by M H Abrams
for Jane and Judy
CONTENTS
Foreword by Harold Bloom
The Fourth Dimension of a Poem
Keats’ Poems: The Material Dimensions
What Is a Humanistic Criticism?
The Language and Methods of Humanism
How to Prove an Interpretation
“This Green Earth”: The Vision of Nature
in the Romantic Poets
Kant and the Theology of Art
Spiritual Travelers in the Literature of the West
Point-Blank Prose: The Essays of William Hazlitt
Acknowledgments
Index
FOREWORD
by Harold Bloom
1
ON JULY 23, 2012, my revered mentor Meyer Howard Abrams will turn exactly a century old. At noon today, February 5, I phoned him to say I was writing this foreword, and rejoiced to hear him sounding zestful and vigorous.
In September 1947, an awkward boy of seventeen, I edged into my first class at Cornell University. My teacher, a calmly cheerful man of thirty-five, was Mike Abrams, as he is universally called. Shy and rather fearful, I gazed at him with instant affection and awe, impulses that continue strongly sixty-five years later.
Without his teaching, his personal guidance, and his extraordinary patience with me, I would have capsized well before freshman year came to a close. My passion for learning, and in particular for appreciating authentic poetry, went back to early childhood, and I had the advantage of preternatural speed in reading, accompanied by total memorization of what moved me most, whether in prose or verse. But socially I scarcely existed, hindered by self-consciousness and acute anxieties.
I am now in my fifty-sixth consecutive year of teaching at Yale University. One element in my refusal to retire is my career-long sense that I want to do for my students what Mike Abrams accomplished with me. For temperamental reasons, I never have, yet must go on trying. His serenity is hopelessly beyond me, but I think back to it and gradually have learned to subdue some aspects of my personality so as to listen intently to my students when they most need adequate response.
I will devote the rest of this brief foreword to Abrams’ intellectual and scholarly achievement in his writings, yet had to begin with homage to his splendor as a teacher, always humane and humanistic. What emerges in all of his published work is a secular faith in disciplined imagination and high aesthetic standards. He continues the tradition of the ancient Hebraic sages. I think of Hillel in particular: “Be deliberate in judgment, raise up many disciples, and build an open enclosure around the Torah,” which for Mike Abrams is the Western literary canon. As his disciple, I try to emulate him.
2
Abrams’ masterwork is The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953), which retains its freshness and clarity. It traces the two paths of critical theory, the classical as founded by Aristotle, and the Romantic, inspired by Longinus, until their mingled culmination in the high Romantics Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Hazlitt.
I purchased my prime teacher’s The Mirror and the Lamp on February 24, 1955 (the date is inscribed upon it), during my Fulbright year at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where I was finishing my Yale doctoral dissertation on Shelley. Going through it now, I see it is covered with penciled-in marginalia, written across fifty-seven years of rereading. At one point today I found in a margin the seeds of what many years later was to develop into my brief book The Anxiety of Influence, though Mike is not to be held culpable for my kabbalistic elaborations.
His other grand work is Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, which he gave me in June 1971, the year of its publication. Powerfully, Natural Supernaturalism chronicles the displacement of religious formulations by high Romantic speculations and visions, in an array of thinkers and poets from St. Augustine through Hegel on to Blake, Wordsworth, Carlyle, and D. H. Lawrence, among many others.
Looking through my forty years of copious marginalia, I find my own awakening to the secularized epiphany or privileged moment, which led me to Walter Pater, and to my subsequent critical reflections on the continuity between Romantic tradition and the twentieth-century poets I most admire: W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, D. H. Lawrence, and Hart Crane.
Mike Abrams has published several other books, the most admirable being The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (1984). Its major essay is “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric.” Here my marginalia are profuse, and explore the affinities of Mike’s establishment of a poetic genre with my own ruminations on the modern crisis-poem, from William Collins on to Hart Crane.
The Fourth Dimension of a Poem and Other Essays, to be published for Mike’s one hundredth birthday, moves me by its vibrancy and humane charm. Here I desire to comment only on the final essay-review, which is of David Bromwich’s superb first book, Hazlitt: The Mind of the Critic (1983).
I had the pleasure and honor of being Bromwich’s teacher at Yale, but he arrived fully formed, the Hazlitt of his generation, and scarcely needed me. This was very different from my relation to Mike Abrams, who had to free me from many doubts and persuade a very rough, rather inchoate social self that it could qualify for an academic and literary critical career.
I give the final paragraph of Mike’s essay-review, and the close of this volume, so as to begin an appropriate grace note for celebrating the Abrams Centennial:
Hazlitt, himself an athlete, describes the elements and relations in his ideal of prose by a trope taken from athletic contests: “Every word should be a blow, every thought should instantly grapple with its fellow.” When he is at his best in expressing the supple energy of his mind in the power of his prose, Hazlitt makes De Quincey’s craftsmanship in the essay seem ponderous, Leigh Hunt’s lightweight, and even Lamb’s, in many instances, sequestered and quaint. There are moods of reading, in fact, in which no other essayist can give us the satisfaction that Hazlitt does. R. L. Stevenson said in one of his essays that “though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt.” David Bromwich, in the opening paragraph of his book about the other Hazlitt, cites this comment as appropriate to the standard Hazlitt, about whom he remarks that “I never cared for him much.” I have a hunch, though, that even the other Hazlitt would have liked Stevenson’s compliment very much.
