Break, Blow, Burn
by Camille Paglia
Pantheon. 272 pp. $20.00

Camille Paglia, a scholar who slipped past the cultural gatekeepers in 1990 with the publication of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, is a figure to contend with. Like her great model, Oscar Wilde, an early “master of mass media,” Paglia’s life and epigrams have had as much impact as her published works.

A child of the 1950’s, the young Paglia fell in love with literature and set out to spend her life in the academy as an apostle of great writing. After receiving her Ph.D. from Yale, she got a job in 1972 at the perfect place: Bennington College, in those days a distinguished liberal-arts school with a strong avant-garde and feminist tradition. At first she blossomed there, but according to her own account she soon self-destructed, entering “my most militant lesbian-feminist mode (which led to me getting fired after a fist-fight at a college dance).”

After Bennington, she proved unable to find another academic position at a liberal-arts institution—ever. For the next twelve years, she sustained herself by occasional part-time teaching jobs at art schools. According to her, she was poison—no one would hire her. The Philadelphia College of Art (now known as the University of the Arts) gave her shelter in 1984, and she has remained loyal to it ever since.

Throughout this difficult time, she continued her labors on Sexual Personae. Many people boast incessantly about their magnum opus. Very few ever write it. Proust is one of the few, Paglia another. After many rejections, Yale University Press took a chance on the 700-page tome, and she was launched.

The argument of Sexual Personae is a combination of D.H. Lawrence, Sir James Frazer, and Norman O. Brown. According to Paglia, the pagan underpinnings of our world have been only partly effaced by the repressiveness of Judeo-Christian civilization; sex and nature, “brutal” forces that constitute our true reality, still flourish in “art, eroticism, astrology, and pop culture,” refuting every attempt to impose wishful thinking on a resistant world. This theme is pursued through Western and much of Eastern art and literature, with illuminating, exciting, and highly debatable things to say about every writer who has interested Paglia because of his or her decadence, sexuality, or witty cruelty.

Curiously, although Paglia claimed to be a woman of the Left, a feminist, and a gay activist, Sexual Personae was not greeted by the grandees of the cultural Left as she might have hoped. The New York Review of Books was silent. Instead, she was first recognized, if I remember correctly, by Roger Kimball in the New Criterion, who saw the book as a sensation, if a mixed one. When the New York Times took notice, the author of the review was not Susan Sontag but Terry Teachout, who called it an often brilliant, scorched earth attack on the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism and traditional feminism, written by an “exciting (if purple) stylist and an admirably close reader with a hard core of common sense.”

Paglia’s ensuing decade of fame—from 1990 to the 9/11 attacks—bore the stamp of her determined personality. As if in compensation for the decades before, she was ubiquitous—in Vanity Fair, on Sixty Minutes, on speaking platforms, debating with traditional feminists. She had, she would tell an interviewer, “all the publicity I could want.” To cap her fame, she instituted a regular column in Salon, one of the first of the Internet’s electronic-only media, thereby acquiring a new audience for her wide-ranging and peppery observations on sexual politics, the Clintons, and her old enemies in the academic world. Not since Norman Mailer abandoned his position as socialist anarchist and bought his first dinner jacket had there been such an anti-antinomian and original figure on the American Left.

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In the period after Sexual Personae, Paglia also published two essay collections; but after September 11, 2001 she essentially fell mute. Her new book, Break, Blow, Burn, comes out of this relatively silent period. It is the result of an inward turn, and in many ways a response to the decade of her own fame. Although Paglia’s publisher has dressed the book in a hot lipstick-pink dust-jacket, perhaps in the hope of finding a public for chick lit-crit, the cover does not represent the book.

Consisting of slow, careful, line-by-line readings of 43 great poems, Break, Blow, Burn (the title is taken from a sonnet by John Donne) is intended by Paglia to be a direct affront to aspects of today’s cultural establishment. Both in her introduction and in a widely circulated series of interviews, she has lined up her two main enemies: contemporary poets and contemporary professors.

The former disappoint her:

Arresting themes or images are proposed, then dropped or left to dribble away. . . . [S]uggestive points are prosaically rephrased and hammered into obviousness. Rote formulas are rampant—a lugubrious victimology of accident, disease, and depression or a simplistic, ranting politics.

The latter group once knew how to read poems and teach others to do so. In the heyday of the New Criticism—“a sophisticated system of interpretation that has never been surpassed as a pedagogical tool”—close readers of poetry enjoyed “stratospheric reputations at the major universities.” But all this ended as, in the following decades, “poetry and poetry study were steadily marginalized by pretentious ‘theory’ ” and by the advent of post-structuralism with its “clotted jargon, circular reasoning, and smug, debunking cynicism.”

Paglia’s real aim in this book is, however, redemptive. She wants to recapture that “magic moment” of the 1950’s and 1960’s when poetry, a form “born in ancient ritual and cult,” was not only prestigious but had the power to sanctify human experience. Revering poets as makers and creators, she hopes to revive, through her work, the dashed hopes and wasted energies of her aging generation, “flamingly altruistic yet hedonistic and self-absorbed, bold yet naïve, abundantly gifted yet plagued by self-destruction.”

