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Arresting poetry: kitsch and the miscreant language of verse

2012; Wiley; Volume: 54; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/criq.12017

1467-8705

Daniel Tiffany,

Crime and Detective Fiction Studies

Critical QuarterlyVolume 54, Issue 4 p. 1-25 CRITICISM Arresting poetry: kitsch and the miscreant language of verse Daniel Tiffany, Daniel TiffanySearch for more papers by this author Daniel Tiffany, Daniel TiffanySearch for more papers by this author First published: 29 January 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12017Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Notes 1 Clement Greenberg, ‘ Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939), repr. in Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 3–21. 2 Herman Broch, ‘ Notes on the Problem of Kitsch’, repr. in Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles (New York: Bell Publishing, 1969), 62. 3 Francis Jeffrey, review of Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake, orig. pub. in the Edinburgh Review, 16 (August 1810), repr in Jeffrey's Criticism, ed. Peter F. Morgan (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983), 65. 4 Broch, ‘ Notes’, 62. One should not overlook the fact that Broch gothicises kitsch by describing it as ‘a foreign body lodged in the overall system of art’. This startling image calls to mind Sedgwick's treatment of ‘live burial’ in her analysis of the thematics of the gothic novel. (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Arno Press, 1980)). 5 Broch, ‘ Notes’, 62. 6On the common ‘beauty’ of art and kitsch, see Broch, ‘ Notes’, 61–64; and Jeffrey, review of Walter Scott, in Jeffrey's Criticism, 68–69. 7On Broch's rejection of the Marxist understanding of kitsch as ‘the full flowering of industrial capitalism’, see ‘ Notes’, 53, 61. 8 Jeffrey, review of Walter Scott, in Jeffrey's Criticism, 69. 9Ibid. 10Ibid. 11 Anton C. Zijderveld, On Clichés (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 98. 12Ibid., 14. On the ‘social functionality’ of clichés, see pp. 17–25. 13Ibid., 16. 14Ibid. 15Ibid., 5. Charles Baudelaire, ‘ Fusées’, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 662. Baudelaire writes, ‘créer un poncif c'est le génie. Je dois créer un poncif.’ 16 Jeffrey, review of Scott, in Jeffrey's Criticism, 73. 17 Aristotle, in sect. 22 of the Poetics, entitled ‘ The Language of Poetry’ (1458a), trans. James Hutton (New York: Norton, 1982), 69. 18Ibid. 19 Jeffrey, review of Scott, Jeffrey's Criticism, 73. Jeffrey adds, ‘he has made more use of common topics, images, and expressions, than any original poet of later times; and, at the same time, displayed more genius and originality than any recent author who has worked in the same materials’ (p. 72). 20 Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Bk 1, sect. 1, p. 3; Bk 2, sect. 16, p. 69. 21 Dante, De Vulgari, Bk 1, sect. 18, p. 43; Bk 1, sect. 15, pp. 33, 37. 22 Dante, De Vulgari, Bk 1, sect. 18, p. 43. 23 William Wordsworth, Preface (1802) to the Lyrical Ballads, ed. Michael Mason (London: Longman, 1992), 57, 59.1. 24 Ben Jonson, Timber or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter (1641), ed. Felix E. Schelling (Boston: Ginn, 1892), 24–25. 25Ibid. 26Preface to Cleveland's poetry (1677), cited in Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), 210. See Davie's discussion of ‘a balance to be struck between too much strength and too much ease’ (pp. 206–210). 27 John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1665), ed. Thomas Arnold (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884), 70–71. 28 Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets, ‘Cowley’ (1779), ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 33. 29Ibid. 30 Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), 115–116. 31 Samuel Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (London: Dent, 1975), 191 (ch. 17). 32Concerning Coleridge's views on his training in Latin, Patrick Cruttwell writes, ‘ he certainly recognized that the traditional kind of classical education, with as its finest flower that absurd bi-lingual acrostic known as “Latin verses”, was largely responsible for bad taste in English poetry; and that sort of education was the pedagogical infant of Roman and English Augustan Taste’ ( The Shakespearean Moment and Its Place in the Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 221). 33On the effects of the introduction of vernacular writing into English school curricula, see John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 77–80, 99–102. 34On the shifting parameters of early formulations of ‘literature’ (and the ‘man of letters’), see Guillory, Cultural Capital, 122–123. 35Ibid., 76. Similarly, he declares, ‘It is the emergence of vernacular literacy which brings the category of ‘literature’ to the forefront of the public sphere’ (p. 123). 36Ibid.,132. 37 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 34, 61. 38Ibid., 66. 39 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, Appendix, 89. 40Ibid. 41 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 66. 42 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, Appendix, 90. 43Ibid. 44 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 199 (ch. 17), 223 (ch. 19). 45 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 68–69. 46Ibid., 70. 47Ibid., 80. Elsewhere, Wordsworth declares, ‘the language of a large portion of every good Poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference to metre, in no respect differ from that of good Prose’ (p. 67). 48Ibid., 56–57. 49Ibid., 62. 50 Jean-Pierre Mileur, Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 202. 51 Guillory, Cultural Capital, 129. Similarly, Mileur warns, ‘to remove the identity of the poet from its objective manifestation in having written is to move away from a visible canon or the source and shape of literary authority toward an altogether vaguer, internal standard’ (Literary Revisionism, 203). 52 Robert Heron, ‘A Critical Essay on the Seasons’ (1793), cited in A. A. Mendilow, ‘Robert Heron and Wordsworth's Critical Essays’, Modern Language Review, 52 (1957), 335–336. 53 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 212 (ch. 18). Elsewhere, Coleridge explains, ‘the very act of poetic composition is, and is allowed to imply and to produce, an unusual state of excitement, which of course justifies and demands a correspondent difference of language’, 211 (ch. 18). 54Ibid., 209 (ch. 18). 55 Francis Jeffrey, review of Wordsworth's poems, orig. pub. in the Edinburgh Review, 11 (October 1807), repr. in Jeffrey's Criticism, 58, 56. 56 Oliver Goldsmith, ‘ Poetry Distinguished from Other Writing’, essay 15 (1765), repr. in Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Washington Irving (Philadelphia: J. Crissy, 1834), 507. 57 Thomas Gray, The Works of Thomas Gray, ed. Edmund Gosse, 4 vols (London: Macmillan, 1903), vol. 2, p. 108. Gerard Manley Hopkins echoes the view of Gray and Goldsmith in a letter to Robert Bridges: ‘the poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself’ ( The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 95). 58 Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets, ‘Gray’, 458. 59See Guillory's excellent discussion of the role of ‘commonplacing’ in the composition of Gray's poetry, in Guillory, Cultural Capital, 88. 60On the historical genealogy of the term, ‘commonplace’ (from Roman antiquity to the Romantic Revival), see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge, 1979), 70. 61On the historical significance of poetry for commonplace books, see David Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 141, 259–60. 62 Allan, Commonplace Books, 154. 63 Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), ed. Edith J. Morley (Manchester: University Press, 1918), 9. 64 William Hazlitt, Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–34), vol. 17, p. 209. 65 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 64, 67–8. 66Ibid., 87. 67On the role of class difference in Gray's relationship with Walpole, see The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longmans, 1969), 118. For a more detailed account of these tensions, see R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Thomas Gray: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 44–51. 68 Thomas Gray, The Complete Poems of Thomas Gray, ed. H. W. Starr and J. R Hendrickson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 38. 69 Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 357. 70 Davie, Purity of Diction, 25. 71Ibid., 24, 138. 72Ibid., 130, 158. 73 Guillory, Cultural Capital, 88. 74Ibid., 92, 87. Guillory's use of the term ‘literary’ in these citations must be viewed with caution, since, strictly speaking, the clichés of Gray's rhapsody are explicitly poetic, in opposition to the rising tide of ‘literary’ (i.e. prosaic) poetry. 75 Hazlitt, ‘ On Shakespeare and Milton’, cited in Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 123, 207, n. 1. 76 Margaret Russett, De Quincey's Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 18. Russett's comments pertain to De Quincey's appropriation of the ‘gross and violent stimulants’ of poetic diction, yet she also reveals the degree to which Gray's commonplace methods haunt various gothic themes – solipsism and the doppelgänger as functions of poetic inversion – at the level of signifier. 77 William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, ed. A. R. Waller (London: Dent, 1916), 118. 78 Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets, ‘Gray’, cited in Guillory, Cultural Capital, 90–91. 79 Teskey, Delirious Milton, 127. 80 Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library (London: Smith, Elder, 1909), 97. 81 Francis Jeffrey, review of Walter Scott, Jeffrey's Criticism, 68. 82 Ezra Pound, Selected Letter, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971), 296. 83Pope's poem sometimes appears under the alternate title, ‘Song, By a Person of Quality’, which allows it to be confused at times with a poem of the same title by Jonathan Swift, which is cited by Francis Jeffrey (though he may be confusing it with Pope's satire): ‘a selection of some of the most trite and well-sounding phrases and epithets in the poetical lexicon of the time, strung together without any kind of meaning or consistency’ (from Jeffrey's review of Walter Scott, in Jeffrey's Criticism, 69–70). The text of Pope's satire can be found in The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Whitewell Elwin and William John Courthope (London: John Murray, 1882), vol. 4, 489–490. 84See Vico's genealogy of ‘poetic wisdom’ (and ‘poetic logic’)in The New Science of Giambattista Vico (1744), trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 109–169. 85 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), trans. Elizabeth Mayer and Louise Bogan (New York: Vintage, 1973), 110. 86 Roger Lonsdale, ‘ The Poetry of Thomas Gray: Versions of the Self, in Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 24. 87 Mileur, Literary Revisionism, 199. 88Ibid., 196. 89 Gray, Complete Poems, 42. 90Ibid., 40. 91Ibid., 24. 92Ibid., 23. 93Ibid., 16. 94 Laura Riding, Introduction to the 1980 edition of The Poems of Laura Riding (1938), (New York: Persea Books, 1980), 5. 95Ibid., 4. 96Ibid., 10. 97Ibid., 3. 98In 1768, Gray published translations of three ancient ballads, ‘The Fatal Sisters’, ‘The Descent of Odin’, and ‘The Triumphs of Owen, A Fragment’. Since Gray had no knowledge of the original languages, he worked from Latin translations of the original Old Norse and Old Welsh. (Gray, Complete Poems, 27–36. 99 Guillory, Cultural Capital, 92. 100 Francis Jeffrey, review of Wordsworth's poems, orig. pub. in the Edinburgh Review, 11 (October 1807), repr. in Jeffrey's Criticism, 57. 101 Jeffrey, review of Byron's ‘Corsair’, orig. pub. in the Edinburgh Review, 23 (April 1814), 79. 102 Davie, Purity of Diction, 26. 103 Guillory, Cultural Capital, 120. 104Ibid., 124. Elsewhere, concerning the poetic project of vernacular estrangement, Guillory refers to ‘poetry as a distinct language, the vernacular's own Latin’ (p. 131). 105 Samuel Johnson, essay no. 37 in The Rambler, cited in Guillory, Cultural Capital, 125. Francis Jeffrey identifies a similar alloy of ‘elegance’ and ‘coarseness’ (a compound essential to kitsch) prized by the author of ‘popular poetry’, who seeks ‘to write all the fine and strong feelings to which cultivation and reflection alone can give birth, with those manners and that condition of society, in which passions are uncontrolled, and their natural indications manifested without reserve. It was necessary, therefore, to write two things that did never exist together in any period of society; and the union, though it may startle sober thinkers a little, is perhaps within the legitimate prerogatives of poetry’ (Jeffrey, review of Byron's ‘Corsair’, Edinburgh Review, 81. 106 Guillory, Cultural Capital, 124. 107 Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, (1928; Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 163. 108Ibid. Barfield writes, ‘properly understood, archaism chooses, not old words, but young ones’ (p. 165). 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