poet as critic

The Poet as CriticAuthor(s): Victor LangeSource: Comparative Literature Studies, , Special Advance Number (1963), pp. 17-23Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40245608 .

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VICTOR LANGE

The Poet as Critic

subject on which I wish to speak briefly is a fascinating one; given far more time than I have this afternoon, it would be immensely reward-

ing to examine it in its historical continuity as well as its critical implications and variations. The relationship between poetic sensibility and the awareness of critical perspectives which commit the poet within his own work and, at the same time enable him to judge publicly is an issue that is, of course, not ex-

plicitly part of ancient poetic theory; yet, it is relevant to our understanding of the humanistic tradition from Dante to Sidney and Gottsched as well as of the subsequent development of critical taste. With this history, however, we cannot here be concerned. I should like, instead, to single out some aspects of the larger theme that are more specifically related to the contemporary topic of this meeting.

In what sense - this will be my question - can it be argued that, in our time, a particular kind of interest or disposition in the make-up of the poet constitutes an important and perhaps essential premise of the critical procedure? May not the poet today claim to be heard not merely in rhetorical self-justification, but as a critic in his own right and perhaps even in preference to the various aesthetic, historical, sociological or merely mercantile theorists of literature? If I argue this question to some extent in terms of the German setting, I do so with the European mainstream steadily in mind, and in full awareness of the remarkable differences between the recent history of poetry and poetics in

Germany and in France. We may assume that between the purposes of the poet and those of the critic

there exists at all times a self-evident connection: originality and judgment, creativity and mediation, individual artistry and social commitment are always in discourse with one another. Yet, ever since the mid-eighteenth century, the critical judgment and the critical performance seem in remarkable measure to determine the poetic, to make categorical claims as to intellectual priority and, in literary esteem, even to outrank it. Indeed, ever since Leibnitz, and the emergence of an analytical philosophical attitude, each age has become

increasingly skeptical of its spontaneous creative energies and inclined, in its

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best minds, to consider itself first and foremost determined by critical predilec- tions. Succeeding generations have, of course, defined this term within their own intellectual presuppositions, but whether we think of Lessing or Diderot, of Schiller or Goethe, of Coleridge or Schlegel, or Matthew Arnold, Sainte- Beuve or Tschernyschevsky, of Dilthey or Valéry - as each offered a formula for the character of his time, he claimed the increasing mobility and importance of the critical judgment in relation to the work of the poet.

But until the early nineteenth century, the poetic performance and the critical act remained joined in an overriding vision of society within which both are essentially variants of the same philosophical purpose. For the classicist writer from Gottsched to Goethe, poetry is the rendering and affirmation of shared and believed social values; criticism reinforces, articulates or popularizes this concept of literature as the natural idiom of a cultural faith. However academic Lessing's poetic principles may be, his criticism is never divorced from his social idealism. Schiller intensifies this adherence to a cultural postulate. He is at the same time the first modern poet for whom the work of art, as a

projection of a virtual reality, transcends the given social conditions; he therefore

separates literary criticism as a philosophical act from the specific aesthetic exercise of the poet. Poet and critic stand for Schiller in a special relationship to one another: if they share the poem as their common object, they differ nevertheless radically from one another in their procedures and their intentions.

In Friedrich SchlegeFs early reflections on literature, the critical activity eman-

cipates itself still more radically from the performance of the poet: as a critic

Schlegel is inclined to accept the given design of the poem without paying attention to its technical condition. He is not concerned with the question: "What is a poem?" but is preoccupied almost exclusively with the intellectual character and the requirements of the critic. What Schlegel envisages is the critic who has qualities like those of the poet: what the poet constructs, the

critic, favoured over the poet in that he is twice removed from nature, must reconstruct. Since the critic offers in his discourse a mirror image of the mirror

image of reality, his work transcends the poem. The procedures of criticism thus become themselves the object of the critic.