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To accomplish all this, Paglia has, paradoxically, set aside the ambitious polemics and argumentative fireworks on display in Sexual Personae, as well as her encyclopedic knowledge of culture high and low, East and West. Instead, she means to use only the tools of the New Criticism to unlock the power of literature for readers. She pleads with them to slow down, to contemplate, to close the iBook, turn off the Pod-Casts, stop scribbling in the blogosphere, and pay attention only to words and their power. Heeding her own admonition, Paglia has here deliberately suppressed much of her own speed, her wit, her wide-ranging intellect, and her fierce energy.

These qualities are missed. For all the honorableness of its intentions, Break, Blow, Burn does not achieve them. In particular, its case for the self-sufficiency of close reading falls short, both in Paglia’s choice of poems to read and in her readings of them.

She begins with three Shakespeare sonnets, three sonnets by John Donne, and two short lyrics by George Herbert. Letting 150 years pass, she then brings together a collection of Romantic verse: two of William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” a sonnet each by Wordsworth and Shelley, plus Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” She skips the Victorians. The last British voice (not counting the slavishly Anglicizing Sylvia Plath) is Yeats.

As for American poetry, Paglia opens with Whitman and Dickinson. She then turns to two modernist masters, Wallace Stevens (represented by two rather slight but programmatic poems) and William Carlos Williams (his two most anthologized short poems), before considering the Harlem Renaissance figures of Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes. Turning to poets still famous and working during her own youth, she chooses one great poem by Robert Lowell and three wonderful poems by the now-neglected Theodore Roethke.

The book ends with a curious assortment of contemporary work that Paglia insists was the best she could find. Two charming poems by Frank O’Hara and Paul Blackburn, offering contrasting camp and “beat” views of urban life, are followed by forgettable efforts from Gary Snyder, May Swenson, Chuck Wachtel, Norman H. Russell, Rochell Kraut, and Wanda Coleman. The capstone of the book is “Woodstock,” one of the more wan lyrics of Joni Mitchell, which Paglia unaccountably proclaims “an important modern poem—possibly the most popular and influential poem composed in English since Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy.’ ”

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In making these selections, Paglia has conspicuously avoided the challenge set by those whom her mentor Harold Bloom would call the strongest poets. Why is there no John Milton, for example, or none of Alexander Pope’s savage lacerations of his enemies? Why does she choose work by Shelley and Wordsworth that is so untypical of their strength as poets? Why does she not show the connections between poems—by mentioning, for instance, that her Robert Lowell poem is an attempt to freshen Donne’s lovers-in-bed poems, or that Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” owes a huge debt to the deliberately phony “American” ballads of Louis Macneice?

When it comes to contemporary verse, if Paglia’s practice matched her advocacy, the later pages of her book would be the most lively and fervent, full of examples of creative strength and daring. Her inability to find strong lyrics more than a half-century old is one sign of failure. Another is the lyrics she does present. If she really believes that the best modern poets have been unable to produce works that last, why not test this proposition against at least one poet of deservedly high reputation—Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, W.H. Auden, or Philip Larkin among the noble dead, or, still with us, Jorie Graham or Galway Kinnell?

Paglia once published an op-ed in the New York Times proposing that the federal government offer grants to rock musicians, “America’s most wasted natural resource.” The Joni Mitchell lyric, a memorial to the lost and impossible dreams of the 1960’s, would seem to confirm the wisdom of declining any such suggestion; it is certainly one of the more pallid expressions of that decade, and quite justly forgotten.

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Then there are Paglia’s readings, the reading of which is intermittently bracing but more often tedious. T.S. Eliot, who would have agreed with her about the absurdity of “theory,” said that the literary critic’s only method is to be very intelligent. Paglia is capable of great intelligence in this book, but in too many places she provides mere paraphrase, a response to imagery with imagery-by-association. She is not interested enough in poetic logic, or keen enough to show the way poetry works—other than through its spooky, imagistic quality—and she frequently reduces the terror and pathos of a poem by re-expressing its theme in horror-movie terms: “Donne portrays himself, like Dali, as a showy phallic swordsman baffled and bemused by a forceful, alluring woman who brushes him away like a pesky fly.” The overall effect is depressing.

Of course, Paglia is always capable of insight. But for the most part she does not meet the commonsense test that William Empson—the real founder of New Criticism—set for close reading: “You think that the poem is worth the trouble before you go into it carefully, and you know more about what it is worth when you have done so.” In the case of contemporary poetry, Paglia all but confesses her disbelief that the specimens she has selected are really worth the trouble—and proceeds to teach us nothing at all about whatever worth they may possess.

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In the end, what hobbles Paglia may well be her intense nostalgia for the 1960’s. Whatever one finally thinks of that decade, a case can be made for certain of its forgotten aspects, and Paglia’s attempt to articulate that case, using only the vocabulary of her literary apprenticeship, is hardly dishonorable. Her almost magical belief in the ritual powers of the New Criticism is driven by the thought that, if only we could all read as well as her teachers did, the age of Aquarius might dawn properly this time.

The trouble is that Break, Blow, Burn reads as if it were written by the artificially preserved hero of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray: by the innocent, idealistic, and austere Paglia that once was, rather than by the much more fascinating person that she has become. But of all the children of the age of Aquarius, she ought to know how pointless and dishonest it is to extol the humanity and morality of the people we once were. I prefer the Camille Paglia of the 21st century, and I wish she would resume being brilliant and cruel, and herself.

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