I Don't Get Literary Criticism

File this under "old news", but I'm just getting around to it due to some recent reading that reinforces my old prejudices.

A couple of years ago at the Absolute Write poetry forum we had a thread about critique vs. criticism. Now I enjoy poetry critique, but I've never really liked literary criticism. I contributed to the thread, including this:

Criticism, on the other hand, is evaluating completed poems and comparing them to some standard that the critic holds regarding poetry. We might not state the standard, but it's always there in the background.

To this a most learned lady replied, a professor of some sort, obviously highly educated, also very sure of what she says. Her reply to the above was:

Be careful about conflating the common use of criticism with literary criticism; they are not the same. Literary criticism, and critical theory, are ways of reading texts that are interpretive, rather than evaluative.



One way of thinking of criticism is to look at it as a reader attempting to find personal meaning in a text, to discover how, and why, a text (a poem, a song, a novel, a letter, an advertisement) does or does not "work" for that reader.

Which brings me to the reading I did that finally spurred me to write this post. At the Chicago Publishers Row Lit Fest in June, I picked up the book The End of the Poem by Paul Muldoon. There were drawn from a series of 15 lectures Muldoon gave at Oxford University in the first decade of this century. Now I don't know Muldoon, had never heard of him before. But the book was marked down from $17 to $4, I liked the title, the TOC looked interesting, and so I bought. About two weeks ago I finally got it out of the bag and began reading it.

This is a book of literary criticism, I guess. Muldoon starts out evaluating Yeat's "All Souls' Night", which he ties line by line to various works of Keats, and to other works of Yeats. He looked at lines, structure, even the date it was written, and showed how this line and that line Yeats had borrowed from Keats, and how he was signalling that he was borrowing from Keats. At the end of the lecture/chapter, I found myself more confused than elucidated.

He then went on to Ted Hughes' "The Literary Life". He evaluated this one all right. It appears to have been about an encounter Hughes and Sylvia Plath had with Marianne Moore in 1958. The poem definitely seemed to be about a real encounter, and hence at least somewhat or maybe entirely autobiographical. At one point Muldoon wrote:

I want to concentrate in this chapter on that aspect of the phrase "the end of the poem" connected to the notion of there being "no barriers" between the poem and the biography of its author—including the hinterland of the letter, the journal, the gossip column....

In addition to this, Muldoon does this same line by line (not every line, but many of them) tying of the poem to other works by Hughes, by Plath, by Moore, and others. I reject this idea that the poem must be autobiographical. That's what he seems to be saying in the quote above. Why must every poem be autobiographical? Why must a poem by a poet be tied to other poems by the same poet? Can he/she not have works totally independent of each other?

Muldoon moves on the Robert Frost's "The Mountain", a poem I discovered three years ago and fell in love with. Muldoon, however, butchers it in his evaluation. The name of the mountain is Hor. This, he says, is a lot like hoar and hoary, which connote white and cold things—frost. Thus Frost is cluing us in to his name through naming the mountain Hor.

Give me a break. Is this what literary critics do? No wonder I never liked it. Could frost never mention ice or frost or cold or white or hoary without some over-reaching critic say it has to be about his own name, and hence autobiographical? This whole the poem must be autobiographical and must be tied to the rest of the poet's body of work and must be tied to poems that poet might have read and must have borrowed from disgusts me.

Give me critique any old day. Literary criticism and me have parted company, and I suspect we will never rejoin, unless those guys who met to define it meet and change the definition.

I Should Be Writing

Back from the funeral, no major household projects going on, reasonable workload at the office, no upcoming trip to prepare for, the checkbook mostly up to date, household finances needing only 30 minutes to bring them up to date. I should be writing. But I'm not.

Yesterday I posted one of my older poems for critique at the Absolute Write poetry forum. Three crits later it's sinking and will hit the oblivion of page 2 today. That caused me to pull out Father Daughter Day yesterday and go through it last night and mark edits that had either accumulated in my mind or that I saw as I read. That's done, and I'll type those edits today sometime. And I did a very minor critique of another person's poem yesterday.

More than a week ago I began a new article for Suite101.com, about preparing for a deposition. Since I had just done that, I thought it would make for a good article, quickly written. Then the funeral trip interrupted me, and I haven't felt like getting back to it. I even did some key word research using some Google tools, and it looks as if it will be a profitable article. Yet, I just don't feel like writing it.

I suppose I'll snap out of it soon. Maybe if I get those few entries made in my financial spreadsheet I'll feel freed-up to write again. I think what's holding me back is the utter futility of it all. And the realization I'm trying to build a platform that may or may not grow to the size I need. My articles on Suite 101 are getting page views at a current rate of 80,000 per year. That's good! Eighty-thousand people a year are reading my stuff. But almost none of those people are looking for my writing. They are looking for information on something, and happen to find mine by a search engine. So will an editor see all those hits and all those people reading my writing as evidence of a platform and quality writing, or as an accident?

