Some Thoughts about Literary Criticism. The Guard: a Short Movie Review. Elite Eleven on ESPN.

Professor One

As I may have said before here, I often find good critical writing superior to what’s passing for good poetry and fiction. At least it can be more interesting. For example, in The New York Times Book Review, most reviewers are zesty stylists, getting me all fired up to read this or that novel or book of poems, only to have the so-called creative work disappoint me. 

So from time to time here, I think I’ll offer some sentences from fairly academic nonfiction that strike me as interesting and finely wrought, touching on the whole nature of arts and letters—and life.

I’ve already praised William Logan’s criticism as intelligent, provocative, entertaining, and full of good insights, all of which helps to wash down Logan’s sometimes excessive cruelty. I’ll probably return to him here. Northrop Frye, Robert Langbaum, Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler are other scholars and critics who deserve attention (though they receive plenty without my help).

ProfessorTwo

 Going further back in the twentieth century, Randall Jarrell and John Crowe Ransom are perhaps more acclaimed as critics than they are as poets. Maybe we’ll have a look at them one day too. I’ve read some Jarrell more recently than Ransom and found him more full of zesty opinion that his supporting examples justified.  

Professor Three

So here, today, to kick off a shallow, fun-filled weekend, are remarks from William H. Pritchard in his Lives of the Modern Poets. My admiration for Wallace Stevens is growing, and Pritchard is one of the scholars who’s helping me along. Pritchard's style can be turgid, but I find the payoffs well worth my effort.

About Stevens, Pritchard says:  “He had, instead, an idea, and with beauty, eloquence, and gravity, he proceeded to set down the great humanist truth he was possessed by for much of his life:  that we are the measure of all things, and that we know how to measure because we know we will die.” (212)

In Stanza V of “Sunday Morning,” Stevens writes, “Death is the mother of beauty” (210).  In trying to summarize Stevens' thinking, Pritchard goes on to say  “. . . how vital is the imagination . . .  we must transform reality yet not transform it too much.” (212)

Happy Weekend--speaking of which, I found the movie The Guard disappointing, despite good acting from everyone, including Brendan Gleason and Don Cheadle.  The plot drags, there’s not a lot character development, its efforts at humor are brief and mediocre, and yet it lacks serious heft as well. Also, a lot of the lines were lost on this American as the director and actors go for authenticity of dialect, it seems, in the West of Ireland.

But all's well because high school football begins today, followed soon enough by college and pro games.  On one of the ESPN stations (ESPN U?  ESPN 2)  there's a three-part series titled Elite Eleven, about highly touted high school quarterbacks at a camp run by Trent Dilfer, former NFL QB, and his staff. The show could be completely scripted, rehearsed, and edited, but it felt real enough tome. If you're a fan, you might give it a look. I was hooked.

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"Anecdote of the Jar," "Ozymandias," Permanence and Perception

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley : The Poetry Foundation [poem]

Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine]

Jean Arp, "Torso of a Giant," 1964, D.I.A.

The visitor comments in response to the May 9 post on Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar” are unusually interesting, thoughtful, and provocative. So, as I’ve done a few times, I’m using today’s post to respond.

Readers dropping in for the first time today will get a lot more from the discussion if they first look at the May 9 post. Yes, this is time-consuming; for that I apologize, but I like the points and questions visitors have raised.

I wonder if anyone will take on the turbo-charged Jeff and Barbaro. FYI, I recently bought a Kindle; satisfied owner, I am. But let’s make that a later, separate discussion.

In what follows, I refer to Shelley’s poem, “Ozymandias,” as an argument about art, or monuments, that runs counter to Stevens’ suggestions, so here’s a link to “Ozymandias” as well as a link to Stevens’  “Anecdote of the Jar.”


Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley : The Poetry Foundation [poem]


Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine]

AltadenaHiker, do you mean you hear Stevens winking (at the outrageousness of his proposition?)?  I hear the wink, but not the outrageousness.

Brenda, isn’t all this simply the way the eye-brain connection works, a simple physiological and psychological fact? Was it Sesame Street where one puppet said, “One of these things is not like the other” and “It isn’t easy being green”?  We see what stands out, and often it stands out just by being unlike everything around it. 


I don’t know if that difference causes fear in animals and plants, but to the human eye and brain, it would make the forest—yes, the huge, “slovenly” forest—seem to surround the jar, seem subservient to the jar as focal point, at least in the mind of a human observer. And maybe, yes, this would make the forest seem “tamed” because, in a way, it’s been conquered by, made secondary to, this man-made or simply other object, force.  Now add in the fact that the jar will likely outlast all the forest organisms, and we have the classic conflict of art vs. nature (immortal shape or words vs. perishable life). The jar doesn’t even have to be pretty to win.

Let me paraphrase the philosopher Berkeley, with his tree falling in the forest and the question of whether it makes a noise if no one is there to hear it: . . . “If a jar is placed in the forest, and there’s no one there to perceive it, does it still make the forest slovenly and subservient to the jar?” In the same way, can a bright, melodious bird humble the rest of the wild? Oh my.

Now if you mix in what I hear AH saying—that there’s at least some playfulness or downright ornery mockery from Stevens as . . . instigator? . . .  then maybe it’s Oh, Oh, My, My. 

One of the most common explanations for why humans create art (and children) is that we feel it’s a hedge against mortality. We die, but our art doesn’t. Our art and our children live on after us.  Of course, that’s not foolproof thinking (or is it just sensing or intuiting?), as Shelley’s great poem “Ozymandias” reveals. However, barring unusual circumstances like defacement, a painting will outlive its painter.  After two thousand years, we still go to see the objects in Rome, not the dead Romans who made them.

Barbaro, should Keats have left the nightingale alone? That’s hardly a perfect analogy, but think about it. 

Song Sparrow

Like you, I’m much more likely to be stirred by nature than art, but organisms die, whether they live downtown or on a Tennessee hill. Art and architecture don’t technically live forever, but left untouched, they outlast tree, bug, bird, and human—by centuries.

Jeff, in the end, long after humans, yes, cockroaches will probably survive jars. Is that what you mean by nature's order, its triumph over chaos or entropy? Well, in that long, long view, you're right. But Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" will survive both its creator and its bird.

So, even if Stevens is delivering his argument with a wink, he probably thinks there’s truth in it. First, the jar is different and therefore commands our attention, whether or not we like that fact. Our rods and cones have a mind of their own.

Secondly, even if it’s not a wonderfully sculpted jar, even if Stevens or we would never call it ceramic art, even if it’s just a pickling jar, it will not only visually and mentally dominate, but also outlast each tree, bird and bush in the raggedy ass, mortal forest.



It seems all wrong, doesn’t it.  That jar is just a crappy, functional kitchen item or umbrella holder ("tall and of a port").  But it’s the star of the show in the forest, even in Tennessee, where forests are especially grand. Man made that jar, and in the poem, a man chose to place it there, where it would necessarily take dominion, simply by virtue of the way human perception and the process of decay go about their business.

I humbly submit that all this irony—this seemingly wrong, daft hierarchy—is why Stevens is winking, if he’s winking. And just to repeat the obvious (is that what I’ve been doing all along?), if we remove the human element as the perceiver, all bets are off. Will ants and chickadees and poison oak feel the primacy of the jar? I humbly submit that we’ll never know, and that’s not Stevens’ point anyway. He’s interested in what art does to, and for, the eye and mind of the species that's created it.

Jeff, palm fronds in Missouri? But more importantly, I like your paint analogy, though I still have stains from quite a few folks, both those in the flesh and those on the page. For that, I'm grateful.



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