This weekend, the third annual Southwell Institute Writers Conference will convene in Mahwah. The focus of this year's conference will be playwriting, so I would like to offer a few thoughts on the topic. Particularly, I would like to make a short case for the long-neglected genre of verse-drama. One of the principal aspects of the Mahwavian movement thus far has been the cultivation of formal verse, so my first argument in favor of verse-drama would be that it is in keeping with this endeavor. But I think there are other arguments, too.
The tradition of modern realist drama, inaugurated by Ibsen and Shaw, has largely eschewed the devises of artifice - including verse - formerly employed by playwrights, in order to present what its practitioners regard as a true-to-life depiction of nature. Thus, a Eugene O'Neill or an Arthur Miller can draw scenes for the stage in no material way differening from the scenes of common life. The emphasis is on this naturalism, which is everywhere opposed to artifice.
But we would do well to remind ourselves (here and always) of Burke's grand dictum: "art is man's nature." One enters into a strange building, one pays money for a ticket, one takes a seat in an auditorium designed for the presentation of plays, one sees strangers moving around in unfamiliar garb, and speaking in unfamiliar accents - in such a situation, one cannot possibly expect to witness ordinary life. In such a situation, the expectation is art - which is to say, something more beautiful and more significant than ordinary life. The stage is like a pedestal, an instrument designed explicitly for the presentation of the art work, and in effect signaling to the viewer the presence of that unique object which is the work of art. It would be no less ridiculous to see a man sitting on a pedestal in the Louvre, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the paper, than it is to see a troupe on stage at Carnegie Hall, acting no differently than they do at home in their own dining rooms.
The ancient playwrights understood this perfectly, and that is why all early drama - whether we look at the tragedy of the Greeks, the No dramas of Japan, or the Sanskrit plays of early India - is heavily stylized. And the drama of the Renaissance and Neoclassical periods - the drama of Shakespeare, Calderon, and Racine - while abandoning much of the rigidity in the formal structure of those early works, still displayed a wealth of artifice, largely drawn from the stores of rhetoric. To be sure, the aim of the playwright was always to imitate nature. But simply to say that X imitates Y, is to state that X is something different than Y. To say that art should imitate nature is to say that art is something different than nature, and what it is is that collection of principles and techniques, the employment of which allows the maker to fabricate objects excelling the commonplace world in truthfulness and beauty. First among the techniques available to the playwright to fashion a dramatic performance uniquely impressive and lovely is verse.
Whatever their thoughts on this question, I wish the new members of the Southwell family the best of luck over the next couple of weeks, as they get to work on their plays. I hope the Mahwah experience is as special and momentous for them as it was for me, and I hope we hear from some of them soon here at the Review.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
The Use of Verse in Drama
A Psalm & A Poem
Psalm 19
To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David.
1 The heavens declare the glory of God;
and the firmament showeth his handiwork.
2 Day unto day uttereth speech,
and night unto night showeth knowledge.
3 There is no speech nor language,
where their voice is not heard.
4 Their line is gone out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.
In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,
5 which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.
David Middleton
“Things”
After Psalm 19:3-4
We live among them here and partly are
What they have always been and still will be
When soul from flesh is sheared along the scar
That marks the stitching-place as soul breaks free.
Yet if we hold them wholly in the mind
To take apart and savor, then let go,
The essence of our senses but the rind
Of some rich fruit we taste but hardly know—
The bare pecan whose trunk is simply there,
Its winter limbs against a winter sky,
The squirrel that brings the nut through dusk’s dim air,
Just doing what it must to live and die—
Such things in turn may be more than they seem
In matter’s shadow-land of squirrel and tree:
Creatures who’d wake with us in that first dream,
Time’s common tongues in timeless colloquy.
(From Measure 3.1)
Type rest of the post here
Thursday, May 22, 2008
A Good Critic is Hard to Find
Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is the most disturbing work of literature I know of; reading it is a genuinely painful experience. An author (at least, a respectable one) who subjects her readers to such an experience must have a very important insight to convey, and I think O'Connor does. Here is how I read her story (with a nod to Dr. Russell for some of his insights); let me know how I do.
The family is described at the beginning of the story as quite ordinary; they are immersed in their mundane tasks, the father reading the newspaper, the children perusing the comics. Little love - one might even say, little concern - is apparent among the various members of the family; Bailey ignores his mother as she speaks to him, the children speak disrespectfully towards their grandmother. To ask if these are good people or bad people seems entirely inappropriate; they are uncommitted people, who, like the great horde in the antechamber of the Inferno, have never taken the side of good or evil in their lives.
The grandmother seems particularly frivolous, fawning over her kitten, obsessed with making a decorous appearance. When the family stops at Red Sammy's barbecue, she mourns with the proprietor over the loss of "better times," and they agree that "Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were now." This preoccupation with other people's sinfulness seems to mark in O'Connor's work those characters who fail to live a genuinely moral life (I am thinking here of "The Life You Save May Be Your Own").
Then the accident happens and the Misfit appears. Here is a character who clearly has taken a side, and its the side of evil, the most heinous evil imaginable. He explains to the grandmother that the reason he acts as he does is because he is convinced that he has been wronged by his incarceration; since the world is a realm of injustice, he sees no reason why he himself should be any different: "You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it." As he goes on to say, "I call myself the Misfit, because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment."
Of course, the Misfit's conception of himself as "a man more sinned against than sinning" reveals an obvious, even ridiculous, lack of self-understanding. But I think it is also true that his words have a representative character; all men, in so far as they are subject to "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" find it impossible to match their sufferings to their sins in a comprehensive manner. This, in the most practical sense, is what it means to live in a fallen world.
