MJ Walker wrote:
> That's interesting, Eileen. What I have read by Vendler, admittedly not
> much (mostly in the NYRB), has got on my nerves a bit, very
> professorial, and her taste in modern poetry seems to me abysmal. Ricks
> , yes but - too, tooo. Worth revisiting, though.
I'm almost certain I started to taper off criticism as soon as I was
done with graduate school. Not entirely...I'd read historical criticism
like Morris Dickstein's, and I tried to negotiate Vendler...apart from
bios w/ critical content, I just cannot go there anymore. Scholarship
ruined me for scholarship. When I got to dissertating I loved the
old-timers--Maurice Morgann's "Essay on the Dramatic Character of
Falstaff" was magnificent, A.C. Bradley I loved, and (less than on
old-timer) Auden's Shakespearean writings aroused my envy precisely
because he was writing from his understanding, surely from his reading
as well, but he didn't *show* it. The faculty that oversaw me would
never have given Auden a Ph.D. I'd probably have made a dreadful and
short-lived professor because I am a subversive who, on the occasions
I've adjuncted in college composition courses, has told my students "The
scholarship requirement is a bullshit game--use it but do not be used
BY it. Give it to your other professors later on because they are part
of the same hypocrisy, and some may believe that this matters."
Basically I was advising them to sell out, but to know that they were
doing so.
There is always an exception.
It is odd (and/or I am) when the critic is more interesting than the
poet. I'm thinking of Angus Fletcher (only name that comes to mind) and
others who wrote extensively on Edmund Spenser. I really *fought* to
like Spenser, to "get" him, I even spent an entire semester in a seminar
on *The Faerie Queene*, he was part of my specialization area, but the
only poem I "got" was the "Epithalamion" (I hope I can still spell it).
I so hated the FQ that it kept me away from the *Amoretti*--a
should-read. However, Spenser's critics were fascinating. Obviously
they knew and saw things in him that I cannot begin to grasp...so I
assume even 30 years later that it was me, not Spenser.
Ken
--
Kenneth Wolman http://kenwolman.com http://kenwolman.blogspot.com
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"Poetry is tribal not material....this is where you can remember the good
times along with the worst; where you are not allowed to forget the worst,
else you cannot be healed."--C. D. Wright
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