Old New Critics
by Ron Smith
from The Georgia Review
Winter 2004
Speaking Of Beauty, by Denis Donoghue
(Yale University Press, 2003).
Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry, by Anthony Hecht
(The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry, by W. D. Snodgrass
(BOA Editions, 2002).
Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs. What is beauty, anyway? There's no such thing.— Pablo Picasso
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.— D. H. Lawrence
There is no [critical] method but to be very intelligent.— T. S. Eliot
Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.— Raymond Chandler
Isn't it odd that, after two and a half millennia of puzzling, pondering, and pontificating, we still have no generally accepted, precise vocabulary for beauty and the arts?
The eighteenth century aimed to separate the philosophy of art from ethics and epistemology, but the philosopher who sought to clarify the issues once and for all, and to build upon the fitful, disappointing achievements of earlier aestheticians, was — too bad for us — Immanuel Kant.
Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) may have spoken "the first rational word on aesthetics," according to Hegel; but, as twentieth-century philosopher Harold Osborne has pointed out, Kant "seems to have been impervious to most forms of beauty, emotionally jejune and sensuously obtuse. He had no taste in music, and apart from some literary works the supreme artistic achievements of the world were a closed book to him."
To think about beauty or artistic power is not the same as to feel it, and what America's first real critic, Edgar Allan Poe, loftily called "the elevation of the soul" seems unquestionably essential to aesthetics. The young thinker and poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge experienced powerful intuitive responses to beauty in nature and art. When he hitched these somehow to Kant's transcendental metaphysics, philosophical Romanticism was off and running. Probably our most intense and profound probes into art and the imagination are the Romantic and the Modernist, the latter clearly heavily indebted to the former. Both the Romantic and the Modernist yearn for yet shy away from comprehensive rational system-building. Even Modernism's purest theoretical contraption, New Criticism, was — is — rarely practiced with programmatic consistency. It is no accident that the icon of literary Modernism, T. S. Eliot, found himself torn between philosophy and poetry, between the intellectual and deliberate on one hand and the artistic and improvisational on the other.
No doubt, another of the reasons for the blurred and tentative state of Western aesthetics is that its art must continually justify and redefine itself. Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility" defined the new Wordsworth poem, but not Pope's "Rape of the Lock" or Stevens' "Sunday Morning." Eliot's observation that poets "must be difficult" was a way of preparing the ground for his Waste Land, but not for the poems of Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, or Elizabeth Bishop.
In aesthetics, of all the philosophical fields, definitions that aren't egregiously exclusive tend to be extremely general. Maybe we can accept Coleridge's definition of poetry as "the best words in the best order" or Rita Dove's "poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful" because they privilege no particular type of poem and allow for new forms and approaches. Because they both focus in and open out. Because they are reasonably exact yet admirably flexible.
But what about art in general? Or, harder yet, beauty? The American Heritage Dictionary defines art as "beautiful or thought-provoking works produced through creative activity," a definition that seems inclusive of almost every made object or human presentation. The same dictionary defines beauty as "the combination of qualities that make something pleasing and impressive to listen to or touch, or especially to look at" — a formulation that is, surely, less than satisfying.
The three books of essays under review here are by writers in their late seventies and early eighties. They represent the English-speaking world's oldest living still productive creative generation. In 1939, the year that Yeats and Freud died, these writers were between the ages of eleven and sixteen. Postmodernist propaganda has it that three decades later, Modernism was defunct. But in 1968 Denis Donoghue, Anthony Hecht, and W. D. Snodgrass were forty to forty-five years old, with sensibilities fully matured, and at the height of their powers. The creators who provide my epigraphs — Picasso, Lawrence, Eliot, and Chandler, all born between 1881 and 1888 — represent the fertile atmosphere of tough, high-minded yet evasive romantic Modernism into which these essayists were born.
These books by Donoghue, Hecht, and Snodgrass are impressive for their accumulated knowledge; they are even more impressive for their freshness and responsiveness, and for their lack of dogma — even late-modernist dogma. As Donoghue says of John Ruskin, these writers have held themselves "ready for discoveries." That their general stances are essentially modernist-formalist in no way limits their work. In fact, their New Critical training provides them with gravity, precision, and depth. Here in the twenty-first century, a hundred years after Modernism's radical (and in some cases even hooliganish) origins, that dynamo of aesthetic experimentation has become a kind of sage traditionalism. Ezra Pound's "Make it new!" has become "Make it thoughtful; make it intricate; make it, for God's sake, good."
Critic Denis Donoghue was born in 1928. His Speaking of Beauty is at first intriguing, soon exasperating, often stimulating, sometimes exhilarating, and finally inspiring. In his introduction Donoghue writes, "Beauty is difficult.... It seems a self-evident value and to brook no question. It thrives on keeping quiet and never explains itself." But others have found ways to make it talk. Even if coerced testimony tends to be merely what the interrogator wants to hear, we are disappointed to find that Donoghue never even attempts to compel beauty into definitive utterance.Donoghue's detailed knowledge of the failure of aesthetics to clarify its subject matter thoroughly informs his book. He writes, "My theme is the language of beauty: not beauty as such or a definition of the beautiful but beauty in its social manifestations, its discursive presence." The implication that Donoghue's is a unified or systematic treatment of even this broad theme can produce considerable reader frustration, since it seems clear long before one finishes Speaking of Beauty that this author never had any intention of coming to grips with his amorphous and enigmatic titular subject. His title really ought to be something like Sort of Speaking About, Maybe, Beauty. In a discussion of so customarily bungled and so theoretically woolly a topic, Donoghue's disclaimers and qualifications are simply unhelpful and often disingenuous. Such statements as "In what follows I have little to say about beauty" and "My theme is not beauty but how we talk about it" are invariably, but ineffectually, contradicted.
