On Poetry
By William Logan
Sunday, February 25, 1996
The Redress of Poetry began as the lectures delivered by Seamus Heaney during his term as professor of poetry at Oxford. The election of an Irish poet to this most English of posts was itself an act awash in political notation; and Heaney took as his subject the adequacy of poetry in a world of violence and political crisis. The redress he proposed was not just a reparation for wrongs sustained, but a restoration of spirit in the rubble of history.
This might seem a wish foolishly utopian, were Heaney not keen to establish that poetry can only dangerously aim for political change. Though it may on occasion intervene in the world, poetry offers instead what Auden called an "affirming flame" -- an alternate world where words have transcendent potential and fulfilling force.
Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year and who often has been a compelling analyst of the role of a private art in a public world, has nervously accepted the mantle of T.S. Eliot as the poet designated to pronounce on poetry and culture. These notes on the language of poetry and its purposes in politics are most forceful when furthest from the intention of the lectures. The poets crucial to Heaney -- Marlowe, Clare, Wilde, Hugh MacDiarmid, Dylan Thomas, and others -- are, like him, much concerned with language, whether displaced from natural dialect or redressing a dialect possessed (in the case of Clare and the 18th-century Irishman Brian Merriman) or reinvented (in the case of MacDiarmid).
As an Irishman who writes in English, Heaney is particularly sensitive to the politics and transgressions of language. His comments only rarely concern his own practice, but where he deals with his own revisions (on using "worked," for example, rather than the "wrought" of his local dialect: "Once you think twice about a local usage you have been displaced from it") or writes on poets whose influence he wrestled with early on, he offers a permanent understanding of the art.
Heaney has the most flexible and beautiful lyric voice of our age, and his prose often answers his poetry in a run of subtle and subtly resonant phrasing (as well as in the witty brilliance of his imagery, as when he describes "the dead-pan cloudiness of a word processor"). Language is often the particular pleasure of these lectures, and it is therefore disturbing to find them so permeable and unresistant to the more brutal vocabulary of contemporary criticism -- to "multivalent," "devalorizing," "empowered," "marginalized," "phallocentric," "patriarchal" and "the other." Such language urges, in its blind but coercive way, all the easy political solutions his argument otherwise opposes.
The essays in The Redress of Poetry have more cumulative force than individual character. Though seldom striking in themselves, they are convincing in their belief that poetic invention "represents not a submission to the conditions of [the] world but a creative victory over them." If Heaney does not have the original prose voice of Auden or Eliot, he has maintained for English poetry a responsive, gratified and radical ear.
"It is still not understood," thunders Helen Vendler in the introduction to The Breaking of Style, "that in lyric writing, style in its largest sense is best understood as a material body." The schoolmarm opening to such a sentence, the unnecessary exaggeration of the two superlatives, the leaden repetition of "understood," and finally that outrageous (but outrageously fashionable) metaphor of the body: This is rhetoric gone wild with self-esteem. It is odd that a writer on style can be so insensitive to style herself. Style is no more a "material body" than it is a bowl of soup (we speak of a writer's "body of work," but we don't mean one with myopia, bad breath and an unpleasant husband). Vendler needs the metaphor to claim that by changing style the poet "perpetuates an act of violence, so to speak, on the self." This is to make every change in style a scar or a suicide; but many changes in poetic style might be called natural or organic, the residue of mad growth or slow invention, the sin of wisdom or the virtue of calculation.
Vendler is one of the most acute of contemporary critics, and her close reading of stylistic changes in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney and Jorie Graham attends to aspects of style not always given formal attention -- Hopkins's adoption of sprung rhythm may be familiar, but not Heaney's concentration on parts of speech or Jorie Graham's changes in line length. Vendler wants to establish that "the first duty of any poet is to reconfigure felt experience in an analogical rhythm -- prosodic, syntactic, or structural"; and when she escapes the duties of her metaphor (duties that lead her into formulations like "Hopkins' new zigzag stylistic body . . . is more nervous and fluctuating than his younger stylistic body") her readings (of, for example, Heaney's "inbetweenness") have all the force and ingenuity of which this critic is capable.
