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\u2019s and Ford\u2019s best work, where the drama of the narration supplants\u2014becomes\u2014the subject matter itself. The same holds true for Eliot\u2019s landmark modernist poem \u201cThe Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Of course, literature itself can act like criticism. Poems about poetry or the writing of poetry \u2014including Artes Poeticae<\/em>\u2014are termed \u201cmeta-poetry.\u201d We can call poems that comment on commenting on poetry meta-critical. Consider this poem by J.V. Cunningham, entitled \u201cTo the Reader\u201d:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Time will assuage.<\/p>\n Time\u2019s verses bury<\/p>\n Margin and page<\/p>\n In commentary.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For gloss demands<\/p>\n A gloss annexed<\/p>\n Till busy hands<\/p>\n Blot out the text,<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And all\u2019s coherent.<\/p>\n Search in this gloss<\/p>\n No text inherent:<\/p>\n The text was loss.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The gain is gloss.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n With that final pun, Cunningham equates all \u201ccommentary\u201d\u2014including that of which this poem consists\u2014with \u201cgloss\u201d 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, \u201cThere is no there<\/em> there.\u201d 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): \u201cTime will assuage.\u201d Assuage what? The answer seems to come in the penultimate line, where we expect to hear \u201cThe text was lost,\u201d but instead are told that \u201cThe text was loss,\u201d 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\u2014including the displacing commentary in the poem, and even this blog\u2014is only gloss.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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 \u201cgoes meta\u201d in a particular way that earlier poetry did not. Eliot\u2019s narrator Prufrock thinks in a poignantly self-defeating way, one that affirms Wittgenstein\u2019s claim that the greatest burden of ineptitude is self-awareness.\u00a0When 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.\u00a0It is with painful self-consciousness that Elizabeth Bishop concludes her famous villanelle \u201cOne Art\u201d with the lines \u201cthe art of losing\u2019s not too hard to master \/ though it may look like (Write<\/em> it!) like disaster.\u201d The poet knows that mastering her form demands that she conclude with the word \u201cdisaster.\u201d The art of writing (along with, for Bishop, the arts of living, traveling, and loving) is part-and-parcel of \u201cthe art of losing.\u201d Her parenthetic, italicized command to herself\u2014\u201cWrite <\/em>it!\u201d\u2014is a master stroke because she also wants us to hear the homophone \u201cRight<\/em> it.\u201d She knows that proceeding to \u201cwrite it\u201d cannot \u201cright\u201d the wrong, given that, as Cunningham puts it, \u201cthe text was loss.\u201d Bishop can only, in passing, frustratedly pretend to pretend otherwise, and with considerable self-conscious irony. In comparison, Pope\u2019s much earlier, more sustained meta-poetic reflection entitled An<\/em> Essay on Criticism<\/em>\u2014even given its self-reflexive wit and sundry famous lines\u2014is 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\u2019s 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, \u201cFurther adventures of the self-delighted self are not what\u2019s wanted.\u201d In short, there are clear differences between modern and older meta-poetry\u2014and between modern and older meta-critical poetry. Unlike Pope\u2019s work, modern meta-critical poetry like Cunningham\u2019s, in reflecting on how we read it, may propose to burn away whatever lies under its lens, including the critical process.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Still, well before Cunningham, the roots of trenchantly disconcerting meta-critical poetry were visible. Consider \u201cA Poet\u2019s Fate\u201d by Thomas Hood (1799-1845), whose work has inspired many spin-offs (Pinsky\u2019s poem \u201cThe Shirt,\u201d for instance, seems to derive much of its content from Thomas Hood\u2019s \u201cSong of the Shirt\u201d). Notice how modern Hood\u2019s Poem is for a nineteenth-century piece. And notice that it begins with a question that turns out not to be one:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What is a modern Poet\u2019s fate.<\/p>\n To write his thought upon a slate;<\/p>\n The Critic spits on what is done,<\/p>\n Gives it a wipe\u2014and all is gone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019s and Ford\u2019s best work, where the drama of the narration supplants\u2014becomes\u2014the subject matter itself. The same holds true for Eliot\u2019s landmark modernist poem \u201cThe Love Song of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":319,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions\/319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}