Criticism As an Art

...The scholarly rationale claims to choose what is most consistent with the author's evident intention...

...He himself preferred old-fashioned spelling, and it would be only simple justice to allow his faults to remain visibly upon his head...

...Macbeth or The Waste Land conveyed something different to their initial audiences than they do to us, because we bring our own societies and associations to them...

...And it must end where it started—with the surface...

...Why, asks Rosen, would one want to take away this quality and replace it with the formal conventions of an essay...

...We are reminded that Romantics prized their idiosyncrasies...

...He wanted writers he loved to share his passions and prejudices...

...We all experience lapses from rationality from time to time...

...Citing Harold Bloom as the most formidable exponent of the theory that "a poem by Wordsworth refers to a poem by Milton, transforms and overcomes it," he argues instead that each work "refers beyond words to the totality of the culture that produced it, and as it moves through time it reveals the capacity to refer to the future as well...

...He regales us with individual stories of how mental imbalance affected writers from William Cowper and Christopher Smart to Friedrich Hölderlin—who believed that through dreams and madness one might escape to an innocent golden age of the Greek gods —Novalis, and Clemens von Brentano...

...As I read it, Rosen's ultimate intention is to argue that insanity is one more part of how the mind operates—not merely a dysfunction, but an altered state...

...His praise of Shaw does not invoke the author of Pygmalion, but rather the fiery music critic and early champion of Richard Wagner...

...He concedes that many creative minds have broken through to fresh insights during spells of mania and irrationality, but he is emphatic in saying it would be foolish to dismiss the miseries these states inflict as a price any artist would gladly pay...

...He was, himself, fully on the side of craziness, and saw Newton and Locke as enemies of all that makes us human...

...Thus he lambasted that formidable, painstaking scholar...

...Although he might take after what he considered the mistakes of his colleagues, Empson was never petty or competitive, happily acknowledging their strengths as much as their weaknesses...

...That many of them associated lapses of reason with heightened perception, feelings and creativity can be discerned from Charles Lamb's letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge about his spell in an asylum: "I look back on it at times with a gloomy kind of Envy...

...Empson's hostility to the dominant Western religion was legendary, and he could not accept that his beloved Donne might have fully embraced the hated creed, even if the 17th-century poet died as Dean of St...

...Who wants to look at a forest and see merely a botanical illustration of chlorophyll in action...

...In common with his critical hero, Rosen has prejudices of his own on display...

...Secret Codes," for instance, discusses repetitive motifs in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and the music of Robert Schumann...

...The Romantic fascination with the unconscious mind as the source of creativity, and how different cultures define insanity, are both thoughtfully examined...

...When writing informally, most took pains to sound spontaneous to their correspondents, as though the thought process were being transferred directly from brain to paper...

...He did this not out of snobbish contempt, but with an unshakable (and usually correct) certainty that he was much better informed than his opponents...

...All now seems to me vapid...

...Dame Helen Gardner, charging her interpretations made John Donne sound too orthodox a Christian...

...In several essays, William Empson is proclaimed "the greatest of our critics...

...The author of Seven Types of Ambiguity was certainly a maverick...

...Empson read intuitively...

...The play of his mind and the depth of his knowledge together enable readers to see what few would notice on their own...

...comparatively so...

...Rosen is an outstanding pianist, a Professor Emeritus of Music and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, the author of two previous volumes as well as the coauthor of two more, and has written numerous articles (many of them for the New York Review of Books...

...Some people are prone to more frequent and severe departures from reason than others...

...Dream not Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of Fancy, till you have gone mad...

...Misspellings disturb pedants even more than irregular punctuation...

...Is our society's current approach to psychosis as a kind of medical aberration—something dividing its sufferers irrevocably from the impulses of the "normal"—more enlightened, or merely less compassionate...

...At the sight of so many dashes, their nerve fails," he sneers...

...He notes that the notoriously opinionated Baudelaire "declared the greatest crimes of liberalism to be the abolition of the death penalty and spelling reform...

...His essays on the likes of Walter Benjamin, William Empson, Roman Jakobson, and George Bernard Shaw provide lyrically rendered perceptions, at once homages to the critic's imagination and masterpieces of Romantic writing...

