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CRITICAL THEORY AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY /Hank Lazer Each person Has one big theory to explain the universe But it doesn't tell the whole story And in the end it is what is outside him That matters. . . . John Ashbery, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" We have still not come face to face, have not yet come under the sway of what intrinsically desires to be thought about in an essential sense. Presumably the reason is that we human beings do not yet sufficiently reach out and turn toward what desires to be thought. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking! SOME TIME AGO T.S. Eliot impatiently (and correctly) declared that "criticism is as inevitable as breathing." Perhaps the contemporary equivalent would be the proclamation that theorizing is as inevitable as breathing. Indeed, a quick glance at MLA job lists or ads for new books of literary criticism quickly convinces us that all "serious" English departments must have specialists in critical theory and that graduate students and literary scholars must have training in critical theory. My intent is not to trace the rise of critical theory in current academic curricula, but to ask about a different relationship: what is, or what ought to be, the relationship between critical theory and contemporary American poetry? For it is my observation, albeit based on limited experience, that although there is a great deal of interdisciplinary study resulting from the current interest in critical theory, there remain certain thorny oppositions within English departments and literary studies that deserve attention and questioning. Indeed, there are certain entrenched prejudices which, for the sake of both critical theory and contemporary American poetry, require some discussion. For example, most English departments, through their sense of teaching positions, specializations, and course content, maintain a 246 · The Missouri Review strict segregation between "creative" writers and literary critics. Even readers and teachers who are sympathetic to Geoffrey Hartman's desire, stated at the beginning of Criticism in the Wilderness, "to view criticism, in fact, as within literature, not outside of it looking in" (CW,l), would not dare to pursue the institutional and pedagogical consequences of such a desire. In my own department, M.F.A. students complain about the "irrelevant" academic courses they are required to take. They profess not to care what works of literature mean; they want more courses in technique. And though the training for poets and critics remains separate, certain shared conclusions and assumptions about writing have in recent years begun to emerge. After several prefatory detours, I would like to state and explore several such shared assumptions. To do so is to examine the uneasy relationship between poetry and critical theory, or, between poetry and philosophy. Or, to state it more succinctly, to do so is to examine the relationship between poetry and thought. At one extreme we have the poet Karl Shapiro in "What Is Not Poetry?"—an essay in In Defense ofIgnorance (1960)—declaring that My favorite essay is Longinus' "On the Sublime," but philosophical essays in general are beyond me. I cannot retain a philosophical concept in my head for more than five minutes and I suspect any poet who can. If poetry has an opposite it is philosophy. Poetry is a materialization of experience; philosophy the abstraction of it. (DI, 264) Though Shapiro is no longer regarded as one of the "stars" of contemporary American poetry, his attitude regarding a split between poetry and philosophy remains a commonly accepted one. Similar remarks can be found in the essays and interviews of poets such as Robert BIy, Louis Simpson, Philip Levine, and countless others. In "A Wrong Turning in American Poetry" (1963), a seminal essay for American poetry of the sixties and seventies, Robert BIy, while advocating an inward, spiritual turn in American poetry, takes pot shots at the overly philosophical poetry of his immediate predecessors. He attacks Eliot for working up "the poem as an idea" (RB, 18) and criticizes "the Metaphysical Generation," the American poets of the twenties and thirties, because "not only were these poets . . . profoundly influenced by the English metaphysical poets, but their basic attitude was detached, doctrinaire, 'philosophical' " (RB, 28). Suffice it to say that the...

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