An alternative history of "innovation in poetry" in the last 100 yrs might focus on the displacement of meditation, and meditative poetry, by other forms of intellectual activity : prose or dramatic mimesis (novels, plays, film), music per se, and science. Thus the "radical changes" offered by Modernists and postmodernists alike might be seen as motivated primarily by "displacement anxiety", the urgent desire to maintain position - to keep up with the times.

Thus Ron Silliman's notion (on display again in his post of today) of "quietude", and a "School of Quietude", can be understood, ironically, as an unwitting acknowledgment of this state of affairs. "Quietude" as the return of the repressed.

Meditative poetry dramatizes an act of cognition or intellectual choice. It dramatizes or symbolizes an intellectual action. This kind of action is what remains after the forms of mimetic poetry (in Aristotle's sense - the imitation of a believable action and its moral & other consequences) have been divided up, shared out among other media and other arts, separated from poetry per se.

The frenetic activity around superficial aspects of style & form, the obsession with secondary techniques, the fascination with melodramatic poet-personae : these seem like symptoms of an art-practice which has lost its bearings, lost its position among the other modes of artistic representation.

Meditative poetry is only one branch of this art; but it's the remainder, the leftover of what used to be a much broader and more confident set of means available to poets who want to reflect experience and reality. R.S. Crane's book (mentioned here recently) - by way of a deep and exquisite review of Aristotle's method in the Poetics - offers some real avenues to explore, in new ways, old ways of making poetry.

The formal beauty of mimetic poetry is what pleases us : and this form involves the efficient and proportional synthesis of parts into whole, resulting in a moving image of experience we recognize as true in a new way. Crane shows that Aristotle points toward something more profound and essential at work here, than the old cliche about "delight & instruction". Pleasure and instruction are not poetry's final ends : they are by-products of humanity's interest in and admiration for the beautiful itself. And this formal beauty of a "true representation" is the practical aim of (mimetic) poetry. Its modes or means of achievement, specifically in dramatic poetry, in Aristotle, are 6 in number : primarily thought, character, and plot; secondarily diction, melody and spectacle. But we also find their analogues in mimetic kinds of poetry other than dramatic. Narrative poems; poetic dialogues; soliloquies or meditations; elegies, hymns or panegyrics on particular events or experiences; odes on specific topics or events - all these and many other types of poems exhibit mimetic aspects akin to those of dramatic poetry.

One of the key things Crane emphasizes is how the formal beauty of poetry is a synthesis of elements, of which the language or diction is only one, and not even the most important. Elder Olson also writes about this. To me this is an essential key to opening up a new way of reading and making poems today.

It's not as though some poets of this generation aren't exploring and practicing different aspects of these modes, at a very high level. I think what Crane's and Olson's approach can do, among other things, is to help make clearer what sorts of contemporary poems and styles have some weight, force, and elegance, and what kinds seem to be merely examples of stylistic solipsism, narcissism, and superficiality. They do this by giving more importance to character (ethos), narrative (plot), and subject-matter, than they do to diction and melody. Not that these last are not important, or can be discounted from the beautiful whole which is the ultimate aim : but the center of gravity is shifted. The poem is a tensile "complex" toward which these secondary elements contribute.

Here is just a sample of what the Chicago Critics can do. It's a footnote from an essay called "An Outline of Poetic Theory", by Elder Olson, which first appeared (in book form) in a collection of essays titled Critics and Criticism, ed. by R.S. Crane, published in 1952 (the year I was born!).

It's a rather long footnote, but I'm going to transcribe the whole thing, because I firmly believe that if & when these sentences are read carefully, and their implications are fully understood, the outcome could be a revolution in the critical climate of reception for contemporary U.S. poetry (at least on its "revolutionary" wing, anyway).

"Nowadays when the nature of poetry has become so uncertain that everyone is trying to define it, definitions usually begin: 'Poetry is words which, or language which, or discourse which', and so forth. As a matter of fact, it is nothing of the kind. Just as we should not define a chair as wood which has such and such characteristics - for a chair is not a kind of wood but a kind of furniture - so we ought not to define poetry as a kind of language. The chair is not wood but wooden; poetry is not words but verbal. In one sense, of course, the words are of the utmost importance; if they are not the right words or if we do not grasp them, we do not grasp the poem. In another sense, they are the least important element in the poem, for they do not determine the character of anything else in the poem; on the contrary, they are determined by everything else. They are the only things we see or hear; yet they are governed by imperceptible things which are inferred from them. And when we are moved by poetry, we are not moved by the words, except in so far as sound and rhythm move us; we are moved by the things that the words stand for.

