Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry - Softcover

Bromwich, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226075613 ISBN 13: 9780226075617

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2001

Synopsis

Skeptical Music collects the essays on poetry that have made David Bromwich one of the most widely admired critics now writing. Both readers familiar with modern poetry and newcomers to poets like Marianne Moore and Hart Crane will relish this collection for its elegance and power of discernment. Each essay stakes a definitive claim for the modernist style and its intent to capture an audience beyond the present moment.

The two general essays that frame Skeptical Music make Bromwich's aesthetic commitments clear. In "An Art without Importance," published here for the first time, Bromwich underscores the trust between author and reader that gives language its subtlety and depth, and makes the written word adequate to the reality that poetry captures. For Bromwich, understanding the work of a poet is like getting to know a person; it is a kind of reading that involves a mutual attraction of temperaments. The controversial final essay, "How Moral Is Taste?," explores the points at which aesthetic and moral considerations uneasily converge. In this timely essay, Bromwich argues that the wish for excitement that poetry draws upon is at once primitive and irreducible.

Skeptical Music most notably offers incomparable readings of individual poets. An essay on the complex relationship between Hart Crane and T. S. Eliot shows how the delicate shifts of tone and shading in their work register both affinity and resistance. A revealing look at W. H. Auden traces the process by which the voice of a generation changed from prophet to domestic ironist. Whether discussing heroism in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, considering self-reflection in the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, or exploring the battle between the self and its images in the work of John Ashbery, Skeptical Music will make readers think again about what poetry is, and even more important, why it still matters.

About this title

About the Author

David Bromwich is the Housum Professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s, published by the University of Chicago Press, and A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost.

From the Back Cover

Skeptical Music collects the essays on poetry that have made David Bromwich one of the most widely admired critics now writing. Both readers familiar with modern poetry and newcomers to poets like Marianne Moore and James Merrill will relish this collection for its elegance and power of discernment. Each essay stakes a particular claim for the modernist style and its intent to capture an audience beyond the present moment.

An essay on the complex relationship between Hart Crane and T. S. Eliot shows how the delicate shifts of tone and shading in their work register both affinity and resistance. A revealing look at W. H. Auden traces the process by which the voice of a generation changed from prophet to domestic ironist. And a close reading of Geoffrey Hill sheds new light on the "conscience of words" in writing. Whether discussing heroism in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, considering self-reflection in the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, exploring the battle between the self and its images in the work of John Ashbery, or even tracing the significance of valor to a prose stylist such as Ernest Hemingway, Skeptical Music will make readers think again about what poetry is, and even more important, why it still matters.

From the Inside Flap

Skeptical Music collects the essays on poetry that have made David Bromwich one of the most widely admired critics now writing. Both readers familiar with modern poetry and newcomers to poets like Marianne Moore and James Merrill will relish this collection for its elegance and power of discernment. Each essay stakes a particular claim for the modernist style and its intent to capture an audience beyond the present moment.

An essay on the complex relationship between Hart Crane and T. S. Eliot shows how the delicate shifts of tone and shading in their work register both affinity and resistance. A revealing look at W. H. Auden traces the process by which the voice of a generation changed from prophet to domestic ironist. And a close reading of Geoffrey Hill sheds new light on the "conscience of words" in writing. Whether discussing heroism in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, considering self-reflection in the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, exploring the battle between the self and its images in the work of John Ashbery, or even tracing the significance of valor to a prose stylist such as Ernest Hemingway, Skeptical Music will make readers think again about what poetry is, and even more important, why it still matters.

Reviews

From the definitive, mid-'80s study Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic to last year's Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s, Yale's Bromwich has carefully mapped the relations between poetry, criticism and public life in the Romantic period. He has brought those same concerns to his essays on modernist poetry for the TLS, New Republic, Raritan and other venues over the last 15 years. Some of these 16 pieces were occasioned by new editions of the poetry and letters of Auden and Crane and the criticism of Marianne Moore, and Bromwich's decision not to tamper with his original essays makes for some minor obsolescences among many luminous observations. Book reviews from the mid-'80s and early '90s of then-new collections from Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, James Merrill and Adrienne Rich give insight into the books at hand, but suffer for not having the last 10 or 15 years of works and lives at their disposal. The chapter on Hemingway seems an odd non sequitur. But Bromwich's readings of particular poems and spins on career trajectories are well worth the price of admission, and his larger-scale pieces are nothing short of brilliant. "Stevens and the Idea of the Hero" superbly explicates the poet's negotiations of what "philosophy and poetry may share in imagining and justifying a way of life." "How Moral is Taste?" begins by asking "Why do we want to be spectators?" and quickly moves from Frost to Burke to Hazlitt to the band Judas Priest's U.S. trial (and acquittal) for incitement to suicide. Chapters on Moore and Elizabeth Bishop (alone and together) find further resonances in this already much-explored relationship, while a piece on Eliot and Crane will have readers re-reading both. Whatever one thinks of Bromwich's particular aesthetic lens (pitched toward "posterity" as "the name of a power of resistance"), any reader of modernism will want the chance to argue with him.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

In this scholarly collection of critical essays, Bromwich (English, Yale) shows how the Modernist movement in poetry, with its tendency toward philosophical pragmatism, use of vernacular diction, and focus on the aesthetic experience of the poet, resulted in an explosion of fresh, exciting works. Modernist poetry, which gained impetus between the world wars, was in part a reaction against the grand, sentimental themes and formulaic poetic styles of the Victorian era. Major practitioners of the craft, from T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and Elizabeth Bishop to the more contemporary Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery, figure prominently in these essays. Bromwich pays special homage to Wallace Stevens, whose complex, eloquent poems reveal an "original power." Of interest to serious students of 20th-century poetry; recommended mainly for academic collections. Ellen Sullivan, Ferguson Lib., Stamford, CT
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226075613
• ISBN 13: 9780226075617
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288