What happened to New Criticism? Even the best critical method may run out of things to say, may become arthritic in its response to new work, may reduce itself merely to method. (Though New Critics analyzed some kinds of poetry more brilliantly than others, any universal criticism might be universally suspect. New Criticism works well for a poetry of logical and defensible meaning, even modernist work where ambiguities have been strained to the limit—but there is a limit.) By the sixties, a sense of routine and exhaustion had set in—most of the New Critics still alive had stopped writing criticism (though Empson was scribbling combative reviews until the end), and younger critics were not, most of them, nearly so talented. Nor were they poets (the poets—Jarrell, Berryman, Lowell—made better reviewers than they did writers of critical essays). The founders, a cleverer lot than their followers, grew old in their understandings; but discoverers always claim the richest land in terra incognita. New Criticism did, eventually, grow tired of itself. Its legacy lies in the craft revealed and the clarity gained.
Most contemporary poetry is written in a tradition, a tradition more susceptible to New Critical readings than to any criticism that has followed. New Criticism remains our basic critical language—the reader schooled there is best placed to return to Matthew Arnold, or David Masson, or Coleridge, or Dr. Johnson and extract the most from them. (I suspect that New Criticism was largely founded on the footnotes of editors of Shakespeare, beginning with Johnson, if not before.) The good doctor says little in The Lives of the Poets about how poems actually work; but he illustrates the value to the critic of generous knowledge, a robust sensibility, and a style like a battery of cannon.
If I have been unfair to the natural disaster of theory, I have grown weary of hearing my students complain that professors don’t like literature very much—indeed, they seem to prefer truffle hunting the sins of the authors. (Of course, I’m interested in the effect of his time upon the poet and vice versa—but I’m not interested only in that.) Theory has reduced literature largely to what Winters calls the didactic function—but the poems, in their poor, poetic way, serve theory almost entirely as a storehouse of negative examples. A generation of students, having chosen English because they love books, has graduated bemused that anyone would read such debauched and offensive trash—the brightest wonder why studying literature seems no different from political indoctrination and why their professors have turned into grim-faced, razor-beaked theocrats. (It’s past time to launch a new Dunciad—where is Pope when you need him?)
I used to think things would get better; but too many young Ph.D.’s now learn no way but theory’s way of discussing poetry, if they discuss poetry at all (they also know little about grammar and less about meter, but those are complaints for another hour). We might instead think of what was lost when the New Critics were cast into the shadows and, as Eliot said of the metaphysical poets, “consider whether their virtue was not something permanently valuable, which subsequently disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared.”
Verse Chronicle
One If by Land
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder was a marquee poet in the sixties, when his eco-Buddhist paeans to nature were read in every commune from Maine to Baja. Decades later, their misty imagism, indebted equally to Ezra Pound and Japanese haiku, seems cloying and sentimental, dependent on the Zeitgeist for its effect. The poetry of the day is passe when the day is past, its beauties no longer beautiful; and even a style stronger than Snyder’s may sooner or later seem obsolete, like the picket fences of Augustan couplets after the hurricane of Romanticism swept through.
The poems of Danger on Peaks, Snyder’s first volume of new verse in twenty years, are a throwback to those heady days of Haight-Ashbury, free love, and Volkswagen buses painted in Day-Glo colors, though what used to be poems are now mostly half-hearted diary jottings followed by a snippet of verse. Snyder has been influenced by the travel journals of Bashō (the style of poetry mixed with prose is called haibun); but, if prose is to have the force of poetry, it can’t be as badly written as poetry.
In 1945 Snyder climbed Mt. St. Helens and on coming down learned that the United States had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The awful contrast—the tranquil splendor of the mountain, the hideous deaths of innocent civilians—brutally affected him:
Horrified, blaming scientists and politicians and the governments of the world, I swore a vow to myself, something like, “By the purity and beauty and permanence of Mt. St. Helens, I will fight against this cruel destructive power and those who would seek to use it, for all my life.”
It’s easy to forgive the pretensions and naivete of the young man, harder to bear the self-satisfied maunderings of the older one. Thirty-five years later, the mountain erupted with far more violence than a mere A-bomb—and, reader, guess what! The explosion reminded him of Hiroshima! The Romantic sublime ended not with a whimper but a bang. As Snyder says elsewhere, in an argot revealing that the sixties never died, “West Coast snowpeaks are too much!”
Snyder has long been a guru for the ecology movement, his poems reflecting the woodsy self-reliance, the Emersonian search for knowledge, that forms an appealing part of his character. He studs his poems with a geologist’s lingua franca—doab, schrund, tephra, lahar, cirque—and has a cheerful disregard for the small formalities of English. Fortunately most of his wilder notions were corrected, between the proofs I read and the finished book, by some cigar-chewing copy editor of the old school, one who still cares for the distinction between “lay” and “lie” and has no love for idiosyncrasies like “fistfull” and “millenia” (though he missed the animal whose neck had been “ate out”). Oh, man! you can hear Snyder say, don’t be so uptight! None of this would matter if the poems weren’t like the disconnected thoughts of a man trying to make verse with magnets on a refrigerator door:
white-hot crumbling boulders lift and fly in a
burning sky-river wind of
searing lava droplet hail,
huge icebergs in the storm, exploding mud,
shoots out flat and rolls a swelling billowing
cloud of rock bits,
crystals, pumice, shards of glass
dead ahead blasting away—
a heavenly host of tall trees goes flat down
lightning dances through the giant smoke.
