Penniless and nearing thirty circa 1990, the one ace up my sleeve was that I “worked with Grossman.” Grossman. The Brandeis English department’s quite literal resident “genius” poet and pedagogue. In August 1989, Allen R. Grossman had in fact received a John D. and Catherine T. Mac Arthur “Genius” Grant. Needless to say, I owned no mutual funds back then, but Grossman’s stock was on the rise when he was my doctoral adviser. In 1991, the year before I defended my dissertation on William Carlos Williams, for example, Grossman left Brandeis for the Mellon professorship in humanities at Johns Hopkins. Grossman flew in to Logan Airport from Baltimore to convene my defense.
In assessing why I was drawn to Grossman as my PhD adviser, it is, however, inaccurate only to regard my interest in him as if I were a weak-kneed quarterback with a bum arm and Grossman a “Blind Side” level offensive lineman who would lead me into the end zone of professional success: a tenure-track job with a manageable teaching load in a town that housed at least one take-out restaurant that featured vegetarian options! Certainly, I noticed his awards and honors, but Grossman was a Brandeis legend since the 1960s, decades before the wider world started paying attention. Brandeis graduates still write in to the alumni magazine to recall Grossman’s stirring words at a vigil on April 4, 1968 after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis. In 1987, he was named a “Professor the Year” by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. His “Poetry: A Basic Course” was among the first released by the Teaching Company, which produces “Great Courses” in their “Superstar Teachers” series. Leading poets and scholars consider Grossman’s Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in Speculative Poetry” (1990), which I discuss in the second part of my essay, to be a literary sacred text. “In the ideal writing program where criticism and creative writing imply, sustain, and nourish one another, Allen Grossman’s ‘ Summa Lyrica‘ would be required reading,” writes Alan Shapiro. The Poetry Foundation website describes the book as a “cult classic.”
Beyond the hoopla, Grossman had a knack for making poetry matter on an experiential level in the lecture hall and in office hours for countless students over a thirty-year career at Brandeis and then at Johns Hopkins, where he taught until retirement in 2005. Grossman, who died in 2014 at age 82, made poetry seem like a lifeline to lost souls. (Born and raised in Minneapolis before heading off to Harvard for undergraduate studies in the 1950s, Grossman liked to note that fellow midwestern poet Hart Crane’s father had invented the Lifesaver candy; ironically Crane died in a drowning accident.) As Gary Roberts has written,
Grossman has conducted through poetry and criticism a radical research into the hypotheses (the groundwork) of transcendental knowledge and its representations. Such literary research seeks to disclose the implications of its claims for the ‘keeping’ (an important term in Grossman’s work) of Western personhood in the present ‘discredited civilization,’ which has now attained the ability to erase all persons. (Roberts, 193)
Roberts suggests how Grossman transforms reading poetry into a suspenseful project worthy of Hitchcock. “No age prior to this age was ever so fully endangered by precisely that eventuality which poetry always contemplates, namely, forgetfulness or obliteration,” Grossman asserts in The Sighted Singer (1992). For the safety of the community and with the fate of personhood in peril, Detective Grossman searched against the clock – we live in what he called “an age of nuclearism” and thus had “attained the ability to erase all persons — for the antidote to “keep” us from “vanishing” (another key Grossman term). Poetry was no antiquated appendage to our hypermediated environment, which Grossman refers to as a “discredited civilization.” Instead, poetry functions as a “resource of last resort” for people like me, and, I suspect, many other scruffy students dwelling in hovels with makeshift desks constructed out of abandoned doors propped up on book filled milk crates we’d lifted from behind the Stop and Shop. Poetry could take the edge off of our collective isolation and provide an avenue for communicating to other a felt blocked souls. “Because I could not say it, I wrote it out in verse,” wrote Emily Dickinson.[1]
In retrospect, maybe Grossman’s theory of poetry as a lifesaver made of words was a tad manipulative. Himself a troubled soul, I could argue that his reading of poetry as a preservation of personhood in a “discredited civilization” represented his strategy to draw into his orbit other malcontents who were only too ready to “discredit” a society that made no room for them. Reviewing How to do Things with Tears, a poetry volume from 2001 that riffs on the “speech act” or “performative” language philosophy of J.L. Austin, Yale’s James Longenbach notes in the Boston Review that Grossman makes a singular statement: “Poetry is what we do with memories, and remembering is what we do with tears.” How could I have resisted Grossman’s emotional logic? Great poetry was not merely Matthew Arnold’s best words in the best order, but rather a transformational feeling machine. Poetry involved an involuntary physical reaction to emotion (tears), which preceded a voluntary internal emotional/mental process (remembering,) which then, through inscription, can be redeemed into a meaningful artistic form. Poets may transform psychic pain through the compensation of language work. I suffered and was willing to work. A kid who grew up in rural Florida with a single mom – my dad died when I was ten — and got by on social security benefits and food stamps, I had labored all my life: as a janitor, a busboy, a word processor, a secretary, flipping burgers at Burger King, bagging groceries, a stringer for a local newspaper, delivering newspapers and handbills. I knew how to type. I could read and write. Maybe, if I followed Grossman’s teachings, I could validate my impoverished life through the venerable literary art.