"A gifted British poet, G.S. Fraser, has objected to these remarks on diction ('Some Notes on Poetic Diction', Penguin New Writing, No. 37 [1949], pp. 116 ff.): 'I think, on the contrary, that criticism should pay a very close attention to diction. I agree with Mr. Allen Tate: 'For, in the long run, whatever the poet's philosophy may be, however wide may be the extension of his meaning... by his language shall you know him.' And I do not find that Mr. Olson's sturdy-looking piece of reasoning stands up very well to my regretful probing. In what sense is it true that we are simply 'moved by the things that the words stand for', and not by the words themselves? Certainly not in any sense in which other words would do as well; in which the fullest paraphrase, or the most intelligent exposition, would be a substitute for the original poem. And certainly not in any sense in which the situation that the poem refers to, if we were capable of imagining that without words - if, for instance, we could draw a picture of it - would be a substitute for the original poem, either. Not, that is, in any sense, in which 'the things the words stand for' means merely the kind of physical object, abstract concept, or emotional state at which the words point. The pointing is the least of it.'

"I willingly concede what I have never debated: that diction is very important to poetry; that, as Tate suggests, distinction of language is an important index of poetic power (although I cannot agree that it is the sole index or even the prime index); that criticism ought to pay the utmost attention to diction; that, as T.S. Eliot has said, the poet is likely to be extraordinarily interested in, and skilful with, language; that we are not 'moved by the things that the words stand for' in any sense that would allow us to dispense with the particular words by which the 'things' are constituted for us; and all similar propositions. The point is not whether diction is important; the reader, if he does not grasp the words, cannot grasp anything further, and the poet, if he cannot find the appropriate words and arrange them properly, has not written a poem. In another respect, however, the words are the least important, in that they are governed and determined by every other element in the poem. There is agreement on all hands that words 'function' in poetry; there should be no difficulty therefore, no matter how we conceive of the structure of poetry, in seeing that words must be subordinate to their functions, for they are selected and arranged with a view to these. Mr. Fraser himself has no difficulty with this fact, although he is disturbed by my statement of the fact; for he goes on to discuss (pp. 121 ff.) 'a wide-scale current use of poetic diction in a really vicious sense to disguise a failure of choice, a confusion of character, or a lack of clear thought'; and he also remarks (p. 126) that 'one cannot ask people to express themselves as confusingly as possible, in the hope that their confusions will prove to have a clear underlying structure; for, as Mr. Schwatz truly says, 'If this were the only kind of poetry... most poetry would not be worth reading.' ' " (Critics and Criticism, abridged ed. 1957, pp. 21-22)

Elder Olson : "words... are governed by imperceptible things". In this regard, again, Mandelstam : "The Word is Psyche".

Have been reading Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, one of those great things you should have read in college... & have Peter O'Leary to thank, by circuitous way of his comments on poet Frank Samperi...

the labyrinthine/byzantine Neo-Platonic/Christian theological history of late antiquity is something I'd like to know more about... those old complex speculations, articulated by Plato & Aristotle, on God, Being, Nature, Person actually might have some relevance for literary criticism, & the idea of developing a "General Criticism" for US poetry world...

(of course it's all old hat for the Postmoderns...)

say for example the Aristotelian idea that individual things (including persons), in their individuality, are, strictly speaking, unclassifiable... - this might have some relevance for the way a critic would want to evaluate an individual poet...

But we have a homegrown school of criticism (The Chicago School, 1950s-60s - R.S. Crane, Richard McKeon, Elder Olson & others) who did some profound exploring in this area - researches on method, & the relation between criticism, literary history & philosophy...

might provide a basis for a new "General Criticism"...

...another jab over at Harriet...

" "Aestheticism" probably carries too much polemical & lit-historical baggage. "Art for art's sake" as a program tried to draw the magic circle around aesthetic experience - but the magic should be left to the art itself. The magic only happens, in any case, when the border between art & life is porous, ambiguous, etc.

I would think that criticism, also, has to reflect the same balancing act. Edmund Wilson in "Axel's Castle" has a lot to say about all this. You can't put art in a special box when the very terms of experience and its reflection are being resolved in a new way in the work itself.

However, I do think U.S. poetry could use a focus on some kind of General Criticism, some general principles which put the logic of aesthetic and critical response on a stronger, mutual footing. It seems to me that the "logic" which presently divides the so-called poetic schools and tendencies is only a kind of pretend-logic, tendentious and polemical.