And yet, as the Misfit recognizes, if Christ rose from the dead, then the order of an unjust world (which is essentially disorder) has been overthrown, and our duty is to commit ourselves to acting in accord with the just order of the world to come: "If He did what He said, then its nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him." Of course, the other alternative is apparent: "if He didn't, then its nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness." His words here are reminiscent of Ivan Karimozov's dictum "if God does not exist, then all things are permitted." The life of the Misfit demonstrates as emphatically as possible what exactly he believes concerning this question.
But the grandmother? Her response to the Misfit is "maybe he didn't raise the dead." This response, too, is revealing and what it reveals is a soul uncommitted. But an unrestrained commitment is precisely what the Misfit (and not just the Misfit) says Christ's triumph requires of us. So in this respect, the grandmother and the Misfit are living lives of a similar moral tenor; this is why the grandmother's last words to the Misfit are: "You're one of my own children." Both have failed to make that commitment to the Gospel which alone can justify the strenuous efforts of a moral life. Both of them, in the absence of that commitment, enjoy that awful liberty which is really death, the liberty to do whatever we want. The difference between them is that the Misfit is conscious of this, and the grandmother is not; the enormous disparity in the kinds of lives they live is really a consequence of taste, more than anything. But the grandmother, in so far as she too belongs to the unjust order of a fallen world, is a misfit also. We all are, and it is only in a consistent commitment to the kingdom of heaven that we can discover the world into which we truly fit.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Waugh, Waugh, Waugh!
We’re crying over this adaptation:
Ross Douthat says that the apparently over-sexed adaption of Brideshead Revisited may be just what the novel needs, because even Waugh thought his book was sentimental and sappy. We agree that parts of the novel are overwrought, but it would be nice to have a movie that didn’t elide the novel’s Catholicism…or compress the time-line to create a bi-sexual, pseudo-incestuous love triangle…or turn Lord Marchmain into a proud pimp of a pappy.
That’s not to say the movie shouldn’t be sexless; after all, the novel is subtitled The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. And of course, it’s dangerous to assume too much from a trailer alone. Maybe the preview intentionally misrepresents the film to generate more interest, and the movie is actually a fair adaptation of the novel, one in which Catholicism is presented as a serious and positive force in the characters’ lives. From the looks of it, though, we’re afraid that this movie will be as disappointing as the 1999 adaptation of The End of the Affair, which took some, er, liberties with the strength of Sarah’s conversion.
(By the way, we're tempted to agree with Douthat’s claim that the Sword of Honour trilogy is Waugh’s superior serious work. But Waugh swings too far into his ironic mode with his [SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT] sudden, unsatisfying, and emotionless description of Virginia’s death.)
Monday, May 19, 2008
An Implausible Thesis
Much futile ink has been spent dissecting the so-called "new atheist" movement, which in fact has nothing new in it besides an unprecedented measure of impudence and asperity. Some have argued that the phenomenon is a reaction to modern fundamentalisms; others have maintained that it is the latest defense of Enlightenment rationalism. To many, the appearance of this faction has appeared quite puzzling. But to my mind, it is not very hard to understand what sort of thing this movement is, nor in what prior circumstances it has its causes.
Even the most cursory glance at the writings of Dawkins and Hitchens (and what sensible person could stand anything more than a cursory glance at their writings) reveals that their particular take on religion consists not merely of disagreement, but of disdain. Those who believe in a god are not simply persons maintaining the truth of a proposition insufficiently demonstrated; they are persons adverse to all rational demonstration. They are fools and liars. Their beliefs have no more intellectual substance than belief in unicorns and elves. They are not to be trusted, in the words of Hitchens. They are abusers of their children, in the words of Dawkins and Dennett. They are objects of pity, when isolated from the public sphere, and objects of unrestrained loathing, when engaged in the public sphere. Perhaps the most striking example of the "new atheist" contempt for religion can be found in their assertion that theology is not even a legitimate field of study; there can be no grander disdain for an opponent's position than the claim that the opponent has no real position.
Thus, in considering the general stance of the new atheists, one cannot escape the conclusion that, if they are correct, everyone who ever wrote or spoke in defense of a belief in God, a God to whom we owe certain duties, was perfectly benighted and untrustworthy. Simply put, the new atheist thesis boils down to the following: we have reached the point in history when the superstition of Plato, and Aristotle, and Isaiah, and Cicero, and Boethius, and Abelard, and Dante, and Chaucer, and Aquinas, and Donne, and Sir Thomas Browne, and Pascal, and Bishop Butler, and Samuel Johnson, and Edmund Burke, and Kierkegaard, and Cardinal Newman, can be replaced with the light and wisdom of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris.
That such a ridiculous thesis could seem plausible to such large numbers of people is attributable to one obvious fact. No fair-minded person who has read Dawkins and Cardinal Newman would consider Cardinal Newman the bigger fool; the only reason why so many people in our age have convinced themselves of this falsehood is simply because they have not read Cardinal Newman. They have not read Cardinal Newman, nor have they read any of the other classic authors, though they may have flipped through the latest issue of the New Yorker or the last installment of Harry Potter. The new atheist movement is nothing more than the entirely predictable consequence of the mis-education of the Western world over the last several generations; it is nothing but the upshot of the now intractable stupidity of Western populaces, which alone could turn a Sam Harris or a Christopher Hitchens into a respectable intellectual figure.