Poetry expresses the human wish for individual acknowledgment, but the lyric concern, Grossman argues in The Sighted Singer, satisfies the wish of the “I” to preserve the beloved. This emphasis on the apostrophic figure of address, the “you,” however, includes benefits to the speaker. We remember Shakespeare’s name and image, as well as his “dark lady,” whom the Bard promises to immortalize at the end of Sonnet 18: “But thy eternal summer shall not fade,/Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;/Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,/When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:?/So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” (Shakespeare, 521). Even such an apparently narcissistic lyric as John Keats’ “When I have Fears,” motivated as it is by the author’s panic about mortality – he died of tuberculosis at 25 –, expresses concern that upon his death the speaker will be unable to see and represent Fanny Brawne, the “fair creature of an hour,/That I shall never look upon thee more,/ have relish in the faery power/Of unreflecting love!” (Keats, 17). Grossman states:
Keats obtains for us all a sense of the enormous obligation which poetry sponsors to specify an object of love – for it is the object of love (his “fair creature of an hour”) which is the cause of his fear. The object of love calls attention to the stake of the speaker in the world, and stake of the speaker in the world is recuperated by the act of writing, so that, out of the anxiety, which the beloved by her perishing beauty and by her dependence on the lover for her being arouses, there comes this record which stands as a modeling of the courtesy to which love calls us: the courtesy of song, of magnanimous acknowledgment. (Sighted Singer,14)
In The Sighted Singer, he distinguishes selves from persons:
I believe that poetry is fundamentally antipsychological, and I would summon as my witnesses the High Modern poets with their advocacy of impersonality, which led them all, each in his own way, to reject the analysis of the ‘real’ self that we find in Freud. I am in effect saying to you that poetry has a destiny not in selves, but in persons; and that, whereas selves are found or discovered, persons and personhood is an artifact, something that is made, an inscription upon the ontological snowfields of a world that is not in itself human. (Sighted Singer, 19)
Poetry manufactures “persons” through what Grossman refers to as a “bitter logic.” By “bitter logic,” he refers to an unbridgeable difference between mortal life and the appearance of the “person” in verse. [2] Because of the difference between quotidian selfhood and representational appearance, lyric entails experiential loss. Here is Grossman: “When Yeats came to contemplate the relationship between the obligation of the poet to establish personhood, and the inevitability for the poet of his being a self, he found that personhood and selfhood were indeed in irreconcilable conflict” (Sighted Singer, 21).
***
Now well into my fifties and myself a long-serving English professor, I’ve been re-reading Grossman’s Summa Lyrica. I speak without hyperbole when I say that thirty years ago I regarded Summa Lyrica as my sacred text. My copy of the special issue of Western Humanities Review (Spring 1990) devoted entirely to Grossman’s Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in Speculative Poetics and “The Ether Dome: An Entertainment,” a long poem, is so thumbed through that pages fall off the binding when I open the volume for the first time in two decades. By contrast to my disheveled copy, Grossman’s plan for the “Summa” could hardly have been more organized in structure and form. As it was for High Modernists such as Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats, the “rage for order” is Grossman’s stated goal in the “Summa.” As Grossman asserts in his “Preface,” “[t]he basis of order in the Summa Lyrica is the procession of commonplaces (loci communes), assertions which are possible to be made (and generally are made) in the presence of poems” (4). Unlike my reading practice two decades ago, I find myself attending to Grossman’s use of Latin terms. The Latinate diction detaches Grossman’s stated goal of sharing “commonplaces” from a human-scale authorial voice that seeks to communicate to a “commonwealth.” “Summa” is hyper-organized. He divides his text through numbered units, each unit devoted to a topic (“Immortality,” “Reading,” “Silence,” Poetic Language,” “Self,” “Privilege,” and so on). Each numbered unit is then subdivided into numbered subunits (1.1, 1.2 and so on). Many units include “Scholiams” — special commentary of a scholarly sort – authored by Grossman or by critics, philosophers, and theorists he quotes. Grossman includes a complicated number system to cross-reference information relevant to more than one topic. In “Preface,” he states his objective: “the attempt has been made to make this work total (a summa), that is to say, to place individual analyses in the context of a version of the whole subject matter” (4). As with St. Thomas’ Aquinas’s “Summa Theologica,” Grossman’s focus is on the whole “Megillah” (to switch from Catholicism to the Book of Esther), or, in certain sections of the “Summa,” on how the part relates to the whole (metonymy and synecdoche).
