Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

The Critic or the Text?

A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950, by Rene Wellek (Cape, Four Volumes : 55s., 75s., 63s., 100s.).
Beyond All This Fiddle, by A. Alvarez (Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 50s.).
Shakespeare's Wordplay, by M. M. Mahood (Methuen, 10s. 6d., hardback 25s.).
The Gaiety of Language, by Frank Lentricchia (Cambridge University Press, 47s. 6d.).
Walt Whitman's Blue Book (New York Public Library, k30).
The Poetry of W. H. Auden, by Monroe K. Spears (O.U.P., 19s. 6d.).

Matthew Arnold's celebrated definition of criticism—as 'a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known in the world'—is still a fine one. He says nothing about a partial endeavour to destroy the worst that is known in the world, and the critic should (as I think) feel under no such obligation to fight bad literature as the radical to fight bad law. The fact that a fair number of critics in our time (and in every time) direct their energies against what they consider to be 'bad poetry' does not alter the fact that the basic duty of the critic is to celebrate.

He may celebrate in general terms, as Voltaire did when he joyfully proclaimed the superiority of poetry over prose : 'Verse which does not say more, better and more quickly than prose would say it, is simply bad verse.' Or he may celebrate by definition, by pointing out the niceties of distinction between 'kinds of beasts' : as when Schiller spoke of the 'sentimental' poet as the modern poet, divided within himself, in conflict with society, and preferred him to the 'naive' poet who never came out of society and whose aims were limited by it.

Hazlitt, after half a century of observation, saw clearly that poets 'are usually weak in constitution, sedentary, nervous, melancholy and thus look for "speculative comforts". They seek compensation for the handicaps inflicted on them by nature : Byron for his mis-shapen foot, Pope for the curvature of his spine.' Even statements such as this are celebratory by nature, if one sees them (as Hazlitt did) as revelatory of a divine system of compensation!

But the moment critics step outside this sphere and enter into any kind of social or moral discussion, then their work suffers. Dr Johnson's monumental stupidities in Shakespearian criticism (and, indeed, in most spheres of art; was there ever a more amusingly blockheaded reactionary?) stemmed from his presupposition that 'it is always a writer's duty to make the world better, and justice is a virtue independent on time and place'. Goethe, too, praised bad writers for their good morals. How happily they would both have accepted office in the writers' union of the U.S.S.R.!

The history of criticism is an amusing, sometimes a heartbreaking, and all too rarely a rewarding one. The most complete account of it so far available is given in Rend Wellek's four volumes: and a fifth to come. Too many pages record, depressingly, man's inhumanity to man; a critical tradition continued into the present time by various critics—notably, I suppose, by Geoffrey Grigson, whose spleen is splendidly (if always predictably) deployed in almost every line he writes. A. Alvarez, too, has an unfortunate habit of turning his back on his subject to lunge wildly at one of his hobby horses. The hobby-horse rock gently on, for the most part, undisturbed; but Mr Alvarez ('Invidious Alf', as one has heard him called) has satisfied his momentary inclination to deal yet another blow at, say, Edith Sitwell, and all is well. (If one had a sixpence for every time he and/or Mr Grigson had dragged Dame Edith's name into a review of someone elses' work, just for the hell of it, one could afford to buy his book: which is extremely amusing, occasionally to the point—especially where the classics are concerned—and often, it seems to me, wildly out.)

In his Preface, Mr Alvarez remarks that he has omitted from his book 'all those close textual analyses which I developed a taste for at Oxford. That particular form of long-winded criticism now seems to me a pointless occupation for anyone not professionally involved in teaching.'

I am not sure it is not a pointless occupation, period. Take Shakespeare's Wordplay, for instance; here is a detailed examination of Shakespeare's 'delight in the intricacies of wordplay (e.g. punning)'. And what does it do for our reading of the plays? It is the equivalent of a close examination of the mind of the man who sets the crosswords in the Daily Telegraph. All right if you like crosswords. And then one has Mr Lentricchia, analysing Yeats and Wallace Stevens at great length; on every page is a new paragraph of opaque prose, staring into (indeed, through) the poetry, and trying to fathom the darkness beyond.

'Yeats would assert . . . that Berkeley and Kant had proved that mind is epistemologically active and constitutive of the natural world. Sometimes he would feel so pressed on the issue of freedom that he would take the self-contradicting solipsistic view (usually an inherent danger of idealistic epistemology) which holds that everything is a representation of the self. In the last analysis, his interest in epistemology seems to me rarely to have been scholarly and disciplined, but, rather, pragmatic and expedient.'

Quite so, Professor. Any questions? You, at the back, there, boy: define epistemology as it relates to Kant's alleged theory of preternatural hebetude in criticism. Discuss its influence on the work of Wilfred Higgens and the Seventh Day Adventists. Please, Sir, may I be excused?

Yes, well of course I am being unfair. I am sure (well, almost sure) that Mr Lentricchia's book will be eagerly discussed by perhaps half a dozen serious men scattered about the world; it may even become (as, the blurb tells me, Professor Mahood's has) 'a modern classic'. All I'm saying is, not for me. Give me the text, any time; with the basic necessary notes. And then just get out of my light.

The edition of Whitman's Blue Book from New York is a shining example of what I mean: so extravagant in its excellence that only America would dare produce it. In one volume is a beautiful facsimile of Whitman's own copy of Leaves of Grass, with his own revisions; in the second a textual analysis and a decently abstemious critical introduction. The result is that one has a basic do-it-yourself Whitman set, from which one can, as a reader, draw all one needs. A minority may go to the many critical works on Whitman; the reader who wants a little more than the average cheaply produced text can find in these two volumes the necessary material from which he may draw himself into Whitman's mind without the aid of any scholar.

Similarly, the publication of Dylan Thomas' early poems illuminates the later ones in a quite extraordinary way; after reading it, one's attitude to this poet cannot help but change. These notebooks show us a growing mind: and show the limitations of its growth.

I must not give the impression that the general reader (I mean, of course, the great majority of the reading public) should never expect a critic to be unacademic (in the best sense of that word) and helpful. The paperback publication of Professor Spears' excellent book on Auden is a case in point. Unobtrusive, constantly illuminating, without undue bias for or against his subject's many quirks, this writer celebrates; without being either denigratory or fawning. And since I was so rude to Dr Johnson, let me end by quoting him approvingly: 'The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it'. The same may be said of criticism.