Alan Williamson: The poet-critic

American Poetry Review, The, Jan 1995 by Williamson, Alan

A few years ago, I came on the following observation in the Modern Library Basic Writings of C.G. Jung:

Society expects, and indeed must expect, every individual to play the part assigned to him as perfectly as possible....(E)ach must stand at his post, here a cobbler, there a poet. No man is expected to be both. Nor is it advisable to be both, for that would be "queer." Such a man would be "different" from other people, not quite reliable. In the academic world he would be a dilettante, in politics an "unpredictable" quantity, in religion a free-thinker--in short, he would always be suspected of unreliability and incompetence, because society is persuaded that only the cobbler who is not a poet can supply workmanlike shoes.

(pp. 162-63)

(There is some irony here: at the back of Jung's mind is Wagner's figure of Hans Sachs, the cobbler-poet, who is essentially the hero of Die Meistersinger, the only character whose judgments are free enough of class-bias and pedantry to be reliable.)

But in some similar way, I think, society does not like the critic to be a poet, and vice versa. Critics, after all, are generally educators; and educators, however marginally, are solid citizens, part of the framework that holds society together. Poets, traditionally, are wild cards, the native inhabitants of the margin. In the English Department I first taught in, there was an infamous institution called Permission to Proceed: a faculty meeting at which the "terminal M.A.s," as they were called, were separated out from the students good enough to "proceed" to the Ph.D. When any of these students were known to write poetry, one or two of my senior colleagues would invariably suggest that we would really be doing them a favor by saving them from academicism, giving them some experience of the "real world." So I wasn't altogether surprised when my own tenure proceedings came to essentially the same conclusion.

But the distrust also works in the other direction. For years, "academic poet" was the worst insult that could be hurled at anyone, as if the double meaning of the word "academic" settled the question of originality, then and there. More recently, the fact that most poets now teach is regularly blamed for everything from our lack of social conscience to our lack of audience. I can remember, as a young person, being nervous of publishing too much criticism too fast, lest it group me with certain prominent older critics whose efforts to publish poems were regularly laughed at.

And yet, I want to argue that this "unpredictable," hybrid quantity, the poet-critic, is useful, even necessary, to both communities, to rescue them from their own potential ingrownness and staleness. Let me begin with the academic side, and say some things that neither old-nor new-fashioned critics will like to hear. There is--I say as one who has practiced it--a poison latent in the critical enterprise even at its best: the poison of voyeurism, of living at second-hand. The risk of imagining a world; of bodying forth that world believably in language; of being compelled to use one's most intimate secrets, and lose friends; even, perhaps, of leading the kind of experimental life that has sometimes gone with great imaginative work--all of these the critic can have the feeling of participating in, without ever really putting anything of his or her own on the line, except intelligence. How easy, from one's solid-citizen vantage-point, to start to feel a little superior to the creatures struggling down there in the mire! And how hard to admit that one motive for that sense of superiority is envy! So the old-fashioned scholar-critic, secure in his knowledge of the rules of composition and the Universal Truths, laughed at Whitman or Wordsworth or Lawrence, for getting these things so often, and obviously, wrong. So the new-fashioned theorist--who is much jazzier, and almost convinced that he or she is the true creator--detects all the politically incorrect prejudices, the social evasions and compromises, that really wrote the great works of the past; including that most specious prejudice, that there were, in fact, human authors.

In both of these contexts, the writer-critic is a useful corrective. Our very presence, after all, is a kind of evidence that poems and stories are written by human beings. Our often humble emphasis on technique reminds the world that even the journeyman stages of any art are difficult. (As Randall Jarrell said in "The Age of Criticism," "It is hard to write even a competent naturalistic story, and when you have written it what happens?--someone calls it a competent naturalistic story.") And that the stages anyone would want to call genius have so much of personal quirk and the unconscious to them, as well as subtlety of effect, that it would be as foolish to consider them a mere dramatization of the ideas of the age as to expect them to be perfect. Finally, we remind critics and students that works of art come out of the experience of being alive; there is nowhere else they can come from. "Reader, he was not kidding," John Berryman howled at the New Critics, speaking of Shakespeare's Sonnets; we find ourselves howling the same thing at the Post-Modernists.