Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

From the definitive, mid-'80s study Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic to last year's Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s, Yale's Bromwich has carefully mapped the relations between poetry, criticism and public life in the Romantic period. He has brought those same concerns to his essays on modernist poetry for the TLS, New Republic, Raritan and other venues over the last 15 years. Some of these 16 pieces were occasioned by new editions of the poetry and letters of Auden and Crane and the criticism of Marianne Moore, and Bromwich's decision not to tamper with his original essays makes for some minor obsolescences among many luminous observations. Book reviews from the mid-'80s and early '90s of then-new collections from Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, James Merrill and Adrienne Rich give insight into the books at hand, but suffer for not having the last 10 or 15 years of works and lives at their disposal. The chapter on Hemingway seems an odd non sequitur. But Bromwich's readings of particular poems and spins on career trajectories are well worth the price of admission, and his larger-scale pieces are nothing short of brilliant. "Stevens and the Idea of the Hero" superbly explicates the poet's negotiations of what "philosophy and poetry may share in imagining and justifying a way of life." "How Moral is Taste?" begins by asking "Why do we want to be spectators?" and quickly moves from Frost to Burke to Hazlitt to the band Judas Priest's U.S. trial (and acquittal) for incitement to suicide. Chapters on Moore and Elizabeth Bishop (alone and together) find further resonances in this already much-explored relationship, while a piece on Eliot and Crane will have readers re-reading both. Whatever one thinks of Bromwich's particular aesthetic lens (pitched toward "posterity" as "the name of a power of resistance"), any reader of modernism will want the chance to argue with him. (Apr.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In this scholarly collection of critical essays, Bromwich (English, Yale) shows how the Modernist movement in poetry, with its tendency toward philosophical pragmatism, use of vernacular diction, and focus on the aesthetic experience of the poet, resulted in an explosion of fresh, exciting works. Modernist poetry, which gained impetus between the world wars, was in part a reaction against the grand, sentimental themes and formulaic poetic styles of the Victorian era. Major practitioners of the craft, from T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and Elizabeth Bishop to the more contemporary Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery, figure prominently in these essays. Bromwich pays special homage to Wallace Stevens, whose complex, eloquent poems reveal an "original power." Of interest to serious students of 20th-century poetry; recommended mainly for academic collections. Ellen Sullivan, Ferguson Lib., Stamford, CT Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A rich smattering of essays on American poets from one of this country's most important critics. Topics in this latest collection by Bromwich (Disowned by Memory, 1998, etc.) range from studied close readings of great and lesser-known works by Stevens, Moore, Ashbery, and other well-known figures to provocative discussions of the aesthetics of modern poetry and the morality of taste. The essays themselves date from the mid-1970s to the present, and it's interesting to chart the author's critical tack across that period—especially as he self-consciously checks his maleness at the door when interpreting the work of Bishop and Moore in 1990. Bromwich is a master of drawing lines between artists (seen here most clearly in his essay on Crane and Eliot) and amplifying poetic resonances: of seminal interest to Stevens scholars is his exploration of the shift in Stevens's pragmatism from Nietzsche to William James. For students of modernism, the author's smart claim that the most compelling aspect of modernist aesthetics arises from what he terms a "rhetoric of understatement" should open countless doors for further poetic inquiry. But of most general appeal in this eclectic mix of refined literary thought are the author's notions of the function of the critic. In various spots, he argues that a good critic "need never do more than point," and point Bromwich does, with remarkable precision and lucidity. His sentences are lithe and supple, although one wishes he'd occasionally remove his gloves and let the passion driving his scholarship through; even the recounting of an incident involving his son (an experience that in part fuels the charged question of how moral is taste) is handledwith uncanny reserve. It seems that Bromwich's prose at times succumbs to the lure of understatement he so rightly identifies in his subjects. Overall, a vital contribution to modern poetics.