The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [55]
Lost and Found
Another way of investigating the question of what is or isn’t literature might be to look not only at the history of taste but also at the way authors and texts are lost and found. This is not as symmetrical a process as the phrase implies. The publication of Herbert Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler, described as “Selected and edited, with an Essay,” occasioned one of the most influential reviews of the early twentieth century, T. S. Eliot’s “The Metaphysical Poets,” which first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in October 1921. Reviews in the TLS, we might note, were unsigned until 1974, when critical anonymity, once the rule rather than the exception, began to seem outdated. “The Metaphysical Poets” explained, contextualized, and offered strong readings of poems by such poets as John Donne, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Abraham Cowley (not to mention the modern French poets to whom Eliot compared them). At the same time, it also began to articulate various critical terms, like “unified experience,” “dissociation of sensibility,” and the value of difficulty, that would influence both the writing and the teaching of poetry (and literature) for much of the ensuing century. “[I]t appears likely,” the review announced calmly, “that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”45
The poems of John Donne had been in and out of print since their initial publication in the 1630s, but it was hardly the case that his works were deemed essential to the emerging curriculum of English departments in the early years of their development. Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton were the Renaissance poets everyone read. For centuries Donne had been regarded as “knotty” (full of intellectual difficulties; difficult to explain or unravel), a word still used to describe his verse. (It’s arguable that some also considered them naughty, especially when they were the work of a poet who went on to be an Anglican preacher.) Some nineteenth-century poets, notably Coleridge and Browning, read Donne and admired him. Browning’s dramatic monologues are strongly indebted to Donne for their abrupt, direct address to the reader and their use of colloquial speech rhythms. But for the most part Donne was an interesting sidebar rather than a central figure for poets and readers of this period. The taste for knotty, witty, intellectual poetry in English had waned. Then came the one-two punch of Grierson’s edition and Eliot’s review, and within a few years, Donne’s poems were the featured centerpieces of some of the most striking and influential works of literary criticism by the teacher-scholars who came to be known as New Critics.
One indication of the midcentury canonization of Donne is the proliferation of titles of works of fiction and memoir taken from his works. Thomas Merton’s No Man Is an Island, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (both allusions to the same work, Donne’s “Meditation XVI”), John Gunther’s memoir of his son’s early death from cancer, Death Be Not Proud—all of these have become classics in their genres. Like Shakespeare, and unlike Spenser and Dryden, Donne crossed over into the allusive mainstream with not even a pair of quotation marks needed to distinguish his seventeenth-century phrases from the lingua franca of modern culture.
I’ve instanced the fluctuating critical fortunes of Donne’s poetry as one example of lost and found. Another, equally canonical, might be the forgetting and the subsequent remembering or re-creating of Chaucer’s metrics and scansion. For many years, poets, critics, and readers misunderstood the verse of The Canterbury Tales, Troilus