Expressions of frustration and anxiety over the state of poetic judgment—of which the writing and publishing of reviews is a formalized instance—are nothing new. Here is Ben Jonson in his Discoveries (1641):

Nothing in our age, I have observed, is more preposterous than the running judgments upon poetry and poets, when we shall hear those things commended and cried up for the best writings, which a man would scarce vouchsafe to wrap any wholesome drug in; he would never light his tobacco with them.

Making allowance for syntax and diction, and only a little for tone—since we have literary curmudgeons of our own—we might hear in these far-off words oddly contemporary concerns. Among the meanings that the OED attaches to ‘running’ are cursory, hasty, flighty, giddy; thus, the "running judgments upon poetry" that Jonson decries are cursory flights of ill-informed reflection, judgment that lacks understanding. It will come as no surprise that Jonson advocates a poetry befitting his classical ideals of decorum, and that his harsher reviews go to such work as he faults for its excess. In his Notes of Conversations with Ben Jonson (1619), William of Hawthornden records Jonson’s opinion that John Donne, "for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging" and that "Donne himself, for not being understood, would perish." Here are passages worth recording as cautionary tales about the dangers of allowing one’s critical faculties to calcify. If there is a test of time, then Donne’s rough meters and excessive articulations pass with flying colors while Jonson’s studied decorousness teeters on the edge of specialist interest.
      Nevertheless, Jonson’s learned vituperations continue to reward attention, as in the Discoveries when he castigates those who "in all they write, confess still what books they have read last; and therein their own folly, so much, that they bring it to the Stake raw, and undigested." It is no great revelation that successful poetry must engage in dialogue with poetry of the past. Long past? asked Ebenezer. Your past, replied the spirit representing what has gone before. The poetry of even the longest past becomes the poet’s own past through a process of deep and devoted reading. Or as T. S. Eliot advocates in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), there is no choice but to write one’s poems in response to poetry of the past. For what happens if one tries to write independently of any tradition? As one of our present-day literary curmudgeons has accurately stated, "Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing. You cannot write or teach or think or even read without imitation, and what you imitate is what another person has done, that person’s writing or teaching or thinking or reading" (Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading). Without past precedent and example, it would not occur to one to write or teach or read. At the same time, as Eliot also emphasizes, the poet must alter the very tradition that draws from. For the reader and reviewer of poetry, the poet’s complex relationship to tradition, or rather the traditions that always are multiple, presents quite a difficult task: the judgment of work that, in the best instances, is new or even strikingly new. How is one to judge what no longer works in accordance with the canons of past judgment? How is one to avoid Jonson’s "running judgments"—which Eliot as well recommends that we avoid?
      One way to avoid such hasty conclusions, simple enough to state though complicated in its execution, is to defer judgment until one has come to some complex understanding of what it is that one is to judge. Thus, one might begin by searching out what a given poet is taking up as a specialization, the techniques that the poet uses, and the uses that the poet is making of literary, philosophical, artistic, and other traditions. Such a task might well involve searching out connections of which the poet herself is not even aware, or perhaps of which she is only dimly aware. Such is the work of a critical reader, striving to make explicit what lies implicit in a text. The effort involved is well worth what trouble it causes to the extent that it helps us one to avoid certain vices found in much American poetry reviewing: hyperbolic praise and vituperative censure. The former tends to make the poet sound like the greatest writer since Dante or Milton, the latter like a hopeless dolt. Neither is very often true, nor does either impression do our literary culture much good. More useful, I propose, is an emphasis on understanding, on articulating ways in which the past lives in the transforming power of the present, and ways in which the present takes up and revises the past, sometimes giving rise to new modes of discourse.
