Sunday, February 16, 2014
3. (Geoffrey Hill)
And to round out a lazy Sunday's work, another purpose to which this, my blog, shall be set: a sort of Reading Journal. Christina Rossetti published one, Time Flies; mine will differ--since I don't read much by way of biblical texts, and since mine is not a true journal or diary, appearing by whim rather than by the day. But from time to time, as time takes wing and swoops and slows and speeds, a place to find words for thoughts on what I'm reading. The Big Arrival of my week: the new Geoffrey Hill Broken Hierarchies:Collected Poems, ed. Kenneth Haynes, out in the UK in November, but, after several delays, only Stateside as of last week--and Amazon still hasn't got it in stock. I had to go far afield--to Barnes and Noble online (still there; with probably only slightly higher traffic than this blog)--to find a copy.
And what a copy to have: gorgeous paper, fragrance of delectable contemplation, a spine built to open and shut and open and shut and stay open, resting flat on a lap or desk, with any of the 973 pages before me. Best of all the poems themselves, many worked over, revised substantially--all vigilantly and diligently corrected by the poet and editor--and hordes entirely new.
Haven't done much reading as of yet, but the author's biography on the dust-jacket--in fact the entire dust-jacket--sure to provide a point of discussion for a future dissertation, or article, or essay: "Geoffrey Hill, the son of a police constable, was born in Worcestershire in 1932. He was educated at Bromsgrove County High School and at Keble College, Oxford..." That patronymic epithet: the pride, the thumb between the teeth, the reminder that class means something special in Britain, that though it has evolved through Hill's life and career, the tag of class, the consciousness that some place great weight by the tag, that the tag is assigned and not chosen, has been with him through it. Then there's "police"--the Victorian institution of the State, a hierarchical order in the biographical blurb on Broken Hierarchies, with its cover a painting of Queen Victorian, with an astonishing sequence of poems, "An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England," taking the weight, at times with skepticism, at times with sardonic contempt, at times with guarded nostalgia, for the Victorian past, at times also with respect for that past, and always respectful of the distance of the past and the difficulty of laying one's sight or words on it.
And what a copy to have: gorgeous paper, fragrance of delectable contemplation, a spine built to open and shut and open and shut and stay open, resting flat on a lap or desk, with any of the 973 pages before me. Best of all the poems themselves, many worked over, revised substantially--all vigilantly and diligently corrected by the poet and editor--and hordes entirely new.
Haven't done much reading as of yet, but the author's biography on the dust-jacket--in fact the entire dust-jacket--sure to provide a point of discussion for a future dissertation, or article, or essay: "Geoffrey Hill, the son of a police constable, was born in Worcestershire in 1932. He was educated at Bromsgrove County High School and at Keble College, Oxford..." That patronymic epithet: the pride, the thumb between the teeth, the reminder that class means something special in Britain, that though it has evolved through Hill's life and career, the tag of class, the consciousness that some place great weight by the tag, that the tag is assigned and not chosen, has been with him through it. Then there's "police"--the Victorian institution of the State, a hierarchical order in the biographical blurb on Broken Hierarchies, with its cover a painting of Queen Victorian, with an astonishing sequence of poems, "An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England," taking the weight, at times with skepticism, at times with sardonic contempt, at times with guarded nostalgia, for the Victorian past, at times also with respect for that past, and always respectful of the distance of the past and the difficulty of laying one's sight or words on it.
2. (Christina Rossetti)
Among things I'd like to use the blog for: a drafting board. In March, I'll be giving a talk on Christina G. Rossetti, and though I've already started writing some ideas, I haven't done much work, and thought I'd include some of what I've done on here and continue writing bits and pieces here, some of which I might use, others which I won't.
Christina, brother of Dante Gabriel, William, and--the least lettered--Maria, must be among the three or four great Victorian poets, alongside Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and perhaps Thomas Hardy or Hopkins.
Having ranks of poets is not entirely mindless; it can lead to sharpening the criteria by which we judge, and these criteria in turn can help us to better notice what is happening with the words on the page; sharper criteria might make for better tools of analysis. (They can also, of course, also bind and blind, to narrow and cramped positions.) Christina G. Rossetti is in that first rank because she unites several of the supreme virtues of poetry: the muscular prose of her syntax, the astonishing purity of her diction (or, maybe the word Davie should have used, "register"), with carefully modulated deviations, the shyly and self-consciously self-dramatizing rhetoric, and most of all the capacity to find words that suggest entire realms of feeling and experience that hover around the poem, sustaining it, so that it seems a crystallization and ordering in miniature of a chaotic atmosphere of life. Like all great poets, she is genuinely suggestive (T.S. Eliot on William Morris, in the essay on Andrew Marvell: "the verses of Morris, which are nothing if not an attempt to suggest, really suggest nothing").
