Poirier's Latest Push

Abstract

In course of writing seven books since 1966, Americanist scholar Richard Poirier has estabhshed several inexhaustible themes. Perhaps most crucial of these is what, in his excellent monograph on Robert Frost, he called the of knowing. It seems many of our finest American writers?Poirier's list would begin with Emerson, Melville, and a Uneage of Emersonian pragmatists, including Whitman, Thoreau, WiUiam James, Frost, Stein, and Stevens?have portrayed goes into writing as if it were physically laborious and as if to be so were a virtue (emphasis on vir-, as in virile). Adumbrating Frost's poem Axe-Helve, he finds work is necessary if we are to get down to grain of things, lines in nature which we cannot otherwise know or see. Closely related to this figurative work-ethic is Poirier's repeated emphasis on of art, not just drama, music, and dance, but literary art, as performance. Writing and reading both are most rewardingly acts of discovery require some labor. Poirier is America's most cogent and committed celebrant of species of literary difficulty cannot be, as The Waste Land's allusive difficulty can be, attributed chiefly to differences between an author's and a reader's interpre tive communities. He favors what Whitman called, in a line of 1860 version of Crossing Brooklyn Ferry later expunged, the push of reading, where this push or interpretive resistance prevents closure and exhaustion even after whole has been parsed, hard words looked up. Two books back he went so far as to define Literature as that writing whose clarities bring on precipitations of density, and he has since repeatedly expressed a like-mindedness regarding Stevens's poetic claim speech is not dirty silence / Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier. Because what he admires most in writing is often, to again quote Stevens, intelUgent beyond intelli gence, because he believes notion of genius can coexist with otherwise