EP&M Online
Essay
Poets and Academics:
Why It Won’t Work Anymore
by
Joseph S. Salemi
Ever since mankind became literate,
there has been a symbiotic relationship between poetry and
book-learning. Once writing systems were invented, it was a
natural step to preserve poems as received texts; and those texts in
turn began to influence what poets subsequently composed. There’s
nothing wrong with such a development—on the contrary, poetry became
richer, deeper, and weightier as a result.
A received body of texts makes a
literary tradition possible, and a literary tradition provides new
poets with the anchors, landmarks, and milestones that allow their work
to be more than mere expressions of feeling, or momentary
epiphanies. The complexities of genre and sub-genre become
feasible, as well as the resonances that follow upon allusion.
Even more important, standards are set. Amateur crap is seen for
what it is—a failure to measure up to what predecessors have
accomplished.
Many years ago I wrote an article for
the Social Studies Review wherein
I argued that a “canon” of literary works was illusory. I still
believe that. There isn’t anyone with the specific authority to
say that such-and-such a work is “canonical,” while some other work
isn’t. Consequently there is no privileged group of texts that
has a greater command on our allegiance than any other group. We
simply have a lot of books, some better known at some times, some less
popular at other times. It’s highly significant that the notion
of a literary canon was dreamt up by academics, the most reflexively
rank-and-status conscious people on the planet. They created the
idea of “canonicity” as a projection of their own Tenure-Committee
obsessions.
However, there’s no denying that we have
a received body of texts, and in the aggregate they constitute a
tradition—that is, something handed down. It’s a multifaceted and
sometimes contradictory tradition of conflicting approaches and
techniques, but it’s there. It’s too extensive to be completely
mastered in a lifetime, but it’s also too important to ignore.
A vast number of modern poems are
wretched because they consciously eschew any visible connection with
this tradition. Or if they make use of tradition, they try to
subvert it or alter it in some unnecessary way. Narcissistic
posturing coupled with ignorance of the past are the distinguishing
marks of much of what is fobbed off as poetry today. And a great
many uninformed editors think that this situation is a sign of
burgeoning creativity.
This wouldn’t happen if we had a living
literary tradition nurtured by genuine scholars. For it was
scholars who made possible the literary tradition and its corollary,
the literary sensibility. Even in the ancient world there were
learned commentators on the Homeric poems. These men glossed
difficult words, clarified metrical issues, explained obscure
references, and made aesthetic judgments as to the relative merits of
passages. They took into account variant readings, and argued
about their validity. Most wonderfully for us, they copied down everything, thus
consigning the spoken word to the relative permanence of papyrus or
parchment.
I have a friend—a wonderful poet in his
own right, and a man who has memorized hundreds of English poems.
If you just give him a name—Sidney, Spenser, Vaughan, Cowley, Kipling,
anybody at all—he’ll quote an entire poem by that writer. It’s a
marvelous achievement. But my friend will admit that when he
recites a poem, on occasion he changes it unintentionally. He
might transpose two words, or substitute a preposition, or use some
synonym for the original word. That’s because my friend is human,
and human beings naturally make those sorts of mistakes. But
papyrus, parchment, leather, vellum, and paper are not human, and that is their great
advantage. Texts are fixed there once and for all. And if
the texts were put down correctly to begin with, they are going to give
you the correct reading for as long as they survive.
Of course, this in turn requires
vigilance on the part of scholars. They must strive to make sure
no errors or misreadings creep into the received texts; and when texts
are corrupt or defective they must suggest emendations. I recall
when a fragmentary text of the minor Roman poet Cornelius Gallus was
unearthed some twenty years ago. The ancient scribe had made a
transcription error (what we today would call a “typo”), and used the
third-person erit where the
plain grammatical sense of the line required a second-person eris. Any first-year Latin
student could see it, and of course one of the tasks of scholars is to
catch and clear up the more intricate flubs that can be perpetrated
when poems are carelessly written down.
