“Arguably the most industrious and notorious poet-critic to brandish that hyphen like a knife between his teeth since his acknowledged master Randall Jarrell. . . . He often comes off as nothing so much as the Dirty Harry of the poetry beat.”
I
logan
Praise for William Logan
—David Barber, New York Times Book Review
Broken Ground
—David Mason, Hudson Review
“[Logan’s collections] are a masterclass in how to read.” —Duncan Wu, Times Higher Education Supplement William Logan is Alumni/ae Professor at the University of Florida. He is the author of seven books of criticism, most recently Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past (Columbia, 2018), and eleven books of poetry. Logan has won the inaugural Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism, the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, the Allen Tate Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.
cover image: debora greger cover design: chang jae lee
“Our wittiest critic of contemporary verse.” —James Marcus, Newsday
“Logan . . . should be declared a national treasure. One of our greatest living critics, he is also one of our sanest; but it is his curiosity that is his finest gift.” —Library Journal
C O L U M B I A U N I V E R S I TY P R E S S
NEW YORK
Poetr y and the Demon of Histor y
“Easily the best poetry reviewer we have.”
Broken Ground Poetr y and the Demon of Histor y
william logan
cup.columbia.edu
printed in the u.s.a.
COLUMBIA
n Broken Ground, William Logan explores the works of canonical and contemporary poets, rediscovering the lushness of imagination and depth of feeling that distinguish poetry as a literary art. The book includes long essays on Emily Dickinson’s envelopes, Ezra Pound’s wrestling with Chinese, Robert Frost’s letters, Philip Larkin’s train station, and Mrs. Custer’s volume of Tennyson, each teasing out the depths beneath the surface of the page. Broken Ground also presents the latest run of Logan’s infamous poetry chronicles and reviews, which for twentyfive years have bedeviled American verse. Logan believes that poetry criticism must be both adventurous and forthright—and that no reader should settle for being told that every poet is a genius. Among the poets under review by the “preeminent poet-critic of his generation” and “most hated man in American poetry” are Anne Carson, Jorie Graham, Paul Muldoon, John Ashbery, Geoffrey Hill, Louise Glück, John Berryman, Marianne Moore, Frederick Seidel, Les Murray, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, Johnny Cash, James Franco, and the former archbishop of Canterbury. Logan’s criticism stands on the broken ground of poetry, soaked in history and soiled by it. These essays and reviews work in the deep undercurrents of our poetry, judging the weak and the strong but finding in weakness and strength what endures.
Introduction: Poetry and the Demon of History Marine sergeant. Another glorious day in the Corps. A day in the Marine Corps’s like a day on the farm. Every meal is a banquet! Every paycheck a fortune! Every formation a parade! —Aliens (1986)
T
oo many poetry critics sound like cheerleaders for the Dallas Cowboys, having signed nondisclosure agreements with the poets under review. There’s no other rational explanation for the lashings of praise lavished week by week on poets of sublime mediocrity. In our Panglossian- Leibnizian world, critics are rarely abused for treating poets with faith, hope, and charity; but they’re roundly attacked, these critics of temper— these assassins, as one anthologist called them—for being critical. The ideal critic has been recruited from Madison Avenue to provide copy for the rear panel of a book, a panel that by long custom must collapse into ecstasy. The trouble with contemporary criticism is that every poetry book is a parade, a fortune, a banquet. In the cloistered world of poetry, every book is worth reading because every poet is a genius. The critic who stays in the trenches too long, sniping at poets, may overrate the rare poet who does publish a good book. Like Browning’s young duchess, such a critic may briefly have a heart “too soon made glad.” We know what happened to her. Alas, such a critic may find that, however much he loves a book, the poet’s next book disappoints. Poets are never consistent, and their talents waver under inconstant breezes. Even in the rare exception like Auden, critics who adored the poet of the thirties often loathed the poet of the fifties. With Lowell, some critics who worshiped Lord Weary’s Castle couldn’t stand Life Studies—or, if they liked Life Studies, they despised Near the Ocean or Imitations or The Dolphin. And everyone hated Day by Day. Perhaps a poetry critic should never fall in love with his poets. There was once a lead critic for two important journals who frequently reviewed
2 introduction: p o etry a nd the d emo n o f h i st o ry
poet A, who could do no wrong in that critic’s eyes—book after book received detailed attention and a standing ovation. Though poet A had been a remarkable and original poet in her second and third books, those afterward were an exhibition of how a superbly gifted poet could turn, by dedicated application, into a carny attraction. I recall poets B and C, about whose books I was little less than rapturous, even if to keep my sanity I allowed myself a quibble here and there. A critic may think such raptures can do nothing but continue and that the novelist, say, who wrote The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove could never write a drama as leaden as Guy Domville. In their forties and fifties, those poets became ghosts of their former selves; and my reviews, though always mentioning the golden hours of the early books, now became surly with disappointment. What can the critic do? The critic can only be honest. The rewards of honesty are slight, but the critic can sleep at night—if he cares for sleep. Perhaps critics are lunatics. I long ago suggested that readers often like best the first book they read by a great poet. With Heaney, I prefer Field Work to much that came before and most after. It’s not a uniform rule, but it’s wise to remember that poetry that breaks ground for the poet sometimes breaks ground for the critic. A fortunate critic three or four times finds a poet who does what should have been done but hasn’t been, or what should not have been done but proves everyone mistaken. There’s nothing better for a critic than to discover a book that goes against all his instincts and convinces him his instincts were dead wrong. No critic’s taste can always be right. Indeed, it would be surprising if the critic were not wrong frequently and embarrassingly. There are also, alas, errors of fact—I once misspelled Robert Louis Stevenson’s last name twice in an essay and in another wrote that Britain had mad cows instead of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. Such mishaps are a chastening reminder of how easily those who love to be right go wrong. A critic who can’t force himself to believe that criticism is sacred should no doubt be hurled headfirst from the tower of criticism, even though criticism is just a minor art in thrall to a major one. (The critic who does believe in the sacredness of criticism should be sacrificing cats to Calliope.) That doesn’t mean criticism can’t have standards or bear them— Johnson’s Lives of the Poets is worth a thousand poets, even if no sensible
i ntr o d ucti o n: p o etry a n d t h e de m o n o f h i st o ry
3
reader would save that book rather than Paradise Lost were the last library and the last copies in flames. I’m thinking, of course, of the rescue of Cotton Ms. Vitellius A XV when Sir Robert Cotton’s library burned in 1731. The manuscript contained the only surviving copy of Beowulf. The question often posed—or perhaps sneered—is “What is the point of criticism?” A good critic can detect what a poem is concealing, whether written four centuries ago with a goose quill or yesterday on a cell phone. A critic can make, at best, some judgment about how good a poet is. The history of literature is littered with misjudgments but probably fewer than is thought. Yet does poetry need critics so sour, so dyspeptic? Why allow so many grouches, bellyachers, and malcontents into the critics’ guild? Why have critics at all if they can’t see the magnificence for the mistakes, the flourishes for the flaws? Why can’t the taste of the age be the taste of critics? Because, says the better angel of our nature, the taste of the age is often blinkered as a fly-blown mule, sentimental as a spring rose, and full of notions that a decade or two later will be considered ridiculous. There’s no particular right to criticism in the Constitution, apart from the tackedon bit of romanticism called the First Amendment—but in many ways the whole document was drawn from profound criticism, and the armies of the Revolution were grumblers all. The critic has every right to kick, or grouch, or gripe, or even raise a hurrah or two. The surprising thing about poetry is that critics are felt to be bad for it. If we have no opinions about what we read, we’re not readers at all—we’re merely beasts gobbling up whatever’s put before us and smiling contentedly. Even omnivores have taste. As Pound reminded us almost a century ago, the Greek krino, to choose, to pick out for oneself, gives us the critic as well as the criticism in him. It also means to separate, to prefer, and even to bring to trial. Of course, to make this argument I’m clothing a few straw men in rags. Critics are no more than readers sometimes paid for their opinions. There are always a few readers who don’t seem to mind hearing the critics’ catcalls and Bronx cheers. All readers of poetry have opinions, often ferocious ones. However loud the cries that poetry criticism should—no, must!—go easy on poets, many poets have violent opinions they keep to themselves, more than a little afraid of what would happen to their careers
4 introduction: p o etry a nd the d emo n o f h i st o ry
if they didn’t. In a century, most of those poets and probably all their critics will be cheerfully forgotten, and all that worry over the contagion of bad reviews will have been wasted. Poetry is necessarily imbued with the past, not just the crisscrossing of influence along generations but the intimate survival and loss of language, both word and phrase. (Take “ungear,” which once meant to unharness horse or mule, now employed by the day traders and investment houses in the farms along Wall Street.) Words and phrases are the beginning of poetry’s DNA; but the past that rises into poetry is also the layering of allusion, the cold references to history, and the intimacies between one poet and another through form, structure, or meter. The past is everywhere in poetry, and the new is often the past reborn. Criticism is the enrichment of poetry by the archeology of the past. All poets— all critics, too—tread on borrowed ground. Wherever the past is present, it’s the lot of critics to dig it out. Whatever critics say will be part of the ruined temples of the future. At a time when scholarship has become so arcane that graduate students have to hire translators to understand what their professors are talking about, critics must be plainspoken. It’s hard to imagine a world where it’s necessary to write, as one scholar recently did, that “Oedipus’ de-oculation concedes violability in the face of external impingements.” The duty of critics is to reply, “When you’re blind, you can’t see the bastards coming for you.” Critics must be honest so the future won’t think our readers complete idiots. If poetry aspires, to borrow a line from Pater, “towards the condition of music,” criticism aspires to ballet—or, some would say, the bullet.
“Arguably the most industrious and notorious poet-critic to brandish that hyphen like a knife between his teeth since his acknowledged master Randall Jarrell. . . . He often comes off as nothing so much as the Dirty Harry of the poetry beat.”
I
logan
Praise for William Logan
—David Barber, New York Times Book Review
Broken Ground
—David Mason, Hudson Review
“[Logan’s collections] are a masterclass in how to read.” —Duncan Wu, Times Higher Education Supplement William Logan is Alumni/ae Professor at the University of Florida. He is the author of seven books of criticism, most recently Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past (Columbia, 2018), and eleven books of poetry. Logan has won the inaugural Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism, the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, the Allen Tate Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.
cover image: debora greger cover design: chang jae lee
“Our wittiest critic of contemporary verse.” —James Marcus, Newsday
“Logan . . . should be declared a national treasure. One of our greatest living critics, he is also one of our sanest; but it is his curiosity that is his finest gift.” —Library Journal
C O L U M B I A U N I V E R S I TY P R E S S
NEW YORK
Poetr y and the Demon of Histor y
“Easily the best poetry reviewer we have.”
Broken Ground Poetr y and the Demon of Histor y
william logan
cup.columbia.edu
printed in the u.s.a.
COLUMBIA
n Broken Ground, William Logan explores the works of canonical and contemporary poets, rediscovering the lushness of imagination and depth of feeling that distinguish poetry as a literary art. The book includes long essays on Emily Dickinson’s envelopes, Ezra Pound’s wrestling with Chinese, Robert Frost’s letters, Philip Larkin’s train station, and Mrs. Custer’s volume of Tennyson, each teasing out the depths beneath the surface of the page. Broken Ground also presents the latest run of Logan’s infamous poetry chronicles and reviews, which for twentyfive years have bedeviled American verse. Logan believes that poetry criticism must be both adventurous and forthright—and that no reader should settle for being told that every poet is a genius. Among the poets under review by the “preeminent poet-critic of his generation” and “most hated man in American poetry” are Anne Carson, Jorie Graham, Paul Muldoon, John Ashbery, Geoffrey Hill, Louise Glück, John Berryman, Marianne Moore, Frederick Seidel, Les Murray, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, Johnny Cash, James Franco, and the former archbishop of Canterbury. Logan’s criticism stands on the broken ground of poetry, soaked in history and soiled by it. These essays and reviews work in the deep undercurrents of our poetry, judging the weak and the strong but finding in weakness and strength what endures.