[lit-ideas] Tillinghast on Lowell
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas " <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2014 05:16:28 -0800
As a result of the Tillinghast article posted earlier by Robert Paul & JL
Speranza I ordered Tillinghast's Damaged Grandeur, Robert Lowell's Life and
Work. It was published as part of the series "Poets on Poetry." In his
introduction Tillinghast writes, "In France since the 1950s - following the
lead of Roland Barthes, and later, of Michel Foucault - and in the United
States since the 1970s, literary criticism has set itself the aim of erasing
the author as an entity and treating the 'text' as a bloodless, authorless
orphan. The work of art is then approached with what Frederick Crews, in
The Critics Bear It Away, has called a spirit of 'aggressive
demystification.'. . . The theorists have their own agenda. One that offers
poetry little nurture. Good luck to them! They leave our story now.
"'My thinking is talking to you,' Lowell wrote in a late poem to his friend
Peter Taylor; emphasizing the personal quality of his poetic discourse.
This emphasis contradicts a tendency, dating from the early days of
Modernism, and particularly popular with the New Critics, to evoke 'the
speaker' of a poem, to avoid at all costs the idea that the speaker may be
the same person as the author. Student poets in MFA workshops are offended
by the very presumption that the speaking voice in their poem may represent
some version of their own voices. They react in a spirit of almost
doctrinaire fervor against a sense of personal identification with their own
poems."
Comment: In thinking about what Geary has written recently (in light of the
above and earlier notes) he seems a mixture of New Critic (not caring about
the author but only the poem) and a Confessional (liking it when Sexton
mentions the normally unmentionable in her poems and 'startles'). I recall
reading New Critic theory but not being terribly impressed. I read Eliot's
theory but without consciously disagreeing with it, set his books aside and
quit reading them. I didn't "think" I rejected his theories but after
reading a lot of his letters rejected him. But I must have rejected his
theories as well - at some level.
On the other hand I never liked Life Studies (and Tillinghast loves it; so
it will be a challenge to finish his book) and yet feel comfortable with the
personal quality of poetry. I never objected to that. I did have a problem
when Lowell's "poetry" seemed little more than "prose." If you can do it in
prose, why call it poetry? But, I am sure, Tillinghast would say, I have
been misreading Lowell. We'll see.
Lawrence
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