[Richard Wakefield]

I would like to hear how readers (or writers, but especially readers) have been influenced or affected by criticism. I have had several experiences where a good bit of critical discussion opened up poetry that I had earlier found unremarkable or impenetrable, or it brought to my attention poetry that I would otherwise have missed. It doesn't happen often, but it seems to me one of the highest achievements possible for a critic and the desire to do it guides much of my own criticism. Richard Poirier's "Poetry and Pragmatism" showed me how a poem finds its way line by line, and this long after I had published a great deal of my own poetry and criticism. So here's my question:

What works of criticism influenced you positively as a writer or reader, and why?

Richard

[RCL]

Richard, I'll show my age: Brooks & Warren, Understanding Poetry and Brook's The Well Wrought Urn. I didn't read them until grad school, but my four years as an English major at Michigan seemed premised on their work--close, close, close reading of texts (so-called New Criticism)before earning any right to generalize or theorize about a text. Of course Richards and Empson had laid a base in earlier works. I've read in every theory and practice since, found some useful (especially historical, marxist, psychological and myth crit; bits of game theory and basic phenomenology)but most garbage. And, to my mind, most Kultural Studies that now dominate university English departments are less than garbage. Deconstruct this!

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Ralph



[This message has been edited by RCL (edited August 01, 2001).]

[Richard Wakefield]

Ralph: Yes, I read at Brooks and Warren at various times, and they helped me learn to focus on what was in front of me -- although of course that's a struggle that never ends.
At the risk of greatly broadening my own question, I would add that some critics have helped me by directing me to a writer's influences, ones I might never otherwise have discovered. Poirier led me to read William James, who had influenced Frost, and then James turned out to be almost a missing link between Emerson and Frost.
Richard

[Ernest]

Looking back I recall stumbling on a book of criticism. It critiqued critics. Stanley Edgar Hyman's formidable The Armed Vision A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism. It was eclectic, extensively so, expanded my horizons, my mental activity at that college age had waned to only a beat or two, having listened to much rock music too loudly.

Of course what book influences one writer may stymie another, or merely fall flat. For me Hyman's book opened an enormous hole in the ice. I could look through it and see how a world populated by strange things. Many points of view, so many it staggered the imagination to ponder the implications of each.

As interesting to site to visit on this subject might be: http://www.arts.uwo.ca/~andrewf/jnzl/jnzl14intro.htm

On the same subject perhaps I would like to introduce an obtuse point of view, that of William Faulkner has his admited aversion to reading....(Of course, his aversion may speak more about Faulkner than it does about examination of criticism. But I bring the subject up anyway, as development of the writer is a strange manifestation.

An Introduction for The Sound and the Fury
The Southern Review 8 (N.S., 1972) 705-10.


I wrote this book and learned to read. I had learned a little about writing from Soldiers' Pay--how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much, as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions. But when I finished The Sound and the Fury I discovered that there is actually something to which the shabby term Art not only can, but must, be applied. I discovered then that I had gone through all that I had ever read, from Henry James through Henty to newspaper murders, without making any distinction or digesting any of it, as a moth or a goat might. After The Sound and The Fury and without heeding to open another book and in a series of delayed repercussions like summer thunder, I discovered the Flauberts and Dostoievskys and Conrads whose books I had read ten years ago. With The Sound and the Fury I learned to read and quit reading, since I have read nothing since.
--William Faulkner

(for the full version I can be emailed.)