It is a basic tenet of literary modernism that the acts of articulation and explanation can displace the matter being related. We can take as an example Conrad’s and Ford’s best work, where the drama of the narration supplants—becomes—the subject matter itself. The same holds true for Eliot’s landmark modernist poem “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock,” where the anguished voice of the dramatic monologue demands a stronger hold on our attention than the more elusive subject matter. Criticism that articulates the effect and meaning of this displacement ordinarily takes us out of that drama, insofar as criticism is not literature.
Of course, literature itself can act like criticism. Poems about poetry or the writing of poetry —including Artes Poeticae—are termed “meta-poetry.” We can call poems that comment on commenting on poetry meta-critical. Consider this poem by J.V. Cunningham, entitled “To the Reader”:
Time will assuage.
Time’s verses bury
Margin and page
In commentary.
For gloss demands
A gloss annexed
Till busy hands
Blot out the text,
And all’s coherent.
Search in this gloss
No text inherent:
The text was loss.
The gain is gloss.
With that final pun, Cunningham equates all “commentary”—including that of which this poem consists—with “gloss” in the sense of sheen, transparent polish, nothingness. Given its wit and compression, the work nevertheless seems to profit from the irony that, as Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, “There is no there there.” Still, irony alone does not a poem make. Is there enough here in the way of emotional disclosure? The key lies in the assertion of the first line (which ends with a period instead of a comma, suggesting that it should not be read only in apposition to the phrases that follow): “Time will assuage.” Assuage what? The answer seems to come in the penultimate line, where we expect to hear “The text was lost,” but instead are told that “The text was loss,” which is something different. Cunningham does not appear to be speaking of a particular loss but of the experience or process of loss in general, which we might expect we could come to terms with through the distancing lens of interpretation and reflection. But we cannot: the gain—including the displacing commentary in the poem, and even this blog—is only gloss.
Has the teacher bird always known in singing not to sing of what to make of a diminished thing? We take it as a given that, even when it retains some of the old formal virtues, as the poetry of Cunningham and Frost does, modern and postmodern literature often “goes meta” in a particular way that earlier poetry did not. Eliot’s narrator Prufrock thinks in a poignantly self-defeating way, one that affirms Wittgenstein’s claim that the greatest burden of ineptitude is self-awareness. When self-reflection becomes the object of contemplation, attempting to achieve wholeness by seeing the object in terms of the subject, the external in terms of the internal, only opens up the possibility of further fragmentation, yet another consciousness of consciousness. It is with painful self-consciousness that Elizabeth Bishop concludes her famous villanelle “One Art” with the lines “the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” The poet knows that mastering her form demands that she conclude with the word “disaster.” The art of writing (along with, for Bishop, the arts of living, traveling, and loving) is part-and-parcel of “the art of losing.” Her parenthetic, italicized command to herself—“Write it!”—is a master stroke because she also wants us to hear the homophone “Right it.” She knows that proceeding to “write it” cannot “right” the wrong, given that, as Cunningham puts it, “the text was loss.” Bishop can only, in passing, frustratedly pretend to pretend otherwise, and with considerable self-conscious irony. In comparison, Pope’s much earlier, more sustained meta-poetic reflection entitled AnEssay on Criticism—even given its self-reflexive wit and sundry famous lines—is too dazzlingly self-assured, too full of technical bravado, too inclined to delight and instruct in the old Horatian sense to move many a non-academic modern reader. Pope’s immensely skillful, socioculturally informative meta-poetry has experienced a revival among scholars in the era of new historicism, but for many others, as Terence Des Pres has put it, “Further adventures of the self-delighted self are not what’s wanted.” In short, there are clear differences between modern and older meta-poetry—and between modern and older meta-critical poetry. Unlike Pope’s work, modern meta-critical poetry like Cunningham’s, in reflecting on how we read it, may propose to burn away whatever lies under its lens, including the critical process.
Still, well before Cunningham, the roots of trenchantly disconcerting meta-critical poetry were visible. Consider “A Poet’s Fate” by Thomas Hood (1799-1845), whose work has inspired many spin-offs (Pinsky’s poem “The Shirt,” for instance, seems to derive much of its content from Thomas Hood’s “Song of the Shirt”). Notice how modern Hood’s Poem is for a nineteenth-century piece. And notice that it begins with a question that turns out not to be one:
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