Scholars provide other ancillary
services to the world of poetry. The location and preservation of
texts is the most obvious—how many works of classical literature would
have been lost forever if it were not for the efforts of Renaissance
scholars like Poggio Bracciolini and Lorenzo Valla? We would have
virtually nothing of Catullus had some curious bibliophile not been
poking around in an old wine cellar in Verona. Even today
scholars patiently piece together bits of papyri to recover lines of
Sappho and Menander. This symbiosis of scholarship and poetry is
part of the excitement that comes from being a part of “the world of
humane letters,” as we used to say before the centers of higher
learning were hijacked by theorists and ideologues.
Nevertheless, sometimes scholarship can
be a burden upon literature. When scholars grow too influential
they can hobble the world of letters with too much remembered detail,
and too much historical complexity. In the late Hellenistic
period, Greek poetry was dominated by Alexandrian scholiasts and
librarians who for all practical purposes turned the art into an elite
specialization. Anglo-Saxon poetry, in the hands of learned monks
in the great monasteries of Wessex and Northumbria, became totally
detached from the living tradition that gave it birth. But these
are the ordinary hazards that go with the symbiosis of poetry and
scholarship. They are rectified in the course of time.
Today, however, we are in an absolutely
unprecedented situation. A large and very influential section of
the academy is explicitly and actively hostile to the entire concept of
a literary tradition and the literary sensibility. This hostility
takes three forms.
The first is the dominance of the fraud
known as critical theory. French in origin, critical theory has
now been transplanted wholesale to hundreds of English departments in
the Anglophone world. This bizarre, quirky, willfully perverse
approach to literature seeks to unmask the supposed secret agenda
behind all texts by showing them to be nothing more than special
pleading for the status quo. Often given the catch-all name of
“deconstruction,” critical theory is an ideological attempt to
discredit any text that might conceivably support racism, sexism,
imperialism, patriarchal hegemony, Christianity, homophobia, Western
civilization… well, you get the picture. It’s merely a
countercultural impulse masquerading as literary critique.
The second kind of hostility is a
generalized contempt for what is called belles lettres, and the
belletristic approach. Connected with critical theory, this is an
attitude that resolutely refuses to see literature as an end in itself,
or as a self-contained world of aesthetic delight. Hatred for belles lettres is part of the
current theoretical insistence that texts are masks for sociopolitical
agendas, and that the job of the responsible scholar is to tear those
masks off and reveal the complicity of literature with
conservatism. If you are so incautious as to maintain that works
of literature can have a beauty and a resonance intrinsic to their
structure, you will never be hired in a literature department today.
The third kind of hostility is
institutionalized and mandatory left-liberalism. Ever since the
appearance of Roger Kimball’s Tenured
Radicals in 1990, and the many subsequent exposés of
leftist dominance of university faculties, there is no question that a
great deal of academia is now as hotly politicized as the
Balkans. In certain departments the situation is worse than in
others. But literature faculties have been particularly hard
hit. Because a great many left-liberal faculty members take the
position that “The personal is the political,” they have made daily
life on these faculties hellish for anyone so presumptuous as to
suggest that there might be reasons for reading and teaching texts
other than to support the fight for worldwide revolution. You
will be snubbed, ostracized, and eventually dismissed if you dare to
criticize left-liberal assumptions publicly.
How does all this affect poets?
Well, the problem is that many poets are academics, or make part of
their living via academic connections. It’s inevitable that some
of these persons will subordinate their art to what they feel are the
received norms of the academic community. Like literature in the
old Soviet Union, conformism and groupthink will come first. No
one will compose a line unless it follows the accepted etiquette for
tone and subject matter. And that, of course, is exactly what the
left wants: a literature and a literary criticism that remain safely
within the parameters of “progressive” thinking.
When the academy is completely in thrall
to leftist and countercultural presuppositions, it can no longer
provide the kind of useful judgments and commentary that were the
traditional contribution of scholars to literary discourse. When
professors refuse to judge a poem on its intrinsic merits as a work of
art, but insist on employing sociopolitical yardsticks in the process
of critique, then the game is over. There isn’t any point to the
process. All we need to do is apply the current ideological
litmus tests to prospective poets, and issue them the Good Housekeeping
Seal of Approval for bien-pensant
conformity.