The astoundingly allusive Donoghue admires "the daring with which [his hero Ruskin's] voice plays in the clutter of allusions," but his own allusiveness in the first half of this book is not so much daring as scattershot. In his first hundred pages Donoghue refers easily — too easily — to dozens of philosophers, theologians, essayists, critics, and artists.
Ignoring overlapping categories, we can observe that the philosophers range from Plato, Plotinus, and Aquinas through Locke, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hegel to Santayana, Croce, and Adorno. The theologians include Balthasar and Levinas; among the essayists are Montaigne, Addison, Hazlitt, and Emerson. Critics cited or gestured toward range from Aristotle and Longinus through Symons, Arnold, Clive Bell, Pater, and Ruskin to Walter Benjamin, Focillon, Empson, I. A. Richards, Blackmur, Derrida, Barthes, de Man, and Jameson.
The artists — visual, musical, literary, thespian — evoked or quoted include Phideas, Titian, Holbein, Shakespeare, Milton, Molière, Hogarth, Blake, Bach, Wordsworth, Keats, Schiller, Shelley, Schumann, Brahms, Dickinson, Flaubert, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Dowson, Beardsley, Housman, Ibsen, Wilde, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, George and T. S. Eliot, Charlie Chaplin, Robert Penn Warren, Garbo, Walker Evans, Marianne Moore, Iris Murdoch, James Merrill, B. H. Fairchild, Tim O'Brien, and Julia Roberts.
Well.
Despite Speaking of Beauty's division into an "Introduction: Words for Beauty" and five "chapters," and despite the partitioning of each chapter into numbered sections, the book is simply not logically organized. Until page 107, it is not so much a book to read as a scrapbook to rummage around in, a kind of slapdash anthology, many of whose entries are by Donoghue himself. Those interested in thinking about aesthetics will most likely want to keep Speaking of Beauty on their shelves, but they should abandon any hope of reading it front to back for argument or orderly exposition.
Even before the first page ends, one suspects Donoghue is not talking (and not-talking) about beauty at all but other matters. Like most commentators over the millennia, Donoghue confuses beauty with expressiveness (though he specifically says he won't), and even with justice and goodness. Again, given the muddled state of the terminology, the confusion is excusable, but Donoghue's easy acceptance of the muddle and his own mixed signals are not. When can one object to such a levelheaded assertion as "A theory of beauty would be a good thing to have, if it could be secured without ideological insistence"? When one strongly suspects that the assertion is merely an excuse for laziness. Anyhow, art is Donoghue's real concern, and it is not identical with beauty.
Yet, early on, I felt that the author's heart was essentially in the right place: "The most immediate reason to talk about beauty is the hope of saving it from the mercenary embrace of TV and advertisements" (and, it turns out, from postmodernist trivialization). How sad that Donoghue's carefully charted indirection is in the main a dodge, that he's actually bent on practicing a rather dazzling but self-indulgent free association. His conceptual gymnastics and learned woolgathering continue to be punctuated by such barren and probably false sentences as "The history of art is the record of the innumerable ways of being beautiful, of appearing to qualified observers to be beautiful, and of seeing images as types of beauty."
At his best Donoghue combines undeniable erudition with a down-to-earth frankness, but comments like "My aim is not to achieve a clarification" seem merely calculated to disarm — though they don't. Over and over Donoghue gestures toward the ultimate, then retreats from rigorous aesthetics.
Chapter 1 begins with "A short list of values" Donoghue claims would elicit "fairly wide agreement." The list is, however, bizarrely inclusive and rife with competing, incompatible categories: "life, love, truth, virtue, justice, and beauty. To these might be added: power, belief, communication, and money." It's not long, though, before Donoghue settles into discussions with the traditional trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty — the values he clearly sees as central. One has to wonder: Why the initial indirection? One suspects that Donoghue — suffering from Postmodernist Stress Syndrome, fearing the wrath of his younger academic colleagues — is simply being, well, equivocal, if not unctuous.
His first three chapters, "Speaking of Beauty," "The Tragic Sense of Beauty," and "Every Wrinkle the Touch of a Master," basically feature the author paraphrasing, quoting, and puttering around in some of his currently favorite works. We are walked through some musings in Mrs. Dalloway; introduced to B. H. Fairchild's interesting poem "Beauty"; funneled through a veritable rapids of ideas about beauty and art; occasionally run aground on feeble comments like "I cannot define beauty or the beautiful"; blurred past a passel of thinkers and artists whose function often seems to be to hint at withheld meanings; reminded of the Elgin Marbles controversy and of Keats's and Hazlitt's responses to the sculpture and the scandal; slipped nuggets of wisdom such as "Good causes are regularly damaged by exorbitant claims for them"; and given thorough summaries of a fascinating Henry James short story and a portentous Roland Barthes essay on Garbo's face.
The first part of Speaking of Beauty is a disaster, yes, but some will find it an enlightening one. In a way, its chaos reflects the 2,500 plus years of confusion in the field of aesthetics. Some might even feel that this book's opening incoherence is a sign of its integrity, but the central matter is confusing enough without Donoghue's adding to the confusion, which he certainly does from time to time. Take his discussion of the "disinterestedness" of the aesthetic. When he says of Henry James's story "The Beldonald Holbein" that its two artist characters "do not desire [the ugly] Louisa Brash," he is playing fast and loose with different meanings of the word desire. He's right that they do not desire her sexually, but certainly they do desire her as an object of contemplation, as "a Holbein." What may look like masterful ease in this book often feels suspiciously like automatic pilot.
