Poets, Critics and Readers

Some fragments from Randall Jarrell's 'Poets, Critics and Readers'

Goethe notes : "All great excellence in life or art, at its first recognition, brings with it a certain pain arising from the strongly felt inferiority of the spectator; only at a later period, when we take it into our own culture, and appropriate as much of it as our capacities allow, do we learn to love and esteem it. Mediocrity, on the other hand, may often give us unqualified pleasure; it does not disturb our self-satisfaction, but rather encourages us with the thought that we are as good as another . .. Properly speaking, we learn only from those books we cannot judge. The author of a book that I am competent to criticize would have to learn from me.”

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But this is quite as true of critics and the poems that are their  patients: when one reads as a linguist, a scholar, a New or Old or High  or Low critic, when one reads the poem as a means to an end, one is no longer a pure reader but an applied one. The true reader “listens like a three years’ child: / The Mariner hath his will.” Later on he may write like a sixty-three-year-old sage, but he knows that in the beginning, unless ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of art. Hofmannsthal says, with awful finality: “The world has lost its innocence, and without innocence  no one creates or enjoys a work of art”; but elsewhere he says more hopefully, with entire and not with partial truth, that each of us lives in an innocence of his own which he never entirely loses.

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perhaps true criticism is something, like sincerity or magnanimity, that cannot be aimed at, attained, directly; that must always be, in some sense, a by-product, whether of writing or reading, of a private poetry-workshop or a private reading-room.

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We all realize that writers are inspired, but helpless and fallible beings, who know not what they write; readers, we know from personal experience, are less inspired but no less helpless and fallible beings, who half the time don’t know what they’re reading. Now, a critic is half writer, half reader:

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For to tell the truth, the first truth, the poem is a love affair between the poet and his subject, and readers come in only a long time later, as witnesses at the wedding...

But what would the ideal witnesses—the ideal public—be? What would an ideal public do? Mainly, essentially, it would just read the poet; read him with a certain willingness and interest; read him imaginatively and perceptively. It needs him, even if it doesn’t know that; he needs it, even if he doesn’t know that. It and he are like people in one army, one prison, one world: their interests are great and common, and deserve a kind of declaration of dependence. ‘The public might treat him very much as it would like him to treat it. It has its faults, he has his; but both “are, after all,” as a man said about women, “the best things that are offered in that line.” The public ought not to demand the same old thing from the poet whenever he writes something very new, nor ought it to complain, The same old thing! whenever he writes something that isn’t very new; and it ought to realize that it is not, unfortunately, in the writer’s power to control what he writes: something else originates and controls it, whether you call that something else the unconscious or Minerva or the Muse. The writer writes what he writes just as the public likes what it likes; he can’t help himself, it can’t help itself, but each of them has to try: most of our morality, most of our culture are in the trying.

We readers can be, or at least can want to be, what the writer himself would want us to be: a public that reads a /ot—that reads widely, joyfully, and naturally; a public whose taste is formed by acquaintance with the good and great writers of many ages, and not simply acquaintance with a few fashionable contemporaries and the fashionable precursors of those; a public with broad general expectations, but without narrow particular demands, that the new work of  art must satisfy; a public that reads with the calm and ease and independence that come from liking things in themselves, for themselves.

This is the kind of public that the poet would like; and if it turned out to be the kind of public that wouldn’t like him, why, surely that is something he could bear. It is not his poems but poetry that he wants people to read; if they will read Rilke’s and Yeats’s and Hardy’s poems, he can bear to have his own poems go unread forever. He knows that their poems are good to read, and that’s something he necessarily can’t know about his own; and he knows, too, that poetry itself is good to read—that if you cannot read poetry easily and naturally and joyfully, you are cut off from much of the great literature  of the past, some of the good literature of the present. Yet the poet could bear to have people cut off from all that, if only they read widely, naturally, joyfully in the rest of literature: much of the greatest  literature, much of the greatest poetry, even, is in prose. If people read this prose—read even a little of it—generously and imaginatively, and felt it as truth and life, as a natural and proper joy, why, that would be enough.