The academic left, when it isn’t
proclaiming its solidarity with the oppressed, insists that it is
unbiased in its judgment of aesthetic value. If you believe that,
then you know nothing about academics and their peculiarly venomous and
insular disposition. These people are inveterate diehard
partisans who will not give an inch on matters of ideology. Over
the last quarter century, with the worldwide collapse of Marxism, they
have become intensely embittered and ferocious in a way that reminds
one of Japanese soldiers chained to their machine guns, ready to fight
to the last cartridge. You think academic leftists will give a
fair reading to a text that flouts their pieties? Forget it.
Once in a discussion of these matters
with a colleague, he raised the following objection: “How can you say
that modern academics are against tradition when you also claim that
they are powerfully concerned with questions of the canon and
canonicity?” I replied, “Because they have created canonicity as a convenient
straw man, in order to press their attack on literary tradition.”
He didn’t have an answer for this, so he changed the subject. The
larger point is that academics like my colleague are continuing to
claim their special prerogative to be the guardians of literature,
while at the same time undermining the world of letters by turning it
into a suburb of politics and sociology. Do we really need such
people as guides? I don’t think we do.
Poets are now going to have to do their
work without reference to anything that is being hyped in mainstream
academia. They are going to have to make use of tradition on
their own, because most academics are no longer trustworthy conduits of
traditional knowledge. They are going to have to depend upon
their instinctive love of belles
lettres, in spite of the furious attacks and mockery to which belles lettres are subjected.
And they are going to have to be deliberately and consciously
contemptuous of anything trendy or politically correct. Only that
sort of explicit gran rifiuto will
inoculate poets against these scholarly distempers.
Are we poets completely friendless in
academia? No, obviously not. There are a few corners of
sanity, a few holdouts, a few renegades who haven’t given in. But
we have to recognize that, for all practical purposes, it is enemy-held
territory.
Joseph S.
Salemi
Copyright © 2006 by Joseph S. Salemi
All Rights Reserved
by
Joseph S. Salemi
Ever since mankind became literate,
there has been a symbiotic relationship between poetry and
book-learning. Once writing systems were invented, it was a
natural step to preserve poems as received texts; and those texts in
turn began to influence what poets subsequently composed. There’s
nothing wrong with such a development—on the contrary, poetry became
richer, deeper, and weightier as a result.
A received body of texts makes a
literary tradition possible, and a literary tradition provides new
poets with the anchors, landmarks, and milestones that allow their work
to be more than mere expressions of feeling, or momentary
epiphanies. The complexities of genre and sub-genre become
feasible, as well as the resonances that follow upon allusion.
Even more important, standards are set. Amateur crap is seen for
what it is—a failure to measure up to what predecessors have
accomplished.
Many years ago I wrote an article for
the Social Studies Review wherein I argued that a “canon” of literary
works was illusory. I still believe that. There isn’t
anyone with the specific authority to say that such-and-such a work is
“canonical,” while some other work isn’t. Consequently there is
no privileged group of texts that has a greater command on our
allegiance than any other group. We simply have a lot of books,
some better known at some times, some less popular at other
times. It’s highly significant that the notion of a literary
canon was dreamt up by academics, the most reflexively rank-and-status
conscious people on the planet. They created the idea of
“canonicity” as a projection of their own Tenure-Committee obsessions.
However, there’s no denying that we have
a received body of texts, and in the aggregate they constitute a
tradition—that is, something handed down. It’s a multifaceted and
sometimes contradictory tradition of conflicting approaches and
techniques, but it’s there. It’s too extensive to be completely
mastered in a lifetime, but it’s also too important to ignore.
A vast number of modern poems are
wretched because they consciously eschew any visible connection with
this tradition. Or if they make use of tradition, they try to
subvert it or alter it in some unnecessary way. Narcissistic
posturing coupled with ignorance of the past are the distinguishing
marks of much of what is fobbed off as poetry today. And a great
many uninformed editors think that this situation is a sign of
burgeoning creativity.
