A NOTE TO TWO FRIENDS ON BIOGRAPHICAL AND HISTORICIST LITERARY CRITICISM

 My arts and letters club’s book club, which I went to for the first time yesterday, took up a book I hadn’t read—I didn’t know it was to be discussed—Will In The World, by Stephen Greenblatt. Apparently enormously popular.

Those attending seem to be primarily university profs. The discussion seemed to me to be, well, academic, and I’d say boring. 

A point I tried to make was that trying to understand the plays by seeing them in light of Shakespeare’s life, ie biographical criticism, or in light of the historical currents and conflicts of his time, historicist criticism, is a lost cause. 

We need to know enough, I granted, to understand all the references and the meaning of idioms and such, but with that in hand, the best way to understand the plays is by way of the plays. 

I’d say that every person attending, maybe eight or nine, disagreed with me. And the one woman reviewing Greenblatt’s book, a history professor, did so quite robustly, although civilly, saying, paraphrase, “As a historian, I have to disagree.”

So I tried to put a thought test to her and the group. I said, imagine a historian reads the Henry plays and can trace the events and characters and speeches in them back to something that was going on in Shakespeare’s life and times but has no particular literary aptitude. And then I said imagine someone with literary aptitude reads them with sufficient footnotes to allow him to understand the idioms and the references. 

I asked, who will understand the plays better. 

She said each will understand them differently. 

I asked her what that meant but I got no answer and then the  general discussion went off in other directions. 

If I guess as to what she meant, I’d say she’d say the historian will see them as historical/biographical documents/artefacts shedding light on Shakespeare’s life and times and the literary person will see them as art and understand them by that lens, as works of art. 

If my guess is right, then that’s part of the point I wanted to make.

I’ll add that I said since Shakespeare is one of the greatest artists in world history, it makes sense to want understand his life and how his times and work inform who he was, but that that’s a different project from understanding the plays and not particularly useful for that, which, as I noted, was the other part of my point.

A FURTHER NOTE ON WALLACE STEVENS’ POEM THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM

 Further to the immediately below blog post.

As written to someone: 

We don’t need poems to teach us anything. In speaking of the “moral” of the story of a poem, moral means to say that reducing a poem to its theme results in some bland homily. This is btw part of what Susan Sontag meant by “Against interpretation”, evading sensuousness.

In The Emperor of Ice Cream that “moral” is something like, we at best in life only enjoy, are the emperors of only, brief transient pleasures gone once had, and which are all a prelude to our finale, death. Other lyrical poems of course offer other bland meanings. 

To get the power of good poems, then, what makes them compelling, is to understand how they accomplish what they say. That requires analysis of the parts; and best is judicious analysis, which will be, as Frye says, proportionate to the work. 

What remains elusive for me is the ultimate attitude the speaker—which is to say, what Stevens wants to say via the speaker—towards this bland moral. 

Austin Allen is right to trace the poem’s fantastical rollicking beginning—the muscular man who rolls cigars consigned to whip up kitchen cup concupiscent curds—through to the comparatively prosaic dawdling wrenches and boys bringing flowers to sardonic, black humour  starkness of the corpse with her horny feet possibly protruding, showing her cold and dumb, in exemplification of the finale awaiting us all. 

The thought strikes me just now in the very process of writing this note that this general movement in the poem from the vital fantasticality of its first few lines to the comparatively prosaic dawdling wenches and flower-bringing boys—the flowers by the way rolled up in “dead” as in dated  newspapers—and to the black humour sardonicism of the corpse, a old woman, cold and dumb in death, who embroidered fantails, perhaps standing for art, now covered by her work enacts Stevens’ theme. The poem’s movement instances its theme. And so we get this poem’s illumination of what it says life is and what it comes to, a finale that mocks us all, which, come to think of it, is a concise iteration of *some* of Austin Allen’s analysis.

And I’ll note that this account or the poem can encompass the view that the first stanza is the beginning of preparations for the funeral or is that it presents a miniature panorama of lived life.

So I do believe that in the very process of composing this note I’ve come to terms with its mocking, sardonic attitude to its “moral”.

P.S. I 100% dissociate myself from Austin Allen saying that the message of the poem seems to be live each moment of   life to the fullest. 

P.P.S. I don’t read *in this poem* Stevens’ adjacency of life in its vitality and more prosaic part beside death such that the former is valued. I read him saying that the finale casts its shadow over all that comes before. In an earlier discussion I noted that “finale” in “let be be the finale of seem” was that greater reality over all that comes before, a kind of seeming, life itself as a kind of seeming. If this view holds, then I say the black humour sardonicism at the end brackets or qualifies what’s in the first stanza. However I can see the argument for the view that regardless of death life is to be celebrated as the first stanza has it.

A FEW NOTES ON WALLACE STEVENS’ THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

WALLACE STEVENS

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are used to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,

Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet

On which she embroidered fantails once

And spread it so as to cover her face.

If her horny feet protrude, they come

To show how cold she is, and dumb.

Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

1. Those described in the first verse are dissociated from the death-laden second verse: they’re not part of it. Not the surreally described muscular cigar roller, described with comical, vital, gently jibing fantastical overtones. Not the dawdling wenches dressed as they are used to. And not the boys bringing flowers, possibly in the way of courting the wenches, rolled in old newspapers. 

2. In trying to understand how these described folks relate to the gist of the poem as indicated in the repeated past line of each verse, my tentative thought is that these likely unsophisticated, opposite of posh types are presented mostly positively—though “wenches” is somewhat of a spanner. But they dawdle and seem to live as how they are. There is a progression in them from the individual somewhat surreal cigar roller to the groups of wenches and boys more plainly described, ie not fantastically. So do we have in miniature panorama both the play of the imagination in the cigar roller and a touch of verisimilitude in the other two? And if we do, then why so thematically?

3. I see the succeeding line, “Let be be finale of seem” as possibly evoking complementary meanings. The conventional reading, paraphrase, let reality—“be”—in finally to pierce appearances—“seem” makes some sense. But I think it folds into a better reading that turns on “finale”. It’s not a spear that punctures, intrudes on appearances as they are happening. It’s the culminating end of what has preceded it. It presupposes some prior thing that comes to a finale, a,culminating end, as I say, that puts what has gone before in some perspective, that gives it coherence, meaning. Which is all why I ultimately see in “finale” death after lives as variegated and panoramic in miniature as set by the three described ranging from the surreally fantastical to the nicely prosaic. Death is the “finale” of them all, regardless of their lived lives, and paradoxically is the the most real “be” there is.

4. And so all of this sets up the theme of our lives as transient contingent things as ephemeral, however momentarily sweet and pleasurable, as “ice-cream” when put against the implacability of death. We in effect govern, are the emperors of, nothing.

5. The second verse seems to me more readily understandable and I’d argue is connected to the more hard to work out first verse by the contrast between those alive in their fantastical vitality and conventional living and the corpse of the old, gnarled, dead woman who embroidered fantails on the sheet in her life that now covers her corpse. This is what life comes to when we affix the beam: vitality, the fantastical expanses of the imagination, the prosaic conventionality of dawdling wenches and boys bringing flowers, living things rolled up in “dead” old newspapers, all that we do, no matter how we’ve lived comes to the “finale” of our deaths, the most real there is that perhaps finally punctures what most seems to us, “seem”, life dissociated from the fact of death.

PROSE POEM IS CONTRADICTORY

 As usual I left the salon with my head buzzing over what we were talking about, this time mostly prose poems, (less so how much I dislike the poem Anthacrite).

So I gave the prose poem point more thought. My basic view is that prose poem is a contradiction, that poems are poems and prose is prose.  And my basic rational, hopefully not arbitrary, demarcation is broken lines as a necessary but not sufficient condition for a set of words to count as a poem.

What is prose but coherent sentences and paragraphs without line breaks except for paragraphs. And poetry? Doesn’t it present itself via verse, that is by setting up its lines in a purposeful way, with the breaks going to meaning in more accomplished poems? If so, then on this formal distinction a prose poem is a day night. Free verse doesn’t obviate this distinction for we still have purposeful line endings.

So, beating a dead horse, line breaks are exactly what prose poems give up, ie the basic difference between poetry and prose.

A prevalent justification for subtracting the difference from the distinction is that prose poems can and do have all the key characteristics of poetry like, dense, charged, implicative language, musical rhythm, imagery, metaphor, inverted syntax, multi layered language and so on. But adding back the difference, prose can have these qualities too and that includes prose that doesn’t say it’s poetry or that it’s like poetry.

Clear thinking, I argue, wants to distinguish between poetry as a definable thing and poetry or poetic as descriptors. I noted the song sung by Johnny Tillotson:

Poetry in motion,

See her gentle sway,

Lovely locomotion,

A wave out on the ocean

Could never move that way.

To elaborate on the self evident, a poem is not that which is poetic. It’s a genre whose boundaries are definable and intelligible, maybe something like—this is mine, with doubtless lots of problems, but I’ll give it a shot:

“A coherent set of words intended to be artistic set in broken lines.”

Whether a poem is good or bad is a separate question that presupposes the validity of something like my definition. 

We need to guard against the slippage from “this is poetic” to “this is a poem.”

I’m not a philosopher but I argue there’s an important point underlying the issue of prose poems. Labels, distinctions, categories, taxonomies that are helpful aren’t merely arbitrary. They’re how we see, understand and articulate differences that matter.

So as I said, or tried to say in the salon, the issue isn’t, why all this differentiation. If we collapse them all, then obviously chaos. This is elementary. Overlaps and borderline cases are rule-proving or rule-illuminating exceptions.  The real question is if the conceptual difference between poetry and prose, even poetic prose, say a prose poem, is worth keeping.

I say in collapsing this distinction we lose sight of a basic principle of setting up words in a functionally generic way, ie line breaks as a necessary condition of poetry. In other words, if poetry conceptually simply merges with poetic, we lose a basic principle of a certain kind of literary genre that differs from others. 

It’s not a question of being rigidly formalistic, of ticking off boxes. It’s a matter of seeing things more clearly. Functional categories don’t just group classes of things. They keep differences intact that we’d otherwise be blind to.

