What’s the Import?: Nineteenth-Century Poems and Contemporary Critical Practice (review)

The bold “aim of this book is to help restore a balance to the critical study of nineteenth-century poetry” (7) through new readings of familiar nineteenth-century poems that stress the aesthetic or “intrinsic” qualities of poetry. This form of reading is intended to point up problems with “contemporary critical practice” that focus too much on interpretations of meaning and not enough on formal qualities that determine reading experience. This accessibly written book, of course, cannot possibly achieve this aim, in the first case because it is unlikely that any single book could accomplish this kind of revolution in literary critical practice. It cannot achieve this aim in the second case because of the lack of rigour that characterizes its engagement with the discourse it seeks to alter and that sometimes characterizes its readings of the poetry itself.

The strength of this book is its original, close readings of familiar nineteenth-century poems that stress the aesthetic experience of reading them. Although the terminology that drives the readings is unnecessarily vague (“resonant,” “flawed,” “important,” and “better” are characteristic examples), McSweeney’s meaning is generally clear to anyone familiar with this blend of new criticism and generalized artistic evaluation. Readings of Dickinson, Hopkins, Hardy, Whitman, and Browning cover writing from the entire century and are not limited to a narrow national focus. One of the most intriguing readings argues against standard interpretations by claiming that the ending of Whitman’s “The Sleepers” “is both an aesthetic and ethical flaw that makes it idle to speak of the poem as a masterpiece” (73). McSweeney argues that, unlike dreams, the poem ends with a resolution and with a “saving message” that is written “at considerable qualitative cost to the poem” (83). The book also includes critiques of lesser known poems, such as “An Irish Picture” by J. Stanyan Bigg. The poem’s reliance on conventions and stereotypes, it is argued, are ethical flaws; McSweeney takes this as an opportunity to question if ethical flaws are the same as aesthetic flaws. The point of all of his close readings is to provide an object lesson in the value of the particular kind of critical-aesthetic reading McSweeney practises.

The weaknesses of the book, unfortunately, undercut the value of these readings. For instance, one would expect from a book that intends to critique contemporary critical practice a detailed history of that practice. But there is no sustained—or even minimal—account of the contributions or purposes of the work of major schools such as poststructuralism, feminism, queer studies, Marxist dialectical historicism, or any others. There is virtually no mention of the most influential thinkers, such as Derrida, Bourdieu, Jameson, Kristeva, D.F. McKenzie, and Butler, which would have balanced the book’s general focus on canonical poetry. The bogeyman of “cultural studies” is raised, or so it seems to me, only as a shadowy spectre of those things inscrutable people do in what used to be the comfortable, genteel halls of gentlemanly literary discussion. The intriguing and even exciting argument that “interpretation of meaning” is too dominant in literary criticism motivated much of my reading of the book, but by the end there was no substantial engagement with the problems of this dominance and no articulation of the real purposes behind it.

More strikingly, in a book that is meant to propose an aesthetic turn in literary criticism, there is no sustained engagement with the concept of the aesthetic. Certainly at least a chapter should have been devoted to explaining the decline of aesthetic readings in literary criticism and to martialing the significant number of allies McSweeney could call on to make his case (there was, for instance, a significant turn to aesthetics in rhetoric in the 1990s). At least Gerald Graff’s argument in Professing Literature should have been engaged to explain the institutional history of the shift McSweeney counters, and most certainly Bourdieus arguments in Distinction and The Field of Cultural...