my pbk. copy of Critics & Criticism (1971)
12.29.2004
12.23.2004
p.s. if I were to re-write those comments quoted in Octopus, I would probably rein in some of the grand abstract claims about poetry & zeitgeist. Mandelshtam, Dickinson, Dante... each had their own unique, characteristic ways of expressing some of the metaphysical questions in relation to poetry. Mandelshtam, for one, made explicit in his essays that poetry-making & poetics are always a living, developing, changing process.
Yet I wouldn't renounce the comments entirely. Even though the insights of the Chicago critics, which I've been talking about over the last couple weeks, have helped me recognize certain critical distinctions - which, if they were put into play, would take the reading of poetry far deeper into the particulars of individual works - still, I think that those critics' forthright renovation of Aristotle's Poetics - after a hiatus of a few thousand years - chimes somewhat with my essay's theme of anachronism.
Yet I wouldn't renounce the comments entirely. Even though the insights of the Chicago critics, which I've been talking about over the last couple weeks, have helped me recognize certain critical distinctions - which, if they were put into play, would take the reading of poetry far deeper into the particulars of individual works - still, I think that those critics' forthright renovation of Aristotle's Poetics - after a hiatus of a few thousand years - chimes somewhat with my essay's theme of anachronism.
In the midst of the Festivites d'Hiver, mon dieu, HG Poetics is swallowed by an Octopus [see "Essays"]. Merci bien, Octopus!
something seasonal from The Grassblade Light:
25
...and there’ll be roomy enough for all the whirling
sand cricket dervishers and all the damsters and
dames in Amsterdam whipping up the food flood and
swizzling their ham-and-eggster-cage-roulade thing...
– in the snowy distance out the window
William heard the carousel’s merry tinkling bell
at the carnival... quiet, meditating on Study Hill
with skull and candle, his heart’s coracle now
only flickering. The end draws near.
Early, he thumbprints his identity in ashes
on his brow. 28 fifths (diminished) plus
one funereal dirigible – Henry, propped up there
in his fragile flying egg. Bluejay – snowtrack
of a ghost dance only. The light shivers
behind the eye sockets, fixed. Hers.
Mother and child. Bruegel’s sack
of peasant colors – a city barge, at Paris level:
Blackstone goes from white to red to blue
and back to black – color of the night above you.
New Year’s night. Take it on faith: this carnival
beneath a farmer’s shed is where we are,
my prodigal. The mined heart of a minor hearth,
a scull turned coracle. A rude and ruddy berth.
And now that cushioned Czar called Balthasar
bows down, and on a plush pillow presents his gift:
one hoary green-gold Mexicano monkey nef.
See how the rainbow folds around that cleft
soul’s sword-point now. Behold her darkness lift.
12.31.98
12.22.2004
Finished Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry on a break this afternoon. Crane closes where he began, with a generous & sensible recognition of the basic value of variety in critical methods.
"Of the truth about literature, no critical language can ever have a monopoly or even a distant approach to one; and there are obviously many things which the language I have been speaking of cannot do. It is a method not at all suited, as is criticism in the grand line of Longinus, Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, to the definition and appreciation of those general qualities of writing - mirroring the souls of writers - for the sake of which most of us read or at any rate return to what we have read." (p. 192)
& etc.
"Of the truth about literature, no critical language can ever have a monopoly or even a distant approach to one; and there are obviously many things which the language I have been speaking of cannot do. It is a method not at all suited, as is criticism in the grand line of Longinus, Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, to the definition and appreciation of those general qualities of writing - mirroring the souls of writers - for the sake of which most of us read or at any rate return to what we have read." (p. 192)
& etc.
R.S. Crane may sound like a voice from another era. Well, he is, but that doesn't mean he's not relevant. Not at all. He's a kind of undoctrinaire formalist - that is, he knows literature, he understands the formal requirements of genres, and he looks at what the poet is trying to do in terms of those generic patterns; yet he's not dogmatic or categorical ("that's a comedy" is not an explanation), and the focus is always on what particular choices make for effective and integral artistic wholes.
