David Bromwich's Note On The Sonnet

There was that depressing several day period when we heard we'd lost Tony Judt and that Hitchens had cancer. For crissakes, I thought, who's going to be providing us now an un-owned, insider's perspective from the Left, Peter Beinart?! Do I really have to spend so many chatty hours visiting the Huffington Post to get the global view, the one that sort of peeks outside of the confines of the baroness's empire now and then? But that worry is over. It sounds like he doesn't want any glorified role, but David Bromwich is now the man. At least here's one of those old stalwarts around, the kind of intellectual who has more of an interest in culture than who holds the power and what they're doing with it.

There have been many excellent intellectuals commenting on the American scene these past twenty years, including those like the lovely Peggy Noonan who likes to talk about "those intellectuals over there", even though she is an outstanding one herself. Few, however, appear to have worked out an aesthetic philosophy on experience first. An anti-intellectual in American life isn't someone who is deaf and dumb to conceptual ideas, just that very sensible person who doesn't see the point in following historical currents outside of its temporary shiftings of power. I can't say that's a fault or an affliction; after all, that's what moves democracies, who's in and who's out. Of course I'm interested in that too, but I hope to God that's not what primarily moves my brain.

Tony Judt's authority rests on his work as a historian. Unusually for one working in America he appears to have gone through a period of time where literature was as much an aim as learning the rules of a discipline. The morality that's unambiguously readable in his sentences are a large part of his persuasive power. Unlike the intimacy found in his often entertaining essays, Postwar, however, can be a plod of a read. A few reviews of it have felt the need to make the point it can just as easily be regarded as a reference work.

Judt's sentences need to account for the extraordinary amount of research behind each one. Occasionally we receive glimpses of the opinionated contemporary mind, in the clause, and want more of it. The intimacy carries over through a few paragraphs. And then we return to the encyclopedic aspect of an extraordinary complex, large span of European history. It seems to me Judt never did work out an aesthetic philosophy, or at least not conclusively, not to the extent you find in his mentor, the great French historian François Furet, whose every clause is not only packed with information, but an unusual amount of poetic and philosophical consideration, and even more breathtakingly, a kind of morality that moves fluidly, so much so that by the end of any one of his pieces of writing, you feel like you've just read a story, not simply the necessities of peer review and obligation. 

I see little evidence that Hitchens ever tried to work out an aesthetic philosophy, or has been able to engage with poetry on its own terms, outside of mining it for quotable material for the cocktail parties. At least there's that, which makes him appear quite the unusual animal in American political circles. Elsewhere in my post on Barthes and haiku, I stated my sense that I believe Susan Sontag had a lifelong instinct for the Japanese aesthetic, and was on her way to writing a book based on it before fucking cancer took her away too. I see her in her essays thinking through the ideas that poetry produces, but not necessarily the poetic conception that creates them.

With that in mind, I think right now my favorite book of hers is actually not one of her own, but the one called Conversations with Susan Sontag, strictly for the way it displays the astonishing amount of cultural discussion she was able to command at any one moment. I'm in awe of that quality, as I don't have that kind of mind, in the same way that reading any transcript of Gilles Deleuze, you can see a man effortlessly combing back and forth libraries of material on the history of philosophy, and without even uttering a single "um". A recent biography shows him reading Sartre's existential bricks for the sheer pleasure of it, like any other mortal would do a novel.

And so enter David Bromwich. Enough has already been pointed out about how badly poetry criticism sucks, and to that, I have little to add, as the argument for/against seems to mimic the same joys/aggravations of democracy itself. At its worst, it is constantly referring to meanings outside the poetic conception as a means of creating meanings simply for discussions to occur around it, which is a bit too arbitrary, for my tastes. Unlike that, Bromwich actually writes from within the poetic conception. You don't find him ecstatically pointing outside the poetic field toward that illuminating gleam on the outside, which invariably turns out to be just some piece of wind-blown tinsel caught on a branch.

All week I've been thinking about his essay "The Invention of Literature" from A Choice of Inheritance. It's occupied me enough, I believe, that a batch of poems has felt compelled to respond to it. I was going to put the following line at the head of one of the poems, but something very disapproving told me it would have been silly to do so, "In art as in science, discovery easily passes into refinement, and refinement into sophistication, among those who talk habitually of things that were once unfamiliar."

Here's his "A Note on the Sonnet" from an anthology he edited,

"The sonnet was perfected by Petrarch, in fourteenth-century Italy; its first subject matter was sexual love. The great English sequences by Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare enlarged the Italian tradition by mingling the actual and imaginative experiences of the poet with the idealisms of love. Milton and Donne in the seventeenth century further widened its range to encompass admiration for acts of public virtue and the utterance of prayer in verse. Yet the Renaissance hierarchy and separation of genres had a long afterlife, so that a modern like Yeats in 'Leda and the Swan' - a sonnet that mixes the pagan theology, a description of a rape, and the prophecy of an impending catastrophe - could still shock readers whose taste had been partly formed on classical models. Since the Romantic period, however, the sonnet has claimed a unique aesthetic prestige. It is a field of exercise for concentrated virtuosity, an invitation to soar and only touch the ground when speech has magically rounded itself, a pattern so resonant that a poet can scarcely write a poem of fourteen lines without courting the genre or somehow alluding to its past. Displacement or suggestive suppression of rhyme may make as true an homage as any overt echo. Whether divided into sections of eight lines six (octave and sestet), three quatrains and a closing couplet, twelve lines and a couplet, or fourteen at once, the sonnet is a place for intense avowal or meditation, the fixing of a compact and memorable record where the subject is found, held, and framed as if in a single pulse of thought and feeling."

That critical act is as eloquent as anything poetry might ever write.