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PARTISAN REVIEW
something about the power for her of Milton's self-directed injunction to
patience. In Gluck's eyes, every poet is ultimately something of a stranger to
her own gift. Gluck's vision of the poet's vocation is far from comforting, but
her faith in the value of poetry's hard discipline offers its own inspiration.
Mary Kinzie's book embodies a program in a way neither Heaney's nor
Gluck's do.
The Cure
<if
Poetry
sounds much like
The Redress
if
Poetry,
and the
range of meanings Kinzie and Heaney mean to evoke by their central terms
overlap a good deal, but the emphasis in Kinzie's book falls rather more on a
remedy for poetry's current bad condition, as opposed to Heaney's concern
with poetry's power to "redress" the world through imaginative understand–
ing. The subtitle,
Moral Essays on the Poet's Calling,
indicates the urgency and
seriousness with which she takes the project of poetry's cure. Kinzie is unusu–
al among contemporary poet-critics in her willingness to render negative
judgments; the first essay of the volume is titled "The Rhapsodic Fallacy,"
and its first sentence breaks the bad news: "Contemporary poetry suffers from
dryness, prosaism, and imaginative commonplace, but these are hardly its
worst features." Throughout her book, Kinzie is concerned to vindicate a
poetry of the "complex idea" against what she sees as a devotion to a poet–
ics of spontaneous outpouring prevalent among contemporary American
poets. She is Johnsonian in her insistence that bad poems reflect not simply
contingent failures of talent or execution, but intellectual and ethical errors.
Kinzie is in fact rather more persuasive when attacking than when prais–
ing. Her attacks are effective precisely because they show her to have reached
a deep understanding of a poem's ambitions, of the effect it imagines itself to
have on a reader. She is devastating in eliciting the core of self-regard and self–
indulgence beneath the widespread mode of "ironic memoir" and in
deploring the prurience that characterizes the cult of victimization in con–
temporary verse. Her enthusiasms are less persuasively presented. Essays on
Louise Bogan and Howard Nemerov offer rich explorations of their sensibil–
ities and poetic strategies, but make an aesthetic case only obliquely. And
while the final chapter promises "a new model of literary apprenticeship,"
Kinzie makes concrete proposals only in passing: "I would...urge the study of
logic, ethics, rhetoric, and metaphysics, and would highly recommend a good
knowledge of European art and languages." Kinzie is the director of what
many regard as the most intellectually rigorous creative writing program in
the country, at Northwestern University; one would be eager to have her lay
out a detailed program for reforming MFA education. Even readers unsym–
pathetic to Kinzie's perspective will admire the clarity with which she maps
the contemporary poetic landscape, but even her most sympathetic readers
might wish that she had spelled out her prescriptions more thoroughly.
VERNON SHmEY