Or, to state the same in somewhat more dramatic fashion, the rise of such evidently ignorant and dishonest men to the status of intellectual authorities in our age fulfills the dire prophecies of Arnold, Spengler, Ortega, Chesterton, and others who wrote at the beginning of the modern era, and confirms that the barbarism which they foretold has now settled firmly over the west.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Glory, Praise, & Puppets
A friend sent us the following footage of an unusual liturgical celebration. We were particularly fascinated by the large puppets that enter during the procession.
Of course, puppets are especially successful in attracting young people to the Church, which explains why the average age of the worshipers above appears to be somewhere around 90 years old.
Still, the usual curmudgeons are upset by this style of worship, which they consider inappropriate and vulgar. These Philistines do not recognize that there is in fact a proud precedent for such celebrations, like this:
And this:
We think that the West Coast Call to Action Conference should be commended for incorporating these celebratory accessories into their liturgy, and we are particularly interested in seeing what muppets they use for their service next Good Friday.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
A Thing Ineffable
In his essay "The Study of Poetry," Matthew Arnold employs a now famous method of delineating poetic excellence. He claims that we should "have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and...apply them as a touchstone to other poetry," and then proceeds to cite a number of lines which he considers worthy of such exemplary status. This method, no doubt unrigorous and capricious, has come in for considerable derision from subsequent critics, not entirely without justice. Yet Arnold's larger point in this passage is sound, and particularly helpful to young poets searching for guidance through the wasteland left behind by modernism.
The criterion of excellence which Arnold points to is "in an eminent degree, truth and seriousness," and it is fair to say that gravity is a characteristic which all of his examples possess. He goes on to maintain - and this is the real insight, I think - that it is just that "seriousness" which produces real stylistic excellence: "the superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner." Or to put it in contemporary terms, the beauty of poetic style is largely a consequence of the wisdom of its content.
Let me offer an example of a passage which illustrates this point, one which quite merits placement even among the samples offered by Arnold himself. In the fourth act of "King Lear," the old king awakes from his curative sleep to find Cordelia beside him; remembering the hasty injustice he committed against his one faithful daughter, he acknowledges her perfect right to resentment: "If you have poison for me, I will drink it./ I know you do not love me, for your sisters/ Have, as I do remember, done me wrong./ You have some cause; they have not." To which Cordelia's simple response is: "No cause, no cause." Now, it is just these four syllables which I often think must be the most gorgeous four syllables in all of English literature; they are certainly an unrivaled example of pure poetic beauty. There is an unobtrusive tropical effect in the repetition, although in this case, the artifice is hardly distinguishable from a natural speech pattern. But, of course, the beauty of the line is really a consequence of everything it expresses: the tender and humble pathos of human forgiveness. Here, as in all fine poetry, and in confirmation of Arnold's proposition, truth and beauty become one thing.
What can we say about the causes of this union? As Arnold pointed out, nothing at all; this is the ineffable thing in poetry. But as incapable as we are of understanding the roots of this identity of truth and beauty, we are perfectly capable of recognizing it as the most prominent feature of all great poetry. Many important things follow from such a recognition, but let me point to one. Aestheticism, or the creed of "art for art's sake," explicitly rejects all moral or theological content in poetry, regarding these things as obstacles to the pure pleasure of the aesthetic experience. But, considered in the light of Arnold's observation, we can see that such a notion fails entirely to account for the unique beauty of poetry, which has its essence, not its hindrance, in truth.
Aestheticism has been one of the fundamental impulses of modernism, and its rejection can help liberate us from the brutalizing strictures of the modernist program. Art is not for art's sake; nothing exists for its own sake; all things, art included, exist for the glory of God. When we commit ourselves as poets to search only for that beauty which has its life in a serious reflection upon His truth, I think we will find ourselves, and our tradition, back on the right path. Then perhaps we will begin to understand the deep significance of those long-contested words which Keats overheard from the lips of the urn, that beauty is truth, and truth indeed is beauty.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
A Sonnet for the Internet Age
By Marion Shore, from (where else?) Measure:
“Lost in Cyberspace”
Confession: here’s the latest of my vices,
small but time-consuming all the same
(Guilty pleasure? Maybe. Midlife crisis?)—
I Google long-lost friends’ and lovers’ names.
Classmates.com, Switchboard, and the like
can yield up treasures. Other times I slog
through a mire of hits. Sometimes I strike
the mother lode: a Webpage or a blog.
So anyway, I type your name, press “search”:
an e-zine has a poem of yours—quite clever;
you’re organist and choirmaster of some church;
you’re on your second wife—or third? Whatever.
I wonder, as I press the enter key,
darling, do you ever Google me?
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Mary Jo Salter in "Measure"
The current issue of Measure opens with several poems by Mary Jo Salter, followed by an enlightening (and, as always, inspiring) interview between Salter and Dr. Baer. What we appreciated most about the interview was Salter’s unpretentious recognition of her audience, which she attributes to her time working as an editor for The Atlantic. There, she explains, she realized that poets “aren’t just writing for ourselves; we’re writing for other people.” Or, as she says elsewhere, “it’s the audience that truly matters.” As a result, “to this day I have very little patience for people with unintentional slowness in writing. I realize that some very great writers have a style that depends upon the slow accumulation of detail—writers like Henry James or Anthony Hecht, for example—but, for the most part, I feel that such writers create a comfortable pace within a gradual buildup. Their readers know that they’re getting somewhere, and they feel it’s worthwhile.” This outlook really should seem obvious, but the fact is that the desires to communicate and to capture the reader’s interest immediately seem unfashionable compared to the instinct to simply get one’s thoughts down on paper, and leave all the hard work to the reader.
