RICHARD POIRIER
"great tradition" it is a tradition of his preferences, with quite out–
rageous exclusions, and with inclusions, when
it
comes to American
literature, that are merely loveable. Above all he is present every–
where in his writing. There is a personality, tense with life, at work
in his sentences, all of them full of quick insinuation, and with
such aristocratic refusal of self-explication that, in their breath–
less, witty, suspended momentum, points are condensed and subor–
dinated - as in his unsurpassed early pieces on Eliot - which his
detractors
still
remain incapable of reaching. For him, English liter–
ature, English culture, England itself can be found in the performed
condition of the English language, with its incommensurable re–
sources. One reason he's feared and mocked is that few teachers
know what to make of this sort of personal energy, know what life
and learning it offers. Most teachers look in criticism for the goods,
to put it bluntly, delivered up, wrapped for carrying to class. Liter–
arY
study as practised by Leavis or by Blackmur, is, for them, far
too contaminated by personal testimony; he insists on preferences
because ,he lives in and of a particular time and thinks of writing
as an act going on or being repeated in that time.
I have brought up Leavis and a few others only to suggest that
there has been at least some activity within English criticism, though
not of the kind that's most easily snitched, which can be an alterna–
tive to any simple and, to that extent damaging application of a
criterion of "relevance." Insofar as the issue touches on popular
culture there are also, of course, the estimable works
of
Raymond
Williams and Richard Hoggart. By too simple a use of the word
"relevance" I mean, for example, that after agreeing with Benjamin
DeMott that "we have to move away from the idea that English
is
a body of knowledge," I can't go on to say with him, if
Time
magazine reports him correctly (and from
his
other statements on
the matter in
Supergrow
I can assume it does), that "we have to
produce readers who think of literature as a valuable resource for
the exploration of life's problems." Actually, the readers I'd want to
produce would be immediately bewildered by Mr. DeMott's lan–
guage, since surely a reader's first concern is with the primary re–
source of literature, which is language itself. In what sense is liter–
ature a "resource" for exploration except through some ways of
ftrst
exploring what goes on in language, any form of language, includ-
