Timothy Steele's 1990 book is an interesting salvo in the conflict regarding the relative value of free verse and metrical verse. Steele considers the growth and current dominance of free verse a striking development when placed against a 2,500-year history of metrical verse. In my opinion, he is more interesting when responding to many of the criticisms of metrical verse than he is in pointing out the misguided choices of modern/contemporary poets. His spirited defense encourages readers to discover what is valuable about meter and what might be lost in the era of its near-demise.
But on the other hand, his firm devotion to meter paradoxically threatens to undermine its importance. Points which seem compelling at first undergo a strange transformation after further scrutiny. Take for example this point: "Shakespeare, for instance, wrote thirty-seven five-act plays in iambic pentameter and approximately 150 sonnets in the same line" (164). Steele employs this strategy throughout his book: cite the use of meter by all the great poets in the history of Western civilization. Unfortunately for Steele, the point about Shakespeare makes me wonder what it is about Shakespeare other than meter that make him such a fascinating writer. In other words, meter being equal, there must be something else that sets him apart from other writers using iambic pentameter. The plenitude and longevity of certain metrical forms forces one to consider non-metrical matters when attempting to discover what is unique and provocative about poets and poems.
Steele easily refutates the reasons often given for the rise of free verse, but he does not convincingly provide a positive explanation for its dominance. It seems to me that the death of meter is largely due to the duration of its unquestioned dominance. That is, the Victorian age so valued meter that other poetic qualities in late Victorian writing moved to fiction or simply dried up. There is so much dreadful verse that flows so metrically. Without the support of meter, poets are forced to search for some other unifying method. In order to invigorate poetry, new writers needed to resuscitate and highlight other techniques. The New Critical revolution emphasized poetic figures such as irony, structure, imagery, repetition, etc. Steele condemns Eliot's concept of "music" over meter, but Eliot's point is well-taken: a poet must do more than search for every purling spring (to quote Sir Philip Sidney).
Friday, July 31, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
W. K. Wimsatt on the Unity of Imagery
W. K. Wimsatt's essay "The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery" is a typical -- and typically useful -- New Critical essay. He argues that Romantic nature poetry employs images of nature that are modified by imagination in order to uncover a subjective similitude (or insight of similitude) that exceeds the result of intellectual comparison only.
To exemplify his point, Wimsatt distinguishes between the "tenor" and the "vehicle" of a given poem. I understand them better as the "tone" or "emotional teleology" of the poem and the "content" of the poem. Wimsatt points out how the content of a Wordsworth poem works with its tone to achieve an organic unity. He writes that "[p]oetic structure is always a fusion of ideas with material." For Wimsatt, Romantic poetry leans toward sensory experience of nature rather than an intellectual exercise that characterizes neoclassical poetry. But the Romantic poet reads the spiritual into these sensory experiences, especially by confronting the mysterious in nature.
Though Romantic and neoclassical poetry find quite different places on the spectrum from "sensory" to "rational," the good poetry of each mode achieves the type of fusion Wimsatt explains. It's interesting that one of the New Critics finds something to admire in poetry of the Romantic era. I've started reading an essay by Allen Tate, who is a good deal less favorable when he discusses a poetic figure by Shelley. Maybe I'll write about that tomorrow.
To exemplify his point, Wimsatt distinguishes between the "tenor" and the "vehicle" of a given poem. I understand them better as the "tone" or "emotional teleology" of the poem and the "content" of the poem. Wimsatt points out how the content of a Wordsworth poem works with its tone to achieve an organic unity. He writes that "[p]oetic structure is always a fusion of ideas with material." For Wimsatt, Romantic poetry leans toward sensory experience of nature rather than an intellectual exercise that characterizes neoclassical poetry. But the Romantic poet reads the spiritual into these sensory experiences, especially by confronting the mysterious in nature.
Though Romantic and neoclassical poetry find quite different places on the spectrum from "sensory" to "rational," the good poetry of each mode achieves the type of fusion Wimsatt explains. It's interesting that one of the New Critics finds something to admire in poetry of the Romantic era. I've started reading an essay by Allen Tate, who is a good deal less favorable when he discusses a poetic figure by Shelley. Maybe I'll write about that tomorrow.
Labels:
New Criticism,
W. K. Wimsatt
Saturday, July 25, 2009
John Crowe Ransom and the Transformation of Desire
John Crowe Ransom's 1947 essay "The Iconography of the Master" begins in typical New Critical fashion by pointing out syntactical figures at work in a poetic text (by Shakespeare). Interesting, but standard stuff. The second half of the essay gets into a fascinating discussion of "teleological speculation." In other words, what is the purpose of a given poem? Ransom argues that this is much more complicated than it might seem (at least, for poetry of quality).
I'm interested in Ransom's use of Freud to answer this question. Ransom begins with a binary opposition between thought-work and substance, which reflects a more fundamental opposition between the ego and the id. (He uses this distinction earlier in the essay when he asserts that mixed poetic diction indicates an interplay between the id and the ego). But in teleological terms, he has trouble fully contrasting these two. If most critics tend to pit the two against each other in a zero-sum power struggle, I think Ransom is trying to remind us that the two were originally theorized to work in concert with one another. That is, the id is too "childish" and demanding to actualize its needs. It needs the special qualities of the ego, one of which is the ego's "aggression against the environment" to help procure the satisfaction of the id's drives.
While the two may work toward the same end, it's also possible that the ego may "fixate" on natural objects in a way that doesn't satisfy the id's drives. While he doesn't provide a lucid discussion of this prospect, nor does he give a clear example, he seems to set up a continuum upon which the two psychic entities interact. The task of criticism then becomes assessing a poem's placement on this continuum. He writes, "we must see how our psychic fixation serves the long-range needs of the biological organism."
With these concerns as a backdrop, it is interesting to look at a Ransom poem like "The Equilibrists," which situates two lovers between their physical desire and the "honor" that requires its restriction:
At length I saw these lovers fully were come
Into their torture of equilibrium;
Dreadfully had forsworn each other, and yet
They were bound each to each, and they did not forget.
And rigid as two painful stars, and twirled
About the clustered night their prison world,
They burned with fierce love always to come near,
But Honor beat them back and kept them clear.
The poem is a complex and ambivalent tale of desire left unfulfilled. While the lovers appear to be the primary figures of the poem, the real subject, the teleological catalyst, is "Honor." The egos fixate upon honor as the sort of restriction instituted by the ego to ensure a later pleasure. But the poem interrogates the possibility of this later pleasure, leaving the lovers in cold graves eternally separated from one another. Honor does not seem to serve our long-range physical needs.
But in true ambivalent style, Ransom also hints at the danger in caving to one's desires:
Great lovers lie in Hell, the stubborn ones
Infatuate of the flesh upon the bones;
Stuprate, they rend each other when they kiss,
The pieces kiss again, no end to this.
What a terrifying image, the body torn into ever smaller bits, each of which continues to seethe with desire. This ambivalence leaves the question of desire in the poem in the same sort of agonized equilibrium experienced by the lovers. I would argue, however, that the aesthetic pleasure of these representations of equilibrium is its own sort of consummation, and the reader who encounters it on the page has obtained the satisfaction unique to poetry.
I'm interested in Ransom's use of Freud to answer this question. Ransom begins with a binary opposition between thought-work and substance, which reflects a more fundamental opposition between the ego and the id. (He uses this distinction earlier in the essay when he asserts that mixed poetic diction indicates an interplay between the id and the ego). But in teleological terms, he has trouble fully contrasting these two. If most critics tend to pit the two against each other in a zero-sum power struggle, I think Ransom is trying to remind us that the two were originally theorized to work in concert with one another. That is, the id is too "childish" and demanding to actualize its needs. It needs the special qualities of the ego, one of which is the ego's "aggression against the environment" to help procure the satisfaction of the id's drives.
While the two may work toward the same end, it's also possible that the ego may "fixate" on natural objects in a way that doesn't satisfy the id's drives. While he doesn't provide a lucid discussion of this prospect, nor does he give a clear example, he seems to set up a continuum upon which the two psychic entities interact. The task of criticism then becomes assessing a poem's placement on this continuum. He writes, "we must see how our psychic fixation serves the long-range needs of the biological organism."
With these concerns as a backdrop, it is interesting to look at a Ransom poem like "The Equilibrists," which situates two lovers between their physical desire and the "honor" that requires its restriction:
At length I saw these lovers fully were come
Into their torture of equilibrium;
Dreadfully had forsworn each other, and yet
They were bound each to each, and they did not forget.
And rigid as two painful stars, and twirled
About the clustered night their prison world,
They burned with fierce love always to come near,
But Honor beat them back and kept them clear.