Is it true that one of the distinctive characteristics of U.S. poetry & poetics USED TO BE, anyway, a suspicion of theory, in fact a suspicion of the whole classical-academic tradition inherited from Europe? Doesn't American literature display a striking UNEASINESS about writing per se? The poet stuck in a jam between native wilderness (and Native languages), and Puritan strictures on art, and overbearing Mother Country (England)? Isn't the subsequent keynote of American poetry this very colonial awkwardness, uneasiness, a DISLIKE for scribbling & inaction?

The Moderns & their late-20th cent. heirs would like us to believe that the key characteristic of American literature is invention and renovation; hence the high value accorded "experiment", avant-garde, etc. But the deeper character of US poetry is rooted in this wilderness unease and alienation, this native awkwardness.

Look again at Emerson, Poe, Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, Pound, Stephen Crane, Hart Crane........... central to all of them is the whole issue of imitation, of how the US poet grows into or relates to the inheritance of the past, and thus grows as an artist - this is, I repeat, not the business of some simplified 20th-cent. "progress in the arts". It's a deeply anachronistic situation on many levels."

Scattered thoughts toward an essay I will probably never get around to writing :

Pity the critic trying to make sense of contemporary poetry in the United States (as a single, whole object of study, that is).

We don't usually pity critics, rather we commiserate with the objects of their criticism; but in this case we might want to make an exception.

I can't really take on such a study myself, since I have trouble sustaining the necessary amount of interest in reading so much verse...

but I'll toss out a few partially-formed ideas here, anyway...

One thing that strikes me about this "field" or phenomenon is that it is somehow lopsided or asymmetrical. It resembles a tilted cone or gibbous moon. In order to explain this, I would, in turn, rotate (90 degrees) Ron Silliman's much-remarked distinction between "school of quietude" and "post-avant".

At one end of this ovoid ellipse I would place the QUIET. At the other end I would place the LOUD. But I mean to apply these adjectives, not, as in Ron's sense, to a certain manner or set of traditions, but rather, to the actual volume of critical discussion, gossip, debate, promotion, talk-about, etc.

The LOUD end of the spectrum might be described as the "range of aspiration" (or exhalation).

Who lives at the quiet end? Established, successful poets, for the most part; also a wide range (though not all, by any means) of the modest workers in the field of academic writing programs.

Axiom # 1 : there is an inverse ratio between a U.S. poet's level of professional success and the amount of talking or writing they do about poetry in general - ie., criticism. (I guess I myself am the most perfect example of this fact.)

What are the reasons for this situation? I'll have to do some more pondering about it before answering : but off the cuff I can think of a few possible reasons :

1. the traditional reticence of artists and craftspeople with respect to explanation. Some artists actually believe this is not their business.

2. professional prudence. The less you say, the less you rock the boat, the less enemies you make, the less you offend.

3. the great difficulty in saying anything useful or true about the field as a whole (not only because of its great diversity & its many mutual antagonisms & jealousies - & not only because characterizing the art of an era requires a high degree of taste, knowledge and acumen - but also because of this very quiet/loud asymmetry itself!).

It seems to me that this quiet/loud divide fosters and promotes other divisions - such as between "progressive" and "conservative", "experimental" and "traditional", etc. Because of the paucity of a general criticism, these tendentious, partisan bracketings and brandings spread like weeds to fill the void.

There are poets who are "quiet" merely out of prudence & caution, or lack of imagination. There are others who are quiet out of necessity : because they have no words to explain what they're doing. This is not always a weakness or a fault.

In fact, again contra Ron Silliman's "quietude/experimental" binary, I would suggest that deep in the shade of the "quiet" end of the spectrum or cone I have been describing, there are poets undergoing the quiet labor of refinement, of refining their art. & I would here re-emphasize something I noted in a recent post : poetic excellence is anachronistic. Literary development is not chronologically progressive; it is logically metamorphic. It is a flowering, not a development in time. Why? Because excellence in art is the conjunction of 2 things : the individual artist's inner growth with the perennial resources of the chosen medium.

This kind of "quiet" can appear really at either end of the literary scene, viewed in its social aspect. Which is why the really good poets seem always to destroy the neat categories set up by commentators to explain them. They have of necessity outgrown their origins, their parochialism, their "school".

The trouble is, there is so much QUIET at the established end, and so much aspirational NOISE at the chatty end, that a sense of our era, of the poetry of our time, is shrouded in a kind of a-symmetrical, highly-professionalized & heavily promoted, haze...

... or maybe it's just me - my own fog...

A comment I posted over here at the Harriet blog :

"I don't think poetry-writing per se is a privileged occupation. Some poets can make a profession out of it, and others may view that as expression of privilege or some other form of social elitism. But poetry-writing per se is a kind of work as well as play. There's nothing inherently privileged about creative activity. Seems rather puritanical to think so.

