Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : criticism (label : subject/criticism).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Some related topics (there are many others) :

Acmeism, academy, affinities, American culture, American poetry, Aristotle, classic, classicism, Coleridge, commentary, disinterestedness, holism, investigative poetics, Modernism, postmodernism, Russian poetry, style, wholeness...

I'd hate to give the soggy impression or do the saggy impression of some neo-bowtie stuffed shirt pseudo-critic. Hey, no way. It ain't me. Please you gotta believe me!!!

What I meaneth to suggesteth, ladies & goons, is that :

1. despite the fact that good art always transcends simple categories & critical abstractions & nostrums & such : even if & as it hews most faithfully to the generic requirements of certain traditional forms;

2. and despite the fact that our unprofessional off-the-cuff impressionistic personal insights & comments are of far greater practical & humane & spiritual value, generally, & usually, than systematic critical werke, generally;

3. nevertheless, there is a place for calling things by their right names, according to an open & explicit set of premises & postulates, designed by the professional critic, to establish differentiae of judgement : because such creative critical labor has its own proper sphere & center of gravity; & because, paradoxically, establishing such differentiae can help us to see, sometimes, how individual works & artists are part of larger ongoing communal projects & traditions.

Thus indie-crit, as I useta call it, is one way to comprehend (through one critic's sense of taste within a partially-perceived scale of universal aesthetic & ethical values) the equality & kinship of something we sense as the Beautiful - across vast variations of style & cultural background.

very interesting article on poet/conservative thinker Peter Viereck in this week's New Yorker.

*

Mark Scroggins on the old-style divide. One aim of the mini-essays I've been writing is to underline the difference between opinion (personal likes/dislikes, lacking any apparent principle of judgement) and criticism (in which ethical & aesthetic principles are somewhat clarified).

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]

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"

Jordan sez: "I wonder (I'm always wondering, call it a character flaw) whether Ron's p-A/SoQ distinction isn't at bottom about prosody and diction."

I think it's about trying to define what is especially "American" in poetry in English (& implicitly identifying what is "American" with what is lively, contemporary, etc. in English poetry worldwide - a globalization-effect).

It's agonistic/dialectical - defining what is by comparison with what, supposedly is not (SoQ is not really American, except as some kind of effete remnant of colonial imitation, or ersatz product of a stodgy, artificial pecking-order/system).

Such pigeonholes are convenient for making snap judgements. But I think they continually bump up against uncategorizable examples.

Trying to examine some of the distinctive qualities of modern & contemporary American poetry could be a very interesting project, an aspect of some kind of larger project of cultural self-awareness & reflection (where have we come from? how does this surface in our writing today?). However, it would be better to try to ground such in a more disinterested framework of literary values. In Ron's framework, there is already a body of progressive/oppositional/approved poetry, and the effort involves matching & absorbing ever more & new examples & products to the existing model of value. It's a kind of collective self-promotion. The binary/agonistic/sports model facilitates this process of self-congratulation : there's always a negative shadow which sets off our shining lights.

By contrast, what I mean by a "disinterested framework of values" would involve comparisons and investigations of contemporary work within a much broader field : ie. world literature.

Notes Toward & So On (7 : Interlude/Apologia)

I will keep this short, promise. #6, I know, was too long - left me feeling dulled, wondering what's the point.

So what is the point? The point is to reflect on the background of what is being presented as poetry. The background consists of dense, radiant, intricate poems. It also consists of the theory or theories of poetry with which people have tried to explain their understanding of it.

In this way, both the poet and the reader might gain some salutary distance from the ordinary noise & jostling of the literary herd. (I mean the place where books are skimmed & reviewed with quick but meaningless labels; where poetry is treated as a form of crowd control or lite entertainment; etc.)

& why take such a lonely and misanthropic and anti-social path?

Because it's not really that. It's the path of love of poems in all their depth, obscurity and radiance.

The background helps provide that. It helps one recognize characteristics of literary language which are overlooked or dismissed by current theoretical jargon-spinners. & so to make a place for something serious, outside the grounds of the po-biz carnival. The specific gravity of the poem & the life.

It might be easier to understand what I was trying to get at yesterday, with my rubrics about poetry's transcendental perfection, if we think of such a characteristic as analogous to what music is & does.

I don't want to think of music "inhabiting" poetry, translating it into an unknown beautiful dream-speech (symbolism). I want to think of the harmony of poetry as sui generis, as applying its own peculiar powers & methods; but that the beauty expressed in painting & music is evidence of analogous forms of harmony.

I think of poetry's harmony as global, manifest in all languages. Global, yet strict. Something different from Ron Silliman's or Josh Corey's "post-avant community".

The strictness I'm talking about has to do with beauty's inherent qualities, which, in poetry, encompass the objects of both sense & intellect, and have to comprehend all the human & natural constructions which make up tradition - going back to the origins of language on the one hand, and the origins of the universe on the other.

The irreducible fact of taste - a corollary of the irreducible fact of art itself - presents literary criticism with its lease on an independent, autonomous field of inquiry : distinct from other forms of allegiance or intellectual endeavor.

When, friends, since Time began the Beguine, was a critic ever popular?

Poetry is one place to shuck the tribal loyalties.

Like what you like, admire what you admire, & try to be honest with yourself about why.

The Best thing about snow (for grown-ups, that is) is what it does to the light.

... am I just being divisive again, setting up my own teams system, like that other guy? Not necessarily. I may indeed differentiate between critical approaches - but I don't claim one is better than the other (though I may prefer one over another); and a new critical approach might find previously-unremarked values in poems from various, different "camps" - not just promote its own school.

