[Andrew Frisardi]

Before this thread sinks back into the archives again, I wanted to add one little bit of Muir’s criticism, plus another poem.

Somebody in this thread said that Muir was nothing special as a critic. I was surprised at the comment, since for me Muir’s criticism is always worthwhile, if humanity and imagination have anything to do with it. Which I suppose is asking for a lot.

Muir’s best book of criticism is The Estate of Poetry, which came from his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in the 1950s.

This passage is from “Criticism and the Poet,” where he discusses a bit the New Criticism at that time, in particular Cleanth Brooks:

I shall not follow Mr. Brooks any further in his analysis of the poem [“Tears, Idle Tears,” by Tennyson], but I confess that this kind of criticism, so thorough and so mistaken, seems to me of very little use to any reader, and that for myself it gives me a faint touch of claustrophobia, the feeling that I am being confined in a narrow place with the poem and the critic, and that I shall not get away until all three of us are exhausted.

Imagine what he’d have thought of the deconstructionists!

And this is from “The Public and the Poet.”

One kind of poetry was written before T. S. Eliot, and another kind after him. But the point of an experiment is that it should solve the particular problem set for it. This was done in the twenties. Yet in spite of that there is a mild outcry against young poets because they do not go on experimenting; it comes mainly from people who remember the excitements of the twenties, a great age, as Wyndham Lewis called it, that did not come off. Yet, if we think of the remaining half of this century as running on without cessation from experiment to experiment, with not even a decade’s length of easy speech, the prospect is alarming. So far as I can judge their work, young poets now find themselves free to write in a natural tongue. What their mentors do not realize is that to write naturally, especially in verse, is one of the most difficult things in the world; naturalness does not come easily to the awkward human race, and is an achievement of art.

The Good Man in Hell

If a good man were ever housed in Hell
By needful error of the qualities,
Perhaps to prove the rule or shame the devil,
Or speak the truth only a stranger sees,

Would he, surrendering quick to obvious hate,
Fill half eternity with cries and tears,
Or watch beside Hell's little wicket gate
In patience for the first ten thousand years,

Feeling the curse climb slowly to his throat
That, uttered, dooms him to rescindless ill,
Forcing his praying tongue to run by rote,
Eternity entire before him still?

Would he at last, grown faithful in his station,
Kindle a little hope in hopeless Hell,
And sow among the damned doubts of damnation,
Since here someone could live, and live well?

One doubt of evil would bring down such a grace,
Open such a gate, and Eden could enter in,
Hell be a place like any other place,
And love and hate and life and death begin.

[T.S. Kerrigan]

Thank you, Andrew, and you, Alicia, for bringing Muir back to our attention. Too many current critics (including Edna Longley, whose reason for being apprars at times to be to promote her husband's verse) have damned him.