The US poetry scene does seem to have its share of confusion... but perhaps that's in the eye of (this) beholder. Perhaps the problem is not so much with the poetry scene(s) as with the climate & methods of critical and aesthetic judgement.

My own feeling today, & I hope to write something more substantial about this, is that the US focus on groups and schools - and also the mode of vision we have inherited from the 20th century, which analyzes art in minute and pedantic detail solely in terms of progressive changes in technique and style, developed in turn to keep up with rapid transformations of history in general - that these two standard approaches to critical judgement are missing something essential.

Reginald Shepherd has picked apart some of these problems, by carefully reviewing some of the history. But I think maybe we need to have a fundamental change in the way we exercise aesthetic judgement and critique. There are a couple of basic categories which the critic or commentator applies : classification and evaluation. And for the most part, contemporary reviewers seem to apply a method we might call "non-judgmental classification". It's enough to outline for the reader what school or tradition the contemporary poet represents, and then enthuse over what seem to be the clever high points of the technique applied within that specific genre or style.

I think we need to get back to evaluation of quality per se, rather than generic/historical classification. When you start to consider aesthetic quality, the first characteristic which jumps to the fore is the poetry's distinctiveness, its originality, its uniqueness. The "new" here is not a function of clever application of supposedly new techniques; it's the synthesis of original and previously-unseen aesthetic wholes. It's the successful poetic expression of new problems and new subject-matter. This phenomenon always requires that the individual poet outgrow, SURPASS the tradition or school from which he or she proceeds. And in fact I think the most effective means of achieving such a level of style is by outgrowing one's parochial beginnings, into the broader, global tradition of poetry, going back to ancient times. & IF THIS IS THE CASE - this fact has serious implications for notions of "progressive" changes in aesthetic styles; because it means that in order for a poet to reach a certain level of quality, he or she has to grasp & apply techniques and modes of address which HAVE ALWAYS EXISTED.

Thus there is a paradigmatically ANACHRONISTIC aspect to aesthetic quality. & I would say that a critical approach that forcuses on the evaluation of individual quality, rather than genetic classification, would be a possible element of a future climate of rfeception for poetry in the US - something I wouldn't want to call either neo-classical or neo-formalist, because these imply a far too narrow set of styles - but maybe "new classicism". (cf. Osip Mandelstam, again, for his similar notion of a sort of "classicism of the future".)

"p.s. I guess "neo-classicism" and "new classicism": are pretty much the same thing.... what's a better term? Perennialism? Permanent poetry? Recapitulationism? Antidisestablishmentarianism? ??"

I wonder if there's not something overly passive in Paul Fry's concept of the "ostensive" moment as the defining characteristic of lyric poetry. I'm not done with the book yet, & I know he has a chapter specifically addressing "negative theology" and quietism in relation to his concept - so I'm probably jumping the gun.) It's as if the political/controversial stakes have become so intense and byzantine in theoretical-historicist literary crit, that eventually some such notion had to be found just to let off the pressure (without becoming, heaven forbid, "a-political"!).

Guess I would tend to think of humankind as naturally, genetically, political - in the sense of creating adaptive orders of social life on earth; and that the a-human or pre-human ("ostensive") reality of non-referential stasis, or "mere being", will always be subject to human adaptation (even if its source, its paradoxical/cthonic power, is non-human).

In my view, the charming stasis or equilibrium of lyric poetry stems from the same root as pastoral - a "peaceable kingdom" hidden within the present & representing a (future) better state of things on earth. It may indeed be a mingling of the human and the non-human, or the human and "nature"; but I wouldn't equate such a state with non-meaning, or some transcendence of, or vacation from, meaning itself. This is too reductive. This state ("quietude?"), along with everything else, will not evade interpretation. Everything is interpretable.

I think one of Fry's main points is that lyric poetry humbles the pride of intellect (interpretation) - restores the balance of actuality and our names for it. I would agree with this (though he might not agree with my spin on his position...). But one can imagine a humbled intellect still active, still interpreting,, still "figuring out" that ultimate global Day of rest.

(& actually, Fry's passage on Virgil's bees (in the Georgics) presents such an image of "active rest". Maybe there's more on this in the chapters I haven't got to yet.)

Reading along in Paul Fry's Defense of Poetry. I haven't even gotten to the chapter in which he zeroes in on theology (contrasting the "mere being" of his "insignificant" ground, with traditional via negativa theology). But I get to thinking as I read along that he reminds of John Locke & the other 18th-cent. materialists with whom Berkeley did battle.

Fry dismisses questions of first causes ("why does anything exist? how did it start?") as of interest only to theologians, not to philosophers, scientists, critics etc., since we can have no comprehension of anything which precedes comprehension itself (reflection, mind, intellect, language, understanding, awareness, knowledge, etc.), and, moreover, it's perfectly possible to imagine this unimaginable cosmic substrate has having no beginning whatsoever. And it seems true that all our conceptions (Nicholas of Cusa's "conjectures") are strictly human constructs, and we live in a kind of human-constructed conjectural reality. But if this unsignifiable substrate (Fry has many names for it) is strictly beyond - because other than - human intellect, then the conjectures of theologians (and philosophers) are just as valid as those of Fry's persuasion. Berkeley described Locke's "matter" as an abstraction, a heuristic convenience, a non-entity : for Berkeley, everything begins and ends in Mind. Berkeley perhaps lacked Cusanus' dialectical sense of a limit; he made up for it with paradoxical faith ("the evidence of things unseen").

Reading Paul Fry, A Defense of Poetry (1995). Out of or after the Yale School of literary Theory. Kind of fascinating - like trying to decipher foreign language.

Out of Geoffrey Hartman, Derrida, De Man, etc. - but on his own track. He seems to have invented a new interpretive tool or explanation for poetry called the "ostensive" - I'll have to check the etymology of that. The idea in a nutshell - as far as I can see blurredly for the moment - is that Criticism (Theory + Historicism) has deconstructed any "essential" reality of or function for literature - that is, it's all a kind of epiphenomena, really indistinguishable from other epiphenomena, predetermined by socio-historical forces at large. But Fry complicates this (it is a "defense" of poetry) with a new idea : that poetry - lyric poetry in particular - is actually a release from meaning, reference of any kind. It's a sort of tautological non-human substrate (sentient or non-sentient, I'm not sure yet - just started reading the book) - it is what it is, so to speak, and in so doing lets reality "be" what it is, whatever that is... He leans a lot on Wordsworth, Keats & other Romantics ("a slumber did my spirit steal..."; "music of no tone"; etc).

Much of this intellectual milieu - the arcane & ponderous philosophical assumptions & assertions about writing, history, reality etc. - I find pretty doubtful & unappealing. Have made a lot of fun of "Theory" over the years. But Fry's idea ("ostension") sparks my interest... that is I recognize certain affinities with, or new ways of reading, my own poetry themes & adventures.

I guess I'm behind the times, as usual - the book was published 12 yrs ago...

Want to get back to poetry... lots of commitments & distractions lately.

Thin scattered thoughts on politics & religion etc. are not enough, irritating.

I know I'm out on a limb - that is, far from the current acceptable climate of opinion among the literary intelligentsia.

Reading interesting book by John MacKay - Inscription and Modernity. Wordsworth, Clare, Baudelaire, & a bunch of Russians (Khlebnikov, Kluiev, Mandelstam especially). From an historicizing left-materialist-Marxist perspective (Barrett Watten is one among many names in the acknowledgements). Interesting to see Mandelstam's Acmeism and "domestic hellenism" taken seriously from this perspective.

I know that in my occasional informal attempts to align or echo Acmeism/Futurism with "me"/post-avant-langpo, I have oversimplified Mandelstam. Also, much of the OM criticism over the decades has emphasized his victimhood, as part of an anti-Soviet polemic. MacKay, on the other hand, looks at Acmeism as not at all nostalgic/reactionary, but as a secularizing, materialist-humanist vision; and MacKay's interpretation of M's deep interest in language and "the Word as such" takes on an almost proto-"language poetry" cast. It would be interesting to contrast this viewpoint with that of Elena Corrigan (Mandelshtam's Poetics). M's critical writing is rich and complex, & can sustain opposing perspectives; there are passages which contradict MacKay's general position ("the Word is Psyche"; the "double strand" of the "verbal material" and the "poetic impulse"; etc.)

In general, MacKay's close readings seem to me both politically tendentious (based on several familiar socio-historical assumptions of left "critique") and very sensitive & discerning. His analysis of Mandelstam's concept of the perpetual renewal and invigoration of ancient poetic language is probing and evocative : inspiring, actually.

Reading the wonderfully clear & accessible critique of string theory, The Trouble with Physics, by Lee Smolin. An education in scientific method.

I'm in the 1st chapter. Discussing how scientists seek to explain diverse phenomena through unification in a comprehensive theory.

What would a "theory" of American poetry look like? It would have to be grounded in a particular idea of the nature of poetry in general, and in a good grasp of the literary history.

