Not My Literary History!

Not My Literary History!

—Jerome McGann

Or

can you turn the pages fast enough to escape from the contents

—Maureen Owen

Or

I have failed miserably, over and over again

—Vanessa Place and Rob Fitterman

Or

Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks

—Ian Hamilton Finlay

Or

Roads of Excess were roads not taken, and that has made all the difference

—Jerome McGann

I begin my remarks by proposing that we ministers of culture, as Jerome McGann calls us, take more seriously than we have the italic underscoring of My and the exclamation point at the end of Jerry’s mantra, which appears in a section heading from The Scholar’s Art, “Not My Literary History!”¹ This outburst paraphrases one of his favorite works of critical scholarship, the poet Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson where “my” refers not to some idiosyncrasy but to a conviction that her deep understanding of Dickinson has to be wrested away from a cultural and institutional hegemony that has sought to repress it. As I interpret and will attempt to re-construct it, the poetic matter of Jerry’s literary history of nineteenth-century poetry, the haunt and main region of his song, remains a seemingly inchoate mix of accidental poetic phenomena stripped of any driving and guiding force until he wrests it away from the same cultural obfuscation. With the exclamation point we get the generous McGann, so often appreciative of others’ points of view, declaiming from the barricades against a canonical poetics and its structuring of writing and reading in the academy, the popular imagination, and the world of publishing of poetry itself and poetry textbooks, in order to reveal a radical counter-poetics.

Jerome McGann, I propose, has re-characterized the field of Romantic poetry by looking at it through the lens of a counter-poetics, indeed, an avant-garde poetics. That vision has led both to a revised understanding of canonical Romantic poems and also to the introduction of previously unfamiliar ones. Instead of filtering and judging Romantic poetry through the Wordsworthian and Coleridgean model of the inward turning, monumental, and elegiac “greater Romantic lyric,” Jerry has shattered that model and replaced it with one possessing very different poetic principles. Putting all the defining poets in Jerry’s literary history into one list, we immediately sense the difference: the Della Cruscans, Erasmus Darwin, Mary Robinson, and William Blake in the late eighteenth century; Byron, Felicia Hemans, and L. E. L. in the early nineteenth; Dante Rossetti, A. C. Swinburne, and Edgar Allan Poe in the later nineteenth up to experimental modernists and post-modernists Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding, Susan Howe, and Charles Bernstein along with so-called concrete poets. That many of the poets in the list just cited are women ought not go un-noted.

Similarly, his literary history should shatter our standard emphasis in scholarship of poetry and education: in critical history during the time of my career, for example, the glad day of Blake and the rediscovery of his counter-poetics and later that of a large cluster of women poets of the Romantic period did not utterly alter our understanding of the most vital Romantic poetic principles. As Jerry, a radical minister of culture, put it: “Roads of excess were roads not taken and that has made all the difference.”² Throughout his career, the road of Blake, as I will show the road of the avant-garde, emerges as the stimulus and drive to his interpretation of Romantic poetry. Jerry’s work situates him in dramatic contrast to an American and British post-World War II cultural history in which the publication and education venues favoring conservative, traditionally formalist poetry suppressed much of the most exciting work done in poetry at that time, as Alan Filreis has described in his book Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960.³ Surely the teaching of poetry and much scholarly criticism, even in its historicist and cultural materialist instantiations, has more or less followed suit.

The paper has two purposes: first, to present the...