The poem is a complex and ambivalent tale of desire left unfulfilled. While the lovers appear to be the primary figures of the poem, the real subject, the teleological catalyst, is "Honor." The egos fixate upon honor as the sort of restriction instituted by the ego to ensure a later pleasure. But the poem interrogates the possibility of this later pleasure, leaving the lovers in cold graves eternally separated from one another. Honor does not seem to serve our long-range physical needs.
But in true ambivalent style, Ransom also hints at the danger in caving to one's desires:
Great lovers lie in Hell, the stubborn ones
Infatuate of the flesh upon the bones;
Stuprate, they rend each other when they kiss,
The pieces kiss again, no end to this.
What a terrifying image, the body torn into ever smaller bits, each of which continues to seethe with desire. This ambivalence leaves the question of desire in the poem in the same sort of agonized equilibrium experienced by the lovers. I would argue, however, that the aesthetic pleasure of these representations of equilibrium is its own sort of consummation, and the reader who encounters it on the page has obtained the satisfaction unique to poetry.
Labels:
desire,
John Crowe Ransom,
Sigmund Freud
Friday, July 24, 2009
T. S. Eliot, Tradition, and Phylogenesis
Eliot's important essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" has been roundly criticized because it actively deplores the one thing that so many people see as the purpose of poetry: to express one's emotions. Eliot insists that "the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past." This consciousness of the past comes at the expense of the poet's consciousness of self: "What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."
A close examination of the essay, however, reveals that this "extinction" is complicated. Of what is the poem comprised if not the poet's personality? Eliot suggests that poetry is made of the "pressure" that fuses feelings into emotions: "For it is not the 'greatness', the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts." Poetry is the combination of disparate impressions and experiences, rather than the expression of emotion.
I'm intrigued by the distinction made here between feelings and emotions. We tend to think of these as synonyms for one another, but Eliot sees the former as separate "floating" processes and the latter as unified under the poet's personality. The concept being disparaged here is "unity." The act of poetry has something to do with the dissolution of the order imposed on the world by the ego. Poetry, as Eliot thinks of it, is meant to dissolve the ego itself.
But it is not just this negative project; it also is a sort of assembly. Poetry is "a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences [...]; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation." In other words, poetry is the new experience of experiences, not the distorted unification of emotion expressed by the poet's ego.
This, of course, is Freudian language. Eliot seems to advance a notion of poetry in which one sees through the productions of the ego for the unconscious impressions and experiences underneath. But Eliot does not seem interested in advocating a celebration of the id, either. It's important to note that his discussion takes place in an essay on both tradition and poetry. This means, first of all, that he doesn't merely substitute a physiological self of seething drives for the unified ego. Instead of glorifying selfish drives, he invokes the "tradition" of history. We do not exist as beings in a simple present; rather, our present is layered over by the successive waves of the past. Our drives are not our own, but have instead been received at the species level. This combination of drives and history evokes Freud's concept of phylogenetic drives that exist as a part of the transmission of culture. Eliot tries to recover this inheritance that has been too vigorously denied by that precious construct, the individual ego.
A second and related issue is that the process of poetry does not celebrate an eruption of drives in real life, or even an understanding of drives through their phylogenetic recovery. Instead, the process Eliot describes is an aesthetic one. He writes: "the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." We suffer as individuals, but the artistic project requires a suspension of the self that allows us access to greater combinations. Eliot references Keats's "Ode on a Nightingale" as a poem that operates not by the expression of the poet's emotion or the actual experience of viewing nightingales; instead, it operates through the productive intersection of separate "feelings" brought together in the words and images comprising the poem.
I find in these two connected perspectives an emphasis on a collective unconscious of images and experiences phylogenetically deposited in the modern subject who might aesthetically recover this inheritance through the contemplation of poetry. At the very least, Eliot's essay should be seen as more than a simple veneration of the English canon.
A close examination of the essay, however, reveals that this "extinction" is complicated. Of what is the poem comprised if not the poet's personality? Eliot suggests that poetry is made of the "pressure" that fuses feelings into emotions: "For it is not the 'greatness', the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts." Poetry is the combination of disparate impressions and experiences, rather than the expression of emotion.
I'm intrigued by the distinction made here between feelings and emotions. We tend to think of these as synonyms for one another, but Eliot sees the former as separate "floating" processes and the latter as unified under the poet's personality. The concept being disparaged here is "unity." The act of poetry has something to do with the dissolution of the order imposed on the world by the ego. Poetry, as Eliot thinks of it, is meant to dissolve the ego itself.
But it is not just this negative project; it also is a sort of assembly. Poetry is "a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences [...]; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation." In other words, poetry is the new experience of experiences, not the distorted unification of emotion expressed by the poet's ego.
This, of course, is Freudian language. Eliot seems to advance a notion of poetry in which one sees through the productions of the ego for the unconscious impressions and experiences underneath. But Eliot does not seem interested in advocating a celebration of the id, either. It's important to note that his discussion takes place in an essay on both tradition and poetry. This means, first of all, that he doesn't merely substitute a physiological self of seething drives for the unified ego. Instead of glorifying selfish drives, he invokes the "tradition" of history. We do not exist as beings in a simple present; rather, our present is layered over by the successive waves of the past. Our drives are not our own, but have instead been received at the species level. This combination of drives and history evokes Freud's concept of phylogenetic drives that exist as a part of the transmission of culture. Eliot tries to recover this inheritance that has been too vigorously denied by that precious construct, the individual ego.
A second and related issue is that the process of poetry does not celebrate an eruption of drives in real life, or even an understanding of drives through their phylogenetic recovery. Instead, the process Eliot describes is an aesthetic one. He writes: "the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." We suffer as individuals, but the artistic project requires a suspension of the self that allows us access to greater combinations. Eliot references Keats's "Ode on a Nightingale" as a poem that operates not by the expression of the poet's emotion or the actual experience of viewing nightingales; instead, it operates through the productive intersection of separate "feelings" brought together in the words and images comprising the poem.
I find in these two connected perspectives an emphasis on a collective unconscious of images and experiences phylogenetically deposited in the modern subject who might aesthetically recover this inheritance through the contemplation of poetry. At the very least, Eliot's essay should be seen as more than a simple veneration of the English canon.
Labels:
phylogenesis,
Sigmund Freud,
T.S. Eliot
Sunday, July 19, 2009
David Porter on the Modern Idiom
In writing about Emily Dickinson as a nineteenth-century precursor to modern American poetry, David Porter slowly constructs a definition of modernism that deserves to be judged apart from its relation to Dickinson. In many ways, Porter's modernism is a series of losses; coherence, meaning, unity, teleology, order, and similitude are all lost. But Porter conceives of two strains of modernism that respond to these losses. Different as they are, Stevens and Frost counteract these losses by providing some sort of organizational principle, Stevens through the constructions of the imagination and Frost through the "inner mood" of the poet and his connection to society.
According to Porter, Dickinson replaces none of these losses. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, representing the second strain of modernism as Porter sees it, make the same refusal (at least during parts of their careers).
Porter provides some great readings of individual Dickinson poems, but his ultimate understanding of Dickinson seems uncharitable at best. He spends his entire book discussing what Dickinson does to language and consciousness, but then denies her a poetic project, a "life-centering angle of vision" (144). For such a sensitive reader, Porter seems incredibly short-sighted to complain that "this Dickinsonian idiom speaks fear without understanding, force without purpose, art without redemptive intention" (261).
I would argue that Dickinson explores the ineffible divergence of the opposed terms in each of these binaries rather than offering the former without the latter. She understands one's longing for the second term from within the first. But they must be separate. If she was to offer understanding, then she would be unable to create the experience of fear. Rather than refusing to replace what is lost, she presents the tangibility of loss. To me, the value of poems like Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" emerges from this same sort of tangibility.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all" --
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."
Recognizing the inevitable failure of communication is its own gain; the loss of connection presents its own materiality. Desire itself is a material absence, and Dickinson's exploration of extreme desire -- extreme separation -- is a substantial poetic project, indeed.
According to Porter, Dickinson replaces none of these losses. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, representing the second strain of modernism as Porter sees it, make the same refusal (at least during parts of their careers).
Porter provides some great readings of individual Dickinson poems, but his ultimate understanding of Dickinson seems uncharitable at best. He spends his entire book discussing what Dickinson does to language and consciousness, but then denies her a poetic project, a "life-centering angle of vision" (144). For such a sensitive reader, Porter seems incredibly short-sighted to complain that "this Dickinsonian idiom speaks fear without understanding, force without purpose, art without redemptive intention" (261).
I would argue that Dickinson explores the ineffible divergence of the opposed terms in each of these binaries rather than offering the former without the latter. She understands one's longing for the second term from within the first. But they must be separate. If she was to offer understanding, then she would be unable to create the experience of fear. Rather than refusing to replace what is lost, she presents the tangibility of loss. To me, the value of poems like Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" emerges from this same sort of tangibility.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all" --
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."
