Reasoning Together

ReasonmgTogether Reasoning Together Bernard Duffey writes : 125 I will be much obliged if you can find space to print these corrections to Leon Surette's rather flagrant misreading of my recent book, Poet!)' rnAmerica,which he reviewed in your Spring 1979issue. He misinforms your readers when he indicates that the final third of my book is controlled by the idea that twentieth-century American poetry is·characterized by what he calls "sophistication:' I don't know about Mr. Surette's notion of '"sophistication;' but in my book that word is used ~hematicallyin one chapter only, and there with particularly directed meaning . This mistake leads Mr. Surette to attribute to me a thesis of which I am guiltless, that of "a fall from innocence (coherence) into confusion (incoherence) and thence into evil ways (sophistication)" as the historical movement of American poetry. Mr. Surette has a powerful but a wayward 1magmation. I do not describe a "fall," and I do not believe for a moment that any such fall took place. Instead, I describe a movement opening steadily into poetic venturesomeness. My central term here is the honorable one, ''avant-garde," and it is repeated very frequently. Its implications are further capitulated in the book's epilogue. From this initial but embracing error Mr. Surette expands into a flow of rhetoric that leads him to damn my argument as one "'that could be applied to any literature-American, Chinese or Latvian" where it "would doubtless be as unilluminating ... as it is when applied to American poetry." Mr. Surette has the advantage of me in regard to decline or fall in Chinese and Latvian literature. I think I have the advantage of him in regard to American poetry. Of course he must make the effort to follow the argument 1fhe is to discern it. That effort once made, he will discover that I am concerned with changing aspects of what American poets have demonstrated tobe the formal and more generally cultural analogues shaping their feelings mto poetic expression. Mr. Surette may disagree with my interpretations at will. But any reviewer would seem to have to take on the burden of firsttrying to understand, at least approximately, what his author's fundamental argument is. I am pleased that he thinks I make "many sensible observations" about the poets I discuss. I hope, of course, that this attainment springs from the approach to the history of American poetry I adopt and perhaps suggests the possibility of greater cogency in it than he can find. Leon Surette replies: It distresses me to think that I may have misinterpreted Mr. Duffey's intention in the final third of his book. It is true that he characterizes 126 Reasoning Together the poetry in America during the first half of this century as "avantgarde," and that the term "sophistication" is used to describe a transitional penod between 'incoherence" and "avant garde." However, the term "avantgarde" is not given any clear meaning by Mr. Duffey that would permit a reader to identify the sort of poetry belonging to that class. In my view, the poetn he puts into the category of "avant garde" is seen to possess the chara;. teristics of the class he labels "'sophistication;' viz: "an individualized and complicated sense of its own nature." His suggestion above that by "avant garde" he meant '"a movement opening steadily into poetic venturesomeness " leaves me still puzzled to understand in what sense his third categorv can be one grounded in "Expression and its Values" as his first two (cohe;. ence and incoherence) clearly are. On his second point, I wrote of Mr. Duffey's thesis: "His code dim{r reflects a Puritan sense of historical process: a fall from innocence (coherence ) into confusion (incoherence) and thence into evil ways (sophistication )." In short I did not attribute to him any belief in, or even consciousness of, such a pattern. Rather I suggested a morphological match between his views and those familiar ones I outline. The issue between Mr. Duffey and myself is more fundamental, however. than any alleged misrepresentation of the details of his study. I did, mdeed, discern that he was "concerned with changing aspects of what American poets have demonstrated...