I had been holding this essay in reserve while I polished it for later publication, but I published it by accident earlier today, and it became visible generally. So I will let it stand as it is, with minor improvements.
AUTHOR'S WORDS TOWARD A PERSONAL POETICS:
A DEFENSE OF THE NEW (OLD) CRITICISM
A
Euro-American born before the middle of the 20th century, I grew up in an environment of reading that included poetry,
and by the time I began to learn to read and write I was convinced that words
work a kind of mental magic. And I was determined to learn to produce this magic. Nothing in my
subsequent experience has vitiated this vision.
A good poem is (metaphorically) enchantment, wonder-working, sorcery. Like music, it moves and
transports us; it is a psychic journey, what drug users call a “trip,” but without drugs; it intensifies and expands consciousness
and perceptions and our capacity for feeling. Like a movie, it takes us on a psychological or emotional roller-coaster ride; unlike a movie, it does not depend on graphic visual images and
sound effects, but on the verbal equivalents of these things, and it works like a kind of hypnosis.
Like all art, it provides a
specialized pleasure, which we call “aesthetic,” meaning the
satisfaction of a complex of desires— desires for order,
proportion, and coherence, as well as for stimulation and excitement; for pleasurable sensations (including the
pleasurable expenditure of energy); and for some correspondence to the world that we inhabit. It does this while it invites us to contemplation of the world, of human nature, and of ourselves as individuals, by means of words.
Therefore, a poet must know words
and be skilled in choosing and ordering them, and in using all the elements and
components of language—that is, in addition to memory (association) and logic, all the linguistic codes relevant to his purpose: concrete, sensuous imagery; rhythm, intonation, assonance,
consonance, and onomatopoeia; connotation as well as denotation; grammar and syntax; figurative and rhetorical language, allusions, and ambiguity—and of course irony, a literary staple ever since the Classical period . . . because the more resources
that are well employed, the greater the aesthetic pleasure; and because resources ill employed weaken or destroy the pleasure of that “trip,” that roller-coaster ride, and create an
undesired effect. (You, Dear Reader, should recognize here the long shadow of
Edgar Poe.)
And, because he lives among others,
the poet must use his power, however limited it may be, ethically and prudently. The power of words to move
people to force social change has been amply documented in our time—very
noticeably, in fact, ever since the invention of printing helped propel the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment in Europe. In addition, the power of words to cause serious social and,
in individuals, psychological damage has also been documented. This is the reality that inspired the Roman Catholic Church unfortunately to promulgate the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. And from the war against human sexuality spearheaded by Augustine of Hippo through the deliriums of the Liber Gomorrhianus and the Malleus Maleficarum to the degrading and dehumanizing theology of Jean Calvin and John Knox in the 16th century, from Nazi and Stalinist propaganda and the Maoist Cultural Revolution to the justifications for Western meddling in the Middle East and the recruitment of assassins by islamist/jihadist puppet-masters today, examples abound. Plentiful evidence
of this can be found in the history, anthropology, psychology, and self-help sections of any
library or bookstore as well as in the daily news.
* *
* * *
At the time that I studied
English-language literature, the
dominant critical philosophy was the New Criticism; its principal method was
the close analysis of the text of the poem, an analysis that ended with an evaluation based on whether the poet, in writing the poem, had made good use of all the relevant linguistic resources. And it was natural that beginning writers like me should apply it in the assessment of their own writing. But by the end of the 1970s it was considered old-fashioned and irrelevant by those who had the most access to the mass media, both academic and
anti-academic, and were insisting on a more demotic and irrational literary vernacular. And also by the imitators of French psychoanalytic deconstruction, who were intent on imposing their own jargon.
With the passage of time, the
tendency among writers to depreciate the values of the New Criticism has grown worse,
producing a corresponding deterioration in the quality of the reader’s aesthetic experience (the metaphorical roller-coaster ride), to the point that many contemporary
English-language poems published today by the small presses, little
magazines, and poetry web-sites, and enshrined in the popular teaching anthologies, sound and look
like simple personal aperçus, anecdotes or newspaper filler, or like translations made by unskilled translators. Or, when they are not blatant propaganda, like messages smuggled out of a psychiatric ward.
The reader either becomes confused,
wondering what the point of the piece was, or ends with the impression that,
for the writer and publisher, anything deserves to be called a poem if only it
expresses sentiments that are “politically correct” in the
current cant or jargon (that is, fashionable ideas—but the phrase originated in the brutal censorship of Stalin’s USSR), in unpunctuated lines that break off mid-phrase before reaching the right-hand
margin of the page. This is embarrassingly evident in the United States.
But the New Criticism is
still the most rewarding mode of study for a poet, and is the best guide for the
construction of poems on the foundation of whatever the world or the
unconscious psyche offers one. Why? First, because poems are, at least
in our culture, texts before they are anything else. And second, because
nothing that lacks coherence in complexity can give much pleasure or even hold the attention of any person of at least average intelligence. A person who takes poems seriously wants to explore
the coherence, the internal resonances, as well as the verbal magic of
effective poems, whether simply as a reader or as a writer in search of models
for structure and verbal skill. Only poems that have met the standards of the New Criticism can provide these models.
Furthermore, because a poem is not just a
linguistic construct, but a verbal work of art and the vehicle of an aesthetic
experience, it follows that writings that are primarily either vehicles of an ideology or exercises for letting
off steam will not be good (skillful and effective) poems, because the writer is more interested in imposing his ideas or expressing his feelings than he is in creating an aesthetic experience by means of the language in which they are couched.
These kinds of
writing—whether attempts at social criticism or what passes for creation—are either politics or psycho-therapy, more or less disguised. Of course, political participation is
a vital concern of everyone, and we all need some kind and some
degree of therapy at times throughout our lives, but these things are not poetry and they only
adulterate the writings in which they are substitutes for the poet’s art.
* *
* * *
A note on the necessity of the text: A text is a visual record of words and other symbols. When a writer writes, he creates a text. Even the performers who populate
the poetry-slam and rapper circuits declaim words that were first written texts, unless they have created and memorized their performances in an
exclusively oral fashion—or simply improvise—and in our culture, even with its great variety of voice-recording techniques, this is equivalent to re-inventing the
wheel. Although performers in pre-literate (e. g., Homeric) societies apparently did this, I doubt that
contemporary performers can do it. Forty years’ experience as a teacher
has convinced me that the great majority of Americans who began school after 1960 have very little interest in, or capacity
for, remembering anything except their social lives and entertainment
preferences.
Evidence for this is found in the growing crisis in education in the United States, with increasing numbers of school drop-outs and steadily decreasing
scores on the standardized academic entrance and exit examinations across the country—in spite of the progressive simplification of these tests in the name of “cultural diversity”—while
“reality TV” and celebrity /entertainment websites and blogs proliferate. (Along with Facebook and Twitter, etc., of course.) We must admit that acceptance of cultural diversity is necessary for everyone’s survival—the alternatives are war and genocide—as long as a society has a common core of human rights and individual liberty, and a common language (among the various vernaculars possibly in use) for vital social and political communication. But this diversity does not include the lowering of standards of competency for the skills that are necessary for the individual to function in society.
Given this situation, one may reasonably infer that even such performers as those mentioned above must
have recourse to the aid of the written word. So, as long as there are poems,
there will be texts of poems. And as long as there are texts, the criteria and the procedures of the New Criticism will be the best for serious poets.
