The question of what we read

In class Professor Powers posed the question as to whether we have a responsibility to appreciate the things that we don't like, based on the thoughts of Wimsatt and Beardsley. It seems that a lot of college is spent sort of guiding our reading tastes. I've made my way through a good deal of stuff that I didn't like while at college because of its literary value. And truth be told, I have come to appreciate a lot of it (mostly because I'm proud that I got through it anyways and now at least understand it). Then I think about writers like Tennyson, who sounds just like the type of poet that an English major should read. But when I took Victorian Lit and had to read Tennyson, let's just say he wasn't my favorite. His writings embody so much of the Victorian era that I understand why his works are important, but I didn't enjoy some of them. Even though I didn't love them, I do appreciate them, but do I have a responsibility to do so? I've always wondered who decides what writers from each time period are the ones that we study in school and the ones that become most popular. Is it the public? The anthologies? Maybe my opinon differs from the decider of the main literary canon. Do I still have a responsibility to appreciate their selections?

Right now I'm taking Womens Literature, and it was interesting that when I first got the class book list, I realized that I had never heard of any of the authors on the list. In past literature classes I read names that everyone knows like Tennyson, Wordsworth, Twain, Hopkins, Eliot, and a whole slew of names that I always felt like I should read because I'm an English major, and those are the names I had always heard talked about. But in my current womens lit class, I'm reading books by women of different races and backgrounds, and I have never heard of any of them before.

A few other people have blogged about Barbara Christian's article "The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism." It's applicable to my thoughts because it discusses the need for us to look low, at the creations of those who are typically excluded from the main literary canon, because there we find suppressed voices that need to be heard so we can hear ourselves. Christian writes, "I wonder if we critics read stories and poems, or, if as our language indicates, our reading fare is primarily that of other critics and philosophers? . . . Why are we so riveted on male thinkers, preferably dead or European?" She asks some valuable questions because on entering into my womens lit class, I had the assumption that the writing would somehow be less valuable than more classic works I had read in other English classes. I guess I'm not sure if I should have to appreciate works that I don't particularly like. But I have to admit that my English education has taught me how to appreciate works that I don't like.

A variety of perspectives

Whenever I stumble upon a poem that I really like, I have this instinctive obsession to transform into search mode to discover if my idea of the poem is consistent with that of others. I search for all articles and scholarly opinions that I can find regarding the poem. Since we've been discussing poetic authority in class, I thought about instances where I had been disappointed by studying other people's interpretations of poems that I liked. I remembered writing my "favorite poem project" for Professor Downing's intro class. I chose Gwendolyn Brooks' "The Preacher Ruminates: Behind the Sermon:"

I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No. Despite
The bright hosannas, bright dear-Lords, and bright
Determined reverence of Sunday eyes.

Picture Jehovah striding through the hall
Of His importance, creatures running out
From servant-corners to acclaim, to shout
Appreciation of His merit’s glare.

But who walks with Him?—dares to take His arm,
To slap Him on the shoulder, tweak His ear,
Buy Him a Coca-Cola or a beer,
Pooh-pooh His politics, call Him a fool?

Perhaps—who knows?—He tires of looking down.
Those eyes are never lifted. Never straight.
Perhaps sometimes He tires of being great
In solitude. Without a hand to hold.

I did the assignment, carefully composing my paragraph about why I chose this as my favorite poem and ensuring that I used enough complex sentences and rid it of all the "to be" verbs. I liked the poem because of its perspective; it contemplates God through similar standards which we use to evaluate other people. He has the whole world in his hand, but there is no being with whom he can affectionately intertwine fingers. Yet, I searched articles to find out about other people's perceptions of the poem. I found an article which speculated that in writing this poem, Brooks intended to address the problem of people valuing formal religious doctrines and practices above compassion. I found that really interesting, but it was almost disappointing to find that the element that drew me into the poem was only the surface of something deeper that Brooks might have intended. But at the same time, it added an extra element that I could also appreciate. I guess I can only conclude that the matter of intention is a blurry one, and so is the matter of interpretation.