Probably some such set of principles (defined or implicit) is part of the equipment of every good critic.

The idea would be to unify one's judgement of the various approaches and styles based on such a "theory" (or set of principles) - & thus offer a persuasive interpretation of the jostling tribes.

Needless to say, you gotta read da book to get da full treatmemt.

RS Crane quietly, succinctly surveys the last few many hundred yrs of poetry criticism, & finds that, despite all the excellencies, dey most of em summat missed the point.

Poetry remains an undiscovered moon.

Here's the conclusion to the section I quoted earlier:

"It is easy to see, therefore, why the critic who uses this language is necessarily restricted, in his selection of attributes for poetry or individual poems, to such characteristics as have clear counterparts or logical contraries in the non-poetic discourse which he takes as the other term of his comparison. This is not to say that the method is incapable of differentiating poetry, as poetry, from other things or of serving as a basis for practical criticism of a highly particularized and perceptive sort. It is, however, to say that the discriminations it permits between poetry and other forms of writing or between the various kinds of poetry are such - and such alone - as can be arrived at by asking what characteristics among those possible in discourse are here present and in what special modifications and combinations. It is not a method, in other words, that allows the critic, as Aristotle's method does, to consider poems in their peculiar aspect as distinct kinds of concrete wholes, of which the special character, as poetic wholes, is determined by internal principles of construction that have, at least as far as imitative poetry is concerned, no strict parallels in philosophy, science, rhetoric, or history." [pp.93-94]

"Jane" has some current thoughts related to this stuff.

Poetry certainly provides food for thought. What a criticism along the lines I'm mulling over here would do, though, is investigate & evaluate the poem as food-source rather than meal : the poem as many-sided living something. As evocative, resonant art-action-work.

Aristotle, according to RS Crane et al. anyway, offers some neglected tools for doing that. Neglected in part because of the critical assumptions (blinders) he outlines in the chapter I just quoted.

Here is a long quote from one of the summary-transition paragraphs of RS Crane's book. I think even without the examples & evidence he offers, you can see how the kind of a priori -theoretical "discourse-application" method he describes, sounds very familiar to us. This relates very much, I think, to what A. Mlinko was getting at, with regard to the problem of reading poems as extrapolated "arguments".

On the other hand, Aristotle's notion of [& method of investigating] an intrinsic, special structure & form of poetry, as "imitation" rather than as verbal discourse, holds, as I have been saying, some serious potential for the reception & interpretation of present-day poetry.

RS Crane, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (U. Toronto Press, 1953), pp. 88-89:

"It is thus correct to say of these other critics, as not of Aristotle, that poetry exists for them primarily in a "verbal universe." And this fact has consequences of the greatest importance with respect both to the principles on which their criticism is based and to the method by which these principles are discovered and applied. The principles of poetics, for Aristotle, we have seen to be principles peculiar to the art of poetry, as the distinctive art of "making" or "imitating" human actions and other experiences in words, or to one or another of the various poetic species; they are identical with the necessary and sufficient internal causes, or principles of construction, that must operate in the writing of a given poem if it is to be a beautiful whole of the particular form desired; they vary accordingly from species to species; and they can be discovered only by reasoning a posteriori from the inductively known nature of any given kind of existing poems to the conditions of artistic success or failure in poems of that sort. For the critics in the second tradition, on the other hand, the principles of poetic criticism are necessarily specifications of principles operative throughout the field of writing as a whole. The basic principles of poetry are therefore identical with the principles basic to all varieties of verbal composition; and of these the most basic, as Quintilian long ago remarked, are the two elements without which purposive speech of any kind could not exist - res and verba, things and language, a subject and the words in which it is expressed, a content and a verbal form; after which the next most important, in any discourse that goes beyond a single utterance, is arrangement. If poetry is to be studied in terms of its character as discourse, in a context of other modes of verbal statement, these are indeed the primary elements to which the critic must refer and upon which he must build - as the modern critics I have quoted clearly do - in his efforts to say what poetry is as a special mode of speech, to discriminate its possible kinds, or to determine the standards upon which it is to be judged.
"They are, it will be noted, the elements which Aristotle distinguished for rhetoric rather than for poetics, and hence, as principles of poetry, they are essentially reductive, in the sense that, unlike the distinction of object, means, manner, and "power", which applies only to imitative poems, they tend to assimilate the structure of poetry to the structure of any discourse, however "unpoetic", in which we can discriminate aspects of content, language, and arrangement. It is necessary therefore to look for other principles through which the meanings of these basic terms (and especially of the first two) can be so specified as to give us a distinctive subject-matter for the criticism of poetry; and this is what the definitions of poetry I have quoted and the many others like them in this tradition are designed to do. They are based on the assumption that poetry has no intrinsic nature such as can be known sufficiently by an induction of the conditions essential to the production of poems as special kinds of wholes but is something that participates, with a difference, in the nature of discourse in general, or rather what is taken, hypothetically, as the characteristic of discourse in general which appears to illuminate most satisfactorily for the critic the problems and values of poetry. This characteristic once selected, the next step is the determination of appropriate differentiae; and from the hypothesis thus formed the critic can then derive, by dialectical necessity... all the more particular terms he needs for the discussion of poetry and poems."

