The Didactic Muse: Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary American Poetry

by Willard Spiegelman

Overview

Writing with the vigor and elan that readers have come to expect from his many astute reviews and essays, Willard Spiegelman maintains that contemporary American poets have returned to the poetic aims of an earlier era: to edify, as well as to delight, and thus to serve the "didactic muse." What Spiegelman says about individual poets—such as Nemerov, Hecht, Ginsberg, Pinsky, Ammons, Rich, and Merrill, among others—is wonderfully insightful. Furthermore, his outlook on their work—the way he takes quite literally the teacherly elements of their poems—challenges long-standing conceptions both about contemporary writing and about the poetry of the Eliot-Pound-Stevens-Williams generation. Beginning the book with a meditation on W. H. Auden's legacy to American poets, Spiegelman ends with a discussion of the multiple scenes of learning in Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover, which he identifies as not only the major epic poem of the second half of the twentieth century but also as the period's most important georgic: a textbook full of scientific, mythic, artistic, and human instruction. The Didactic Muse reminds us that poets have traditionally acknowledged their function as teachers, from Horace's advice that poetry should please and instruct to Robert Frost's aphorism that a poem "begins in delight and ends in wisdom." Whereas many of the critical remarks of the most important Romantic and modern poets suggest their desperate attempts to separate poetry from instruction, Spiegelman demonstrates that their practices often contradicted their theories. And he shows that our best contemporary poets are now embracing the older, classical paradigms.

Originally published in 1989.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691606903
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #997
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

Read an Excerpt

The Didactic Muse

Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary American Poetry

---

By Willard Spiegelman

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06799-5

---

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: W. H. Auden's "New Year Letter"

    Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae
    aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae.
    quidquid praecipies, esto brevis, ut cito dicta
    percipiant animi dociles teneantque fideles
    omne supervacuum pleno de pectore manat.
    ficta voluptatis causa sint proxima veris.

(Poets aim either to benefit, or to amuse, or to utter words at once both pleasing and helpful to life. Whenever you instruct, be brief, so that what is quickly said the mind may readily grasp and faithfully hold: every word in excess flows away from the full mind. Fictions meant to please should be close to the real.) — HORACE, Ars Poetica

From Horace to Robert Frost ("a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom") the major current of Western poetics has flowed from the wells of pleasure to the depths of instruction. That poetry serves pedagogy seemed as unarguable in the classical and early modern worlds as it may appear untenable in the contemporary one. Poets traditionally held their mirrors up to nature not simply to reflect it but to occasion reflection and right action in their readers. Poet as teacher, reader as student: the roles are clear from Horace's obiter dicta, maxims, and specifically literary advice (e.g., in Epistles 1.2 he applauds Homer's models of behavior, like Ulysses as utile exemplar of wisdom) to Wordsworth's remark to Sir George Beaumont that "every great poet is a Teacher — I wish to be considered as a teacher or as nothing." Poets have appropriated to themselves the sacred obligation of preparing a citizenry, a prince, an individual conscience for life in this world. As a still earlier example, Aristotle might be considered the first defender of the role that mimetic poetry can play in the education of future leaders. And although didacticism has had a bad press at least since Keats ("we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us") and Shelley ("didactic poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse"), the younger Romantics nevertheless proclaimed their intention of "doing the world some good" (Keats) and implied a hope, in a para-phrase of Shelley's Defence of Poetry, that eventually it might acknowledge their legislating prophecies. To "teach the adverting mind," what Shelley hopes that Mont Blanc will do, is likewise his own anticipated accomplishment.

Horace's remarks from Ars Poetica are a positive rejoinder to the condemnation by Plato and his like-minded successors of poets who misuse art's mimetic powers. The lines also dramatize a dialectic of instruction within poetry itself: Horace replaces a simple dichotomy ("aut prodesse ... aut delectare") with a complex synthesis of simultaneity ("aut simul et iucunda et idonea") that I shall use as a starting point for the following reflections. Pleasure and instruction, far from occupying opposing ends of a logical or aesthetic spectrum, sit squarely together in both the poet's intention and the audience's reception of his work. Brevity is not only the soul of wit but also the sine qua non of instruction: the very concision of verse, even in forms fuller and more discursive than epigram and lyric, allows it privileges that might be denied to the wordier wanderings of prose.

In the panorama of literary culture, it increasingly appears that modernism was an aberration. Or, at the very least, many of its formulaic injunctions, if not its practices, were. Ezra Pound's command, "Go in fear of abstractions," and William Carlos Williams's preference for a direct, sensuous apprehension through images to any lengthier speculation are understandable responses to the excesses of late Victorian preaching and the mindless music of Swinburne's opulent periphrases, but the altar of symbolism at which the great moderns worshiped seems in retrospect to have been a temporary and perhaps fragile structure. Since 1945 American poets have increasingly rejected the major principles of Yeats and Pound even as they have absorbed their lessons, in favor of more didactic stances in their poetry. Frank Kermode's Romantic Image, which identified the iconic centers of modernism and relied on Pound's insistence that the "image" is not, and is always antithetical to, an idea, cannot be taken as a guide to the poetic heirs, especially the American ones, of the modernist giants. Equally aberrant is the deliberate turning away from traditional aesthetics in Charles Newman's condemnation of postmodernism, a diatribe that purports to deny the traditional wisdom but has trouble finding a substitute for it: "What we finally want from literature is neither amusement nor edification but the demonstration of a real authority which is not to be confused with sincerity, and of an understanding which is not gratuitous.'