Dr. Baer also asks her about the religious overtones of her work. Though she explains that she has “vacillated over the depth of [her] belief in God,” she explains that “I do feel, on some level, that there’s a force out there that teaches us how to love, or that, at least, makes it possible for us to love.” She continues by describing the connection between her poetry and her belief in “a God of love”:
It seems to me that much of the very act of poetry—making likenesses, and metaphors, and similes—is consonant with human love. That’s what Herbert thought poets were doing. Finding and acknowledging the likenesses in the universe. So even though I don’t go to church or feel part of any organized religion, I can’t either as a person or a poet, completely discount the yearning for something divine.
Here’s our favorite from the selection in Measure; it is also available here. (Unfortunately, because we're still tyros at this, we're unable to get the formatting exactly right: the second line of each stanza should be indented.)
“Erasers”
As punishment, my father said, the nuns
would send him and the others
out to the schoolyard with the day’s erasers.
Punishment? The pounding symphony
of padded cymbals clapped
together at arm's length overhead
(a snow of vanished alphabets and numbers
powdering their noses
until they sneezed and laughed out loud at last)
was more than remedy, it was reward
for all the hours they’d sat
without a word (except for passing notes)
and straight (or near enough) in front of starched
black-and-white Sister Martha,
like a conductor raising high her chalk
baton, the only one who got to talk.
Whatever did she teach them?
And what became of all those other boys,
poor sinners, who had made a joyful noise?
My father likes to think,
at seventy-five, not of the white-on-black
chalkboard from whose crumbled negative
those days were never printed,
but of word-clouds where unrecorded voices
gladly forgot themselves. And that he still
can say so, though all the lessons,
most of the names, and (he doesn't spell
this out) it must be half the boys themselves,
who grew up and dispersed
as soldiers, husbands, fathers, now are dust.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
The Future of Catholic Fiction
There’s an interesting discussion going on over at InsideCatholic.com about the future of Catholic fiction. Todd M. Aglialoro observes:
There's no question that Catholic fiction these days is pretty slim pickin’s. Those of us yearning for novels with Catholic themes, supported by a Catholic moral universe, are generally forced to go back fifty years, to Waugh or Greene or O'Connor. We hunt down Sigrid Unset, or play up the Catholic signals (just don't call it allegory!) in Tolkien. Or maybe we cruise used bookstores and seminary going-out-of-business sales for some of the many less-masterful but still quite solid examples of popular Catholic fiction that abounded in the first half of the last century…And so I ask, along with the frustrated authors, where is the Catholic fiction?
One respondent identifies Ron Hansen as a particularly good Catholic novelist. We’ve been reading a bit of Hansen ourselves lately and will be posting about his A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith & Fiction. (Surprisingly, though, nobody’s yet mentioned J.F. Powers, even as one of the great Catholic writers of the past.)
Monday, April 28, 2008
A First Measure of the New "Measure"
Happy day—the new issue of Measure has arrived! We haven't been this excited for the mail since we ordered that decoder ring from the back of Archie Comics. (That was...what, 5-7 weeks ago? It should arrive any day!) We haven’t had time to read through the entire issue carefully yet, but are looking forward to exploring (and writing about) its contents over the next couple of weeks. This one opens with six poems by Mary Jo Salter, followed by an interview with Salter conducted by Papa Baer. The issue also includes twelve finalists of the Howard Nemorov Sonnet Contest. The winner is A.M. Juster’s “No”:
No, not this time. I cannot celebrate
a man’s discarded life, and will not try;
these knee-jerk elegies perpetuate
the nightshade lies of Plath. Why glorify
Descent into a solipsistic hell?
Stop. Softly curse the waste. Don’t elevate
his suffering to genius. Never tell
me he will live on. Never call it fate.
Attend the service. Mourn. Pray. Comfort those
he lacerated. Keep him in your heart,
but use that grief to teach. When you compose
a line, it is a message, not just art.
Be furious with me, but I refuse
to praise him. No, we have too much to lose.
Frederick Turner’s introductory note to the poem—and what he calls the poem's “searing denials, its noble ethical ruthlessness barley suppressing its grief and denials, its noble ethical ruthlessness barely suppressing its grief and pity”—captures the poem’s moral force and critical relevance:
The absolute naturalness and idiomatic force of its dramatic monologue is perfectly constrained within the form—not a beat is missed—just as the love the speaker has for the suicide is constrained by the terrible Dantean judgment the speaker must recognize. The poem…reminds us that art—even art as great as Sylvia Plath’s—is also irreducibly a message, with the responsibilities of any message. The poem is then an important critical document, rebuffing both the moral relativism and sentimentality of much contemporary literature and the shallow aestheticism of some of its critics.
Formal excellence, “Dantean judgment,” and moral seriousness—a Mahwahvian’s dream!
By the way, here’s subscription information for Measure. The price is right, and the editors have announced that they will now be publishing two issues a year. And here’s information about this year’s Nemerov Sonnet contest, judged by Timothy Steele.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
The English Language Is In a Bad Way
Note to Self: add Ian Robinson's Untied Kingdom to Self's summer reading list. Self likes what he learned in B.R. Myers's recent review in The Atlantic. According to Myers, Robinson writes that the U.K. "has 'lost its mind, a state that prevents it from taking anything seriously.'" Robinson associates this state with what Myers calls "the spread of careless language" debasing our culture and politics. Robinson, who has harshly criticized recent translations of the Bible, associates the decline of language with the dire state of religion in England. But even Myers, who wishes that "Robinson had made a little less of his faith in this book," concludes that "when it warns against slovenly language, the voice of faith sounds to this heathen ear a lot like the voice of reason." Self, this is remarkable -- faith and reason NEVER agree!