     Of course, I am also speaking here about the transforming power of the past, that is, ways in which even—perhaps especially—the newest, freshest voices can speak as they do because they exist under the influence of tradition. As Kathy Eden emphasizes in her study of Erasmus, Friends Hold all Things in Common (2001), the term ‘tradition’ (from Latin tradere, to hand over, give up, surrender) comes from ancient Roman law and refers to the usual means whereby the ownership of property was transferred or given over. The notion is apt in that what is handed over remains valuable insofar as it continues to be a vital part of a culture’s life. It is not enough for the inheritors of tradition to take ownership of the old property; they must work to integrate the old property into the contemporary lifeworld. But for this integration of old property into the new world to work, the old lifeworld must in some sense die. Here is one of the more powerful paradoxes that anyone devoted to literary study must face over and over: traditions must constantly die to stay alive. For the integration of transferable property into a new context to work, the older context must already be shifting, fading, or gone. At the same time, to integrate property from an old context, the contemporary lifeworld must undergo its own constant shifts and revisions.
      A suggestive version of how a new mode of discourse arises from the dead material of the past occurs in Jorie Graham’s poem "Opulence" (in The Dream of the Unified Field, 1995). In literal terms, this poem is about the blooming of a flower, the "self-brewing of the amaryllis rising before me." The poem establishes a relationship between this self-brewing flower and a simmering language by means of the image of the tongue—"this utterly sound-free-though-tongued opening." The concern with language then becomes explicit with "bits of clench, jolt, fray and assuage—/ bits of gnaw and pulse and, even, ruse…" These bits of "some immortal scale" suggest the struggle—the jolt and fray—along with the natural beat of the pulse and even the ruse—the kind of subterfuge that means a dodge, a movement in a new direction—of a new way of language. This emergence of something new is part of the same process that involves "something’s decomposing—like hearsay growing." As the old language decomposes, it makes way for the new, whose growth the old nourishes. As the process goes on, the older discourse becomes, like hearsay, a kind of talking that is unrooted, though its decomposing matter becomes the very stuff in which the new discourse takes root.
     The process of taking root and emergence does not suggest that the new discourse is inevitable; rather, it is the process itself, the dying away of the old to make way for and nourish the new, that is in some sense necessary if a language and its poetry are to stay alive. As the motion of this process goes on, it is the "something underneath"—the life supported by the soil—that begins to "loosen" the "tight dictation of the four inseparable polished / and bullioned / buds." But then the new language, at first a "tight dictation," becomes an exclamation that by the end of the poem becomes a "yes yes yes yes" echoing Molly Bloom’s "yes I said yes I will Yes" at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses. Molly Bloom here recalls her acceptance of her husband’s marriage proposal, an acceptance that in the novel’s final "yes I said yes" takes on an air of inevitability even though a few lines earlier Bloom has recalled, "and I thought well as well him as another." This tension between the seemingly unavoidable and what could have been otherwise calls to mind another statement by the other literary Bloom, talking about tradition as a "carrying over of influence": "All continuities possess the paradox of being absolutely arbitrary in their origins and absolutely inescapable in their teleologies." The choosing of an influence may begin more or less as a matter of stating, Well as well this as another, but once the influence carries over, and as long as it gives rise to something new, then a new line of development occurs that in retrospect looks and sounds unavoidable. But to survive, this new growth must be like the "green vine angering for life" in Stevens’s "Nomad Exquisite," a strong growth like nothing else, taking occupation of its niche.
     The critical reader’s, the reviewer’s challenge is to track such new development, take into account the soil from which it grew, and bring language to what has not yet been named. This last task presents an especially difficult challenge since it means articulating an account of what one overhears in the poet’s work, thus helping to form a community of understanding in relation to what might otherwise remain a monologue. As Graham puts the matter in "Opulence":

