The New Criterion

There are critics by nature and critics by necessity, and perhaps even critics by accident. Donald Justice liked the idea of criticism more than he liked being a poetry critic. When he came to collect his essays just before turning sixty, there were scarcely a hundred pages to trouble him. The rest of Platonic Scripts (1984) was pieced out with interviews and scraps from his notebooks, the detritus of a writer’s life, though no less revealing for that. There were reviews from the 1950s he chose not to preserve, reviews that displayed a more captious temper than his later essays; much as Justice relished the corrosive wit and mortal lightning of a Randall Jarrell, he had decided his interest in critical prose could better be served by the rare essay, written when the spirit moved him.

What to Justice might have seemed a lazy engagement with criticism proved an exemplary method—of serving poetry only when he could add a note of clarification or mount a small protest. At times, to a remarkable degree, he sensed—with the antennae of the artist—some crucial turn in the relation between the poet and poetry:

Before Adam ate of the fruit which made him a poet and hence an exile, not even the serpent could have questioned his sincerity. The term is inapplicable to a state of innocence.

This statement begins the early essay “Baudelaire: The Question of His Sincerity.” Justice might later have regretted a rhetorical remark so bold. Still, it’s hard not to admire the density of thought and character such insight required. Every poet must have his muse, but is the muse here Eve or Satan? Plato’s Republic stands behind the poet’s necessary exile from Paradise, but a darkly figured irony has made the Fall the transfiguration of man into artist.

Half a century later, poets are still bewildered by sincerity (that term crucial to eighteenth-century and Romantic criticism), worried that the poet is honest only to the degree he is a slave to autobiography—what Justice called the “biographical test of sincerity.” Poetry was not always a subdivision of the boundless estates of memoir, but we are now suspicious when poets lay claim to alien experience—or no experience at all, just sensibility. If a poet writes of a mine disaster, readers feel he ought to have survived that disaster; if a poet writes of murder, he ought to be spattered with blood. This is to discount severely the license of verse (worse is the contemporary taboo against daring to write as an Eskimo if you’re a Somali, or, perhaps, a Texan if you hail from Rhode Island). Personae, where allowed at all, seem to violate the character of modern lyric, and if not mere whimsy too close to the sham or counterfeit.

Perhaps the particular topology of lyric means that, to be taught by its charms and caught by its terrors, we must believe the lines come from knowledge earned, not stolen graces—but to believe that all poetry must exist under the rubric of biography is to leave out much of Eliot, Pound, Moore, Stevens, and Frost, to mention only the moderns. Not to recognize the “advantage of treating the work as primary, the life as secondary,” is to banish the aesthetic, what makes a poem by one murderer better than another’s.

Randall Jarrell fifty years ago wrote about poets, bad poets, whose “hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever been expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with ‘This is a poem’ scrawled on them in lipstick.” Justice, too, was troubled by whether sincerity required only life raw and unprocessed—what might be called the Down-and-Out Syndrome, where my morphine habit trumps your unpleasant divorce. (It’s curious how quickly the freedom of confessional poetry came to feel constricting, even suffocating.) It would have been pointless for the serpent to question Adam’s sincerity before the loss of innocence, because even suspicion could not exist before the invention of hypocrisy and cant. Of course Satan knew more about sincerity than anyone; indeed, you might say he taught heaven the idea.

In his criticism, Justice was wary of abjectly or flagrantly personal poets (of Howl he said slyly, “The ideal reviewer would be a sympathetic caseworker or analyst”). He struggled to defend, two generations after Eliot, the poetry of impersonality, an aesthetic now often viewed as naive or quaint. Justice was claiming the right not to put the self on display, just before Lowell and Plath marked out the intimacies in poetry we have come to expect. This guardedness marked Justice’s work so deeply, his early poems exist almost beyond the shadow of biography. “I don’t find myself taking a lot of trouble trying to get myself in,” he remarked of his poems. “I go to far more trouble trying to leave myself out.” That, of course, might be the plaint of a man who felt his life not dramatic enough for poetry (perhaps there lay his fondness for Larkin). What he admired in Baudelaire was that his “work generally has a high degree of formal sophistication and accomplishment while containing matter of a certain strangeness and, in some cases, wildness.” In that tension between the imposition of rational form and the sudden outbreak of the unexpected, Justice found the model for artistic imagination.