Like Yeats, the Nobel laureate Irish modernist he revered, Grossman wanted to connect what he called the “incident” to the “archetype.” In Grossman’s reading of Yeats’ “Easter, 1916,” “Easter” signifies the archetypal sacrifice of mere being (selfhood) for a significance (personhood) that requires a violent transformation into representation, in this case when Irish Republican revolutionaries were murdered in Dublin’s General Post Office during the rebellion against British rule. Through rhythm and form, the poet conserves the names of martyrs:
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born. (Yeats, 270)
Like Yeats in “Easter, 1916,” Grossman asserts that the poet’s primary task is to memorialize “persons.” “A poem facilitates immortality by the conservation of names,” he writes at 1.4 (7). Granted, Grossman addresses a deeply human desire for personal commemoration in the “Summa.” Rereading Grossman in middle age, however, I find myself puzzled by his exceedingly impersonal rhetorical style. Why does he avoid the first-person voice? Why does he use the ongoing past tense (“has been made”)? Grossman casts the relationship between writer to reader along a vertical axis (God/human), rather a horizontal axis (human/human). He regards his theory of poetry as an “act of love” directed towards the “safety of the beloved,” but whatever “care” the reader may receive from Grossman will not resemble a face-to-face kind of nurturance. This will not be, to quote Mike Meyers’ Barbra on Saturday Night Live, “coffee talk.” We know this will not be “coffee talk” from the bardic tone evident in the first of the numbered statements on “Immortality”: “1. The function of poetry is to obtain for everybody one kind of success at the limits of the autonomy of the will” (5). Question to Self: did you understand what Grossman was saying in this first of his “commonplaces”? Did you understand this sentence from 4.4 on “Poetic Language”: “The source of the poetic quality is the risk of commitment of all being to an unalterably singular manifestation” (15), or this statement, also from 4.4?:
At the point where manifestation really occurs (on the outer skin as it were of representation) presence is post-catastrophic. (On poetry and the brokenness of worlds see 31.15.) Hence the ideology of the unique language event (style) is a repetition of the nature of manifestation elevated to a moral allegory. Poetry incorporates as a rule, as the differentia specifica of its kind, the sacrificial history of presence. (16)
I wonder about the cropping up of Latinisms – in this case “differentia specifica” – in a text that I am already finding opaque because of the abstract approach, not to poems, or to a poet’s body of work, or even to a period or national version of the genre, but to “Poetry” itself. What is the function of the Latin phrase? Clarification? Amplification? Nuance? A registration Grossman’s unquestionable authority? I suspect that Grossman believed his impersonal rhetorical style signified his sponsorship of poetry as a holy discourse. He says as much in “Scholium on God” (17.5):
The first constitutive rule of image construction (eidetic substantiation) is the distinction of realms. The most fundamental distinction presented by Western culture is the distinction between man and God. God creates man at every moment of interhuman perception by participating as difference in relationship. The imitation of this difference, inherent in the grammar of metaphor, accounts for the sense we have of the centrality of metaphor in eidetic (human-presence) discourse. (36)
Today, I find myself asking questions about poetry’s “eidetic” function and the “bitter logic” that goes with it. Is poetry’s main role to preserve names and photographic images of persons? Is such a role necessarily based on registrations of distinct realms of appearance? Is form really so crucial in helping readers remember names, as Grossman states? What does it say about Grossman’s ambitions – one could say chutzpah – to take on this herculean task so others can see each other? Should the focus be on Poetry, as it is for Grossman, or, as Stephanie Burt argues in Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (2019), on how to read individual poems in a pluralistic context in which the concept of Poetry may mean different things to different people in different times and different places. All of that said, I can see why I was less interested in asking those questions than in feeling impressed that my academic field could have such a world-preserving function. And how lucky I was to be studying at the feet (metrical and otherwise!) of the Spokesperson for Personhood!