Through the early chapters, which make up more than half the book, there are hints of better and more original things to come: "it seems clear that the 'tense' of beauty is the future, and that its apprehension is propelled by a politics of hope and anticipation, a surge of feeling beyond the merely given present moment."
Donoghue is quite capable of fascinating close reading; however, he too often contents himself with quotation and generalization, though he can be an impressive quoter and generalizer: "As in the best metaphors, you have to sense the awkwardness the feeling has had to ride across to achieve this particular representation. In a metaphysical conceit, you are alert to the considerations that threaten to make the figure absurd before coming to the better sense that it's not, after all, absurd: only your squeamishness was a nuisance."
In chapter 4, "The Force of Form," Donoghue truly begins to justify his book. Here, instead of an orgy of allusion, instead of faux-perplexed gesturing, we begin to get logical argumentation as well as necessary and pointed polemic. The chapter begins, "I have been postponing the consideration of beauty in relation to form...." Although he says that he has done so "because I find the question difficult to articulate, much less answer," this is false modesty. "It is," as Donoghue says, "the primary question." After spreading an erudite smokescreen for 107 pages, Donoghue gathers the courage to say, "It seems to me that form entails the conversion of matter, so far as possible, to spirit. At the moment of conversion, form and beauty seem to be one and the same. I don't see any difference between beauty and formal perfection...." Apparently, by this point, Donoghue has overcome his apprehension that this kind of talk will be taken to be hopelessly out of date, a form of romantic Modernism — which of course it is. He becomes remarkably clear and forceful: "It is true that in our time matter, in addition to the rights it deserves, has been given privileges it doesn't deserve.... Some people want pure phenomena in which no act of mind is involved. It follows that the same people want to dismiss spirit as sheer mystification and send it slinking away as if it should be ashamed of itself."
Donoghue has taken offhis mask of... what? Hand-wringing confusion? Bafflement? He enlists Wallace Stevens and Archibald MacLeish (not to mention Hegel) in his defense of form, though vestiges of his previous timidity (or subterfuge) remain. Note the word seems here: "The beauty of literature seems to entail resistance to the official designations of reality." A poem "maintains its autonomy — never absolute, however — by virtue of its form." Under the pressure of deep conviction, Donoghue's language becomes elevated: "Form is spirit as it makes its appearance and seems to realize its destiny.... Form is counter-statement.... Society makes statements and sends forth instructions, edicts, laws, definitions of reality. Literature makes counter-statements, Greek where the official designations are Roman." Literature "cannot be reduced to the journalism of themes or the commonplaces of social practice." His central notion is that literature is antinomian, "a structure of values that stands aside from the official versions of reality and goes its own way," and "if work of literature challenges the official accounts of reality directly, we say that it is antithetical to them; but more often it is antinomian, it does not engage in conflict, it declares its presence and lets posterity come to a judgment." It's no surprise that Donoghue, like many in his generation, is really a rebellious traditionalist and a formalist, that he reveres the monuments of High Modernism. And, though he retains a healthy skepticism, he finds so-called postmodernist and simplistically politicized literary criticism to be extremely unhelpful.
By page 121, Donoghue has clearly roused himself: "Form can't be evaded; it is the coherence of the work of art.... Form transfigures what otherwise merely exists, and by that transformation it maintains the validity of freedom.... Form is substance as imagined, not merely received; transfigured, not mimed." The generally mild Donoghue has now become outright combative:
These considerations seem to me much more convincing than the common arguments against Formalism: that it removes itself too quickly from the issues the poem deals with; that it conspires with the totalitarian zeal of the eye, the gaze; that in literary criticism it is so obsessed with the autonomy of the poem that it ignores the tendency of words to sprawl beyond their formal limits; and that a concern for beauty of form is an elitist satisfaction, morally disgusting while people are dying of hunger and disease. These arguments imply a claim for art that no serious critic makes. No one claims that a great symphony makes redundant the work of dentists, doctors, physicists, biologists, or politicians.... Aesthetics is in no danger of being demystified by irony or critique.The Irishman Donoghue is currently University Professor and Henry James Professor of English and American Literature at New York University — and when we get to the following passage, it's obvious that he has not only taken off his bafflement mask, has also taken off the gloves:
Some teachers of literature are encouraging their students to disregard the radical question of form and the values it entails and to concern themselves instead — diagnostic intent being the sole mode of attention — with the extractable ideological stance of the work in hand. They are prepared to settle for commonplace attitudes and notions rather than rise to the occasion of the most complex structures of feeling. The particular qualities that justify the writing and reading of literature are precisely those which such teachers are encouraging their students to ignore, in the interests, apparently, of a seminar that may be thought of as lively. They are willing to set aside the difficult virtues of irony and skepticism for the trivial satisfaction of feeling morally superior to whatever they read.... In colleges and universities we are regularly admonished to attend to our students' interests and to assume that these are popular, contemporary and discursive. "Content analysis" is supposedly enough. I can't imagine that such advice would be proffered, and with such reiterative emphasis, to teachers of mathematics, physics, or a foreign language.To Donoghue, as to so many of his generation, art matters in ways that can only be described, though with necessary trepidation, as sacred. If Romanticism shouts its belief in the transcendent and art's access to it, Modernism mutters, "Maybe, probably, maybe not..." Late modernist that he is, Donoghue remains at least somewhat wary: "Form is inspiriting because of the possible order it divines, but it is not money in the bank." Donoghue's last chapter, "Ruskin, Venice, and the Fate of Beauty," is an exhilarating homage to that thinker's "nearly ideal form of paying attention to beauty" and his "capacious" sense of the beautiful. This is the essay that started Donoghue "thinking of writing a short book on the language of beauty" (as he told us way back on page 1); substantial in length and content, it is at times quite moving. Donoghue quotes Ruskin's biblical, romantic prose at length. But he also sympathetically examines (and in part accepts) Proust's charges of "idolatry"; Carlyle's complaint that Ruskin "twisted geology into morality, theology, Egyptian mythology"; James's denigrating reference to Ruskin's "magnified rapture"; Eliot's impertinent autobiographical insinuations; and Pater's complaints that Ruskin was too general and abstract. Donoghue points out that Hopkins "takes beauty for granted in much the same way that Ruskin did — as an act of God." "Beauty is a gift... [that] points to or yearns toward God's grace." One currently unfashionable point of agreement between Romanticism and Modernism can be seen clearly in Donoghue's "None of these writers — Ruskin, Hopkins, or Stevens — would have thought of regarding beauty as 'socially constituted.'" Donoghue quotes a passage from Modern Painters, noting "false notes" and infelicities; then he says, "Ruskin's sense of beauty impelled him to look at [trees] as intently as anyone in the nineteenth century had ever looked at anything." Finally, Donoghue doesn't so much convince as inspire, doesn't so much persuade as share his enthusiasm. What he really admires is Ruskin's ability to observe and to value: "He was always reverential toward fact, the bold existence, interest, and quality of a thing seen or heard."