the monologue reduced—or is it expanded—to
this chatter seeking all the bits of light…

As the chatter of monologue seeks out the light, the reader’s task is to cast light on the chatter. In his "Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties," John Stuart Mill famously states that "eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard" because poetry is more inwardly oriented while eloquence is attuned to the more or less familiar categories and protocols of public discourse. Accepting for the moment Mill’s binary between eloquence and poetry, one might say that the reader’s task is to bring eloquence to what is overheard in the poem.
     Another way that I propose avoiding some of the vices that contemporary reviewing is heir to is to relativize, or rather to relationalize, the notion of literary quality. The notion of relationalism is one that Walter Ong formulates in Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (1981). Applied to the concerns of literary judgment, relationalism emphasizes that because poems do not exist in a vacuum, but rather occur and function in relation to multiple and intersecting webs of influence and meaning, there is no sense in attempting to search out poems that are good in some unqualified sense. As Robert Scholes reminds us in Textual Power, the days are long gone when one could credibly seek to rank literary works on something like an absolute scale. Fifty years ago Malcolm Cowley, in The Literary Situation (1954), rejected the application of "the same simplified standards" for every author. Cowley both employs and critiques a stock exchange metaphor to emphasize that literary judgment

…depends in each case on a different system of measurement—as if the par of one author had to be reckoned in inches of growth, that of another in closeness of texture, that of another in mass, and that of still another in his ability always to surprise us with a word. No stock market would be able to record such varied computations.

As Cowley emphasizes, the "literary exchange" again and again misses such subtleties of judgment. Of course, Cowley is speaking here of what he calls "true authors," that is, writers who are bringing something new to the art, and few of us figure out a way to invent something appreciably new. Nevertheless, it seems to me that we miss something important if we as critical readers and reviewers are not on constant watch even for subtle nuances of invention and innovation. This does not mean that all poems will be of equal value, but rather that literary value must be understood in relation to the varieties of cultural work and play that contribute to the life of a given moment.
     Years ago when I was teaching an introductory course in poetry writing, a student asked what was for me a crucial question. The class had just finished discussing William Stafford’s poem "Traveling through the Dark." The discussion was shaped in no small measure by Judith Kitchen’s insightful treatment of the poem in her Understanding William Stafford (1989), in which she draws out the poem’s implications about humans’ attitudes toward and interactions with nature and technology. When the class session was over, a student approached to ask one of the kind of basic questions that I love: Is it true that John Milton is the greatest poet in the English language? I had not thought of this before, but it immediately occurred to me that the further question that must be asked is, Good for what? If one is looking for a deeply learned sensibility capable of articulating the complexities of experience in a sublime and theological language forged in the furnace of strong belief, then Milton surely is the man. On the other hand, if one wants a poetry in a quiet voice of no less depth of conviction alive to the often subtle and difficult ethical implications of the modern world, then William Stafford will serve one well. The point is that each poet has a kind of specialization that sets the work apart from others, and it would be a mistake to judge Stafford’s poetry according to the protocols of Paradise Lost, just as it would involve one in error to seek out Stafford’s sensibility in Milton’s mighty lines.
     Eliot’s "Tradition and the Individual Talent" again may prove to be helpful. As Eliot emphasizes, the poet "must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past," but then he offers a strong qualification:

I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value…

The poet’s work must be at once old and new, it must alter the tradition that it fits into, it must enact judgment on the very past from which judgments arise. As with any other use of language, a poem can only make sense—however complicated or unparaphrasable this sense—because of the long traditions of language that feed into it, and yet the poem will be strong only if it somehow challenges its tradition. The critical reader must remain alive to the difficulty, delicacy, and tact called for by the task of judging what is new, even if it is only slightly new. Even a subtle innovation in some sense challenges the canons of previous judgment.
     Surely there are qualities that one can argue for without prescribing in advance the forms or styles that will honor them. In his introduction to The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (1960), Donald Justice states that "Kees is original in one of the few ways that matter: he speaks to us in a voice or, rather, in a particular tone of voice which we have never heard before." Here is one criterion, that of speaking in a tone heretofore unheard, that carries across virtually any style of poetry, and this criterion is fulfilled when the poet makes his or her distinctive use of tradition. The reader comes to recognize such distinctiveness by way of a struggle, similar to the poet’s, to take hold of as much of the interwoven traditions of our languages and literatures as possible.



Jerry Harp is a frequent contributor to Pleiades and the author of Creature (Salt, 2003). He has two forthcoming collections: Gatherings (Ashland, 2005) and Urban Flowers, Concrete Plains (Salt, 2005).