***
Eugene Goodheart, who died on April 9, 2020 at the age of eighty-nine, was the other chaired professor and senior Jewish American intellectual in the Brandeis English department when I studied there from 1986 to 1992. Sadly, but for reasons I will explain below, understandably, I never enrolled in one of Professor Goodheart’s graduate seminars on the novel or on contemporary literary theory. Why was I drawn to Grossman rather than Goodheart? Many of Goodheart’s writings – he authored more than a dozen books in a prolific career that spanned over a half century — focus on themes comparable to Grossman’s writings. How religion and literature relate to each other, for example, concerns them both, as does literature’s interpersonal dimension, as does the problem and promise of the development of an inner life in an alienating modern world. Both American Jews born in the early 1930s, both distinguished professors at the only secular, Jewish-sponsored university in the United States, I am struck by their compassionate reading of Christian texts. Goodheart’s defense of the maligned 19th Century English critic Matthew Arnold, for example, focuses on Arnold’s Pauline reading of resurrection as a symbolic state of internal transformation. In fact, part of Goodheart’s project in books such as The Skeptic Disposition in Contemporary Criticism (1984) is to rescue Arnold from contemporary dismissals of him as a statist and elitist whose notions of “touchstones” and definition of canonical literature as the best words in the best order has an embarrassing whiff of naïve appreciation as well as disinterested objectivism. Writing in the wake of the heyday of deconstruction, which Goodheart reads primarily as a form of nihilism, Arnold becomes for Goodheart in “Criticism at the Present Time” a champion of criticism unafraid to associate literature with a kind of secular religious viewpoint that expresses yearning for transcendence: “Though Arnold was an acute witness of a process of secularization that would eventually sever literature from those religious ideals, he wrote at a time when secularization meant an eliciting rather than a demystifying of the values to be found both in secular literature and in the scriptures. For Arnold, literary culture reveals the hidden meaning of Christianity” (Skeptic, 19). He continues:
Arnold insists on St. Paul’s literary use of terms like ‘grace,’ ‘new birth,’ and ‘justification,’ which in Arnold’s view, have been ‘blunderingly taken in a fixed and rigid manner, as if they were symbols with as definite and fully grasped a meaning as the names line or angle.’ Paul’s language must be read as metaphors for inner states of feeling. Reciprocally, it requires a kind of religious sensitivity to perceive the spiritual character of poetry. (Skeptic, 19-20)
What Goodheart says of Arnold, I suspect, could be read as a piece of displaced autobiographical reflection on Goodheart: “Though he lacked a mystical sensibility and probably mistrusted all accounts of the supernatural as evidence of a dogmatizing intellect, he had a profound feeling for the transcendental character of the religious idea, of what he called the ‘power not ourselves which makes for righteousness.’ “(Skeptic, 20) Goodheart advocates for the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of literature, but, like Arnold, he is also a social critic. “Society is the arena in which the best self is realized,” he writes in reference to Arnold. (Skeptic, 23)
Grossman’s “voice,” I have argued, was not composed to sound as if it stemmed from a Wordsworthian “man speaking to men,” but rather was designed, like Whitman’s, to invoke a collective person of cosmic proportions. By contrast, Goodheart’s self-stated (and decidedly Aristotelian) virtue is “balance,” which he describes as “taking seriously what is of value in opposing positions.” Regarding himself as a descendent of the late 17th Century British statesman George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, Goodheart makes a case for “trimming” in Holding the Center, his collection of political essays from 2013:
Trimming is a metaphor derived from sailing. In order to keep a boat afloat and on course, the sails have to be trimmed as the winds change direction. The trimmer would like to draw a straight line down the middle, but the unpredictable behavior of the winds requires that he tack to left or right, creating a zig-zag motion, on order to keep the ship afloat. (“Holding the Center,” xii)
As with the moderating, flexible disposition evident in the political writings from his last decade of life, I now recognize Goodheart’s penchant for “trimming” when he was coming to terms with the unyielding viewpoints held by Left and Right wingers during the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, Goodheart challenged the false binary between “tradition” and “innovation” by relying on Freud’s notion of the “uncanny.” In “The Uncanny Canon” from Does Literary Studies Have a Future? (1999), he enters the fray in a battleground that pitted conservatives such as William Bennett and Roger Kimball, who treat the canon as a timeless repository of values such as courage and justice, against feminists, postmodernists, and multiculturalists, who view the canon as imperialistic because it promotes work by Dead White Males from Aristocratic cultures. To employ his own Freudian term, Goodheart has an uncanny ability to capture paradoxes in his own perspective on literary and philosophical heritages that seem diametrically opposed. At the same time, Goodheart, who has been accused of liberal wishy-washiness that avoids action and definitive statement because he sees merit in many sides of an issue, is in fact steadfast in his (again Freudian) resistance to ideologically driven readings. Where I preferred Grossman’s authoritative tones when I was 25, I find myself drawn to Goodheart’s circumspection. He offers the sound judgment of the open-minded individual who argues from the evidence of specific texts and specific instances of injustice. He treads lightly when addressing oppression in the context of colonialism, imperialism, or any other large-scale form of domination. His emphasis on interpreting the facts of a specific case left Goodheart as something of a lone voice in the wilderness of academic literary studies driven by theoretical commitments and political allegiances, rather than by fair-minded assessments of individual texts and authors. To return to his “trimming” metaphor, however, I admire Goodheart’s willingness to change his mind about vexing issues:
In politics, the trimmer may be a liberal or a conservative who steers between ideological extremes, changing course as circumstances change. He must, of course, choose a side on an issue, but not always the same side for every issue, since he is responsive to changing situations. “Holding the Center,” xiii)
Applying Halifax’s “trimming” model to Goodheart’s literary criticism, we notice that for Goodheart the “classics” by no means promote a unified perspective on human experience that can be inculcated by conservatives to define a common set of standards about ethics, aesthetics, civics, or theologics. Goodheart points out that the Western tradition is marked by conflicts as wide as those evident in the differences between Marx and Adam Smith, Plato and Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Hegel. Further, he notes that it is far from clear how contemporary readers are supposed to respond to Achilles’s wrath or to the misanthropic sensibilities of Nietzsche and Swift. Are we to imitate? Resist? Notice such qualities in ourselves and try to reform them? Like Gerald Graff, who urges instructors to “teach the conflicts,” Goodheart steers clear of Right and Left resistances to canonical literature. The canon offers multiple, and often contradictory, approaches to how to live with meaning and purpose:
[The canon] accommodates quarrels between the rationalist Plato and the immoralist Nietzsche, between Enlightenment liberalism and Burkean conservatism, between the Augustan affirmation of Reason and the Romantic celebration of the imagination. The energies of art are often subversive and not easily contained within a canon, which is a term of theological orthodoxy. (“Does Literary Studies,” 43)
Goodheart teaches us that there is a difference between indecision and occupying the space “between” orthodoxies while resisting the temptation to avoid complexity in the name of ideology. There is nothing wimpy, for example, in his critique of Leftist canon-bashers: “The unmasking critic tends to regard the canon and the classics that constitute it with a generalized mistrust – as if the canon was an imperial conspiracy to dominate the mine and not open it.” (Does Literary Studies, 53) By using a scalpel instead of a hatchet – as when he distinguishes between “opening” and “dominating” a mind – Goodheart moderates extreme positions. Wondering about why some critics resist the classics, he notes the populist bent in American culture that associates “difficulty” with “elitism.” He then comments on the paradox that much Leftist canon critique is itself elitist because of its opaque discourse and patronizing tone. Leftists believe “groups need to be protected because of their perceived incapacity to respond to what is not immediately available.” (53) Goodheart challenges conservative and progressive views on the canon by pressing against his own resistances and by challenging assumptions held by other critics, such as the association between “difficulty” and “elitism.” We read classics not to fortify our respect for representations that have been valued in the past. To invoke Julia Kristeva, we read classics because they elicit the stranger within ourselves, and so expand and challenge our pat notions of identity. Heart of Darkness is such a text that tests received wisdom and hard and fast notions about identity:
Like Marlow in Heart of Darkness, who to his astonishment finds himself responding to the menacing howls that he hears in the African wilderness (the howls are repressed voices in himself), the most rewarding reading of a work is finding the uncanny in it: that is, its alienness, which corresponds to something in ourselves from which we are estranged and to which we may become reconciled. The shock of recognition is not the facile confirmation of what is already present to our consciousness, but the more difficult realization of what we have ignored or repressed in our lives. (Does Literary Studies, 52-53)
Goodheart’s Freudian approach would not fit the bill on talk shows where Conservatives lambast “tenured radicals” for refusing to teach value-oriented literature. At the same time, Goodheart’s arguments for why we should read classics – they teach us about our own otherness – diverges from Progressive suspicions that classics promote imperialism and patriarchy. “The life of the mind does not subsist in either/or” he writes in Culture and the Radical Conscience (1973). (x)
In spite of thematic similarities as well as the broad learning he shares with Grossman, Goodheart’s tone and temperament seem antithetical to Grossman’s. A student of Lionel Trilling’s at Columbia, Goodheart writes in the tradition of Philip Rahv and Irving Howe, wide-ranging New York Jewish Intellectuals associated with Partisan Review. Rahv and Howe taught at Brandeis in the university’s first decades. Like Trilling, Rahv, and Howe, Goodheart’s writings convey an accessible intelligence while evoking specific debates relevant to historical moments of cultural life. Writing, for example, on the canon controversy of the 1980s and 1990s, we have seen how Goodheart punctures holes in both sides of the debate. He challenges the idea of thinking of literary studies in terms of “war.”