Ambitious critics sometimes strive for an unnatural level of objectivity, a "scientific" detachment that deforms whatever love they have for their subject into dead measurement. They also tend to be frustrated artists, and their frustration can feed envy and resentment. The highly accomplished Donoghue, though, is one of the good guys, one of the lovers more than one of the judgers or cold quantifiers.
At his best, Donoghue is a fine critic, sometimes a brilliant one, who writes for the nearly extinct well-educated general reader. His avoidance of jargon is admirable, his way of reading subtle but traditional, common-sense but shrewd. He can be surprising without being trendy. His way of reading is well established, its roots deep in examined (and no doubt unexamined) cultural and literary assumptions.
His baggy Speaking of Beauty is partly a celebration of a return to traditional ways, to what he sees as a recent "mellowness in intellectual weather." In his introduction he writes, "'Theory' is no longer the punitive discourse it was when Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Stanley Fish, Frederic Jameson, and their colleagues were first engaged in it. The tone of 'cultural studies' is not now as acrimonious as it has been.... [F]or whatever reason, there is more space for themes — beauty is one of them — which not long ago were held to be regressive. The word 'aesthetic' is no longer a term of abuse and contempt." Still, despite Donoghue's quietly jubilant suggestion that the era of nihilistic and politicized Postmodernism is past or passing, the timid, evasive first part of Speaking of Beauty is evidence that he hasn't entirely recovered from the bullying of the past couple of decades.
The other writers under review here, Anthony Hecht and W. D. Snodgrass, are poets first, critics and essayists second. Unlike Donoghue they show no signs of having been traumatized by recent academic culture wars. They have been mightily irritated, yes. But they remain unintimidated.
No matter what their era or background, real poets know that reading has never been the straw-man "innocent activity" that today's angry theorists sneer at.
Anthony Hecht was born in 1923. 1 His Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry never attempts to obscure its author's weighty and sometimes haughty traditionalism. In fact, it seems to go out of its way to assert it, opening with two somewhat redundant essays on the sonnet and focusing especially on Shakespeare's use of the form. There is a bit of schoolmasterly lecturing here about literary history. William Empson and Eliot are touchstones for this writer. Earnestness within irony, epistemological ambition within ambiguity, complexity of feeling, fusion of emotion with music and idea — these are the modernist virtues Hecht both respects and exhibits.
Hecht's title is, in one way, provocatively "poetic." The author expects his reader to recognize the most obvious source of the book's title as the famously mystic assertion from "Ode on a Grecian Urn" that serves as one of the book's epigraphs: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are Sweeter." Such a title (and the word mysteries in the subtitle) allows Hecht to concur with the highest values of Romanticism, those that place art, especially poetry, at the apex of human creativity — indeed, of human experience. However, Hecht the modernist is wary of the mystical. One can say that this book's aim is not to intuit or assert the mystical but to honor the power of direct aesthetic experience and then to render that experience eloquent. To feel and then to articulate feeling. To place the work first, then to do one's job as a critic. Hecht's explanation about this comes only at the end of his book, where he asserts the at least quasi-spiritual nature of artistic form:
It may be claimed that the music of forms goes unheard in two senses. First, in that it makes itself felt subliminally, working upon us in ways of which we are not fully aware unless we put ourselves to the study of the work in question, and examine it with care, tact, and delicacy. It will not dwindle under such examination, though there are some who suspect that it will...Here is the essence of late Modernism: the preservation of the mysterious/ultimate/primitive power of art and yet the assertion of the Formalist's faith in analysis.
Like every good essayist, Hecht wants to share his enthusiasms and explore his own responses. In Melodies Unheard we are treated to discussions of sestinas, from Sir Philip Sidney to recent masters such as James Merrill; of Henry Noel's neglected "Gaze Not on Swans"; of Hopkins' extraordinary "The Wreck of the Deutschland"; of an early draft of The Waste Land; of Robert Frost's "The Wood-Pile"; of well-known and less-well-known poems by Elizabeth Bishop; of the work of a number of contemporary poets; of Moby-Dick; of Paul's letter to the Galatians. The book closes with general treatments (always illustrated with specific examples) of rhyme and matters of form. (Hecht is keenly perceptive about traditional forms, a fine close reader. His eleven pages on "Technique in Housman" are particularly insightful.)