She stands also with Tennyson and Browning because she innovates; she discovers new capacities in language to make discoveries about life and the world. (Proust on discovery: "It remained to Berma's credit that she discovered it, but can one use the word "discover" when the object in question is something that would not be different if one had been given it, something that does not belong essentially to one's own nature since someone else may afterwards reproduce it?"--Trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, Enright; vol 2, 193).
In her poetry, it is the inheritance of hymns, Wordsworth's plain style, the King James Bible of course, and probably an Italian Renaissance sonnet tradition (Petrarch, Dante, others I don't know anything about) that she would have known from childhood, which mix to produce something new in its cold metallic reticence and unflappable calm.
Tennyson, either chary or withholding of critical remarks, at least in public, admired her. His son, Hallam, records: "Of Christina Rossetti, as a true artist, he expressed profound respect." Moving in its brevity; his respect was worth a great deal to most of his contemporaries, and he pays her a sort of homage by saying no more, but inviting readers to discover her on their own (he is more garrulous in picking at Browning's poetic garrulity).
But she has not been well-served by twentieth-century critics. She was a favorite of Larkin's, and he does her the honor of elevating her alongside Emily Dickinson. Dickinson we all know to be a genius, a bold scientist in the laboratory of verse; she's hardly a shut-in in the House of Literary Fame, where Rossetti is more likely to be upstairs in the bedrooms while the party is raging in the parlor.
Aside from Larkin, there's not much that does what criticism does--helps us see anew, or for the first time, and helps us to apprehend, and comprehend, the life of poetry. The one great exception is Eric Griffiths, whose essay on Rossetti, originally a lecture, was published in Essays in Criticism in 1996: "The Disappointment of Christina Rossetti." It's a rich mine and yet, perhaps because of its feline delight in clawing, playfully and viciously, at other critics, it has not been drawn on much; not enough anyway.
My talk is on Rossetti and questions. She asks a great many. Lots of poets ask questions, of course--but she asks more. I need to find some numbers to support me, but a quick look at the titles in the excellent Penguin edition of her work shows how often questions head the poems, and this is even before considering the questions that are in the poems. She takes questions up in some of the poems, too; she cares about whether she ought to ask questions and, I think, about how to ask questions.
Questions after all can be classified in so many ways. (The Saul Steinberg cartoon: http://movingimages.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/saul-steinberg-question-marks2.jpg) They don't all do the same things, and her questions, I am going to explain in the talk, do something particular that leads to the deeper forces; it's my preferred way of doing criticism to trace dust drifting on the surface in order to find the deeper currents of a work. Hers are not the portentous rhetorical questions of Yeats, nor plaintive, seeking questions of Lowell. They are somewhere between rhetorical questions and "genuine" questions.
A clue for how to approach them is found in Griffith's essay, where he writes: “Rossetti has nothing as sublime as Job, though her lyrics are comparably genuine as they bring together in utterance a ‘consciousness of…inadequateness’ and a grateful iteration which finds its own words somehow successful, felicitous even. A speaker can really feel both these ways and at the same time about words, troublous though this is for a theory of language to describe”—Griffiths (110)—It’s this balance of feeling that I’m interested in--often,her questions evince both the "consciousness of inadequateness"of her language, and of herself--and are also "grateful iterations" that find their "own words somehow successful, felicitous even." In future posts, I'll start to explain how this is; it's the explanation that I'm working on. It involves God, having a soul, and some other things.
Christina, brother of Dante Gabriel, William, and--the least lettered--Maria, must be among the three or four great Victorian poets, alongside Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and perhaps Thomas Hardy or Hopkins.
Having ranks of poets is not entirely mindless; it can lead to sharpening the criteria by which we judge, and these criteria in turn can help us to better notice what is happening with the words on the page; sharper criteria might make for better tools of analysis. (They can also, of course, also bind and blind, to narrow and cramped positions.) Christina G. Rossetti is in that first rank because she unites several of the supreme virtues of poetry: the muscular prose of her syntax, the astonishing purity of her diction (or, maybe the word Davie should have used, "register"), with carefully modulated deviations, the shyly and self-consciously self-dramatizing rhetoric, and most of all the capacity to find words that suggest entire realms of feeling and experience that hover around the poem, sustaining it, so that it seems a crystallization and ordering in miniature of a chaotic atmosphere of life. Like all great poets, she is genuinely suggestive (T.S. Eliot on William Morris, in the essay on Andrew Marvell: "the verses of Morris, which are nothing if not an attempt to suggest, really suggest nothing").
