Literary History and the Evaluation of Poetry

1

Big title, narrow focus: my own procedures in writing a history of American poetry from 1945 to 1995 (published with the title "Poetry, Politics, and Intellectuals" as part of volume 8 of the Cambridge History of American Literature [1996]) are my subject. The period I covered was obviously unsettled: in this period a great deal of poetry was published and critical commentary was not abundant. I am aware of three assumptions that guided this history. The first is that the unit of study is the single poem. The second is that a radical sifting of the poems published during the period was needed. The third is that the most relevant context of poetic writing is the culture of institutionalized American intellectuals. These assumptions had a great bearing on my evaluation of poetry but also on the overall shape of this little history.

These assumptions were not inevitable. One might as easily write about poets more than poems, since in an obvious sense poems are produced, or caused, by poets, and careers provide convenient shape for general (the representative career) and temporal (the phases of a career) claims. R. S. Crane insisted on this single approach to literary history: "A literary history... is a narrative of the changing habits, beliefs, attitudes, tastes, and purposes of individual persons and groups or organizations of persons living in particular times and places; it is not a history of literature but of literary men.... Its real subject is the changing behavior, during a particular period, of a particular writer or group of writers interested in a particular literary problem and influenced by a particular complex of conditions" (7). By 1935 Crane had already felt the ground shift under his traditional sense of agency: men, not women, not conventions, not languages, write texts; the tone of denial implies the challenge to traditional agency. He had to sound scientific (his particular this and particular that) and repeat himself to hold firm an already challenged sense of agency. We cannot share his ardor now, though in the criticism of poetry the agency of poets is still relatively secure. For the sort of history that stresses persons more than poems, the development of careers, progress, or movement from one book to the next determines the narrative. The lives of poets figure prominently there. Instead I relegated nearly all mention of the development of lives and careers to an appendix of biographical notes. And I quoted most of the poems I discussed in their entirety, with the result that my narrative is a rather atomistic read.

My second assumption was that the authority of the history would rest on the quality of the poems I cited. This history is meant to be an anthology of specimens as much as a narrative of development. Crane argued that the "criteria proper to a history and to a critical anthology are essentially different, and it is not in the interest of excellence in either form that they should be mixed" (9). If the poems I cited were not compelling in themselves, however, as every reader might determine for him- or herself, the claims I made about the development of the art during this period would seem to be based on exactly the wrong data, viz., on the poems that would soon be forgotten. Crane's view was that minor writers may just as aptly exemplify the patterns of literary history as major writers do (10), and this view still has great currency. One might now consider poetry as a form of discourse whose value and authority are fully dispersed throughout its instances. Strong poems and weak ones, stunning and banal ones, original and derivative ones, achieved and half-achieved poems might all have places in a history of this discourse of poetry. This approach would find support in widely held claims about the structure of literary culture that can no longer be thought of as only Foucauldian, but it would find much...