"...For the secrets of art are not, like the secrets of nature, things lying deeply hid, inaccessible to the perception and understanding of all who have not mastered the special techniques their discovery requires. The critic does, indeed, need special techniques, but for the sake of building upon common sense apprehensions of his objects, not of supplanting these; and few things have done greater harm to the practice and repute of literary criticism in recent times than the assumption that its discoveries, like those of the physical sciences, must gain in importance and plausibility as they become more and more paradoxical in the ancient sense of that word: as if - to adapt a sharp saying of Professor Frank Knight about social studies - now that everybody is agreed that natural phenomena are not like works of art, the business of criticism must be to show that works of art are like natural phenomena."
- The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry, p. 180
- published in 1952. "paradoxical?" - boy, if he'd only known what was arriving a few decades later!
"...For the secrets of art are not, like the secrets of nature, things lying deeply hid, inaccessible to the perception and understanding of all who have not mastered the special techniques their discovery requires. The critic does, indeed, need special techniques, but for the sake of building upon common sense apprehensions of his objects, not of supplanting these; and few things have done greater harm to the practice and repute of literary criticism in recent times than the assumption that its discoveries, like those of the physical sciences, must gain in importance and plausibility as they become more and more paradoxical in the ancient sense of that word: as if - to adapt a sharp saying of Professor Frank Knight about social studies - now that everybody is agreed that natural phenomena are not like works of art, the business of criticism must be to show that works of art are like natural phenomena."
- The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry, p. 180
- published in 1952. "paradoxical?" - boy, if he'd only known what was arriving a few decades later!
A few of the curious consequences of RS Crane's Aristotelian-inductive approach (ie. a kind of scientific-investigative process : you take poems one at a time, you ask questions of them having to do with what the poet was trying to achieve, and what kind of guiding or formative impulse shapes the work; you proceed by the method of "multiple hypotheses", weighing different possibilities rather than following some abstract, a priori schema or theory about what poetry in general "is"):
1. On the business of "form & content" in poetry (remember that?): the form turns out to be the complex poetic representation as a whole; the matter is the verbal material (like clay in pottery) out of which the form is developed. This is the reverse of the usual arrangement (whereby "form" is the language, "content" is the subject-matter).
2. The method shows a kind of impersonality which is bracing. Although no evidence can be ruled out when analyzing a poem, the method doesn't begin with the biography or literary development of the poet. Questions are asked of individual poems : is this an "imitative" or "didactic" work? If the former, what is being represented by the speaker? Is the lyric an emotional response to a situation? Or a decision or exortation to action (ie. Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress")? Or a meditation on a serious issue called forth by a situation (Gray's "Elegy")? From a variety of directions, the critic tries to get at what the impulse or motive for the poem is - what kind of impression or effect is the poet driving at?
Imagine a critical reading of contemporary poems which came at them in this way, using various analytical tools (genre, mode, literary history, creative impulse) to triangulate the measure of beauty or effectiveness of the work.
This seems so different from what we usually get in a critical article or review : a combination of taste and impressionism, which, because it lacks method and consistency, usually falls back on a stock of "in-house" references and vocabulary; ie., the reviewer, the poet & the reader must share a closed circle of acceptable discourse and knowledge to even make primitive sense of the values to which the critic refers. The reviewer leads in with a resume of the poet's background or past performance, or the "school" to which he/she belongs; perhaps a brief polemic about the parlous state of literary affairs and the salutary difference this poet makes; then a few hyperbolic remarks on the high points of the book under review, a few gentle hints or words to the wise about weaker examples; and that's it. Or perhaps we get a "close reading" of one of the poems in the book : we learn that both the poet & the reviewer have a veritably seraphic deep & special knowledge of some kind, or a genius for subtle triple-entendres, or a mastery of some arcane metrical technique - and this is offered by way of a general aesthetic assessment of the book. It's a wonderful amalgam of sophistry and pseudo-pedantry, which, at least in comparison with Crane's methodical approach, never gets close to particular poems at all.