She stands also with Tennyson and Browning because she innovates; she discovers new capacities in language to make discoveries about life and the world. (Proust on discovery: "It remained to Berma's credit that she discovered it, but can one use the word "discover" when the object in question is something that would not be different if one had been given it, something that does not belong essentially to one's own nature since someone else may afterwards reproduce it?"--Trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, Enright; vol 2, 193).
In her poetry, it is the inheritance of hymns, Wordsworth's plain style, the King James Bible of course, and probably an Italian Renaissance sonnet tradition (Petrarch, Dante, others I don't know anything about) that she would have known from childhood, which mix to produce something new in its cold metallic reticence and unflappable calm.
Tennyson, either chary or withholding of critical remarks, at least in public, admired her. His son, Hallam, records: "Of Christina Rossetti, as a true artist, he expressed profound respect." Moving in its brevity; his respect was worth a great deal to most of his contemporaries, and he pays her a sort of homage by saying no more, but inviting readers to discover her on their own (he is more garrulous in picking at Browning's poetic garrulity).
But she has not been well-served by twentieth-century critics. She was a favorite of Larkin's, and he does her the honor of elevating her alongside Emily Dickinson. Dickinson we all know to be a genius, a bold scientist in the laboratory of verse; she's hardly a shut-in in the House of Literary Fame, where Rossetti is more likely to be upstairs in the bedrooms while the party is raging in the parlor.
Aside from Larkin, there's not much that does what criticism does--helps us see anew, or for the first time, and helps us to apprehend, and comprehend, the life of poetry. The one great exception is Eric Griffiths, whose essay on Rossetti, originally a lecture, was published in Essays in Criticism in 1996: "The Disappointment of Christina Rossetti." It's a rich mine and yet, perhaps because of its feline delight in clawing, playfully and viciously, at other critics, it has not been drawn on much; not enough anyway.
My talk is on Rossetti and questions. She asks a great many. Lots of poets ask questions, of course--but she asks more. I need to find some numbers to support me, but a quick look at the titles in the excellent Penguin edition of her work shows how often questions head the poems, and this is even before considering the questions that are in the poems. She takes questions up in some of the poems, too; she cares about whether she ought to ask questions and, I think, about how to ask questions.
Questions after all can be classified in so many ways. (The Saul Steinberg cartoon: http://movingimages.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/saul-steinberg-question-marks2.jpg) They don't all do the same things, and her questions, I am going to explain in the talk, do something particular that leads to the deeper forces; it's my preferred way of doing criticism to trace dust drifting on the surface in order to find the deeper currents of a work. Hers are not the portentous rhetorical questions of Yeats, nor plaintive, seeking questions of Lowell. They are somewhere between rhetorical questions and "genuine" questions.
A clue for how to approach them is found in Griffith's essay, where he writes: “Rossetti has nothing as sublime as Job, though her lyrics are comparably genuine as they bring together in utterance a ‘consciousness of…inadequateness’ and a grateful iteration which finds its own words somehow successful, felicitous even. A speaker can really feel both these ways and at the same time about words, troublous though this is for a theory of language to describe”—Griffiths (110)—It’s this balance of feeling that I’m interested in--often,her questions evince both the "consciousness of inadequateness"of her language, and of herself--and are also "grateful iterations" that find their "own words somehow successful, felicitous even." In future posts, I'll start to explain how this is; it's the explanation that I'm working on. It involves God, having a soul, and some other things.
1. (first words)
The title is from R.P. Blackmur, who's in my personal pantheon of nine or ten great twentieth-century literary critics. "Provisional" is one of his favorite words--criticism being, for him, always a provisional act, an attempt at understanding that is liable to change. Maybe it's an assumption of all good critics that their words are not the last words, that others, and often they, at a later date, will revisit what they have said to tweak and turn the terms. But Blackmur liked to draw attention to the fact and remind his readers of it.
He doesn't, I think, need to be taken as defending lazy criticism--as if calling criticism provisional were an excuse for not trying to set matters right--but there is no knowing that will prove valuable to others, what wobbling rocks and fallen rotten trunks will make for the best route across the swamp. And it's all wobbling rocks and fallen rotten trunks at some point; I'm not sure where the literature comes in this analogy; perhaps the whole environment we walk through.
An Empson approach is required--as often--to make sense of what Blackmur means: he is holding himself between two contraries: the awareness that all criticism is provisional, and the belief that criticism needs nonetheless to be finished, to be made as right, as solidly realized, precise, and perfected as possible if it is to serve as a stone for anyone at all.
To raise myself to still loftier heights, there's a wonderful moment in Proust's Recherche, the second volume, when the Narrator tells us of his discovery that a youthful momentary lapse of decorum, his nearly leaning in to kiss the hand of the arid aristocrat and diplomat M. de Norpois, has been remembered and recounted by the diplomat years later--embarrassment cedes to hopeful optimism: there is no knowing what acts, what events will perish, which will remain; most do perish--this he concedes--but a list of names from an archaeological dig in Ancient Egypt (I think) reminds the Narrator that, against odds, there are some things that, even after being lost, or seemingly wasted, will be rediscovered.
