The Poet as Critic

Author(s): Victor Lange

Source: Comparative Literature Studies, , Special Advance Number (1963), pp. 17-23
Published by: Penn State University Press
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VICTOR

LANGE

The

Poet

Critic

as

subject on which I wish to speak briefly is a fascinating one; given

far more time than I have this afternoon, it would be immensely rewarding to examine it in its historical continuity as well as its critical implications
and variations. The relationship between poetic sensibility and the awareness
of critical perspectiveswhich commit the poet within his own work and, at the
same time enable him to judge publicly is an issue that is, of course, not explicitly part of ancient poetic theory; yet, it is relevant to our understanding
of the humanistic tradition from Dante to Sidney and Gottsched as well as of
the subsequent development of critical taste. With this history, however, we
cannot here be concerned. I should like, instead, to single out some aspects of
the larger theme that are more specifically related to the contemporary topic
of this meeting.
In what sense- this will be my question- can it be argued that, in our time,
a particularkind of interest or disposition in the make-up of the poet constitutes
an important and perhaps essential premise of the critical procedure? May not
the poet today claim to be heard not merely in rhetorical self-justification,but
as a critic in his own right and perhaps even in preference to the various
aesthetic, historical, sociological or merely mercantile theorists of literature? If
I argue this question to some extent in terms of the German setting, I do so
with the European mainstream steadily in mind, and in full awareness of the
remarkable differences between the recent history of poetry and poetics in
Germany and in France.
We may assume that between the purposes of the poet and those of the critic
there exists at all times a self-evident connection: originality and judgment,
creativity and mediation, individual artistry and social commitment are always
in discourse with one another. Yet, ever since the mid-eighteenth century, the
critical judgment and the critical performance seem in remarkable measure
to determine the poetic, to make categorical claims as to intellectual priority
and, in literary esteem, even to outrank it. Indeed, ever since Leibnitz, and
the emergence of an analytical philosophical attitude, each age has become
increasingly skeptical of its spontaneous creative energies and inclined, in its
i7

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i8 + COMPARATIVE
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best minds, to consider itself first and foremost determined by critical predilections. Succeeding generations have, of course, defined this term within their
own intellectual presuppositions,but whether we think of Lessing or Diderot,
of Schiller or Goethe, of Coleridge or Schlegel, or Matthew Arnold, SainteBeuve or Tschernyschevsky,of Dilthey or Valry- as each offered a formula for
the character of his time, he claimed the increasing mobility and importance
of the critical judgment in relation to the work of the poet.
But until the early nineteenth century, the poetic performance and the
critical act remained joined in an overriding vision of society within which
both are essentially variants of the same philosophical purpose. For the classicist
writer from Gottsched to Goethe, poetry is the rendering and affirmation of
shared and believed social values; criticism reinforces,articulatesor popularizes
this concept of literature as the natural idiom of a cultural faith. However
academic Lessing's poetic principles may be, his criticism is never divorced from
his social idealism. Schiller intensifies this adherence to a cultural postulate.
He is at the same time the first modern poet for whom the work of art, as a
projectionof a virtual reality, transcendsthe given social conditions; he therefore
separates literary criticism as a philosophical act from the specific aesthetic
exercise of the poet. Poet and critic stand for Schiller in a special relationship
to one another: if they share the poem as their common object, they differ
nevertheless radically from one another in their proceduresand their intentions.
In Friedrich SchlegeFsearly reflectionson literature,the critical activity emancipates itself still more radically from the performance of the poet: as a critic
Schlegel is inclined to accept the given design of the poem without paying
attention to its technical condition. He is not concerned with the question:
"What is a poem?" but is preoccupied almost exclusively with the intellectual
character and the requirements of the critic. What Schlegel envisages is the
critic who has qualities like those of the poet: what the poet constructs, the
critic, favoured over the poet in that he is twice removed from nature, must
reconstruct.Since the critic offers in his discourse a mirror image of the mirror
image of reality, his work transcends the poem. The procedures of criticism
thus become themselves the object of the critic.
But if for Schlegel- and indeed for most German writers until Tieck and
E. T. A. Hoffmann- critic and poet, however different their methods, may
remain effective within one and the same individual, this is no longer due to
any notion of their common social responsibility, as rather to the fact that
criticism, whatever its purpose, requires above all an empirical understanding
of the poet's craft.
Among nineteenth-century German critics, and in the critical utterances of
the poets themselves, this empirical experience ceases altogether to have an
effective bearing on criticism. Literature and criticism fall apart. Criticism defines its terms and its purposes at an ever widening distance from the practices
of the poet, and operates in a speculative or psychological context. In Germany,
far more than in England or in France, criticism becomes academic, pedantic,
rhetorical and therefore non-literary; it petrifies in elaborate systems, and becomes pointless in the quarrels of aesthetic partisans, platitudinous among the

