Alan Williamson: The poet-critic

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

(pp. 53-54)

Or consider the essay that juxtaposes Robinson Jeffers with the "literary reprimand[s]" he has received from Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass. A foregone conclusion, one might think: what contemporary reader will not prefer Hass, at least, both for his more tempered, craftsmanly style and for his liberal humanism? Yet Gluck works us around to see that there is nothing more "human" than "the manner in which Jeffers espouses rock...exposed, rash, extreme, vulnerable." And then to see Hass's stance as more defensive and rigid--but also, more complex in possibility--than most readers would allow:

Hass hates disappointment, hates being imprisoned in its continuing and limited range of attitudes, of tones: rue, regret, plangent lament. When Hass sighs in Praise he does so with a kind of savage fury, constrained by perspective, by habitual poise; in these moments, he comes closest to being what Milosz has always been, since to write as an ancient soul is to write as an ironist...

(pp. 66-67)

Some critics delight us because they really can pick out what's good in an immense range of styles; others for the rigor with which they make the case for a single, elusive virtue. Gluck is of the latter kind. The virtues she champions are severity of argument, tragedy, lack of easy self-forgiveness. While my own canon might not include, say, Seidman or Oppen, I enjoy the angle of vision that lines them up with poets I, too, passionately admire: Eliot, Jeffers, Plath, Berryman, Bidart. Above all, I enjoy Gluck's principled opposition to the cant of the life-affirming--perhaps the most repressive form of tolerance that commonly influences the ranking of poets.

Many poets dislike literary theory from a cursory acquaintance with its premises, without actually reading it. Heather McHugh is one of the few who know it well enough to argue back on its own terms. Her Broken English (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) is greeted by its blurbists--who lean a little toward the theory side--as putting an end to "useless bickering and distrust." In fact, I would argue, the "bickering" between poets and theorists is about something: it is about the intellectual irresponsibility with which, on the academic side, half-truths about subtle questions have been made into dogmas, their counter-truths pursued and, as a theorist might say, de(r)rided with all the energy of an Inquisition. One of these dogmas is that our experience of presence in the world is an illusion, because consciousness does not exist apart from language, and language always points to other language, never directly to the Thing. So we find McHugh writing, of Paul De Man's essay on Rilke:

A reader like Paul De Man astutely remarks the reversals in Rilke's work--the sudden turning of out to in and subject to object, before to after, death to life, fiction to reality, and vice versa. But what De Man call Rilke's "ambivalence" is, to my mind, in the nature of poetic language; indeed, art must raise and ratify this discomfort, this uneasiness, the play of the senses against what escapes them, or of language around what is unspeakable. Most poets seem to believe that consciousness is larger than language and many critics today seem to doubt that it is. For criticism, consciousness is coextensive with language...whereas the poet's art exists precisely in the refinement of language until it's able to suggest or trigger uncontainable or inexpressible experiences of consciousness, depths of presence.