Goodheart wrote “Friends,” an essay on Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep, for the London Review of Books in 1989. Is it surprising that Goodheart is reviewing Booth? The book under discussion concerns ethical and interpersonal matters, but what is most Goodheartian in Booth is the Arnoldian willingness to think against oneself. Goodheart writes that Booth takes an imaginative leap, but not in the traditional sense of suspending disbelief to enter the fictional worlds of Twain’s Missouri or Jane Austen’s England. Rather, the reader must try to imagine how readers from other “subject positions” – Blacks who find Twain racist, feminists who chafe against Austen’s complicity with male authority in Emma – construct their reading of works that Booth clearly loves, but needs to understand as best he can from other points of view.
In “Obama On and Off Base,” a Dissent essay from the first term, Goodheart, himself a Red Diaper Baby, defends the 44th president against Leftists who disparaged Obama’s willingness to compromise with moderate Republicans:
Anyone who has read the history of the Lincoln and Roosevelt administrations has to be struck with the unfairness of the contrast. Their presidencies proceeded through fits and starts, hesitations and uncertainties. Rarely did they avoid making compromises to achieve results. Either unread in that history or willfully ignoring it, Obama’s critics express dismay and disbelief at every failure, every inconsistency, apparent and real, in his performance.
We usually remember FDR as a larger than life politician who pushed through the New Deal with a supreme confidence in his righteousness. Pushing back against this view, Goodheart connects FDR to Obama. He describes both leaders as lacking a grand map to reach policy objectives that sometimes succeeded, sometimes failed, and almost always were the product of compromise with opponents who held different views about how to negotiate a public crisis. “Their presidencies proceeded through fits and starts, hesitations and uncertainties. Rarely did they avoid making compromises to achieve results.” I just can’t imagine Grossman celebrating how great leaders flew blind, patching their programs together as best they could in the face of political resistance and social turmoil.
As I age my admiration grows for Goodheart’s writings, while, as my remarks on “Summa Lyrica” demonstrate, my feelings about Grossman’s writings on poetics have shifted from grad student gaga to respect mixed with confusion about his precise meanings and uneasiness with his hermetic discourse. To return to my query about why I studied with Grossman, not Goodheart, when I was a grad student at Brandeis, I realize I lacked the maturity to appreciate Goodheart’s critical approach. I was looking for a sage with The Answer, rather than accepting the need to wrestle on my own with life’s insoluble problems with a seasoned guide who admitted he did not know everything. Goodheart’s self-stated virtue of “balance,” which he describes as “taking seriously what is of value in opposing positions” (xix), was not the zig-zag path I wanted to take in the balkanized terrain of academic humanities when I was facing a lethal job market thirty years ago. How much easier to latch on to hyperbolic claims of the death of the author (Barthes), the zero sum game of literary competition between young and old “strong” poets in an agonistic battle for supremacy (Bloom), the prison house of language (Jameson), the schizophrenic mindset that would free us from the paternal structures underwriting Freud’s Oedipus complex (Deleuze), the female poet as madwoman in the attic (Gilbert and Gubar), or even, for that matter, Grossman’s theory of poetry as “a last resort,” “against our vanishing,” and “an act of love.” After all, these approaches made headlines when reporters wanted juicy stories about the MLA convention. Goodheartian “trimming” is clearly what we need to temper our fiercely divided polis, but the term was not getting the buzz among knowing grad students and the brilliant crop of assistant professors that Brandeis hired to clue my cohort in to what was happening at Stanford, Cornell, Penn, and Yale. “What kind of critic are you?” Grossman once asked me in his office. “Who do you read?” Stumble. Pause. “Why, I’m…I’m…eclectic.” My translation for eclectic was unemployable when I was starting out in the 1990s. Thanks to Goodheart’s example, I now regard eclecticism as a virtue. Rereading Goodheart, I admire what he would call his “skeptical,” but not “radically skeptical,” disposition. I appreciate his unwillingness to believe that any conviction should be held with absolute certainty, including his own skepticism.
