Me: I send my immediate family a new poem every day usually with a small note about the poet.
I was especially moved by the this one short one below.
I’d never heard of the poet.
I like the hard c in “crying” against the soft leaf sounds. I like the double meaning in want, a lack and a desire. And I like the main contrast between that which is wispy, barely seen and heard, traces, against the impactful explosion of emotion in the last line.
The Want Of You
Angelina Weld Grimke
A hint of gold where the moon will be;
Through the flocking clouds just a star or two;
Leaf sounds, soft and wet and hushed,
And oh! the crying want of you.
R: It does not move me, because it feels like the speaker knows, and likes it, that she is being poetic in the approved manner. Including those elements you point to.
Me: Hard to think of a lot of revered poems, when the poet or if you prefer, the voice of the poem, or speaker, isn’t being self consciously poetic in an approved manner. You could point to any number of effects, like coupling, or the contrasts in euphony, and so on and on, and not them as instances of that.
How to distinguish them here as a matter of literary criticism and evaluation?
R: Wordsworth persuaded an entire culture that his poetry was a true expression of the human soul and that the previous poetry was artificial, rhetorical, e.g Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes, a complex imitation of a poem by Juvenal. As Coleridge pointed out, Wordsworth claim is false, just a new convention, but his poems didn't (and sometimes still don't) feel that way, Wordsworth dominated poetry in the 19th (though some followed Keats in the elaborate tradition), and some people may still pull it off, but most sound (to me) like poor imitations of the real thing. Pound, Eliot, etc. tried to react against this, by making the image do all the work, (no, "Oh!"s for example) and that led to a convention of flatness that can work but now most often sounds merely dull to me.
Me:
... but most sound (to me) like poor imitations of the real thing..
That’s my question.
From a literary criticism, evaluation perspective, how do you show that the little poem I sent you doesn’t work?
Or how do I show it does?
If we base our our view of that on our feelings on reading it, then that’s entirely unhelpful in wanting, if possible, to make an objective assessment of it.
Of course it may be that an objective assessment is impossible in these matters.
But it is possible at least with extreme examples.
“Roses are red violets are blue
Your face looks and smells like poo.”
So why not with less than extreme examples?
R: There is no disputing about taste. One can point others to what gives you pleasure, but you can't make them drink of it. What I care about is whether people's accounts of what they are responding to make sense to me. I always feel your critiques do, but not your finding themes. There is just agreement about Harlequin among those people who are taken by the right people to be good judges of literature. Hume has made the most widely admired case for something like that view of taste. Arguments are not involved, and philosophers have explained why.
Me: I don’t know his case and I don’t know the explanation.
Can you summarize them?
Something must underlie the agreement, some set of reasons. And if there are reasons, then it seems to me there’s an argument or there are arguments.
Consensus on such things doesn’t arise out of whole cloth. What is the basis of this agreement? Would it be hard for you to explain why doggerel isn’t good poetry, is bad poetry, why Harlequins aren’t great books, are bad books?
And where there is evaluative disagreement on specific works, there is, I’d think, usually a common starting point for what standards apply.
R: I just finished Judas. 2/3 of the book is the story of a very odd, touching, and unusual relationship between an older woman (but not that old) named Atalia and a younger man (but not that young) named Shmeul. . 1/3 consists of long sections in which the father-in-law of Atalia talks about the rights and wrongs of the path Israel took from the 20s on.
The two are tied together plot-wise because Atalia lives with her father-in-law and hires the Shmeul to converse with the father-in-law, who is a cripple, and do a few simple chores. She shares the house because her husband was brutally killed in one of the Arab Israeli wars and the house was left to her and her father in law. and their relationship, as slight as it is, transforms Shmeul.
The intellectual section consist of two parts, first,. a rehash of the debate about how Jews should relate to the Arabs and Palestinians, while the second is about Jewish attitudes to Judas, the subject of Shmeul's abandoned academic study.
I don't think serious students of this matter would find the intellectual stuff very impressive. I think the intellectual stuff is there to give a slight but lovely novella (a genre that is hard to publish) some intellectual heft and novelistic length. And if there is some connection it is aridly abstract, some parallel that illuminates neither, but weakly justifies its inclusion.
For example, the moral might be (crudely stated in a way that connects the 2 sides) that while intimacy can transform people, it cannot triumph over political reality. (Atalia's father was very close to many Arabs, but that meant nothing politically).
I would bet a lot that some found the intellectual part very good, and perhaps even the basis of the work's value, while I feel the reverse. I can't see how any argument could alter that. However, over time a consensus will emerge as to where the book stands in his oeuvre, and where the oeuvre stands in modern Israeli lit, and where in world lit. But not because some arguments demonstrated its worth.
Me: I haven’t read this book, in fact had never heard of it.
But what you say exemplifies some of the nuances in the question of whether taste is arguable. As I’ve noted, at the extremes, lousy doggerel poetry, formulaic, poorly written novels, all bad art at the extreme, invite defensible, easily argued points about why appreciation of them, not seeing them for what they are, reflects bad taste.