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Fanny's Blog
As we all know, Flannery O'Connor's short stories, essays, and letters stand among the greatest achievements in twentieth-century American literature. Unfortunately, these works over-shadow her contributions to the blogosphere. Enjoy.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Wordsworth's Legacy
I too have found some thoughts originally intended to be a comment grow to a greater length, so let me go ahead and post them here. I think the topic merits the extended discussion; the influence of Romanticism is still very much with us, and we will be well served as writers to recognize which aspects of that influence are beneficial, and which are otherwise.
I think there is considerable agreement here. I share C. Seamus' love of Wordsworth's poetry; in fact, he is one of the few Romantics whose work I appreciate more, rather than less, as I get older. I agree that all young poets working in English should put themselves to school with his craft at some point in their development. Likewise, I agree that his efforts towards a revival of the ballad form were an invaluable enrichment of the formal repertoire of English poetry, an enrichment which had its origins in a reverence for tradition. I am not trying to form an estimate of Wordsworth's accomplishments as a poet, which I think were tremendous; I am trying to discern what elements of his legacy may bear a disadvantageous sway over contemporary poetry. Great artists leaving dangerous precedents are a common phenomenon. Think about Milton; his style has proven to be both sublime and inimitable, and the eighteenth century is littered with unintentional parodies of the Miltonic tone, from Young to Thomson to Akenside. Or, in another art, consider Beethoven; his undeniable masterpieces are in large part a consequence of his expressive innovations, but by the time we get to the narcotizing moodiness of Debussy and Mahler, we wonder if it was not time for Western music to put Beethoven's expressivity aside and search for models elsewhere. I think Wordsworth's legacy may be something like this.
I mentioned parenthetically the discrepancy between Wordsworth's theory and his practice, and of course, I should have considered this fact at greater length. It is the theory I find much more pernicious, and the poetry is most excellent, I think, precisely where it departs from the theory, which is, as Coleridge asserted, in "two-thirds at least of the marked beauties." The unhealthy legacy of Wordsworth's actual compositions, I think, is in his very frequent thematic choice of "incidents and situations from common life." I have no objection to this kind of poem in and of itself, but I find this mode of writing has arisen to monotonous exclusivity in our times, and often with some very ridiculous results; after all, to find the "unusual aspect" in commonplace things takes an unusual mind on the level of Wordsworth. Put simply, I think a distinct lack of variety in contemporary verse can be traced to Wordsworth's compelling precedence, which is, of course, no indictment of Wordsworth himself; in this respect, to imitate Wordsworth is certainly not to imitate Wordsworth.
As I said, it is Wordsworth's theories with which I take the greater issue, and I think the considerable disregard for them displayed in his own compositions tells against these ideas quite a bit. Throughout the Preface, I perceive a continuous opposition of what is "natural" and "spontaneous" and "simple" to what is merely the effect of "false refinement." The passage quoted by C. Seamus from the Appendix seems to imply a kind of literary Rousseauism, according to which ancient poets wrote from a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" which their corrupt descendants could only imitate with insincere tropes. Poetic traditions necessarily decline as they continue. This subtle primitivism, neglectful of the grand dictum of Burke, that "art is man's nature," is what I mean by an "embarrassment at art" and "suspicion of artistry."
In his Preface, Wordsworth states, "if my conclusions are admitted, and carried as far as they must be carried if admitted at all, our judgments concerning the works of the greatest Poets both ancient and modern will be far different from what they are at present, both when we praise and when we censure." This appears to me to be identical to the claim that, recognizing his principles cannot be reconciled to the practice of many acknowledged masters, Wordsworth has chosen to prefer his principles to the precedent of those acknowledged masters. This is what I mean by a "hostility to tradition."
I agree that these words could be interpreted as C. Seamus did. Coleridge himself tried to interpret the seeming hostility to tradition in Wordsworth's claim as a specific challenge to neo-classicism, "the gaudy affectations of a style which passed too current with too many for poetic diction." But I think its fair to say that they could be interpreted far differently as well; the choice here between Coleridge and Wordsworth may be less a choice between who is right and who is wrong, as opposed to a choice between who is clear on these topics and who is ambiguous.
The question is, which reading of Wordsworth, with which influence, has passed into our time, and again, I think it is fair to say that it is the reading of Wordsworth which I put forward in my first post which has prevailed, the Wordsworth who emphasized the commonplace and the commonplace language, in defiance of poetic tradition. The animus to tradition in modern poetry hardly needs to be argued for. The commonplace, as I said, is so frequently recurring in contemporary poetry as to seem (to myself at least) rather tedious. The commonplace language, devoid of tropical and figurative effect, predominates.
Of course, there is not space enough here to produce samples as evidence, and I am speaking from a general impression of contemporary poetry, but let me cite one example of contemporary criticism, from a source familiar to C. Seamus, the Reaper Essays. In the essay "The Death of the Lyric," one of the points of culpability of the contemporary lyric (which, unquestionably, is culpable in many, many respects) in the eyes of the author is the fact that "they do not remotely sound like the words that real people in real situations would ever say." Doesn't this at least sound like the remnant influence of Wordsworth's most dubious tendencies?
