Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

Social Reproduction and the Institutions of Poetry

Samuel Solomon

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781350178397
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350063877
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

What is the political potential of poetry in the contemporary era? Exploring an often overlooked history of Marxist-Feminist poetics in post-war Britain – including such poets as Denise Riley, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Wendy Mulford and Nat Raha – this book confronts this central question to debates about the value of humanities education today.

Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism demonstrates how ideas of social reproduction have been central both to the forms of post-1945 British poetry and the educational institutions where poetry is overwhelmingly encountered and produced. Combining new archival research with close readings of key poets of the period, the book charts the interrelated crises both of poetry itself and literary education more widely. Paradoxically, the very marginalisation of poetry in contemporary culture serves to offer the form new opportunities as an agent of social transformation.

1

Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge

Sarah Brouillette’s Literature and the Creative Economy takes millennial New Labour discourse about the “creative economy” as a starting point for understanding the contemporary political economy of UK literature. Specifically, New Labour arguments about the creative economy paradoxically inflated the value of “creative” workers (and of their products) on the basis of their resistance to value. Brouillette shows how the image of the creative worker, modeled after the “artist” whose labor cannot be easily quantified in terms of “hours” and who might engage in apparently useless activities, has become dominant in narratives about the valorization of capital in the deindustrialized United Kingdom more broadly:

Faith in a cultural realm liberated from the constraints of the capitalist market has gelled with the new vocabulary of creativity and its political and economic uses. Artists’ vaunted ability to contest bureaucratic management and other forms of regimentation is no longer at all unique. (Brouillette 206–7)

Brouillette effectively demonstrates how this inflated faith in “creative work” was cribbed from management theories that, for their part, drew on psychological models of the creative individual. This nexus of management studies, psychology and government policy is based, Brouillette explains, on an erroneous but nonetheless influential understanding of the artist, and particularly of the writer, as a personality type. Such an understanding of the writer has, I show in this chapter, an equally significant source in lyric pedagogy—that is, in the praxis of creating proper readers of poems. For example, Brouillette points to a telling detail in her analysis of the “Symbolic Equivalence Test” developed by American psychologist Frank Barron in order to test the “creativity” of different people; she usefully explains that this test “was itself inspired by a writer. Barron had seen Cecil Day-Lewis give the Clark Lectures on ‘The Poetic Image’ at Cambridge in 1946” (61). Brouillette shows how Barron seized on Day-Lewis’s description of how poets use metaphor to “transmute” images: for Barron, this provided a model for determining how to judge an individual’s “independence of judgment.” I would add to Brouillette’s persuasive framing of this account the fact that Day-Lewis was functioning as a critic (or poet-critic) and pedagogue as much as a writer when he gave the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge. Critics and poet-critics such as F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot had previously delivered the Clark Lectures, and Day-Lewis’s Lectures (later published in book form) were produced in an emphatically pedagogical context. The model of the writer as creator that he espouses is one that circulated in the pedagogical context of Cambridge English, which is the focus of this chapter. In Brouillette’s words,

Barron argued that an appreciation for complexity is what allows the healthy individual to experience seemingly contradictory states of being with no real difficulty: she is healthier than others because she has experienced and worked through psychological problems . . . It is writers who best model the Complex Person for Barron . . . They are . . . more comfortable with ambiguity, balancing dualisms within themselves; they are, for instance, at once sicker and healthier than average. (62)

There are notable differences between the work of Day-Lewis and that of the critic-pedagogues that this chapter focuses on, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, William Empson, J. H. Prynne and Veronica Forrest-Thomson.¹ All the same, the resonances with the work of Richards and Empson at least will become evident. The published version of Day-Lewis’s The Poetic Image cites Richards approvingly on more than one occasion, including the following:

Mr. I.A. Richards has most usefully reminded us that ‘that amazing capacity of his [the poet] for ordering speech is only a part of a more amazing capacity for ordering his experience.’ Consistency of impression in a poem is the result of a successful ordering of the experience from which the poem is derived. (Day-Lewis 74)

For Richards, teaching literature was precisely about the ordering of experiences, including vicarious experiences gleaned through the reading of poems. The models of creativity that management theorists developed on the basis of psychological theories are, in fact, based on an understanding of literary experience that was developed in early twentieth-century British higher education. This understanding was promoted alongside the propagation of English as a discipline with its own methodological prerogatives: reading poetry properly required an expansion of human capacities, including the capacities for passivity and social deracination. Of course, this shared rhetoric regarding the creative personality does not necessarily operate as social reproduction in the same ways in each of these contexts; the mid-century Cambridge lecture hall, the psychological theory inspired by it, the management theories that followed on this and the cruel optimism of the salvagers of capitalism (this time it’s creative!) are hardly equivalent rhetorical contexts. Still, the durability of this rhetoric—of the properly literate person who is taught how to survive contradiction—requires inspection.

I begin this chapter with a sketch of lyric pedagogy at Cambridge in the twentieth century, focusing on the work of I. A. Richards (1893–1979), F. R. Leavis (1895–1978) and especially William Empson (1906–1984). My aim in doing so is to illuminate how the discourses surrounding so-called Cambridge School poetry have been and remain indebted to Practical Criticism. To this end, I consider how selected writings by J. H. Prynne and Veronica Forrest-Thomson respond implicitly to the demands made for “valuable” poetry by Richards and Leavis and presuppose the kind of lyric reading that Practical Criticism teaches—namely, a close encounter with the text in clinical isolation that tests and bolsters the moral fortitude of the reader. In their poetry and prose, both Prynne and Forrest-Thomson, that is, are caught in a loop of ambivalent complicity with Cambridge’s pedagogical project of Practical Criticism, and this thwarts some of the anti-moralizing, political aspirations of their work. Practical Criticism as a form of pedagogy is generally inhospitable to any attempts to understand the institutions of poetry in relation to social reproduction.

My aim in describing “Practical Criticism” is to trace the refinement of lyric pedagogy, the ideological formation in which close attention to poetic texts putatively functions as moral preparation for social and political life. I. A. Richards delineated his experimental project in his 1929 book Practical Criticism; he provided his students at Cambridge with poems, divorced of any contextual information (he withheld authors’ names and dates of publication), asked students to analyze and evaluate them and printed their responses, interspersed with his own judgments of their aptitudes. This kind of examination soon became formalized at Cambridge; to this day, students in the English faculty there (not to mention elsewhere in the United Kingdom and in some former British colonies) are required to take an exam in Practical Criticism that follows similar protocols. Considering the valences of this pedagogical practice throughout, I outline the ideological currents running through the polemics of Richards, Leavis and Empson, and consider their actual manifestations in pedagogical and critical practice. My reading of this work is influenced by the historical materialist accounts of Terry Eagleton, Chris Baldick, Francis Mulhern and Ian Hunter from the 1970s and 1980s that sought to explain the rise of English as a discipline. These critics traced the ways in which literary study, and particularly the reading of English lyric poetry, was purported to reconcile the divisions in man’s (sic) being supposedly wrought by industrial capitalism.

I then consider some of the poetic, pedagogical and critical texts of the “Cambridge School” poets, focusing on brief examples from the work of J. H. Prynne and Veronica Forrest-Thomson. These poets in particular, but also their peers Peter Riley, Andrew Crozier, Wendy Mulford and others, were trained under the English tripos at Cambridge, a course in English literature brought into being through the efforts of Richards and others that to this day maintains designated training and examination in Practical Criticism.² That is to say, the work of poet-critics like Empson, Prynne and Forrest-Thomson responded to Practical Criticism and to related manifestations of lyric pedagogy, and in this chapter I illustrate the strengths and limitations of the social thinking of poetry and criticism formed at this conjuncture. My goal is to understand the constellation of forces that overdetermine the social and political mission of poetry at Cambridge and to illustrate how certain aspects of lyric pedagogy persist beyond their instrumental usefulness. This chapter, overall, demonstrates why Cambridge-based debates about literary pedagogy from the twentieth century continue to persist and why social reproduction is the best framework for addressing such debates today.

Here I encounter some methodological difficulties. My outline of the Cambridge ideology of lyric can hardly begin to exhaust the full range of poetic production and literary criticism at Cambridge University, much less the city of Cambridge, and even less the shorthand of “Cambridge Poetry” that has encompassed writers based in London, Sussex, Essex, East Anglia and Yorkshire. Moreover, I run the risk of implying that a few texts on literary criticism and pedagogy, primarily produced in the 1920s and 1930s, somehow directly and monolithically determine the poetics of Prynne, Forrest-Thomson and some “Cambridge School” writ large from roughly 1967 through the present. In fact, such a claim would require a great deal of empirical work that is not the task of these chapters. This would also demand thorough documentation of Prynne’s teaching (formal and informal) practices at Cambridge, a biographical project quite distinct from what I am undertaking.³

In spite of these omissions and qualifications, Practical Criticism remains important for understanding much twentieth-century poetic production in the United Kingdom and particularly those works that emerged in relation to the Cambridge University English faculty. Moreover, the continued justifications for doing Practical Criticism at Cambridge and beyond, as well as instructions about how to do it, provide perhaps the most influential extant manifestation of lyric pedagogy and of its relationship to social reproduction in postwar Britain. Pedagogical-ideological formations are always enmeshed with processes of social reproduction, but these enmeshings are not fixed: they are accessible to shifts in broader modes of accumulation and production. This chapter explores the durability of Practical Criticism and its particular version of lyric pedagogy; the following chapters will consider how explicitly Marxist-feminism approaches to the politics of poetry have provided disruptive alternatives.

Practical Criticism and society

It was at Cambridge that Practical Criticism inherited, in its purest form, the nineteenth-century tradition of situating literary criticism within a distinct and ameliorative sociopolitical itinerary. Practical Criticism transformed this tradition into a more specifically lyric pedagogy. I. A. Richards, William Empson and F. R. Leavis, unlike Matthew Arnold, were not state functionaries; they were students and teachers with a deep interest in the possibility of producing knowledge about literature as it related to life. Richards made his name as a critic in volumes such as Principles of Literary Criticism, Science and Poetry and Practical Criticism that wear their Arnoldian provenance on their sleeve. While Richards expressly rejects the idea of an “aesthetic” faculty or organization of faculties, he maintains that poetry has and ought to have a special place in society.⁴ In particular, the reading of poetry has a distinctly moral dimension for Richards insofar as it provokes the reader to take up a stance in relation to the world through textual interpretation and evaluation. Passages such as the following provide the purest and most exacting expressions of lyric pedagogy:

The fine conduct of life springs only from fine ordering of responses far too subtle to be touched by any general ethical maxims . . . The basis of morality, as Shelley insisted, is laid not by preachers but by poets. Bad taste and crude responses are not mere flaws in an otherwise admirable person. They are actually a root evil from which other defects follow. No life can be excellent in which the elementary responses are disorganised and confused. (Principles of Literary Criticism 62)

The “morality” that Richards finds lacking in contemporary life is “a morality which will change its values as circumstances alter, a morality free from occultism, absolutes and arbitrariness,” one that allows individuals to have as many “valuable experiences” as possible (58–59). This explosion of valuable experiences is, for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Social Reproduction and Lyric Pedagogy
• 1 Practical Criticism and Lyric Pedagogy at Cambridge
• 2 Denise Riley’s Socialized Biology
• 3 Forms of Reproduction in the Early Work of Wendy Mulford
• 4 Institutional Geologies and Lonely Sociality
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page