Justice believed that the artist, to be an artist (like the priesthood, the occupation required a calling, required certain vows—and certain sacrifices), could not be entirely in control of his medium. What he loved in poetry, at last, was succumbing to it, then letting a measure of strangeness or wildness break in. His remarks on sincerity seem headed for an inversion of the obvious kind—that if art cannot be forced to reflect life, life must reflect art. Yet he offered something more radical: that “sincerity is saying what the form obliges you to say regardless of whether or not you believe in it.” In a footnote, he went further, suggesting that having spoken the words you must pretend to believe them, or at least learn to shut up (that would have been the Alexandrian solution to some of Auden’s doubts about his boyish lines). Sincerity is not flinching from what the form requires you to say; indeed, the sincerity of art is no more, and no less, than the honesty exacted in the form.

Having deftly sketched portraits of his fellow critics in The Armed Vision (1948), a book now almost forgotten, Stanley Edgar Hyman tried his hand at fashioning the ideal critic “out of plastics and light metals”—but what he came up with was a set of impossible standards. Jarrell mocked him by saying that Hyman’s critic would “resemble one of those robots you meet in science-fiction stories, with a microscope for one eye, a telescope for the other, and the mechanical brain at Harvard for a heart.” Yet what if the perfect critic were not the sum of warring factions, but simply a reader balanced like a spirit level, an Aristotelian who could see not just in fractions? Justice himself suggested that the reader must avoid asking too much of criticism (I would add, lest he get it), because the critic’s worst sin is to be clever when a poem is not.

I hope I shall not be classed as some sort of philistine for making the argument, but as Empson remarks, “one must judge how far a thing needs explaining”; and I am trying to avoid the kind of critical thinking that pretends to understand more than is there to be understood and that at the same time is unwilling to state the obvious, especially if it would seem in any way naive to do so.

Much academic criticism has become merely an intellectual exercise, with merit badges awarded by the MLA. One longs for critics who serve the art by surrendering to it. Justice was that sort of critic, in a way that Jarrell could be. Close reading is now somewhat despised—I’m sure some Ph.D. has declared it the dead hand of patriarchal order laid upon the indeterminacy and instability of the poem’s matriarchal text. A critic who does not want to out-Herod Herod is a dangerous thing, if he allows the poem to open itself on the poem’s terms.

Consider Justice’s solicitous reading of a stray line from Hopkins, “Wíry and whìte-fíery and whírlwind-swivellèd snów”:

This line has the same sort of flash and dash that some effects in Turner’s landscapes, also of the 19th century, seem to have. It cannot quite be held to the literal representation of a thing, nor can a degree of the literal be wholly denied it. It can be said in this sense to be brimming with suggestion. White, of course, does signify in respect to a snowstorm; it is literal enough. But what of wiry and fiery? I have seen a good deal of snow in my time and have yet to see any that could be accurately described as wiry—possibly in a Japanese print featuring snow falling; nowhere else. As for fiery, perhaps if there were lightning in the vicinity it might apply, but this must be a rather rare weather phenomenon, and one, in any case, not mentioned in the newspaper accounts of the time on which Hopkins depended. Nor is there a possibility of fires running through the rigging of the ship, for many of the passengers sought refuge by climbing into the rigging and hanging on. We are left to guess and to gloss as imaginatively as possible.

The critic is after the music of poetry here, the moment where meaning comes a little loose in the drive toward sound (think how the confused, disruptive shouts in the first scene of The Tempest, distant ancestor to The Wreck of the Deutschland, let the storm break into the reasoned progress of dialogue). The passage starts with a brilliant remark—those late Turners of wash and smear, scrawl and smudge, do seem the synaesthetic equivalent of Hopkins, if we allow that both artists believed photographic accuracy did not compensate for the loss of psychological suggestion. (Turner did not want to be Canaletto any more than Hopkins wanted to be Browning.) Here the manner of the critic is all. Justice has teased out the evidence of Japanese prints, weather reports, and the logic of rigging, all to admit the fault (that the line is not literally accurate) and reward the virtue (that what Hopkins is after is beyond precision). The critic’s very judiciousness proves striking—and not merely because of Eliot’s droll remark that for the perfect critic “there is no method except to be very intelligent.”

As a critic, Justice had the advantage of writing more or less at whim (there are different advantages to writing on demand). How delicately, after the passage above, the poet approached the matter of meaning: “Poetry is thought to have, like royalty, its privileges, one of which is to hover perpetually just above sense.” That hovering is what defeats so many readers unused to poetry—you cannot read poems until you learn to read what is not there as well as what is. Indeed, there are some forms of meaning the poem may refuse to offer. The characteristic that applies to Justice’s criticism, the one he might have valued most as a compliment, is its reasonableness: it refuses to make a case stronger than the evidence allows, accepting that, so far as meaning goes, not every edge of the carpet can be nailed down—or pulled up, for that matter.