That’s the volcano erupting, and it looks as if it erupted in Miss Purple Prose’s eleventh-grade English class. The words couldn’t have been thrown onto the page with more juvenile abandon if the volcano had hurled them there.
The reader is left with desultory scraps from journals, even when Snyder’s not writing journals (“I’m 63 now & I’m on my way to pick up my ten-year-old stepdaughter and drive the car pool. / I just finished a five-page letter to the County Supervisors”). At one point he tells us, in case we’re interested, that he’s going to try an ostrich burger and then that he’s busy eating it—“The Ostrich burger is delicious. It’s big, with lots of lettuce, onions, hot mustard …” Stop! you want to say. The poor poems, when they can get a word in edgewise, would embarrass even a county supervisor:
Earth spirit please don’t mind
If cement trucks grind
And plant spirits wait a while
Please come back and smile.
This compassionate, benign, grizzled patriarch, supporter of just causes, sensitive to the land around him, a Buddhist (more or less), is the sort of man you’d call if you had to overhaul a tractor engine or drag a cow out of the mud (he’s also the sort who asks a mountain for help and thinks that it answers). If you want someone to write you a decent poem, however, you’d better look elsewhere. A lot of readers buy poetry books because they agree with the author’s character or politics and like to be thought of as people who read such things—perhaps they don’t mind too much when the writing has grown slovenly (a dozen or more poems end with a cute three-word tag like twitchy pine boughs or velvet-dusty pigs). Books like Gary Snyder
’s should come free in a box of granola.
Rita Dove
To read a lot of criticism these days, you’d think the most important thing about a poet was his ethnic identity or sexual proclivities and the most important thing about a poem was its ethnic identity or sexual proclivities. This is a recent notion, as well as a bad one; but it isn’t bad because who our ancestors were and whom we sleep with have no consequences. (To treat people badly because their skin has a different hue, or because they don’t share our lusts, or because they’re lame, halt, or blind is a despicable way of behaving. It is also impolite.) The notion is bad because poems of identity offer only a narcissistic, needle’s-eye view of the world—when poetry is used merely to build self-esteem, it’s time to make Larkin required reading. Thank goodness Homer didn’t go on about being blind and Ionian.
Even so, Rita Dove’s American Smooth reminds us how important it is never to ignore the sins of the past or to pretend the past hasn’t afflicted the present. Dove has a natural interest in the history of blacks in America, a history she has labored into verse. It’s curious that it so often seems a labor. A long section of poems consists of accounts by black soldiers of their service in World War I. Unwelcome in the segregated American forces, they served overseas because France asked for them and there fought furiously and bravely. One poem, however, consists of eleven pages of diary entries about life aboard a troop ship; and for tedium it rivals building the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks. Worse, the poet’s note to the sequence bristles with resentment.
Blacks in America have a lot to be resentful about, but I’m not sure the poetry of resentment is the best way to deal with it. The scene is a country club, and some thoughtless white woman has just complimented Dove on her dress by telling her she looks “good in every color.”
For once I was not the only
black person in the room
(two others, both male).
I thought of Sambo; I thought
a few other things, too,
unmentionable here. Don’t
get me wrong: I’ve always loved
my skin, the way it glows against
citron and fuchsia, the difficult hues,
but the difference I cause
whenever I walk into a polite space
is why I prefer grand entrances.
“Don’t / get me wrong” suggests the poet worries that we might think, for a moment, she’s ashamed of being black. Something hidden and mortifying is touched here, but like those “unmentionable” things it’s skated over in favor of a swish of indignation and a self-satisfied nod of triumph.
Very occasionally you get a hint of the angers and sharp-toothed motives that swim like great predators beneath the tranquil waters of these poems. Dove instead tries to fob the reader off with sentimental rubbish—say, about the heart: “I can’t wear it / on my sleeve, / or tell you from / the bottom of it / how I feel.” You read that and you know the price of saccharin just fell through the floor. Or perhaps you’d prefer some love couplets, tossed off seemingly on the spur of the moment:
I could choose any hero, any cause or age
And, sure as shooting arrows to the heart,
Astride a dappled mare, legs braced as far apart
As standing in silver stirrups will allow—
There you’ll be, with furrowed brow
And chain mail glinting, to set me free:
One eye smiling, the other firm upon the enemy.