I take my betes noirs very seriously.

It's possible to think critically about poetry & poetics, that is, in a disinterested way. Such thinking is a kind of creative activity. Some of that goes on here at HG Poetics.

Also, here, I talk a lot about my own writing. That can be viewed, correctly, as self-promotion, I guess - mostly silly & counterproductive, since the only way to advance your work is to find other people who want to publish it.

I guess since I blur these two activities here on the blog, it's my own fault if the first activity is not taken seriously. That's why I guess it would be better to write essays & reviews, rather than blog notes, about the poetics issues one takes really seriously.

With respect to the first strand (disinterested thinking), I would really like to see the development of a new stream of criticism, which takes some of the insights of these Chicago critics into account. Because there is a big & serious difference between those who promote poetry as a "verbal structure", and those, like these "neo-Aristotelians", who view the poem as something slightly other than the words per se: a kind of imaginative gestalt, if you will, an image-form (I'm grasping for terminology here), in which logos (diction) is fitted to mythos (story) in a holistic force-field. This concept of poetry's dual nature might be analogous to Mandelshtam's figure of the poem as always dual - fusing the "verbal material" with the "poetic impulse".

...thus, note carefully what Crane is saying here : the ultimate criterion of poetic value is its lastingness, the perennial quality of its beauty and interest.

If true, this should make us revise our notions of literary tradition and development. Not to say that there are not productive advances in literary forms, or that the canon is a fixed collection of past classics. (As Crane points out, Aristotle might have found King Lear a more complex & interesting example of tragic poetry than Oedipus.)

It is to say, however, that beauty is the criterion, which subsumes both pleasure & instruction. The criterion is not merely formal or aesthetic in an exclusionary sense - it's probable that ethical, moral & political values will inform our notion of the beautiful. But poetry also has its own scale of inherent expressive values - originality, elegance, rightness, clarity, eloquence, etc. - which make up the beauty of the work as a whole.

If beauty is the criterion, the critic will have to shun polemics and special pleading of every kind. Claims of novelty, "experiment", marginality, "progressiveness", political relevance, etc., are all partial claims, which - if not related to the final cause and the ultimate criterion (lasting beauty) - actually fall outside the realm of critical judgement.

With these things in mind, maybe readers can begin to distinguish for themselves between general "poetry business" (promotional activities of the entrepreneurial or socio-political kinds), and genuine criticism.

...read this review this morning. Here again is that mainstream/alternative divide, except in Britain. I like the layers of complexity the writer (David Kennedy) brings out. A review should note the provenance of the book under review, however. Not to do so seems to underline the ingrown nature of the poetry toenail.

This "binary", this divide, this line in the lime... if you started with an economic analysis of the poetry world (which Kennedy touches on), and then observed the different ways various poets, critics & reviewers manipulate that economic situation (ideologically, professionally), you'd probably come up with something resembling a pale replica or minor offshoot of the political left/right divide in general (1. capitalists, 2. workers, 3. intellectuals = 1. professional published poets, 2. unpaid "marginal/progressive" poets, 3. "critics").

Kennedy remarks on the complacency trap which both sides of the divide tend to drop into. I suppose Bourdieu & American Poetry Wax Museum have probably covered this stuff with more discourse than I could ever assimilate. The professional rewards are real (academic jobs, grants, awards, royalties, fame), on the one hand, and yet the constraints (ethical, practical, aesthetic) on poetry careerism are equally real, and this contradictory situation creates all kinds of weird phenomena in the realm of poetry's critical reception (blurbism as criticism; tactical ideology as criticism; buddy networking; etc.).

Pushkin thought poets should be treated as independent literary professionals, whose "market" is the general public - reviewers, bestowers of honorary positions, and interest claques be damned. It's a nice idea, sort of like western civilization.

& after you've read, digested & fully absorbed Aristotle, Coleridge, & the Chicago School... then relax, go over here, & see how it's done by a practical do-it-yourselfer. & do all this before the holidays really get underway. is that clear?

"Ain't it a little late in the day," you ask, "to bother with criticizing the "'New' Critics?"

First of all, you shouldn't use "ain't" unless you need a rhyme for plaint. Secondly, this here Chicago School, it seems to me, clears the ground, enlightens the region, establishes some first principles, or reminds one of existing principles for which you don't need to re-invent the refrigerator magnet.

Relevant it is indeed to such contemporary issues in this wee corner of Blogistan such as:
1. how the heck can I ever read all them poetry books?
2. how can I get around that current can of ards which asserts that poets today ain't got no theory?
3. how can I get beyond this plague of simplistic labels, pigeonholes, clubs & sandwiches?
4. what is a literary critical method anyway?
5. can I be a critic too?
6. what is the relation between poetry & reading public? is it really a closed system or "guild"?

What RS Crane, for one, emphasizes, is that both Aristotle & Coleridge established grounds for evaluation on several bases, & in so doing, allowed for a criticism which resists reduction to some totalizing analogy or reductive principle (ie. Empson : poetry = linguistic ambiguity; New Formalists : poetry = traditional metrics; Language School : poetry = denatured diction). So there's a lot of poetry out there. Say you find something that grabs you, and you want to read it with certain practical purposes in mind, like mapping its territory or explicating its virtues. With some of the knowledge provided by the Chicago critics, you can begin to develop your own means & methods of evaluation & appreciation - on a vastly different, & independent, philosophic &/or aesthetic basis.