1. On the business of "form & content" in poetry (remember that?): the form turns out to be the complex poetic representation as a whole; the matter is the verbal material (like clay in pottery) out of which the form is developed. This is the reverse of the usual arrangement (whereby "form" is the language, "content" is the subject-matter).
2. The method shows a kind of impersonality which is bracing. Although no evidence can be ruled out when analyzing a poem, the method doesn't begin with the biography or literary development of the poet. Questions are asked of individual poems : is this an "imitative" or "didactic" work? If the former, what is being represented by the speaker? Is the lyric an emotional response to a situation? Or a decision or exortation to action (ie. Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress")? Or a meditation on a serious issue called forth by a situation (Gray's "Elegy")? From a variety of directions, the critic tries to get at what the impulse or motive for the poem is - what kind of impression or effect is the poet driving at?
Imagine a critical reading of contemporary poems which came at them in this way, using various analytical tools (genre, mode, literary history, creative impulse) to triangulate the measure of beauty or effectiveness of the work.
This seems so different from what we usually get in a critical article or review : a combination of taste and impressionism, which, because it lacks method and consistency, usually falls back on a stock of "in-house" references and vocabulary; ie., the reviewer, the poet & the reader must share a closed circle of acceptable discourse and knowledge to even make primitive sense of the values to which the critic refers. The reviewer leads in with a resume of the poet's background or past performance, or the "school" to which he/she belongs; perhaps a brief polemic about the parlous state of literary affairs and the salutary difference this poet makes; then a few hyperbolic remarks on the high points of the book under review, a few gentle hints or words to the wise about weaker examples; and that's it. Or perhaps we get a "close reading" of one of the poems in the book : we learn that both the poet & the reviewer have a veritably seraphic deep & special knowledge of some kind, or a genius for subtle triple-entendres, or a mastery of some arcane metrical technique - and this is offered by way of a general aesthetic assessment of the book. It's a wonderful amalgam of sophistry and pseudo-pedantry, which, at least in comparison with Crane's methodical approach, never gets close to particular poems at all.
12.21.2004
Jordan plays the acoustic Double Hyperbole:
"Poetic production (Supply) is in pretty good shape. I would say we're likely to start seeing more and more heart-stoppingly good work, especially as the country slides further into venality and barbarism."
The equanimous golden mean is somewheres in between?
"Poetic production (Supply) is in pretty good shape. I would say we're likely to start seeing more and more heart-stoppingly good work, especially as the country slides further into venality and barbarism."
The equanimous golden mean is somewheres in between?
R.S. Crane is the greatest. I love this book. Get it back in print!
The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry, U. Toronto Press, 1953
(Not least in that he led me to 1770s poem by Sir John Henry Moore, called The Duke of Benevento - a riot)
What Crane does among other things in this book is debunk, in a wonderfully ironic tone, most of the criticism of the last 3000 years or so, focusing however on 2 strands of 20th-cent. criticism : New Critics, and "myth criticism" (the method of discovering hidden themes, symbols, layers of meaning, which explain how Henry IV or Hamlet are really recreations of archaic myth or the Jungian racial subconscious). He shows that both trends are reductive in different directions, and by the end of this book you'll see a lot of affinities between standard modern lit crit and medieval pedantry (pseudo-science, pseudo-theology).
His argument is that what these critical approaches miss is the substance of poetry-making itself. What poets are about is the fashioning of "concrete wholes" (poems); what this process involves is the shaping of a form, which coalesces around a dynamic, creative idea. Poets & artists recognize this process : they experience the inability to write or compose anything, until this shaping idea, this ruling spark, manifests itself - the catalyst, which triggers the coalescence of the whole thing. Crane talks about it as happening with the writing of critical articles as well.