If Justice failed to see that “fiery” might refer to the burning sensation of extreme cold (and perhaps the white-hot color as well), he was also the type of critic who would have been pleased to have it pointed out—and delighted to argue the matter. (Doesn’t a sharp blast of snow prickle the face like icy wires?) Indeed, the critic is out not to exhaust all possible meanings but to suggest how, as meaning occurs, it bears upon the poem panoramically. Even in the plainest passage, such a critical eye can find something worth remark. That, as his students know, was the method Justice applied in workshop—he loved to alight on style in an unusual way, or upon some point of craft rarely noticed. He never drafted a lecture on a linebreak, but he might offer a long aside—like Mozart skimming through a set of variations—about the effects to be had by breaking the bone of a line anywhere else.

It was axiomatic of Justice’s practice that technique meant something—but not too much. Though he adored the effects of meter, he felt obliged to say, “It seems a mistake for a rationalist defender of the meters to insist on too much meaningfulness.” He had in mind those writers of metrical handbooks who think that every reversed foot is a peripeteia. One of the pleasures of an even temperament is that it never likes to see things carried too far (if such a poet bears a tattoo, it is Terence’s Ne quid nimis). Justice loved the part of poetry that asked for a formal vocabulary, that required some thinking beyond the mere matter of the poem—as he put it, the “meters signify this much at least, that we are at that remove from life which traditionally we have called art.” Life might provide the germ of art; but it could not become art without added pressure.

Wordsworth’s formula in the preface to Lyrical Ballads has hardened into one of the most troubling dogmas of modern poetry:

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears.

The last part, though rarely quoted, borrows that longing so rare in poetry before the Romantics, if we exclude Donne: the wish for poetry to be drawn from the same springs as science. The chemical reaction Wordsworth imagines, in which the tranquility is gradually dissolved so that the original overwhelming emotion emerges, is no distant cousin to the operation of Eliot’s shred of platinum in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in which the mind of the poet is compared to the catalyst, itself left unchanged, that transforms experience into poetry. (Eliot misunderstood his chemistry: not only did the reaction he described produce sulfuric acid, not sulphurous, but a catalyst merely accelerates or inhibits a reaction—it does not cause it. Eliot’s metaphorical chamber also lacked the necessary hydrogen. Still, one knows what he meant.)

Justice felt that Wordworth’s formula was often applied too slavishly, and that it omitted a final step: “Let emotion be recollected, in tranquillity or turmoil, as luck and temperament would have it. And then what? Art lies still in the future.” And then what? That is the voice of the skeptic at the back of the room. Justice compared meter to the photographer’s chemicals, an analogy superficially derived from that Romantic entanglement with science: “Such artifices are, let us say, the fixatives. Like the chemicals in the darkroom, they are useful in developing the negative.” The darkroom chemicals here, however, are part homage to Wordsworth and part dissent—a challenge to recognize the part of form in inspiration. Inspiration may require not freedom but fetters.

If for an audience the meters function in part to call back the words of the poem, so for the poet they may help to call the words forth, at the same time casting over them the illusion of a necessary or at least not inappropriate fitness and order… . The meters serve as a neutral and impersonal check on self-indulgence and whimsy; a subjective event gets made over into something more like an object.

Of course Justice is writing nearly two centuries later—for Wordsworth meter was the fixed and unexamined medium of poetry. The later poet is defending a medium whose beauties had been despised, or even forgotten. There, there again, is that refusal to go too far, to overstate the case merely for the drama of it; one might say that his characteristic style was itself a “check on self-indulgence and whimsy.” Just as the poem might be emotion recollected, it could be form recollected, the poem drawn to words through the action of the form. The inventions promised in or demanded by form were for Justice just as authoritative and eloquent as the invocations of memory, and perhaps on occasion even more so.

It is rare to find a critic so personal so deeply steeped in the persuasions of craft. Most of Justice’s criticism was uneasy, short, even abrupt or truncated. If the cause was perhaps that he took little comfort in the critic’s role, the impulse, as in his fine piece on the free-verse line in Stevens, was to illuminate technique—not the recondite or occult, but matters of craft other critics tended to overlook, they were so familiar. His work enjoyed the merit of the practical critic—he took to criticism to explain something to himself. Of those short lines in Stevens:

There is more here than meets the eye, so to speak, and the presence of other determining features than the visual is one reason his verse can seem so rich and resonant, even when the ideas are relatively trivial or repetitive.