But if for Schlegel - and indeed for most German writers until Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann - critic and poet, however different their methods, may remain effective within one and the same individual, this is no longer due to

any notion of their common social responsibility, as rather to the fact that

criticism, whatever its purpose, requires above all an empirical understanding of the poet's craft.

Among nineteenth-century German critics, and in the critical utterances of the poets themselves, this empirical experience ceases altogether to have an effective bearing on criticism. Literature and criticism fall apart. Criticism de- fines its terms and its purposes at an ever widening distance from the practices of the poet, and operates in a speculative or psychological context. In Germany, far more than in England or in France, criticism becomes academic, pedantic, rhetorical and therefore non-literary; it petrifies in elaborate systems, and becomes pointless in the quarrels of aesthetic partisans, platitudinous among the



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purveyors of culture, and mere defensive rhetoric in the pronouncements of the

poets themselves. For as the tenets and the postulates of literary criticism are made to depend

increasingly on ideological assumptions and the view of poetry becomes more and more sentimental - this is certainly true in mid-nineteenth century Ger-

many - the poet's understanding of his own craft becomes shallow and inarticu- late. Speculative criticism on the one hand, and, as a logical corollary, a view of the poet as a spontaneous genius, discredit and belittle all serious reflections on the poetic process. Critical self-reflection is taken to be a preoccupation with technical irrelevancies.

Nothing is more striking in its consequences for German nineteenth century literature than the loss- on the part of poets and critics alike- of pragmatic view of poetics. There are not many among the more conspicuous German

poets and novelists whose accounts of their own working principles have serious critical value: Môrike, Stifter, Storm, even Keller or Fontane, are altogether pedestrian and conventional in their understanding of poetological principles. None of them appears aware of the critical revolution that is taking place in France at the same time. The well-known exceptions merely confirm the rule: Heine, Immermann, Grillparzer, Otto Ludwig or Hebbel prove again and again the stubborn pull of historical and speculative tendencies upon minds that are

thoroughly aware of the empirical conditions of their craft but unwilling, as critics, to concede the decisive importance of linguistic or structural con- siderations.

In Germany it is not, or not yet, as in France, the major poets (such as Baudelaire or Flaubert, or Mallarmé), who concern themselves with practical criticism, but minor writers such as Heyse, Spielhagen and Freytag. Their awareness of poetic craftsmanship, and their understanding of its relevancy to a

theory of literature is in many ways superior to that of the major critics. What

they have to say about narrative form or dramaturgy, or questions of genre, of

structure, of suspense, of perspective, is incomparably more specific than the

cursory treatment of these topics in the aesthetic or historical or psychological criticism of Vischer or Dilthey.

Still, even this pragmatic criticism of the minor talents remains, in a sense, an academic exercise; it is prescriptive and didactic within a conventional view of the role of literature. It shows certainly little of that intense compulsion by which their French contemporaries, in the face of mounting skepticism towards the social function of literature, attempt to justify the very act and

meaning of poetic composition in terms of the energies and devices of language. Until Arno Holz, a much underrated writer, the German poet-critics continue to rest their principles on the props of obsolescent idealisms. The turning away from this form of ideological literary judgment towards an awareness of the

specific character of the poetic resources occurs in Germany at a remarkably late date.

The doubt in the efficacy of literature that we find first advanced by Poe and Baudelaire, and as it appears later in the self-critical work of

Maupassant, Turgenev, Henry James and Chekhov- this tantalizing suspicion



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of futility is in Germany first and most intelligently stated not by a poet or a

literary critic but by Nietzsche in his early essays. In The Birth of Tragedy and Human All Too Human the poet appears throughout as an altogether questionable character, his performance as evasive and irresponsible, and his work as thoroughly out of season. Only gradually Nietzsche becomes fascinated

by the very ambivalence of the poetic act, and recognizes in the "deviousness" of the poet one of the pathological features that should, he argues, become the

object of criticism. The poet has for Nietzsche ceased to be "the moon- and God-intoxicated prophet"; he is the disaffected antagonist of life and, by his