It’s like something scribbled on the table of a medieval-theme restaurant, where men in armor are bashing away at each other a few feet from your table. The inflated language, the sloppy pun on “sure as shooting,” the dappled mare, and that ridiculous smiling eye! Sir Walter Scott can take the blame for the props, but the ugly composition (almost every line desperate for its rhyme) and ungainly meter (now too many iambs, now too few) are all Dove’s own.
No matter what subject she touches, it turns to lead in her hands: Salome, Hattie McDaniel, chocolate, Adam and Eve, a drive-in, dance lessons. Dove rarely does more than what’s expected (she’s steady as a gyroscope and twice as dull, though always whirring away) and increasingly writes as if lecturing a class of third graders:
Don’t
hold your breath. Don’t hold
anything, just stop breathing.
Level the scene with your eyes. Listen.
Soft, now: squeeze.
Is that another love poem? Yes, about owning a handgun (Glock or Keltec seems to be the choice). If this conflicts with her liberal values, she makes no mention of it—then she writes in the voice of a bullet: “o aperture o light let me off / go off straight is my verb straight / my glory road.” My glory road !
In her best work, the former poet laureate catches some residue of black experience; but she scarcely realizes that in herself lie the tensions that reveal the long sorrows of race in this country. Even when a poet doesn’t trade in confessions, the reader wants some sense of the private world behind the mask. Dove’s poems have become so superficial, so lacking in felt life, they might have been ordered from some poem sweatshop in a third-world country. After a series of banal commissioned poems, written to be carved on the backs of twelve marble chairs in a federal courthouse (Dove’s poetry has invited more commissions than a corrupt police department), you wonder if this is what the end of her poetry will be: all public spirit and no private life.
Two Versions of Gilgamesh
The ancient heroes who slashed and burned their way into epic were the bully boys of their time, tearaways, real roarers, greedy and careless, their deeds so exaggerated they’d overwhelm any kernel of fact if we didn’t have historical examples like Alexander and Caesar to remind us how much a man might accomplish without fiction. If Achilles and Odysseus, Beowulf and Gilgamesh never existed, they were lucky in their poets. Derrek Hines’s knockabout version of Gilgamesh shakes some of the dust off a poem too often translated with white gloves (a 1946 version modestly rendered the dirty bits in Latin), as if simply by being the oldest of western epics it must be treated with the courtesy due some doddering relict wearing the family jewels. This is disastrous for that venerable antique, which can be made to sound more like a monumental inscription than a poem.
If there was once a king named Gilgamesh, he ruled the Sumerian citystate of Uruk nearly five thousand years ago (from Uruk the name Iraq is derived) and was worshiped as a god longer in his culture than the Holy Trinity has been in ours. The tales that accrued around him have come down to us in Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Elamite, Hurrian, and Hittite, the tablets that bore them salvaged from the great rubbish dumps of ruined cities across the Middle East. The standard text consists of eleven tablets (with a twelfth misfit), all of them damaged or fragmentary, in a version edited in Nineveh in the seventh century B.C. Anyone attempting to bring this old yarn to life has a lot of broken crockery on his hands.
Hines has thrown the cuneiform back onto the scrap heap and started fresh:
Here is Gilgàmesh, king of Uruk:
two-thirds divine, a mummy’s boy,
zeppelin ego, cock like a trip-hammer,
and solid chrome, no-prisoners arrogance.
Pulls women like beer rings.
Grunts when puzzled.
A bully. A jock. Perfecto. But in love?—
a moon-calf, and worse, thoughtful.
Not all readers will care for a translation that takes such liberties (“two-thirds divine” violates any sensible genetics; but that’s the ancient poet’s fault, not the translator’s), though Hines is hardly the first poet to retailor the past to the fashions of the present. Dryden long ago saw the value of what he called “imitation,” where the translator aims, not for the vanities of fidelity, but for the violations of license. Hines’s Gilgamesh is only the latest in a long line that descends from Samuel Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” and Pound’s translations of “The Seafarer” and the Chinese poems in Cathay down to Robert Lowell’s infamous Im
itations and Christopher Logue’s peculiar and muscular versions of the Iliad, which have carried the tradition farther than Dryden might have imagined.
Since Hines has learned many of Logue’s virtues and a few of his vices (no one would want Logue’s mannerisms to become the default style for the classics), you have to be prepared for a jazzy tone and language that careers slangily across the centuries. Here one of Gilgamesh’s soldiers lodges a complaint during the campaign to cut down the cedars of Lebanon:
So, we figured, no snatch for medals in this caper.
A month now, desert-yomping in full kit.
Scorpion wind in the face, crotch rot, boils.
Not helped by our great King, who wakes each morning
from dreams like multiple car crashes.
Yomping in full kit, for British squaddies, is what GI’s call humping full packs. (American readers may find a few references bewildering, such as the “toff’s precious Hooray Henrys”—this may be a good thing in a translation from Babylonian.) The language, though often hopped-up and bug-eyed, carries some of the strangeness of the shattered text.
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