, which consist almost exclusively of reviews. Moreover, it’s about time reviewing was restored to a place of importance in the literary culture. It has fallen into such disesteem that academic journals like American Literature increasingly farm it out to graduate students. Still, reviewing is not criticism as such; "short views" are not long ones. The writing of reviews encourages a shifting ad hoc approach to thinking about books. Now I don’t mean that critics should have an "approach" in the current academic sense of a ready-and-waiting methodology that supplies conclusions in advance. I mean simply that book reviewing, which is primarily the exposition of other writers’ views, makes it hard for a critic to develop an independent point of view; "independent" in the sense of bearing a unique stamp of mind, but also in the sense of being independent of the work under discussion.

By contrast, these poet-critics do not always know what they are looking for in the poets they read. Although much attention is given to what Morgan calls the poets’ "preoccupations," there is rarely a generalizing structure of thought behind the cataloguing of themes. The critic may locate a poet within a tradition--Rudman says for instance that the work of Zbigniew Herbert "has close philosophical links with that of Eastern European poets such as Paul Celan, Vasko Popa and Janos Pilinsky"--but he is unlikely to say how the addition of the poet causes the tradition to jell. Instead the critics bounce haphazardly from theme to theme, unstitching a body of work and spilling it into a miscellany. When intelligence is discussed, it is in the tones of unspecified approval. For example, Taylor praises David R. Slavitt by saying that "though his stanza forms are often intricate, they never prevent, or even impede, the explorations of a mind that takes suggestions as they come, weaving them into the pattern." As it turns out, this is a statement about form rather than intelligence, but I don’t want to fault it overmuch; it is an interesting example of the current commonplace that elaboration of form is at odds with the movement of thought. But other than claiming that thought constructs form in Slavitt’s work, it says little about what Slavitt actually thinks.

The same shortcoming tends to show up even in Gioia, who as a general rule is attentive to the quality of a poet’s thought. In his (highly recommended) essay "The Loneliness of Weldon Kees," for instance, Gioia writes that

It seems foolhardy to pick a fight with a critic of such acumen, but couldn’t this be more accurately described as pathological anxiety--what the psychoanalytic theorist Otto Kernberg defines as "chronic, diffuse, free-floating anxiety"--dressed up as fashionable existentialist Angst; self-justification, not self-understanding? Even if it is not this, however, one must ask what has become of the hard work of evaluation. Gioia does not submit Kees’s thought to criticism; he seems to find it perfectly acceptable; he merely restates it in different words. The purpose of such writing, as Howard Nemerov used to say, is to turn poetry into prose as quickly as possible.

In much criticism of poetry there is small concern to reduce a poet’s work to the simplicity of order. There is almost no effort to translate the poetry not into prose but into a view. Ideas are left in the condition of themes, and the difference between them is this. A literary theme is like foam; it is without edge; it offers nothing for the mind to take hold of. In speaking of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, for example, Mark Rudman says: "What happens to the self in his poems reverberates through the body politic." Aside from the fact that this is a sentence that wishes to look as if it were saying something instead of really saying something--a kind of sentence that is all too characteristic of much criticism by poets--it raises the issue of Amichai’s politics only to dispense with it. A few paragraphs later Rudman returns to the subject: "Amichai only embraces the public sphere through the self." But, again, instead of explaining what this means, or setting forth Amichai’s view of the public sphere, Rudman swerves immediately into a discussion of the love poems before concluding with a few remarks about Amichai’s translators. Now something can be said about Amichai’s politics. He is a Meistersinger of what the philosopher Richard Rorty, writing recently in Dissent, named "futile leftism"--a leftism that is eager to display the correct sympathies, preferring sympathy to the risk of social action. Under the politics of futility, Amichai’s work sags into a posture of fatigue, as if he had simply given up instead of finding a solution to the problem that bedevils any Israeli (perhaps any Jew) how to iron out the apparent contradiction between Jewish particularism and universalist democratic ideals. The futility and fatigue run throughout the poetry; whatever Amichai touches leaves him tired; birthdays weigh him down, war memorials provide targets for future gunners, love ends in loss, and even when it flies it only flies a little. This is not an authentically tragic sense of life, for instead of fear and pity at the death of great men you get sympathy for victims.

I don’t intend to convert this into an essay on Yehuda Amichai. Nor do I mean to make a scapegoat out of Mark Rudman, who for the most part is a wise critic, rewarding to read. What I want to suggest is a different kind of criticism than that which is practiced by even the best contemporary poet-critics. The difference may be this. Poets seem to conceive of criticism as something that before anything else must be useful to them. Robert Morgan for instance complains that since the 1970s literary theory has had "no point of contact with the concerns of most working poets." And the truth of the claim is less important than the assumption behind it. This is the assumption behind what might be called the Creative Writing School of Literary Criticism, in which criticism has an instrumentalist or even vocationalist function, assisting the practice of poetry. In its extreme forms such criticism overbalances into an almost compulsive attention to details. John Matthias for example passes on an anecdote about a workshop that he took from John Berryman during a summer conference at the University of Utah in 1959. After reading aloud and then annihilating three stories by the seventeen-year-old Matthias--a job of criticism that was "as unremitting and detailed as it was devastating"--Berryman turned to "The Open Boat" for an example of a style that could withstand unremitting scrutiny. For an entire morning he concentrated upon the first sentence of Crane’s story, pointing out that it was written in iambic pentameter and repeating it over and over with varying stress:

What finally was the point of the lesson? Matthias isn’t sure, but "it was a marvelous display of pedagogical virtuosity and critical ingeniousness. . . ." Someone else might be struck by the deliberation, the sheer effortfulness, with which Berryman carried out the exercise. It is almost as if he believed that, by fixing his attention microscopically upon one element, he could will the style to yield up its secret. Of course this is a variation on the New Criticism’s practice of "close reading." At the same time, though, it has drifted a good distance from New Critical practice, which was originally designed as a method for limiting the context of meaning to the text itself. There could be, it was argued, no knowledge of a text’s subject-matter that was prior to a close reading of it; the text was the whole context of understanding. In Berryman’s hands the context has shrunk to the scope of a sentence; there is no larger whole. And meaning is not at issue at all. The entire attention is absorbed by a technical detail.

Most poet-critics are not as persistent as Berryman, yet nearly all of them are as wrapped up in the problem of technique. The usual form of their essays is a series of quotations accompanied by technical commentary. They quote extended passages and carefully pour over individual lines; they repeat phrases to emphasize a point; they enumerate the images and comment on line breaks and sound patterns. At times the ratio of quotation to commentary approaches 1:1. Even when they dedicate themselves to what a poet is saying rather than how he says it, the critics explicate the how rather than the what. They do not answer an argument with an argument, but with a formal analysis. They never ask whether a poet’s vision of the human experience is true or false. They stare past the vision to the technical features of visualizing.

Now it will be objected that I am overstating my case, because as a matter of fact contemporary poets are deeply suspicious of technique. In an essay on him, Henry Taylor quotes William Stafford as saying that poetry is

Taylor observes sharply, however, that Stafford tends to define technique in extremist terms that few poets would ever agree with:

And yet Taylor is closer to confirming Stafford’s dislike of technique than he realizes. On his own showing poetry is something that glides and comes naturally; it is characterized by spontaneity; it cannot be controlled. No matter how badly someone wants to write a poem, it may still refuse to budge. Or the words may arrive when one is least expecting them, prickling the skin. Poetry cannot be written by an act of will. It is an attitude toward immediate feelings. Although he does not share Stafford’s dislike for "technique," then, Taylor agrees that nothing must be allowed to mediate between feelings and the poem. His quarrel with Stafford is over terminology, not theory.

Some such distinction as this between immediate feeling and rational mediation has a principled quality for most poets now writing. John Matthias advances another version, saying that poetry is at its best when it "seems to be demanded by the pressure of experience rather than just desired. . . ." In an informational brochure, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop advances yet another: "Though we agree in part with the popular insistence that writing cannot be taught, we exist and proceed on the assumption that talent can be developed. . . ." This is very nearly creative writing’s oath of office. What it appears to be stating is that while the mind can control the experience of poetry it cannot create it. Will, technique, rational control--these may assist a poet in developing his talent, but they cannot remedy an absence of talent. They belong to a different faculty of mind. To put it in readily familiar terms: there is a creative faculty and there is a critical faculty. Criticism is the deliberate and effortful part of a poet’s life, whether he criticizes another poet or his own work in successive drafts, after the furor has cooled. Hence the absorption with technique. Technique is rational insight applied to poetry after it has been created.

So much for the criticism of poet-critics. What cannot fail to amaze an observer, though, is the stubbornness of the theory. Two aspects of the same activity are treated as if they were incompatible, like one’s own happiness and a promise to someone else. A merely conceptual distinction between creativity and criticism is reified into a categorical this or that, like the question of ethnic origins. The theory is also badly dated. Not only does it swear by an irrationalist belief in Platonic inspiration--a belief that Castelvetro dismissed in the Renaissance as a fairy tale invented by poets to keep outsiders from inquiring too closely into their methods--but what’s more, it is based upon faculty psychology, a medieval scheme of mind dating to Avicenna and Roger Bacon. Faculty psychology split the mind up into three cells: from front to back (1.) common sense and imagination, (2.) fancy and judgment, and (3.) memory.

These have been relabeled (1.) talent and immediate feeling and (2.) technique and criticism. (3.) has been largely abandoned, just as the schools have abandoned the memorization and recitation of poems like "Excelsior" and "The Highwayman." Anyone who proposed to restore (3.) to literary education would be laughed down, but (1.) and (2.) are still going strong--even if the theory of poetry and criticism that depends upon them is more than 700 years out of date. Meanwhile, the rational evaluation of poems is everywhere neglected; for that would require the whole mind, not a third of it.

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An omnibus review of Mark Rudman. Diverse Voices: Essays on Poets and Poetry. Brownsville, Ore.: Story Line Press, 1993. Robert Morgan. Good Measures: Essays, Interviews, and Notes on Poetry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. Dana Gioia. Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture. St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1992. John Matthias. Reading Old Friends: Essays, Reviews, and Poems on Poetics, 1975-1990. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Henry Taylor. Compulsory Figures: Essays on Recent American Poets. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

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