John Freeman revisits Randall Jarrell's Poetry and the Age over at Bookforum, considering why it's considered a must-read by lit types half a century after its publication (Not that I've read it yet; but the essay makes a good case for bumping the title up on the teetering TBR list).
"... when the National Book Critics Circle began calling on its members to recommend five books of criticism to the readers of its Critical Mass blog (www.bookcritics circle.blogspot.com), one that popped up time and again—amid thickets of collections by George Orwell, Edmund Wilson, and Virginia Woolf—was a title intimately acquainted with such issues of readership: Randall Jarrell’s Poetry and the Age. Published in 1953, during what many consider to have been the golden age of criticism, a time when statistics also said reading was on the wane, Poetry and the Age is a complicated hybrid: It is a strong and sensible argument against the primary role that criticism had begun to play in literary quarterlies. It is also a shining example of how engaged and freshly written criticism can shape what we read. Jarrell’s essays on Robert Frost, for one, were enormously helpful in refocusing our attention on his poetry rather than his persona."
Personally, I've harbored a love-hate relationship with lit-crit. I'm disgusted by the premise of a profession predicated on, in so many cases, looking for flaws and announcing them to the world. I'm bored by anxious debates about whether a poet was more of, say, a Surrealist or a Dadaist. I grow weary of critics who exploit the literary work of others to trumpet their own voices, their own pet theories, their own puffed-up names. I'm irritated when a critic champions a title as worthy because of how it represents its social context, void of any artistic consideration of the words in the text. And I'm particularly indifferent to the legions of readers who spend the bulk of their reading time with critics pontificating on books, rather than with the books themselves. Too often, we value the debate--basically, the words of the people who sound smart--than our own ideas about books, or the author's own words. Often criticism devolves in joylessness in its chatter about an art form that I, for one, prefer to celebrate in.
On the 'love' side, I'm a sucker for passionate talk about books and writers and language; I'm drawn to browse the books of critics every time I enter a bookstore. I love learning from the ideas of others, and the best of critics teach and inspire me. From Vladmir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature to Virginia Woolf's analysis of how social structures influence literary culture in A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, lit crits often challenge me, pushing me to better writing and better reading--to say nothing of the admirable reading list that comes my way.
Think the great age of criticism is over? Not a chance. Ellen Bryant Voigt's book, The Flexible Lyric, breaks down poetry craft with mind-blowing intensity. Meghan O'Rourke writes fantastic essays (I particularly enjoyed older pieces on Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner, her praise of "small" novels, and her tribute to The Virginia Quarterly Review). Lit crit is growing increasingly savvy on the blogosphere. I have Tony Hoagland's Real Sofistikashun waiting for me on my shelf, an essay collection drawn from his articles in Poetry--the two of which I read are fantastic.
And maybe Jarrell's the next critic worth checking out. Freeman thinks so anyway.
"Jarrell’s intervention ... was personal and relentless. While other critics affected authority, he embraced subjectivity; while others embraced a vocabulary accessible only to themselves, Jarrell could be lyrically colloquial. ... humorous, anecdotal, occasionally mean, full of elaborate metaphors and long, shambolic sentences that employ the comma and semicolon like a man raising his finger to pause the audience as their hands go up with questions."... Though he was fearsome (the poet and critic William Logan has described Jarrell’s style as 'genially murderous'), he was also an enthusiast, and in his essays on Frost, he is forever asking—no, begging—the reader to stop reading him to go read more Frost than he can fit into his already enormous bank of quotations. ...
"... 'Admit what you can’t conceal,' Jarrell concludes in 'The Age of Criticism,' 'that criticism is no more than (and no less than) the helpful remarks and the thoughtful and disinterested judgment of a reader, a loving and experienced and able reader, but only a reader. . . . Remember that you can never be more than the staircase to the monument, the guide to the gallery, the telescope through which the children see the stars. At your best you make people see what they might never have seen without you; but they must always forget you in what they see.'”
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