Helen Vendler advocates "aesthetic criticism," which she suggests is not primarily about determining meaning or declaring cultural value, but is rather about describing the artistic workings of a text. In other words, criticism should not just describe "what happens," but should also uncover "the music of what happens."
There's something immediately appealing about this bold argument made at a time when Theory was so insistent no such thing was truly possible, much less desirable. Vendler's is a call to get back to the text as a work of art and not just a puzzle or a political statement.
Unfortunately, this perspective is flawed. Yes, it is important to agree that literary texts are works of art; and, yes, the critic's task is largely comprised of exploring the operations of aesthetics; but the crucial and meaningful step in criticism is the contextualization of aesthetic principles in the cultural forces which give rise to aesthetics in the first place.
The biggest problem with Vendler's approach is that her social views determine her aesthetics, rather than the other way around. A good example occurs in her analysis of Adrienne Rich's two uses of the constellation Orion. Vendler approves of an earlier Rich poem ("Orion" from 1969) because it is "unsettled," but dislikes the later poem because it has "become more rash and violent" (383). And yet, looking at the poems, one sees that they both use Orion in a rather figurative way, once as a protector and once as a destroyer. I don't see that either view has any more or less aesthetic value. To decide which poem is more insightful, interesting, or powerful becomes a process of verifying its truth claims. Vendler has clearly done this (and declares for the former poem), but she does not elucidate the verification process, how the poem's art has led to the insight. In fact, she conceals her decision-making process under the guise of aesthetics. Committed writing become unartful, even if it is figurative and compelling, like the poem Vendler maligns:
Orion plunges like a drunken hunter
over the Mohawk Trail a parallelogram
slashed with two cuts of steel
A night so clear that every constellation
stands out from an undifferentiated cloud
of stars, a kind of aura
All the figures up there look violent to me
as a pogrom on Christmas Eve in some old country
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
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Read her account of Whitman's "reprise" in Poets Thinking. What she's "concealing" is a shameless one-upmanship, based pretty much on professional envy. That sounds harsh, but it's true. M.H. Abrams already accounted for reprise in Whitman, while defining the "greater romantic lyric." This was expanded upon (partly polemically) by De Man and Hartman, who argued that the greater romantic lyric came about by the foregrounding of an ethos, logos, pathos dialectic, first in Coleridge's conversation poems, then in the Wordsworthian poetic praxis, in which an ironic or descriptive stance toward a scene grounded its internalization by a poet, and his synecdocahl or pathetic coloring of it. Harold Bloom then turned upon this expansion to argue that the Emersonian triad of "Fate, Freedom, and Power" that grounds his "Conduct of Life," came to replace this dialectic in American poetry starting with Whitman--and traces its development up to Stevens's "Snowman" poem. Vendler straight up steals from these discourses of the 60s and 70s for her book for the common reader, published in 2006, which begins with a broad introductory polemic against all of them (and a bunch of other old/dead critical curmudgeons like richards, burke, brooks and frye). Her notion of reprise really is a plagiarism from Abrams, and doesn't go beyond its evolution in Hartman, de Man or Bloom. Also, she develops a term, "retinal innocence," supposedly as a noble synecdoche against the ironies of santayana, to designate Whitman's pathos/power/it must give pleasure stage. This is clearly just an an appropriation of Bloom's argument (in, of course, his book on Wallace Stevens) that the topos which grounds that stage of figurative thinking in the synthetic canonicity of american literature is Emerson's dialation into a transparent eyeball. And it doesn't start or end just there, either--read her close enough, and you'll find she's always concealing sources.
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