Desperate Measures

William Logan: I first encountered the chap in the December issue of The New Criterion a year ago and found his criticism invigorating. I set about to get his stuff but was stymied by his popularity, which is promisingly low. I was able to find one book of poems among the scattered branches of our local library, then another came and by that time I had purchased four volumes from the Uptown bookstores where one can find things sometimes and was working my way through his works. I wanted to get some volume of his criticism, saw he had a recent one, balked at the price, and then bought Desperate Measures, an older volume of criticism and assorted essays.

I have just finished puttering through it—I just didn’t want it to end, you know? He writes essays and criticism hither and yon and then gathers these from the four corners of the earth into a book and tries to rake in a little more money. For your money, the essays in here alone are worth it, if you would like to learn a sensible thing or two about poetry you might not otherwise. And for your money, to have be exposed to the thinking of his criticism, to follow along as he explains what is wrong and what is right, and how things should be done, how this or that effect is achieved or bungled, and what is disliked for what reasons, for that your money can scarcely buy better.

We suffer, in our day, it seems to me, from a lot of fraud. We suffer from people pretending to judgment who don’t know how to judge. If you don’t know how to judge, learn what is good and how to tell. But many people only learn how to fake said judgment, how to find out what is safe and not what is good and why it is good. In our day we affect judgment and develop a talent for remaining in fields of safe contemporary and erroneous consent rather than judging truly. We really do judge by means of herd instinct and while it is good to be guided by the opinions of others, it is not good to use a fraudulent consensus to coddle one’s laziness. The frauds of which we now speak use glozing words meaninglessly (which, I suppose, is the only proper way to use glozing words), praise with the high sounding cliche, the timbrel and the harp, at best gesture vaguely when they are being prudent (not with the directness of truth, you see), and end on etceteras suspiciously frequently. It is a particular weakness in our day that we do not want to look under the surface of things and have lost the ability to do so. We, moreover, have made ourselves shallow with our merely cosmetic concerns: we care about fairness but not about justice, we care about niceness but not about courtesy and honor, we know God to be neat but not terrible or just or holy if we really know him at all; we have whittled down (in what is our only great achievement, and a pretty lousy one at that) great things and rendered them petty making ourselves dishonest and all our traffic dishonest.*

William Logan’s writing is useful for cutting through all of this. The book is valuable for the contemporary criticism even if you do not read contemporary poetry because it will help you find the good in contemporary poetry, it will help you understand with many examples what is good or bad, it will help you to understand these people in a way that understands their aims (one almost writes ‘sympathetically,’ and certainly, Logan might be said to be sympathetic to the plight of a modern poet, but somehow sympathy is not the modification that adequately describes him), among other things. You will also find him with long explanation of older poets (on Frost, on Bishop, on all of 20th Century American poetry—which is really good— and random explanations of Milton, even some Byron and some others in a curiously useful essay on poetics—it is worth noting that what he says in that essay is penetrating but all of it latent in the other criticism so that even though he deals with esoteric matters he called trust, valence, armature and such, one feels one is familiar with these things by being exposed to his criticism, and that is valuable).

If you were to be interested in better appreciating poetry, you could do worse.

*It is dangerous for a human being to indulge too much scorn for any human weakness, I suppose. And when it is not dangerous, it can be humiliating (but that is wholesome, in the end) which is also painful. No sooner does one decry some outrage or another of which our race is ever guilty than one finds oneself condemned in the accusation. It will not do to say we hate dishonesty or we will too painfully expose our dishonesties. But how can one cease from such denunciations? One must strive on. We should say we must hate dishonesty, and we should wish we loved the truth. The test for our love of the truth will be, of course, how willing we are to have all our dishonesties exposed, however painfully.