Comments on: Weekly Prose Feature: “The Eolian Self” by Bruce Bond

By: Graham

Graham — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:42:11 +0000

I am the grumpypants in question. I’m not sure why I turned up as “Grah” rather than “Graham,” but so be it. Mr. Bonds, I’m very grateful for your long and thoughtful response–I think I’d suggest that you have a Coleridge study in you that doesn’t fully converge with your concerns over the creation of American literary history. I think–and I honestly do not mean this unkindly–that you suffer from what Dorothy Sayers called over-procession of the Spirit–a mighty wind of splendid words. I think I could use a little more anchoring. You yourself point out, “Language must have an outside.” “The Romantics open for investigation the paradox that will continue to haunt post-war critical culture”–post-war? Which war? The Napoleonic Wars, closest to the Romantics in time? The Crimean? Often, post-war means “after 1945,” but I’m not sure how we got from 1815 to 1960 in six words. Yes, I was in part jesting about the romance and Early Modern France, but this just gives rise to more questions. “The defining characteristic for a Medieval romance has less to do with the stability of the self than with the sense of wonder made possible by a lost sense of continuity with a thing idealized after the fact”–a kind of false nostalgia; an interesting idea, but is that in fact a good description of “The Alexander Romance,” or “Cliges,” or “Sir Orfeo”? I think *those* romances are more like testing-grounds for manners, ethics, and moral self-creation. They all feature wonder, but not, I think the kind of wonder that comes from idealizing realities after the fact–not so many have flown to heaven borne up by griffins, or lost a wife to sinister fairies, and *then* decided afterward that it was better than it seemed at the time (“You know, griffins really *stink*. But I won’t mention that in the writeup…”). “Early Modern” is not–as you know–the same thing at all, since it describes what we used to call “the Renaissance”–and their romances were by the likes of Calprenede and Scudery, and perhaps, although fantastical in other ways, closer to the refracted nostalgia you describe. I’m not remotely, as another poet puts it, a “pedantic literalist”–I think I’d just be more comfortable with your defense of the metaphysical if it were more specific, and I think it *can* be more specific without sacrificing a necessary relationship to mystery, as you say.

By: Chavala

Chavala — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 00:39:38 +0000

I found a lot of wisdom in Bruce Bond’s essay and agree with his perception of the fickleness of poetic reductivism. Bond was awfully kind to the person with the harsh response, by the way.

By: Bruce Bond

Bruce Bond — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:31:28 +0000

Oh my, I had no idea that I would anger someone so, and I am indeed a bit saddened by the response. But so it is. A couple things. Note that I say broad-stroke literary history is easy target, so yes, there is an aspect to what I have done that is easier than actually constructing a literary sketch of history. Absolutely. That said, Swenson’s particular sketch that goes back to Perloff in part (at least the division of history into two traditions) and farther (in terms of the Romantic view of self) is often constructed in a way to defend an anti-metaphysical strain that is decidedly anti-Romantic. What I want to suggest is that there is often a simplification of the nature of language, meaning, and poetry that results, and indeed there are necessary metaphysical assumptions that make language possible no matter what the tradition. My intent is not to “beat up” anyone, however I do want to challenge the assumptions in that intro as something not specific to Swenson but far more broad in its implications. The old sense of “romance” in this language has to do with Medieval romance, a genre made possible actually with the dawn of a new skepticism and the end of what Barfield calls “participation consciousness.” Sorry if that was unclear. I was asked to keep the article fairly short and did not want to get too off topic. The romance genre then articulates a longing to get recapture some of what it lost to reason–a process akin to what we might go through as children. Thus, the defining characteristic for a Medieval romance has less to do with the stability of the self than with the sense of wonder made possible by a lost sense of continuity with a thing idealized after the fact. I know you were making fun of me, but yes, Early Modern France is a good example. Gilgamesh is less so. What is beneath the ground is akin to the unconscious–if we believe in such a thing, a thing that we do not directly experience but nevertheless we might postulate as real. I think that postulation is pretty critical to me personally and to those I know who struggle to make sense of their nature. The metaphor of metaphysical ground is therefore paradoxical, since “ground” is a figure more appropriate for empiricism. So I like to think of the postulation of some necessary summons beyond appearance as equally groundless. I see acknowledgement of this groundless ground is critical to mental health. If we see ourselves as some floating subjectivity with the full powers to create our universe as we please, then, well, I worry. There is a hubris in that and a kind of delusion. Naturally I wish I had not angered the last reader so. He or she makes good points, but I do think there is an important thing at stake in critiquing a version of literary history that is fundamentally anti-metaphysical in its roots. Meaning cannot be reduced to mere form–OK, that argument needs space to make, and I realize it might or might not sound convincing. But the result of a resistance to metaphysics and a simplistic conflation of form and meaning lead to a view of meaning that could generate a less committed and abundantly meaningful poetics, less charged with the pressure of the real, as Stevens says, which to me is the pressure of necessity. And yes, I will own the “grandiloquent” label. Mea culpa. I am a sucker for the intensity of that kind. My hope is that readers will see past what they hate in what I love and recognize that indeed there is something at stake here. “Pointless” seems harsh to me, and I might have touched a nerve. I am sorry for that. Be well.

By: Grah

Grah — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 16:35:54 +0000

–but since *American Hybrid* is not a study of Coleridge, but an anthology of contemporary American verse, Mr. Bond’s remarks are essentially pointless. Why beat up on Ms Swenson for a few phrases in an introduction, except that it’s low-hanging fruit? Mr. Bond then concludes with sweeping statements that are even more dubious than Swenson’s: “Such is poetry’s great humanizing gift: to provoke us, lure us, to venture out by going in, to venture in by going out. The fruits of this are “romance” in the largest, oldest sense—wonder as not a form of escape but a means of transformation, not an assertion of our stability or sovereignty but an unsettling of the familiar, not a statement of self-importance but a watering of the known ground to glorify the roots that we can never see.” Romance in the largest, oldest sense? What does that mean: the ballad-like poems of Spain, the novels of Early Modern France, Gilgamesh, what? What single genre could possibly transform AND unsettle AND water, but not provide escape, or assert stability? What is the known ground? What are the roots we can never see–are they trees, spirits, skulls, gems? Grandiloquent and weak writing.