Some of the Chicago School's essays on poetry can seem dry and abstract. They focus on method, on the criticism of criticism; there's a high degree of theoretical abstraction. But it's worth the effort to work through them. Elder Olson's essay (found in Critics & Criticism), "William Empson, contemporary criticism, and poetic diction", is absolute gold.

American poetics of the latter part of the 20th century was all about language, vocabulary, ambiguity, diction, spearheaded by the "alienation effect" of the Language poets' critique of all the other styles then current. In this the LPs were in line with the New Critics.

The popular image of the NCs is that of old white academic fuddy-duddies, the establishment against which the Projectivists, Confessionals, New Americans, Beats, Afro-Americanists, Deep Imagists - all the movements of the 50s & 60s - were in revolt. But the NCs were actually radical innovators in their own right. It's the Chicago School which represents something like a true return to classical poetics - they are the real old fuddy-duddies. & they are so old-fashioned that now, in 2008, their ideas sound, at least to this poet, very radical indeed. I say that anyone who reads & digests Olson's piece on Empson will discover a whole new way of thinking about and responding to poems. Notions of poetic language, and the meaning of "meaning" in poetry, will be sharply revised.

Olson was interested in the poem, not as language, but as ACTION. In this he curiously chimes with his near contemporary, that other Olson! Charles Olson, the great scourge of Western philosophy, would be mortified to find how Aristotelian he seems, through the lens of Elder Olson. Charles O. also thinks of the poem as ACTION - but he envelopes his sense of the poetic act in the feathery mantle of the pompous Magus-Poet. A kind of suprematism - the Act of the Breath of the Line makes a Micro-Cosmos... the Instauration of the Local Epic World-Body of Bodies in Action... thus Charles went to the extremes at either end - the limits being the (Poundian) beak of his Ego, and Epic. Elder, on the other hand, understood beauty as an Aristotelian mean between excess and deficiency. He was interested in the action of the poem as mimesis or imitation. (& I don't mean to make too much fun of Charles O., though he certainly deserves it - would be more interested in exploring ways Charles actually fulfilled Elder's conception of poetry - & challenged the NCs - than in contrasting the two of them at Charles's expense. Maybe Charles is to Elder somewhat as Whitman was to Emerson!)

How is it these Chicago critics never had much influence in poetryland? Perhaps they fell through the cracks between the instauration of the New Criticism in academia, which I guess ran through the 50s (Understanding Poetry was their big textbook - which I need to take another look at), and the rise of the Confessionals & New Americans et al. The "mainstream" slice-of-life poetries of the 60s and 70s were mocked and derided by Langpos & NY School alike, for lacking theory and self-reflexive irony; they had a master critical school just sitting there on the shelf, which might have been applied in their defense.

But everything you need, to put away for good most of the language-oriented poetries of the 80s & 90s, is right there in Elder Olson. Read it and leap.

(It makes you wonder what they've been teaching in MFA programs, and what the public pontificators on poetry over the last 3 decades have been doing. I never heard about this in my English or writing classes, back in the day. They all get an "F" for ignoring the theoretical work of the Chicago School, as it applies to poetry.)

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".

Mark, with more give-back on the question of Crane et seq.

That it comes down to an unresolved divide between remnants of the Romantic and the new strictures of the Modern.

Wasn't it coming from Pound (with Stephen Crane, Whitman, Poe in the background, mocking, in their different ways, the enfeebled denatured exhalations of Victorian poetry) - the notion that poetry should be as exact and exacting as prose, as science? Wasn't this part of a general trend toward hardness & toughness & clear-eyed objectivity throughout 1st half of 20th cent.?

Scientific perception grounding the autonomy of the art object. Eliot's strictures : "the classic". (Stevens & Crane is a diffun't animal.)

Unable & unwilling to go too far into that huge issue. But again, it seems like Crane was working from a different basis. I think he was looking at Joyce's Ulysses as an objective correlative to the spiritual or intellectual substance - the quiddity - of Ireland & Dublin in the modern world.

The Bridge would do something similar for the aura and spiritual destiny of America. Once he found the accurate form - that is, the plot of his poem : a dawn epiphany leading through a sequence of dream-panels of American history, & through the hell-gate (Poe in the subway) to achieved affirmation (the final panel, which he actually wrote first) - once he had recognized this inner plot or structure, the specific materials fit into place. It seems important that he composed the last section first : this underlines how the methodology differs from that of Pound, WCW, Olson (stemming perhaps from The Prelude) - their long-poems-as-autobiographical-diaries, as Ulyssean nosti, as record of the poet's ongoing struggle with "the facts" & with him's artistic soul.

I understand Mark's reservations about the hifalutin' & artificial diction of some passages in The Bridge. For me these serve merely to accent the visionary strangeness, the otherness, of the whole. There are other weaknesses which are probably much more damaging (sort of a faded 20s hyperbole, a kind of febrile gusto). But again, in the several re-readings I've given the poem, there was sheer enjoyment, stimulated by the shifting forms & voicings of the sequence of panels, the melodic force of the diction, the way the two threads of "plot" (the narrator's dream-day and the flow of American history) mingled & spread, like the river at the poem's center. The pleasure of aesthetic finish, the sense of rounded completion, is a powerful effect, which should not be discounted - and which is missing from the endless ongoingness of some of the other looooong poems.