The much bedeviled matter of "edification" or didacticism deserves more detailed treatment than it has received; perhaps it should simply be acknowledged that "didactic" is one poet's opprobrious term for another's work not to his liking. To call something didactic is to call it bad, superficial, preachy. Yet all the principal remarks of the major nineteenth-century poets, even before they ossified into Ancient Sages, suggest the fundamental identity of teaching with writing and of learning with reading. Modernism suppressed both sentimentality and direct instruction, replacing them with an "erotics of the image," but discursiveness, as Robert Pinsky defines it in The Situation of Poetry, has re-entered the pages of much important contemporary American poetry. Perhaps this tendency reflects a gradual retrenchment, a poetic equivalent of political conservatism (this is another way of defining what Robert von Hallberg refers to as the "suburban" nature of some of the best postwar American poetry), or perhaps it indicates the desire of many poets to speak in the honest, sometimes unironic tones of conversation, and to imbue their work with the virtues of good prose. Thus, the label "discursive," whether taken as "wandering" or "explanatory" (the complementary terms are Pinsky's), may be applied to recent American poetry in predominantly longer forms as well as to the epigrammatic, witty, and deliberately condensed lyrics of J. V. Cunningham and the mock-pedagogy of John Ashbery. Like discourse, both philosophy and pedagogy have returned beneath the poetic mantle. Poets have resumed their historically sanctioned, or at least self-proclaimed, roles as teachers. This role-taking may be only the inevitable effect of their literal presence, in great numbers, within the confines of the academy and their new jobs as teachers of "creative" writing (a distinctly postwar phenomenon), although I suspect a cultural cause deeper than that of a mere vocational rearrangement. Acts of informative teaching have produced a new rhetoric of instruction within our poetry, and poets as various and undidactic as Robert Hass (Field Guide), Tess Gallagher (Instructions to the Double), and Annaliese Wagner (Hand Work) have been giving us recipes, templates, guides, and treatises for several decades. Reading through the titles of individual poems in representative volumes by other essentially lyric poets also yields a survey of instructional motifs: witness Maxine Kumin's "How to Survive Nuclear War" in The Long Approach (1985) and, from David Wagoner's Collected Poems (1976), "The Lesson," "The Singing Lesson," "The Breathing Lesson," "Advice to the Orchestra," "A Police Manual," and "Do Not Proceed Beyond This Point Without a Guide." The list could be extended.

"Education by poetry is education by metaphor," said Frost in a famous pronouncement. Elsewhere he seems to prepare an audience for the very points I assert in this book: "School and poetry come so near being one thing ... it is but an extension from the metaphors of poetry out into all thinking, scientific and philosophic." Frost preferred to construe both poetry and its constituent metaphors as living things; reaffirming a Coleridgean organicism, he condemns those people as lost who would dare to think of their material without the saving, organizing grace of a "gathering metaphor." Metaphor is "a very living thing," he asserts, and poetry educates us to think metaphorically, thereby enabling us to work through and with the metaphors of other disciplines. Living before Thomas Kuhn, Frost anticipated Kuhn's thesis that science works intuitively to effect its major revolutions. Frost himself suspects as much: "Poetry is simply made of metaphor. So also is philosophy and science, too." If one agrees with Frost that metaphor, which is usually said to separate poetic from scientific language, in fact forms the basis of all kinds of knowing, then one should also reverse the standard dichotomy between science and poetry from the other direction, in order to allow poetry to contain within itself the kinds of methodology usually deemed "scientific." Literary analysis is a curious two-way street. A poem, of course, is the solution to a set of formal and intellectual problems that one must try to reconstruct when attempting to understand it, but it is also a piece of empirical evidence from which one moves forward to an inductive conclusion. One proceeds from data to conclusion, and at the same time attempts an archaeological act of reconstruction, from the poetic conclusion to the original hypothetical set of problems from which it derives. Poetry is not discourse, but it may be discursive without undermining its poetic status.

It is necessary to attend more closely to the relationship between styles of teaching and poetic technique, to the implied roles of our poets as well as to their metaphors. The polemics of Adrienne Rich, the sometimes vatic looniness and political obsessiveness of Allen Ginsberg, and the cracker-barrel stances of A. R. Ammons and (with some added layers of Talmudic sagacity) Howard Nemerov are all pedagogic strategies. Our poets are wearing many of the same cloaks that teachers have traditionally chosen for themselves, those of Socratic eiron, Eastern guru, soapbox orator, parent, and psychotherapist.