...A painfully comic solution devised by Jean Bruneau for his edition of Flaubert's letters involved "a faithful transcription [of those] written before the author was 12, after which point everything was corrected...

...Sometimes, Rosen rightly maintains, a writer turns "into the interfering editor of his own work...

...William Blake termed madness "a refuge from unbelief" brought on by scientific rationality's attack against religious mysticism...

...Disarmingly, Rosen does none of these things...

...Paul's Cathedral in London...

...Rosen further cautions against reducing any work to a formula, or distorting it by concentrating on one feature to the exclusion of everything else...

...In fact, that is his objective, as he makes clear here in his brief Introduction when he declares, "I am fascinated by the form of criticism which attempts to uncover a secret unperceived before by any other observer...

...An essay on a related subject, "The Definitive Text," dissects the philosophies driving editors in their selections among manuscript variations of the same text...

...Rosen's generous humanism makes him, like all great critics, an indispensable commentator on the Romantic era, and on our own...

...In the end, whatever is being examined has to remain whole, even if more mysterious, subtle and complex than it seemed at first...

...Charles Rosen's Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen (Harvard, 249 pp., $27.95) illustrates this abundantly...

...most of us are unlikely to be skinning an octopus, or tracking down exactly the right kind of European potato to bring off the mouth-watering pommes de terre a la manière d'Apt...

...His particular bête noir is the contemporary academic notion that literature can be about nothing but itself, and has nothing to do with the world outside language...

...Rosen's solution would be to have editors frankly admit "the conflicting claims of multiple versions" and, when possible, print variorum texts, rather than use their ideological preferences to establish something "definitive...

...Rosen never makes the mistake of oversimplifying to prove a point...

...The Cookbook as Romantic Pastoral" salutes that culinary wizard Elizabeth David, while slyly pointing out that many of her scrumptious Mediterranean recipes should be taken by the American reader as evocative poetry only...

...Rosen's piece ranges over a number of topics...

...Rosen believes the critic's arguments should be "so presented that they not only reflect the work [under discussion] but also reflect back upon it...

...Rosen inquires sarcastically, "Did Bruneau feel that 12 is the age of reason, the moment when Flaubert should have known better, and that from this point on his graphic vices must be covered up...

...Or so many acres of potential wood pulp...

...The Romantics believed they saw the connection between the repressed desires of the sane and those acted out by the mad...

...Biographical data confirm Gardner's thesis...

...It is easy to admire Milton, harder to love him, yet Empson's sympathetic readings reveal an endearing person...

...In Rosen's felicitous characterization, "He often wrote like a hearty, old-fashioned country squire from one of Fielding's novels, speaking his mind to his social inferiors...

...Some critics try to enhance their importance with Big themes, ingenious theories, or by talking more about themselves than the work at hand...

...The most unconventional essay in this collection is probably "Mad Poets," a meditation on the number of writers of the Romantic era who suffered from spells of insanity...

...Separating Life and Art: Romantic Documents, Romantic Punctuation" skewers the "timidity" of those who standardize punctuation and spelling when editing the letters and journals of writers...

...Indeed, at the heart of his appeal for Rosen is the unstinting generosity of spirit he applied to the authors he wrote about...

...Or only the holes of woodpeckers...

...he gets right down to his subject and elucidates its peculiarities or glories in a way that captures our attention and delight...

...But intentions can shift even during composition, and the last impulse may not necessarily prove superior to its intermediate stages...

...Yet such is his skill that as he reveals hidden aspects, we are beguiled into feeling we have helped him stumble on his discoveries...

...Unfortunately, as Rosen observes, too many critics leave us less than we started with...

...Criticism, though, is not simply a mirror or a diagram, "not the reduction of a work to its individual, interior symmetries, but the continuous movement from explicit to implicit and back again...

...Nevertheless, the closer we scrutinize the verse, the more closely Empson's version matches that tricky, subversive voice speaking from the page...

...Editors come in for frequent drubbings...

...This collection of essays, an example of his diverse interests, covers a wide variety of topics and people...