 An
odd kettle of fish
Chris
Wallace-Crabbe
Terry
Eagleton
How to Read a Poem
Blackwell, $27.50 pb, 191 pp, 9781405151405
The
English critic Terry Eagleton is nothing if not a dasher. Once
suspected by many as the kind of postmodern theorist who undermined
the category of ‘literature’, he has increasingly hiked
into its territory. In The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996),
he turned against the kinds of scepticism and virtuality which
he saw as demeaning all literary or cultural study. The book certainly
made some of his former allies quite cross, not least because
it was penned with such rhetorical high spirits. His Marxist foundations,
sturdily nourished in a Salford boyhood, remained, however, and
were built upon. Yet they are sometimes twinned with residues
of Catholic belief, as his recent attack on the atheism of Richard
Dawkins has shown, full as it is of residual theology. He can
certainly be an odd kettle of fish. In How to Read a Poem,
Eagleton takes a broad brush. He remains at home with the traditional
texts, the kinds of poems we have long deemed important. For example,
the last two works to get careful attention are the rustic ‘Fifty
Faggots’, by Edward Thomas, and Hopkins’s marvellous
sonnet ‘God’s Grandeur’, in which imagination ‘is
a reflection of God’s action within the individual; and like
divine grace it “redeems” the world by restoring it
to us in all its pristine freshness’.Somewhere between mick
and Marxist (or both), Eagleton wishes to find a substantial place
for poetry: layerings of meaning which have nothing in common
with the virtual paradises and comical simulacra of postmodern
thought. His innate conservatism is revealed if we look at which
poets receive most attention here; they are Eliot, Hopkins, Keats,
Shakespeare, Yeats. Now I am back in the landscape familiar to
me from the first-year English course in 1953. The world hasn’t
fallen apart, after all.
At Eagleton’s heart here is a warm place for that kind of
tradition to which Walter Benjamin paid tribute:
Experience
for Benjamin meant the stories which the old recount to the young;
and its disintegration in modern times was in his eyes one of
the most grievous forms of modern poverty. In a world of fleeting
perceptions and instantly consumable events, nothing stays still
long enough to lay down those deep memory traces on which genuine
experience depends.
This
is a crucial piece of tribute, laying clear for us that the status
of our experience lies at the core of what the mercurial Eagleton
is after, what he yearns to preserve.
Yet as we move into these fluently concise pages, we may well
suspect that Eagleton is a kind of modern Santa Claus, trying
to cram all manner of things into our stocking. Early on, he says
very finely that literary criticism is ‘a sensitivity to
the thickness and intricacy of the medium which makes us what
we are’. At this point, we can surely feel his closeness
to Leavis, or to Empson; but he swiftly skates on into the modern
death of experience, the loss of who we really are, and thence
to the throbbing core question, ‘What is poetry?’
As its title, How to Read a Poem, plainly suggests, this
is a work aimed at the senior high-school student or the young
undergraduate (probably a reason why the price has been kept so
modest). Accordingly, and with due propriety, Eagleton does his
general topics first, one after another. Once he has Form pretty
much in place, he steps forward through the local categories of
practical criticism: through meaning, tone and pace, down to rhyme,
rhythm and imagery. It is delightful also to see his remark that
‘One of the most neglected formal techniques is punctuation’
soon followed by melancholy wit in the complaint, ‘Colons,
incidentally, have almost passed out of existence, along with
string vests and sideburns’.
Yes, Eagleton can be funny, but he is also a subtle close-reader
of the poems which he holds up for examination. There is, for
instance, a beautifully done rhythmic reading of Ralegh’s
‘Walsinghame’ and Stevie Smith’s quasi-daggy ‘Not
Waving But Drowning’; this could be exemplary for students
trying to analyse aural effects. And he turns up with some masterly
rhetorical analyses of passages from Yeats, whose Irishness no
doubt appeals, even though his excesses appal the critic. There
is also a wickedly funny reading of a stanza from Tennyson’s
‘Mariana’.
In Eagleton the persuasive critic, there is a Romantic-modernist
poet struggling to get out: not drowning, but waving. From time
to time, he releases the odd Wildean sentence such as ‘Serial
killers may indulge in unspeakable flights of fancy’. What
is more, at the opening of one chapter he quotes an old chunk
of his own Shakespearean parody, only to disclaim it with nervous
irony.
Having come from the Cambridge which held both Leavis and Raymond
Williams, Eagleton goes in search of ways to mesh close reading
with social and historical responsibility; indeed, Leavisism quite
often went along with Marxism. In passing,
I should add that the Russian formalists bob up as heroes here,
especially Yuri Lotman.
The book ends with extended analyses of four nature poems, accounts
in which the political critic blends with the intense reader of
verse. Exemplary of Eagleton’s final approach is his brief
account of the iambic pentameter measure as being ‘a triumph
of reconciliation between order and freedom, necessity and spontaneity,
the rule-governed and the open-ended … it allows for just
the kind of balance between the individual and the social order
which liberal societies tend to favour’.
In this highly readable study of poetry and criticism, a passage
of this kind gives us the best brief picture of Terry Eagleton’s
strenuously held position. Overly masculine though it is, How
to Read a Poem should do well here, especially among those
who have never heard of Lotman.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe's most recent publications are Read It
Again and The Universe Look Down (both 2005).
|
|
|
|
|
More
current reviews
Judith
Armstrong : Janet Turner Hospital's Orpheus
Lost
'If
the role of myth is to elaborate an unbearable truth so frequently
and variously that its burden is made bearable, it is no wonder
that the story of Orpheus and Eurydice exists in a multitude of
retellings and a plethora of different versions on canvas, screen,
stage and disc.'
Read
full review.
John
Hirst on Louis Nowra's Bad Dreaming
'Nowra
is not judgmental about traditional culture, and explains its practices
as an effect of the constraints and imperatives of the hunter–gatherer
life.'
Read
full review.
James
Ley: Coetzee on Confession
'Inner
Workings is of interest partly because it contains occasional
writings. It is a collection of ‘more direct compositions’
which might ‘throw light on the often oblique novels’.'
Read
full review.
|
|
AUSTRALIAN
BOOK REVIEW: