Four Poet-Critics

Finally we come to the critic whose criticism may be said to be a by-product of his creative activity. Particularly, the critic who is also a poet.

—T. S. Eliot, “To Criticize the Critic”

In one of his Oxford lectures on poetry Christopher Ricks took hold of our preconceptions about the relationship between poet and critic and gave them a good shaking: “what I’d like to know is why, since Tennyson and I work in exactly the same medium (language, in a word), it’s always me giving a talk about him and never him giving a talk about me?” (TLS, February 25, 2005). Exactly. Aside from the obvious fact that Alfred, Lord Tennyson is stone-cold dead and Ricks is very much alive, this is a good question. It is particularly appropriate since Ricks’s prose seems much more vital than most poets’ verse. If more of our critics could write with the panache of Christopher Ricks, we might be inclined to read their criticism as something more than a dreary duty. As it is, our poets often write criticism or autobiography into their poems, and our critics sleepwalk through readings of the usual poets, always the usual poets, as if it were agreed that reading anything else would cause too great a strain.

That is why, upon opening Dan Chiasson’s One Kind of Everything, I was not at first encouraged. He begins with essays on the hypercanonical Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop; his subject is “self”; and he can write with remarkable inflation and redundancy: “Poetic figuration (and the imaginative activity it emblematizes) has come to seem, to many who have considered the matter, either afactual or explicitly antifactual, the mark of renunciation and transcendence in the face of mere fact.” When I swallowed my incredulity that anyone would choose to write prose like this instead of aspiring to energy and verve, I settled down to discover that Chiasson’s book is better than I thought. The prose does not get much livelier, but the subject of voice in poetry, even in recent American poetry with its varieties of egomania, is worth considering.

His introduction naturally brings up denials of personality in poetry, Eliot’s more than Keats’s, when he remarks that “we have been trained to recognize the aesthetic value of suppression, perhaps of repression, where anecdote, gossip, disclosure and complaint are concerned—where the ‘acutely personal’ is concerned.” But of course artfulness often represses. When poetry is too raw, we get squeamish in the way we recoil from an embarrassing drunk at a party. Chiasson understands that these withholdings are strategies, aspects of voice. Even Eliot was not quite as impersonal as he pretended. “The logic of modernism, like that of Emersonian idealism, included autobiography all along. What a poem does when it allows that ‘personal reminiscence’ into the representational plane—more, when it focuses on it, builds a poem around it, allows its inclusion to change the way poems are made—is perhaps the primary subject of this book.” Perhaps Chiasson is right, but reminiscence is not the most interesting subject of this book. Lowell’s selective autobiography is one thing; Bishop’s refractive narratives are another. She outclasses Lowell as a poet because her strategies are less baldly self-centered. That we can read her loneliness in “Crusoe in England” is only one fascination of that beautiful poem. Chiasson is trying to get at person, at voice, which turns out to be a good way of discovering technique.

Even more than Yeats, Lowell has to be read through the biographical lens, though a handful of his best...