The Irrational Karl Shapiro¹

Karl Shapiro is, as he says, a “critic in spite of himself”—a man of feeling, intuition, and personal taste, who over the years has had little inclination and less use for the abstruse ways of modern criticism. To be sure, he admits that he has written some of it himself but usually in an offhand manner and mainly because in our “Age of Criticism” even the poets have had to write the stuff to get along. Recently, however, he has found a use for criticism and an urgent one: to damn it, along with damning the poetry that has gone hand in hand with it as the dominant literature of nearly the past half-century. As might be expected, the chief targets of this deliberately explosive collection of essays are Eliot and Pound and their camp, the New Criticism. But as part of his bold campaign to rescue poetry from its captors and to clear the ground for a new Romanticism (“Irrationalism” is perhaps the more apt term), Shapiro also attempts a demolition job up and down the modern literary front. Eliot is wired to Auden and Yeats, Marxism to Freudianism, Partisan Review to Kenyon to the Explicator, “Original Sin” to sociology, the “poetry of ideas” to the autotelic or non-ideological form of criticism. “It is necessary to demolish the great empty Bastille of criticism . . .” says Shapiro, and by this he means all the modes of our literary culture—the creative as well as the critical—that restrain the natural, open, mysterious play of the human psyche, the free spirit which he believes must inform a literature if it is to be both alive and relevant. With the removal of our formalistic, bookish, and idea-ridden state of letters, Shapiro also believes that natural judgment and taste would replace the elaborate equipment which readers of poetry have been given to carry in their heads, that a vast, “healthy” literary audience would come in view, and that the men writing for it would follow in the steps of the true poet-prophets of life, uninhibited and uncontaminated by culture and society: Whitman and Henry Miller, particularly; Blake, Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, D. H. Lawrence, and William Carlos Williams as well. Poetry would again become personal and vital, direct and sincere, accepting and benign; it would also be animated by what Shapiro calls “cosmic consciousness,” or, if the poet chanced to be Jewish, by “God consciousness.”

All of which Shapiro proffers seriously, and even angrily. I think there is much to be said in favor of the stand he takes, but there would be a good deal more if he had argued its issues with more precision and thoroughness and if he had paid more attention to reality and less to his own gestures of defiance and reverence. It is not that Shapiro shouldn’t allow himself to get angry; in fact, one of the things I like about his book is that he cares enough about literature to get sore at what has been happening to it under the influence of a fancy, restrictive, and increasingly academic set of prescribed manners. “Against the hollow, impersonal voices of the official literati we must raise the sound of the living human voice,” snaps Shapiro and I, for one, have no wish to gainsay him. Similarly Shapiro’s zeal is itself liberating when it conveys that rare and unmistakable happiness of a critic who is writing about Whitman or Henry Miller because he is getting something of personal value out of them, who has not merely found a topic for a professionally acceptable essay. Still anger and zeal do not take the place of pertinacity, and they lead easily to a kind of self-indulgent unseriousness of their own, with which In Defense of Ignorance is, unfortunately, loaded.

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Part of the trouble is that Shapiro is convinced that extreme opinions and a fulminating style are required if one is to break in upon the closed circuit of serious literary opinion that T. S. Eliot has created. This is silly, if understandable. Also much of his apparent critical distemper results from what I take to be his new commitment to being deliberately personal, irrational, and wild—a more serious matter, which I shall say something about as I go along. Yet there is little besides their impudence to explain judgments such as the following, chosen almost at random: “But the career of Auden is curiously without center; it is uninteresting. It consists of a series of reports on the goodness and the badness of English poets and their ideas.” Or again: Yeats “belongs to the past, with all its claptrap of history and myth.” Or again: “Eliot’s style of deliberate plagiarism is the first symptom of failure to locate the language—in his case a lifelong admission of defeat.”

It should be said that Shapiro has his charming and funny side, and indeed his sense of humor and a saving strain of self-irony help as much as anything to keep his book sane. But on the whole, he too frequently wants to write as a man who has had it and to show that if those implicated in the great conspiracy of modern letters would wake up, as he has finally done, and see the light, would trust only their real intuitions and judgments and then speak their own minds, all would begin to go well. But if Shapiro’s judgments can be suddenly and deadly accurate, his general method of a highly provocative and free-wheeling impressionism leads more frequently to his evading the need to bear down on his subject when the going gets tough, and then instead of being bravely irrational, he becomes simply naive and unintelligent. “The New Criticism is one of the more noxious by-products of the culture religion and it is too large a subject for me.” At too many points In Defense of Ignorance reminded me of nothing so much as that moment at a party when, in the middle of a serious discussion, the local “creative writer” turns to the nearest listener and says, “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

All of which is the last thing that is going to move the massive and solid reputations of Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and Auden out of the way and give poetry back to the common reader and to the sort of poets that Shapiro likes and would like now to be himself. The only effective argument against one kind of major poetry is, of course, another kind; the real answer to The Waste Land is not Shapiro’s arguments but Robert Lowell’s great Life Studies. Shapiro himself says as much. But that he should have chosen to assert the claims of the anti-reason, anti-art, anti-Establishment position at this time is itself significant, and later I want to come back to a few of the topical implications of his stand.