specific strategy, turns into its most powerful critic. Now he can only strive to

emancipate himself from the idealistic tradition and proceed from disillusion- ment to recognize his own impotence as a teacher. More and more the world of art appears to Nietzsche an immense system of metaphorical deception that conceals the inevitably tragic nature of life. But this ineluctably tragic situation the poet must make articulate: he must learn to lie, willingly and cunningly; he must operate obliquely behind masks that make his reflections upon the

inescapable modern dissociation from truth at least tolerable and plausible. Nietzsche's extraordinary perception for the shades and subtleties of the poet's

complex and paradoxical intention, for the calculated gestures of the poet's performance, for his techniques of deception and persuasion, for his art of

camouflage- all these capacities soon become part of the new apparatus and

vocabulary of European criticism. Nietzsche's own procedure as a writer was

always metaphorical, and his efforts as a critic were always directed precisely at unmasking the authentic impulse behind an oblique statement and at determining the intentions that produced it. This, Nietzsche's central purpose, has in turn prompted a large variety of modern critical procedures; it has led to a kind of criticism most characteristic of our time, which attempts to determine the nature and function of symbolic expression.

Nietzsche was, at any rate, one of the first to demonstrate the limitations of genetic criticism, whether historically or psychologically motivated, and to focus instead upon the specific and characteristic properties, however ambiguous, of the poem itself. This historic change in the direction of criticism has been of the greatest importance for subsequent poets and critics alike. After Nietzsche and the experiences that became crystallized in his work, all significant literature, whether poetry, drama or fiction, has been aware of the precariousness of its own intellectual premises. The poets themselves have been intensely concerned with the scope and the limitations of their craft: they have made the reservations towards their own effectiveness an essential part of their work.

At best, these self-critical reservations, we know, are not so much stated as discursive reflections apart from the poem, the novel or the play, as built into its thematic and formal structure. The critic, in turn, is thus held more closely than ever before to the task of identifying, indeed perhaps even of completing the

inherently tentative design of the poet. The poem itself and its elaboration in critical discourse have thus become more and more interdependent. If classical criticism was, for Lessing or Matthew Arnold, a re-production, a re-thinking



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of the poetic intention, modern criticism, since Baudelaire and Nietzsche, and in the tradition of Schlegel, responds to the statement of the poets and rounds it out.

"Poetic Intention" has therefore emerged as one of the central categories of

contemporary criticism - the term to be understood not in any psychological or biographical sense, but as an indication of the exact relationship between poetic devices and poetic purpose. The critical utterances of the poet, his reflections either on his own work or that of other writers, are today more

specifically than ever before, part of his total strategy. When Wordsworth

suggested that "every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or

original, must create the taste by which he is to be relished," he assumed a constant of poetry which is subject to the historical variants of taste; if Valéry, echoing Baudelaire and Mallarmé, insists, on the other hand, that every poet must contain a critic, he makes the critical act, beyond its immediate disciplinary function, an indispensable part of the poet's intention.

For the major European poets of our time - Pound, Valéry, Eliot - criticism is the calculated extension, the mirror image of their poetry, whatever the ostensible public purpose of their critical writings may be - the training of poets, as Pound intended, or the correction of public taste, or the education of readers with regard to undervalued modes of writing or to unknown contemporaries or to the particular manner of the poet-critic himself. The chief German poets of the past fifty years have not always been so specifically preoccupied with a defense of their own idiom; by conviction and tradition they have shown a sounder

respect than many English critics for the historical and cultural context of their work. But ever since the beginning of the great dialogue between the emerging modernist movement and its opponents, between Arno Holz and Stefan George, the German writers, too, have regarded their critical pronouncements as part of their performance as poets. HofmannsthaFs or Borchardt's criticism may wish to sustain a larger cultural vision; Thomas Mann's reiterates the question as to the feasibility of art in an analytical age; Benn's criticism may hope to create an understanding for a kind of poetry that must exist beyond any ideological faith; Brecht may in his critical pronouncements seek to justify poetry as social

persuasion. But all of these share an extraordinarily vivid knowledge of the

relationship between intention, devices and effect, and an awareness at the same time, of the limits of the poetic utterance. None, not even the most articulate of these poets, intends to offer anything like a theory of literature. But they are aware of the central importance of language and its strategic possibilities, and speak with remarkable intelligence of the procedures of composition rather than of inspiration or enthusiasm, that "vain confidence," in Dr. Johnson's words, "of divine favour."

