My post yesterday seemed to garner some attention (thank you, both of you) and so I thought I would continue to think through this question of what we value in a work of art.
enjoyed this post (and the last one) - it seems like poetry criticism has suffered from its own sort of regulatory capture, and it's hard to find a poetry reviews in major publications (apart from maybe William Logan) that aren't, at worst, ambiguously complimentary.
It's interesting that you mention Keats and Faulkner, figures who are both a little disingenuous in the way they downplayed the care and exactitude they put in both their reading and writing in order to claim a loftier kind of inspiration.
Keats, who claimed "if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all", yet was plagued with self-doubt over his own laborious work. Faulkner, who often retreated behind a facade of the semi-educated country bumpkin/farmer, who was a voracious intellectual who consumed vast quantities of french philosophy (an interesting look at his library: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26473869).
I'm not a fan of the way poetry is often taught in schools, with each poem a puzzle to be puzzled out. But if the writer has shed some sweat - is it unreasonable that the reader should work a little too?
Thank you for your comment, and for reading. My newest post gets at some of what you say here, including Logan. There's an interesting piece at The Point on negative criticism that you might enjoy (I found it a little hard to follow at times):
I agree that if a writer has shed some sweat, a reader should be prepared to shed some, as well. For instance, I don't think one can read Auden's great, "Musee des Beaux Arts" once or twice. It has taken me years of living with and teaching that poem for it to mean as much to me as it does. But in a way, I "got" it the first time I read it, just as I "get" all the Caravaggios I see upon first seeing them, but then am inspired to return to them again and again. So the process is both effortless and effortful at once.
enjoyed this post (and the last one) - it seems like poetry criticism has suffered from its own sort of regulatory capture, and it's hard to find a poetry reviews in major publications (apart from maybe William Logan) that aren't, at worst, ambiguously complimentary.
It's interesting that you mention Keats and Faulkner, figures who are both a little disingenuous in the way they downplayed the care and exactitude they put in both their reading and writing in order to claim a loftier kind of inspiration.
Keats, who claimed "if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all", yet was plagued with self-doubt over his own laborious work. Faulkner, who often retreated behind a facade of the semi-educated country bumpkin/farmer, who was a voracious intellectual who consumed vast quantities of french philosophy (an interesting look at his library: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26473869).
I'm not a fan of the way poetry is often taught in schools, with each poem a puzzle to be puzzled out. But if the writer has shed some sweat - is it unreasonable that the reader should work a little too?
Thank you for your comment, and for reading. My newest post gets at some of what you say here, including Logan. There's an interesting piece at The Point on negative criticism that you might enjoy (I found it a little hard to follow at times):
https://thepointmag.com/criticism/negative-criticism/
I agree that if a writer has shed some sweat, a reader should be prepared to shed some, as well. For instance, I don't think one can read Auden's great, "Musee des Beaux Arts" once or twice. It has taken me years of living with and teaching that poem for it to mean as much to me as it does. But in a way, I "got" it the first time I read it, just as I "get" all the Caravaggios I see upon first seeing them, but then am inspired to return to them again and again. So the process is both effortless and effortful at once.