Guest Post: Henry Gould on Unjustly Neglected Ph.D. Monographs and the American Sublime
[Ed. Note: A little more than a month ago I passed around the proverbial hat to support the work that goes on here at Digital Emunction. The first person to respond with actual legal tender was frequent commenter Henry Gould. When Henry asked if he could contribute a guest post, I was wary for all the right reasons, and feared I might find myself in the unhappy position of having to reject our first patron. I was therefore much relieved when he sent in the following. I hope you enjoy it. --rpb]
Before there was a grafting, by that Minnesota poet Robert Bly and others, 50 years or so ago, onto American poetry, of semi-sophisticated, wire-limbed, thin-shanked surrealism, there was a (perhaps one-sided) debate going on, mid-century, between the New Critical orthodoxy, of Wimsatt & Beardsley, Ransom & Brooks & Tate et al., on the one hand, and one of the founding & now former critics in that wave, R.P. Blackmur, and his foremost disciple, John Berryman, on the other. This confrontation between differing ideas about the character and means of poetry is one of the main topics of a perhaps-neglected work of scholarship, published in 1984, by Bloom. No, not Harold Bloom – rather, a fellow named James D. Bloom. The book is titled The Stock of Available Reality : R.P. Blackmur and John Berryman (Cranbury, NJ : Associated University Presses, 1984).
Can we summarize the crux of this debate? (This is not to paraphrase Bloom, who explores many facets of and affinities between the two writers; this is merely a rough approximation.) Both Blackmur and Berryman conceived of poetry as involved with the “sublime”, as that term was understood before them by Milton, Emerson, Whitman, Keats, Yeats : a kind of visionary holism, a distinct mode of inspired speech. Here is Blackmur, in a late essay (“Between the Numen and the Moha”), quoting Montaigne, approvingly : “But the true, the supreme, the divine poesy is above all rules and reasons. Whoever discerns the beauty of it with assured and steady sight, he does not see it any more than the splendor of a flash of lightning. It does not seduce our judgement; it ravishes and overwhelms it.” Berryman was after what he called a “naked” poetry : struggling against the mandarin and clerical tendencies of Eliot’s New Critical rationalizers, those who would hem poetry into neat and autotelic boxes of pure art, detached, ultimately, from emotion, motive, affect and social engagement.
Bloom explores the problematics of holding to a high Yeatsian stance in practical, skeptical, anti-poetic America (illustrated by way of Berryman & Blackmur’s mixed responses to Wallace Stevens - who obsessively reiterated his own ambivalence about the possibility of a romantic, “American sublime”). The path Berryman took involved what critic M.H. Abrams described as the intense rhetorical yoking of contraries – “humilitas-sublimitas” – the forced conjunction (ethically, culturally, stylistically, all at once) of high and low. As Bloom writes, Abrams thought this manner was fundamentally alien to the English sensibility – but not to the American (think Melville’s Queequeg, or Dickinson’s contrastive extremes, visionary-parochial).
I believe Bloom here has another great, unnoticed camerado : the Auerbach of Mimesis. In this masterpiece, Auerbach draws perhaps the definitive critical portrait of Western literature - as the grafting of Homer’s elegant, noble clarity (the Hellenic) onto Biblical sublimity (the Hebraic): a sublimity which consists most truly in a narrative compounding or fusion of the awesome-divine with the parochial everyday, the human (tragi-)comedy.
How does this debate concern us today? American poetry continues to struggle with the nature of the poet’s role – and with the proper, practical, corresponding style, or “level”, of diction and address. There is much confusion, polemic, & talking-past-each-other, & much inverted shop-talk, detached from the stubborn contingencies and substance of the larger world. The layered strictures of the New Critics are no longer in force, yet American poets still seem narrowly focused on technical fixes – whether through systematic academic craft-training, or the latest avant-garde gimmickry. In both cases there is the underlying assumption that writing poetry is some kind of learnable “process” resulting in “works”, literary objects neatly detachable from their crafty makers. It is a rationalistic, neo-classical attitude, perhaps inherited from the New Critics, as well as from the genuinely American obsession with technological tinkering. All these trends work against Berryman & Blackmur’s devotion to Yeats, and to Milton, and to the sense of a great visionary tradition of inspired poet-speech - sublime, awful, intense, naked, awkward, and fundamentally unpredictable.
