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

Willard Spiegelman's new book is a welcome follow-up to his The Didactic Muse: Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary American Poetry (Princeton University Press, 1989), which accommodated poets so differently "instructive" as Allen Ginsberg, Howard Nemerov, A. R. Ammons, Adrienne Rich, and James Merrill. How Poets See the World: The Art of Description in Contemporary Poetry exchanges "Scenes" for "See," "Instruction" for "Description," and a chapter on the English poet Charles Tomlinson necessitates the disappearance of "American." A scholar equally at home in English romantic poetry and contemporary American poetry, Spiegelman also traces the afterlife in contemporary American poetics of descriptive modes and practices of the major English romantic poets. As for his own working assumptions about poetry and criticism, How Poets See the World is a congenial successor to his Majestic Indolence: English Romantic Poetry and the Work of Art (Oxford University Press, 1995), in which he posited a Kantian realm of the aesthetic as a counter to literary criticism that views art predominantly through a political, sociological, or ideological lens. He sees his most recent book not as bucking a trend but in sync with renewed critical interest in aesthetics and formalism during the last decade.

Spiegelman concedes that over the centuries description has been panned as often as it has been touted. Like "didactic," it frequently gets a bad press. Wittgenstein regarded it favorably ("We must do away with all explanation, and description must take its place"), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued similarly ("It is a matter of describing, not of explaining or analyzing"). Roland Barthes and Paul Valéry, who relate verbal description to painting, are among its numerous detractors. Barthes evokes playfully a nature morte ("Adjectives are the tools of [a] delusion [making things seem alive]; whatever else they may be saying, their very descriptive quality makes them funereal"). Earlier, Valéry had observed: "The invasion of Literature by description was parallel to that of painting by landscape. A description is composed of sentences whose order one can generally reverse. . . . This mode of creating, legitimate in principle, . . . leads, like the abuse of landscape, to the diminution of the intellectual part of art." Depreciations of description as merely frivolous ornamentation can be traced back to medieval rhetorical treatises, and dusted off, they served nobly in the modernist revolt against Victorianism with its, as Yeats put it in his 1936 introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, "irrelevant descriptions of nature."

Spiegelman's gracefully learned, wide-ranging introductory chapter "'The Way Things Look Each Day': Poetry, Description, Nature" appropriates a witty turn of phrase by Wallace Stevens that requires a double take. When we look at things they also look back at us is a recurrent theme in American poetry, voiced in the nineteenth century by, among others, Ralph Waldo Emerson in "Waldeinsamkeit" ("Leave authors' eyes, and fetch your own, / To brave the landscape's looks") and by Emily Dickinson in poem #627 ("The eager look — on Landscapes — / As if they just repressed / Some secret — that was pushing / Like chariots — in the West"). Such looking can be a highly fraught transaction. Spiegelman asks, "was ever a European as conscious of looking at the landscape as Americans are? Our self-consciousness humbles, frightens, and stimulates us into a fearful piety as well as acts of aggression that a European might not attempt" (11). Underlying American conceptions of landscape is a "collective and complex effort to reply to its invitations or temptations by honoring, with or without subduing, it" (13).

Engaged in acts of seeing, the contemporary poets Spiegelman writes of fashion their lyric selves indirectly, through how they see the world around them, and through a distinctive style informing their acts of description. They do not teach or preach, nor do they supply us with self-confessions or accounts of their relations with others. They are, in some respects, a modest lot, but remarkably attendant to the ordinariness of everyday reality and...