Recognizing the inevitable failure of communication is its own gain; the loss of connection presents its own materiality. Desire itself is a material absence, and Dickinson's exploration of extreme desire -- extreme separation -- is a substantial poetic project, indeed.
Labels:
David Porter,
desire,
Emily Dickinson,
T.S. Eliot
Edmund Burke and the Sublime
Edmund Burke insists that aesthetic responses are first and foremost physiological responses. When he suggests that the sublime operates by terror and the beautiful operates by love, he means that one has the physiological experience of these "passions" (e.g. tension or relaxation). As physiological reactions, these extreme experiences elude reason. Confronting the sublime, Burke writes that "the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it."
Up to this point, there is an exclusive relationship between subject and object: each object gets experienced directly by the subject. But this relationship enters language. Burke contends that words elicit a physiological reaction based ontheir uses in the subject's past, even though these connections are no longer conscious:
"Such words are in reality but mere sounds; but they are sounds, which being used on particular occasions, wherein we receive some good, or suffer some evil [...] and being applied in such a variety of cases that we know readily by habit to what things they belong, they produce in the mind, whenever they are afterwards mentioned, effects similar to those of their occasions."
From this perspective, words create physiological responses because they refer back to earlier experiences to which the word was applied. Rather than being a signifier in a hermetic signifying system, the word possesses a history for the subject. Each use of a word relies upon earlier uses. The direction of this movement points back to childhood. Although Burke doesn't mention this specifically, the word comes to activate childhood memories, those experiences during which children learn language. A complex word gets laid over an experience from the past, and when that word is used, the past is in some way recovered.
In this argument, Burke provides the warrant for a shift to Oedipal terminology. He takes this step fully when he writes about the father: "[t]he authority of the father, so useful to our well-being, and so justly venerable upon all accounts, hinders us from having that entire love for him that we have for our mothers, where the parental authority is almost melted down into the mother's fondness and indulgence." The authority of the father is associated with the sublime, while the love of the mother is associated with beauty. Our aesthetic responses to objects take place within this paradigm of memories.
In spite of these similarities, however, it rewards the careful reader to distinguish between the "delight" of Burke's sublime and the pathology of Freud's repression. Burke describes the sublime as a terror mitigated by distance. He writes that "terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close." For Burke, the viewer is not truly endangered by the sublime object. Instead, the somatic symptoms are aesthetically recreated to enforce the sublimity of the law-giving father. In this way, the initiate is brought into existing social relations, a sublation involving the assumption of social power through the denial of selfhood.
In speaking of the Deity as the ultimate authority, Burke writes: "whilst we contemplate so vast an object [...] we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him." But he reiterates the social value of this subjection by again stressing the benefits gained through this process: "If we rejoice, we rejoice with trembling; and even whilst we are receiving benefits, we cannot but shudder at the power which can confer benefits of such mighty importance." The sublime is a delight because it dramatizes one's initiation into the law of the father, through which the assumption of power takes place. To relive the terror aesthetically is to reenact one's emergence into social power.
Sigmund Freud's theory of repression and the unconscious focuses on drives which cannot be sublimated into aesthetic responses, i.e. energy which must be repressed. For Burke, that which exceeds reason is given a harmless aesthetic release as the sublime, while for Freud the uncanny represents the return of the repressed in a truly terrifying form: "among those things that are felt to be frightening there must be one group in which it can be shown that the frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns" ("The Uncanny"). Whereas Burke posits a vast, obscure sublime into which one both disappears and is created, Freud presents "[s]evered limbs, a severed head, a hand detached from the arm" as examples of a self constructed as guilty and implicated in crimes of desire that exceed the power of aesthetics to sublimate. While Freud's conception creates its own problems for the subject's autonomy, it avoids what is, for Burke, ultimately a complicity with the status quo based on one's acquiescence to the authority of the sublime object.
Up to this point, there is an exclusive relationship between subject and object: each object gets experienced directly by the subject. But this relationship enters language. Burke contends that words elicit a physiological reaction based ontheir uses in the subject's past, even though these connections are no longer conscious:
"Such words are in reality but mere sounds; but they are sounds, which being used on particular occasions, wherein we receive some good, or suffer some evil [...] and being applied in such a variety of cases that we know readily by habit to what things they belong, they produce in the mind, whenever they are afterwards mentioned, effects similar to those of their occasions."
From this perspective, words create physiological responses because they refer back to earlier experiences to which the word was applied. Rather than being a signifier in a hermetic signifying system, the word possesses a history for the subject. Each use of a word relies upon earlier uses. The direction of this movement points back to childhood. Although Burke doesn't mention this specifically, the word comes to activate childhood memories, those experiences during which children learn language. A complex word gets laid over an experience from the past, and when that word is used, the past is in some way recovered.
In this argument, Burke provides the warrant for a shift to Oedipal terminology. He takes this step fully when he writes about the father: "[t]he authority of the father, so useful to our well-being, and so justly venerable upon all accounts, hinders us from having that entire love for him that we have for our mothers, where the parental authority is almost melted down into the mother's fondness and indulgence." The authority of the father is associated with the sublime, while the love of the mother is associated with beauty. Our aesthetic responses to objects take place within this paradigm of memories.
In spite of these similarities, however, it rewards the careful reader to distinguish between the "delight" of Burke's sublime and the pathology of Freud's repression. Burke describes the sublime as a terror mitigated by distance. He writes that "terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close." For Burke, the viewer is not truly endangered by the sublime object. Instead, the somatic symptoms are aesthetically recreated to enforce the sublimity of the law-giving father. In this way, the initiate is brought into existing social relations, a sublation involving the assumption of social power through the denial of selfhood.
In speaking of the Deity as the ultimate authority, Burke writes: "whilst we contemplate so vast an object [...] we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him." But he reiterates the social value of this subjection by again stressing the benefits gained through this process: "If we rejoice, we rejoice with trembling; and even whilst we are receiving benefits, we cannot but shudder at the power which can confer benefits of such mighty importance." The sublime is a delight because it dramatizes one's initiation into the law of the father, through which the assumption of power takes place. To relive the terror aesthetically is to reenact one's emergence into social power.
Sigmund Freud's theory of repression and the unconscious focuses on drives which cannot be sublimated into aesthetic responses, i.e. energy which must be repressed. For Burke, that which exceeds reason is given a harmless aesthetic release as the sublime, while for Freud the uncanny represents the return of the repressed in a truly terrifying form: "among those things that are felt to be frightening there must be one group in which it can be shown that the frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns" ("The Uncanny"). Whereas Burke posits a vast, obscure sublime into which one both disappears and is created, Freud presents "[s]evered limbs, a severed head, a hand detached from the arm" as examples of a self constructed as guilty and implicated in crimes of desire that exceed the power of aesthetics to sublimate. While Freud's conception creates its own problems for the subject's autonomy, it avoids what is, for Burke, ultimately a complicity with the status quo based on one's acquiescence to the authority of the sublime object.
Labels:
Edmund Burke,
Sigmund Freud,
The Sublime,
uncanny
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Aristotle on Discovery
I set myself a difficult task by promising to read Aristotle's On Poetics. The goal was to gain insight into how poetry works, but Aristotle is primarily interested in narrative. It's refreshing to read a carefully structural analysis written by someone who still believes that there's such a thing as the Perfect Plot. His ideas make particularly good starting points for discussions about drama and fiction, but their applicability to poetry is complicated.
It seems more productive to work negatively; that is, start with something that Aristotle focuses on and then chart its absence in lyric poetry. The thing that jumps out at me is the fascinating discussion of "discovery." He lists the ways in which characters may discover information about themselves or others and what these discoveries can lead to. For Aristotle, the greatest discoveries are those that lead to a change in fortunes for the hero. His fate or the fate of others hangs in the balance.
I turn to modern lyric poetry and ask myself what the "characters" discover and what hinges on these discoveries. Because I'm focusing on Ezra Pound for an upcoming project, I think of his work. But I discover that overt discoveries are rare, at least within the bounds of the poems themselves. First problem: often the only "character" in a lyric poem is the poetic speaker. Second problem: these poems are often aestheticized statements of previously-held positions. There is not a change but an attempt articulate or confirm a given perspective. This is especially true of Pound, who spends a lot of time asserting rather than searching for discoveries. Here's the first two lines of "Salvationists" as an example:
Come, my songs, let us speak of perfection-
We shall get ourselves rather disliked.
Pound has a position and he asserts it. There's a certain amount of bluster in poems of this sort. Perhaps more useful in this discussion are those poems (unfortunately more rare) which most faithfully hold to the Imagist ideal. "Alba" serves as a good example:
As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.
There is something to this poem, but the poetic speaker does not actually make a discovery. That is, there is no before the discovery and after the discovery. Aristotle joins the discovery to the peripety (the change in direction or fortunes). Instead, the discovery seems to be the reader's prerogative. The poem is basically a simile offered to the reader, but one that isn't dramatically experienced by the speaker. What do we make of this equivalence? It seems that narratives structure discovery, while lyrics juxtapose suggestions, bequeathing discovery on readers.