Stevenson was right: no other critic in English, not even Dr. Samuel Johnson, matches the power of Hazlitt’s prose. Last year I reread nearly all of Hazlitt, searching for answerable style in my old age. I memorized again many passages that had become shadowy recollections, but one in particular stays with me, so that sometimes I murmur it to myself during sleepless nights:
Surely, if there is anything with which we should not mix up our vanity and self-consequence, it is with Time, the most independent of all things. All the sublimity, all the superstition that hang upon this palpable mode of announcing its flight, are chiefly attached to this circumstance. Time would lose its abstracted character, if we kept it like a curiosity or a jack-in-a-box: its prophetic warnings would have no effect, if it obviously spoke only at our prompting like a paltry ventriloquism. The clock that tells the coming, dreaded hour—the castle bell, that “with its brazen throat and iron tongue, sounds one unto the drowsy ear of night”—the curfew, “swinging slow with sullen road” o’er wizard stream or fountain, are like a voice from other worlds, big with unknown events. The last sound, which is still kept up as an old custom in many parts of England, is a great favourite with me. I used to hear it when a b
oy. It tells a tale of other times. The days that are past, the generations that are gone, the tangled forest glades and hamlets brown of my native country, the woodman’s art, the Norman warrior armed for the battle or in his festive hall, the conqueror’s iron rule and peasant’s lamp extinguished, all start up at the clamorous peal, and fill my mind with fear and wonder. I confess, nothing at present interests me but what has been—the recollection of the impressions of my early life, or events long past, of which only the dim traces remain in a smouldering ruin or half-obsolete custom. That things should be that are now no more, creates in my mind the most unfeigned astonishment. I cannot solve the mystery of the past, nor exhaust my pleasure in it.
(“On a Sun-Dial” [1827])
Regret hardly could be phrased more eloquently or plangently. I recall that I first read “On a Sun-Dial” for one of Mike’s classes, and treasured his comments upon it, one of which stressed the strength of: “Time, the most independent of all things.” Abrams, a great scholar-teacher, approaches his one hundredth birthday with an autonomy that yields nothing to time. In my own lifetime of battling incessantly against all vagaries and fashions that threatened to dehumanize aesthetic education and criticism, I have relied implicitly upon Mike Abrams as my sage and fathering force, and I am only one of many.
The Fourth Dimension of a Poem*
“THE FOURTH DIMENSION of a Poem.” To explain that enigmatic title, I’ll begin by quoting the opening paragraph of a novel written while its author was teaching at Cornell:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
Humbert Humbert’s obsession with Lolita has sensitized him to a fact to which we are ordinarily oblivious; that is, that the use of language involves a physical component, the oral actions of producing the words we utter, and that by attending to them, we can become aware of the mobile and tactile sensations of performing these actions. The point I want to stress is that poets, whether deliberately or unconsciously, exploit the physical aspect of language. It is this component—the act of its utterance—that I call the fourth dimension of a poem.
There are, one can say, four dimensions that come into play, to produce the full effect of reading a poem. One dimension is its visible aspect, which signals that you are to read the printed text as a poem, not as prose, and also offers visual cues as to the pace, pauses, stops, and intonation of your reading. A second dimension is the sounds of the words when they are read aloud; or if they are read silently, the sounds as they are imagined by the reader. A third, and by far the most important dimension, is the meaning of the words that you read or hear. The fourth dimension—one that is almost totally neglected in discussions of poetry—is the activity of enunciating the great variety of speech-sounds that constitute the words of a poem.
It is easy to overlook the fact that a poem, like all art forms, has a physical medium, a material body, which conveys its nonmaterial meanings. That medium is not a written or printed text. The physical medium is the act of utterance by the human voice, as it produces the speech-sounds that convey a poem. We produce those sounds by varying the pressure on the lungs, vibrating or stilling the vocal cords, changing the shape of the throat and mouth, and making wonderfully precise movements of the tongue and lips. It can be said, then, that the physical production of a poem begins next to the heart and ends near the brain. That is one reason that poetry is felt to be the most intimate of the arts, in addition to being the most inclusive and nuanced in expressing what it is to be human. I want to emphasize how important it is to become aware of this fourth, material dimension of a poem. Lifelong and constant habituation in using language has made us largely oblivious to the oral activities that bring a poem into being—the sensations of motion, shape, and touch that we feel, and the oral gestures that we make, in performing such activities; but to be oblivious to these physical sensations and gestures, and simply to look through them to the meanings of the words that they convey, is to disembody a poem. An important advantage of reading a poem aloud is that to do so helps to reembody it, by emphasizing the palpability of its material medium. And that is important, because the oral actions that body forth the words of a poem, even when they remain below the level of awareness, may serve, in intricate and diverse ways, to interact with, confirm, and enhance the meanings and feelings that the words convey.
What I have said will, I think, become more clear after I discuss some poems, then read them aloud. But before I do so, I want to stress that there is no one right way to read a poem aloud. Good readers vary greatly, and even the same reader does not read a poem twice in precisely the same way. I go back far enough so that, when I was a college student, I heard T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and e. e. cummings read their poems; each read differently, but all read well. I heard Robert Frost talk his poems, to great effect; and I heard Dylan Thomas recite poems in a Welsh bardic chant, to equal effect. In the early decades after the founding of Cornell, a famed English professor, Hiram Corson, read poems aloud in Sage Chapel accompanied by the chapel organ, to high acclaim.
I myself favor a more subdued mode of reading—a flexible one that subordinates itself to, and tries to express and convey, the physical as well as the semantic particularities of an individual poem. To illustrate, I shall point out some of the distinctive qualities of each of six poems, then read it aloud. I chose these examples because they are all splendid poems, of which I am especially fond, yet differ markedly in the implied voice of the lyric speakers, in what the speakers say, and the style and pace and tone in which they say it. I will attend to all four dimensions of these poems, but will emphasize especially their fourth dimension—that is, the differences in the physical, enunciative actions which help the poems achieve their varied effects, by interacting with the meanings and moods that the words of the poems convey.
1.
W. H. Auden, “On This Island” (1936)
“On This Island” was written by W. H. Auden at the age of twenty-eight, in an exuberant display of his early mastery over the resources of language. Most prominent is his use of devices—especially the emphatic repetition of stressed syllables, and the conspicuous patterning of speech-sounds—that he had learned from the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. Almost all of Hopkins’ poems, although written in the high Victorian period, had not been published until 1918, only eighteen years before “On This Island”; and Hopkins’ linguistic innovations captivated Auden, as they did other young poets of his generation.
Auden’s poem represents the sea and shore as overlooked from, presumably, a chalk cliff on the southeast coast of the large island called Great Britain. “Look, stranger”—the poet addresses himself directly to you, whom the poem thus posits as a fellow viewer of this vibrant scene, drenched in sunlight and resonant with the sounds of ever-moving water. Conspicuously in this representation, Auden exploits all four of the poem’s dimensions—its visible appearance, its speech-sounds, its meanings, and also its fourth dimension, the act of its utterance—and makes them cooperate so as to convey to the full the sights, motions, and sounds of this sunlit seascape, as well as the exhilaration that the view evokes in its observer.
Throughout his description, Auden makes us aware of something we ordinarily are oblivious to—the delight that can reside in mere utterance, in our uniquely human ability to enunciate an astonishing variety of speech-sounds. Infants show this delight in the activity called “lalling”—that is, the repetitive utterance of newly learned consonants: ma-ma-ma-ma, da-da-da-da, la-la-la-la. Auden recovers for us, on a complex level, this lost primitive pleasure. For example, he bids us to look at
—this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers.
In representing the dazzle of the light (which seems to leap up from the moving waters that reflect it), Auden matches the delig
ht he experiences in viewing the represented scene by the delight he evokes in our oral activities of verbalizing that representation—delight in the repeated utterance of the elastic l’s, and in the evolution of the speech-units, from “leaping” to “light” to “delight” to “discovers” (“the leaping light for your delight discovers”). The restless movements, both in the scene and in its verbal representation, are brought to an abrupt stop by the sturdy sequence of stressed sts in the imperative to you, the listener, to “Stand stable here.” In that last phrase, Auden exploits the potential semantic content of uttering the initial st’s—a combination of consonants that recurs in many English words that denote a sudden cessation of movement, in words such as “stop,” “stay,” “stuck,” and “stock-still”; “Stand stable here.”
Such a prominent play of speech-sounds is not only pleasurable in itself, but has an additional function; and that is, to replicate the sounds that the words signify. For example, in “The swaying sound of the sea” (the last line of the first stanza), which describes the rise and fall in loudness of the sound of the sea swells, the sibilance of the enunciated s’s mimics the susurrus of the sliding waters, at the same time that the undulating rhythm of the spoken line—most prominent in the pressure and release of the medial y in the word “swaying”—mimics the undulation of the waves that produce those sounds. Auden also reminds us, by using oral echoism, that at the sea’s edge, the waves do not merely hiss. As they strike the shore, they also make slapping and clicking sounds (line 9):
—and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide. . . .
In the lines that follow, Auden foregrounds something that he also does, less obviously, elsewhere in the poem. He has learned from Gerard Hopkins the trick of breaking a word in the middle and then rhyming the first half of the severed word with the end word of a nearby verse line: