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