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THE POET AS CRITIC +

19

purveyorsof culture, and mere defensive rhetoric in the pronouncements of the

poets themselves.
For as the tenets and the postulates of literary criticism are made to depend
increasingly on ideological assumptions and the view of poetry becomes more
and more sentimental- this is certainly true in mid-nineteenth century Germany- the poet's understandingof his own craft becomes shallow and inarticulate. Speculative criticism on the one hand, and, as a logical corollary,a view of
the poet as a spontaneous genius, discredit and belittle all serious reflectionson
the poetic process. Critical self-reflection is taken to be a preoccupation with
technical irrelevancies.
Nothing is more striking in its consequences for German nineteenth century
literature than the loss- on the part of poets and critics alike- of pragmatic
view of poetics. There are not many among the more conspicuous German
poets and novelists whose accounts of their own working principles have serious
critical value: Mrike, Stifter, Storm, even Keller or Fontane, are altogether
pedestrian and conventional in their understanding of poetological principles.
None of them appears aware of the critical revolution that is taking place in
France at the same time. The well-known exceptions merely confirm the rule:
Heine, Immermann, Grillparzer,Otto Ludwig or Hebbel prove again and again
the stubborn pull of historical and speculative tendencies upon minds that are
thoroughly aware of the empirical conditions of their craft but unwilling, as
critics, to concede the decisive importance of linguistic or structural considerations.
In Germany it is not, or not yet, as in France, the major poets (such as
Baudelaire or Flaubert, or Mallarm), who concern themselves with practical
criticism, but minor writers such as Heyse, Spielhagen and Freytag. Their
awarenessof poetic craftsmanship,and their understanding of its relevancy to a
theory of literatureis in many ways superior to that of the major critics. What
they have to say about narrative form or dramaturgy,or questions of genre, of
structure, of suspense, of perspective, is incomparably more specific than the
cursory treatment of these topics in the aesthetic or historical or psychological
criticism of Vischer or Dilthey.
Still, even this pragmatic criticism of the minor talents remains, in a sense,
an academic exercise; it is prescriptiveand didactic within a conventional view
of the role of literature. It shows certainly little of that intense compulsion
by which their French contemporaries, in the face of mounting skepticism
towards the social function of literature, attempt to justify the very act and
meaning of poetic composition in terms of the energies and devices of language.
Until Arno Holz, a much underrated writer, the German poet-criticscontinue
to rest their principles on the props of obsolescent idealisms. The turning away
from this form of ideological literary judgment towards an awareness of the
specific character of the poetic resources occurs in Germany at a remarkably
late date.
The doubt in the efficacy of literature that we find first advanced by
Poe and Baudelaire, and as it appears later in the self-critical work of
Maupassant,Turgenev, Henry James and Chekhov- this tantalizing suspicion

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20 + COMPARATIVELITERATURE STUDIES

