Following is a version of a brief presentation that I delivered at the recent conference of the Associated Writing Programs.
Several years ago it occurred to me that I write only one poetry review. Of course, I focus on different books, discuss different implications, make or imply different judgments. But I’m always asking two questions: 1) What is this poet picking up on from tradition? and 2) What is this poet doing that is new? One will no doubt discern in these questions the influence of T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” along with the books that Harold Bloom was publishing in the 1970s, such as The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading. In fact, in A Map of Misreading, Bloom raises the question of what happens in the human lifeworld without tradition, which can refer to many things, from the Euro-American tradition to literary tradition to the sonnet tradition. Bloom’s answer is that nothing happens without tradition, nothing at all. We are, after all, creatures endowed with little if any instinct, meaning that we depend greatly upon imitation and the habits, practices, and customs that we inherit.
The term tradition comes from the Latin tradeo, tradere (to give up, give over) and in ancient Rome referred to the usual means whereby inherited property was given over. I find this etymology informative because it helps to point out that what is handed over in tradition is meaningful and vital only if it is somehow integrated into the contemporary world. If it is hidden away and forgotten, then it ceases to live in a culture’s world; in a rather real sense it ceases to be. Ideally, both the inheritance and the contemporary world are creatively altered by the encounter between the two.
In other words, merely to imitate what has gone before is a failure of art; this principle is one that has been known for centuries. Recall that Samuel Johnson declared Milton’s “Lycidas” a failure because it contianed nothing new. With a certain trembling–because it’s Dr. Johnson–I disagree with the conclusion; nevertheless, I agree with the major premise that to succeed as art something must be new; it must pick up on and play some variations on or with something from tradition.
At times the variation may seem at first to be a violation or even subversion of the very tradition that is being kept alive, on the move, by the new work. When Walt Whitman broke open the old iambic line, it seemed to some a crisis from which culture might not recover. It can be instructive to begin reading through the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. To this day, coming across “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in this context can still be a startling moment.
In the usual run of literary pursuit, not everyone can pull off such drastic innovations as Whitman and Eliot achieved. I doubt that everyone should try to do so since some moments call for a deepening and development of the materials at hand rather than a radical revision. Nevertheless, there is always the obligation to make something of what one has inherited. Sometimes this making can come about by a kind of parodic tribute. I have elsewhere, in a rather Bloomian moment, suggested that the title poem of Mark Strand’s Man and Camel (2006) be read as a parodic revision of Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West,” in which the speaker describes a woman walking by the sea and turning the sounds of the waves into the human voice of her song. The poem thus describes the encounter between nature and the human figure as a kind of duet. This description occurs in a meditative mode that I conjecture Stevens picked up from Wordsworth and filtered through his French Symbolist manners. In “Man and Camel” Strand picks up on the Stevensian meditation and filters it through his surrealist mode, yielding a description of a man singing a duet with a camel a very different kind of interaction between the human figure and a representative of nature. Near the end of the poem, this odd, singing couple walk out of town into the desert, but then they return and say to the speaker, “‘You ruined it. You ruined it forever.'” I take it that what the figure of the poet has ruined is the old mode of meditation. And yet this act of parodic ruination has also paid tribute to the past while creating something lovely and stirring and new.