Alan Williamson: The poet-critic

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

It would be nice to say that, in turning toward the world of poets, we turn toward health and honesty. But here, too, people feel safer in schools, like fish; vanity and spite do their eternal work; and human beings tend to be easy on themselves when the world is easy on them. The more monolithically the age approves of a given style--whether it is the journalistic "confessional" poem, the "stones-and-bones" surrealist one, the political protest, or the arch and campy New Formalist tour de force--the less its practitioners are likely to listen to the little inner voice that tells them their poem could be more honest, could be beautiful in ways the current aesthetic neither knows nor cares about. It may be that almost the entire function of poet-critics, among poets, is to make that little voice louder. James Wright said, "there can't be good poetry without a good criticism," because "the effort to write poetry" should be "an intelligent act." He said that, ironically, at a time when his own poetry was lavishly admired, not for its intelligence, but for free-association and emotional directness. But he remembered his own teachers, Roethke and Ransom, and held himself to a more complete aesthetic.

Another function of the poet-critic may be to arm us against the slings and arrows of fashion by reminding us of the long view and its inevitable corrections. To remind us that no aesthetic school was ever so right, so timely, as to lift all its adherents to greatness; or to sweep all its opponents into the rubbish-heap of history. That the classicist Valery and the avant-gardist Apollinaire were writing their great poems at exactly the same time. That if Frost, Eliot, Williams, Stevens, and Crane all sniped at each other unmercifully, posterity has not felt obliged to do so. That Byron was terribly wrong to hate Wordsworth and Coleridge, but perfectly right that no one in the future would ever consider Southey their equal. That, by the same token, Sylvia Plath may not come in a package-deal with Adrienne Rich, Judy Grahn, and Alice Walker, simply because all express anger against men. Etc., etc., etc.

After this panegyric to the poet-critic, the reader may expect me to say I'd rather be one than anything else in the world. But no: that wouldn't be honest. I have had the luck, the last ten years, to work in an English Department that values the two things I do essentially equally; and so have been spared the anxieties of the first part of my academic career. But, inwardly, the old sense of being "unreliable," neither one thing nor the other, still nags. When I go to my study in the morning, I must choose. Do I take up the work that is (relatively) quick and fun, because it can be done mainly with the intellect, but that for that very reason leaves a slight guilty sense of being too safe, respectable, secondary? Or the work that is much more self-exposing, much more painful to fail at, even for one blocked morning? I could say--and it may be true--that the two will, in the end, form a coherence, too complex to be understood along the way. But I don't think it would be to the good of either to believe that too complacently, as I go. There's a kind of threshold of faith, that makes me not finish the easy poem, refuse the invitation that would lead to the too-glib article, that comes with the competition between the two, and that I would not willingly do without.