of futility is in Germany first and most intelligently stated not by a poet or a

literary critic but by Nietzsche in his early essays. In The Birth of Tragedy and
Human All Too Human the poet appears throughout as an altogether
questionable character, his performance as evasive and irresponsible, and his
work as thoroughly out of season. Only gradually Nietzsche becomes fascinated
by the very ambivalence of the poetic act, and recognizes in the "deviousness"
of the poet one of the pathological features that should, he argues, become the
object of criticism. The poet has for Nietzsche ceased to be "the moon- and
God-intoxicated prophet"; he is the disaffected antagonist of life and, by his
specific strategy, turns into its most powerful critic. Now he can only strive to
emancipate himself from the idealistic tradition and proceed from disillusionment to recognize his own impotence as a teacher. More and more the world
of art appears to Nietzsche an immense system of metaphorical deception that
conceals the inevitably tragic nature of life. But this ineluctably tragic situation
the poet must make articulate: he must learn to lie, willingly and cunningly;
he must operate obliquely behind masks that make his reflections upon the
inescapable modern dissociation from truth at least tolerable and plausible.
Nietzsche's extraordinaryperception for the shades and subtletiesof the poet's
complex and paradoxical intention, for the calculated gestures of the poet's
performance, for his techniques of deception and persuasion, for his art of
camouflage- all these capacities soon become part of the new apparatus and
vocabulary of European criticism. Nietzsche's own procedure as a writer was
always metaphorical, and his efforts as a critic were always directed precisely
at unmasking the authentic impulse behind an oblique statement and at
determining the intentions that produced it. This, Nietzsche's central purpose, has in turn prompted a large variety of modern critical procedures;it has
led to a kind of criticism most characteristicof our time, which attempts to
determine the nature and function of symbolic expression.
Nietzsche was, at any rate, one of the first to demonstrate the limitations
of genetic criticism, whether historically or psychologically motivated, and to
focus instead upon the specific and characteristicproperties,however ambiguous,
of the poem itself. This historic change in the direction of criticism has been
of the greatest importancefor subsequentpoets and critics alike. After Nietzsche
and the experiences that became crystallized in his work, all significant literature, whether poetry, drama or fiction, has been aware of the precariousnessof
its own intellectual premises. The poets themselves have been intensely concerned with the scope and the limitations of their craft: they have made the
reservationstowards their own effectiveness an essential part of their work.
At best, these self-critical reservations,we know, are not so much stated as
discursive reflectionsapart from the poem, the novel or the play, as built into its
thematic and formal structure.The critic, in turn, is thus held more closely than
ever before to the task of identifying, indeed perhaps even of completing the
inherently tentative design of the poet. The poem itself and its elaboration
in critical discoursehave thus become more and more interdependent.If classical
criticism was, for Lessing or Matthew Arnold, a re-production,a re-thinking

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THE POET AS CRITIC

21

of the poetic intention, modern criticism, since Baudelaireand Nietzsche, and in

the traditionof Schlegel, respondsto the statementof the poets and rounds it out.
"Poetic Intention" has therefore emerged as one of the central categories of
contemporary criticism- the term to be understood not in any psychological
or biographical sense, but as an indication of the exact relationship between
poetic devices and poetic purpose. The critical utterances of the poet, his
reflections either on his own work or that of other writers, are today more
specifically than ever before, part of his total strategy. When Wordsworth
suggested that "every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or
original, must create the taste by which he is to be relished," he assumed a
constant of poetry which is subject to the historical variants of taste; if Valry,
echoing Baudelaire and Mallarm, insists, on the other hand, that every poet
must contain a critic, he makes the critical act, beyond its immediate disciplinary
function, an indispensable part of the poet's intention.
For the major European poets of our time- Pound, Valry, Eliot- criticism
is the calculated extension, the mirror image of their poetry, whatever the
ostensible public purpose of their critical writings may be- the training of poets,
as Pound intended, or the correctionof public taste, or the education of readers
with regard to undervalued modes of writing or to unknown contemporariesor
to the particularmanner of the poet-critichimself. The chief German poets of
the past fifty years have not always been so specifically preoccupied with a defense of their own idiom; by conviction and tradition they have shown a sounder
respect than many English critics for the historical and cultural context of their
work. But ever since the beginning of the great dialogue between the emerging
modernist movement and its opponents,between Arno Holz and Stefan George,
the German writers, too, have regarded their critical pronouncementsas part of
their performanceas poets. HofmannsthaFs or Borchardt'scriticism may wish to
sustain a larger cultural vision; Thomas Mann's reiterates the question as to
the feasibility of art in an analytical age; Benn's criticism may hope to create
an understanding for a kind of poetry that must exist beyond any ideological
faith; Brecht may in his critical pronouncements seek to justify poetry as social
persuasion. But all of these share an extraordinarily vivid knowledge of the
relationship between intention, devices and effect, and an awareness at the
same time, of the limits of the poetic utterance.None, not even the most articulate of these poets, intends to offer anything like a theory of literature.But they
are aware of the central importance of language and its strategic possibilities,
and speak with remarkableintelligence of the proceduresof composition rather
than of inspiration or enthusiasm, that "vain confidence," in Dr. Johnson's
words, "of divine favour."
It is true enough that poets are not always able to define or discuss their own
production in anything like reliable terms. Yeats's theoretical utterances were
often absurdlyprejudiced;and the vagueness of Rilke's or GerhartHauptmann's
critical effusions is well-known. These poets are so completely self-centeredand
so much concerned with their own emotional or philosophical dispositions that
they reinforce the old distrust of criticism by poets. Good poets, we know, have
at times been bad critics; they have tried to deal with uncongenial poetry

