Literature and the Child: Romantic Continuations, Postmodern Contestations

“Infant Sight”: Romanticism, Childhood, and Postmodern Poetry

Richard Flynn “INFANT SIGHT”: ROMANTICISM, CHILDHOOD, AND POSTMODERN POETRY w he idea of the child and the ideal of the child have, since their simultaneous invention, been inseparable—in Schiller’s words, the child is “a lively representation of the ideal,” a representation we adults construct “from the limitation of our condition” (51, my emphasis). Our tendency to view childhood as an idea or ideal makes it difficult for us to see childhood as lived experience. In art, childhood is a representation or a construct that the adult recaptures or recalls, and hence it is mediated both through the artistic process and through an experiential state, adulthood , that is temporally and emotionally distanced from the original experience. Since the Romantic poets, particularly Blake and Wordsworth, recognized its metaphoric potential, childhood as a subject for poetry has increasingly preoccupied post-Romantic poets .Forpostmodernpoets(historicallyspeaking,poetsworkingsince World War II) the subject has taken oneven greater importance, both as a counterreaction to an academic version of modernism that was anti-Romantic and aesthetically conservative and as a field for wrestling with the difficulties of subjectivity introduced by the Romantics but made more complex in a postindustrial society. For postmodern poets, “the recourse to childhood” may be, as Mark Edmundson argues, a “major mode of resistance to oppressive social forms” (750), but at the same time it may also be regressive—perhaps an ultimately nostalgic response to the “depthlessness” that Fredric Jameson argues characterizes postmodernity. Defining postmodern poetry itself is complicated by multiple competing discourses. Anxious about a critical discourse they perceive as paying insufficient attention to the human person, many mainstream poets exhibit what Edmundson describes as “instinctive hostility” to a critical theory advanced by “conceptual disciplines” that themselves “become authoritarian, intoxicated with the univer105 sal presumptions of theory [whose] practitioners forget that poetry (childhood, power, and play) exists” (760–61). In his provocative essay, “Vital Intimations: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Promise of Criticism,” Edmundson traces the contemporary crisis in both poetry and criticism to the split between Coleridge and Wordsworth when Coleridge denounced the passage in the “Immortality” ode that calls the child the “best philosopher” as “mental bombast.” Contending that “academic literary criticism has followed the spirit that Coleridge evinces in this judgment when it should have been listening just as hard, if not harder, to Wordsworth” (739– 40), he laments that the idea of childhood as a meaningful construct has “become all but untenable within the provinces of [contemporary] high culture . . . . The child as ideal is something that, in the wake of Freud, one must leave high culture to find” (750–51) in, say, the novels of Stephen King. The gulf between philosophy and poetry, Edmundson argues, has “enervated literary culture in part because the critics are not talking to—or defending—the poets anymore: they’ve gone hand and glove with the other people in the school of arts and sciences ” (759). Though Edmundson’s essay is a spirited defense of poetry , it is doubtful that the gulf between criticism and poetry is primarily traceable to the rise of literary theory. Certainly, throughout the twentieth century, both mainstream writers and experimental writers have concerned themselves with negotiating the perceived gap between theory and practice. Although later I shall discuss some more experimental writing, especially that of Lyn Hejinian, I begin with a literary-historical account of how certain “mainstream” postmodernist poets—Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop—formulated their relationship to childhood in reaction to their New Critical literary mentors. Beginning in the 1950s, these poets found the need to reject the aesthetically conservative stances of their modernist mentors— Ransom and Tate for Lowell and Jarrell, and Marianne Moore for Bishop. Bristling against the classicism and decorum demanded by these mentors and distrusting the hostility toward Romanticism in the New Criticism, these poets sought, in Jarrell’s words, to “write the kind of poetry that replaces modernism” (“Note” 51). If Jarrell could argue (then heretically) that “‘modern’ poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism,” then the “best modern criticism [was] extremely anti-romantic” (“Note” 48). As we know now, this criticism was to help rewrite the history of modernist poetry in such a 106 Romantic Ironies, Postmodern Texts way as to deemphasize the more radical elements of modernist experimentation (downplaying the achievements of writers like Stein and Williams) and to emphasize the unity, impersonality, and autonomy of the lyric poem. If the...