Still, I've nothing else to do but plunge back in and get some more articles up. Three more and I begin earning a ten percent bonus. I could have three articles up in three days. I'll do it. I'll probably get that one article finished and post it tonight, and shoot for having two more up by Sunday. During our weekend trip I worked on the analysis of another Robert Frost poem. That will give me at least three articles.

I still need to articulate steps two and three of my platform-building plan. Maybe I'll make that my next post.

Robert Frost on Poetry

Last night I was dead tired when I got home, for some reason. Was it the emotional letdown after the successful class I taught during yesterday's noon hour? Or was it my bagworm ministry for 35 minutes before church yesterday evening? Or might it just be over-eating and under-sleeping while the wife's away? For whatever reason, I slept the sleep of the dead last night--until about 3:30 AM, when I woke up and felt something crawling on me, something insect-sized. I pulled it off, squished it between fingers, and rolled over. I suspect a tick picked up from the bagworm infested bush. Of course, after that I imagined every little itch to be a tick and probably pulled off several imaginary ones. Still, I got back to sleep and slept well.


I'm working on several articles for Suite101.com, including one on a book I checked out from the Bentonville library, The Notebooks of Robert Frost. I waited for this book to come in, then was somewhat disappointed in it when I finally got it. I guess I expected to see drafts of all of Frost's famous poems and observe how he went about his compositions. Or maybe I expected copious notes of his poetic philosophy, or preparation for his many lectures.


The book has little of that. I'm going to write a review of it for Suite101.com, so I can't put all of what I want to say here. But I did find an interesting segment with some quotes on poetry. Quotations allegedly from Frost about "Poetry is..." are rampant, such as "Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom." Maybe he said this, maybe he didn't. I never see those with source citations. But this book documents some things Frost wrote about poetry. In his Notebook 38, he wrote the following under the heading "Poetry":

• Poetry is prowess
• Poetry is the renewal of words
• Poetry is the dawning of an idea
• Poetry is that which tends to evaporate from both prose and verse when translated.
• Poetry is the Liberal Arts. The Liberal Arts are Poetry.
• A poem is a momentary stay against confusion
• Poet is a master of sentiment

According to footnotes in the book, the prowess comment would be related to Frost's lecture titled "Poetry as Prowess", and the renewal comment is related to his lecture titled "The Renewal of Words".


Now, I have not yet studied these sayings of Frost. Perhaps he wrote them together in notebook 38 as a list of lectures given or that he thought he might give someday. I see that he repeated a couple of these in notebook 26.


The notebooks are hard reading, and I can see I would need to own a copy to really get much out of them, for in the little time I have the book for (actually, it's already three days overdue), and as difficult as it is to read for long sittings, I'm not getting all that much out of it. But he has some gems in it that are worth thinking and remembering. In the same notebook 38, after his list of what poetry is, he has this statement, evidently intended to be another statement of what poetry is:

• Difference between smoke and smoke rings.

That's good enough for me. Off to the library now to beg forgiveness and hopefully renew this overdue book for a couple of more weeks. I need to see a few more gems in it.

SEO: An Unfruitful Weekend Study

Due to my low revenues from my Suite101.com posts to date, I had little motivation to write articles for that content site this weekend. It seemed to me that blackberry picking would be more profitable (got about a quart). I wanted to push through the discouragement to write a poetry article and a history article. I even brought home some references from the office to maybe write a civil engineering article. Alas, on Friday evening I decided I really should 1) clean-up the articles already written for linking and images, and 2) do some research in SEO: search engine optimization.

The clean-up was easy. I found some public domain photos residing on the Internet, with the site giving permission to copy and use. And I added a bunch of links, internal and external to Suite 101, to my existing articles. I'm probably not done with that, but I'm close. On to SEO.

I found, however, that I couldn't deal effectively with SEO. I found plenty of references, but my mind was just not in it. I'd pull up a reference, and begin to read, but quickly said to myself, "Is this really necessary? How does this equate to advancing a career in creative writing? How will my ego, demeanor, and pocketbook be bettered by this? And how will this affect my creative writing? Will it diminish my other writing?" Not being able to answer, I kept shifting to mindless computer games--as if Minesweeper will better advance my second career.

By Sunday afternoon I had had enough. Since SEO wasn't working, I knuckled down and wrote two articles and posted them. One is the last in my series about Robert Frost's poem "Into My Own." The other is in my continuing series on the lead-up to the American Revolution, this one on some writing of Samuel Adams. These are probably not any better optimized for SEO than ones I posted earlier. They do, however, have links and images. And today I'm getting some hits for them.

