How Poets See the World: The Art of Description in Contemporary Poetry (review)

The late Anthony Hecht, indignant at the critical trend of discussing poets without ever quoting the texts of their poems, commented in a 1999 interview that, "a study of poetry that stays … far away from the texts it is putatively considering has no real concern for poems." Then Hecht, who, in contrast to the critics he complained of, was always generous with quotations, proceeded to quote. And we are lucky he did, for the luminous passage from Rosamund Tuve I excerpt below (a passage I'm indebted to Hecht for quoting) shows that as early as 1952, some critics were uneasy at the way other critics manhandled texts. Tuve wrote in part:

There is … loss, though there is no great harm, in looking at … poems to see whether they know what we know. The harm comes when we become willing to overlook a certain amount of violence done to the play, done to the conception clearly central to the poet, done to the theme, done to the image—in the interest of finding in a piece the clichés of our own favored patterns.¹

Tuve's felicitous phrase for what theorists do—"looking at poems to see whether they know what we know"—provides a good occasion of thinking about Willard Spiegelman's splendid new study. First, though, we must reverse Tuve's terms. For like only a handful of living critics, Spiegelman has the perspicuity, patience, and tact not so much "to see whether poems know what we know" as to find out what—indeed, whether—we can learn what poems know.

Throughout Spiegelman's study, one looks in vain for an encoded vocabulary or a rigid categorization. Perfectly familiar with such approaches, this critic quietly chooses another path. When he comments of Jorie Graham, John Ashbery, and Irving Feldman that "they look carefully at the world, either natural or artistic, and they commend themselves to us by their own attention to external circumstances" (4), Spiegelman might well be describing his own method. And when he characterizes his chosen poets in this study (and choice is a crucial component of his approach), Spiegelman might be referring to his own reticence: "These are not self-confessing poets, nor do they cannibalize their friends and family. Although they invariably deal with their own histories, their life experiences, they often do so at a remove" (15).

Attention is key, and so is pleasure—key to the poets Spiegelman is drawn to, and to his critical mode. "Words like 'beautiful' and 'pleasure,'" he writes early on, "need to be brought back into discussions of literature" (5); and How Poets See the World takes its place on the modest but growing list of recent critical studies that do such recovery work.

The importance of pleasure; the absence of a charged barricade such as gender or race; the decorum and distance afforded by a poetry which avoids the confessional—clearly these qualities can be detected in Spiegelman's own critical approach, no less than in the poetry he warms to. The poets he focuses on in this study are respected in some quarters, dismissed or ignored in others, for reasons that vary but are linked by the notion of difficulty. Amy Clampitt was sometimes accused of being overdecorative and excessively learned and allusive ("poor pretentious Amy Clampitt," Thom Gunn, usually a judicious man, called her in print). Jorie Graham can seem hermetic, Charles Wright elliptical and elusive, John Ashbery notoriously opaque. The British poet Charles Tomlinson isn't well known in this country; neither are the Americans Irving Feldman and Theodore Weiss. None of Spiegelman's chosen poets provides the easy pleasure of self-revelation, scandal, narrative, or much in the way of obvious humor—compare the accessibility of two popular and accomplished poets whose work is much simpler, and much less demanding, Billy Collins and Sharon Olds.

Each in his or her own way, and their...