Contrarian Women
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry Contrarian Women By Phoebe Pettingell The aggressive, eye-catching title of Camille Paglia's fifth critical study, Break, Blow, Burn (Pantheon, 272 pp., $20.00), makes you...
...Whether or not one finds Riding a worthy writer depends on one's stomach for a certain kind of philosophical absolutism and one's tolerance for her godlike tone...
...You probably will not agree with all that Camille Paglia says...
...Until her death, she continued to write prickly manifestos, never losing faith in her mission to prove that language ought to be a redemptive force in human communication...
...The child prostitute would enter heaven on Judgment Day, and those who abused her would be condemned to eternal torment...
...When a former friend wrote critically of her, she condemned the First Amendment for allowing such books to be published...
...I find her grandiose generalizations about "Truth," "Soul" and "Language" as irritating and vague as political rhetoric that appeals to undefined notions of "Freedom" and "Democracy...
...She was arrogant in her sense of entitlement to lovers and husbands of other women, and believed her own writings and ideas could save civilization...
...But she will provoke you into honing your own interpretations...
...More important, she realized that the credo "art for art's sake" ultimately trivializes not only literature, but the language we use to express ourselves, so that humanity loses the ability to imagine itself capable of progress...
...While an undergraduate at Cornell, she married a graduate student, Louis Gottschalk...
...Her 1990 volume, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, catapulted her into the cultural spotlight, where she has continued to air her provocative, gender-bending views on movies, painting, pop music, and literature...
...It is "bound for the graveyard, since its secret cargo is the groom's syphilitic seed...
...In the days of New Criticism, one was taught never to read biography into a literary work...
...Good criticism helps us read more deeply...
...Examining one of three sonnets entitled "Love" by the 17th-century poet George Herbert, Paglia finds he avoided this "trap of preciosity, where language loses meaning" because its only subject is words...
...Paglia dissents...
...But for a time she resolved that sex between women and men was wrong because it interfered with spiritual intimacy...
...Take me toyou, imprison me, for I Except you enthrall me, never will befree, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me...
...Riding had been living in a ménage à trois with Graves and his wife, Nancy, when she fell in love with another poet, Geoffrey Phibbs...
...Paglia outlines her crusade in her Introduction: "My attentiveness to the American vernacular—through commercials, screwball comedies, hit songs, and AM talk radio (which I listen to around the clock)—has made me restive with the current state of poetry...
...There are two main movements: a huge, expanding circle (the ascending falcon) and an arrowlike, linear track (the beast bound for Bethlehem...
...Before Harold Bloom (Paglia's teacher at Yale), critics reckoned this was hyperbole for the misery of the oppressed in a world where innocence is a luxury...
...Taken up by the Fugitive Poets as their only female member in 1923, she carried on a passionate affair with Allen Tate...
...Laura Riding remained a little recognized figure with a small cult following...
...In this respect, Camille Paglia can be seen as one of her progeny...
...Riding survived her suicide attempt and moved with Graves to Majorca, while Nancy and Phibbs set up house together...
...Decades after those events, in the 1980s, Elizabeth Friedmann became acquainted with Riding and visited the writer until her death in 1991...
...Graves and Phibbs were quarreling over her...
...Paglia frequently links literature to the wider culture—whatever surrounded its composition, as well as what came before and after...
...In 1928 Laura Riding, an American poet, and Robert Graves, an English one, published ? Survey of Modernist Poetry...
...Her fixation on violence and rape may be too strong for some tastes...
...she notes that babies' tear ducts pick up venereal infections in passing through the mother's birth canal, thus literally "blasting" (in the old sense of "withering") their ability to secrete tears...
...Her defenses do not excuse some of Riding's often outrageous behavior...
...He and Riding fell in love (sexually, as well as "spiritually"), Graves returned to England, and Jackson divorced his wife, who had just suffered a severe breakdown...
...Lesser critics read "Daddy" as an allegory of Plath's own psychological history...
...Aiming at "the general reader," Paglia is unafraid to explicate the nuts and bolts of constructing a sonnet, or to spell out the underlying principles of the Romantic movement...
...One of her most provocative poems is actually titled, "If a Woman Should Be Messiah...
...Riding and Jackson mostly lived in Florida, selling boxed oranges by mail as they labored over their Utopian project...
