[lbo-talk] why Prince is right

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Jul 12 19:48:33 PDT 2010


Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Jul 12, 2010, at 8:46 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > misunderstood this when I wrote my post alluding to Plato. But still
> > ... "real" is always a bit suspect.
>
> I've asked this question before, when you wax democratic about art (an impulse I have some sympathy with). Why did you devote your academic life to studying Milton, Pope, and Pound, and not Edgar Guest?

Actually, I've wrestled with that myuself at times, even before I became involved in politics. It's tied up with the question of why be concerned with art at all, Pound or Guest. Northrop Frye noted that "defenses of poetery" were seldom persuasive to anyone who wasn't already well inside the walls. A beginning, I think, can be made in terms of multiple decorums: judgment only makes sense in terms of a given decorum (roughly,'fitting' relations among implied speaker, implied reader, subject, & style). I've never tried to develop the idea, however, and it may break down under pressure.

_Perhaps_ one could argue that (for example)

Shop Girl

For a moment she rested against me

Like a swallow half blown to the wall,

And they talk of Swinburne's women,

And the shepherdess meeting with Guido.

And the harlots of Baudelaire.

carried a larger sense of human possibility than does It take's a heap o' living. And IF so then one could (possibly) argue that the decorum (harmony of verbal style with subject matter) required of Shop Girl had greater potential for grasping human possibility than the decorum demanded by Guest's poems. It could be.

But literary judgments (or musical or architextural or ...) only become vicious if they implicitly or explicitly are translated into moral judgments (judgments of human worth) of those who respond to a tiven work. It's one thing to flinch at "It takes a heap o' living to make a house a home" or at the velvet paintings they still sell ar sidewalk tables and antoheer thing to be contemptuous of the person who enjoys either of these.

Carrol



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list