It seems more productive to work negatively; that is, start with something that Aristotle focuses on and then chart its absence in lyric poetry. The thing that jumps out at me is the fascinating discussion of "discovery." He lists the ways in which characters may discover information about themselves or others and what these discoveries can lead to. For Aristotle, the greatest discoveries are those that lead to a change in fortunes for the hero. His fate or the fate of others hangs in the balance.
I turn to modern lyric poetry and ask myself what the "characters" discover and what hinges on these discoveries. Because I'm focusing on Ezra Pound for an upcoming project, I think of his work. But I discover that overt discoveries are rare, at least within the bounds of the poems themselves. First problem: often the only "character" in a lyric poem is the poetic speaker. Second problem: these poems are often aestheticized statements of previously-held positions. There is not a change but an attempt articulate or confirm a given perspective. This is especially true of Pound, who spends a lot of time asserting rather than searching for discoveries. Here's the first two lines of "Salvationists" as an example:
Come, my songs, let us speak of perfection-
We shall get ourselves rather disliked.
Pound has a position and he asserts it. There's a certain amount of bluster in poems of this sort. Perhaps more useful in this discussion are those poems (unfortunately more rare) which most faithfully hold to the Imagist ideal. "Alba" serves as a good example:
As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.
There is something to this poem, but the poetic speaker does not actually make a discovery. That is, there is no before the discovery and after the discovery. Aristotle joins the discovery to the peripety (the change in direction or fortunes). Instead, the discovery seems to be the reader's prerogative. The poem is basically a simile offered to the reader, but one that isn't dramatically experienced by the speaker. What do we make of this equivalence? It seems that narratives structure discovery, while lyrics juxtapose suggestions, bequeathing discovery on readers.
Labels:
Aristotle,
discovery,
Ezra Pound
Friday, July 17, 2009
Claude McKay and the Ghosts of our Heritage
It is fascinating to open the Selected Poems of Claude McKay after first perusing poetry anthologies. First, the anthologies have been very selective. The second edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry features five poems by McKay; Twentieth-Century American Poetry edited by Gioia, Mason, and Schoerke has six; the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry has a whopping twelve.
The anthologist's imperative to be selective, however, forces these unfortunate editors to decide which McKay they want to present. While all the notes agree that McKay's most important and influential work was comprised of angry yet controlled poems of social protest against racism and racial violence, there's another McKay that has gone missing: a poet so firmly shaped by the experiences of the landscape of his youth that he remains haunted by memories of place. McKay's childhood in Jamaica roils just beneath the surface, and his early Songs for Jamaica explores the ruptures of past into present.
"North and South" begins "O sweet are tropic lands for waking dreams!" These tropic lands burst into the conscious mind as the speaker inhabits a much different place. For example, the speaker in "Home Thoughts" imagines a connection back to the island:
Oh something just now must be happening there!
That suddenly and quiveringly here,
Amid the city's noises, I must think
Of mangoes leaning to the river's brink
There's a sort of synchronicity that allows the adult to overlay his current urban surroundings with the Caribbean of his youth. The speaker experiences two places simultaneously. This is its own sort of doubling; though the speaker is still one, he inhabits and is acted upon by two worlds.
I think this sort of synchronicity or dual subjectivity establishes an important argument that can help us read his more well-known protest poems. The adult is shot through with unconscious memories of the past; he cannot deny or erase his heritage. In fact, the poem "Heritage" begins:
Now the dead past seems vividly alive,
And in this shining moment I can trace,
Down through the vista of the vanished years,
Your faun-like form, your fond elusive face.
The important question about youth, then, is what sort of spirit is released into the future. In perhaps his most well-known poem, a sonnet called "The Lynching," McKay's final couplet is: "And little lads, lynchers that were to be, / Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee." The most wrenching lines of the poem, and the ones that cause such outrage, are those that condemn the next generation to the sins of their fathers. If McKay's boyhood yields "O sweet are tropic lands for waking dreams!", then one shudders to imagine the worlds that lads in "The Lynching" will inhabit in the future.
The anthologist's imperative to be selective, however, forces these unfortunate editors to decide which McKay they want to present. While all the notes agree that McKay's most important and influential work was comprised of angry yet controlled poems of social protest against racism and racial violence, there's another McKay that has gone missing: a poet so firmly shaped by the experiences of the landscape of his youth that he remains haunted by memories of place. McKay's childhood in Jamaica roils just beneath the surface, and his early Songs for Jamaica explores the ruptures of past into present.
"North and South" begins "O sweet are tropic lands for waking dreams!" These tropic lands burst into the conscious mind as the speaker inhabits a much different place. For example, the speaker in "Home Thoughts" imagines a connection back to the island:
Oh something just now must be happening there!
That suddenly and quiveringly here,
Amid the city's noises, I must think
Of mangoes leaning to the river's brink
There's a sort of synchronicity that allows the adult to overlay his current urban surroundings with the Caribbean of his youth. The speaker experiences two places simultaneously. This is its own sort of doubling; though the speaker is still one, he inhabits and is acted upon by two worlds.
I think this sort of synchronicity or dual subjectivity establishes an important argument that can help us read his more well-known protest poems. The adult is shot through with unconscious memories of the past; he cannot deny or erase his heritage. In fact, the poem "Heritage" begins:
Now the dead past seems vividly alive,
And in this shining moment I can trace,
Down through the vista of the vanished years,
Your faun-like form, your fond elusive face.
The important question about youth, then, is what sort of spirit is released into the future. In perhaps his most well-known poem, a sonnet called "The Lynching," McKay's final couplet is: "And little lads, lynchers that were to be, / Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee." The most wrenching lines of the poem, and the ones that cause such outrage, are those that condemn the next generation to the sins of their fathers. If McKay's boyhood yields "O sweet are tropic lands for waking dreams!", then one shudders to imagine the worlds that lads in "The Lynching" will inhabit in the future.
Labels:
Claude McKay,
the double
Thursday, July 16, 2009
William Wordsworth and the Double
Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads is justly read and reread by generations of literature students. Each time I read it I find more to contemplate; the things I thought I understood develop new complexities. The idea that strikes me this time through the text is Wordsworth's attempt to define what a poet is:
"[...] a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which [...] resemble the passions produced by real events [...]."
The part that grabs my attention is Wordsworth's claim that poets are "impelled to create" passions. Poets are naturally expected to be creative, but Wordsworth allows them a level of imagination that borders on fabrication. Poets are "delighted" to recognize the manifestation of their passions in the natural world, and their poems recreate the passions. But what does such a recreation entail?
Wordsworth's use of the term "conjure" is particularly subtle, suggesting one the one hand that something is merely recollected and on the other hand that it is actually brought forth. He says that "the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind." Both the poet, who is temporally separated from the original experience, and the reader, who never experienced it, gain an emotion that actually exists in the mind.
This "existence" can either be viewed as either obvious or radical. I believe it's radical. Those who favor the belief that the existence of emotion in the reader is obvious are perhaps mistaking emotion for "understanding." Language conveys information (in complicated ways, of course), but to encounter something through the distance of the intellect, to confront an idea, is different than to experience emotion.
There's a bit from the second book of "The Prelude" that exhibits how thoroughgoing this creation is:
A tranquillizing spirit presses now
On my corporeal frame, so wide appears
The vacancy between me and those days,
Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,
That, musing on them, often do I seem
Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself
And of some other Being.
This brings me to the double, of course. Two Wordsworths interact with one another, the later shaping the earlier through recollection, but the earlier always shaping the later by the addition of experiences. How often do we see this figuration in literature? It seems foundational to poetry as well as subjectivity itself. Doubling reenacts the process of individuation. And, if doubling is forever occuring, then individuation is not an act safely relegated to the past but an ongoing process. We are not individuals; we are perpetually individuating, experiencing whatever joys or traumas accompany this process.
"[...] a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which [...] resemble the passions produced by real events [...]."
The part that grabs my attention is Wordsworth's claim that poets are "impelled to create" passions. Poets are naturally expected to be creative, but Wordsworth allows them a level of imagination that borders on fabrication. Poets are "delighted" to recognize the manifestation of their passions in the natural world, and their poems recreate the passions. But what does such a recreation entail?
Wordsworth's use of the term "conjure" is particularly subtle, suggesting one the one hand that something is merely recollected and on the other hand that it is actually brought forth. He says that "the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind." Both the poet, who is temporally separated from the original experience, and the reader, who never experienced it, gain an emotion that actually exists in the mind.
This "existence" can either be viewed as either obvious or radical. I believe it's radical. Those who favor the belief that the existence of emotion in the reader is obvious are perhaps mistaking emotion for "understanding." Language conveys information (in complicated ways, of course), but to encounter something through the distance of the intellect, to confront an idea, is different than to experience emotion.
