Plus ça change: A Response to Maurice Lee

In 2003, Robert von Hallberg, who had just completed writing the modern poetry section of the Cambridge History of American Literature, published an essay in American Literary History describing his “procedures in writing a history of American poetry from 1945 to 1995.”¹ He recounts having decided that the best way to proceed would be to focus on the “single poem” as the most significant unit for constructing his history—a decision that sacrificed comprehensiveness in favor of “a radical sifting of the poems published during the period.” To determine which works would be included, von Hallberg decided that “the most relevant context” would be “the culture of institutionalized American intellectuals” (“Literary History,” 7). To be sure, he was not prescribing a general approach to the writing of literary history or even, more particularly, of American literary history. The challenge of focusing on a particular genre and on a relatively recent period for which the critical and scholarly literature is comparatively thin played a significant role in shaping his design. But even here, von Hallberg did not treat his choices as “historical” in the first instance. Rather, they derived from his commitment to making a poem’s aesthetic achievement central to the question of whether or not it would count for his literary history. This commitment is worth remarking. Given that the Cambridge History emerged in the wake of the anticanonical fervor that swept through English departments in the 1970s and 1980s, and that, for the History’s general editor Sacvan Bercovitch, the watchword for the enterprise as a whole was “dissensus,” von Hallberg’s account of how he went about doing what he did might seem surprisingly traditional.²

Yet Maurice Lee’s essay on canonicity and accountability suggests otherwise. That is, although von Hallberg and Lee are concerned with different historical periods, the title of Lee’s essay, “The End of the End of the Canon?,” along with the persistence of major authors in his data set and the fact that these data, like von Hallberg’s, are drawn from intellectuals working within established cultural institutions, suggest that the uptake of both essays is pretty much the same, namely, that however much our discussion of the literary canon has called for us to change the works and authors who appear on our syllabi, the authors we collectively teach most frequently in introductory courses are those whose work has long garnered praise and admiration from our predecessors in the academy. Of course, there’s no reason to believe that the questions we put to those works are the same as those asked by teachers and scholars in previous decades, but the mere fact that we continue to find answers to the questions that interest us among many of the same authors might be seen as attesting to their ongoing value for literary study.

On the point of literary value, although von Hallberg does not use the terms “canon” or “canonicity,” his brief essay makes explicit what Lee’s essay skirts: selection is often an assertion of literary merit or worth. According to von Hallberg, what matters for poetry is what matters for the poets whose work has continued to preoccupy practicing poets. He writes:

Poets see literary history as an anthology. This should matter because poets, as noted, make literary history, even if they rarely write it. Ezra Pound argued that the history of art is the history of masterpieces, not mediocrity. Poems that are not fully achieved as art, derivative or feeble ones, in his view, do not affect the history of poetry. This Olympian view sounds suspect in academic discourse, but it is widely shared among poets.

(“Literary History,” 8)

There’s a lot here to be unpacked, but the issue I want to pursue at present concerns the idea that what may govern nineteenth-century canonicity in the classroom today is the extent to which certain authors or works have preoccupied (and continue to preoccupy) their literary successors. Certainly, for many of the twentieth-century African American authors that I teach regularly (an admittedly male-dominated group that...