The personal implication is that In Defense of Ignorance has been written by a more or less typical modern poet who is going through a state of conversion. The basic text is not “Stop reading Eliot and the critics and start reading Whitman,” but rather, in Shapiro’s words, “Everything we are taught is false. . . . Change your life.” And this is finally what he is saying to himself within the pages of these essays; he is trying passionately to talk himself into something: namely, that he can still break loose from a decade or more of accepting as a poet and promoting as editor of Poetry the literary habits and norms of the age, that he can still get out of his commitments to reason, restraint, and sophistication and become irrational, excessive, and natural—a “white aboriginal” as Lawrence called Whitman. “‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,’ ” affirms Shapiro in Blake’s words. Much of the interest, and possibly explanation, of his book comes from watching him go as far (or “far out”) as he does to arrive at irrational positions that will allow him to touch bottom again after all these years of drifting with the tide of acceptable academic poetry and criticism. The excessive combativeness of Shapiro’s negative judgments—particularly against Auden, who, for all his “rationalism,” has clearly been one of Shapiro’s own leading influences—the almost superstitious veneration of Whitman and Miller, the eager praise for Wilhelm Reich, the new affiliations to Zen and Hasidism and even to science : all of this bespeaks the attempt to get back to the “ignorant” and wayward young poet who wrote Essay on Rime—and set forth anew. In Defense of Ignorance contains, in fact, the sudden confessions of guilt that begin by blaming others, the hysterical talk about conspiracies, and that special mixture of dogmatism and self-hypnotism which we have learned in our time to associate with another kind of conversion and return.

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When I have said all this, I do not mean that Shapiro’s book is unwarranted or his zeal wholly misplaced. Personal excesses and doctrinaire biases aside, he is closely in touch with the fundamental literary problem of the present—the problem of skillful, highly trained writers, particularly poets, to break through literature to a direct and meaningful encounter with contemporary realities. As a veteran of the literary age—which, however much it will continue to stand for the contemporary one in the quarterlies and the university time schedules, has pretty clearly played itself out—Shapiro is well worth listening to. His cardinal point that “poetry has lost its significance, its relevance and even its meaning in our time,” seems to me largely true. Nor does the matter stop there, for the canons of modern poetry have had an enormous influence on the literary consciousness of the period, so that the terms and standards of T. E. Hulme, Eliot, Richards, Ransom, et al.—derived largely from one way of reading one type of verse—have been applied willy-nilly to the theory and practice of fiction, drama, and of criticism itself.

Thus it won’t do to conclude, as has one dean of modern poetry, that Shapiro is merely going through an “intemperate” phase; or to say, as has one of our prominent scholar-critics, that this book is only a defense of “willfulness,” an attempt at rebellion which lacks its proper “point in time.” These are merely facile ways to ignore the fair number of hits that he makes against the poetry of Eliot, Pound, and Yeats (who, incidentally, is not so “brilliantly invulnerable,” as Richard Ellman says he is, to Shapiro’s charges that he dallied in the occult, that his visions of history “are so much doodling in the margins of his mind,” and that his fear of the irrational frequently led him into an excessive “stylization and depersonalization of experience”). Also Shapiro’s critics dismiss without a hearing the justifiable basis of his point that the New Poetry or New Humanism or New Classicism, call it what you will, has had an inhibiting and narrowing effect upon recent literature and that writers such as William Carlos Williams and Henry Miller may very well be the ones who, as he says, can “give literature back to life.”