He describes the Poetics of Aristotle, almost alone in the history of criticism, as focused on the how of the poetic process itself: laying out a kind of layering of "default mechanisms". It's not a simple symbiosis of "form & content": form dominates & suffuses everything, uniting the material into an imaginative whole - in the same way that wood becomes different built things, or clay is shaped into various forms, so language is shaped to the organizing concept - the "plot" in dramatic & narrative poetry, the "argument" in many other modes. These layers of "default" (this is my own terminology, not Crane's) - in other words, Crane, via Aristotle, describes how the verbal texture, the language itself, becomes the "material" of the "thought", the thought in turn is the "material" of the characters, the characters in turn are the material of the plot - kind of an overlapping or layered spiral of formal energy. (You could find analogues in the design of kinds of poetry other than dramatic : diction/concept/speaker/argument, etc.)
When you start considering individual poems from this approach, as particular formal inventions worked out from a unique set of "plot" instigations, shaped into a unitary, irreducible aesthetic entity - you really are looking at poems differently from those approaches which involve cataloging the poem's meanings based on an analysis of the vocabulary (usually, as Crane shows, applied with some simple set of oppositions - the famous New Critical "tension"), or installing the poem in a preconceived set of anthropological, psychological or mythological theories.
For Crane, the matter hinges, as I've remarked earlier (yesterday), on whether the critic looks at poems as simply a special type of language use, or, on the other hand, poems are conceived as conceptual objects, formal events, the apperception and appreciation of which involves language to the same extent that we take an interest in the "clay" itself in pottery or sculpture.
This book came out in 1953. Much happened in poetry & criticism in the 2nd half of the century (Crane died in 1967). One way to look at the new movements of that time in American poetry (Lowell's Life Studies & confessionalism, "Deep Image" etc., NY School, Objective-Projectivism, Beats, etc.) as reactions against the pedantic, reductive methodologies promoted by New Criticism ("shape a beautiful object using formal diction & traditional technique which is self-contained and autonomous based on a skillful balance of opposing tensions"). But, as Crane shows, the overwhelming trend of literary criticism, since the Alexandrians and Horace, has been against the Aristotelian approach, & has favored philological and rhetorical analyses of the poem as a species of language, rather than, with Aristotle, as a type of art, an organic form, the mystery of the making of which can only be studied inductively, a posteriori. So that one can see, for example, that the Language poets' dialectical appropriation of Russian Formalist and New Critical philology, or the structuralist & post-structuralist resolution of literature into language codes and defunct language codes, respectively - that these "new" movements actually retain and repeat the ancient categorical biases : poetry is "decoded" as a rhetorical or linguistic phenomenon, and then recruited into whatever agenda the critic pursues.
Let's have a new approach, which focuses on the poem as conceptual whole, the product of a creative process - often a mimetic or dramatizing process - which involves forming an integral, beautiful representation, a unitary effect : irreducible to mere linguistic coding or critical appropriation. This is a theory for artists and poets, rather than for critics, philosophers & rhetoricians.
The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry, U. Toronto Press, 1953
(Not least in that he led me to 1770s poem by Sir John Henry Moore, called The Duke of Benevento - a riot)
What Crane does among other things in this book is debunk, in a wonderfully ironic tone, most of the criticism of the last 3000 years or so, focusing however on 2 strands of 20th-cent. criticism : New Critics, and "myth criticism" (the method of discovering hidden themes, symbols, layers of meaning, which explain how Henry IV or Hamlet are really recreations of archaic myth or the Jungian racial subconscious). He shows that both trends are reductive in different directions, and by the end of this book you'll see a lot of affinities between standard modern lit crit and medieval pedantry (pseudo-science, pseudo-theology).
His argument is that what these critical approaches miss is the substance of poetry-making itself. What poets are about is the fashioning of "concrete wholes" (poems); what this process involves is the shaping of a form, which coalesces around a dynamic, creative idea. Poets & artists recognize this process : they experience the inability to write or compose anything, until this shaping idea, this ruling spark, manifests itself - the catalyst, which triggers the coalescence of the whole thing. Crane talks about it as happening with the writing of critical articles as well.