In Summa, Grossman declared his understanding of the truth of poetry from a steep and icy peak. Goodheart’s tone is, oddly, authoritative, but at the same time he does not pretend that his perspective is beyond challenge or refinement. In fact, one of Goodheart’s complaints about much contemporary literary criticism is that the critic refuses, in Goodheart’s terms, to think against oneself, and so to challenge approaches driven by groupthink. Occupying a centrist position because unwilling to deny valid positions held by debate participants, Goodheart resists dogmatism. He views all perspectives as inherently limited and, therefore, subject to revision and change. There is a “this is true, isn’t it?” quality to his style, that, ironically, signals the author’s confidence because he is open to revealing his vulnerabilities. To recognize vulnerability as a strength, rather than as a weakness, indicates Goodheart’s enduring wisdom.
Grossman’s voice represented supreme power and unquestioned authority over subject matter and stunned audience. Words poured out of his mouth in lecture hall, but I felt he needed an official forum and sturdy auditorium as well as for the roles of lecturer and auditor to be clearly defined before he could begin his utterances. Grossman spoke a lot of words in lecture halls and office hours, but rarely, at least in my experience, in relaxed form such as a friendly conversation over coffee. In fact, Grossman, mysteriously, once told me, “poets cannot have friends.” Another time, at a rare departmental picnic to celebrate a nice spring afternoon following a poetry reading, Grossman ambled over to the party in his ubiquitous gray suit and tie, however hot the day. He stood yards away from the rest of the group, smoking his pipe and gazing off into the distance. I came up to him. “Why are you standing so far away from everyone else? Why don’t you join the party?” “I gave that up a long time ago.” I was his student as well as teaching assistant for a good four years, but I never was asked over to his house in Lexington or out to have a meal with him at a restaurant in Cambridge. (This may say as much about my social awkwardness as about Grossman’s impersonality.)
Grossman described poetry as an act of care for the beloved, the you, but, in my experience, when it came to pragmatic forms of assistance, Grossman was no master, at least for me. By contrast, I owe a debt to Goodheart for professional support after I defended my Brandeis dissertation in 1992, by which point Grossman had already left the university to join the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 1991. I remain indebted to Grossman for his fine-grained editorial work on my dissertation, which, in part because of his critical guidance, I published as my tenure book in 1995. But it was Goodheart, not Grossman, who offered me crucial support when I needed it most. To be specific, in the spring of 1992, after I had defended my dissertation, but had not yet secured a teaching position for the fall, I received a call from Harvard’s History and Literature program to interview on campus for a three-year appointment. When I got news of the Harvard interview, I did the obvious thing: I called Grossman in Baltimore to ask if he could put a word of support in for me to Philip Fisher, his closest colleague when they were both at Brandeis; Fisher had recently moved from Brandeis to a chair at Harvard. I cannot forget what Grossman said to me on the phone that day: “I’m sorry, I can’t help you. I don’t know anybody at Harvard.” Although I was not his student, I somehow knew I needed to call Gene Goodheart. I had worked for several years as Goodheart’s assistant for a Mellon funded Humanities Center that he ran at Brandeis, so I had that connection. (He knew I could order plates of blond brownies and trays of hummus and pita with the best of them for the Mellon seminars!). I called Goodheart, explaining about the Harvard interview, and asking if he would drop a note to friends he knew at Harvard. Goodheart asked the obvious question: “Why don’t you ask Allen Grossman?” Me: “I did ask him. He won’t do it.” Goodheart was silent for a moment. He didn’t chastise Grossman or express any concerns about me or my work. “I’ll send them a note.” And he did and it worked because I got the job, a proverbial cat bird’s seat to landing on the tenure track, which happened for me after my second year at Harvard. Once I had achieved an academic version of “personhood” – a permanent position at Purdue, a university press book in print, publications in refereed journals — Grossman would eventually associate himself with me in print. He would, for example, include a conversation with me as a chapter in his University of Michigan “Poets on Poetry” series volume, The Long Schoolroom, and he would write a generous endorsement for the back cover of my first book of poems, Bryce Passage. But when I was merely a vulnerable individual of no status in the profession – not a visible “person” — it was Goodheart, not Grossman, who helped me land a significant non-tenure spot that bought me time and resources to build credentials that helped me secure a tenure-track offer from Purdue in 1994. The memory that I can’t get out of mind when I write these pages is that when I most needed real-world care as an unemployed PhD, pushing thirty, and with nothing in the bank, it was Goodheart, not Grossman, who acted on my behalf.