Is anyone practicing this kind of poetics now? Well, I think an argument can be made for another Minnesota poet in that regard: Gabriel Gudding. But I am going to leave that for another day.
Muldoon would answer to “sublime, awful, intense, naked, awkward, and fundamentally unpredictable,” altho not to “visionary,” while Grossman would answer to all of the above.
Auerbach’s great work is hardly “unnoticed,” btw.
Hey, inneresting, Henry.
I know that’s not much of an inneresting answer, but inneresting…
And Gabe is an unpredictable poet, no question about it.
You’re right, Michael, “unnoticed” was awkward - what I meant was that Auerbach was not referred to by Bloom in “Stock of Available Reality”.
>sublime, awful, intense, naked, awkward, and fundamentally unpredictable.
C.D. Wright
& thanks, Kent. Inneresting is a lot more inneresting than interesting.
Michael, Kent : my sketch of an “American sublime” here is pretty obviously just a sketch, lacking definition & rigor… & rather than suggesting contemporary poets (Wright, Grossman, Muldoon…) who fit my partial description, it might be more useful to try to define it more clearly…
Bloom’s chapter on Berryman’s short story, “Wash Far Away”, about a college prof. trying to teach Milton’s Lycidas, sharpens the contrast between the neoclassicals (New Critics), who echoed both Eliot’s & Samuel Johnson’s downgrading of Milton, & the grand, bardic, expressive, Miltonic “intensity of motive” that Berryman saw himself trying to emulate….
- anyway, that would be one avenue to explore…
& just to be goofily, stupidly provocative, since I’m fairly ignorant about Muldoon, Grossman, & CD Wright’s work(s), I would offer the following reservations with regard to their “sublime” credentials :
Muldoon : too ingratiating
CD Wright : too “literary” in the professional sense
Grossman : closest of the 3 to the “sublime” - but theoretically, rather than in the poetry itself
& you are welcome to prove me wrong!
Maurice Manning’s ‘Lawrence Booth’s Book of Practical Visions’
>CD Wright : too “literary” in the professional sense
Henry, you really should take a closer look at C.D.’s work. She’s about two blocks away from your office, after all. Is her work informed by highly sophisticated technical brio, much of which has roots in the “professional”? Of course. (”Professional” is a very tricky term in context of your post– What do you mean, actually? Berryman is very “professional,” obviously. His late “vernacular,” both in form and aim, can’t be comprehended without account of his very professional literary training; Gudding, despite his “Buddhist” preachings, is one of the most “professionally” ambitious poets I’ve ever met, etc.) But Wright is also one of our most pithily regional and down-to-earth poets: The grubbily specific and local is the fuel for her abstract sublime. Sort of like Stevens (well, you know), only with real toads.
> you really should
Should.
> highly sophisticated technical brio
Intensifiers.
> “professional”
Scare quotes.
I use these too. They are bad for me. I like hanging out here but I need to cut these additives out of my diet. I will pledge to keep these out of my writing, along with ingratiating asides (”Well,” “I mean,” “after all”) and off-point comparisons of one person to another.
Thanks for the writing tips, Jordan. We’ll keep on doing our best, then.
onward! (I also use too many exclamation marks)
Kent
I also say onward! :)
Did I ever tell you the story Daniel Nester likes to tell, of Sid Vicious walking into a studio Freddie Mercury was practicing in at the time?
Sid: Oh Freddie, it’s you, still bringing ballet to the masses?
Freddie: Doing our best, Mr. Ferocious. (closes the door)
Kent, my mini-essay here is only an approximation of what I think a critic or thinker on poetry is supposed to be about. & my comments in the comment stream are even more sub-critical. My jabs at the 3 examples offered (Wright, Grossman, Muldoon - Manning I haven’t read at all, sorry to say) are simply a protest at the suggestion that you can fit a poet so quickly into such a preliminary pigeonhole.