The claim that prose poems are poems repudiates the virtue of the distinction between poems and prose. And more so, perhaps an irony here, the notion that a prose poem collapses the distinction should be put together with understanding that it, a prose poem, derives its very meaning from the intelligible difference between the two.

So “proselets” is ok with me.

SOME OF MY PROBLEMS WITH CAMUS’ MYTH OF SISYPHUS

Here are some or my beefs with Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus 

1, He says the universe gives us no ultimate meaning, which is what everyone wants the answer to. That gap generates absurdity. Why therefore is life worth living? Why don’t we just kill ourselves? But what’s the basis for saying life is absurd given that gap. He just asserts it.

2, Who’s to say that life short of ultimate meaning is meaningless? Who’s to say, for example, that the satisfactions we get from the less than ultimate events in our lives, love, family, children, a job well done, not to omit to mention great accomplishments aren’t enough to satisfy us as to meaning.

3, And why does it follow from his unproven assumption that since life is absurd, meaningless, it’s imperative to rebel, live freely and passionately in the lucid understanding of our condition?

4, And I have a terrific problem with his central conceit, Sisyphus forever repeatedly pushing a rock up a hill as exemplification of how we all live lives of pointless repetition. While repetition is an inexorable truth about life: 1, there is no case made that it is all necessarily pointless—that’s just asserted; and 2, there is no case made, nor could it be, that it comprises the sum of our existence.

5, Therefore, for him to fault us for evading these truths is a perverse move. For he’s accusing us of shirking what he asserts as true but can’t establish and which our common experience persuasively counter argues. 

6, His grand theory of absurdity really discloses a different analysis following from the premise that universe offers no meaning. Granting that for argument’s sake, existentialism via Sartre, for example, says we must choose and work consciously on meaningful projects in order to give our lives meaning in the face of that emptiness. Those projects are qualitatively different from pointless repetitiveness.

7, Camus’ own trio of rebellion, freedom and passionate living belie pointless repetitiveness. 

A NOTE ON EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBERTSON’S THE HOUSE ON THE HILL

The House On The Hill

Edwin Arlington Robinson

They are all gone away,

   The House is shut and still,

There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray

   The winds blow bleak and shrill:

They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day

   To speak them good or ill:

There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray

   Around the sunken sill?

They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play

   For them is wasted skill:

There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay

   In the House on the Hill:

They are all gone away,

There is nothing more to say.

Hi Richard: 

I liked speaking (too briefly) with you about Robinson’s poem. But I left feeling unsatisfied about what it means even as I think I understood us saying that its meaning might be either a certain kind of worked through acceptance or mere rumination, ie obsessive repetition. So (given my own obsessiveness 😊)I looked at the poem more closely, more leisurely and gave it some thought, as I sometimes do with poems we’ve read. 

I think the final repetition of “They are all gone away” is said differently from how it’s said earlier. At first it seems declarative. We’re told of the fact of absence. 

But comes the question: “Why is it then we stray / Around the sunken sill?”, which suggests knowing the fact isn’t enough. We know they’re gone, but we keep returning to where they were. The fifth stanza then makes it plain that imaginative efforts are futile in coming to terms with this loss: “our poor fancy-play / For them is wasted skill.”

At poem’s end , therefore, has the speaker not gotten a certain kind of acceptance? The last “There is ruin and decay” is  stated after the speaker has worked through the impossibility of accommodating in any way ruin and decay. And so when “There is nothing more to say” finally comes, it means more than literally “I have nothing else to say”. It means there is nothing that can be said, that can alter the fundamental fact of the loss, neither language nor imagination.

There’s no consoling substitute, no transcendence, reunion, religious assurance, or claim that the dead somehow live on. Acceptance here means accepting the impossibility of any consolation or comfort. The house remains ruined; the people remain gone; and the only response finally is literal and notional silence, poem’s end.

I see the poem’s movement as not simply from the fact of loss as ruin and decay to bleak acceptance. It’s more a repeated attempt to come terms with loss. The speaker in effect asks: “I know they’re gone; why, then, do I keep returning to them?” The answer finally emerges in “our poor fancy-play,” the recognition that efforts somehow to accommodate ruin and decay are useless.

So the six-times repeated refrain is like a thought being worked through. Doesn’t each “There is nothing more to say” have a slightly different quality as the speaker struggles with what it all means? At first it’s assertion; then it’s perplexity; then admonition to stop imagining; and finally, after “ruin and decay” have been squarely faced, it’s acceptance of the irredeemability of loss.

My view is that the repetition of “There is nothing more to say” isn’t opposed to the speaker’s thinking; it’s how it’s conducted. The speaker keeps circling the house until fully confronting that there’s nothing there. Isn’t there too much amplitude in this struggle to deal with, think through, loss to obviate it as mere rumination? For example and as noted:

Why is it then we stray

   Around the sunken sill?

They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play

   For them is wasted skill:

There is nothing more to say.

The final “There is nothing more to say” is now the conclusion the speaker has finally come to terms with.

Cheers (I guess 😊)

Itzik