There's a bit from the second book of "The Prelude" that exhibits how thoroughgoing this creation is:
A tranquillizing spirit presses now
On my corporeal frame, so wide appears
The vacancy between me and those days,
Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,
That, musing on them, often do I seem
Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself
And of some other Being.
This brings me to the double, of course. Two Wordsworths interact with one another, the later shaping the earlier through recollection, but the earlier always shaping the later by the addition of experiences. How often do we see this figuration in literature? It seems foundational to poetry as well as subjectivity itself. Doubling reenacts the process of individuation. And, if doubling is forever occuring, then individuation is not an act safely relegated to the past but an ongoing process. We are not individuals; we are perpetually individuating, experiencing whatever joys or traumas accompany this process.
Labels:
individuation,
the double,
William Wordsworth
Monday, July 13, 2009
William Carlos Williams's Paterson
It seems ironic that William Carlos Williams's Paterson includes the line "It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written." After all, some would argue that Paterson itself exhibits this "dangerous" flaw. And yet he provides an effective comeback a few lines later when he instructs the reader to "write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive." Williams therefore makes a careful distinction between careless writing and bad writing. The suggestive but not quite explanatory difference is that careless writing is "green," evoking flora, growth, spring, vigor, and so on.
The question we must ask about Williams is what subject matter and which poetic techniques most frequently ensure we achieve the necessary "greenness." In Paterson the question of subject matter is a deceptively difficult one. Williams is well known for presenting the sensible world to the reader. That is, abstractions don't suffice for Williams; one must work through the objects of the world. His subject matter in this text is the city of Paterson. He takes a Whitmanesque approach, gathering tangible people, objects, actions, and language to construct his complex and variegated city.
And yet it is not as simple as Williams bringing Paterson to the reader. Paterson is a city figured as a human being:
Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls
its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He
lies on his right side, head near the thunder
of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,
his dreams walk about the city where he persists
incognito. (Paterson I.I)
I think it's very important that Williams makes this metaphor: city as man. This relation says something about each term; each is implicated in the other. For instance, the city has dreams that begin in water and continue as people who walk about the city. Conversely, people are filled with the landmarks of the city:
something
has brought him back to his own
mind .
in which falls unseen
tumbles and rights itself
and refalls - and does not cease, falling
and refalling with a roar, a reverberation
not of the falls but of its rumor
unabated (Paterson III.I)
The natural world flows through the individual as a "rumor" or a "reverberation." The river, with its persistent movement and unceasing roar, represents desire. It is a perpetual source of energy that moves through the subject as well as the city:
Beautiful thing,
my dove, unable and all who are windblown,
touched by the fire
and unable,
a roar that (soundless) drowns the sense
with its reiteration
unwilling to lie in its bed
and sleep and sleep, sleep
in its dark bed. (Paterson III.I)
This passage recognizes the act of repression, forcing the roar of the river to "its dark bed" like a hidden unconscious. Williams's particularly astute observation is that the reverberation is not caused by the falls, but by its "rumor." The river-as-the-unconscious is only understood through the distortions required of it to become conscious.
But if I could pick up on Williams's complex metaphor, I see a sort of shortcoming in the poem. Williams too often accepts anything the river brings to him. That is, using an early notion of Freud's, the unconscious is simply the place where things rest (or percolate) that are not currently in the conscious mind. There is much that is ordinary or mundane in the unconscious. But because it is part of the flux of the river, Williams considers everything important. All of this is a round-about way of saying that Williams includes too much. His attempt to grasp everything tangible leads to a collection of objects of varying quality and intensity. He would have been better to be more selective in his material and more intent in discovering language's ability to pick up on the "rumor" of desire.
The question we must ask about Williams is what subject matter and which poetic techniques most frequently ensure we achieve the necessary "greenness." In Paterson the question of subject matter is a deceptively difficult one. Williams is well known for presenting the sensible world to the reader. That is, abstractions don't suffice for Williams; one must work through the objects of the world. His subject matter in this text is the city of Paterson. He takes a Whitmanesque approach, gathering tangible people, objects, actions, and language to construct his complex and variegated city.
And yet it is not as simple as Williams bringing Paterson to the reader. Paterson is a city figured as a human being:
Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls
its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He
lies on his right side, head near the thunder
of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,
his dreams walk about the city where he persists
incognito. (Paterson I.I)
I think it's very important that Williams makes this metaphor: city as man. This relation says something about each term; each is implicated in the other. For instance, the city has dreams that begin in water and continue as people who walk about the city. Conversely, people are filled with the landmarks of the city:
something
has brought him back to his own
mind .
in which falls unseen
tumbles and rights itself
and refalls - and does not cease, falling
and refalling with a roar, a reverberation
not of the falls but of its rumor
unabated (Paterson III.I)
The natural world flows through the individual as a "rumor" or a "reverberation." The river, with its persistent movement and unceasing roar, represents desire. It is a perpetual source of energy that moves through the subject as well as the city:
Beautiful thing,
my dove, unable and all who are windblown,
touched by the fire
and unable,
a roar that (soundless) drowns the sense
with its reiteration
unwilling to lie in its bed
and sleep and sleep, sleep
in its dark bed. (Paterson III.I)
This passage recognizes the act of repression, forcing the roar of the river to "its dark bed" like a hidden unconscious. Williams's particularly astute observation is that the reverberation is not caused by the falls, but by its "rumor." The river-as-the-unconscious is only understood through the distortions required of it to become conscious.
But if I could pick up on Williams's complex metaphor, I see a sort of shortcoming in the poem. Williams too often accepts anything the river brings to him. That is, using an early notion of Freud's, the unconscious is simply the place where things rest (or percolate) that are not currently in the conscious mind. There is much that is ordinary or mundane in the unconscious. But because it is part of the flux of the river, Williams considers everything important. All of this is a round-about way of saying that Williams includes too much. His attempt to grasp everything tangible leads to a collection of objects of varying quality and intensity. He would have been better to be more selective in his material and more intent in discovering language's ability to pick up on the "rumor" of desire.
Labels:
desire,
objects,
Sigmund Freud,
William Carlos Williams
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Cary Nelson's Socioeconomic View
Cary Nelson seeks to historicize the study of modern American poetry in order to correct the record of literary history as it has been institutionalized in the academy. Nelson argues that poetry is more varied and complicated than the narratives that are told about it, narratives that reduce complexity by deemphasizing or completely skipping over whole poetic traditions. In particular, Nelson points out that much poetry was being written that rejected the modernist break from the past. The poetry that survives the critical and historical apparatus is a modernism that "reinforces a romantic ideology of timeless individual achievement and a disdain for lived experience" (37).
I find it very easy to agree with all of this. A problem emerges, however, when Nelson attempts to discuss what makes overlooked poetry worth recovering. For example, he praises H. H. Lewis's "Thinking of Russia":
I'm always thinking of Russia,
I can't keep her out of my head,
I don't give a damn for Uncle Sham,
I'm a left-wing radical Red.
Nelson highlights the concise and effective wordplay that substitutes Sham for Sam, but this is the whole poem. I may be looking for techniques that I've been trained to by the academy, but if there's no other skillful use of language than a quick pun, than I'm not sure what there is to value. Nelson appreciates its commitment and clarity, but the poem seems flat to me as a use of language.
My comments here of course reveal the unfortunate tendencies against which Nelson struggles. Our aesthetic perspectives are based on entirely different notions of what the function of poetry is. Without inventive language and an important discovery that rewards repeated readings, I'm just not that interested. To me, it reads like propaganda -- and it would if it was for rather than against the American economic (and military) system. In fact, I'm sympathetic to the underlying concerns that give rise to the third line, but the poem itself hasn't investigated these in a compelling way. Staunch (though humorous) assertion is all we get.
Nelson succeeds more when he discusses poets or poems that are richly provocative that have only sometimes been coopted by the prevailing literary history. Nelson admits that poetry can be interpreted -- and especially retroactively interpreted -- to perform different social functions. He discusses Eliot's The Waste Land as a poem with at least two viable histories, the revolutionary and the reactionary. Nelson contends that it cannot be decided which of these two is true; the practice of literary history involves understanding the direction and uses of interpretation.
I find it very easy to agree with all of this. A problem emerges, however, when Nelson attempts to discuss what makes overlooked poetry worth recovering. For example, he praises H. H. Lewis's "Thinking of Russia":
I'm always thinking of Russia,
I can't keep her out of my head,
I don't give a damn for Uncle Sham,
I'm a left-wing radical Red.
Nelson highlights the concise and effective wordplay that substitutes Sham for Sam, but this is the whole poem. I may be looking for techniques that I've been trained to by the academy, but if there's no other skillful use of language than a quick pun, than I'm not sure what there is to value. Nelson appreciates its commitment and clarity, but the poem seems flat to me as a use of language.