The instigation for this essay, obviously, was Bloom’s study. As I was reading it, a little light went on : first of all, I realized Bloom was offering a clear historical context for Berryman’s crazy poetry. He was clarifying, for me, what Berryman was doing in terms of past poetry & literature, in a way I could accept. Then the light went on : that is, the fundamental “humilitas-sublimitas” stance - the fusion, that is, of the sublime & the ridiculous - actually made sense in terms of Yeats, Milton, Auerbach, Berryman….. & then Gudding. & I saw it as something happening in our poetry now.
The sublime is categorically “outside”. It is the sublime which is the other face of human shame, gaucherie, imperfection…. & possibility of grace. It is what makes the extended SCALE of stylistic & ethical values possible in (our) literature.
I don’t see that happening - in the poetry itself - in much of the sanctioned, established, honored, awarded, skillful, technically-adept, etc. etc. poetry of the American MFA-Romantic mainstream. But then I wear horse blinders.
I will pledge to keep these out of my writing, along with ingratiating asides (”Well,” “I mean,” “after all”) and off-point comparisons of one person to another.
Ugh, right? Co-sign.
Yes, Henry, just quickly: Again, I think your post is thought-provoking. You know by now that I think you are a really and highly sophisticated (with two more intensifiers) smart horse with blinders. But we all wear blinders. Bits and reins, too. Giddyup, Jordan! :~)
And to be clear, I think that Gabe Gudding is a terrifically inneresting poet, also!
> Giddyup
We’re all houyhnhnms here, Illinois kid. :~)
Kent, re your question above, about what I meant by “professional” :
I think in order to answer that, I need to supply some context for the 50 yrs between Blackmur & Berryman’s flourishing, & G. Gudding. At mid-century, B & B had something solid against which to push back (with their more capacious, “sublime” concept of poetry). Pound’s notion of a “live tradition” - the idea that poetry has some kind of mysterious objective existence, passed from antiquity to the present. & Blackmur, one of the best critics of the century, while he opposed the NC’s narrow & pedantic codification of Eliot’s sense of tradition & objectivity, nevertheless himself remained a great admirer of Eliot (Blackmur thought Eliot’s poetry far exceeded in emotional & social range, the limits of his (Eliot’s) own critical notions). In “Lord Tennyson’s Scissors”, Blackmur’s summing-up of 20th-cent poetry in English, Yeats, Pound & Eliot are the clear “greats”, & set the benchmark for the rest. Both Berryman & Blackmur’s thinking about poetry have to be seen in the context of their fundamental ASPIRATION to participate in that truly objective “live tradition” in which they still believed, one in which BOTH sides of Coleridge’s formula for good poetry - “more than usual emotion in more than usual order” - were still necessary.
So what happened in the 50 yrs that followed? The rebellion against NC formalism was successful. Lowell’s Life Studies took B & B’s stance much further, & in a new direction - toward what can be described as American version of what Keats called Wordsworth’s “EGOTISTICAL sublime” [my caps]. The academic poetry niche, first established by the NCs themselves, morphed into an anti-intellectual, neo-romantic Grove of Poesy, where poetry was always treated as a (only semi-rational) “special case”. The 2nd half of Coleridge’s dictum was downgraded - poetry became simply “more than usual emotion” (expressive, creative, personal, anecdotal…) parlayed in free verse, mostly. This was the new mainstream, rebelled against in different (mostly unsuccessful) ways by the NY Schoolers, langpo, New Formalists, etc.
I would say for the most part that CD Wright’s poetry falls into that academic mainstream of romantic-regional-hybrid self-expression. There is no literary or philosophical absolute outside the poet’s creative self-expression to provide a counter-balance to the expressive self : there is no actual ground for the “sublime” in the original sense.
