Poetry in Conversation With Itself

For any writer, the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge brings moments of painful recognition at every turn. Richard Holmes’s magisterial biography of Coleridge is replete with examples of the Romantic poet bemoaning his own sloth, procrastination, and lack of literary production. A typical diary entry from 1804: “so completely has a whole year passed, with scarcely the fruits of a month […] I am not worthy to live […] I have done nothing! Not even layed up any material, any inward stores—of after action!” We feel you, Sam.

The irony of all of this is that to a modern eye, Coleridge was an extraordinarily prolific writer. His collected works stretch to some 15 volumes, spanning literary criticism, history, journalism, and political polemics. Indeed, Coleridge’s prose writings, most notably his Biographia Literaria, established him not only as the first major exemplar of the modern literary critic in English, but also as the prototype of the poet-critic—a writer whose accomplishments as a poet are matched by their skill at writing about literature.

So why did Coleridge so consistently see himself as a failure? Perhaps because while he was often capable of producing torrents of prose, he was never able to match this level of productivity in his poetry. Many of his best-known poetic works, like “Kubla Khan” or “Christabel,” were never completed to his satisfaction, and he often regarded himself as a poet who had never lived up to his full potential—a view shared by many of his peers and closest friends. In short, the first great poet-critic in English was plagued by the fear that he was too much a critic and not enough a poet.

Such questions of priority have haunted the figure of the poet-critic in the ensuing centuries. Most poets, of course, do write criticism at some time or another in their careers, whether it is reviews of others’ work, statements of their own poetics, or introductions to anthologies. But we tend to award the title “poet-critic” to those unicorn-like figures who are accomplished enough to be recognized in both modes of writing—who develop, we might say, a distinct voice, perspective, and style in criticism as well as in poetry. Indeed, the threat that seems to hang over the post-Romantic poet-critic is that the voice of the critic—analytical, argumentative, public—may overwhelm that of the private, introspective, and inspired poet.

The modern poet-critic par excellence, of course, is T.S. Eliot, whose utterances about poetry are as often quoted as his poetry. Modernism spawned poet-critics because it so often needed to explain itself and its newness; Eliot’s famed statement that “Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult” links poetic difficulty to the exploding complexity of twentieth-century society.

Although Eliot’s output as a poet was relatively slim compared to that of some of his peers, his criticism helped reinforce his status as a towering literary authority. If as a poet Eliot could be seen as an innovator, his criticism—along with his social and political writings—could be conservative, even reactionary, helping to cement the idea of a literary canon and the idea of the critic as an Olympian arbiter of taste (despite Eliot’s own wry warning in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” not to follow the canons of “dead critics”).

Yet Eliot also offers another possible approach for the poet-critic: poetry as criticism, or more precisely, the idea of a poem that includes criticism. The Waste Land famously includes its own footnotes, which Eliot later derided as “bogus scholarship,” but which help present the poem as a self-critical, self-reflexive work, one that is conscious of itself as a reflection on literature and the literary tradition. Here again, Coleridge is a predecessor: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” includes its own marginal glosses, which mimic the language of scholarship but take on a poetic logic all their own. Nor was Eliot the only modernist writer to explore poetic criticism: William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All intersperses poems with prose that theorizes poetry and reflects on art, and Gertrude Stein’s lectures and essays often move with the same rhythms and repetitions as her more strictly “literary” works.

Moving toward contemporary poet-critics, I find I’m less interested in poets who succeeded in making themselves authoritative reviewers and tastemakers (Randall Jarrell being one obvious mid-century example) than in poets who have found ways to blur the lines between poetry and criticism. Charles Bernstein’s A Poetics offers an example of a book that, while presenting itself as critical writing on the “state of the art,” frequently complicates and undermines the authority of its own critical voice; the piece “Artifice of Absorption” is itself written in verse, mixing the “public” voice of criticism with the “private” voice of poetry. Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson offers a poet’s reading of Dickinson, one that is both grounded in scholarship and highly personal, even idiosyncratic, in a style continuous with that of Howe’s own poetry.

What’s the status of the poet-critic today? Changes in the literary marketplace and the rise of academic creative writing have diminished the traditional role of the critic as someone who mediates between the poem and the reading public, although Stephanie Burt is one poet-critic who admirably fulfills this role. Today’s poet-critic is more likely to be a poet-scholar, someone who publishes both books of poetry and academic literary criticism or theory. The poets Evie Shockley, Craig Santos Perez, and Margaret Rhee are a few that come to mind from this generation of poet-scholars; their poetic and scholarly work tends to be distinct but complementary, extending their intellectual and critical interests into multiple realms.

At the same time, such poet-scholars do participate in what I would call a larger movement toward the poem as criticism. Perhaps the most influential poet currently working in this vein is Claudia Rankine. Rankine has, for many years, pursued the critical goal of reclaiming the lyric as a political form by blurring the line between poetry and critical prose; Citizen moves both inward and outward, merging the essayistic, introspective, and polemical, while Just Us takes the form of scholarship by poetic means, complete with footnotes and fact-checks. Like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” or The Waste Land, Just Us is a book in conversation with itself—perhaps the greatest achievement a poet-critic can give us.