My comments here of course reveal the unfortunate tendencies against which Nelson struggles. Our aesthetic perspectives are based on entirely different notions of what the function of poetry is. Without inventive language and an important discovery that rewards repeated readings, I'm just not that interested. To me, it reads like propaganda -- and it would if it was for rather than against the American economic (and military) system. In fact, I'm sympathetic to the underlying concerns that give rise to the third line, but the poem itself hasn't investigated these in a compelling way. Staunch (though humorous) assertion is all we get.
Nelson succeeds more when he discusses poets or poems that are richly provocative that have only sometimes been coopted by the prevailing literary history. Nelson admits that poetry can be interpreted -- and especially retroactively interpreted -- to perform different social functions. He discusses Eliot's The Waste Land as a poem with at least two viable histories, the revolutionary and the reactionary. Nelson contends that it cannot be decided which of these two is true; the practice of literary history involves understanding the direction and uses of interpretation.
Labels:
Cary Nelson,
marxism
Andrew Ross on the Failure of Modernism
Andrew Ross argues that Modernism considers subjectivity problematic due to compelling contemporary attacks on epistemology (i.e. subjectivism). Subjectivity, from this perspective, is a "problem" which must be resolved, however inconclusively, by reforming language. Ross maintains that poetic practice, and language in general, always retains a role in subjectivity. Because modernism does not understand that this role persists, failure is its chief theme. This theme plays out primarily in a poetry that dismisses subjectivity in favor of other modes of apprehending a truer reality; but Ross points out that these efforts to obtain some sort of unifying conception of reality are bound to fail. Modernism speaks of and through these failures.
I'm inclined to agree with the basics of Ross's argument, but I don't find modernism's interest in failure evidence of failure. That is, it seems modernist poets merely see in the failure of subjectivism an important loss for the subject, not necessarily an equivalency. Parallel discoveries might include the heliocentric solar system, the existence of other galaxies, or the theory of relativity. Each of these revolutionary ideas affects our notions of ourselves, damaging (or at least recasting) the development of our subjectivities. Again, this is a human drama.
I think Ross recognizes that modernist explorations of these revelations are not completely without value. While Ross points out that modernist's believe the aesthetic process cannot bridge the rift torn open by the indeterminacy remaining after subjectivism has been demolished, they certainly have done something in producing their texts. Ross's reading of "Gerontion" (and, by extension, Eliot's other early work) involves, in part, an interpretation of sexual frustration as a rejection of subjectivity marred by imperfect desire (57). Sex is itself an articulation bound to fail because it derives from a too-complete sense of complementarity. From this perspective, Eliot's poetic project may fail, but in doing so it provides a diagnosis of the various manifestations of failure in modern life.
I'm inclined to agree with the basics of Ross's argument, but I don't find modernism's interest in failure evidence of failure. That is, it seems modernist poets merely see in the failure of subjectivism an important loss for the subject, not necessarily an equivalency. Parallel discoveries might include the heliocentric solar system, the existence of other galaxies, or the theory of relativity. Each of these revolutionary ideas affects our notions of ourselves, damaging (or at least recasting) the development of our subjectivities. Again, this is a human drama.
I think Ross recognizes that modernist explorations of these revelations are not completely without value. While Ross points out that modernist's believe the aesthetic process cannot bridge the rift torn open by the indeterminacy remaining after subjectivism has been demolished, they certainly have done something in producing their texts. Ross's reading of "Gerontion" (and, by extension, Eliot's other early work) involves, in part, an interpretation of sexual frustration as a rejection of subjectivity marred by imperfect desire (57). Sex is itself an articulation bound to fail because it derives from a too-complete sense of complementarity. From this perspective, Eliot's poetic project may fail, but in doing so it provides a diagnosis of the various manifestations of failure in modern life.
Labels:
Andrew Ross,
modernism,
T.S. Eliot
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore is justly appreciated for her carefully detailed poems that reveal her observation of the natural world. If, as she claims, "it is human nature to stand in the middle of things," then she does so in her poetry, bringing objects (and especially animals) closer to the reader.
But the poem from which the above quote comes, "A Grave," also shows a bit of the symbolism she is often credited with avoiding. This becomes apparent right at the beginning of the poem. Moore often comes up with titles that lead directly into the poem, the classic example being "The Fish," which begins as if the title was the beginning of the first line. "A Grave" is less clearly this type of beginning, causing the reader to wonder if the poem is titled "A Grave" because it concerns one's final resting place, or because those words begin the first phrase: "A grave man looking into the sea." This ambiguous beginning creates a situation in which neither the grave nor the sea (or the man) are objects-in-themselves; they operate as figures for one another.
Moore explains about the sea "you cannot stand in the middle of this." It is too vast and, more importantly, filled with the emptiness of death. I hope I can be permitted such an oxymoronic phrase because, although Moore insists that "the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave," she nonetheless describes it in great detail, as is her general poetic tendency.
But it seems that these descriptions do not describe the truth of the sea as an object; the end of the poem explains that the activities of the ocean only create an appearance: "and the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bellbouys, / advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink-- / in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness." Some might read this and say that the ocean is given pure object status; it is without consciousness; it is only the activity within and around it. But my reading, and one that I feel may have been intended during its composition, assigns some importance to the human understanding of this pure object. In other words, the poem's project is not just to achieve objectivity; it is to understand human powerlessness in the face of such a vast object. The poem deliberately starts with the human perspective, explaining the desire to understand.
In a way, this poem replicates the Romantic sublime in which the vast natural object traumatizes the person who experiences it. But the resolution of the experience is very different; the poem doesn't chart the speaker's restorative revelation at the end of the poem. The experience is so traumatic, in this sense, that the human disappears in the face of it. In the same way that the grave symbolizes death, the ocean initiates the sublime and terrible death of subjectivity, so vast and uncontrollable that it abolishes the human.
But this is nonetheless a human drama. A poet still writes the poem; a reader still reads it. The victory of the object is one that is witnessed by the vanquished human, and though the poem doesn't chart the viewer's existential angst, it nonetheless proceeds through meaning-making systems of those whose meaningfulness has been brought into question. Very ambiguous, but Moore's line that things interact with the ocean "neither with volition nor consciousness" is written in language and understood through symbolim, giving at least some hope that our actions are not meaningless.
But the poem from which the above quote comes, "A Grave," also shows a bit of the symbolism she is often credited with avoiding. This becomes apparent right at the beginning of the poem. Moore often comes up with titles that lead directly into the poem, the classic example being "The Fish," which begins as if the title was the beginning of the first line. "A Grave" is less clearly this type of beginning, causing the reader to wonder if the poem is titled "A Grave" because it concerns one's final resting place, or because those words begin the first phrase: "A grave man looking into the sea." This ambiguous beginning creates a situation in which neither the grave nor the sea (or the man) are objects-in-themselves; they operate as figures for one another.
Moore explains about the sea "you cannot stand in the middle of this." It is too vast and, more importantly, filled with the emptiness of death. I hope I can be permitted such an oxymoronic phrase because, although Moore insists that "the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave," she nonetheless describes it in great detail, as is her general poetic tendency.
But it seems that these descriptions do not describe the truth of the sea as an object; the end of the poem explains that the activities of the ocean only create an appearance: "and the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bellbouys, / advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink-- / in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness." Some might read this and say that the ocean is given pure object status; it is without consciousness; it is only the activity within and around it. But my reading, and one that I feel may have been intended during its composition, assigns some importance to the human understanding of this pure object. In other words, the poem's project is not just to achieve objectivity; it is to understand human powerlessness in the face of such a vast object. The poem deliberately starts with the human perspective, explaining the desire to understand.
In a way, this poem replicates the Romantic sublime in which the vast natural object traumatizes the person who experiences it. But the resolution of the experience is very different; the poem doesn't chart the speaker's restorative revelation at the end of the poem. The experience is so traumatic, in this sense, that the human disappears in the face of it. In the same way that the grave symbolizes death, the ocean initiates the sublime and terrible death of subjectivity, so vast and uncontrollable that it abolishes the human.
But this is nonetheless a human drama. A poet still writes the poem; a reader still reads it. The victory of the object is one that is witnessed by the vanquished human, and though the poem doesn't chart the viewer's existential angst, it nonetheless proceeds through meaning-making systems of those whose meaningfulness has been brought into question. Very ambiguous, but Moore's line that things interact with the ocean "neither with volition nor consciousness" is written in language and understood through symbolim, giving at least some hope that our actions are not meaningless.