These chapters on style began as the Richard Ellmann Memorial Lectures at Emory University and have been published simultaneously with The Given and the Made, Vendler's T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at the University of Kent. The latter lectures, on the donnee or "given" in a poet's life that is transfigured into art, pair two older postwar poets, Robert Lowell and John Berryman, with two much younger contemporaries, Rita Dove and Jorie Graham.
The pairing -- intriguing, unbalanced, entirely to the advantage of the older poets -- reveals the weakness of Vendler's critical vision. She is superb on Lowell's "public and private forms of history" and particularly on his "disloyalty," both to family and to art; and her consideration of Berryman is fond but overstretched. (If she is unconvincing in arguing that the enclosed form of Berryman's Dream Songs restages Freud's analytical hour, her suggestion that "successive sessions of psychiatric therapy may be seen as another form of the 'sessions of . . . silent thought' which generated Shakespeare's sonnets" is sidesplitting.) Like all these lectures, The Given and the Made is limited by its occasion -- a lecture requires a specific length more than a specific subject and becomes a Procrustean bed for the partial ideas or rambling observations that an essay might allow precise development.
Vendler has a soft spot for younger poets, though her taste has been wildly uneven. Her close consideration of Rita Dove cannot conceal the utter dullness of the poetry, while her critical loyalty to Jorie Graham claims a major reputation for a poet more interesting to read about than to read, whose philosophical musings do not yet have the depth or resonance of Wallace Stevens's (and whose trilingual childhood, Vendler's biographical "given," has little effect on her poems). Vendler has attempted a higher biographical criticism that risks being biographically reductive: Her analysis of the ways the life is transposed or transformed into art is without insight into the means. We remain ignorant of why Berryman and Lowell could return as art the ruins of manic depression or family history.
The stylistic emphasis of the one book and the biographical concerns of the other avoid judgment on language -- its currents of meaning, ambiguity and betrayal. Vendler is too susceptible to hall-of-mirrors notions that poems are mimetic responses to themselves -- she is always looking for and applauding a "structural and rhythmic enactment" (mimetic accuracy is "the virtue, the fundamental ethics, of art") -- but a critic who can write of Berryman's "layer of psychic squalor beneath high artistic convention" or the "inescapable social accusation of blackness" suffered by Dove is worth the attention of close argument.
Anthony Hecht is our country's darkest, most brutal and moral, most magnificent living poet, an heir to Elizabethan manners. He richly deserves the Nobel Prize (though, in the way of fallen things, Allen Ginsberg or John Ashbery is much more likely to receive it). His Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, now published as On the Laws of the Poetic Art, are a defense of certain traditional understandings of poetry -- that poetry is an art most eloquent when impersonal and complex, full of tension and contradiction, ripe in mythological and literary relation.
The lectures are informal and discursive affairs, and in their slapdash desk-learning recall a certain Victorian mode -- a precis of a particularly jumbled half-paragraph might run: "Book of Job a sublime poem -- imagery drawn from architecture -- architecture the oldest of the arts -- earth described as building in Old Testament---God a builder-architect, embraced by Masons -- Haydn a Mason -- Baron Gottfried von Swieten, too." There are curious facts galore, but facts never marshaled into argument. Hecht's method is to support some entirely uncontentious notion with a list of examples and quotations, some absurdly long. "The Laws of the Poetic Art" seem finally to be that poetry is sometimes visual, sometimes musical; that sometimes the wilderness is paradise; that sometimes poetry is public, or private, or composed of contraries. This is not a distinguished addition to a series that engendered Kenneth Clark's The Nude and E.H. Gombrich's Art and Illusion.
When Hecht argues that, contrary to much modernist thinking, poetry does not have to reside in "things," or suggests that "the framed limits of a painting" may be a rough equivalent to Aristotle's dramatic "plot," or writes of "this restless ambition to render the visible world in words," you have a sense of how charged with idea these lectures might have been. But the manner is so often professorial and the prose occasionally so flyblown ("he had not evinced the normal attempts at verbal articulation"), it's like watching your great-aunt dress up as Dr. Johnson. Poetry will not be rescued from the philistines in this way (and there's a lot of tub-thumping about philistines). Hecht's poems remain a far more eloquent defense of the art.
William Logan is the author of the forthcoming book of poetry, "Vain Empires."
© 1996 The Washington Post Co.
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