It is true enough that poets are not always able to define or discuss their own

production in anything like reliable terms. Yeats's theoretical utterances were often absurdly prejudiced; and the vagueness of Rilke's or Gerhart Hauptmann's critical effusions is well-known. These poets are so completely self-centered and so much concerned with their own emotional or philosophical dispositions that

they reinforce the old distrust of criticism by poets. Good poets, we know, have at times been bad critics; they have tried to deal with uncongenial poetry



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(Schiller on Burger, Goethe on Hôlderlin, Wordsworth on Pope), or they have overrated poetry to which they felt particularly attracted: Coleridge praised Bowles, Blake acclaimed Chatterton and Macpherson.

The question as to whether poets are necessarily good critics is a tricky and perhaps unanswerable one. Mr. Robert Graves has recently maintained that

poets are the only proper judges of poetry and it may well be true that the best critics of poetry have themselves been distinguished poets. If Valéry asserts (somewhat categorically) that every genuine poet is necessarily a first-rate critic, he is right at least in so far as valid criticism can be founded neither on sub- jective nor on ideological grounds but must derive its principles from convictions and interests that have to do with the effect of specific poetic devices.

The modern poet undoubtedly knows more about the limits and possibilities of his craft than his predecessors. That he often knows more than his judges is the reason why Eliot prefers the technical specialist to the philosophical critic. Knowing and making are, in any case, for the contemporary poet-critic, closely related. And just as the character of poetry is increasingly determined by the self-critical skepticism of the poets, so the kind of criticism that we receive from poets seems to depend on the particular form to which they are committed: the lyrical poet is today especially reflective and communicative: the critical observa- tions of Valéry, Benn or Auden - whether they are wise or capricious - comple- ment and complete their poetry. The dramatist whose work tends increasingly toward the speechlessness of pantomime, comments in the form of explicatory pronouncements. Only the experimental novelist of our time appears wholly absorbed in his performance. The constructive and the reflective activities of Kafka or Joyce coincide, their critical energy is fully consumed in their composition. The differences between the fiction of Henry James or Gide or Thomas Mann on the one hand, and Faulkner on the other are due not merely to the

variety of artistic temperament, but to the degree to which in each case the critical intelligence of the artist has itself become the subject matter of fiction.

It is sometimes objected that the criticism by poets tends to be confined to linguistic matters, that it is, as a recent skeptic put it, "concerned less with the whole than the part, less with the what or the why than the how of writing; that it examines paragraphs, stanzas, individual lines rather than poems as wholes; that it examines a method rather than a work." This seems to me only an inevitable reflection of our contemporary preferences: we have little sympathy with Herder's faith in the intuitive power of the critic; ideas are for us no longer essences but tools and directives.

With few and admittedly vociferous exceptions, the most interesting contemporary criticism has not been immediately directed at the philosophical impulses behind the work of the poet; not, that is to say, like much academic criticism, at subject matter or content, but primarily at the poetic procedure within the given resources of language. What T. S. Eliot, himself recently pointedly doubtful of the uses of criticism, has called "the intolerable wrestle with words" may well lead the poet, in his critical reflections, beyond his primary performance into a casuistical defense of a particular mode. But even



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the question to which criticism must in the end always turn: whether a poem, however well made, is worth reading can today and in our society not be answered by moral precepts, and not by taking refuge in vision or inspiration. The answer can be provided only through an understanding of the function of

poetry as the sort of exploration and definition of reality which the poet's critical and responsible use of language can perform.



poet as critic

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