Labels:
Marianne Moore,
objects,
subjectivity,
The Sublime
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Wallace Stevens, Imagination, and Desire
I suppose it's inevitable that all discussions of Wallace Stevens get down to the concept of imagination at some point, so I might as well end the suspense early and mention it at the outset: clearly Stevens is interested in the imagination. The point is not to discover this interest, but to discover what it might mean. I'll start with my favorite single image from his work, the ninth section of his well known "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird":
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
What intrigues me about this snippet is its representation of the mind's complex relationship to reality. In the simplest sense, there are no circles in the sky. The viewer simply imagines a growing set of concentric circles marking the blackbird's progress in space. It's as if the viewer adapts the concept of planetary orbits to the flight of the blackbird: over time, the bird moves away, and its progress can be mapped. Using the imagination, order is applied to something otherwise without it.
But that's not entirely true. Stevens seems interested in the possibility that the viewer has discovered the circles rather than created them. For him, the mind discovers relationships to more fully understand the world, not to disregard it in the creation of a world. In other words, the circles themselves may be the abstract conceptions of the viewer, but they function in relation to the world. It's that connection to the real that concretizes the imagination.
In "So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch," Stevens spends the majority of the poem working in the abstract, playing with algebraic variables rather than concrete objects:
On her side, reclining on her elbow.
This mechanism, this apparition,
Suppose we call it Projection A.
In the early-going, Stevens carefully avoids particulars, suggesting that the form and not the content of the image is the "mechanism" at work. The figure is assiduously not named in the title, instead given the place-marker "so-and-so." But Projection B, made up of the figure's gestures, is given many more details. Finally, Projection C is situated at the end of a dialectical shifting of perspectives:
To get at the thing
Without gestures is to get at it as
Idea. She floats in the contention, the flux
Between the thing as idea and
The idea as thing. She is half who made her.
This is the final Projection, C.
In other words, the concreteness of the object cannot be denied, as if everything is a creation of the mind. And yet the sensible object itself is not the total of its existence; there is a term that exceeds it: the idea. She, the "object" in this poem, is "half who made her." She exists, but partly through the imagination of the viewer.
But there are two further statements in the poem that require attention. First, the ending returns to the concrete, as if to award it some priority: "Good-bye, / Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks." Stevens does what he refused to do throughout the poem on principled grounds: he names the figure in the final line. This nod toward the concrete, however, is undercut by its sudden and ironic appearance at the poem's close.
Second, and what particularly interests me most about this poem, is the reference to desire: "The arrangement contains the desire of / The artist." Here he explicitly refers to desire as an important aspect inhabiting the imagination. He seems to employ a psychoanalytic conception of the figure in the poem, calling her a mechanism, apparition, and projection. The figure is a mechanism that activates or transforms the subject's desiring energy. In particular, this figure is an apparition, a ghostly return of a past figure. The return of Mrs. Pappadopoulos is a condensation of that most fundamental and perpetual of psychoanalytic interactions: the interaction with the parents.
This might seem like a stretch -- and a stretch into an area that many critics of Freud find particularly unnecessary (and uncomfortable). But it seems like the return to the family drama is itself a condensation of an even more fundamental struggle: the development of subjectivity in which the family plays only a part (though an important one). While I haven't fully developed my ideas on this matter, it seems that individuation is at the heart of family relations, and concepts such as the oedipus complex can only be understood in this larger context.
I might be straying too far away from Stevens's poem, but I think individuation and desire plays a role in the poem. The poem stages an encounter not with the mirror image Lacan describes, but rather with the image of the Other. There's an interaction going on in which the subject projects desire onto the figure on the couch as an apparition of his own imago. In other words, imagination isn't the free interaction of object and all conceptual possibilities; it is bounded by the subject's experiences, marked most fundamentally by the process of individuation.
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
What intrigues me about this snippet is its representation of the mind's complex relationship to reality. In the simplest sense, there are no circles in the sky. The viewer simply imagines a growing set of concentric circles marking the blackbird's progress in space. It's as if the viewer adapts the concept of planetary orbits to the flight of the blackbird: over time, the bird moves away, and its progress can be mapped. Using the imagination, order is applied to something otherwise without it.
But that's not entirely true. Stevens seems interested in the possibility that the viewer has discovered the circles rather than created them. For him, the mind discovers relationships to more fully understand the world, not to disregard it in the creation of a world. In other words, the circles themselves may be the abstract conceptions of the viewer, but they function in relation to the world. It's that connection to the real that concretizes the imagination.
In "So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch," Stevens spends the majority of the poem working in the abstract, playing with algebraic variables rather than concrete objects:
On her side, reclining on her elbow.
This mechanism, this apparition,
Suppose we call it Projection A.
In the early-going, Stevens carefully avoids particulars, suggesting that the form and not the content of the image is the "mechanism" at work. The figure is assiduously not named in the title, instead given the place-marker "so-and-so." But Projection B, made up of the figure's gestures, is given many more details. Finally, Projection C is situated at the end of a dialectical shifting of perspectives:
To get at the thing
Without gestures is to get at it as
Idea. She floats in the contention, the flux
Between the thing as idea and
The idea as thing. She is half who made her.
This is the final Projection, C.
In other words, the concreteness of the object cannot be denied, as if everything is a creation of the mind. And yet the sensible object itself is not the total of its existence; there is a term that exceeds it: the idea. She, the "object" in this poem, is "half who made her." She exists, but partly through the imagination of the viewer.
But there are two further statements in the poem that require attention. First, the ending returns to the concrete, as if to award it some priority: "Good-bye, / Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks." Stevens does what he refused to do throughout the poem on principled grounds: he names the figure in the final line. This nod toward the concrete, however, is undercut by its sudden and ironic appearance at the poem's close.
Second, and what particularly interests me most about this poem, is the reference to desire: "The arrangement contains the desire of / The artist." Here he explicitly refers to desire as an important aspect inhabiting the imagination. He seems to employ a psychoanalytic conception of the figure in the poem, calling her a mechanism, apparition, and projection. The figure is a mechanism that activates or transforms the subject's desiring energy. In particular, this figure is an apparition, a ghostly return of a past figure. The return of Mrs. Pappadopoulos is a condensation of that most fundamental and perpetual of psychoanalytic interactions: the interaction with the parents.
This might seem like a stretch -- and a stretch into an area that many critics of Freud find particularly unnecessary (and uncomfortable). But it seems like the return to the family drama is itself a condensation of an even more fundamental struggle: the development of subjectivity in which the family plays only a part (though an important one). While I haven't fully developed my ideas on this matter, it seems that individuation is at the heart of family relations, and concepts such as the oedipus complex can only be understood in this larger context.
I might be straying too far away from Stevens's poem, but I think individuation and desire plays a role in the poem. The poem stages an encounter not with the mirror image Lacan describes, but rather with the image of the Other. There's an interaction going on in which the subject projects desire onto the figure on the couch as an apparition of his own imago. In other words, imagination isn't the free interaction of object and all conceptual possibilities; it is bounded by the subject's experiences, marked most fundamentally by the process of individuation.
Labels:
desire,
Imagination,
individuation,
mirror stage,
Wallace Stevens
Monday, July 6, 2009
Edwin Arlington Robinson
The general opinion of E. A. Robinson seems heavily influenced by the "anthology effect." Space constraints usually force editors to choose shorter lyrics over longer narrative poems. Robinson's voluminous works in this latter form are necessarily skipped over, which leads to a misrepresentation of the poet's body of work. In the case of Robinson, however, it seems few would lament this omission.
Though I don't claim the authority to speak of "the longer works" in any depth, it does seem that these poems don't provide Robinson the opportunity to display his strengths: humor, concision, and the use of everyday speech. While there's nothing prohibiting a long poem from employing these qualities, they tend to retreat in the face of a wordy horde. Check out the opening lines of "Roman Bartholow":
Where now the morning light of a new spring
Fell warm on winter, patient in his grave,
And on a world not patient, Bartholow--
Like one above a dungeon where for years
Body and soul had fought futility
In vain for their deliverance -- looked away
Over the falling lawn that was alive.
This all still appears a bit overstuffed compared to short poems (though still narrative) like "Miniver Cheevy," a concise character study capped with a wryly humorous ending. Similarly, the shorter poems usually treat more contemporary subject matter, unlike Robinson's trilogy of long poems on Arthurian themes.
Though I don't claim the authority to speak of "the longer works" in any depth, it does seem that these poems don't provide Robinson the opportunity to display his strengths: humor, concision, and the use of everyday speech. While there's nothing prohibiting a long poem from employing these qualities, they tend to retreat in the face of a wordy horde. Check out the opening lines of "Roman Bartholow":
Where now the morning light of a new spring
Fell warm on winter, patient in his grave,
And on a world not patient, Bartholow--
Like one above a dungeon where for years
Body and soul had fought futility
In vain for their deliverance -- looked away
Over the falling lawn that was alive.
This all still appears a bit overstuffed compared to short poems (though still narrative) like "Miniver Cheevy," a concise character study capped with a wryly humorous ending. Similarly, the shorter poems usually treat more contemporary subject matter, unlike Robinson's trilogy of long poems on Arthurian themes.
