Essay

SPEAK THROUGH MY WORDS
From Neruda to Celan, the life and love of a literary critic

By John Felstiner

hat does it mean nowadays, and what does it matter, to be a literary critic? To think day in, day out about poems, let's say, and to write and teach about them?

Far more than when I entered this profession in 1961, today everything goes - from abstruse philosophical theory to minute linguistic analysis; from tracing biblical filaments in Emily Dickinson's verse, for instance, to assessing the men or women in her life; from Allen Ginsberg's kabbalist Buddhism and tantric Judaism to the sneakers he wore in Prague, now accessible to scholars in Stanford's poetry archive. And at the prick of a pin this whole undertaking may collapse. Recently Ken Kesey recalled: "You know, I don't think Allen read any criticism at all!"

If I had to identify my own approach, I'd call it Mid-Fifties New Criticism, but smelted countless times over the years and reblended with what has seemed purifying or enriching. Such is my interpretive approach ­ the close scrutiny of whole poems - but that approach is pervaded (it should go without saying) by upheavals lived within earshot of: World War II, Vietnam, Israel, Chile, and on and on. Plus, of course, a lifetime's ordinary personal losses and provisional gains.

From college, I still hear the senior British critic I. A. Richards cajoling us to read a poem for that which makes it irreplaceably itself and not some other thing. And daily more precious to me, from so far back, is my mentor Bill Alfred valuing a stanza of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde for "that attention to detail which is a species of love." Decades later when I came upon Paul Celan underscoring Walter Benjamin's maxim on Kafka - "Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul" - I recognized my true ground.

Attentiveness, Aufmerksamkeit: Kafka had it, and I look for literary critics, in some way corresponsive with our authors, to practice attentiveness as well.

Essay (Plain text)

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