Earl Wasserman: A Critical (Re-) Reading

Abstract

To illuminate Earl Wasserman's critical moment, begin with a meditation on Post-Kantian aporia. When history of New is written, its line of descent will begin with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and indirectly from Immanuel Kant. Mobilizing Kant's insight that consciousness exists, a priori, independent of object of consciousness, Coleridge wrote poems such as Eolian Harp (Effusion XXXV) that teetered on edge of satanic solipsism, or texts such as Christabel,. Kubla Khan, and Chapter Twelve of Biographia Literaria, all of which are interrupted in one way or another by eruption of subject. The worst fear of Coleridge's life, to judge from late poems such as Work without Hope and Constancy to an Ideal Object, was that he was Schopenhauer--that there was no hope because every endeavor, up to and including keeping one's eye on hope of transcendence, was nothing more than a form of ego-projection, a mistaking of gloriously backlit self for angelic glory itself. The growing predicament of much nineteenth-century poetry--what it is about--and increasing subjectivity of that poetry are Coleridge's legacy, helped by John Stuart Mill's distinction between heard (eloquence) and overheard (poetry) in Is Poetry? So, too, is positing of criticism as correction of history--as, for example, in Matthew Arnold's Function of at Present Time (See my Criticism and Metahistory). By time of T. S. Eliot, subjectivity is a paramount concern of poetry itself, and of criticism--say, Metaphysical Poets and Tradition and Individual Talent. The dissociation of sensibility and intellect serves to fragment poet-as-subject, but it does not shift focus of poetry away from subject. And mutual informing that occurs between individual poet and historical place that s/he attains is, above all, informing of subject. Poetry is about mind of poet in act of creation: enter New Criticism, I. A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, et al., stage right. Wasserman's critical position evolved over eighteen years from The Finer Tone: Major Poems (1953) to Shelley: A Critical Reading (1971), same years as New Criticism. Foreword, Wasserman took aim at the new (Tone 3), unnamed but quite probably Brooks, Warren, or both. This tentative identification is prompted by what Wasserman said about how New Critic understands poetry generally, focus of Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry, as well as what he said about Ode on a Grecian Urn--in more than one sense centerpiece of Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn. As Jack Stillinger observes, Ode on a Grecian is an exemplary text in Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren's extremely influential textbook, Understanding Poetry (1938), where it is presented with a dozen questions beginning In what sense is urn a 'sylvan historian' (line 3)? and concluding Are last two lines a teasing utterance or not? What is their truth? Do preceding 48 lines serve to define it? (474-76). As subject of a famous essay, Keats's Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes, in Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn a decade later, it has a central place among case studies assembled to demonstrate that the language of poetry is language of paradox (3). Wasserman was concerned that poem, considered as transcendental subject, had been consigned by New Critic to a nominalistic hermetism that verges on subjective solipsism. new critic insists that a poem be examined as a poem and not as another thing, but he has constricted this excellent principle until it has come to mean that everything communicated by poem is defined within its own boundaries and nowhere else (Tone 3). Not that hermetic (or hermeneutic) circles can remain unbroken: I state this constriction in extreme form because, although most explicators are sensible men and know need of reaching outside text for information, it is clear that they resent act, engage in a ritual of violent self-flagellation for occasional transgressions, and wish work were so self-sufficient it would not tempt them to sin (3). …