Where authority lies

In reading Wimsatt and Beardsley's formalist ideas, my instinct is to regard them skeptically. First they establish that the author's intentions in writing poetry are absolutely not valid criteria on which we can judge a poem. Alright, so once the poet crafts their words and presents them to the public, then the words must stand on their own. I suppose I can go along with that. Words can be manipulated in interpreted in so many ways, and so by releasing their recorded words to the public, I can see how an author also signs away their rights to controlling the interpretation of their words in a way. But Wimsatt and Beardsley go further with their Affective Fallacy to declare that the readers emotive response to poem are also not worthy criteria that we can use to judge poetry. I'm left with the blaring question, "Where does poetic authority come from!?"

Apparently, it lies within the text itself. But what is the text if it's not a transfer of words between one person's creative intentions and another person's response to those? Sure, a lot of intention might get lost in the transfer, and some interpretive or emotive inclinations in the reader might interfere with their reading of the poem, but I think those things are perfectly valid. The formalists are trying to objectify poetry and transform writing into some kind of scientific process. But so much of poetry deals with manipulating language and using it in unconventional ways, and that seems to indicate the need for us to regard it subjectively. If we disregard the role of the people in dealing with the text, then it becomes nothing but a lifeless set of words.

When Wimsatt and Beardsley claim that asking the author their intention of a writing a poem is not a critical inquiry ("Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle"), I had to question this idea. While the idea of intention is blurry because a writer may not even be able to clearly verbalize their intention, and it's something which we can only speculate about on our own, I think that the writer has as credible an input on the poem as any other person who reads it. They offer a different perspective, which Wimsatt and Beardsley may distinguish as a psychological inquiry that has nothing to contribute to a critical analysis of the poem. But I think it adds another dimension to the poem, and I don't know that it should be held completely separate from the poem itself.

I found two videos on youtube that have distinctly different takes on Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask," and I thought it was interesting to watch them together. This one ties into a sort of African identity at the root of the contemporary African American's life:

That which we know

T.S Eliot's ideas about tradition which he expresses in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" have led me to contemplate a few things. He discusses the importance of tradition as something that we must obtain "by great labour" (1093). It takes not mere marination in the fact that tradition is what brought us where we are today, but it requires intentional studying and reading of writers of the past. This idea resonates with why I chose to be an English major with a literature emphasis. I chose to be an English major because I enjoy writing a decent amount, but I felt that my writing was ill-educated because I hadn't read enough. As I've progressed though four years of literature classes that focused on studying other people's writing, it has often left me itching to write something of my own that isn't simply in response to what other people have written. But after reading so much, I feel much better equipped to write anything on my own.

While studying poetry and literature of the past has its benefits, there is so much literature to be read. Eliot even notes, "The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition" (1094). And while he dismisses it by saying that other people have done it so it can be done, over time more and more literature comes about. We're living about a century after Eliot, and that means an extra century of literature that exists as tradition to us.
I still have to agree with Eliot's general idea of studying and reading the writer's that make up our tradition. He writes, "Someone said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did'. Precisely, and they are that which we know" (1094). It's true that regard a lot of really old writing as just painful to read because it's so far removed from where we are today, but I guess it really is part of what we are today.

The question of context

When we were presented with the poem "We Wear the Mask" in class without any authorial context and were told to freewrite about it, I felt a slight sense of panic. I enjoyed the poem and I thought it expressed an understandable emotion. But one thought lingered even as I wrote about what I thought the poem communicated: Who is the "we"?! It made me feel like I could only make up what it was about, but it wouldn't be valid until I knew the "we" based on the author's identity. When we were informed with the poet was written by Paul Laurence Dunbar, a son of slaves, I couldn't help but view the poem differently. It suddenly seemed exclusivist and non-applicable to me.