He describes the Poetics of Aristotle, almost alone in the history of criticism, as focused on the how of the poetic process itself: laying out a kind of layering of "default mechanisms". It's not a simple symbiosis of "form & content": form dominates & suffuses everything, uniting the material into an imaginative whole - in the same way that wood becomes different built things, or clay is shaped into various forms, so language is shaped to the organizing concept - the "plot" in dramatic & narrative poetry, the "argument" in many other modes. These layers of "default" (this is my own terminology, not Crane's) - in other words, Crane, via Aristotle, describes how the verbal texture, the language itself, becomes the "material" of the "thought", the thought in turn is the "material" of the characters, the characters in turn are the material of the plot - kind of an overlapping or layered spiral of formal energy. (You could find analogues in the design of kinds of poetry other than dramatic : diction/concept/speaker/argument, etc.)
When you start considering individual poems from this approach, as particular formal inventions worked out from a unique set of "plot" instigations, shaped into a unitary, irreducible aesthetic entity - you really are looking at poems differently from those approaches which involve cataloging the poem's meanings based on an analysis of the vocabulary (usually, as Crane shows, applied with some simple set of oppositions - the famous New Critical "tension"), or installing the poem in a preconceived set of anthropological, psychological or mythological theories.
For Crane, the matter hinges, as I've remarked earlier (yesterday), on whether the critic looks at poems as simply a special type of language use, or, on the other hand, poems are conceived as conceptual objects, formal events, the apperception and appreciation of which involves language to the same extent that we take an interest in the "clay" itself in pottery or sculpture.
This book came out in 1953. Much happened in poetry & criticism in the 2nd half of the century (Crane died in 1967). One way to look at the new movements of that time in American poetry (Lowell's Life Studies & confessionalism, "Deep Image" etc., NY School, Objective-Projectivism, Beats, etc.) as reactions against the pedantic, reductive methodologies promoted by New Criticism ("shape a beautiful object using formal diction & traditional technique which is self-contained and autonomous based on a skillful balance of opposing tensions"). But, as Crane shows, the overwhelming trend of literary criticism, since the Alexandrians and Horace, has been against the Aristotelian approach, & has favored philological and rhetorical analyses of the poem as a species of language, rather than, with Aristotle, as a type of art, an organic form, the mystery of the making of which can only be studied inductively, a posteriori. So that one can see, for example, that the Language poets' dialectical appropriation of Russian Formalist and New Critical philology, or the structuralist & post-structuralist resolution of literature into language codes and defunct language codes, respectively - that these "new" movements actually retain and repeat the ancient categorical biases : poetry is "decoded" as a rhetorical or linguistic phenomenon, and then recruited into whatever agenda the critic pursues.
Let's have a new approach, which focuses on the poem as conceptual whole, the product of a creative process - often a mimetic or dramatizing process - which involves forming an integral, beautiful representation, a unitary effect : irreducible to mere linguistic coding or critical appropriation. This is a theory for artists and poets, rather than for critics, philosophers & rhetoricians.
12.20.2004
Went up for a break to a 3rd-floor library carrel, thinking about previous Virgil comments. Opened up my RS Crane book, started reading. Looked up at the books on the carrel shelf - & found that the carrel's collection was entirely devoted to Virgil's poetics. Art thou with me, dolce padre?
Virgil's 4th Eclogue contains the famous messianic passage, predicting the "virgin birth" of the Child who will bring the return of the Golden Age. So his pastoral is tainted with "history". (& the eclogue is echoed later in the center of the Aeneid, in the lengthy apostrophe to Caesar Augustus.)
Dante, self-appointed heir to Virgil, places his pastoral earthly paradise in Purgatory, a way station to the final refuge in Paradise; but that Paradise is full of earthly history - the center of the final rose containing the empty chair for the coming of the messianic Holy Roman Emperor (Henry VII).
Milton, the revolutionary Protestant and advocate of regicide, sets aside any merely earthly political authority : his Adam & Eve, before their fall, in Eden, are taught directly by angel-shepherds, and after the fall, political authority on earth is described as under apocalyptic judgement.
Eliot(monarchist) & Pound(fascist) - political authoritarians both - looked to Dante, rather than Milton, as their model. But for Dante, divine & earthly (political) authority were counterbalanced. For Eliot & Pound, the (medieval) balance was broken : the feebleness, or complete lack, of a desired spiritual authority, made political authoritarians of them both.
The world is still dealing with these problems (imposed, politicized religious ideology; authoritarian politics; spiritual anomie & despair).
Virgil's 4th Eclogue contains the famous messianic passage, predicting the "virgin birth" of the Child who will bring the return of the Golden Age. So his pastoral is tainted with "history". (& the eclogue is echoed later in the center of the Aeneid, in the lengthy apostrophe to Caesar Augustus.)
Dante, self-appointed heir to Virgil, places his pastoral earthly paradise in Purgatory, a way station to the final refuge in Paradise; but that Paradise is full of earthly history - the center of the final rose containing the empty chair for the coming of the messianic Holy Roman Emperor (Henry VII).
Milton, the revolutionary Protestant and advocate of regicide, sets aside any merely earthly political authority : his Adam & Eve, before their fall, in Eden, are taught directly by angel-shepherds, and after the fall, political authority on earth is described as under apocalyptic judgement.
Eliot(monarchist) & Pound(fascist) - political authoritarians both - looked to Dante, rather than Milton, as their model. But for Dante, divine & earthly (political) authority were counterbalanced. For Eliot & Pound, the (medieval) balance was broken : the feebleness, or complete lack, of a desired spiritual authority, made political authoritarians of them both.
The world is still dealing with these problems (imposed, politicized religious ideology; authoritarian politics; spiritual anomie & despair).
The idea of juxtaposing two complimentary notions of pastoral - the pastoral eclogue vs. the "pastoral letter" - makes me think of the traditional "wheel of Virgil". This was a medieval description of Virgil's literary project : to begin with simple, arcadian-nostalgic eclogues, proceed to didactic Georgics, and synthesize with heroic-utopian-tragic epic (Aeneid). In this way Virgil circumscribed or synthesized both "pastoral" principles - within a "wheel" which contained all modes of poetic narrative (that is, excluding drama).
Josh responds to my "pastoral" comments of the 17th. Thanks, Josh.
I think I wouldn't characterize my original take as simply "Christian" or "too Christian"; I see it, anyway, as simply literary. I'm not promoting a particular version of pastoral; rather, I'm trying to understand how the literary mode called pastoral might be seen as combining both Pound's "eclogic" and his didactic impulses.
The eclogue or the pastoral may, as Josh says, evoke a fragile, trespassable, "synchronous", aesthetic (imagined) space; but I think the same always implies what has been rejected or kept outside (history, violence, etc.). & I think the trajectory of Pound's career indeed represents an attempt to fuse these contradictory/complimentary meanings of pastoral : his "epic" project itself was an effort to go beyond the closed circle of fin de siecle art-for-art's-sake; it was an attempt to fuse the aesthetic eclogue-pastoral with the rhetorical-didactic "shepherding"-pastoral. Unfortunately the authoritarian structure of his plans for world-renovation led him further & further into his own political anti-paradise. & I agree with you, that the partial peripeteia of this personal melodrama or tragedy appears in the Pisan cantos, when he's in the jail cage, looking at birds on the phone wires and ants in the sand.
(I say partial peripeteia, because Pound, like many a Sophoclean or Shakespearean tragic character, came to only a partial recognition of his mistakes. Yet even that partial recognition allowed him, sometimes, a new tone in the poetry.)
I think I wouldn't characterize my original take as simply "Christian" or "too Christian"; I see it, anyway, as simply literary. I'm not promoting a particular version of pastoral; rather, I'm trying to understand how the literary mode called pastoral might be seen as combining both Pound's "eclogic" and his didactic impulses.
