Review by New York Times Review
POETS and critics have been around for a long time, and some writers have been both poets and critics, but the "poet-critic" was invented in the 20th century. This hybrid role was created by T.S. Eliot and then adapted by a generation of poets who won positions in American colleges as literary critics, before the M.F.A. in creative writing gave poets jobs teaching writing workshops. The poet-critics of that era shared a point of view. They were against experimental literature. They valued rhyme and meter not only as expressive forms, but as safeguards against sentimentality, narcissism and even madness. They saw poetry as a way to preserve the individual's spiritual and intellectual integrity in a society dominated by science and mass culture. They praised reason and proportion, but their mood was apocalyptic. Adam Kirsch is a poet-critic of this type. He has taken up the aesthetic ideas of Eliot and his successors with anachronistic fidelity. Kirsch is not an academic; most of the essays in "The Modern Element," his new book on contemporary poetry, first appeared as book reviews in The New Republic. Kirsch writes with admirable clarity for a general reader not automatically familiar with the poets he discusses. But when he is done with his poets, the general reader does not have much reason to read them. Like the poet-critics he admires, Kirsch mounts a defense of poetry at the expense of poetry he disapproves of. His taste tends to be narrow and formulaic; and the results show not only in "The Modern Element," but in "Invasions," his new volume of poetry. For Kirsch, "the modern element" is a value in literature that reaches across time, or at least back to Matthew Arnold. Arnold used that phrase to describe "the demand for intellectual deliverance" that we feel when we confront the "immense, moving, confused spectacle" of the contemporary world. Kirsch wants to keep us from reflexively equating the "modern" with poetry that is formally disjunctive or that scandalizes through personal revelations. In order to become fully, genuinely modern, which is to say, subtly responsive to contemporary experience, poets need the discipline of traditional form, by which Kirsch means primarily rhyme and meter. These techniques chasten the poet's ego, encourage reverence for the past and promote a stance of reasonableness and skepticism. The "mastery of traditional form," Kirsch writes, "alone allows meaningful departures from tradition." The word "alone" turns this otherwise plausible claim into a simple prejudice. Kirsch rules out in a stroke the "meaningful departures from tradition" by free verse poets from Whitman to Frank O'Hara. (He writes well about Alien Ginsberg's "Howl," but he is less interested in it as a poem than as a cultural event.) The essay in which he makes this claim is a reconsideration of the poet-critic Yvor Winters. Kirsch endorses Winters's statement that "the creation of a form is nothing more nor less than the act of evaluating or shaping (that is, controlling) a given experience." But "controlling" troubles Kirsch, because it hints at the tyrannical moralism that ultimately turned Winters into a crank. Seeking poems that demonstrated his moral principles, Winters approved only an eccentric canon of poets, which Kirsch aptly calls "a toy kingdom, a Monaco of poetry existing in placid unrelation to the empire all around it." Kirsch wants to hold on to Winters's definition of a good poem, but to make it more flexible. He argues that poetry must move beyond the "old opposites" (such as classicism and romanticism, meter and free verse, reason and feeling) that warped Winters's judgment. But Kirsch's own judgments keep returning to those false alternatives. He begins an essay on John Ashbery's work by observing that it combines experimental and traditional "inspirations." Then it turns out that what is good in Ashbery is the traditional and what is bad is the experimental. This is no surprise, because Kirsch is deeply indebted to Eliot's criticism, which revolved around those "old opposites." The influence shows not only in Kirsch's explicit nods to Eliot but in unmarked echoes. Kirsch says that Theodore Roethke "wrote best when he could dislocate language into a nearly private idiom," which is what Eliot said the modern poet must do: "to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning." Only a poet like Donald Justice, Kirsch notes in another essay, "who is susceptible to great emotion knows the importance of disciplining that emotion." Kirsch might have said, "Only a poet like Eliot," since his dictum is a paraphrase of Eliot: "Only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things." Eliot's deliberate provocation has become Kirsch's bland doctrine. One implication is that only disciplined emotion is "great" emotion. This assumption makes Kirsch a sensitive reader of formalists like Justice and Richard Wilbur, poets who are rhetorically restrained and temperamentally modest; he is also eloquent on the caustic Philip Larkin, who disciplines emotion