This morning before work I was able to concentrate a little on SEO. I found some good training sites and copied and pasted them into a Word document, and printed a few pages. I think part of my problem is I still have not learned to read stuff on the web for comprehension. I need to learn that to save a tree or two, but I'm not there yet. So my reading material for the evening is in hand. I'm off to plan the next two engineering articles I'll write.

Miscellaneous Musing on an Unexpectedly Free Lunch Hour

I should probably be writing something that will someday lead to revenue, but I find myself drawn here instead. I had a lunch appointment today, but the other party cancelled unexpectedly. I'll have to go out and buy something shortly, but until then I'll enter a few miscellaneous musings here.

• I'm up to 19 articles posted on Suite101.com, and have maybe four in the hopper that may jump out this weekend. The writing is enjoyable. Unlike at some Internet content sites I get to choose my own topics, the articles go life as soon as I post them, and I can edit them as needed. Unfortunately, so far I have earned only $0.03 (not a typo) based on ad clicks, on none for over a week.
• This search engine optimization thing (SEO) is going to have a steep learning curve, I'm afraid. No doubt my failure to do this well is keeping my page views low, thus fewer viewers to click on the ads. But to learn SEO will take hours and hours of reading and experimentation. You have to know this because Google and other search engines are the main way readers find your articles. So titles, subtitles, meta tags (still not quite sure what they are or if they still hold importance or not-the SEO experts seem unsure of this), and image captions all need to be "key-word rich". Yuck. I must now bow down to the Google altar.
• Suite 101 now requires that each article include at least one image, preferably more. This is adding a lot of minutes to the time it takes to ready an article for posting. Yet, the SEO experts say this is part of SEO and I will benefit by doing it. I have to believe the experts, I suppose, but I'll believe it when I see it.
• As expected, writing for Suite101.com is taking pretty much all my creative writing time. I've not even thought about other freelance queries, or novels, or Bible studies. Well, except for the Bible study I'll begin teaching in about three weeks. I have that pretty much completed as much as I need for teaching. And about a week ago I worked on an appendix to the Harmony of the Gospels. I have about an hour to do to finish that appendix, and hope to do it this weekend.
• The good news is that poetry has returned and filled what little time I have for creative writing outside of the Suite stuff. It hasn't returned in a big way, but at least it has returned. Possibly writing the Suite articles on Robert Frost was part of the catalyst for that.

Well, I'm off to either buy a lunch or forage. This weekend may be the height of blackberry season in these parts, and I hope to pick a bunch.

Book Review: "Robert Frost" (a book by that title)

Given that Robert Frost is my favorite poet, and that I've been writing some articles on him at Suite101.com, I decided to do a little more research on him. So I got the book from the public library Robert Frost by Philip L. Gerber, 1982 G. H. Hall & Co. ISBN 0-8057-7348-7. This was originally published in 1966, and is part of the "Twayne's United States Authors Series."

At 171 pages, this is rather slim as Frost career-length reviews go. This is based on the bibliography in the book, which lists several multi-volume studies. As such, I suppose this could be called a Frost primer. That's perfect for me. It is divided into six chapters:

1. Man Into Myth: Frost's Life
2. Poet in a Landscape: Frost's Career
3. The Appropriate Tools: Frost's Craftsmanship
4. The Aim Was Song: Frost's Theories
5. Roughly Zones: Frost's Themes
6. Testing Greatness: Frost's Critical Reception

Each of these presented a pretty good discussion of the subject. Well, to my layman's mind it was a good discussion. I'm sure those more learned in Frost would laugh at the brevity of it. But again I suggest that this is exactly the type of book needed for someone who had never read a Frost criticism or biography. The chapter on his life did a good job of exploding the myth Frost worked so hard to create: that he was a New England farmer. He may have done some of that, but except perhaps for some very early years he never did it to make money. Possibly his living on a farm and resulting observations gave fodder for poems. If so, who cares exactly what his career was? Although he never earned a degree, he spent a lot of years on college campuses, either as poet-in-residence or professor. It would seem his main income came from these, supplemented by book sales. Or maybe the other way around.

My favorite chapters were on Frost's craftsmanship and on his theories of poetry. He alone among the major American poets bucked the trend to imagism and modernism (okay, maybe Edna St. Vincent Milay also). He was called old fashioned for writing in rhyme, meter, and form. Although his first couple of books were highly acclaimed, the "experts" said he would have no staying power. He proved them wrong, and I, in my semi-learned state, believe his staying power was because he wrote in form. People still like that, and are more likely to buy that than other things that pass as poetry.