...Nonetheless, A Mannered Grace and The Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader clarify why the likes of Sylvia Plath and John Ashbery have taken her seriously and derived inspiration from her work...
...she turns each poem into a cinematic scene...
...Her manner is that of the most stimulating lecturer: She never patronizes, but shares what engages her...
...In this view, Theodore Roethke's "Cuttings" "is a regrounding of modern English poetry in lost agrarian universale...
...Break, Blow, Burn offers close readings of 43 poems, beginning with a staple of high school English, Shakespeare's "That time of year thou mayst in me behold," and concluding with Joni Mitchell's "melancholy art song" called "Woodstock...
...Reviewers occasionally described her thinking as "messianic...
...In 1939, she and Graves traveled to the United States where they encountered Schuyler Jackson, a book reviewer for Time...
...Initially, modernist writers wanted to escape the Romantic idea of creativity as a socially redemptive, quasireligious mode...
...A friend of Eugene Debs, Nathaniel Reichenthal hoped to groom his daughter to become the American Rosa Luxemburg...
...Then two smaller ones: a pendulum arc (the rocking cradle) and an exploding pinwheel (the reeling desert birds...
...By 1955 Riding renounced verse, declaring that "poetry obstructs general attainment to something better in our linguistic way-of-life than we have...
...Laura Riding was born in 1901 as Laura Reichenthal, the daughter of a Jewish Socialist who had immigrated to the United States...
...she prefers to see the young woman in John Donne's "The Flea" as the poet's future wife...
...Blake closes with the image of a "youthful harlot's curse" that "Blasts the new-born Infant's tear,/ And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse...
...She has now written a comprehensive biography, A Mannered Grace: The Life of Laura (Riding) Jackson (Persea, 571 pp., $37.50...
...Sylvia Plath's "Daddy"—"one of the strongest poems ever written by a woman"—is an updating of Yeats' "The Second Coming," wherein the horror prophesied by the Irish poet is identified with the malign patriarchy of the Third Reich—a monster so potent its ghost can never be exorcised...
...The young whore has also passed a blight to the man with his bride in the "Marriagehearse...
...Years of classroom teaching have shaped her approach and her sense of what needs to be interpreted...
...Unlike partisans of the "art for art's sake" school—who held, in Auden's well-known phrase, that "poetry makes nothinghappen"—Paglia maintains that "poetry is not just about itself: It does point to something out there, however dimly we know it...
...He tries to seduce the cool Miss by pointing out an insect that has just bitten both of them in turn...
...Medieval scholasticism also flirted with this form of narcissism (as Umberto Eco demonstrates in The Name of the Rose...
...By 1925 she divorced Gottschalk, moved to New York, and published "A Prophesy or a Plea," an essay claiming that poetry could become a way of clarifying human thinking and communication...
...The couple began work on what she called "a magna carta of the human mind," entitled Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words...
...Bored with life as a faculty wife in a succession of college towns, she began writing poetry as Laura Riding Gottschalk (she invented the "Riding...
...The ending of this poem sounds scandalous, even after more than three centuries...
...She was furious at her former partner for popularizing and distorting her person and ideas...
...Graves and Riding remained collaborators until 1939...
...Shortly thereafter Graves' reputation as a novelist and memoirist soared, and his verse also began to sell...
...The author counters that "the modernist doctrine of the work's selfreflexiveness once empowered art but has ended by strangling it in gimmickry...
...Friedmann is a forgiving editor and biographer who can become overly sympathetic...
...In "Holy Sonnet XIV," Donne implores God to "break, blow, burn and make me new," for only force will penetrate his stubborn, solipsistic nature...
...The ending of Yeats' "The Second Coming" is structured, Paglia argues, "by dramatic visuals and emblematic choreography," like Art Deco design...
...Robert Graves invited her to collaborate with him, so she moved to England, quickly falling into intrigue with his family...
...She later labeled literature "a perverse exploitation of language...
...At this point Riding restyled herself as Laura (Riding) Jackson...
...Poetic language has become stale and derivative, even when it makes all-too-familiar avant-garde or ethnic gestures...
...Graves, meanwhile, published The White Goddess, a mythic theory of the muse widely read as a portrait of Riding...
...Hence the poem, with its horror movie finale, is as hybrid as the sphinx, who represents our buried impulses, vestiges of a past that keeps turning into the future...