> (mostly unsuccessful)
Yes, like all baseball teams but one
>Yes, like all baseball teams but one
You mean the Twins, of course….
seriously, though, Jordan….. I meant “unsuccessful” only in terms of an aesthetic “literary absolute”. Such a thing, in our freewheelin’ times, would be sort of like one of those physics axioms which nobody understands, has never been proven, & yet remains useful for some reason for physicists….
>Such a thing, in our freewheelin’ times, would be sort of like one of those physics axioms which nobody understands, has never been proven, & yet remains useful for some reason for physicists<
Like a World Series for the Cubs…
> The 2nd half of Coleridge’s dictum was downgraded - poetry became simply “more than usual emotion” (expressive, creative, personal, anecdotal…) parlayed in free verse, mostly. This was the new mainstream, rebelled against in different (mostly unsuccessful) ways by the NY Schoolers, langpo, New Formalists, etc.
HG, why do you think they were unsuccessful?
>Like a World Series for the Cubs…
what is it with Chicago and bears? Just curious. Did a bear walk along lakeside in 1880?
Henry, I take your point. All rebellions are unsuccessful, since they either fail to overturn those in power, or if they succeed in their immediate aims, after a few quick rounds of meet-the-new-boss they invariably reinscribe the old power dynamics. Usually with a vengeance.
This is an unexamined hyperbolic blog comment. Still.
>All rebellions are unsuccessful, since they either fail to overturn those in power, or if they succeed in their immediate aims, after a few quick rounds of meet-the-new-boss they invariably reinscribe the old power dynamics. Usually with a vengeance.<
Hey, kind of like Language poetry!
> kind of like
Henry’s point exactly. And his unspoken corollary: there, but for the grace of our two left feet each, go we.
>HG, why do you think they were unsuccessful?
Ange, aside from the Pyrrhic quality of literary group-formations (which see Jordan above) - since the “literary absolute” (which see Coleridge above) is just plain hard to do, & is an achievement of individual poems -
I think they were “mostly unsuccessful” because they were reactive to the main tendency - & thus somewhat peripheral - rather than becoming the main stream themselves. The special techniques & idioms they developed, that is, were reactive to prior poetry. It can be argued that this is normal; I guess I would say, au contraire, that American poetry is still searching for its own “main stream”. & I’m sort of suggesting that the way to look for it is through this idea of the “humble sublime” as an intrusion of something categorically “other”, outside literature per se. For me Gudding’s extremism really echoes Berryman’s in that direction.
Oh, and by the way, Henry, on the sublime, its absence from “post-avant” modes, etc., why not Ange’s poetry, in fact? Just a quick thought. Moxley might be another, though I don’t think she is as substantial a writer as Ange (ur, sorry, I know this might be sounding weird). But seriously: Gabe Gudding, much as I like him poetically and personally, as approaching the sublime more than these two writers? More clarity on this, please. We are interested.
Henry, you really ought to read the essay by Susan Howe in the last CR. It’s right down this alley.
Thanks, Bobby, will walk over to Serials later today & see about that.
Kent, have been mulling over a more extended review on Gudding for a while now, hope to get to it soon. In the meantime, here’s a homework assignment : read Bloom’s book. Then come back & ask me again….
This is a little off-topic, but re-reading this “Lumpy Corral” poem by the late Janet Sullivan, who passed away a few months ago (near-90) - an elegy for her late husband, who had been a professor of photography at RISD - …
- not exactly sublimity, maybe, but… I like it. The picture-within-the-picture (Russian doll) effect.
http://www.digitalemunction.com/the-lumpy-corral/janet-sullivan/
I’m starting to think that the master-master narrative of the West, & esp. the U.S., is the parable of the Prodigal Son (in all its 4-fold, 8-fold allegorical glory). & Berryman/Gudding & the “humble sublime” seem to me to play a part in that tale.
Wrote a review today of Gabriel Gudding’s 2 books (A Defense of Poetry, and RI Notebook), which expandeth on this’n blogge scrolle. Have been ponderin’ on it for about 9 months now, I reckon! Sent it to famoso stikhi gyornalyi. Fingers crossed. & Happy New Yearz (of the Dragons, or the Pigs, or ? Squirrels?)