American education
Bromwich, David
David Bromwich Canon Bashing This academic year, the New York Times Magazine observed the end of spring term with an article ("The Battle of the Books," June 5) on the current anticanonical...
...In the coming years, these will be some of the people worth fighting against...
...and it is easy to learn something about him...
...David Bromwich Canon Bashing This academic year, the New York Times Magazine observed the end of spring term with an article ("The Battle of the Books," June 5) on the current anticanonical fashion in teaching literature...
...Not two years before, it was the neoconservative intellectuals and their undisputed ascendancy in the culture of 1985...
...For the most part, though, the canon was closed...
...This is a rich subject...
...For the first two decades of his career, he was appreciated by a small circle and heartily despised by the established reviewers...
...But how far is this claim borne out by the cases mentioned above...
...What Eliot actually did was to convince a lot of readers that Donne ought to be valued in the special way of a poet who still matters to living poets...
...The Magazine has taken a noticeable interest in culture, lately: an article earlier in the year on trends in academic feminism...
...Consider the fortunes of Wordsworth...
...Academic swingers say that great work in the arts, too, is a matter only of provisional success, and they want to see it become a distant memory...
...and another, just two weeks before this one, on the fate of the humanities at Columbia University...
...but anyway he did his work consistently...
...The hype in these pieces is always the same—cheap reverence, and a pandering servility...
...Pass over it and you come to a pretty steady assumption...
...Eliot smuggled in the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, Malcolm Cowley promoted Faulkner, there was a Henry James revival...
...At present, the severer sort of academic republicans have come to dislike his paternalism again, and are therefore about to supplant him with the always popular, continental and ingratiating Byron...
...Their kind of approval seems to have lasted well into this century, in the textbooks at least...
...He was at the center of a protestant tradition Eliot wanted to displace...
...His work stayed alive partly because a good anthologist, Palgrave, and critics like Arnold and Bradley, wanted to hold on to certain poems and passages...
...Milton, that is to say, was simply not part of the T.S...
...meanwhile, it was already under siege in the antiromantic manifestos of Pound, Eliot, and their modernist school...
...Yeats knew a good deal about Donne without any help from Eliot...
...Morals, said William Carlos Williams, are the memory of success that no longer succeeds...
...So it begins to look as if this were not quite a matter of smuggling, after all...
...In all the fevei of public self-absorption, they lose their grip even on facts that were once thought common knowledge...
...When a new fashion really hits, academics look as bad as everyone else...
...But that is a small confusion, or anachronism...
...He's never been comfortable with the T.S...
...We spare the reader some extensive descriptions of clothes and furniture...
...and second, the way we do things now, in the classrooms and color supplements...
...But they argue better than they read, and their arguments all have the same first step: a confusion of mass culture with democracy...
...But our concern here is not with Atlas, whom we leave to his projects, but rather some of his new informants, and the things they want us to believe...
...But, for now, here is a "fact-check" on two statements that were meant to go down routinely...
...so that, for the New Critics, the rare defense of a poem by Wordsworth could seem a test of mastery on a par with the more intricate moves in chess...
...If that is enough to constitute them as a tradition, and even the sole "great" tradition (to be reviled the more fiercely on that account), then all of us are in trouble—the people who believe the story, as much as those who, knowing better, would rather say nothing and have an office that they can live in comfortably...
...Donne was the most controversial of them...
...Start with those "seventeenth-century metaphysical poets" Eliot is supposed to have "smuggled in" to the canon...
...The last sentence is exactly as cogent as "He's never been comfortable with the Jeremiah tradition, though he's one of the leading scholars of the gospel of John...
...Occasional disputes broke out, reputations flourished and declined...
...He climbed, slowly, to a safe esteem, and clinched his public respectability by accepting the poet laureateship a few years before his death...
...The truth is that Eliot and Milton have almost nothing in common—apart from the fact that they were white males...
...You were either on the syllabus or off the syllabus...
...Here Wordsworth is a representative and not an exceptional case...
...In short, the latest academic consensus, in 1988, approaches a point the argument had reached around 1818, which did not prove to be the end of anything...
...With journalism ready to flatter this claim, they are in a position to evangelize more thoroughly than ever before...
...One afternoon," continues Atlas, "I talk with Stanley Fish, the chairman of Duke's English department, in his newly renovated office...
...Last summer, in the same kind of article for the same FALL • 1988 • 479 Notebook journal, he had addressed with equal relish a somewhat different subject: the life, relations, and picturesque anecdotes of Professor Allan Bloom...
...and Eliot attacked it (and Milton above all) with scorn, 480 • DISSENT Notebook snobbery, and a fine selective connoisseurship...
...Eliot gave reasons, and wrote poems of his own, and he changed people's minds: in this, he did what persuasive readers have often done, throughout the history of literature and criticism...
...The following assertion covers, apparently, the last two to four centuries (in contrast with the last five to ten years...
...You can find a sentence of qualified praise for his originality in Samuel Johnson's Life of Cowley...
...Eliot tradition, he says, though he's one of the leading Milton scholars in America...
...The caption here ought to read: We're so smart today because they were so dumb yesterday...
...By then, however, he had lost the respect of his poetic successors—one of whom buried him five years before his death, in a poem called "The Lost Leader...
...Eliot tradition...
...It is noteworthy that "the syllabus" alone is taken to decide membership in a canon...
...Duke University, in that year, not having yet made its appearance on any of the relevant maps...
...Specimen One...
...History can be divided into two parts: first, the way they used to do things (you know, them: Pope, Emerson, the Bronte sisters, people like that...
...Indeed, so far was the canon from being "for the most part . . . closed" that it takes an act of recovery to see how the great reputations came to be what they are today...
...Coleridge admired his poems, spoke of them warmly and often, and wrote an imitation of them...
...But the story in question, mostly about some professors at Duke, was thrown together and written up in the usual way by James Atlas—Times correspondent on the Intellectual Beat, and author of a novel, The Great Pretender...
...The large-scale revival of Wordsworth, which the current anticanonical wisdom accepts as a thing of timeless provenance, was (it is no exaggeration to say) the effect of advocacy by readers, critics, and scholars, working separately or in concert over the last thirty years...
...Specimen Two...
Vol. 35 • September 1988 • No. 4