...The dangers of self-referential writing have been noticed before...
...In discussing William Blake's powerful "London"—his outraged cry against the industrial revolution's ravaging of his native city—she matches the poet's passion with her own energetic descriptions...
...Riding posited the superiority of the female sex: "The dualistic masculine version of human nature to which society is fitted in its functioning and objectives cripples and stultifies them, as a standard of personality that does not refer to them personally," she asserted in her characteristically opaque style...
...Interestingly, she is more influential today than she was during her lifetime...
...Emily Dickinson's famous "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" becomes, in the critic's reading, a miniature morality play in which an innocent lady rides in a carriage with a stranger...
...Despite her convoluted style and Utopian ideas, she was an original thinker who understood the problems faced by creative women in a culture that foisted alien values on them, forcing them into the role of diminished men...
...This fierce defense of the "obscurity" of certain contemporary writers—like e.e...
...she was the "thinker," molding his ideas and behavior...
...She was better known for scandal, having deliberately walked out of a third-floor window in 1929...
...I find too much work by the most acclaimed poets labored, affected and verbose, intended not to communicate with the general audience but to impress their fellow poets...
...That alone makes Break, Blow, Burn a creative read...
...Sometimes, it seizes us and remolds our ideas and behavior...
...He succeeded in raising her to be uncompromising and something of a zealot, but she veered from his political path...
...Her latest offering derives its moniker from "Holy Sonnet XIV" by the early 17th-century poet John Donne, whose verse has retained its power to shock...
...Riding continued with her own writing, too, and attracted a coterie of young writers to her orbit, often repeating the complexities of her original ménage in England...
...Donne, Paglia says, "portrays himself, like [Salvador] Dali, as a showy phallic swordsman baffled and bemused by a forceful, alluring woman, who brushes him away like a pesky fly...
...A companion volume...
...He established an international reputation...
...In Paglia's summary, "We will never be pure until we are abducted and raped by God...
...She listens to his blandishments, then he rapes and murders her...
...For all her flaws as a person and as a writer, she fulfilled at least part of her father's dream by becoming a kind of Rosa Luxemburg of literary criticism and feminist thinking...
...At its best, it too becomes a form of literature—like musical variations on a theme by another composer...
...Those who turn their backs on media (or overdose on postmodernism) have no gauge for monitoring the metamorphosis of English...
...Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" gets the most space (10 pages), but it is also the longest poem (80 lines) she tackles...
...Rarely does she devote more than three or four pages to a single work...
...On Poetry Contrarian Women By Phoebe Pettingell The aggressive, eye-catching title of Camille Paglia's fifth critical study, Break, Blow, Burn (Pantheon, 272 pp., $20.00), makes you wonder—as she no doubt intended you should—what has set the reigning bad girl of the arts on the warpath this time around...
...The Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader (Persea, paper, 386 pp., $21.85), provides a judicious selection of her poems and essays...
...cummings—took the literary world by storm...
...Ideas have become design, starkly juxtaposed with the murky turbulence of elemental forces—storm, flood, drought...
...An acquaintance described them as resembling the couple in Grant Wood's painting "American Gothic...
...Paglia's imagination is never static...
...Call it MTV for poetry...
...For convenience, I will continue to refer to her by her more famous pen name...
...With a stubborn and sometimes perverse integrity, Riding persevered in the face of hostility and incomprehension...
...Phibbs was trying to patch up his own marriage to resolve the situation...
...This diatribe signals that we might be in store for the literary equivalent of a Rush Limbaugh rant, but once Paglia strips down to wrestle with the poems, she indulges in the liveliest form of practical criticism—the sort that stirs you to pull dusty anthologies from the shelf and immerse yourself in the music, rhythm and emotional theater of lyrics...
...He holds this up as an image of sexual mingling, but the woman simply squashes the bug...
...The most powerful literature breaks through convention to allow us fresh understanding...
...The forgotten, unassuming harlot is proxy for tyrannous Mother Nature herself, whose judgment will fall on a society where exploitation—economic, political, religious, and sexual—has become the law of the land...
...Like her mentor, Paglia suggests Blake has in mind something more literal...
...Paglia demonstrates that it is equally concerned with the legacy of Auschwitz and its crippling effect on our collective psyche...
Vol. 88 • March 2005 • No. 2