It's a version of the thought at the end of Middlemarch, where Eliot insists on consoling us with the vision of Dorothea's undetected acts diffusing themselves widely, fostering good in the world. Proust is more honest than Eliot, and more surprising (there's no drumroll, but instead he arrives at the thought as if by chance, appropriately; and it is occasioned by flitting embarrassment over a minor social trip), but they are alike in their sense of time stretching forward and unexpected preserving as well as destroying. Empson was attuned to it, too, in his beautifully imaginative work on pastoral and the waste of life, in his poetry--as was one of Blackmur's critical masters, Eliot, of course.
What does this of this loftiness have to do with provisional criticism--not here, even, but in general, in its bearing even on critics like Blackmur who have and will held up? Well, accepting that criticism is provisional might lead one to care too little--to surrender to the belief that time wastes all. But the potential for critical revision, change, destruction, loss, oblivion, can be held against the prospect that time is also a great restorer, redeemer, and even conservationist--given the chance of this, one ought to make any and all of one's acts in time as perfect and finished as possible. They stand a chance of mattering simply because they do happen in time. The point is one never knows. So why not. Presume not, one was damned; despair not, one was saved.
And so this whimpering little whelp of a blog: casting out words and thoughts--or not casting out, but sending forth--both in the comfort that, being a blog, there is space for thoughts and phrases of all shapes and sizes, some more provisional than others, and also in the somewhat ponderous belief that it's not entirely a waste to send these thoughts out into the ether, that I might as well try to shape them, finish them as well as I can; they can be provisions--good or bad, tasteless or savory--for whoever happens on them.
He doesn't, I think, need to be taken as defending lazy criticism--as if calling criticism provisional were an excuse for not trying to set matters right--but there is no knowing that will prove valuable to others, what wobbling rocks and fallen rotten trunks will make for the best route across the swamp. And it's all wobbling rocks and fallen rotten trunks at some point; I'm not sure where the literature comes in this analogy; perhaps the whole environment we walk through.
An Empson approach is required--as often--to make sense of what Blackmur means: he is holding himself between two contraries: the awareness that all criticism is provisional, and the belief that criticism needs nonetheless to be finished, to be made as right, as solidly realized, precise, and perfected as possible if it is to serve as a stone for anyone at all.
To raise myself to still loftier heights, there's a wonderful moment in Proust's Recherche, the second volume, when the Narrator tells us of his discovery that a youthful momentary lapse of decorum, his nearly leaning in to kiss the hand of the arid aristocrat and diplomat M. de Norpois, has been remembered and recounted by the diplomat years later--embarrassment cedes to hopeful optimism: there is no knowing what acts, what events will perish, which will remain; most do perish--this he concedes--but a list of names from an archaeological dig in Ancient Egypt (I think) reminds the Narrator that, against odds, there are some things that, even after being lost, or seemingly wasted, will be rediscovered.
It's a version of the thought at the end of Middlemarch, where Eliot insists on consoling us with the vision of Dorothea's undetected acts diffusing themselves widely, fostering good in the world. Proust is more honest than Eliot, and more surprising (there's no drumroll, but instead he arrives at the thought as if by chance, appropriately; and it is occasioned by flitting embarrassment over a minor social trip), but they are alike in their sense of time stretching forward and unexpected preserving as well as destroying. Empson was attuned to it, too, in his beautifully imaginative work on pastoral and the waste of life, in his poetry--as was one of Blackmur's critical masters, Eliot, of course.
What does this of this loftiness have to do with provisional criticism--not here, even, but in general, in its bearing even on critics like Blackmur who have and will held up? Well, accepting that criticism is provisional might lead one to care too little--to surrender to the belief that time wastes all. But the potential for critical revision, change, destruction, loss, oblivion, can be held against the prospect that time is also a great restorer, redeemer, and even conservationist--given the chance of this, one ought to make any and all of one's acts in time as perfect and finished as possible. They stand a chance of mattering simply because they do happen in time. The point is one never knows. So why not. Presume not, one was damned; despair not, one was saved.
And so this whimpering little whelp of a blog: casting out words and thoughts--or not casting out, but sending forth--both in the comfort that, being a blog, there is space for thoughts and phrases of all shapes and sizes, some more provisional than others, and also in the somewhat ponderous belief that it's not entirely a waste to send these thoughts out into the ether, that I might as well try to shape them, finish them as well as I can; they can be provisions--good or bad, tasteless or savory--for whoever happens on them.
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