Last semester I studied Alfred Lord Tennyson in Victorian class, and I remember stumbling across lines in his poetry that I had heard people quote elsewhere. As I read "In Memoriam A.H.H.," I remembered when my sister told me about one of her many high school break-ups, and she said her new favorite quote was "Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all." And in reading "Ulysses," I recognized a line that a friend of mine had posted on her facebook page: " I am a part of all that I have met." I was studying Tennyson through the lens of the Victorian era, and I wondered if people like my sister and my friend who quoted these lines knew anything about the Victorian faith crisis or Tennyson's striving to create his own meaning in what he saw as an otherwise futile existence. I wondered if my sister knew anything about the heart-wrenching loss Tennyson experienced with the death of his best friend. Does it matter if they didn't? Is it okay to take text out of the context in which it was written and attribute it with our own personal meanings?

"The world is nothing, the man is all"

[If you wish to understand others, you must first intensify your own individualism.]

I'm pretty sure that I remember Professor Downing teaching that the word "autobiography" first developed in the Romantic period. After reading something like Emerson's "The American Scholar", I can definitely see hints of ideals that would motivate a person to record their life story because they were convinced of its importance. But I have trouble seeing why he would suspect anyone would want to read it. Emerson seems so absorbed in his own thoughts that he wants to share them with anyone willing to listen. But he’s also so deafened by his blaring ideas that he can’t hear anyone else.

"The American Scholar" boasts of individualistic ideas. He begins the thing by declaring an end to American dependence on any kinds of foriegn thoughts; the people of this country "will sing for themselves." By the end of the essay, he concludes, "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves." Hello, American individualism! And it extends farther than just establishing our country as its distinct body of people; he also declares that each man should realize the importance of himself:

Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political movement, is, the new importance given to the single person. Every thing that tends to insulate the individual, -- to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state; -- tends to true union as well as greatness.

Our society today seems all too based on that type of idea. When each man pursues his own self interest, it turns out to be the best for everybody. Apparently it works for both economics and for our literary pursuits.

This idea of individualism is something I often think about in regards to reading and writing. They are such solitary activities that require the readers and writers to pay a great deal of attention to themselves and their own thoughts. It creates a world of people participating in solitary activities. I guess I find solace in the fact that literature is also a form of communication. It's not just for the individual to gain inspiration and independence; it's also a way to express their ideas with others.

The inconstant wind and the ever-changing veil

Emerson has a sense that poetry falls short of his divine ideals, and that poetry, despite its best attempts, usually forms "a corrupt version of some text in nature." There's a similar idea in Shelley's "A Defense of Poetry." Shelley distinguishes poetry as very different from any rational act that a person can intentionally perform. He describes the type of inspiration necessary for creating poetry: "The mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness" (713). This idea of the mind constantly seeking to grasp a "transitory brightness" or reach some divine realm of the sublime is very Romantic and much like Emerson. I like Shelley's imagery that some kind of wind, which acts as a strong and influential external force, works together with the imagination within the poet's mind to create poetry. It's like only the right combination of internal and external force allows the poet to glimpse the brightness he seeks.


Another image that Shelley used to describe the poet that I really liked was the veil. Poetry "strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms" (714). What we see when we look at the world is something like Plato's shadows on the cave wall, but Shelley describes it with the image of the veil. We see things through this veil, or "film of familiarity", that hangs over our eyes and our thoughts, but true poetry suddenly pulls the veil back slightly or rips a little hole in it so we can get a glimmer of the essence of truth. However, even the clarity that comes through the breakthrough of one veil only reminds us that there exists something like an infinite number of veils. Shelley writes, "Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed" (710). This makes poetry sound so frustrating. It tries so hard to uncover the truth and real meaning, but it can never break through the endless layers of veils. It never shows us the object in distinct clarity rather than its hazy outline, and we never can fully "see things as they really are" (as Matthew Arnold would say).


But Shelley also describes a way that poets create veils of their own: "[Poetry] arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them or in language or in form sends them further among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide" (714). So in some cases, poets create their own veils that can cover times of despair with some type of beauty or meaning. The veil dictates the type of light that can penetrate through it, and it controls the clarity of the objects that exist on the opposite side. Poets are the veil-changers. That must be why Shelley considers them “the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men” (715).

