Poetic Argument: Studies in Modern Poetry by Jonathan Kertzer (review)

HUMANITIES 133 Jonathan Kertzer. Poetic Argument: Studies in Modern Poetry MeGill-Queen's University Press 1988. 201. $29.95 The thesis of this book is a welcome one. It was commonly supposed in modernist poetics and criticism and implied in the central poetic texts of modernism that if poetry thinks it thinks unreasonably. An early statement of this position is Robert Graves's Poetic Unreason (1925), which, says Kertzer, 'insists on a categorical difference between "intellectual " and "emotional thought"; a latter-day modernist, Octavia Paz, claims 'that poetry "says the unsayable", because it "violates the laws of thought", such as the principle of contradiction, in favour of a logic of its own.' Kertzer denies this. 'There is no independent logic of the imagination, no poetic unreason, no illogical antilogic. Poetic arguments are not different in kind from any other arguments.' Kertzer uses Graves's word 'unreason' throughout the book to draw attention to the dependence of this notion of a supposedly transcendent mode of thought on the very reason or logic it purports to transcend. His neatest demonstration is where he exposes the confusion in Eliot's 'account of nondiscursive poetic logic' in the preface to his translation of Anabase by Saint-John Perse. Eliot assures the reader that the obscurity of the poem (and the same could be said of The Waste Land) is due not to 'incoherence' but to 'the suppression of "links in the chain", of explanatory and connecting matter.' Kertzer points out that 'Eliot has not distinguished between two logics, the one conceptual and the other imaginative, but described a compressed argument that resists and engages the reader's rational powers.' Poetic arguments are not different in kind, then, but different perhaps in the form of rhetoric used to display the argumentpoetic rhetoric being frequently 'more dramatic, festive, or flamboyant.' Kertzer argues, persuasively, that the modernist assumption persists even in the deconstructions of the postmoderns J. Hillis Miller and Paul de Man. Though, like him, they reject 'the opposition between poetic and logical argument,' they do so 'by insisting that all arguments depend on the "illogic" of "rhetoricity", aporia, or poetic unreason,' and for Kertzer rhetoric is not by definition subversive of logic. 'If logic is the dynamic of argument that deploys reason and provides reasons, then rhetoric is an argument's engaging appeal and linguistic aggression.' Rhetoric in poetry 'involves not just techniques of persuasion, but the entire range of poetic diction or lexis.' It includes metaphor, and, with Ricoeur, Kertzer maintains that what is true of poetic rhetoric generally is true of metaphor in particular: 'it works logically and has semantic value.' Ricoeur is quoted: 'If metaphor is a competence, a talent, then it is a talent of thinking.' Kertzer outlines his thesis in a long first chapter and puts it to the test in an examination of five modem poets- Eliot, Stevens, Moore, 134 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 Edward Thomas, and Dylan Thomas- in whose work he detects the modernist doctrine of unreason. There are two causes of obscurity. In the first chapter the reader is disabled from judging the merit of the argument by the lack of substantiating poetic illustration. One must suspend judgment, but also one must wait for the later chapters to supply the material with which to build a surer understanding of the author's stated thesis: his thought is obscured, not impaired, by this indexterity of organization. Secondly, he fails to keep a sharp dividing line between the idea he is opposing and the idea he is defending: the fault here is clumsiness of exposition. I have a third complaint. I am in sympathy with Kertzer's general position (though, referring to my study The Imagination ofEdwardThomas, he seems to think I would not be) butIam uncomfortable with his terms: 'logic' and 'argument' are not supple enough to conveythe various, intricate ways of poetic thinking. Availing himself of the peculiar, expanded meaning given by Wittgenstein to 'logic' makes matters worse not better. The theme of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the isomorphic relation of the linguistic representation of reality to what is represented, and therefore the impossibility of imagining, or representing in language, the illogical. To invoke this conception...