The eclogue or the pastoral may, as Josh says, evoke a fragile, trespassable, "synchronous", aesthetic (imagined) space; but I think the same always implies what has been rejected or kept outside (history, violence, etc.). & I think the trajectory of Pound's career indeed represents an attempt to fuse these contradictory/complimentary meanings of pastoral : his "epic" project itself was an effort to go beyond the closed circle of fin de siecle art-for-art's-sake; it was an attempt to fuse the aesthetic eclogue-pastoral with the rhetorical-didactic "shepherding"-pastoral. Unfortunately the authoritarian structure of his plans for world-renovation led him further & further into his own political anti-paradise. & I agree with you, that the partial peripeteia of this personal melodrama or tragedy appears in the Pisan cantos, when he's in the jail cage, looking at birds on the phone wires and ants in the sand.
(I say partial peripeteia, because Pound, like many a Sophoclean or Shakespearean tragic character, came to only a partial recognition of his mistakes. Yet even that partial recognition allowed him, sometimes, a new tone in the poetry.)
RS Crane (Languages of Crit. & the Structure of Poetry), again, emphasizes how Aristotle's Poetics differs in approach from most contemporary crit., even that which uses Aristotelian terminology.
In Winters, Ransom, Empson, Brooks & Warren, et al., the difference is clear right at the beginning, with their various opening definitions of poetry. As Crane shows, these critics define poetry as a branch of discourse. Aristotle defines tragic & epic poetry as a branch of artistic imitation. The poem is an "artificial whole" or "imitation". The imaginative wholeness of the poem evokes, by analogy, the wholeness of a particular action (beginning, middle, end). Aristotle doesn't try to define all poetry; he focuses on examples of a particular kind. Within this kind, the poem is a kind of imaginative simulacrum (mimesis) of an action. This is its substance ("plot is the soul of the poem"); language is the medium (there are other kinds of imitations - visual, musical - which use different media).
The relations between this particular kind of poetry (imitative : tragic/dramatic, epic) and other kinds (didactic, lyric) are not dealt with by Aristotle. But a criticism which takes as its subject the poem as aesthetic whole, rather than the poem as form of discourse, or merely verbal structure, is a criticism which is marking out a different approach to poetry as a whole. The notion of the poem as some form of relation or balance - in Aristotle's terms, a mean between extremes - a balance, that is, between logos & mythos, between medium and theme, between discourse and subject - a relation aiming at a fusion, an aesthetic wholeness, a complete impression, a fruition or fulness (Aristotle's proper "magnitude")... - this whole idea raises new perspectives, new plateaus, for critical reception of various kinds of poetry.
In Winters, Ransom, Empson, Brooks & Warren, et al., the difference is clear right at the beginning, with their various opening definitions of poetry. As Crane shows, these critics define poetry as a branch of discourse. Aristotle defines tragic & epic poetry as a branch of artistic imitation. The poem is an "artificial whole" or "imitation". The imaginative wholeness of the poem evokes, by analogy, the wholeness of a particular action (beginning, middle, end). Aristotle doesn't try to define all poetry; he focuses on examples of a particular kind. Within this kind, the poem is a kind of imaginative simulacrum (mimesis) of an action. This is its substance ("plot is the soul of the poem"); language is the medium (there are other kinds of imitations - visual, musical - which use different media).
The relations between this particular kind of poetry (imitative : tragic/dramatic, epic) and other kinds (didactic, lyric) are not dealt with by Aristotle. But a criticism which takes as its subject the poem as aesthetic whole, rather than the poem as form of discourse, or merely verbal structure, is a criticism which is marking out a different approach to poetry as a whole. The notion of the poem as some form of relation or balance - in Aristotle's terms, a mean between extremes - a balance, that is, between logos & mythos, between medium and theme, between discourse and subject - a relation aiming at a fusion, an aesthetic wholeness, a complete impression, a fruition or fulness (Aristotle's proper "magnitude")... - this whole idea raises new perspectives, new plateaus, for critical reception of various kinds of poetry.
... 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".
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".
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