"The Least Innocent of All Innocent-Sounding Lines": The Legacy of Donaldson's Troilus Criticism

Abstract

“The Least Innocent of all Innocent-Sounding Lines”:The Legacy of Donaldson’s Troilus Criticism Gretchen Mieszkowski There can be no question about the impact of E. Talbot Donaldson's Troilus and Criseyde criticism during its own time. In the 1960s, when his deliciously witty papers appeared on MLA programs, audiences spilled out the doors. He was one of the two most famous and influential American Chaucerians of his era. But it has been nearly half a century since 1958, when Donaldson first published his most important ideas about Troilus and Criseyde in Chaucer's Poetry.1 The British are fond of saying that Americans reinvent literary criticism every decade. Semiotics, poststructuralism, deconstruction, new historicism, feminism, gender studies, discourse studies, and cultural studies; we are now four-and-a-half turns and overturns of critical conception since the heyday of Talbot Donaldson's Troilus criticism. In the 1950s and '60s, New Criticism ruled the seminar rooms of the Yale Hall of Graduate Studies in the persons of some of its greatest practitioners: Cleanth Brooks, Maynard Mack, Louis Martz, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and E. Talbot Donaldson. To the New Critics, works of literature were self-sustaining, self-contained, autonomous aesthetic wholes. New Critics wasted little time on a writer's biography2 and no time at all on situating a work in the gender, race, and class issues of its period. Their goal was to uncover the work's wholeness through close readings—analyses of imagery, diction, ironies, paradoxes, ambiguities, and literary conventions. As far as I know, Donaldson never wrote or lectured on the theory of what he did, but it was this critical conception that underlay his work. What mattered was the text alone. His exams often consisted exclusively of passages of text. He was even known to remark that only Middle English stood in the way of a student's understanding Chaucer's poetry; if you could master the language, the poetry was yours. In the 1958 preface to Chaucer's Poetry, Donaldson identifies Chaucer's language as the "principal hindrance to a full enjoyment of Chaucer" [End Page 299] and claims that the "apparent strangeness of his ideas is largely the result of readers' discomfort with his language." Chaucer, he writes, "is a great poet whose poetry is as valid and as exciting today as it was in the fourteenth century; to the student of literature, indeed, it is far more important than the fourteenth century."3 Donaldson was an immensely learned man. An unlearned editor of William Langland would be like an opera diva who could not carry a tune. But Donaldson wore his learning ever so lightly and, in a passage like this one, inching up as it does on overt hostility to historical scholarship, he came close to denying that learning was needed to read Chaucer's poetry. Donaldson's purpose was never to access the fourteenth century via Chaucer's works; it was always and nearly exclusively to experience Chaucer's poetry. An Americanist colleague of mine shares poems with me from time to time: Derek Walcott, Emily Dickinson, Billy Collins—whomever he is currently enjoying. One day he recalled the heady experience of coming to understand how poetry works, of actually "reading" a poem for the first time. And then he mused, "You know, New Criticism empowered readers." E. Talbot Donaldson empowered readers: Judith Anderson, Mary Carruthers, William R. Crawford, Stanley Fish, Denton Fox, Anne Fuller, Marjorie Garber, Elizabeth Kirk, Roger Lass, Eleanor Leach, Jeannette Lutton, Rita Madsen, Gretchen Mieszkowski, William Miller, Alice Miskimin, Lee Patterson, Sylvia Peterson, Norma Phillips, Elizabeth Reedy, Carolynn Van Dyke, Joan Whitehead, Clem Cary Williams, William S. Wilson, and many, many others. We turned into new historicists, reader-response theorists, gender critics, feminists, analysts of cultural studies, deconstructionists, and novelists. Many of us adopted critical stances directly opposed to Donaldson's, but we went our varied ways empowered by New Critical conceptions of how to read a poem, and empowered by him. If contemporary criticism has turned its collective back on New Criticism, then has it also turned its back on the work of this foremost of the medievalist New Critics? Have we left Donaldson far...