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CRITICISM AND THE WRITTEN POEM
Martin Harrison
A FEW WEEKS AGO, there was a poem by Les Murray in the Times Literary Supplement in which he suggests that Australian criticism may die because the publishers are too frightened to publish controversial and (in the particular case) potentially litigious material. Murray's poem 'The Oxford Book of Alacrity' refers, as you might have guessed, to the still not re-released biography by Peter Alexander. OUP's decision to withdraw the Murray biography lands them the soubriquet 'Oxford University Suppress' in Murray's snappy, memorable poem. His epithet may stick, but if it does it will be because it correctly identifies something about freedom of expression. 'My life,' he writes, 'has been impounded/ by Oxford University Suppress.'
Litigation threats aside, though, it occurs to me that the poem supposes something more than a responsibility on the part of publishing houses. The poet writes and, over time, serious critics carry out the matters of assessment and documenting and interpretation: more importantly perhaps, they build into the work what the creator cannot put there with any degree of absoluteness -- a meaning in relation to other ideas and historical events, and a meaning and a motivation in relation to the life of the artist. Once established in the field of criticism, these matters are there to be freely debated. It's these further connections (between poetry and culture and between poetry and a biographical self) which the allegedly cowardly publishers and a threatened suit of libel have put in jeopardy. Or so the TLS's 'The Oxford Book of Alacrity' has it.
Modernists, let's face it, were luckier than we post-modernists and post-post-modernists are in this critical matter. Not only did a lively, theoretically based criticism and teaching come into existence in the universities in the 20s and 30s just as they were getting going but a number of poets found that their own pre-occupations as poets got quickly hitched into those new critical agendas. The writing of new poetry, the teaching of poetry at university and in schools and a widely practised literary critical activity came into existence side by side: it's hard to imagine the reputation of a Yeats or an Eliot or a Stevens or a Pound outside of this modernist symbiosis between critic and poet. None of that fame depends on biography, the figure of the poet's life. Indeed several of the great modernists, Eliot and Auden for instance, expressly forbade the writing of a biography.
It is worth stressing that this symbiosis was a public and critical relationship. It was not about making poetry academic. Significantly, four of the five poets just mentioned never worked in universities; and the one who briefly did, Pound, wrote one of the more trenchant 'raves' about how negative universities are in his 'Provincialism The Enemy'. The great exception, I suppose, is Robert Frost. Frost more or less singlehandedly invented what we still eighty years on recognise as the trade and trappings of 'the poet' -- a quasi-professional who is regularly seen in the university, a public spokesperson living in country retirement.
Frost, in fact, made not only what is even by contemporary standards an extraordinary amount of money traipsing through the campuses of America. It was there, in that lively modernist environment of scholarship and creative writing, that he definitively 'lodged' -- his term -- his poetry in the national consciousness. It has stayed there ever since. (Partly inspired by Frost himself, not even the furphies and controversies of Frostian biography have displaced it.)
Modernist criticism (whether it was Leavisite or New Criticism or Empsonian or practical or Freudian or literary genre theory) took it for granted that if you wrote about language, poetics and imagination then you wrote too about modern writing and in particular poetry -- and, what's more, you wrote publicly and influentially about all of them. It's worth remembering that the late modern, post-war period is a time when a writer in the Anglo-American context like Leavis could seriously propose literary study as the foundation of university life. But it is also the period when a key public intellectual like Sartre is writing not only his own plays and novels but about the imagination and literature in general and about Genet and Faulkner in particular. It's when Heidegger is doing his main work on representation, technology and poetic thought (in particular in relation to his contemporaries like Trakl, George, Benn as well as the classic instance of Holderlin); and it's when the historian of science, Gaston Bachelard, turns away from chemistry to look at the images of poets (again, mostly his contemporaries from the Cahiers du sud orientation) as a means of studying modalities of lived space and imagination.
Just in case it is forgotten, it is worth recalling too that it is not a politician or an historian but a literary critic who, writing about radio broadcasting and the proper function of poetic imagery, coins the only original Australian contribution to public critical terminology: I am referring of course to literary critic Arthur Phillips and his critical term, cultural cringe.
The Americans have done much better in keeping this active symbiosis together. The wealth of contemporary American poetry is matched by enormous institutional support for writers and a lively critical context. The full force of that phrase 'lively critical context' needs to be made real, however. It's the context of debate, often edgeless and hard to pin down, about art, writing, poetry. In recent months the British critic, James Wood, and British philosophy historian Jonathan Rée have been important in my own reading; but virtually everything else has come one way or another from that 'lively American critical context'. Language critics Charles Bernstein and Robert Perelman, recent essay collections on poetry by Helen Vendler and Marjorie Perloff, William Gass's work on Rilke, a recent American translation of Irigaray's book on Heidegger, San Diego-based Michael Davidson's book on poetry and materiality, Norman Holland's book on cognition and poetry finally caught up with after ten years -- I've been visiting both new and familiar books and essays. And an Australian critic's book? None. Unless, of course, I count Michael Taussig's troubling but exciting book, Defacement, as a kind of literary criticism in anthropological mode. But Taussig lives, works and is famous in the USA not here. Here, the lack of university presses, the lack of critical or poetics or aesthetics lists from the publishers and, I'm sure, the ongoing crisis of impoverishment and decline in our administratively 'dumbed down' Australian university system have no doubt assisted in that absence.
Not quite. No-one had mentioned Rosemary Huisman's The Written Poem to me nor had I seen any reviews when it first appeared two years back. This multi-faceted book by a Sydney University critic and scholar is about why poems, and in particular contemporary poems, look the way they do, why they have the visual and prosodic features they do and how the structuring of the poetic line bears upon the nature of reading. Equally concerned with manuscript, printing and hypertext, it's also a book which situates Australian poetry in the mainstream of contemporary debates in poetics. To a degree, it's a response (often negative) to post-modern ideas of American critics like Frederic Jameson, Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein. In part, it draws provocatively on the work of linguists like Halliday and social critics like Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu.
In other words, The Written Poem is a book which assumes (correctly) that criticism cannot but engage, whether directly or indirectly, with poetics and philosophy. Deeply layered, philosophical issues to do with meaning, textuality, structure and prosody are at the heart of current practices in Australian poetry as they are in American. The debate about poetry may be particular but is never parochial. Besides, it's searching questions which demand good answers. What interests Huismans is the practice of silent reading and how that changes the lyric quality of poems. How did the poetic line come about? What are the connections between literacy and the idea of 'avant-gardes'? In a manner not unconnected with what provoked Les Murray's poem, she asks how far the poet can control the way subjectivity and self are represented.
Catching up with this complex and accomplished book (Cassell have just re-published it in paperback as The Written Poem: Semiotic Conventions from Old to Modern English) made me wonder what would be the effect on our contemporary writers of having several such criticism and poetics works appearing in Australia each year rather than (as is the case currently) one in a blue moon? Perhaps the deep connections between literary criticism and freedom of thought would become more clear, more established. Perhaps public responses to poetry would become less quirky, less embittered. Perhaps these matters would not then find their only means of expression when reduced to spats and libel actions.
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Return to Australian Book Review /August 2000