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we can think of But it seems to me that spuriousness arises only if we
prematurely constrain literature by subjecting it to other considerations.
Relations are a different matter.
Audience:
Professor Donoghue, was not the theory of art for art's sake
formulated originally as an approach to social problems, political prob–
lems, through the means of art?
And to Mr. Milosz, was the late Joseph Brodsky constrained by the
directly political support which was shown to him throughout his career,
and which contributed to his international reputation?
Denis Donoghue:
My understanding of the theory or the practice of art
for art's sake in the nineteenth century is that it was designed to exert
pressure against an otherwise oppressive reality. There is a useful phrase
that Wallace Stevens uses in several of his essays, where he speaks about
the violence without, which is the violence of reality pressing upon the
artist as indeed upon the citizen. But he also speaks about the imagination
as the violence within. Ideally, he thinks that the potency of art is, in fact,
a function of this double pressure. But he certainly emphasized the pres–
sure of imagination against an otherwise oppressive reality. When T . S.
Eliot wrote his comment on art for art's sake, he was to some extent de–
flecting a certain blow. He was saying that the value of art for art's sake,
as truly understood, is art as practiced by a Flaubert or Henry James, who
minds his own business, gets on with his art, is concerned with the possi–
bilities of his linguistic medium, of the genre, of the history of literature,
oflanguage, and is concerned to work in that fashion.
Czeslaw Milosz: I
do not believe that the kind of support Joseph Brodsky
found in this country was political in nature, nor is the fact that he was
offered a university teaching position due to any kind of political support.
His position was not a sinecure, and he was a very conscientious teacher.
He was completely independent.
Hilton Kramer: I
think I can add a footnote to this response.
In
1964,
when I was working as an editor at
The New Leader,
which was a fa–
mously liberal anti-Communist magazine, we published I believe the first
English translation of a poem by Joseph Brodsky, the elegy to John
Donne, translated by the late poet Eugene Garrigue.
It
was certainly not
the custom for
The New Leader
to publish poems, and this poem would
not have been published at that time in the Soviet Union, while Brodsky
was still suffering immense difficulties there.
The New Leader
published it
as a gesture of political support, for his protection. I don't think there is