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22 + COMPARATIVE
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(Schiller on Burger, Goethe on Hlderlin, Wordsworth on Pope), or they have
overrated poetry to which they felt particularly attracted: Coleridge praised
Bowles, Blake acclaimed Chatterton and Macpherson.
The question as to whether poets are necessarily good critics is a tricky and
perhaps unanswerable one. Mr. Robert Graves has recently maintained that
poets are the only proper judges of poetry and it may well be true that the best
critics of poetry have themselves been distinguished poets. If Valry asserts
(somewhat categorically) that every genuine poet is necessarilya first-ratecritic,
he is right at least in so far as valid criticism can be founded neither on subjective nor on ideological grounds but must derive its principlesfrom convictions
and interests that have to do with the effect of specific poetic devices.
The modern poet undoubtedly knows more about the limits and possibilities
of his craft than his predecessors.That he often knows more than his judges is
the reason why Eliot prefers the technical specialist to the philosophical critic.
Knowing and making are, in any case, for the contemporarypoet-critic,closely
related. And just as the character of poetry is increasingly determined by the
self-criticalskepticism of the poets, so the kind of criticism that we receive from
poets seems to depend on the particularform to which they are committed: the
lyrical poet is today especially reflectiveand communicative: the critical observations of Valry, Benn or Auden- whether they are wise or capricious- complement and complete their poetry. The dramatist whose work tends increasingly
toward the speechlessnessof pantomime, comments in the form of explicatory
pronouncements. Only the experimental novelist of our time appears wholly
absorbed in his performance. The constructive and the reflective activities of
Kafka or Joyce coincide, their critical energy is fully consumed in their composition. The differences between the fiction of Henry James or Gide or Thomas
Mann on the one hand, and Faulkner on the other are due not merely to the
variety of artistic temperament, but to the degree to which in each case the
critical intelligence of the artist has itself become the subject matter of fiction.
It is sometimes objected that the criticism by poets tends to be confined to
linguistic matters, that it is, as a recent skeptic put it, "concernedless with the
whole than the part, less with the what or the why than the how of writing;
that it examines paragraphs, stanzas, individual lines rather than poems as
wholes; that it examines a method rather than a work." This seems to me only
an inevitable reflectionof our contemporarypreferences:we have little sympathy
with Herder's faith in the intuitive power of the critic; ideas are for us no longer
essences but tools and directives.
With few and admittedly vociferous exceptions, the most interesting contemporary criticism has not been immediately directed at the philosophical
impulses behind the work of the poet; not, that is to say, like much academic
criticism, at subject matter or content, but primarily at the poetic procedure
within the given resources of language. What T. S. Eliot, himself recently
pointedly doubtful of the uses of criticism, has called "the intolerable wrestle
with words" may well lead the poet, in his critical reflections, beyond his
primary performance into a casuistical defense of a particular mode. But even

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the question to which criticism must in the end always turn: whether a poem,
however well made, is worth reading can today and in our society not be
answered by moral precepts, and not by taking refuge in vision or inspiration.
The answer can be provided only through an understanding of the function of
poetry as the sort of exploration and definition of reality which the poet's critical
and responsible use of language can perform.

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