Notes
[1] The late poet and critic Reginald Shepherd writes,
Grossman shares the Romantic and High Modernist exalted idea of the poet’s vocation and of the power of poetry to engage and encompass the world on equal terms…Though his poetry is not devoid of irony or even humor, Grossman is never embarrassed or ironic about the greatness he believes poetry to be capable of making apparent, nor about his own ambitions to approach such greatness, although in his view its attainment is impossible: to write the perfect poem would be to reach the end of poetry. (Shepherd, Blog)
[2] As Micah Towery reports:
[Grossman] sees persons as “value-bearing,” and he differentiates “persons” from “selves” along this line of value. The self is something that can be discovered or found. The self is what Freud parsed: a hurricane of secret desires, phobias, and complexes. Persons, however, are what poets write about; they are “artifacts.” Now, to say it is a construction of sorts, does not mean it has no “presence.” I don’t think of this construction as a mask, a falseness, something that obscures, but rather the actuality of what we perceive when we encounter other selves. In other words, I experience “Micah Towery” as a self—myself. You, however, encounter me as an object (in the Thomistic sense), but more: a person. You encounter my presence through my writing.
Works Cited
Stephanie Burt. Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems. New York: Basic Books, 2019.
Allen Grossman. “Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in Speculative Poetics.” Western Humanities Review. Spring 1990.
–. The Sighted Singer: Two Works On Poetry For Readers And Writers. With Mark Halliday. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Micah Towery. “Blogging through Allen Grossman, Part 1: The Role of Poetry.” The The. February 9, 2010. http://www.thethepoetry.com/2010/02/blogging-through-allen-grossman-part-1-the-role-of-poetry/
Roger Gilbert. “Visionary Care: Allen Grossman’s Dialectic.” Poetry’s Poet: Essays on the Poetry, Pedagogy, and Poetics of Allen Grossman. Daniel Morris, Editor. National Poetry Foundation Press. Orono, Maine. 143-168.
Eugene Goodheart. Culture and the Radical Conscience. New Brunswick: Transaction, 2001. (Reissue of 1973, Harvard University Press.)
–. Does Literary Studies Have a Future? Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
–. “Friends: A Review of The company we keep: An Ethics of Fiction by Wayne Booth.” The London Review of Books. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v11/n06/eugene-goodheart/friendss. Vol. 11 No. 6 · 16 March 1989
–. Holding the Center: In Defense of Political Trimming. Taylor and Francis, 2013.
–. “Obama On and Off Base.” Dissent. September 2010
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/obama-on-and-off-base
–. The Skeptic Disposition in Contemporary Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
John Keats. “When I have Fears.” Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology. Helen Vendler, Editor. Boston: Bedford, 1997. P. 17.
James Longenbach. Review of How to do Things With Tears. Boston Review, http:// bostonreview.mit.edu/ (April 8, 2002).
Gary Roberts. “Allen Grossman.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 193: American Poets since World War II, Sixth Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998, pp. 148-158.
William Shakespeare. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (sonnet 18). Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology. Helen Vendler, editor. Boston: Bedford, 1997. P. 521.
Alan Shapiro. Review of The Sighted Singer. Amazon website. https://www.amazon.com/Sighted-Singer-Poetry-Readers-Writers/dp/0801842433/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=allen+grossman+mark+halliday+sighted+singer&qid=16061443
Reginald Shepherd. “On Allen Grossman.” Reginald Shepherd’s Blog. February 4, 2007. http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/2007/02/on-allen-grossman.html
William Butler Yeats. “Easter, 1916.” Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology. Helen Vendler, Editor. Boston: Bedford, 1997. P. 268.
“Allen Grossman.” The Poetry Foundation Website. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/allen-grossman