Now, I think one response to this statement is the response which Coleridge essentially made - neither Pindar nor Virgil nor Petrarch nor Spenser nor Keats nor Tennyson "sound like the words that real people in real situations would ever say." This is just not a standard which can fairly be derived from even the most cursory reading of the masters. And this was my point in preferring Coleridge’s revolution. If we find contemporary poetry stagnant and unsatisfactory, and if we as writers wish to create really excellent works, a reconsideration of Coleridge and the principles upon which he wrote (and C. Seamus is right that I am focusing here only on one part of his work, but I think it is the better part) will be wonderfully beneficial towards guiding us out of the present morass. Particularly, his compelling critique of those tendencies in Wordsworth's ideas which are still quite prevalent will serve to remind us that present canons of taste may not always have the greater part of truth in them.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
How Wordsworth Helps
The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully as they did, their language was daring, and figurative. In succeeding times, Poets, and Men ambitious of the fame of Poets, perceiving the influence of such language, and desirous of producing the same effect without being animated by the same passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of these figures of speech, and made use of them, sometimes with propriety, but much more frequently applied them to feelings and thoughts with which they had no natural connexion whatsoever. A language was thus insensibly produced, differing materially from the real language of men in any situation.
We were originally going to post this as a comment to Signor L.E.’s recent post about Romantic poetry, until it grew into a post of its own. Long story short, we disagree with much of what our fellow Mahwahvian says about the value of Wordsworth’s poetry.
It is true that a lot of contemporary poetry is too much like Wordsworth at his most solipsistic. While “Tintern Abbey” is one of our absolute favorite poems, and we love The Prelude, it would be nice if contemporary poets moved outside of their own minds to explore other lives and other minds. But many of Wordsworth’s poems were narratives about extraordinary events of ordinary people (that is to say, common and rural rather than aristocratic and urban), such as “The Idiot Boy,” “The Thorn,” “Goody Blake” (just to name a few from Lyrical Ballads), and modern readers tend to overlook major, un-personal efforts like Ecclesiastical Sketches (a sonnet series about the history of Christianity in Britain) and The White Doe of Rylestone. (And it’s also worth noting that his most insular work, The Prelude, was never published in his lifetime.)
Most importantly, it’s not fair to say that Wordsworth expressed “embarrassment at art,” that he was “hostile to the [tenets] which had prevailed in the Western tradition from its beginning,” or that he was suspicious of “artistry in all its forms.” Wordsworth displays strict artistic discipline, and there’s nobody better to look to as a model for formal craftsmanship and artistry in blank verse, the sonnet, and the ballad. In fact, one of the central purposes of the Lyrical Ballads (as the title suggests) was to revive the ballad, which was of course an ancient medieval form, by incorporating lyrical elements to varying degrees. So, in at least that case, he was trying to bring new life to a Western tradition.
The sort of artistry Wordsworth was attacking was narrow and well-defined. He was not challenging all artifice but what he called “poetic diction,” or “the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers.” He explains this in an appendix to the Preface of Lyrical Ballads:
He also approves of that distance between the poetic and the common, but also calls it the “great temptation to all the corruptions which have followed: under the protection of this feeling succeeding Poets constructed a phraseology which had one thing, it is true, in common with the genuine language of poetry, namely, that it was not heard in ordinary conversation; that it was unusual. But the first Poets, as I have said, spake a language which, though unusual, was still the language of men. This circumstance, however, was disregarded by their successors; they found that they could please by easier means: they became proud of modes of expression which they themselves had invented, and which were uttered only by themselves.”
Put more simply, Wordsworth was annoyed with the clichéd phrases and abstractions that populated eighteenth-century poetry especially. One can prefer the more abstract and artificial (in the negative sense) style Wordsworth was resisting, but he certainly was not throwing out centuries of English poetry with the bathwater.
One last thing. While Coleridge’s most famous poems (Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Kubla Khan,” and Cristabel) are supernatural or dream-like, much of his poetry was very much like what Wordsworth was writing at the same time, both in subject matter and form. His conversation poems (“The Aeolian Harp” and “Frost at Midnight” are my favorites) and “Dejection: An Ode” are very personal and, while metaphysical in some regards, are certainly not supernatural tales.
We say all that to say all this: Mahwahvian poets should look to Wordsworth as a model, because his technique was superb, he understood the power of poetic tradition—and wasn’t afraid to reject what was false and phony in fashionable poetry. His arguments about poetic language are still important, especially for younger poets, who tend to resort to abstractions and stock phrases. Nor would it hurt us to emulate the variety of his subject matter and style, as he explored not only his own consciousness in exciting ways through his lyric poems, but also presented the lives of other people, and evokes powerful emotions, through his narratives.
"The Ballad Rode Into Town"
As long as we're posting about ballads...Here's one by the Godfather of Mahwah himself, Dr. Baer.
“The Ballad Rode Into Town”
The ballad rode into town one day,
wearing his deadly gun,
and his Mexican spurs jingled along
in the heat of the mid-day sun.
He wore his blacks, he wore his boots,
he wore a Colt on his hip,
with a re-bored barrel, its trigger filed,
and a custom black-butt grip.
He’d come across the desert heats,
like Dante through his hell,
over the mesas, day and night,
through the sage and the chaparral.
Right up the only street in town,
he and his Morgan came,
as the free-verse rummies scattered,
and slithered away in shame.
But at the saloon, the rondels came out,
with the pretty villanelle,
“Now, that's what I would call a man—
a man with a story to tell.”
And even the gambler couplet agreed,
“That's a mighty heroic chap,
who'll face them alone, and fire his Colt,
with the crack of a thunderclap.”