I am reminded of gallery reviews written by painters who, ignoring whether a painting is abstract or still life, go immediately to the mechanics of art—how the brush is loaded, how long the strokes, how dark the underpainting. Justice wrote that Stevens’s short lines “become rich in particulars, bristling with nouns and verbs, incapable, it would seem, of becoming discursive and philosophical, as Stevens in his longer lines does seem incorrigibly tempted to become.” In such a passage, you sense not just the poet looking at the minutiae of technique, but a fellow practitioner curious about how poems are put together, methods he might make use of himself. It’s like looking over the watchmaker’s shoulder as he disassembles a Patek Philippe.

A certain contrariness in Justice’s character made its way winningly into his criticism. He was always willing to question a certainty, merely to see where a reversal of expectation led. (I’m reminded of Auden’s practice in revision of tossing a “not” into a line.) Justice was proud of being stoical—he was “appalled” to hear one poet say he had moved an audience of high-school students to tears—but he did like to analyze those moments he felt touched in some obscure way. In his piece on “The Prose Sublime,” he finds himself thinking that the subject may be the vehicle for the style, not vice versa, the reader moved not by meaning but simply by the way the words are arranged. (He might have found an analogy in pop songs, where the lyrics may be indecipherable or misunderstood, without much changing the emotional effect.)

This is an outlandish argument, which Justice immediately qualifies, but, without having seen the partial truth, there would be nothing to qualify. If we are not moved only by the subject, in verse or prose, then how much we are moved by style alone? This has been forgotten at a moment more devoted, almost as an article of faith, to the poem’s humdrum stuffing. Of course, contemporary academic critics scarcely believe the poet says anything himself—he is just the wooden dummy for that greatest of ventriloquists, the Spirit of the Times. You only have to think of the dreadful verse now ritually offered up at Presidential inaugurations to lament that subject has beaten style to death.

In the pieces on the prose sublime, on the oblivion that haunts even the best writer, on the necessary obscurity of poetry, and on the music of words, Justice’s talent for observation is married to a scrupulous curiosity about (and a private delight in) the secret workings of the art. The play of sound in poetry has never been more judiciously described, with shrewd consideration of its effects and a refusal to make too much of them. Reading these short essays, I regret that Justice didn’t devote himself more thoroughly to criticism, once or twice a year. Those who were never in his workshops may read with envy his delicately nuanced interpretation of “Eros Turannos,” an easy poem to love but a difficult one to know—envy because so many other readings of sensible brilliance have been lost to all but the memories of Justice’s students.

What Empson did dramatically and even melodramatically, Justice did modestly, with the tact of discrimination. What his criticism does best is show how a poet approaches poetry from within. Justice left a series of four essays on writing his own poems, essays that will interest readers haunted by the drafts of Wordsworth or Keats, which lack only the poet’s commentary. The essays register Justice’s slight bemusement at the direction of finished poem, often askew from the original idea, but also his pleasure as the language bore itself toward an end, with the artist’s connivance and even cunning, yet in a way slightly beyond his control. The poet who so loved rules and games recorded when he allowed a rhyme to slip or where he simply deleted a line the form required, almost as a reward for having fulfilled the terms of engagement elsewhere. One can have forms, and follow forms, and believe in forms—but not too much.

Poets generally reach back to go forward (as Eliot harked back to Donne), though they risk being stranded by the taste of the age. In the long run, perhaps, matters level out, but a poet’s life is short and the horizon of his career shorter. Justice was drawn to poets who, though serious, lived in the “underworld or underclass of art.” His introduction to the work of Weldon Kees is fond but critical—Justice saw the limitation of his poems, even as he made a plea for their virtues. The quiet acts of rescue he performed (most importantly for Joe Bolton, his student at the University of Florida) reveal a modest rage against neglect. Justice was forever mystified by fashion, which could promote the mediocre fool or abandon the out-of-sorts genius. (“There is a randomness in the operation of the laws of fame,” he wrote, “that approaches the chaotic.”) The coarse historical question, as he noted, is why Hopkins’s music should be praised while Swinburne’s is condemned. I doubt Justice would have disagreed that Hopkins—or Hart Crane, for that matter—was a poet far superior to Swinburne. The answer is that what these poets had in common was, in Swinburne’s case, vulgarized by what they did not.