through satire. But it follows that the rhapsodic, ecstatic and prophetic do not have much place in Kirsch's aesthetics. Neither do camp wit, the "linguistic somersaults of a Paul Muldoon" or the lowly pun. Kirsch says that the pun is "finally of limited interest, because it calls attention, not to the world, but to the way we speak about the world." The comment explains his impatience with Geoffrey Hill, James Merrill and Jorie Graham, who in different ways insist that poetry speaks about the world precisely by calling attention to how we speak about it. Not to put the world first is to make the self too important, Kirsch feels: this is the pitfall of "narcissism" that mars the work of Louise Glück, it seems. (His memorably ad feminam review of Glück brings up another narrowness in "The Modern Element": of the 30 poets Kirsch treats, only five are women, and only the three-page discussion of A. E. Stallings, a young formalist poet, qualifies as positive.) The apocalyptic mood of Eliot and other poet-critics comes across in Kirsch's poetry. In the ominously titled "Invasions," he writes poems about the threat to civilization represented by the decay of religious faith, consumerism, 9/11, the Iraq war and the passing of the postwar New York intellectuals. Kirsch's brooding on the end of things becomes as predictable as his iambic pentameter lines, which unroll smoothly without syntactic surprises. "Invasions" is divided into three parts: poems composed in the 16-line sonnet form that George Meredith used for "Modern Love" bracket a group of rhymed poems called "The Consolations," each of which begins with a Latin epigraph from Boethius. "Serious" is the term of highest praise in Kirsch's criticism; and as these choices of form and subject suggest (Boethius!), his own poems are nothing if not serious. Eliot was a deeply, richly divided writer, whose inspiration was both traditional and experimental. In his case the poetcritic's poetry and criticism are often at odds; one hand challenges or battles the other. Kirsch, by contrast, seems to write poetry to satisfy his own critical prescriptions, or what he believes Arnold's or Eliot's to be. In "Invasions" the first person singular does not appear; traditional form is employed; the emotion feels cautious and rueful - disciplined, in short; and too often the total effect is of dutifulness. But there are no formulas for writing great poems. As Kirsch reminds us, Yvor Winters proved that long ago. Langdon Hammer is chairman of the English department at Yale and the poetry editor of The American Scholar.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
The skill of these essays, most written for the New Republic, is breathtaking. Kirsch puts his finger on exactly what is wrong with some of the most difficult (or confused or obscure) contemporary poetry with absolute lucidity, but in a respectful, almost gentlemanly way that stings far more than any snarky tirade. He is the velvet hammer of poetry critics, nailing Jorie Graham's obfuscations (Her poems are obscure . . . because they reside in the privacy of the poet's mind and not in the public realm where poet and reader discuss things in common); John Ashbery's self-indulgence (To read this kind of thing can be intermittently stimulating; to read it at great length . . . is mildly masochistic), and Sharon Olds' narcissism with just the right note of modest, almost parental disapproval. He leaves outrage to the reader. Kirsch is equally penetrating about poets he admires, particularly technicians like Derek Wolcott, Richard Wilbur, and James Merrill, making you desperate to read them, or reread them, which may be the greatest service of all.--Nance, Kevin Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Kirsch, a prize-winning poet (The Thousand Wells), a widely published author (Wounded Surgeon), and a critic for the New York Sun, cuts to the heart of modernism's poetic tradition with 26 essays that mitigate a cacophony of fashionableness in contemporary poetry and its criticism. Ten years in the writing, this book explores and analyzes the work of 23 leading contemporary poets who represent the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st century. As poet exemplars, Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land) carry Kirsch's pursuit of the vital in modern poetry within the heart of his subject's works. The result is a disambiguation of essential from inessential elements in contemporary poetry and within a range of its interpretations. We are not left bereft. As such, one essay features the work of four young poets who are "doing some of the most moving and vital writing of their poetic generation." His appraisal, rigorously bold and provocative, strips modern poetic tradition to its ultimate predicament: "to surrender to complexity" an onerous feat of ironic simplicity. A discerning critique recommended for academic libraries, particularly those with strong literature collections.-Katharine A. Webb, Ohio State Univ. Libs., Columbus (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
