Against Oblivion It�s not often a book of liter…
Against Oblivion
It�s not often a book of literary criticism makes the review pages of the Sunday newspapers, but Iain Hamilton was mates with journalists and has just died, so there is plenty to mitigate the editors� strange decision. However, the main mitigation is that he wrote about poets with notable lives: the mad Robert Lowell, the alcoholic and suicidal John Berryman, the suicidal Alun Lewis .. you get the picture. But what about the poetry? Well, Hamilton�s aim in his posthumous book Against Oblivion is to try to rescue poets from oblivion by making up a list of immortals. It�s not an easy thing to do in a poetry-despising culture. John Carey is sympathetic but is keen to defend popular poets against Hamilton�s disdain. Carey disapproves of poets who crave fame and those who are contemptuous of it; he cites John Berryman and Wallace Stevens as an example of the latter. �Asked what distinguished him, as a poet, from an ordinary man, Wallace Stevens replied, Inability to see much point to the life of an ordinary man.�
Carey takes this as a sneer. Yet surely Stevens is saying the distinction is one of lack, or of pretention: the word inability has a poet�s ambiguity? One senses an atom of contempt, perhaps, yet several more of yearning. Stevens was a fairly ordinary man of his time - repressed, lonely, disappointed - except he wrote exceptional poetry. His inability was for ordinary happiness. His poetry is a yearning and the awareness of the futility of that yearning. Carey gives away the reason for his own contempt for Stevens� affliction when he says contempt is �registered by writing verse of impenetrable obscurity�. Anyone who has read Stevens’ The Plain Sense of Things, or Berryman�s He Resigns knows that the only �impenetrable� thing is Carey�s skull. And he�s a professor of English too, at Oxford. Jeez. I�m reminded of that Lichtenberg aphorism: a book is a mirror, when an ass looks in don�t expect an angel to look out.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Old orations of the cold
- Mr Stevens and Mr Cummings
- Critchley on poetry
- The Idea of Poetry
- Things, merely
