Charles Legere 7/8/13 The Critical Significance of Biographical Evidence and The Methods of Literary Studies Its my first

t day as a Houghton Library Visiting Fellow, and I started the day with a visit to the Houghton Library itself, then a walk over to get an ID, then a walk back over to the Lamont Library, which is where Ill mostly be working, in the Woodberry Poetry Room. I talked to Chloe Garcia-Roberts about the kinds of things I wanted to look at to write about, and she made several recommendations, including that I look at the Harvard University Archives holdings about the WPR itself, such as the guest books. Im interested in the space of the WPR as a contact zone, a place in time, where mid-20thcentury poets like John Ashbery and Frank OHara encountered the high modernist poets of an earlier early-20th-century generationPound, Eliot, and Stevensand transformed the latter for a new generation. For example, as Chloe pointed out to me, Harvard is where Stevens, whose readings are memorialized on vinyl through the Vocarium Series, gave his last reading, and Ashbery, who visited the WPR and perhaps attended Stevens readings, gave his first. I might hypothesize a connection between Ashberys experience of listening to Stevens serious intonations on vinyl at the WPR, and his (Ashberys) subsequent incorporation of popular culture material into his own markedly post-Stevensian oeuvre. Serious and flip / Flip and serious. Its interesting, too, to think of the influence the WPR might have exerted by exclusionto think, for example, of the Radcliffe women, like Lyn Hejinian and Helen Vendler, who didnt have access to the then-all-male Harvard University libraries, not to mention all those poets who didnt have accessand who perhaps didnt even know to miss itbecause of their class, status, region, race, and/or nationality. So, here we are, in the middle of the 20th century, and I get the impression that theres an interesting and lively community of young poets (Ashbery, OHara, Koch) coalescing at Harvard; at the same time, theres an active, burgeoning academic poetry critical scene in the US and the UK. You could conjecture that this grows out of Understanding Poetry, and T.S. Eliots essaysI.A. Richards is teaching at Harvard around this time. Into this mix, we can add that in September 1946, after a wartime suspension of four years, the English Institute reconvenes at Harvard. I head over to Widener, where I pull a (non-circulating) copy of the English Institute Essays, 1946 (NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 1947), which, I see, re-prints the talks from two of the four

sessions from that years institute: The Critical Significance of Biographical Evidence and The Methods of Literary Studies. (Photo of Widener Stacks) If we run it all togetherThe Critical Significance of Biographical Evidence and The Methods of Literary Studieswe could say thats a good subtitle to characterize the most generatibve academic debate in poetry scholarship/criticism at that time. Begin with Harvard Professor Douglas Bushs contribution to the morning Biography session, simply titled John Milton, where Bush writes that the whole body of [Miltons] prose, as the fullest record of his intellectual and spiritual development, is very important in itself and forms the best introduction to and commentary upon his major poems. (5) Here, Bush is trying to chart a path between literary biography and literary criticism, between our regard for the integrity of the man and that of the artist, but hes uneasy about that reciprocity, writing that, A poem of Miltons should yield pretty much its full significance to a reader who possesses a very few biographical facts, (14) and that, It may, I should think be lad down as a theoretical axiom that, if a work of art is not a self-sufficient entity and does not make its essential impact without biographical aids, there is something wrong with it (unless, of course, it has a topical subject). (13) Notice that pretty much and his parenthetical: this isnt a polemic, by any means. Bush concludes by hazarding that in the hands of ideally tactful and judicious scholar-critics (such as you and I), [biographical evidence] can and should be useful in recreating the circumstances of composition, in promoting a receptive attitude, and perhaps now and then throwing light on the text. (19) Now, look at Cleanth Brooks simply titled Literary Criticism, which was delivered in the afternoon session on Methods. Brooks begins with an attack on Maurice Kellys book on Milton, The Great Argument, for conflating the attitudes derivable from Miltons prose with his poetry: Brooks points out that Mr. Kelly tends to make the assumption about poetry which most of us constantly make; namely, that a poem is essentially a decorated and beautified piece of prose. (128) In short, Brooks argues that you cant read a poem as if its entirely within the control of the author who writes themthat a poem has a life of its ownand that you should never try to understand a poem in terms of historical evidence around it. You can see how this argument could be seen, at the 1946 English Institute, as a direct response to historian-cum-scholars like Bush, who were trying to judiciously bridge biographical/historical scholarship and criticism.

And here we can trace one starting node of a debate in the academy that still shapes the terms of poetrys reading in the 21st century. Brooks writingsUnderstanding Poetry, The Well Wrought Urnwere or would go on to be required reading for many an aspiring poet or literary critic, for undergraduates (UP) and graduate students (WWU); Bush was Helen Vendlers teacher. 1946, 1947. Heres a complex of ideas in motion, likenable to that to which Raymond Williams refers in the Preface to his book Keywords, when he describes going back to college after his wartime service, and finding a shift in values that had something to do with the changing meaning of the word culture. Brooks Literary Criticism is, if not quite verbatim, the same essay he would publish in 1947 in the Sewanee Review, Criticism and Literary History: Marvells Horatian Ode. In the English Institute version, like in the Sewanee Review one, Brooks writes about Marvells Horation Ode, a poem that seems particularly, even problematically, tied to its thencontemporary context. But Brooks writes, I would begin by reemphasizing the dramatic character of the poem It is a poem essentially dramatic in its presentation, which means that it is diagnostic rather than remedial, and eventuates, not in a course of action, but in contemplation. (151) Here, Brooks is at pains, contra Bush, to associate what makes poetry special with the contemplative and eternal (that word is Rene Welleks, from his 1946 English Institute talk, pg. 121he puts it in quotes too!). It would be interesting, then, to try to untangle the ties back from John Ashberys poem As One Put Drunk into the Packet Boat, back through Brooks reading of Marvells Ode, and then through Marvells own riffing on the poetry of his contemporary Tom May, to which Ashberys poem actually refers. That is to say, Im thinking of Ashbery at Harvard in mid-century, and the WPR, and the academic and critical milieu, and I suspect that in As One, Ashbery isnt just writing about Tom May, but all of those connections, and the much larger question of poetry and life.