Looked again (on coffee break) into RS Crane, Languages of criticism and the structure of poetry (U. Toronto, 1953). This is the real deal, esp. the third essay ("The languages of contemporary criticism").

Seriously, this will change your way of seeing things.

If I have time to quote some passages, I will.

Aristotle saw things differently.

Crane shows how the standard method of 20th-cent. criticism was so pervasive, you couldn't se that there were other approaches.

The standard method assumed "poetry" is one big thing, a kind of discourse, and you defined "it" by differentiating it from other kinds of discourse (but all these kinds are still cousins : all "discourse", "language-usage").

Aristotle saw these very unique & specific activities which people did which came to be called "poetry". Tragic, comic, epic were sharply differentiated from one another, & from other genres. They weren't "modes of discourse" : they were forms of an art of imitation.

Then he investigates their structure & shape, to discover how they create that specific power & beauty he calls "imitation".

I'm really not succeeding here in transmitting Crane's very valuable insights.

The "art of imitation" (in dramatic/epic poetry) is structured, not with discourse, but upon the armature of plot.

[I know I'm repeating some things I tried to describe a few months ago. I'm just going back in that direction.]

Sorry for the long-windedness yesterday. Looks now like a hodge-podge proto-essay, which somebody else will write if I don't get crackin'.

& the "list of paradigms" is not very gripping, much less complete. I'm going back to RS Crane's book Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry.

As I was taking my shower this morning, was thinking that the real focus of interest for me here, what woke me up at 3 a.m. the other day, was this :

By going back to Aristotle, the Chicago people found a way to re-frame a formalist criticism (ie. one that focused on what & how the poem does what it does - as opposed to thematic or other kinds of readings). Instead of reifying the poem in isolation - a la New Criticism - this framework creates a holistic sense of poetic form : not only text, but performance; not only an internally-balanced aesthetic object of beauty, but a dramatic shape, which has specific techniques for creating particular rhetorical effects and evoking particular responses in its audience (emotional, interpretive).

Not only text, but living expression - an offshoot of the living poet & his or her dramatis personae. (Goes back to places in this blog's archive where I thought about the difference between prose fiction & poetry.)

This is not really new : Horace developed a practical criticism which analyzed the poem's rhetoric. But Aristotle seems more fully-rounded : he can distinguish these rhetorical effects, yet in symbiosis with the analysis of the poem as a formal shape, a kind of verbal sculpture.

What I'm thinking is that a framework which includes both text & performance - both objective shape, and its effects, its resonance - could be generated as kind of a general platform for developing a new critical vocabulary to apply to contemporary work.

When you look less to the model of New Critical "close reading" of the internal texture of the diction, and more to the meanings and effects projected in the dramatic action which is the poem, you might find a more capacious fit between meaning & expression, style & its effects.

With some such framework, you might be able to talk about the seemingly odd & baroque expressive techniques of contemporary poets, in a way which shows their affinities, differences, inheritances from past poetries.

& it might give poets more confidence in the motivations which impel them to offer their artistic activities as some kind of contribution to society at large. If poems are art works - not texts to be "processed" into their ideological paraphrases; not exercises in some dys-Platonic scriptorium, but forms which absorb text, in order to unite writing with dramatic presence - we might have a new sense of the symbiotic relationship between style & theme, between diction & Aristotle's trio of powers (ethos, pathos, logos).

