What Is It Then Between Us?: Traditions of love in American Poetry by Eric Murphy Selinger (review)

Eric Murphy Selinger. WhatIs It Then Between Us?: Traditions oflove in American Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. 25 Ip. Eric P. Elshtain Metropolitan State College of Denver Selinger argues that love is not an occasional subject forAmerican poets, but is, in fact, a generic center ofAmerican poetry. He traces a line from Winthrops lay sermon "A Modell of Christian Charity," to the poetry ofJames Merrill, demarcating differing ideas oflove and poetics along the way, arguing that two strains of love — Petrarchian and Protestant — struggle within American poetry. Selinger begins by asserting, "since no one before me has put together a book ofAmerican poetry oflove, either a critical study or an anthology, I have no monolith to undermine , no canon to shoot down" (1). This anti-caveat certainly comes as a relief : here is a book with no bone to pick, and an author concerned with close readings ofpoems through a subtle and interesting claim. Indeed, the author is at his best when he engages in intimate readings, as he chides Emerson for being "too self-ironic and New Englandly proper" (30), or spends time explicating the fifth section ofWhitman's "Song ofMyself," in which "Whitman pivots from mystical insights to home truths" — a shift enacted by "a mention oflove" (35). It is when the author moves away from his micro-readings ofpoems, when he decides that he is not merely seeing patterns but making rules, that his book ceases to be about poetics and begins to literalize the "lessons" ofthe poems via vague psychoanalysis. Throughout his book, Selinger uses the poems as lessons in love, and substantiates his claims with an often intrusive and unnecessary gallery ofGallic critics: Derrida, Barthes, Kristeva, Beauvoir. The poems, then, become psychological and ideological love lessons: wounds and reparations, selfversus "the other," male versus female, lesbian and homosexual mutuality. Reading the poems as such, their successes and failures do not hinge upon the language they use or their artistry, but upon how well the poems help create "an America ofLove" (184); that is, the poems are read as encapsulations ofanother great American genre: the self-help book. A critic is certainly in a bind when, to prove his model, he claims that Whitman had "faith in the power of language" (47). Selinger's analysis includes too many ofthese non-insights as he tries to squeeze a particular theory out ofthe poetry he examines. He also fails to distinguish between Love and love — one, the philosophical idea which, in America, is inextricably bound to the Christian readings of eros, agape, and caritas; and the other, love between two people. This lack of distinc128 + ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW H- SPRING 1999 Reviews tion presumes that the private and the poetic are always political — that American poems are the autobiographies of lovers and political manifestos exclusively. Selinger's interest in the objects of the poet's love leaves many of his readings flat. His chapter on Creeley and Lowell is more about the poets' relationships with their wives and lovers than it is about their poetry. The author even admits as much: "In my reading of Creeley I have not, I realize, attended to questions of composition as much as the poet would like" (125). That sentence is appended with this endnote, a quotation from Creeley himself: "Some concerns have been persistent e.g. the terms ofmarriage, relations ofmen and women, sense ofisolation__ But I have never ... begun with any sense of'subject,' [since] the point I wish to make is that I am writing" (216). Writing is the very thing Selinger elides when discussing poetry. "To turn the beloved into a poem," Selinger claims in his chapter on Adrienne Rich, "does a certain violence to her sovereignty of self (148). To take poetry to task for what people do to other people is wrong-headed and does a disservice to poem and poet alike. Selinger's literalization makes it impossible for him to read the poems on their own terms. When Selinger struggles through Mina Loy's harrowing Songs to Johannes, he flips back and forth between considering the "I" ofthe poem a persona and Loy herself. He finds the poem "successful" when the "I" is ironically...