The intrusted treasure of the poet

I've been reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, and a passage in it addresses the way he views the significance of the poet. In the section "A Panegyric upon Abraham," Kierkegaard writes,

If a consciousness of the eternal were not implanted in man; if the basis of all that exists were but a confusedly fermenting element which, convulsed by obscure passions, produced all, both the great and the insignificant; if under everything there lay a bottomless void never to be filled what else were life but despair? If it were thus, and if there were no sacred bonds between man and man; if one generation arose after another, as in the forest the leaves of one season succeed the leaves of another, or like the songs of birds which are taken up one after another; if the generations of man passed through the world like a ship passing through the sea and the wind over the desert—a fruitless and a vain thing; if eternal oblivion were ever greedily watching for its prey and there existed no power strong enough to wrest it from its clutches—how empty were life then, and how dismal! And therefore it is not thus; but, just as God created man and woman, he likewise called into being the hero and the poet or orator.

I realize that's a relatively long and intricate passage, but basically, Kierkegaard is addressing the meaninglessness that could have existed in life if God had not created the relationship between the poet and the hero. He compares the relationship of poet and hero to the relationship that exists between man and woman: they exist as distinctly seperate beings, but they have an important interdependence between them that creates essential meaning in the world.

Kierkegaard describes the poet as someone who happily admires the hero but lacks the capability to take on the role of the hero. He is the "genius of memory" who can recall and admire only what has already been done. Also, the poet "contributes nothing of his own, but is jealous of the intrusted treasure." That idea of jealousy interested me because in some of the Romantic writings we've been reading about the poet, the writers seem almost to have a jealousy for the the fact that they've been intrusted with this intuitive gift to seek eternal truths, and yet they so often fail at capturing them with words. Emerson talks about the way that the poet is representative; his ideas do not belong to him. In fact, he writes that when the poet finally produces something new and orginal, "it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you" (737-8). So while Kierkegaard's discussion of the poet is a more relational description of the poet in terms of the concept of the hero, I think it's insightful into more of the ways we can view the role of the poet.

Mass Graphomania

As I thought about what it means to be an author, I remembered a discussion of the idea of graphomania from the novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. A character in the story listens to his cab driver talk about his life, and he thinks, "My talk with the taxi driver gave me sudden insight into the nature of a writer’s concerns. The reason we write books is that our kids don’t give a damn. We turn to an anonymous world because our wife stops up her ears when we talk to her" (91).

According to Kundera, graphomania (an obsession with writing books) is bound to only grow worse in the type of society we've established. In class we talked about how the notion of "author" didn't come into being until the invention of the printing press, and the word has taken on a plethora of meanings ever since. Kundera writes, "The invention of the printing press originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania, the writing of books had the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without" (92).

I thought about Kundera's remarks in regards to what we read from Emerson's "The Poet," because Emerson writes so much about the value of a poet's expression. Since Emerson's ideas about the poet were so distinct and basically exclusive, he most likely wouldn't consider a man who writes because his kids don't care about him and his wife won't listen to him a poet. But is there value in other people's stories even if they fail to tap into an eternal truth? This is the passage in Kundera's novel that intrigues me the most:

The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry “We are all writers!”

The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it’s too late.

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding. (106).

Although he's addressing something pretty different than Emerson, I think Kundera provides good insight into the way that it has become so easy for anyone to be an "author" with the developments of the printing press and now the internet. His idea of mass graphomania results from the fact that people are so anxious to become poets or authors that they stop reading and listening. While writing offers potential for self-exploration and searching for truths of humanity, it seems there's a need for a balance with listening to other people's ideas and stories.

I'm interested in reading more about Emerson's ideas about reading. It sounds like Emerson doesn't think too highly of reading unless it inspires readers to become their own poets. But if everyone does set out on a quest to become Emerson's inspired poet, will we enter into an "age of universal deafness" toward each other? Does this idea relate at all to Emerson?

Here's an interesting article about how Kundera's graphomania appears in our society.

Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.