In his second and final book of criticism, Oblivion (1998), Justice gathered half-a-dozen new essays along with a scrap or two, reprinting only a few pieces from Platonic Scripts. Lying behind all these essays is a deep attention not just to matters rarely discussed, but to the power of poetry imbued with the unsaid. Critics rarely mention how often in first reading a poem we find ourselves in a state of confusion. “I suppose everyone must agree,” Justice suggested, “that in the normal course of going through poems we put up with a good deal of obscurity, and with oddly little complaining.” Even after close study, there may be lines or passages that do not open themselves to meaning (not to mention poems like Ashbery’s, where mystification is part of the entertainment). Justice argued that, not only is such mystery a pleasure, but also that words have a power beyond their petty meanings, though that power may be hard to isolate or define. He went this far, in one of those graceful acts of qualification at which he was a master—that “obscurity is not the path to the sublime; but then in fairness you must add that neither does it defeat the sublime.” He also admitted, mildly, “I am one of those who like poetry that is difficult, up to a point.”

Justice felt it almost a moral imperative to oppose the taste of the age, though not simply because it was the taste of the age. (That is one of many ways in which his criticism might offer a code of practice.) His gestures of rescue and out-of-the-way judgments were never exercises in indulgent appreciation—he could say of Yvor Winters, his teacher only a few years before, that the “Winters style just won’t stoop as well as it will soar… . The trouble is that in the occasional poems his friends and enemies are scarcely to be distinguished from the gods and heroes of mythology and legend.” This is dry, and surely if we want to choose between dry critics and wet ones, the dry win every time—if you are a dry reader, that is. He remarked of Tennessee Williams:

The notion of the poet in Orpheus is pretty rudimentary, though perfectly consistent with a notion of the “poetic” which leads Williams to rhapsodies about legless birds that sleep on the wind, etc., and that leaves the rest of us glumly repeating after Bentley—“fake poeticizing.”

Justice was capable of high-voltage wit, though after his scattered early reviews he never practiced it in print. He said of Paul Goodman, “Such a poet is more than usually at the mercy of circumstance,” while calling Kenneth Patchen “this Thurber of Bohemia.” It was a brutality for which Justice later provided an alternative, though in private he liked poetry criticism of the knockabout sort.

A critic half at odds with his medium can sometimes make profit from necessity, and Justice’s critical gift sometimes lay in writing notes around a subject. There are virtues to sustained argument, to be sure, but they are not always the virtues of the prolonged act of notice that is the poet’s art. Such minute observation frees the critic from contriving an argument where he feels none, and permits (in the way of Lamb’s essays) a tour around the islands of a subject, with no grander purpose except to see what is there. Indeed, to place Justice’s characteristic understatement in context (he agreed in an interview that for him “understatement is … practically, a religious principle”), we might remember that in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle wrote, “The sincere man will diverge from the truth, if at all, in the direction of understatement rather than exaggeration.” That might be called a sincerity that is embraced by not making too much fuss over itself—but then followers of the Golden Mean form a lonely club.

Poets have three or perhaps four lives after their deaths—the life in scholarship (which ranks poets by the Ph.D. dissertations devoted to them); the life in anthologies (where the reputations of most poets survive, those that survive at all); and the life in biography (where a dramatic tale can insure survival of even a second-rate poet, while domestic contentment may doom a poet much better)—but each distorts the poet’s achievement in a different and unhappy way. The afterlife most poets wish for comes among readers, yet, after a few decades, readers require introduction—that is the burden and honorable labor of the critic. Biographies of Byron are read far more frequently than the poems on which they stand. For every thousand readers of the tales of his life, perhaps one gets through Don Juan and is grateful. The lives inform us and entertain us in every superficial way, but the poems, if great enough, educate us in ways that are never repeated.

The life of a critic is rarely an artful matter. If you are also a poet, you live as a critic partly in opposition to the art. The virtue of Donald Justice’s criticism is not merely in its illumination of the byways of craft, or his close knowledge of poetic art, but in the skeptical and humane intelligence that refused the thumps and blows a poetry critic is tempted to offer. He is one of the finest critics of manners after Eliot—and by manners I do not mean just “hat politeness,” as it once was called. A critic of manners examines the duties as well as desolations of poetry, examines the private virtues of a public art. Justice would never have considered himself a major critic, one who shifted borders or shouldered rivers from their beds. He was, instead, a grand and microscopic noticer, like one of those blazingly intelligent English clergymen who stood in Darwin’s shadow and saw the world always anew.