The assets that Donoghue emphasizes in art — disinterestedness, supremacy of form, complexity, balance, and sheer skill — all are honored by Hecht, who touches lightly upon Eliot's antisemitism but reveres the work so much that he is won over, albeit with an anxious heart, by Eliot's greatness as a poet.
Four recent pieces on contemporaries (Richard Wilbur, Yehuda Amichai, Charles Simic, Seamus Heaney) are surprisingly thin and unsatisfying. The sparkling, cynical postmodernist levity of Simic seems simply beyond Hecht, though to his credit he strives to be a "best reader," attempting to pin down this poet somehow with the surrealist label.
The most interesting aspect of Hecht's work, and one of the central sources of his artistic energy, can be found in his attraction to — perhaps obsession with — Christianity. This seems traceable to at least three origins: his deep love of the British poetic tradition, most of whose powerful effects and themes grow out of its Christian struggles and values; Jewish experiences of intolerance; and his personal World War II witnessing of Nazi death camps.
To Anthony Hecht the world hurts. And in that hurt is life's most profound meanings. This partly explains Hecht's deep appreciation of the work of Hopkins. Hecht brings together the biographical, the spiritual, and the vocational when he observes, "The pain that his conversion gave the parents he deeply loved was inextricable from Hopkins' sense of the emotional paradoxes in which his faith was fixed." Hecht modestly addresses his own relationship to Christianity in his wise piece on the tone of St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians:
As a Jew living in a society essentially secular but nominally Christian, I have felt a need to learn the ways and something of the faith of the majority.... It is impossible to be a Jew of my generation without being keenly aware of anti-Semitism, and sensitivity to this point alone has invited a study of Christian doctrine. My training in my own faith was of the most rudimentary and desultory kind, but over the years I not only grew to know it better but became increasingly acquainted with the convictions of my Christian neighbors.Hecht is drawn to extremes, especially to horror and anguish. "What scares us as much as anything else," he says, "is something in ourselves too terrible to think about and therefore carefully suppressed." In Shakespeare's sonnets he emphasizes "the appalling note of universal corruption," the "increasing darkness and unending corridors of guilt." He finds rather too much anguish in Bishop's grimly whimsical poem "Wading at Wellfleet." Hopkins' "The Wreck of the Deutschland" is "richly enmeshed with both familiar and unfamiliar Christian paradoxes": "The wind, which is spirit, the breath of God, was breathed into Adam, conferring life; but it is no less the whirlwind out of which God speaks to Job, the sign of the destructive powers later to be described in Revelation."
Hecht elucidates Hopkins' Christian themes as well as any Christian I know. Melville's love-hate relationship with belief, too, speaks to him deeply. Hecht's piece on Moby-Dick, written for the dedication of a plaque to Melville, is one of the best essays on the novel in many years. Hecht demonstrates that the book is "gleefully or sardonically subversive on a number of topics," especially religion and "unrestrained American capitalism and the Ideas and sanctions (some of these religious ones) that support it." He sees Ahab as "the incarnation of America's dream of its own Manifest Destiny," arguing persuasively that it has been Ahab's fate "to bear the burden of Puritan theology, to demand justice from an intractable, predestinate order, to defy the unfathomable, invisible powers that haunt the life of modern man and that seem to consign him, with a savage mockery, to a tragic end."
Like every formalist worth his salt, Hecht knows when to break ranks, when to look outside the work. "The need to take the intellectual atmosphere of historical periods into any account of texts" is of course a necessity. His mind-reading act in dealing with a one-word change in Eliot's Waste Land is truly impressive and ranges over historical material I've never before seen brought together in this way. Hecht's fascinating biographical treatment, "On Robert Frost's 'The Wood-Pile'" is not only informative and intriguing, but also surprising in that it stops short of obvious formalist and theological interpretations.
For all his air of superiority, Hecht reads and writes about literature for truly humble (as well as practical) reasons. As he says at the end of his introduction, "the poets and poems discussed here have been... my instructors, and the essays that follow mean to express some measure of my indebtedness and gratitude." Like Donoghue and Snodgrass, Hecht believes in the importance of mimesis but finds the magic of art in its form. However, his attitude toward form at times seems different from that of the others. There are Hecht moods in which form represents doleful limitation: despite his rigorous satisfactions of working within them, traditional forms become on occasion a metaphor for the doom of our lives, for the restrictions of the flesh and mortality, for the oppressive forces of history. The trick, the heroic achievement, is to live within, to resist, to avoid crumbling under the pressure. Where Donoghue, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, speaks of form as a natural expression of energy, Hecht tellingly speaks of Elizabeth Bishop's "triumph over the form" of the sestina, as if the form were a tyrannical force, like gravity to a bird or a pilot. It is revealing that Hecht rightly points out, "our greatest formal poets — Donne, Herbert, Campion, Herrick, and Hardy — rarely embrace received forms apart from the sonnet. What they do so conspicuously and brilliantly is to invent forms of their own."
When you read Hecht, you know why verse is not prose. In Unheard Melodies his deeply impressive final essay, "The Music of Forms," combines old-fashioned scholarship with extraordinarily sensitive close reading. In it, he objects to Galway Kinnell's suggestion that it is imagery that defines poetry. He also objects to William Stafford's anti-intellectual comment that analyzing poetry is like "boiling a watch to see what makes it tick." Yes, we can profitably dismantle this watch (and put it back together) and, no, it's not the imagery that matters. More than anything else, it's the shape and the harmony. Hecht directs us to Ben Jonson's "Epitaph on S.P a child Q. El Chappel" and demonstrates the significance of its "music, which is subtle and ingenious"; he quotes three translations of an Apollinaire poem, noting the fine differences of emotion embodied in the smallest differentiations of language ("where in Wilbur joy vanquishes sorrow, in Merwin it comes in oscillation with pain, as though love itself were tainted with inescapable misery intrinsic to itself..."); and he even refers us to Rodgers and Hart's "The Lady Is a Tramp," with its "fine rhythmical sophistication." Hecht's range of allusions is wide, the density of his literary parallels great, and he quotes approvingly Frost's "A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written."
What is the source of the sadness that seems to pervade much of Unheard Melodies? Hecht makes no mention of teaching until the closing pages, but then he says, "the overwhelming majority of my students were quite simply deaf to almost all metrical considerations.... And I [have] reluctantly concluded that there are many who are not so much mystified by meter as completely oblivious to it." Meter is the essential element of expression in most English poetry, and Hecht feels the life of his most cherished art ebbing away.
His fine book ends by giving, really, what seems the central, dispiriting reason for his title, the "second" to the above-quoted first: "There is a second way the music of forms — its echoic effects, recapitulations, harmonies, and above all its melody — goes unheard: all too often, alas, it falls upon deaf ears."
W. D. Snodgrass was born in 1926. His To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry is ostensibly the most narrowly focused of the books under discussion. And yet, in some ways, it is the most universal. Since we all use language, since we all began as children who reveled in language play, this book's delight in word-slinging, -juggling, and -bending is infectious. In fact, probably the best precedent for this book's tone — though not for its affable accessibility — is that mixture of sophisticated wit and dumb jokes we find in Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, what Joyce himself called "jocoserious."
Snodgrass's first book, Heart's Needle, won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. To Sound Like Yourself, his most recent, is in many ways a poet's self-help book; however, it is, as Robert Atwan said of Emerson's essays, "self-help elevated to the highest literary standard."
Where Donoghue and Hecht are mainly impressive, sometimes imposing essayists, Snodgrass is entertaining, invigorating. Where they are decorous, dignified, even patrician, he is brash, earthy, lively. Where they ponder, suggest, grasp, he asserts, fiddles, pounces. Like Donoghue and Hecht, Snodgrass is always alert to the danger that he may "turn a propensity into a rigid theory." Of these three books, Snodgrass's is the one I most look forward to rereading and recommending.
To Sound Like Yourself shows an abundant and restless — almost manic — verbal and emotional intelligence. Snodgrass is just so much looser than Donoghue or Hecht. Donoghue, trained in music (he was, perhaps still is, a singer), would never dream, one suspects, of adding musical scores to lines of poetry. Snodgrass merrily does it all through his book.
Like Speaking of Beauty and Unheard Melodies, To Sound Like Yourself does not begin particularly well, though it much more quickly begins to charm. In the opening essay, Snodgrass's almost boyishly personal style, somewhat discomfiting candor, and use of his own poems for illustration can seem self-indulgent and self-serving. He is at first too often silly and cute. But the vividness of his imagery and anecdotes, the enthusiasm and precision of his observations, soon won this reader over.
This is a more unified book than Donoghue's or Hecht's. It can be read straight through for tips on writing poems or as an introduction to the reading of poetry or for sheer delight in the acrobatics of language. The first section, "Pulse and Impulse," includes two essays, "Good Gray Poets and Great Horned Owls" and "Apple Trees and Belly Dancers," which combine an informative discussion of poetic rhythm with autobiographical insights. The next section, "Against Your Beliefs," comprises a single chapter that should be required reading for every teacher, student, critic, and poet who believes literature is basically just propaganda. Here, Snodgrass demonstrates that fine and central works by Hopkins, Hardy, Lawrence, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Ginsberg, not to mention Milton and Eliot, have meanings counter to the authors' "conscious beliefs." In "Disgracing Are Verse: Sense, Censors, Nonsense" word games, parodies, puns, and "linguistic pranks" of all kinds demonstrate that "We need the imponderables of music, moonshine, and malarkey" to "combine areas of conscious, near-conscious, and unconscious cognition." Along the way Snodgrass illuminates children's secret codes, the essence of folk ballads, some facts about brain physiology, the pleasures of bathroom humor, some subtleties of body language, the impossibilities of translation, a few oddities about triple meters, and a number of other matters, including the nature of "Spore Prose" and a lovely passage from Finnegan's Wake.
"Whitman's Selfsong" is a major forty-page, five-part essay about our great American poet. Snodgrass moves easily and logically between biographical and formal considerations, knitting the two with rare skill and understanding. He comments intelligently on Whitman's "drive toward absorption and inclusion" and "transformation and identification," his "denials and evasions," "fractures of ordinary usage," and "brilliant camera work."
Snodgrass shows how Whitman's "sublimation" "justifies and ennobles the drive for promiscuity" and how Whitman avoids a perennial trap laid by "promises of universal love," most of which "have led to spiritual cannibalism." The critic points out that the biographical facts Whitman "labored to suppress and transfigure" in fact "seeped into every technical aspect of his work." And he convinces us that he's justified in saying, "'Song of Myself' is... the most powerful and ambitious poetic account of our world's nature, of our spiritual reality, since Paradise Lost" — then proceeds to compare the structures of the two poems. Contrasting Whitman with Alexander Pope, Snodgrass writes that Whitman "could no more adapt to his society's literary practice than to its mating rituals — to strict couplets, if you will. To realize his mind's music, Whitman had to invent new tactics, artifices, usages, linkages, devising what we might call a polymorphous per-Verse."
Snodgrass's last section, "Meter, Music, Meaning" is not particularly original, but it's wonderfully clear. He takes up, in sequence, stress meter, syllabic meter, and syllabic-stress meter, declaring right at the beginning, "I am not messing into those weary squabbles about whether poets should use traditional meters." (Hecht, too, insists that neither traditional nor "free verse" is better than the other.) "I assume... that we ask an artist for something of his or her own, the product of a unique mental and emotional structure... an individual sensibility..." This brings Snodgrass to one of his central convictions: "Those personal qualities, evading group beliefs and strictures, naturally tend to harbor in less conscious areas; sadly, this means we may be less than aware of our own private characteristics." "It does take most of us a long time to discover our distinctive sounds; many never do.... Could any system tell you how to sound like yourself? That's what systems aim to modify, even to squelch." This is not only the artist talking, not only the critic, but also the teacher. Eliot found that teaching can harm thinkers and artists. But it seems to have broadened the experience and deepened the thought of Donoghue, Hecht, and especially Snodgrass — even if it has, in some ways, discouraged and disheartened them.
"What use is meter?" asks Snodgrass. Then, once again suggesting that a good ear is more important than a good theory, he says, "Any rule, too well obeyed, nearly guarantees the trite and dull." So many have believed, he notes, that "through propriety, obedience to rules, they could rise to beauty." But "a rhythm which becomes unobstructed and habitual, or which is overemphasized, loses immediacy and, with it, meaning and its retention."
Snodgrass's attention is minute. He perceives that the line "I saw that a car had demolished a bus," with its "balletic" anapests, "might suggest, if it appeared in a poem (where we are more responsive to such matters) an almost ghoulish delight in carnage." He also points out that "a particular stressed syllable may actually be shorter than a specific unstressed one, as in the word "pittance."
Where Hecht emphasizes Hopkins' agon, Snodgrass focuses on his vigor. Snodgrass is brilliant on Hopkins' "delightful, surging energy," his "enforced stresses," his "jarring collisions — even ten-syllable smash-ups," his "often extravagant, sometimes downright desperate" rhymes, and on how his "heavy initial stresses burst into excited loops of light syllables." Snodgrass delightfully observes that, like Milton, "Hopkins built and rigidly observed elaborate imaginary fences so that he could leap those laid out by others." Techniques and inventions "helped produce the most memorable rhetoric and vocal music in English since the time of Christopher Smart."
Snodgrass is dutiful in his treatment of syllabic meter, even if he seems a bit underwhelmed by its potentials. (Hecht slams it directly.) Still, Snodgrass is good on Marianne Moore — on both the details of her technique and of her rather astonishing psychology when he connects these to her biography and draws intriguing parallels between her and another never-married, rhythmically innovative New Yorker, Whitman. Here, as elsewhere, Snodgrass is daring yet never hubristic: "Having gone so far, I will hazard another speculation," he says, acknowledging the conjectural nature of his probe. "Unquestionably," he says firmly, puckishly, "Moore felt the need for restraints."
Of all poetic restraints, it is syllabic-stress meter that Snodgrass most honors, especially its ability to "provoke ingenious assertions of individuality." As I said before, Snodgrass is not original in these discussions, but he is extraordinarily good. He quotes and then paraphrases Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum: "'Abundance of stresses'... not merely accompanies but embodies intensity." And has the following observation ever been made more persuasively, articulately?
Uniform disposition of stresses... tends toward the emotional and musical, involving us, rather like dance music, in a kind of unquestioning participation. When emphases are either clustered or dispersed, gradations of meaning are created, so provoking more intellection, more discrimination, more personal dramatic sense.Snodgrass is excellent on "falling meters," the trochaic and dactylic. He sifts sounds so finely sometimes that one does wonder if these really are angels and if they really are dancing on the head of this particular pin. But, he's willing to admit when he's stretching. We come away agreeing with him that, yes, we need much more research on what we might call acoustic psychology.
Snodgrass can be as traditional as any commentator; he takes great pleasure in demonstrating "the shining validity" of Wordsworth's "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways." Still, those who do not really love poetry, but merely worship it, will be offended by much in Snodgrass's book. Of the three critics dealt with here, only Snodgrass finds a rather complex delight in quoting the famously bad poet William McGonagall. Snodgrass makes it clear that poetry is less a well-wrought urn than a liberation of the unconscious. He wants us to know that at parties he enjoys singing "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to the tune of "Ain't Misbehaving," and of poets who enjoy this sort of thing he writes, "We are like lovers who dare express ourselves only in mocking raillery lest we be obliterated by our own adoration."
For Snodgrass, as for so many artists, irreverence is a form of reverence, sacrilege a form of worship. (This is of course quite different from postmodernist practices that in essence recognize neither the sacred nor the profane as a legitimate category.) Snodgrass points out some healthy psychological functions of politically incorrect jokes and dialect writing. He parodies and rewrites, deliberately ruining fine and even great poems. (In Unheard Melodies Hecht did this, too — but only once and with distaste.) Snodgrass is excellent at writing badly. He rewrites Wordworth's Lucy poem with a sly, wicked delight in subtly exposing the fatuousness of so much contemporary writing. He reworks Whitman's "To the Garden of the World," making it "dull enough for most literary magazines." He dissolves "the rush of bitter emotion" in Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break" by removing its "lighter, swifter syllables" and regularizing the poem into iambics. He revises the opening of Frost's "Desert Places" so that it no longer "bespeaks great emotional turbulence," so that we might merely "go there for a weather report." He adds syllables to a Shakespeare sonnet, thus diminishing its admirable "structure of tensions and releases," as well as to lines by Samuel Daniel and William Butler Yeats. Astutely pointing out the surprising impotence themes in central poems by those high priests of sex, D. H. Lawrence and Allen Ginsberg, Snodgrass notes, "If we had hoped for eroticism, we find an unseemly, an inappropriate chastity." Finally, in mock distress, he cries, "Where are the orgies of yesteryear...?" He revels in perversity. Like Whitman, he makes it seem downright wholesome.
