Two Histories Contending

"There are always two histories of man in literature contending for our faith," Emerson wrote in 1845. One is the "scientific or skeptical," a tale of "gradual composition, subsidence, & refining." The other is "the believer's, the poet's, the faithful history," a story of "descent from a superior and pure race" (Journals). He was writing about cosmogonies, but the contrast he draws might apply equally well to writers of literary history. As Andrew DuBois points out, at one end of the literary-historical spectrum you have pure historical determinists like Hippolyte Taine, accounting for the emergence of poets by anatomizing the race, milieu, and historical moment from which they emerged. For literary historians like these, poems are essentially specimens from an ecosystem now vanished; the historian's aim is to reconstruct that ecosystem as a comparative anatomist might reconstruct from a few mastodon teeth not only the skeleton of the extinct beast but the grasses on which it fed.

At the other end of the spectrum are critical idealists like the New Critics, for whom poems are abstracted from time, from history, from change. Serene in their formal perfection, they have neither origins nor ends, neither parents nor children. As Robert von Hallberg puts it, each poem is "an isolato or wonder, a miracle," and the role of the literary historian is simply to identify the miracle and then to—well, what? If Taine's overweening explanatory arrogance reduces the individual poem to a specimen, von Hallberg's modesty leaves the literary historian little to do, except to function as a museum curator, selector, and guardian of works whose perfection he can only display and protect. Insofar as he finds himself yielding to impulses to reconstruct historical contexts, he is resisting the desires of the very poets he is ostensibly serving, for they all wish to achieve a perfection that stands outside of time.

It is refreshing to find someone who is willing to oppose the prevailing critical fashions of our time, which are much more Taine-ish than New Critical. At least one of von Hallberg's sentences seems worthy of being carved in stone over the entrance to every graduate English department: "Whatever poetry is, it cannot be that which threatens to swallow it up." But von Hallberg's insistence on restricting literary history to a study of poems that can claim to be "so fully achieved that other poets cannot afford to overlook them" would make short work of the earlier volumes of the very series in which his own work appears. The poetic richness of the half-century he wrote about (1945-1995) gives him a luxury of choice that writers on earlier eras do not share. Like fastidious shoppers at an upscale supermarket examining a pile of identically sized peaches, historians of twentieth-century American poetry forget the plight of their colleagues in earlier eras, rummaging through bushels of packinghouse culls at sad local groceries. Few American poems written in the nineteenth century are "fully achieved." At most they have a flicker of originality in asingle stanza or a single line or else some novelty of theme or treatment that lifts them above pure imitativeness. Even poets ofconsiderable power like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville have resonant lines in poems otherwise murky or garrulous. Should we throw these verses away because they occur in poems not perfectly transparent? Then we would lose Emerson's "'Tis the day of the chattel, / Web to weave, and corn to grind; / Things are in the saddle, / And ride mankind" ("Ode: Inscribed to W. H. Channing") and Melville's "What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder, / The human integral clove asunder, / And shied the fractions through life's gate?" ("After the Pleasure Party").

Writers about earlier eras of American poetic must be patient, catholic of taste, and acutely receptive to the faint stirrings of originality. As Shira Wolosky points out in the introduction to "Poetry and Public Discourse: American Poetry 1855-1900," forthcoming in volume 5 of...