I especially liked the things Gerber said about "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening." While I can't really continue to use this as an excuse, it was this poem, or rather it's treatment by a succession of English teachers in junior and senior high, that ruined poetry for me for thirty years. They said this was a suicide poem. I didn't see it. They said I had to see it. I said I didn't see it. They said I had to see it. I said I didn't. I decided I either wasn't cut out for poetry or it was something I wouldn't get, so from that point on I parted ways with it, building a New England stone wall between us. Here's what Gerber wrote about it:

Critics have from the start appreciated his skill in handling metaphor and symbol. Perhaps it is a part of his basis for protest that in their zeal the critics overdid it, as they have generally overdone so much in the twentieth century and as they have specifically overdone Frost's own "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

To say that "Stopping by Woods" has been one of the most discussed poems of the twentieth century is an understatement. It has been analyzed, explicated, dissected--sometimes brilliantly--but altogether to the point of tedium. ...Proud as Frost was of this lyric, and only partly because it got into the anthologies more frequently than any other, he felt that readers made themselves too busy over "my heavy duty poem" and squeezed it for meanings not present...."

...Frost ordinarily gained amusement from the meanings people located in his work, meanings he claimed to have been totally unaware of. ...he became downright touchy about the "busymindedness" that inspired the ceaseless flow of questions, many of them asinine indeed, concerning the minutiae of "Stopping by Woods."

He was irritated by people who asked to know the name of the man who did the stopping. It appalled him to have someone write inquiring whether those woods really fill up with snow. ...Who would be going home that way so late at night? What did the woods mean? What did the snow stand for? Could a horse really ask questions?

Ah, so I was right and my teachers were wrong! And to think they cost me thirty years--no, can't blame them. But wait, what's that Gerber writes just a little further on?

Like other major poets, Robert Frost writes on multiple levels of meaning. ...Frost's symbols are hidden like children's Easter eggs--barely out of reach and easily found.

...His gift was for creating an artifice so vivid, moving, and significant on the initial level that any probing for further rewards can seem like meddlesome prying....

Well, I guess I'll have to give up and begin looking for those hidden meanings Frost hid like Easter eggs. At least I don't have to go digging holes to do so.

The section "How Poems Arise" is a good two page description of how Frost went about capturing ideas and setting them to verse. I won't go into details, but it's not too far from my own: a long gestation period before anything ever escapes the mind and finds paper.

I give this book an enthusiastic recommendation for all who want to explore Robert Frost and his world and his poetry. It's a shame it has to go back to the library in a few days. I could benefit from a second reading.

Thinking about the excellence of Robert Frost

In my new-found freelance career, I'm posting at Suite101.com. Two of my first handful of articles there are about Robert Frost's poem "Into My Own." This was the first poem in Frost's first book, A Boy's Will. I began reading this poem about three of four years ago after I bought the book, The Poetry of Robert Frost: The collected poems, complete and unabridged. "Into My Own" was the first poem in the book, given that the book is arranged chronologically by publication. I've read on farther into the book, but keep coming back to this one.

Frost uses a number of poetic devices in the poem. His form is the sonnet, but with rhyming couplets in lieu of any of the sonnet interlocking rhymes. His meter is iambic, as the sonnet demands. He uses metaphor and imagery. His word choices are great. The line breaks are masterfully chosen. Even though the form dictates where a line break should be, Frost's lines progress in a way that later lines requires re-interpretation of earlier lines. What more could you ask for in a poem?

I'm writing a series of articles on Suite 101 about this poem. So far I have posted, or have enough material for, the following.

• Robert Frost's "Into My Own": An Overview
• Imagery and Metaphor in "Into My Own"
• Word Choices in "Into My Own"
• Rhyme and Meter Enhance "Into My Own"
• Effective Use of Line Breaks in "Into My Own"

The 800 word limitation in Suite 101 articles means I need to break this up as shown. Will I write all five articles? I'm not sure, but I'm seriously thinking about it.

But as I've done so I'm somewhat sobered concerning my own poetry. Frost is such a master, I shouldn't compare myself to him. Yet, when I read "Into My Own", one of his less-well known poems, and see how much excellence is in it, I can't help but wish I could do as well. Did Frost set out to do all that he did in this one 14 line poem? Did he really think through those excellent word choices? Did he plan the poem to progressively reveal the character and to not finish with the character building until the last line? Or did the poem just come out in a rush of emotion and creativity, as many people think you should write poetry?

Well, it's something to strive for, that's for sure. But, given that I have not analyzed any of Frost's other poems as much as I have this one, I'm wondering what else is in store for me in these 607 pages. Will I analyze the rest of them to such an extent that I write five 600-word essays on each one? That would be a lifetime of work.