This wouldn’t happen if we had a living
literary tradition nurtured by genuine scholars. For it was
scholars who made possible the literary tradition and its corollary,
the literary sensibility. Even in the ancient world there were
learned commentators on the Homeric poems. These men glossed
difficult words, clarified metrical issues, explained obscure
references, and made aesthetic judgments as to the relative merits of
passages. They took into account variant readings, and argued
about their validity. Most wonderfully for us, they copied down
everything, thus consigning the spoken word to the relative permanence
of papyrus or parchment.
I have a friend—a wonderful poet in his
own right, and a man who has memorized hundreds of English poems.
If you just give him a name—Sidney, Spenser, Vaughan, Cowley, Kipling,
anybody at all—he’ll quote an entire poem by that writer. It’s a
marvelous achievement. But my friend will admit that when he
recites a poem, on occasion he changes it unintentionally. He
might transpose two words, or substitute a preposition, or use some
synonym for the original word. That’s because my friend is human,
and human beings naturally make those sorts of mistakes. But
papyrus, parchment, leather, vellum, and paper are not human, and that
is their great advantage. Texts are fixed there once and for
all. And if the texts were put down correctly to begin with, they
are going to give you the correct reading for as long as they survive.
Of course, this in turn requires
vigilance on the part of scholars. They must strive to make sure
no errors or misreadings creep into the received texts; and when texts
are corrupt or defective they must suggest emendations. I recall
when a fragmentary text of the minor Roman poet Cornelius Gallus was
unearthed some twenty years ago. The ancient scribe had made a
transcription error (what we today would call a “typo”), and used the
third-person erit where the plain grammatical sense of the line
required a second-person eris. Any first-year Latin student could
see it, and of course one of the tasks of scholars is to catch and
clear up the more intricate flubs that can be perpetrated when poems
are carelessly written down.
Scholars provide other ancillary
services to the world of poetry. The location and preservation of
texts is the most obvious—how many works of classical literature would
have been lost forever if it were not for the efforts of Renaissance
scholars like Poggio Bracciolini and Lorenzo Valla? We would have
virtually nothing of Catullus had some curious bibliophile not been
poking around in an old wine cellar in Verona. Even today
scholars patiently piece together bits of papyri to recover lines of
Sappho and Menander. This symbiosis of scholarship and poetry is
part of the excitement that comes from being a part of “the world of
humane letters,” as we used to say before the centers of higher
learning were hijacked by theorists and ideologues.
Nevertheless, sometimes scholarship can
be a burden upon literature. When scholars grow too influential
they can hobble the world of letters with too much remembered detail,
and too much historical complexity. In the late Hellenistic
period, Greek poetry was dominated by Alexandrian scholiasts and
librarians who for all practical purposes turned the art into an elite
specialization. Anglo-Saxon poetry, in the hands of learned monks
in the great monasteries of Wessex and Northumbria, became totally
detached from the living tradition that gave it birth. But these
are the ordinary hazards that go with the symbiosis of poetry and
scholarship. They are rectified in the course of time.
Today, however, we are in an absolutely
unprecedented situation. A large and very influential section of
the academy is explicitly and actively hostile to the entire concept of
a literary tradition and the literary sensibility. This hostility
takes three forms.
The first is the dominance of the fraud
known as critical theory. French in origin, critical theory has
now been transplanted wholesale to hundreds of English departments in
the Anglophone world. This bizarre, quirky, willfully perverse
approach to literature seeks to unmask the supposed secret agenda
behind all texts by showing them to be nothing more than special
pleading for the status quo. Often given the catch-all name of
“deconstruction,” critical theory is an ideological attempt to
discredit any text that might conceivably support racism, sexism,
imperialism, patriarchal hegemony, Christianity, homophobia, Western
civilization… well, you get the picture. It’s merely a
countercultural impulse masquerading as literary critique.