But if Henry Miller, for one, proves to be a vitalizing and truth-giving influence, I doubt if it will be in his role of one of Shapiro’s “poets of the cosmic consciousness.” Nor does Miller’s best and most influential writing seem to me to embody the conditions for the renewal of poetry that Shapiro says it does: that poetry “must repair to the wilderness, outside society, outside the city gates . . .” and so forth. It is precisely when Miller is in society, implicated in its codes, that he demonstrates his amazing ability to get underneath his experience and swing it gracefully to the light. Shapiro comes much closer to stating the conditions by which poetry can be renewed and the particular power and appeal of Miller himself, when he adumbrates George Orwell’s point about Miller’s extraordinary capacity for “acceptance,” which, incidentally, is least impressive when Miller, like Margaret Fuller, decides to accept the cosmos. Shapiro also comes much closer to stating these conditions of renewal in his remarks about William Carlos Williams’ capacity for “living the life of the poet,” by which Shapiro means the “man to whom the daily life is the poetry itself, whatever his occupation.” Here is where Miller and Williams and Whitman make a viable common cause: their relish for personal daily experience; their ability to wind themselves into their reactions and remain articulate, truthful, and accepting; their common grasp of what Orwell calls the Realpolitik of the mind; their faith in the human community, which means something only because they have kept faith with the human in themselves; finally, their love of naturalness, spontaneity, and concreteness that helped them to lift up living and contemporary speech, as well as experience, to the level of art.

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This I take also to be the valuable side of Shapiro’s position, stripped of his own esoteric and “cultural” features such as the call for political and social disaffiliation and the advertisements for his heady brew of scientism, mysticism, populism, Reichian psychology, and the “higher consciousness” system of P. D. Ouspensky. Whether Shapiro can make poetry out of his affiliations with the “cosmodemonic” remains to be seen; as part of a program to reinvigorate and redirect the literary imagination, it seems to me largely beside the point. At this hour of history, when the daily life goes on in ways that are as provisional and fantastic as any writer who is really conscious could wish, the relevant poetry will not need to “experience a sense of total unity with all nature, or the universe, or some degree of that experience.” To be conscious of, and faithful to, the extraordinary nature of the so-called ordinary, contemporary life—as over the years the poetry of Auden has been—will be enough. Shapiro is too hot for mysticism by fiat, too willing to let his concern with the irrational and its possibilities flow into misty doctrines that evade the human situation at either end by vaporing into primitivism or supernaturalism.

A case in point is his discussion of the Jewish writer in America, whose special obligation is to regain his “God-consciousness” and establish it “centrally in his work.” This is asking a lot, particularly as it involves nothing less than an inspired leap beyond Jewishness as religion, a content-less assertion of the existence of God, or, in other words, the pure flame of faith burning in a void. Nothing could be more literary, though it appears in a book that consistently damns bookishness, than is Shapiro’s discussion of Jewish consciousness which he takes wholesale from Martin Buber. And he unwittingly acknowledges the gratuitousness of the demand when he offers as his leading example of “the poetry of the Jew” Saul Bellow’s Augie March. Possibly it is, but would Shapiro wish to call it an example of a “God-centered literature”? On the same subject of the problem and opportunity of the Jewish writer in America, Bellow himself comes much closer to the mark when he speaks of the Jew’s special experience of “the strangeness of discontinuity and of a constant immense change . . .” and goes on to say that “the narrowly confined and perfect unit of a man . . . would prove to be outside all that is significant in our modern lives, lives characterized by the new, provisional, changing, dangerous, universal.” Written almost a decade ago, Bellow’s remarks are, it goes without saying, even more pertinent today, and those of us who, like Shapiro, are interested in Jewish consciousness and in its relations to a type of literary consciousness that has begun to emerge and spread would do well to consider them.

To this latter consciousness In Defense of Ignorance itself gives valuable witness. From what I can see, a number of Shapiro’s assumptions (including some that are silent or only half-expressed) function as a kind of critical supplement to the recent poetry of Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke, and to developments in fiction represented, for example, by the appearance on the scene and the more programmatic stories in The Noble Savage, or by Bellow’s fiction or Norman Mailer’s Advertisements or the section from James Baldwin’s novel published by Partisan Review. At one end is Salinger’s “Seymour, an Introduction,” at the other is William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. In the life of our time, with its steady erosion of sense and center, the truth for a growing number of writers has moved from somewhere in the middle to some personally fertile extreme, reached by tapping the drives and fantasies that flow powerfully beneath reason and intellect. Thus, the writer arranges some head-on encounter of the self with one or more of its obsessions and reports it as candidly and concretely as possible, whether as autobiography or not. The result is a brooding and souped-up naturalism that places a high premium on sincerity and energy of invention, for which the current term “wild” is as appropriate as any. I would place Shapiro’s book in this development and read it as another unmistakable sign that the literary atmosphere has begun to change radically. What convinces me is not only the personal and contemporary significance of his attack upon the modern tradition but also the exuberance and ruthlessness with which he is willing to cash in its whole achievement. It will take exuberance and ruthlessness to deliver the new in poetry and some of those who accomplish it will no doubt be written off as “wild men,” as Wordsworth and Shelley were, by their more complacent and reasonable contemporaries.

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¹ A review of In Defense of Ignorance by Karl Shapiro (Random House, 338 pp., $4.00).