Doing Criticism. James Chandler

If one wanted to identify a small fault in this poem, for example, it might be the switch in relative pronouns from “that” to “which,” where, grammatically, “that” should appear in both instances. I can think of possible defenses of this switch. One might call it a deliberate performance of colloquial speech, for example, though I don’t myself find this defense very convincing. We might also defend the switch of pronouns as a sign of haste. We know that William Carlos Williams was a practicing physician in his native New Jersey, and that he sometimes dashed off short poems on a typewriter between patients. That would make a kind of sense of the inconsistency, though it wouldn’t explain it away.

Implicit in some of the questions posed in this rudimentary act of criticism is an assumption of some grounds for comparison, and comparison lends a further dimension to the act of criticism. David Hume strongly emphasized that practical criticism depends on, well, practice, especially the practice of comparing works with one another. Suppose, then, that we undertake another little thought experiment and imagine another piece of textual scrawl on an arguably similar theme (Figure 1.2):

      FIGURE 1.2 Manuscript copy of Emily Dickinson’s “Forbidden fruit a flavor has.” Emily Dickinson Collection, Amherst College, Manuscript 187.

This piece of writing is untitled, like the message we might imagine on the refrigerator door. Like that message, too, it seems a bit messy and informal. We may, however, be struck by some special features in this arrangement of words.

      We might notice first that the words here compose two independent clauses, each consisting of exactly fourteen syllables. These two clauses are also marked by a certain rhythm, and by a peculiarity of grammar that we might call “syntactic inversion”: not “has a flavor,” but “a flavor has.” Not “that mocks lawful orchards,” but “that lawful orchards mocks.” We know that that second example involves an inversion because, if we look carefully, we see the inflected ending of the English verb to mock—“mocks”—needs to correspond to a singular subject. We might therefore first have imagined that the line involves the mocking of the flavor of the forbidden fruit before realizing that the grammar requires us to read it the other way around: it is the flavor, with its peculiar quality, that mocks the lawful orchards. This sort of device, which demands revisiting the lines, can expose and test our routine assumptions about the world, as the best poetry often does. We might also detect the dominance of f sounds in the first part of the poem, and how they give way to l sounds in the second part, with the interesting word “lawful”—with its l, f, l sequence—making the pivot from the one to the other. And some words, it turns out, rhyme with others.

      Seeing all this, we might conclude that this piece of writing is a poem, even before we ever see it laid out in a book of poetry in this form (perhaps the same book in which we found the Williams poem):

      Forbidden fruit a flavor has

      That lawful orchards mocks;

      How luscious lies the pea within

The pod that Duty locks!¹²

Looking at these two poems together, critically, we might ask a new set of questions. Which is a better poem? What is the difference between their treatment of the question of how sweet it is to taste fruit that one is not supposed to be tasting? How much does it matter that the second poem was published some forty years earlier and composed well before that? How much does it matter that it was written by a woman? By Emily Dickinson, in fact? Is there an allusion to the book of Genesis in the Dickinson poem? Is there an allusion to the book of Genesis in the Williams poem?

As we think about these two poems in broader contexts, other critical questions come to mind, especially if we learn a little more about the authors. One of Emily Dickinson’s only sojourns beyond her home in Amherst, Massachusetts, was a brief spell in the nearby Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Does this piece of information matter to how we think of this poem’s relation to the book of Genesis? Williams, for his part, was active in a twentieth-century poetry movement that rejected a heavy reliance on poetic diction, on simile and metaphor, and on figurative language generally. Should “This Is Just to Say” be paired with another famously brief, elemental poem by Williams, the one about a red wheelbarrow—“glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens”—in order to see both poems as advancing his effort to, as he put it, clean off the words of American English?¹³ Should its straddling of verse and prose be paired with another short American poem about food and sustenance, Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Bean Eaters” (1960)? In this poem, two rhyming quatrains, both relatively terse and formal, about an old, impoverished African American couple, eating and remembering, give way to a final stanza that seems to dissolve its verse into prose: “And remembering…/ Remembering, with twinklings and twinges, / As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.”¹⁴ What does this formal dissolution convey about conditions of their daily life and the circumstances of their acts of remembering? What does it convey about lived experience on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s?

      1.3 Limits of the Lyric Paradigm

These are the sorts of questions that will be familiar enough, I suppose, to anyone who has taken even an elementary course in the subject we call “English.” It has, however, grown fashionable in recent decades to think of them as questions not particularly essential to the great issues of the modern world, or even to the hard work of getting on in life. At the outbreak of the Second World War, W. H. Auden famously wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen,” and even Wordsworth, for all his faith in the mission of the poet, confessed that he sometimes felt that his attempt to address the great problems of his time by resort to poetry might seem merely a “feeble effort.”¹⁵ Questions of social efficacy aside, however, there has been a clear demotion of the study of poetry since the decades when it was enshrined at the heart of liberal education, an essential part of what it meant to learn to read well. This book can be thought of in part as resisting that demotion.

An initial response is simply to declare that engaging with poems in the way I have begun to do with Williams, Dickinson, and Brooks is a pleasure in itself; that the sheer joy of articulate response, as we put our pleasures and our puzzles into words, is already a great deal. The drive to do criticism, H. L. Mencken wrote, “is no more and no less than the simple desire to function freely and beautifully, to give outward and objective form to ideas that bubble inwardly and have a fascinating lure in them, to … make an articulate noise in the world.”¹⁶ One might go further to claim that this sort of activity opens the mind and liberates the spirit; indeed, that its interplay of analysis and judgment brings, as I put it earlier, new value into the world. In our engagement with Williams, Dickinson, and Brooks, to be sure, the question of value is dynamically in play: the poems seem to analyze and judge us even as we attempt to analyze and judge them.¹⁷ The guiding assumption behind Richards’ influential program in practical criticism is that the organized and “articulate noises” of a lyric poem provide a particularly good—even paradigmatic—starting point for this activity.

      Two questions thus emerge here and now. First, how do we extend the scope of criticism’s subject matter beyond the lyric poem—the poem itself—so as to identify a range of things that might serve the work of practical criticism as well as the lyric poem does? Second, how do we extend the benefits of critical engagement beyond the circumference of personal growth and gratification? Both are important questions for addressing the question of how to do criticism at the present time.

To the question of extending the scope of practical criticism’s subject matter, at least two important lines of response have been pursued in the past. Both will be familiar enough, but one is more limited than what I propose here, the other more expansive. The former approach is to extend the subject matter of criticism to include a domain called “literature.”