The second kind of hostility is a
generalized contempt for what is called belles lettres, and the
belletristic approach. Connected with critical theory, this is an
attitude that resolutely refuses to see literature as an end in itself,
or as a self-contained world of aesthetic delight. Hatred for
belles lettres is part of the current theoretical insistence that texts
are masks for sociopolitical agendas, and that the job of the
responsible scholar is to tear those masks off and reveal the
complicity of literature with conservatism. If you are so
incautious as to maintain that works of literature can have a beauty
and a resonance intrinsic to their structure, you will never be hired
in a literature department today.
The third kind of hostility is
institutionalized and mandatory left-liberalism. Ever since the
appearance of Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals in 1990, and the many
subsequent exposés of leftist dominance of university faculties,
there is no question that a great deal of academia is now as hotly
politicized as the Balkans. In certain departments the situation
is worse than in others. But literature faculties have been
particularly hard hit. Because a great many left-liberal faculty
members take the position that “The personal is the political,” they
have made daily life on these faculties hellish for anyone so
presumptuous as to suggest that there might be reasons for reading and
teaching texts other than to support the fight for worldwide
revolution. You will be snubbed, ostracized, and eventually
dismissed if you dare to criticize left-liberal assumptions publicly.
How does all this affect poets?
Well, the problem is that many poets are academics, or make part of
their living via academic connections. It’s inevitable that some
of these persons will subordinate their art to what they feel are the
received norms of the academic community. Like literature in the
old Soviet Union, conformism and groupthink will come first. No
one will compose a line unless it follows the accepted etiquette for
tone and subject matter. And that, of course, is exactly what the
left wants: a literature and a literary criticism that remain safely
within the parameters of “progressive” thinking.
When the academy is completely in thrall
to leftist and countercultural presuppositions, it can no longer
provide the kind of useful judgments and commentary that were the
traditional contribution of scholars to literary discourse. When
professors refuse to judge a poem on its intrinsic merits as a work of
art, but insist on employing sociopolitical yardsticks in the process
of critique, then the game is over. There isn’t any point to the
process. All we need to do is apply the current ideological
litmus tests to prospective poets, and issue them the Good Housekeeping
Seal of Approval for
bien-pensant conformity.
The academic left, when it isn’t
proclaiming its solidarity with the oppressed, insists that it is
unbiased in its judgment of aesthetic value. If you believe that,
then you know nothing about academics and their peculiarly venomous and
insular disposition. These people are inveterate diehard
partisans who will not give an inch on matters of ideology. Over
the last quarter century, with the worldwide collapse of Marxism, they
have become intensely embittered and ferocious in a way that reminds
one of Japanese soldiers chained to their machine guns, ready to fight
to the last cartridge. You think academic leftists will give a
fair reading to a text that flouts their pieties? Forget it.
Once in a discussion of these matters
with a colleague, he raised the following objection: “How can you say
that modern academics are against tradition when you also claim that
they are powerfully concerned with questions of the canon and
canonicity?” I replied, “Because they have created canonicity as
a convenient straw man, in order to press their attack on literary
tradition.” He didn’t have an answer for this, so he changed the
subject. The larger point is that academics like my colleague are
continuing to claim their special prerogative to be the guardians of
literature, while at the same time undermining the world of letters by
turning it into a suburb of politics and sociology. Do we really
need such people as guides? I don’t think we do.
Poets are now going to have to do their
work without reference to anything that is being hyped in mainstream
academia. They are going to have to make use of tradition on
their own, because most academics are no longer trustworthy conduits of
traditional knowledge. They are going to have to depend upon
their instinctive love of belles lettres, in spite of the furious
attacks and mockery to which belles lettres are subjected. And
they are going to have to be deliberately and consciously contemptuous
of anything trendy or politically correct. Only that sort of
explicit gran rifiuto will inoculate poets against these scholarly
distempers.
Are we poets completely friendless in
academia? No, obviously not. There are a few corners of
sanity, a few holdouts, a few renegades who haven’t given in. But
we have to recognize that, for all practical purposes, it is enemy-held
territory.
Joseph S. Salemi
All Rights Reserved