Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry (review)

Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry. David Bromwich. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. xvii + 256. $49.00 (cloth); $16.00 (paper).

David Bromwich's Skeptical Music is a learned and elegant account of certain English and American poets of the twentieth century. In addition it is a "defense," that is to say a general essay bearing upon poetry and its use in the world. In that sense, Skeptical Music is not only a work of scholarship and hermeneutic taste, but also a polemic.

There is no question about the productivity, the abundant fruitfulness of Bromwich as a reader. The question that must be addressed—bearing in mind that Skeptical Music is a work undertaken and completed in the last years of the twentieth century—is the truth of the argument and the claim of the meanings, the dispositions, that he recommends. At the end of his first chapter, Bromwich writes,

There are times when the fact and reason of the present appear so tidal an onrush that they threaten to carry off any possible imagining of a future. All that throng of worthy or energetic purposes, of fashions that exert an unchallengeable command, are a provocation that the poet may turn away from simply for the sake of imaginative freedom. Posterity then becomes the name of a power of resistance. . . . [18]

But is there really any "power of resistance," among the powers of the person, that does not require as its principle of existence institutional alliances from which no one can "turn away"? Indeed, the generality of poetic making (the artistic form of language) is a contingency of such alliances, a dependency by which is obtained not only the power but the imagination of resistance. The idea of Wallace Stevens's "Skeptical," as it is adapted in Bromwich's title, implies the explicit (and, it seems to me, historically unattested) separation of poetic authority from institutions of other kinds, such as religious, national, discursive, artisanal, or amicable. The question seems to be whether there is, in effect and in any sense, an aesthetic domain competent of the high purpose of resistance, an aesthetic domain innocent of the disabilities, the partiality of institutional (national, ethnic, religious, or gendered) membership. One notes Bromwich's praise of Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory—"the one great book of its kind that belongs to modernism"—and his somewhat constrained construction, in a discussion of Geoffrey Hill, of Adorno's proscription of poetry after Auschwitz as "the simplification of the human image in the name of a more-than-human ideal" (17, 160). But there is no reference to Adorno's more considered remarks in Negations on the "shame" of art.

Bromwich's readings in Skeptical Music evoke a certain pathos, because the richness of his account (of T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Hill, and others) attests to a much more complex civilization than his polemic admits. He appears to want poetry without religion, perhaps because he misunderstands religion as a totalitarian "simplification of the human image in the name of a more-than-human ideal." But the epigenetic bond of scepticism and religious belief is clearly attested in the logical relation between Eliot's early corrosive mis-readings of F. H. Bradley (in the later pages of his dissertation, Knowledge and Experience) and the profound religiosity of The Waste Land. Bromwich appears to abridge religion in the latter in order to authorize his preference for The Waste Land above the Four Quartets. It is precisely on the basis of this recognition that the affinity between "T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane" (the title of chapter 3) is establishable. "The Broken Tower," Crane's elegiac masterpiece, is founded on the inescapable theologic narrative of the supersession of materiality by its Other. This narrative yields that commodious "decorum" of human scale (the no longer deformed human image) Bromwich praises in the fifth part of Crane's "Voyages." But one can't, strictly speaking, imagine the...