They followed him past the Sheriff's door,
abandoned back in June,
then passed the burned-out Weekly Press,
in the silent afternoon.
The ballad rode into town that day,
wearing his deadly gun,
and his Mexican spurs jingled along
in the heat of the mid-day sun.
He rode his Morgan up the street,
and stopped at the only birch,
where all the decent blank-verse folk
were coming out of church.
“Where is she?” he said and waited,
under the Texas skies.
“I'm here!” the lovely sonnet called,
and lit up the rider’s eyes.
“They've terrorized this western town,
and bullied us all, my dear.
So set things right and proper,
then take me away from here.”
Right then, the critics gang rode up,
a motley crew of thugs,
with .38s and rifles cocked
with lethal dum-dum slugs.
Quickly, the fearful crowd dispersed,
to hide and watch and wait;
the gang boss sneered, “Any last words?”
as he aimed his .38.
But the ballad blew a bullet hole
right through the de-con's eye,
and dropped the freud and marxist crits,
and then the gender guy.
There were, when his chambers were empty,
six dead in the Texas heat;
there were, when he holstered his .45,
six thugs on the dusty street.
And when the celebration peaked,
Miss Sonnet reappeared,
and she and her man rode off to the west,
and even the rummies cheered.
So the ballad rode out of town that day,
still wearing his deadly gun,
and his Mexican spurs jingled along
in the heat of the mid-day sun.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Two Romantic Revolutions
I have been covering the Romantic period with my class over the last few weeks, and consequently, have been spending a good deal of time thinking about the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge. And since I know the literature of this period is a matter of special interest and expertise to at least one member of the Review's illustrious staff, I thought a few reflections on these two authors might be of interest here.
The publication of the Lyrical Ballads is recognized, I think, as the most revolutionary event in the history of English poetry. That revolution was almost entirely of Wordsworth's making; that is to say, the principles of taste which have arisen to precedence since the publication of that book were drawn from Wordsworth's work, both from his poetry and his theoretical musings in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (I am ignoring for now the very real inconsistencies between the two). Some of the most famous of these principles are the well-known focus on "incidents and situations from common life," a preference for the "language really used by men," and a general suspicion of artistry in all of its forms.
But we should remind ourselves that another, and very different, revolution was undertaken by Coleridge, both in the poems he published in the Lyrical Ballads, and in his own critical reflections later presented in the Biographia Literaria. It is interesting to note one place where he and Wordsworth concurred; they both agreed that the tenets laid down by Wordsworth in his Preface were radically hostile to the ones which had prevailed in the Western tradition from its beginning. For Wordsworth, this was cause enough to reevaluate that whole tradition, including the work of many long acknowledged masters; for Coleridge, this was self-evident proof that these principles were themselves inadequate.
Coleridge's revolution was specifically against the stultified mannerism of late neo-classicism, but it took the form of an appeal to the long tradition of poetry preceding the neo-classical period; in this sense, it was more a reform than a revolution. The masters to whom Coleridge appealed "placed the essence of poetry in the art," who aimed at an "exquisite polish of the diction." The language they used had a greater affinity with the language of the philosophers than the language of the common man. His own great contribution to the Lyrical Ballads, the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," is unquestionably one of the most artificial - in the true sense of the term - works in the entire history of English poetry.
Over the last two centuries, it is Wordsworth's revolution that has carried the day. True to his boast, he has indeed established the taste by which not only his own works, but, to a great extent, all poetic works, are judged. The contempt for artistic tradition, implicit in Wordsworth's theory, has become overt and prominent in the modern age. The language of ordinary life is the only language employed by contemporary poets; an "exquisite polish of diction" would be regarded now as something merely archaic or pretentious. The embarrassment at art expressed by Wordsworth can still be recognized in the lack of stylistic effect so common in contemporary poetry; the death of rhetoric has been both a cause and an effect of this figurative deprivation. The concern with the quotidian remains central; the latest click on the Eratosphere reveals poems written on the following, very mundane topics: the poet's backyard, the poet's driveway, a pigeon, aftershave, garbage floating in the ocean, a dog burying a bone, and (believe it or not) sheet protectors.
But if we want to restore poetry to a flourishing condition, we might want to consider reviving Coleridge's revolution instead, and seek, as he sought, a poetry of rich artistry, with all the freedom that such artistry bestows; a poetry which does not flatter the reader with a familiar language or thematic content, but which attempts to elevate the mind of the reader through extraordinary language and extraordinary insight; a poetry, above all things, formed and directed by the same principles which have formed and directed the tradition of Western poetry, and the works of the incomparable masters so plentiful in that tradition.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Opening Day!
We believe the following poem is the most poignant metaphysical meditation on baseball since Field of Dreams. And although it has its share of metrical infelicities, at least it doesn't have Kevin Costner.
"On the Eternal Implications of America's National Pastime"
For me, the World Series of 1990
Had all the holy force of St. Paul's blinding.
O! the Lord did earn my infinite praise
When Cincinnati swept the Oakland A’s.
As I watched each game I was begging, kneeling,
clasping my hands and staring at the ceiling.
I promised God that, should the good guys win,
I’d lead a holy life, one free from sin.
An early homer clubbed by Eric Davis
Confirmed the gospel word that Jesus saved us;
His Resurrection was briefly in doubt
With runners on corners and no one out,
But God can lose no spiritual quibble
If His bullpen includes Robbie Dibble,
Who did much more than simply save two games—
He saved my soul from Hell’s fierce flames.
To cheer a losing club for nine long innings
Can kill your soul as sure as mortal sinning.
For Heaven’s sake, be careful who you choose—
Eternal damnation’s yours if they lose.
That deadliest of vices, Doubt, creeps in
When your team’s dead last and can’t buy a win.
The faith of fans is fragile: “Oh, why bother
To reconcile my soul with God the Father
When He and I could never get along:
His taste in teams is vile! His judgment, wrong!
It’s bad enough He lets a good man suffer—
But letting Boston blow a two-run buffer?!”
(So Billy Buckner lost the Catholic Church
With that famous, graceless, run-ceding lurch.)
It seems unfair that Peter turns his keys
For all those jerks who root for the Yankees;
Meanwhile, no Cubs fan’s passed through Heaven’s gate
Since, what, nineteen hundred and zero-eight?
But don’t question God’s justice or wisdom.
Just find a first-place team and root for them—
Until they start to stink. Your next move’s simple:
Go cast them out, like changers from the temple;
Profess your faith in who’s the new best squad,
Till one wins it all—and wins you for God!
The jealous, bound to law, won’t understand;
These Pharisees will spit, “fair-weather fan!”
But years from now, enjoying paradise,
You’ll thank me for my verses and advice.
(I’ll be wearing a hat beneath my halo,
Spitting seeds with Christ and Christopher Sabo.)
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Harry & Man at Yale
Does anyone else find this news a bit depressing?
Drawing on their expertise in theology, children’s literature, globalization studies and even the history of witchcraft, professors have been able to use Harry Potter to attract crowds of students eager to take on a disciplined study of the books.
We realize that nearly everyone but us has read the books, but does that mean a series written for children should be getting so much attention in universities? One can point out that C.S. Lewis’s children’s books get serious consideration, but Lewis wrote other works, too, and they articulated a clear philosophy that The Chronicles of Narnia illustrated. To my knowledge, Rowling's done no such thing.
Even if you don’t mind college students--including Ivy Leaguers!--studying Harry Potter, let's agree this comment is absurd: “What [Rowling's] really done is come up with a mode of captivating a whole generation...As an adult, you’ll be thinking, ‘What would Harry have done?’” WWHHD? I know people like to see Harry as a Christ figure, but that’s taking it a bit too far.
And by the way: if you’re an adult who aspires to act like a fictional adolescent wizard, seek professional help.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
The Trial of Veronese
In 1573, the painter Paolo Caliari (a native of Verona, and so more familiarly known as Paolo Veronese) was summoned before the Venetian office of the Inquisition. He had recently completed a depiction of the Last Supper in one of the city’s basilicas, and the Inquisitors wanted to know why he had filled his picture with such seemingly irreverent figures as dwarves, dogs, and a servant with a bloody nose.
Particularly suspicious were a number of figures who appeared German or Swiss, and thus were presumed to represent Protestants. Veronese addressed his interlocutors with great confidence, asserting that it was his privilege and duty as an artist to paint according to the precedence of artistic tradition, and the lights of his own talent. Eventually, he appeased the Inquisitors by simply changing the title of his work.
This little episode, when it is remembered now at all, usually takes its place in the tired modern narrative, as but another example of the Magisterium’s nefarious authority, exercised across two millennia for the exclusive purpose of suppressing every noble and civilizing impulse in the soul of Western man. From this perspective, it is a parallel to the more famous trial of Galileo, revealing the same spiritual despotism of the Church at work in the artistic, as well as the scientific, realm. The notion that any authority - most especially, a religious authority - can have a just capacity to place any limits on the creativity of the individual artist is almost universally regarded nowadays as an exploded myth from the dark days of superstitious tyranny, from which we and our enlightened predecessors have long been liberated. Cries of censorship and dictatorship accompany even the attempt to withhold public funding from the latest abomination on display at the Whitney or the BMA, so perfect is the contemporary belief in the inviolability of the artist's vision.
And yet, this absolute deregulation of the arts is less likely a sign of their liberation, than of their insignificance. The era of modern art began with the "art for art's sake" movement, whose proponents disclaimed any moral import in the work of art. Within less than half a century, the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset could claim, “to the young generation, art is a thing of no consequence.” And of course, this is the obvious effect of the Decadent credo, for when art has been divested of any moral content, it has quite simply ceased to be of relevance to the lives of individuals or societies. On account of its irrelevance, the people grow increasingly indifferent towards it, and as the people grow indifferent towards it, their laws grow indifferent towards it. The negligence which modern jurisprudence displays towards the arts is not like the respectful restraint it shows towards property rights; it is like the insouciance it reveals towards the choice of baby names. No modern authority finds it necessary to regulate the arts, precisely because every modern authority is certain that none of its citizens takes the arts the least bit seriously.
But the Inquisitors at Veronese's trial did most certainly take the arts seriously; I would maintain that they took the arts far more seriously than the fine arts professors or gallery owners or non-profit directors, who are so loud in their proclamations of art's importance. They took the arts seriously, insomuch as they believed the arts had a significant influence over the opinions and behaviors of the people, and it is hard to see how anyone can share this conviction, without recognizing the need for some parameters - broad and informed, no doubt - to check the abuses of this potentially momentous influence. After all, it was not only the Church which exercised such an authority over art in past ages; Augustus exiled Ovid for the poet's licentious verses; Shakespeare composed under the gaze of Elizabeth's vigilant censors. And the fact remains, that great poets like Ovid and Shakespeare flourished in ages when such regulations were in place, and that since these regulations have been removed, we have had no such great poets. I think the reason for this is simply because those masters lived in ages which took the arts seriously, and we do not.
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