Snodgrass clearly sees poetry (in the words of Seamus Heaney) "as a kind of free love between the auditory imagination and the unharnessed intelligence," and he tends to emphasize its somewhat Freudian therapeutic functions. Where Donoghue fairly flinches when recalling the imperious theorists of recent decades, Snodgrass airily dismisses the "tin ear" of the critical world.
Snodgrass plunges headlong. Often he manages to combine almost miraculously genuine humility with by-the-way polemic. When it comes to criticizing American culture or American education, there is none of Donoghue's shell-shocked hesitancy or Hecht's self-protective Olympianism. In a disarming discussion of how he wrote his poem "Old Apple Trees," he writes,
By the time I've reached the phrase "each disguised as if not its neighbor," it's clear, even to me, that I'm scarcely talking about trees, or even my neighbor. More likely, I'm biting still other hands that feed me — talking about some of my less admirable students who, I fear, share certain qualities with those supermarket chickens. Unquestionably, I am talking about the American middle class and its failure to turn freedom and prosperity into creative individuality — a failure disguised alternately by gaudy self-displays of costume and manner, then by blameful demands for still more freedom, still more unfair advantages.Snodgrass ends his rowdy, delicious book this way:
I earlier suggested that the consistent "beat" of isochronic verse might be related to the mother's heartbeat and might approach, in its constancy, a kind of "ideal" (a bit like a child sitting under the piano "in the boom of the tingling strings"). If that seems far-fetched, I will go a step farther and suggest that the less regular rhythms of our more ambitious poems may reflect the brain's effort to resolve this ideal accountability with its own rhythmic nature and its effort to convert into language the varying and ever-shifting facts of an unstable and fractious world.
•
All three of these interpreters assert personal connections as if they were universal ones, but such is the critic's prerogative. Donoghue, Hecht, and Snodgrass are from time to time simply wrong. But, unlike postmodernist critics, none intends "creative misreadings." Given the tenor of the critical times, all three of these Old White Men will be accused of "elitism." Donoghue is clearly apprehensive about such charges; thus, much of his fancy footwork. Anthony Hecht, on the other hand, uses words like aristocratic not only without misgiving but with approbation, as in "aristocratic freedom from anxiety." Snodgrass, frank psychological pragmatist that he is, says, "Admittedly, exclusion has often added to the pleasures of poetry"; but he is as far from being snobbish as any poet writing today.
The best comment on elitism I know is by Stephen Dunn, who writes in his wonderful prose collection Walking Light, "The good poem [and, we can add, the good essay] is elitist, if by elitist we mean pandering to no taste lower than our own." In the sense of striving for one's highest ideal of excellence, one's best achievement, I'd like to ask this: what's more elitist than the NBA or the NFL?
Like their sometimes dictatorial New Critical teachers, Donoghue, Hecht, and Snodgrass revere artistic ambition, structural intricacy within coherence, thematic ambiguity, and tonal complexity. But they are far less doctrinaire than Brooks and Warren were when that older guard felt they were creating a rigorous new intellectual field against great cultural inertia. And, unlike the early Eliot, Donoghue, Hecht, and Snodgrass do not admire or recommend inaccessibility for its own sake. "A crucial measure of any work of art is its range of interpretation — that is, in the amount of inspection it will repay," writes Snodgrass. Then, like the others reviewed here, he asserts the importance of the so-called subjective: "Readers, like actors, must depend on their own sensitivity to unfold subtexts of character and emotion."
Why, really, read books like these?
Poets will find encouragement and clarity. Teachers will find much of use; teachers of poetry and poetry writing in particular will find much that's handy in Hecht's book and especially in Snodgrass's. Art lovers mystified by lesser commentators will behold a lifting of mists and will find amity and companionship.
General readers will delight in the revelations by, and the sheer play of, these sharp minds. They will discover perhaps the "energy [that] goes to make a major man, a personage," as the personage Denis Donoghue says of the personage John Ruskin. They will encounter the qualities Snodgrass admires in Hardy: "the complexity of attitude, the richness of mind which lets us accept, not his ideas, but him, the man whose work embodies so many of our hopes and doubts, reasonings and contradictions."
And, perhaps most of all, readers will find themselves being reminded of this piece of music or painting, that story or novel or play or film, and especially this poem, that stanza, this line. Look at this, the first-rate critical essayist says. Weigh this in your mind, heft it in your imagination. Even when such writers are wrong, their judgments dubious, we readers should be grateful. All three of these books are, if nothing else, museums, enclosures dedicated to the muses. And, except for the first half or so of Speaking of Beauty, they are generally well administered and well lighted. To adapt (against its grain) a phrase from editors Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou, from their 1998 anthology Modernism: these are museums, not mausoleums.
In a few more years, all the voices of the Twenties generation will be silent. Have we learned from their best work? Will we always have books like these?
1 Editor's note: Anthony Hecht died on 20 October 2004, while this review was in press.
The Georgia Review
University of Georgia
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© 2004 the University of Georgia.
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