SLSL "The Small Rain" - RP Blackmur

Fri Nov 29 11:09:32 CST 2002

_Form and Value in Modern Poetry_ (p. 36)

http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/r._p._blackmur.html

Blackmur, R. P.

Richard Palmer Blackmur (1904-65) grew up in Boston,
and although he never received a university degree, he
was shaped by the intellectual environment of Harvard
and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since he came to
maturity in the anni mirabiles of modernism, 1921-25,
he was instinctively in touch with the best in
contemporary writing, and his position as an editor of
Hound and Horn (1928-30) drew him to the center of the
American literary scene. A fine poet himself, Blackmur
brought to his literary criticism a practical
understanding of how writers think and feel.
Blackmur began to write criticism at precisely the
time when "close reading" became the dominant mode of
literary analysis, and his essays of 1930-34
(collected in The Double Agent) are models of the
genre. His early critical method may be seen as a
fusion of (1) T. S. Eliot's practice of never
generalizing without a text at hand, (2) Henry James's
gift for delicate moral and aesthetic discriminations,
and (3) William Empson's demonstration (in Seven Types
of Ambiguity, 1930) that the theories of I. A.
Richards could be transformed into an intricate
procedure for linguistic analysis that teases out the
paradoxes and nuances of poetic discourse. Blackmur
was especially influenced by Richards's clinical
analyses (in Practical Criticism, 1929) of the act of
reading and by the distinction Richards draws between
the determined "statements" of science and the open
"pseudostatements" of poetry. In many ways Blackmur
shared the same assumptions about the instability of
language found in later deconstructionist criticism,
but with the crucial difference that he felt that
these contradictory linguistic signals could be
partially controlled by the "rational imagination" of
the writer and reader.
One might say that Blackmur was uniquely equipped to
handle the poets of his age, since his critical
sensibility had been shaped by the same forces that
underlay their methods, and it is not surprising that
his criticism of the 1930s contains the
definitive--and enduring--early assessments of the art
of W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, E.
E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore. In each case
Blackmur's analysis is based upon scrupulous research
(which always lies beneath the surface) and an
admirable grasp of each writer's distinctive "voice."
His form of critical attack varies from author to
author, emphasizing linguistic effects in the case of
Stevens and Cummings, the use of myth and magic in
Yeats, the problem of poetry and belief in Eliot. In
every instance Blackmur strikes so close to the
essential qualities of the writer that his early
essays remain authoritative and exciting after nearly
half a century. No critic of the 1930s, save Pound and
Eliot, has worn so well.
After the early 1940s, when Blackmur gave up his
career as an independent man of letters and accepted a
teaching position at Princeton, his criticism
gradually became engaged with wider cultural and
intellectual interests. His essays of the 1940s on
Henry James still display the keen interest in
language that marks his early criticism, but they are
also concerned with the social and moral dimensions of
James's imagination. Like the later Eliot, Blackmur
became more interested in general problems of
literature and culture (although without Eliot's
doctrinal emphasis), and in his later years he
concentrated on the European novel, believing with
James (in the preface to The Ambassadors) that the
novel is "the most independent, most elastic, most
prodigious of literary forms." In these studies he is
concerned with the ways in which cultural assumptions
determine literary forms and with the nature of
literature as a social institution. New Criticism,
with its emphasis on close reading of individual
"poetic" passages, had always been weakest when
confronted with the larger architecture (and the more
explicit social concerns) of the novel. In his work on
Henry James and in Eleven Essays in the European Novel
Blackmur took up the challenge of moving beyond formal
analysis to a consideration of the moral dramas
embodied in fiction. In many ways his concerns in
these essays are those of his contemporary Lionel
Trilling, although Blackmur's point of view is less
ideological. His aim was to uncover the writer's
fundamental (and often conflicted) assumptions about
how behavior is represented in language.
The essay was Blackmur's chosen form, but throughout
his career he labored on a critical biography of Henry
Adams, whose skeptical spirit appealed to his deepest
emotions and beliefs. Published in an edited version
15 years after his death, Henry Adams (and especially
the chapter "King Richard's Prison Song") reveals in
moving detail Blackmur's ability to penetrate, and
reinvoke in highly charged language, the thoughts and
feelings of another writer.
Although R. P. Blackmur played a major role in shaping
modern American literary criticism, his greatest
achievement lay (as he would have wished) in his
impact on American poetry. A generation of
poets--among them Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell,
Delmore Schwartz, and John Berryman--was deeply
influenced in style and sensibility by the example of
his criticism. Speaking of an obscure review that
Blackmur published in Poetry magazine in May 1935,
Berryman said flatly that it "changed my life." Later
Berryman wove part of that review into his poetic
tribute to Blackmur, "Olympus" (Love & Fame, 1970,
18). Appropriately, Blackmur's words are set up as
what they were: poetry.
In my serpentine researches
I came on a book review in Poetry
which began, with sublime assurance,
a comprehensive air of majesty,

'The art of poetry
is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse
by the animating presence in the poetry
of a fresh idiom: language

so twisted & posed in a form
that it not only expresses the matter in hand
but adds to the stock of available reality.'
I was never altogether the same man after that.
A. Walton Litz

Notes and Bibliography

R. P. Blackmur, The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and
Elucidation (1935), Eleven Essays in the European
Novel (1964), The Expense of Greatness (1940), Henry
Adams (ed. Veronica A. Makowsky, 1980), Language as
Gesture: Essays in Poetry (1952, Form and Value in
Modern Poetry, 1957, selections), The Lion and the
Honeycomb: Essays in Solicitude and Critique (1955),
Outsider at the Heart of Things: Essays by R. P.
Blackmur (ed. James T. Jones, 1989), A Primer of
Ignorance (ed. Joseph Frank, 1967), Selected Essays
(ed. Denis Donoghue, 1986), Studies in Henry James
(ed. Veronica A. Makowsky, 1983).
Robert Boyers, R. P. Blackmur: Poet-Critic: Towards a
View of Poetic Objects (1980); Edward T. Cone, with
Joseph Frank and Edmund Keeley, eds., The Legacy of R.
P. Blackmur: Essays, Memoirs, Texts (1987); Joseph
Frank, "R. P. Blackmur: The Later Phase," The Widening
Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (1963);
Russell Fraser, A Mingled Yarn: The Life of R. P.
Blackmur (1981); Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Armed
Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary
Criticism (1948, rev. ed., 1955); James T. Jones,
Wayward Skeptic: The Theories of R. P. Blackmur
(1986); René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism:
1750-1950, vol. 6, American Criticism, 1900-1950
(1986).

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