Well, the _term_ isn't likely to evolve a positive connotation, agreed, but
"bombast" can and I think does apply to some styles that may be--but need
not be--re/perceived negatively whether employed by a poet or a critic. It
continues to puzzle me as applied to Jorie Graham, though, because her style
is so quiet and small-gestural as to belie its tough-mindedness and
complexity--as in "The Surface," where we'd both missed a lot from our
respectively negative and positive vantage points, I'd say. (Would you,
Henry?) A bombastic critic such as Logan seems, on the other hand--
especially in contrast to Blackmur, going by the many thoughtful and to me
highly insightful propositions by him that you've quoted in several posts
("discovery" as "judgment," the "anonymous" relative to the "impersonal,"
the "tragically" premature closure of "thought")--may or may not accomplish
the task of criticism s/he has taken on in consequence of that bombast. I
wouldn't rule it out as an effective rhetorical tool in some critical
instances, in other words.

If Logan's _New Criterion_ review article (which covers a number of poets
besides Graham, btw, and finds only one to praise) is anything to go by, his
bombast serves no purpose but loudness so far as I can tell, and he struck
me as one of the crudest critics I'd ever read: statement after statement
that alleged flaws in one poet's work after another without troubling to
provide much evidence of them, while ostentatiously dragging in
irrelevancies like Grinling Gibbons' woodwork (which Logan
hilariously/offensively dismisses as "fussy and dust-catching" in the course
of more legitimately criticizing Richard Wilbur's ornateness), and all
rendered in a style suggestive of aspiring to immortality as a denizen of
book-blurb hell. Worse yet in that NC piece was the kind of comment made
about a poet whose work Logan had come not to trash but to tout--Linda
Gregg. In her place, if a critic had turned from attacking the work of
Graham and Anne Carson in such terms as Logan favors ("the oddity of Anne
Carson's poems conceals every virtue except their originality and exposes
every flaw except their contempt") to say that my "poems glow like Cezanne
apples," I'd have felt nothing but excrutiating embarrassment.

As for the rest, Henry, I agree with your general critical perspective, but
I suspect we'd disagree on its applicability to at least some and maybe all
specific cases if we got down to any besides Graham--just as a matter of
taste.

Candice



on 8/5/01 11:39 AM, Henry at [log in to unmask] wrote:

> I don't think "bombastic" will ever designate any positive aspects of
> style. The Blackmur essays emphasize how poetry in the West has depended
> on the wholeness & objectivity of the Greek tradition (Homer, the
> tragedians, the philosophers) & the different kind of universality
> & objectivity of the Biblical foundations. What you have there over
> the centuries, through efforts of different poets in different eras,
> are achieved means of expression which integrate the strictly poetic
> (aesthetic), with primary & recurrent questions of philosophy & religion.
> The achievement of realism, say, as described in Auerbach's _Mimesis_,
> has its counterparts in the slow changes of lyric/epic/didactic idioms.
>
> I think this is really one of the deep secrets of style in poetry,
> in that, over time, there is a grafting or integration of the aesthetic
> & the philosophical as dramatized in the mimesis of experience. This
> is where the force of poetry's purpose or role is found, in its
> learned capability to articulate these integrations. So that as with
> Blackmur you can evaluate poets & poems which somehow fall short
> because of shallow roots - a misunderstanding of the true capacities
> of style. So you find clever takes on fashionable contemporary
> thinkers, but in an idiom so artificial, so removed from ordinary
> problems (which are found at one of the magnetized poles of any
> philosophy), that the result is glib or unconvincing. One is
> left unmoved. Or you find masses of poems which are little dramas
> or illustrations of current political debates, but because they
> don't know poetry's own deep traditions, the style is flat,
> imitative, full of cliches & shallow emotions. Or you have a debate
> between "art" & "the academic", or between "spirituality" and
> "technological society", but because of light reading & an
> ignorance of the Classical-Hebraic foundations, the polemicists
> are unaware that most of these issues have already been transmuted
> into SONG, into styles & forms which are there to absorb &
> learn from & adapt today. When this gets turned into just another
> polemical crusade - as it was during the 90s in the US - the point
> gets lost - I mean the practical point for writers themselves. It
> turns into a pedagogical debate about the great books & different
> issues of snobbery & elitism, etc. But the point that gets lost
> that us poets should take to heart is that the tradition provides
> the very speech, the idioms, of our own poetry - the good food.
> It's the very "breath of another" Graham sees in that lamp.
>
> What I'm saying is, I guess, if you explore deep enough, there's
> a fused objectivity, an integration ALREADY THERE, between the
> "lyrical" & the "philosophical", between speech as art (Homer,
> Sophocles) & thought as intellectual light. That's the kind of
> standard of clarity that I think might move poetry beyond those
> enormous shadows of the early modernists toward something
> new, equal to their achievements.
>
> Henry