In much of the poetry discussed in this book, the pedagogy is inflected with irony, wit, self-deprecation, and skepticism, all of them modernist stances as well as the legacy of an ingrained American common sense. In other words, it combines direct preaching with the "indirection" associated with modernism in early Eliot and Auden, as well as in their novelistic contemporaries. Thus, Ammons in "Uh, Philosophy" (Northfield Poems, 1967) pretends to dismiss his subject offhandedly, even while delving more deeply into it:

    I understand
    reading the modern philosophers
    that truth is so much a method
    it's perfectly all
    right for me to believe whatever
    I like or if I like,
    nothing:
    I do not know that I care to be set that free:

Later in the same poem, Ammons disavows the power of abstract ideas in favor of an updating of Yeats's enterprise of nakedness: "philosophy is ... / something to knock people down with:/ ... the philosophy gives clubs to / everyone, and I prefer disarmament." And yet in no other recent poet do ideas, scientific principles, and philosophical abstraction collide so gracefully with the facts of ordinary perception and the habits of daily routine. Ammons charms readers disarmingly, making what Richard Poirier terms the standard American "association of heroic action with denudation," but he always carries plenty of defensive scientific equipment on his field excursions.

In combining plain speaking, explanation, scientific examination, and playfulness, Ammons meanders down one discursive path. In addition to following this path, this book surveys those of Nemerov, Ginsberg, Pinsky, Rich, and of Anthony Hecht and James Merrill, all poets born between 1920 (Nemerov) and 1940 (Pinsky). These constitute a generation for which World War II was the central historical fact and whose first major works (with the exception of Pinsky) were published during the supposedly arid decade of the 1950s. Merrill is central to the argument because he incorporates scientific themes, philosophical language, and the expectation of instruction into increasingly capacious poetic forms. He is the first poet since Yeats to have seriously defined a universe or created a system, and to have recreated, in The Changing Light at Sandover, not only a scene of instruction and revelation but also a textbook for a spiritual and physical understanding of the universe.

At the start of his career Merrill angered some reviewers who called him a mere miniaturist, making poems about and into glittering nacreous objects, the elegant impedimenta from a life of lustrous privilege. Then, in his "sacred" books, when he answered a call for "poems of science," other critics dismissed as simplistic or irrelevant his efforts to include subatomic particle physics, genetics, and doctrines of reincarnation into a cosmic theodicy. Whether Merrill's explanations of the universe originated from his own imaginings or in those disembodied voices speaking to him from a crackpot mechanism and a board game is moot. He met the demands of his spirits and, having learned a lesson, became, in his turn, a teacher to his readers. The Changing Light at Sandover stands as the most complete object in a field littered with Romantic and post-Romantic disiecta membra; it challenges too-easy categorical distinctions between lyric and narrative and judgments about the tones, subjects, and processes appropriate to each. As an epic poet, Merrill has sought to teach — through the discourses of his spirits and the other dramatic characters who enter his mind or the room of his instruction, now inscribed within the pages of his text.

Whereas Ammons courts "abstraction" with polysyllabic, latinate diction and his own preferred, key words ("saliences," "peripheries," "radiances") in essentially lyric structures, Merrill's abstractions owe less to a signature vocabulary. Employing the widest range of diction available to any living poet, he gives primers in scientific principles, manners, world history, art appreciation, and family relations, registering the lessons in appropriate speech. Mixing lectures, narrative, dramatic encounters, extractable lyric moments, and even some Poundian illustrations ("In a work this long, / Madness to imagine one could do / Without the apt ideogram or two"), The Changing Light at Sandover gives new meaning to the term "georgic."

As poets of instruction, all of the writers dealt with in this book are, in fact, georgic, whether explaining, lecturing, delivering opinions, or more generally sharing enthusiasms with a specific or implied audience. "What we have loved, / Others will love, and we will teach them how," proclaimed the confident Wordsworth at the end of The Prelude: another name for the instruction proffered by our poetic teachers is love, bestowed hopefully and received gratefully in the exchange between them and their readers.

I begin with some commentary on a paradigmatic poem by the preachiest of postwar poets, the one who most clearly bridges the gap between the modernist generation and the contemporary Americans I label "didactic." W. H. Auden's "New Year Letter" marks a turning point for its author, and is a fitting introduction to certain styles in contemporary poetry. Combining instruction with wit, philosophy with chattiness, it announces Auden's arrival in this country, and it divides his earlier, English work, with its political engagements and youthful ironies, from his return to religion and the increasingly avuncular, fussy, and cozy tones of his later poetry.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Didactic Muse by Willard Spiegelman. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. ix
• ONE. Introduction: W. H. Auden's “New Year Letter”, pg. 1
• TWO. The Tempered Tone of Howard Nemerov, pg. 25
• THREE. The Moral Imperative in Anthony Hecht, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Pinsky, pg. 56
• FOUR. Myths of Concretion, Myths of Abstraction: The Case of A. R. Ammons, pg. 110
• FIVE. “Driving to the Limits of the City of Words”: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich, pg. 147
• SIX. The Sacred Books of James Merrill, pg. 192
• SEVEN. Some Speculations in Place of a Conclusion, pg. 247
• NOTES, pg. 259
• INDEX, pg. 267