Labels:
E. A. Robinson
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Jacques Lacan, the Mirror Stage, and the Double
"The Mirror Stage" must be the most productive few pages of theory ever written. I go back again and again to the ideas in this very short paper Jacques Lacan delivered in 1949 (though I understand its genesis came several years earlier). For me, the concept of the fundamental alienation at the heart of subjectivity caused by the gulf between the image of wholeness we see in the mirror as a baby and the ungainly mass of our uncontrollable somatic functions at that stage of development is widely applicable.
In an essay for school, I called the image in the mirror "that most thoroughgoing of all archetypes: the self." The image is that through which we conceive of ourselves. I have productively used this concept when looking at bildungsromans in which protagonists form an idealized image of their self sufficiency -- and then proceed to fail to reach that image in various ways.
But the mirror stage also seems productive in terms of the "double" that I've been yakking about recently in relation to Pound and Eliot. If the self and the image of the self are both selves, then by definition we're witnessing a doubling. The double is uncanny for the very reason Freud points out: "this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed" (Freud, "The Uncanny"). The double, in this sense, might often be seen as the return of the earlier assemblage of uncontrolled drives. One is confronted not just with a strange but familiar version of one's self; this uncanny interlocutor is by turns a terrifying and embarrassing eruption of one's own ghastly lack of control.
It seems this idea has some connection, in reverse, to one of the ideas in Herman Rapaport's Between the Sign and the Gaze. Rapaport is interested in the fantasm as a frame for the viewing of another thing. His example is Plato's allegory of the cave, which requires that one imagine a cave in order to understand something about reality. That is, it is not necessary that the cave itself actually exist; it is a stage upon which an intellectual drama unfolds. Rapaport feels that this fantasm, i.e. the imagined cave, must be offered in order to represent the unrepresentable. According to this view, philosophy and literature are filled with fantasms.
Rapaport reads the mountain in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Mont Blanc as more than simply an image; it is instead a frame that allows the staging of desire, which for Rapaport means an encounter with the libidinal experiences of our earliest years. It is not a signal of the return of the repressed, but more like a forum through which our desire is articulated.
It may not be any great insight that the double I've been discussing seems to exemplify Rapaport's fantasm, but it does seem useful to continue considering the mirror stage as a fundamental forging not just of an alienated self, but a self that carries the burden of another, less developed, self with it all the time. Though it always affects our ability to make meaning of our interaction with the world, the actual imago itself may appear from time to time to haunt us.
In an essay for school, I called the image in the mirror "that most thoroughgoing of all archetypes: the self." The image is that through which we conceive of ourselves. I have productively used this concept when looking at bildungsromans in which protagonists form an idealized image of their self sufficiency -- and then proceed to fail to reach that image in various ways.
But the mirror stage also seems productive in terms of the "double" that I've been yakking about recently in relation to Pound and Eliot. If the self and the image of the self are both selves, then by definition we're witnessing a doubling. The double is uncanny for the very reason Freud points out: "this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed" (Freud, "The Uncanny"). The double, in this sense, might often be seen as the return of the earlier assemblage of uncontrolled drives. One is confronted not just with a strange but familiar version of one's self; this uncanny interlocutor is by turns a terrifying and embarrassing eruption of one's own ghastly lack of control.
It seems this idea has some connection, in reverse, to one of the ideas in Herman Rapaport's Between the Sign and the Gaze. Rapaport is interested in the fantasm as a frame for the viewing of another thing. His example is Plato's allegory of the cave, which requires that one imagine a cave in order to understand something about reality. That is, it is not necessary that the cave itself actually exist; it is a stage upon which an intellectual drama unfolds. Rapaport feels that this fantasm, i.e. the imagined cave, must be offered in order to represent the unrepresentable. According to this view, philosophy and literature are filled with fantasms.
Rapaport reads the mountain in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Mont Blanc as more than simply an image; it is instead a frame that allows the staging of desire, which for Rapaport means an encounter with the libidinal experiences of our earliest years. It is not a signal of the return of the repressed, but more like a forum through which our desire is articulated.
It may not be any great insight that the double I've been discussing seems to exemplify Rapaport's fantasm, but it does seem useful to continue considering the mirror stage as a fundamental forging not just of an alienated self, but a self that carries the burden of another, less developed, self with it all the time. Though it always affects our ability to make meaning of our interaction with the world, the actual imago itself may appear from time to time to haunt us.
Labels:
Herman Rapaport,
Jacques Lacan,
mirror stage,
Sigmund Freud,
uncanny
Friday, July 3, 2009
Robert Frost and the Training of Desire
We live in the land of the lyric, but long ago there were tales told in verse full of dialogue and identifiable, if not intense, plots. Unrhymed blank verse droned on and on page after page. In the case of Robert Frost, monosyllables rattle in rows that told of farm and country landscapes in New England. But you wouldn't know it. The anthologies collect the short and sharp lyrics, leaving the longer pieces grassy and wanting wear.
While I'm not consistently moved by Frost's longer narrative poems, I found much to think about while reading "The Bonfire" from his 1916 collection Mountain Interval. The poem describes a father who tells his children "Oh, let's go up the hill and scare ourselves" by setting fire to a pile of collected sticks and brush. Although it's not exactly prudent to do so, the protagonist wishes to throw off restriction.
If read from a psychoanalytic point of view, this scenario suggests access to the unconscious or a release of the repressed. The protagonist says "Let's all but bring to life this old volcano, / If that is what the mountain ever was -- / And scare ourselves. Let wild fire loose we will." This seems like a complete release from restriction, but the poem is really about what it means to scare one's self -- or more appropriately, to scare one's unconscious through the imposition of the superego.
The protagonist shares the story of when he was a child and set fire to nature. Rather than let the fire burn, he was able "to hold it back / By leaning back myself, as if the reins / Were round my neck and I was at the plow." He was saved from utter destruction by the repression of his desire to run away. He was able to put out the fire after imagining, "The woods and town on fire by me, and all / The town turned out to fight for me - that held me." The internalized presence of the social sphere encircled the protagonist, forcing him to do the right thing and tamp down the flame around him.
The protagonist wants to pass this lesson on to his children, the danger of letting one's self be consumed. He argues that the world can bring greater challenges and more substantial scares, specifically war. He says that "War is for everyone, for children too." If one cannot face the danger of fire, which perhaps signifies the terrible energy of one's own unconscious desires, than one cannot develop the ability to steel one's self against the collective terrors of war.
One must face the threat of Self-annihilation to achieve the victory over the "fire" of the unconscious. But this is not just an individual effort: "I mean it shall not do if I can bind it." The danger must be overcome by obeying the society in which one is implicated. The ultimate success, although the poem carefully does not mention it, is the redirection of one's energies from the destruction of the self or the community toward the community's enemies. If the poem is a sort of rite of passage, then the true transformation is from child to warrior.
While I'm not consistently moved by Frost's longer narrative poems, I found much to think about while reading "The Bonfire" from his 1916 collection Mountain Interval. The poem describes a father who tells his children "Oh, let's go up the hill and scare ourselves" by setting fire to a pile of collected sticks and brush. Although it's not exactly prudent to do so, the protagonist wishes to throw off restriction.
If read from a psychoanalytic point of view, this scenario suggests access to the unconscious or a release of the repressed. The protagonist says "Let's all but bring to life this old volcano, / If that is what the mountain ever was -- / And scare ourselves. Let wild fire loose we will." This seems like a complete release from restriction, but the poem is really about what it means to scare one's self -- or more appropriately, to scare one's unconscious through the imposition of the superego.
The protagonist shares the story of when he was a child and set fire to nature. Rather than let the fire burn, he was able "to hold it back / By leaning back myself, as if the reins / Were round my neck and I was at the plow." He was saved from utter destruction by the repression of his desire to run away. He was able to put out the fire after imagining, "The woods and town on fire by me, and all / The town turned out to fight for me - that held me." The internalized presence of the social sphere encircled the protagonist, forcing him to do the right thing and tamp down the flame around him.
The protagonist wants to pass this lesson on to his children, the danger of letting one's self be consumed. He argues that the world can bring greater challenges and more substantial scares, specifically war. He says that "War is for everyone, for children too." If one cannot face the danger of fire, which perhaps signifies the terrible energy of one's own unconscious desires, than one cannot develop the ability to steel one's self against the collective terrors of war.
One must face the threat of Self-annihilation to achieve the victory over the "fire" of the unconscious. But this is not just an individual effort: "I mean it shall not do if I can bind it." The danger must be overcome by obeying the society in which one is implicated. The ultimate success, although the poem carefully does not mention it, is the redirection of one's energies from the destruction of the self or the community toward the community's enemies. If the poem is a sort of rite of passage, then the true transformation is from child to warrior.
Labels:
desire,
repression,
Robert Frost
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