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A BOOKS
Baker, Peter. ONWARD: CONTEMPORARY POETRY AND POETICS. Peter Lang Publishing, 1996. ix + 439 pp. $22.95.
Bawer, Bruce. PROPHETS AND PROFESSORS: ESSAY ON THE LIVES AND WORKS OF MODERN POETS. Story Line Press, 1995. 351 pp. $15.95.
I am pleased that Bawer has collected his viogrous reviews and essays which were originally published in the New Criterion, the Wall Street Journal, and the Hudson Review. Although he deplores the "usual suspects"-creative writing programs; the silly Beats; the PBS series Voices and Visions; the self-promotion of literary interview(ers and -ees)-he is never boring. As he says about "the Phenomenon of Allen Ginsburg," for example: "Not only does Ginsberg win brownie points from his critics for being a mensch and a 'martyr' (a martyr to what? fame? wealth? honors?); he actually gets credit for his courage. What courage? Why the courage-believe it or not-to print such rubbish and to call it poetry." It is, of course, ironic that Bawers' own style is untidy. Look, for example, at "brownie points," "believe it or not." I assume that he uses these words because he is the victim of his anger. Perhaps he is at his best in his essay on Helen Vendler; he underlines the fact that she has "no ear," that she is not a poet. Surely he is correct in wanting critics of poetry to be poets. But there are few poet-critics, men of letters today. We have no Eliot, Empson, Tate, Winters.
I must admit that there are few surprises in the essays. I like the fact that Bawer tries to rescue Louise Bogan (a poet-critic) from obscurity, that he recognizes the fiction (especially the stories) of Aiken, that he regards Patterson as a weak poem, that he notices the relation of Stevens' paradoxes to Wilde's epigrams. (But I do not like his carelessness: he claims, for example, that Winters called Stevens a "hedonist." Winters, however, did not entirely dismiss Stevens but regarded "Sunday Morning" as one of the greatest poems written since 1700.)
I ask Bawer: Why do you waste valuable time on such subjects as Ginsberg and the "poetry business"? Why don't you write more for the quarterlies? The very fact that I respond strongly to these essays implies that Bawer deserves...