The Point of View for My Work as a Critic: A Dithyramb

I

All is foreseen but freedom to choose is given.

—Akiba

When I was very young, freedom beckoned through the poets I first loved: Hart Crane, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, John Milton, and above all William Shakespeare in Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra. The sense of freedom they conferred liberated me into a primal exuberance. If women and men initially become poets by a Second Birth, my own sense of being twice-born made me an incipient critic.

I do not recall reading any literary criticism, as opposed to literary biography, until I was an undergraduate. At seventeen I purchased Northrop Frye's study of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry, soon after its publication. What Hart Crane was to me at ten, Frye became at seventeen, an overwhelming experience. Frye's influence on me lasted twenty years but came tumbling down on my thirty-seventh birthday, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithyramb, "The Covering Cherub or Poetic Influence." Six years later, that had evolved into The Anxiety of Influence, a book Frye rightly rejected, from his Christian Platonist stance. Now, at seventy-eight, I would not have the patience to reread anything by Frye but I possess almost all of Hart Crane by memory, recite much of it daily and continue teaching him. I came to value other contemporary critics—Empson and Kenneth Burke particularly—but have now dispensed with reading them also. Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Walter Pater, Emerson, Oscar Wilde I go on reading as I do the poets.

Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place literary, that is to say: personal and passionate. It is not: philosophy, politics, institutionalized religion. Whether it has any function at the present time is questionable, but is there still a "present" time? When all is not only foreseen but advertised, the presentness of the present evaporates.

If the only alternative to "academic literary criticism" is journalism, then the supposed stigma of schoolteaching criticism dissolves. Reading, teaching, writing for me are three words for a single activity. From 1988 on I gave up any academic audience (except for my own classes) and turned towards the common reader, abroad and at home. Twenty years later I find myself with a reception (neither journalistic nor resentful) beyond expectations. Readers, albeit in our Age of the Screen, abound all but universally and they seek something beyond information. Call it insight or vision (to risk grandiosity) or, most simply, a singular voice that speaks into the solitude of deep reading.

What do I teach, whether face-to-face or on the page? Self-reliance, which might hearten those I never can meet into refusing what gives them less than wisdom, cognitive power, and aesthetic splendor. Isolated readers throughout the world do not need nor want political exhortation, historicizing, incessant contextualization. Their Shakespeare writes the dramas of daily existence in Macedonia or Indonesia. He is not "early modern" but the immediate presence in their present: marriages, births, deaths, disasters, unexpected enlargements of existence, the continuous reinvention of the human.

II

There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae. They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expectedmore.

—Stevens, "Large Red Man Reading"

What can humanistic education mean in the twenty-first century of the Common Era? Anachronism can be put aside because it is banal: say "the Internet" and philosophy flees. Teaching, as I apprehend it, is an internalizing process in which I address a single one, other yet anticipated, as I was addressed by M. H. Abrams and Frederick A. Pottle. What I can hand on is not a method but only a self, however fictive or edged by the ironies of inheritance.

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