And there will be, is, a consensus about that.
My intuition is that the easier judgments about taste in extremes suggest that taste is arguable in better works like, say, Oz’s, even as there may be virtually intractable evaluative and, too, literary critical disagreement over them.
To view differently whether, say, the link between the intellectual part and the story part in Oz works means what if the issue comes up?
You’ll say you found the connection arid and forced and your opposite will say he didn’t. Then you will be pressed to give reasons and clarify the criteria from which you are judging and that you are applying and so will your opposite. And it’s entirely probable you’ll agree on the criteria while disagreeing on their application in this instance. And one of you may or may not persuade the other.
I’ve had experiences of my judgments about works being changed or qualified by being given reasons for difference I found persuasive.
You detach taste from our response to art, which, taste, is just a dimension of the engaged whole of us, mind, emotion, intuition, perception, erudition and so on; and you locate taste in some inviolable, unreachable sphere.
You take our tendency generally to stick to what we feel about works of art as beggaring the possibility of persuasive argument.
Your very last point betrays a category error. I guess there is a sociology of and a psychology of the consensus you lastly speak of, using Oz’s novella as a hypothetical instance. And you say once consensus is entrenched, that’s that and argument has nothing to do with it.
But that doesn’t account for the arguments that led to a conventional view in the first place.
And that same that doesn’t account for re-evaluation.
And it doesn’t account for any individual’s experience with a work and for him getting into, so to say, a quarrel with convention.
Nor does it account for differing schools of thought on any number of issues raised by works of art and their creators too.
That’s the error: your brief descriptive account of how consensus gets formed and is what it is, is different from people experiencing works afresh or again and rethinking them.
The first, it is obvious, doesn’t logically or practically entail the impossibility of the second. And the second will articulate itself in arguments.
R: There is no history of such arguments making a difference. Musical works last by being attended over long periods of time. Same with all works of art. In the short term there has been no time for time's winnowing. The best short description of criticism I know is "discourse grounding evaluation." One can see why the person says what they do, they are seeing the same work, but you just respond differently.
Me: It’s never happened to you?
R: Quite often I just don't get a New Yorker cartoon. Someone then tells me what is going on. Then I can enjoy it (or not) and the judgement is there. It also happens with poems. I did not understand for quite some time that the speaker was a river in Hart Crane's Repose of Rivers (I think that is the title), once I did, boom, I got it, and loved it. Often when people don't like something they simply don't understand it. A student hated Portnoy until I read it aloud and he saw it was funny. Then he loved it. I think we can point people to what is going on so they are sure they get it, and then they can judge. So, no, no-one has ever persuaded me that my judgment about something I understood perfectly well was better or worse than I found it. You can change understanding, but not the judgment of something that the person believes they understand. I have persuaded only by pointing out what was not understood. One teaches what one understands and let's the chips fall where they may.
R: I should add that people point out things in works that I have missed but which do not alter my judgment, just add a bit to it. Also, bad interpretations have confused me. For years people said that Kafka's Address to an Academy was an allegory of Freuds Civilization and Its Discontents. I like the story but that somehow ruined it. Then I read that it was an allegory of Jewish efforts to assimilate to German society, and suddenly it was genius---as so often with Kafka. No argument, just a change of the whole gestalt as we used to say, and then boom.
Me: “... So, no, no-one has ever persuaded me that my judgment about something I understood perfectly well was better or worse than I found it....”
Another problem with what you say beyond what I’ve noted is this: no one understands complex works “perfectly.” So taste will always be informed by a better understanding, which always takes the form of an argument.
Me: “ Hume reminds us of the radical difference in kind between matters of fact and the pronouncements of sentiment. Verdicts of sentiment lack a truth-value. So it is surprising to find him endorsing the position that many judgments of taste are “absurd and ridiculous” (SOT, 269). Small differences affect taste, yet most people notice only “the grosser and more palpable qualities of the object” (SOT, 278). Only judges with a more refined taste will respond to the “universal” appeal of superior art. Because refinement demands considerable practice, such critics are few in numbers.”
R: Sure, but no arguments are involved, just sensitivity to detail and we learn quickly which critics are insensitive. But that is what I said when the critic is reading the same book, that their comments indicate they get it. But I can then disagree with their judgment.
Me: How does sensitivity to detail or whatever it is in any instance, it’s unlimited, that makes for a superior apprehension of a work get communicated save by reasoned discourse, which is to say, an argument?
Me: Plus, you haven’t dealt substantively with this small account of Hume saying what I say, that bad taste at the extreme is easily judged and explained and good taste will reflect itself in an apprehension “of the ‘universal’ appeal of superior art,” that refined taste “demands considerable practice,” which all suggests what I’ve been arguing about taste itself being arguable.
R: Show me one. Give me an example.
Me: Sure. Here’s one that took me just under 12 seconds to find: https://www.jstor.org/stable/427018?seq=1 (In this essay, a critic disagrees by a series of arguments with Eliot’s criticism of Hamlet as a flawed play and shows why Eliot is wrong.)
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