Dickinson's nerves, Frost's woods Poetry in the shadow of the past

BY THE TRANQUIL STANDARDS of poetry criticism, William Logan is a slasher, a burner, a brawler, a big-game hunter with a sleepless eye. For most critics, writing a negative review is roughly as appealing as euthanizing a beloved corgi. When the deed must be done - a foundering book put out of its misery - the unfortunate task is executed with maximum stirrings of pity and regret. Wine is poured, candles are lit, better days are remembered fondly and at length. Only then is the fatal dose slipped solemnly under the tongue. Logan's negative reviews read more like giddy blood sport. His pan of Ted Kooser's "Home Repair Manual" didn't even bother to toss sawdust on the floor before leveling its first, fatal line: "Ted Kooser is a prairie sentimentalist who writes poems in an American vernacular so cornfed you could raise hogs on it." Logan is both a worldclass grumbler with a crotchety disdain for what used to be called multiculturalism and a stiletto-sharp stylist with appealing allergies to cant and special pleading. (Not even Richard Wilbur, one of his favorites, got off easy for publishing a weak book at age 79.) At once meaner than he needs to be and funnier than he has any right to be, he writes so well you nearly forget how much you disagree with him. While Logan's reputation as a hatchet man is well-deserved, his often hilarious vituperations have long obscured his talents as a close reader and literary historian. In his latest book, "Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods," he seems determined to balance his accounts. Here the barbed aperçus and hollow-point insults of his reviews have given way to careful, almost comically meticulous literary-historical investigations. The book's eight essays take up two poems each, many among the best known in the English language. In his introduction, Logan says that the pairings are connected by "theme or subject, linked by the 'spooky action at a distance' quantum physicists adore." Some are less spooky than others: One essay considers two versions of Shakespeare's second sonnet; another weighs Shelley's "Ozymandias" against the poem his friend Horace Smith composed on the same theme. More surprising juxtapositions come when John Keats's "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" is set against Donald Justice's "Henry James by the Pacific," or Robert Lowell's eerie "Skunk Hour" marches up the ramp to Logan's ark alongside Seamus Heaney's sly, erotic "The Skunk." It's no real knock to say that this two-bytwo arrangement comes to feel superfluous. Logan ultimately seems less interested in any cross-pollinations between the poems than he does in the historical research he undertakes in each half-chapter. Convinced that critics have generally paid too little attention to what he calls "the practical aspects" of the work in question, he says that his central task "is to drag poems back to the world in which they were made, to restore the lost background of their creation." While admitting that "knowledge of the circumstance is not ipso facto knowledge of the poem," he is keen to demonstrate "that facts lying outside the poem are often crucial to its inner working." What kind of facts? Logan doesn't rule anything out. A critic "must be omnivorous," he says, and his historical appetite has him raiding biographies, letters, census records and city plat maps. It is not enough to know that the word "damasked," used by Heaney to describe a skunk's tail, derives from "Damascus," a connotation that lends "a certain Crusader antiquity." Logan wants us to know, too, that damask was so expensive in Ben Jonson's day that a single tablecloth cost as much as a pile of bricks big enough to build a two-mile-long wall. He can tell us that a "nine-knot yawl," such as the boat mentioned by Lowell, would have to move with uncharacteristic speed, and he has even guessed, based on the postal-delivery schedules of 19th-century London, that Keats must have written his poem about George Chapman's Homer translations on a Sunday morning. This approach occasionally pays real dividends. In the most impressive example, Logan establishes, to a fair degree of certainty, the real-world setting of William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow." With the help of a stray reference in a 1954 essay, Logan reveals that the "red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens" likely belonged to Thaddeus Marshall, a black street vendor in Rutherford, N. J. Marshall had a "massive chicken coop" behind his house, Logan finds, which makes it easy to imagine that he used the wheelbarrow to hawk his eggs around town. The information is revelatory, even revolutionary. It allows us to hear in Williams's "so much depends" an epiphany that "encompasses, not just the majesty of trivial things, but the life those things drag behind." 'Facts lying outside the poem,' Logem declares, 'are often crucial to its inner working.' A handful of similar discoveries might have justified Logan's faith that "the facts lying outside the poem" could offer a bulwark against what he mockingly calls "the private and emollient gestures of readers." We need history, he insists in his introduction, to give us interpretive guideposts - "wooden stakes marking a road through heavy snow." At the very least we need it to limit the possibilities, reminding us what an author "could reasonably have known and might reasonably have meant." It sounds plausible enough in theory. In practice, however, Logan's all-devouring investigations suggest inadvertently that the past offers a far less secure guide to meaning than he would hope. Though often impressive in their own right, his heaps of facts, dates and details spin off so many potential interpretations - some mutually incongruous, if not outright contradictory - that history comes to seem more like the blizzard than the path. none of this is to say that the book doesn't have its pleasures, especially for anyone with a taste for literary trivia. But to borrow Logan's customary bluntness, the historical material he's assembled is simply too much - and therefore not enough. After all, criticism requires something more than mere accumulation: As the etymology of the word implies (it derives from krimin, "to separate or decide"), what you leave out is just as important as what you put in. And throughout "Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods," Logan proves so reluctant to stake his claims among the endlessly multiplying interpretive possibilities that we begin to wonder whether he's succumbed to a vice that for him had long seemed unthinkable: a failure of nerve. This dereliction is all the more puzzling given Logan's polemical aims. Like textual originalists in every field, he wants to recruit history as a sledgehammer against the present, particularly against readers who would dare "impose their own experiences" on the great poetry of the past. But meaning doesn't subsist in art like a relic in an ancient vault. A poem without a reader is just ink, and any work that turns up its nose at the private gestures and personal experiences of its audience stands little chance of becoming a classic. Perhaps neophytes need reminding that even the best poems are products of their time. For the rest of us, however, the far greater mystery - the same pondered by the traveler in Shelley's "Ozymandias" - is that the passions they once inspired somehow yet survive. ROBERT p. baird has writtenfor The London Review of Books, Esquire, Harper's and Poetry.

This book of essays from poet and critic Logan (Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure) strains to resituate famous poems. Revisiting and critiquing the arguments of mid-20th-century new criticism, Logan claims that focusing solely on poetry's artistry "amounts to willful neglect" of its history, thereby justifying his own "historical-biographical-archeological" method. Logan's chapter titles suggest the unexpected friction produced by pairing singular poems. In the essay "Shelley's Wrinkled Lip, Smith's Giant Leg," Percy Bysshe Shelley's masterpiece "Ozymandias" is compared with his contemporary and rival Horace Smith's poem of the same title, which also describes a ruined, ancient statue (specifically, a "gigantic leg") in a desert. The less-than-revelatory insight offered is that Shelley's poem is better because "a disembodied granite arm has pathos, a granite leg nothing but bathos." Elsewhere, Logan lists a "roll call of influence[s]" that Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams may have encountered when composing their respective short imagist poems, "In a Station of the Metro" and "The Red Wheelbarrow." While the accrual of potential influences is intriguing, it buries the poems in discordant, hypothetical data. Longtime poetry readers may find Logan's selections overly familiar, while newcomers will find his academic references forbidding, leaving it unclear which group Logan hopes to reach. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.