Here's a paragraph from the conclusion of Olson's "An Outline of Poetic Theory":

"Thus far we have proceeded on the supposition that the imitative poetic arts have as their ends certain pleasures, produced through their play upon our emotions. Certainly, these are ends of art and such as any consideration of art must embrace; but to suppose that art has no further effect and that it may have no further ends relative to these is vastly to underestimate the powers of art. It exercises, for example, a compelling influence upon human action - individual, social, or political - for among the causes of the misdirection of human action are the failure to conceive vividly and the failure to conceive apart from self-interest; and these are failures which art above all other things is potent to avert, since it vivifies, and since in art we must view man on his merits and not in relation to our private interests. It is not that art teaches by precept, as older generations thought, not that it moves to action; but clearly it inculcates moral attitudes; it determines our feelings toward characters of a certain kind for no other reason than that they are such characters. The ethical function of art, therefore, is never in opposition to the purely artistic end; on the contrary, it is best achieved when the artistic end is best accomplished, for it is only a further consequence of the powers of art. The same is true of any political or social ends of art, provided that the state be a good state or the society a moral society. To reflect on these things is to realize the importance and value of art, which, excellent in itself, becomes ever more excellent as we view it in ever more general relations."

So let's cut to the chase here, Hank - what's it all about, this rambular delving amongst the Chicago School tie?

As my better Ange is choristering over there today, in the same key with my squawks - it has to do with a search for a descriptive language for what poets are doing (today). A context.

Poetry reviewers do this naturally - improvising, more or less. But how to picture the wide-screen hysterical landscape?

Rather than put the poem in a bottle of battling-balancing textual forces (New Critics), or read poetry in terms of some other (non-poetic) level of critical discourse (everybody since 1975, more or less), the Chicago critics developed a formalist criticism : the formal terms of which, however, open out toward the wider, deeper connotations and consequences of art.

The history of American poetry/poetics for the last century takes an hourglass shape. The early moderns blew the top off the bottle of style, diction, form, et al. Eliot, Pound, Cummings, Stein, etc. etc.

Toward mid-century, the bottle narrowed into the methodological funnel of the New Criticism : poem as self-contained object.

Just at mid-point, the glass began to bulge out again : Projectivists, Beats, Life Studies, translations, free verse, & so on toward the open-ended flarfy fin-de-siecle.

When Elder Olson, RS Crane & the other Chicago critics began (toward mid-century) to differentiate themselves from the New Criticism, I think they discovered a useful set of "paradigms" (my very partial unofficial paraphrase/list) :

1. Critical pluralism allows many approaches & methods equal validity : walk in fear of over-extended critical universals (misapplied abstractions & categories of judgement).
2. Poetry is not described or defined simply by an analysis of diction or verbal texture. The words are not the form, but the material : the wood which takes the form of the toy ship.
3. Said form includes the cognitive and emotional resonances felt by the poem's readers & audience (ie. the "action" of the poem is not merely autotelic, self-contained, self-reflexive. It has measurable aesthetic consequences & contexts).
4. It's possible to distinguish aesthetic methods and effects, in the process of responding to & interpreting a poem's meaning(s), purpose, motive, impact, etc. & this seems like a sensible place to begin, since a poem is, first of all, a work of art.

2 essays which focus most directly on these issues are by Elder Olson (in the volume Critics and Criticism, ed. by RS Crane):
"An Outline of Poetic Theory"
"William Empson, Contemporary Criticism, and Poetic Diction"

another interesting background find in my digging around the Chicago School.

The trouble with this argument is that the aesthetic is simply evaporated or absorbed by the ethical.

Sure, criticism should investigate & evaluate the ethical aspect of works of art - no doubt about that! But a work of art sheds light on moral issues by means which are aesthetic. Our response, & its purpose, are an indivisible synthesis of the two (aesthetics & ethics). Yet, by the same token, the aesthetic criteria of beauty are not measurable using ethical categories (wouldn't 'Arrystotle agree?).

Look at this fascinating bit from a Cox essay on Jules Laforgue, printed here in Jacket. I guess this is the kind of thing I meant, yesterday, as the standard of "world literature". Just really careful, perceptive, informed reading. A real critic is a real literary historian.

"Laforgue’s poetry is more moving and more difficult than anyone would think whose idea of it derives from Eliot’s imitations. Eliot captured some of its tones of voice, applying them to ends of his own, to mask and evade. When he found other means to do it his interest in Laforgue declined.

Pound’s never lapsed. It was Laforgue who opened his eyes to certain qualities in Propertius and it is features of Laforgue’s writing that underlie the Homage and crop out at places in Mauberley. To call it verbalism seems to degrade intellectual detachment to stylistic trickery but the facts are complex. If some of his tricks are extreme, Laforgue’s detachment is exponential: he mocks his own self-mockery. Something in him Pound always found hard to grasp but knew was there and strove to emulate. He once described it as force coinciding the fragility, great power with great nonchalance. It’s not exactly nonchalance, rather a studied offhandedness. His last word in Canto CXVI: ‘...Jules... deeps in him...’"

[I like the line about "Jules" too. Sounds like a quote from Forth of July, ha-ha]