Reviewed: On Poetry. Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2013, reissued 11/2016. Paperback $15.95, 176pp.

Home // March.15.2017 // Chris Sinagra

Maxwell's demons

The critic who attempts to tackle a subject as ambitious as that which Professor Glyn Maxwell has taken up-the ontology of poetry-is at risk of biting on more than he can ruminate on, shifting in turn the weight of his burden On Poetry. One must undergo the obligatory self-humbling, since there are anxious hit men waiting to put him out of his misery.

In view of which, let me start with a bang: I do not feel Maxwell has made the proper concessions. My reactionary caveat to the reader is to keep in mind two of the time-old truths any reader should keep in the back of his mind while reading this wonderful book: there is no consensus as to what constitutes poetry, and some works of literature use media other than words to achieve their affects. With that in mind, then, let's listen to how, in his Introduction, Maxwell plugs his own project. He gets off to a running start.

This is a book for anyone.
There are as many outlooks on poetry, on poets, on poems, on poetics, as there are people who read, but my book is for anyone. So forgive me if I leap as far back in time as possible to find a place where we all agree.

. but does not leap very far. We must qualify this first remark, that his book is for "anyone", by noting how it might be "for" the people but neither "about" nor "of" them.

There is no period far enough back in time we could look upon to save us from the essential disagreements regarding poetry, over what it is for and what it is made of.

This is not a bad thing. One of the virtues of Maxwell's book is in his making bold to assay some answers to these questions, in seven essays, each elucidating a virtue of poetry: "White", "Black", "Form", "Pulse", "Chime", "Space", "Time".

There is a delightful poetry in this sequence that makes for a nice sample of what anyone-even the poetaster-can expect from Maxwell's high-minded dilations. We begin with "White", all the colors of light, and end with "Time", a terminus which dilates our own human time in the course of this eschatology. Note the insertion of the anxious convulsing "Pulse" at the center (and it holds). But while grand in his scope, both in vision and subject, Maxwell is not an imperialist philosopher, dividing only to conquer his subject. He shows the tact the critical service he renders unto his subject would ask of him.

We should be concerned with the book's sins as much as its virtues. I am reminded of the non-starter start (the one I quote above) when Maxwell dismisses briskly Dylan's visions of sin: "Bob Dylan and John Keats are at different work. It would be nice never to be asked about this again."

Would Maxwell allow that this is a question that could be asked well, if in asking it we are inviting critic and reader both to take a step back (or a leap) and consider the media in which the two creators work? Maxwell strikes me as presciently dyspeptic about Dylan, though at this time of writing pseudo-dyspepsia about Dylan has roared back into fashion. (See: David Ward in Smithsonian; Christopher Ricks, Francine Prose and Charlie Pierce talking with Christopher Lydon on Radio Open Source; Craig Jenkins in Vulture; Tim Parks in NYRB; Max Rivlin-Nadler in The Village Voice; or Polly Atkin, musing poetical on her blog.)

Really, is there any confusion that Dylan sung and Keats did not? (At least, professionally. I suppose even poets may tra-la-la in an off hour.) I don't think there is, so I should say it seems disingenuous for Maxwell to treat the question as intolerably foolish. There are crucial differences in the art of the writing of song and the art of the writing of poetry, but there is also a crucial overlapping we must attend to. As Ricks, a noble reminder, reminded us upon Dylan's winning the Nobel Prize, the medium of poetry is words alone, whereas the medium for the song is threefold: words, voice, and music. None of the three must be privileged, but considered alongside and among the others in order to make (or understand... ) the art that is Dylan's, an art that is triangulated-as was Shakespeare's. We do not brusque aside Shakespeare because his verse was acted, and like Dylan's, popular among the lay.

Maxwell's essay-chapter on "Pulse" palpitates with first-rate observations, giving us the full breadth of his command over the theme, starting from Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and finishing with Robert Frost. He mentions Byron only within parentheses, which is, I think, a shame. Byron was especially good with pulse. Given what he's written cogently about the authors he does attend to, I am interested to learn about what Maxwell could divine from the these throbbing lines from "Farewell to Thee" (41-4), besides the incestuous love affair:

Should her lineaments resemble
Those thou never more may'st see,
Then thy heart will softly tremble
With a pulse yet true to me.

And I'd have much liked to see what Maxwell would glean from these lines of "Prometheus" (31-4), which pulse not in feverish love but with the stifling anger of shaken majesty:

And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
And in his Soul a vain repentance,
And evil dread so ill dissembled,
That in his hand the lightnings trembled.

Perhaps it's bold of me to wish that this book touched upon authors other than those chosen by the critic to unpack and pick apart. But then, there are more statues of Byron in Greece than there are in Great Britain. The distribution of appreciation across the world, pages and places, us not readily understood. It's too bad that books which catalog case examples in poetic ability can't be infinitely long, with chapter following chapter in endless succession of new pleasures.

For the few cases he had room and spirit enough to touch upon here, Maxwell makes a good go of it. He enriches the commentary with his own lived experiences, and each essay glitters with lucidity. As a set, the essays show many of the virtues we find in the poetry Maxwell loves-not least of these a genuine love for one's subject. Readers who come to this book are likely to share that feeling of affection.

(Though as Samuel Johnson said, "No man but a blockhead wrote except for money." Buy the book and share the love.)

Banner graphic source: Photo (detail) of a 17th-century oil painting ("Waterscape with Rainbow") modeled after Allart van Everdingen. In the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art; in the public domain. This version taken from Wikimedia.