¤xed, the attributes of which I like to try to de¤ne and put in some perspec-
tive. And in a curious way, I am—I might as well confess it—in love with
the twentieth century (this despite all its elitism and imperialism, its Euro-
centrism and even, in its Continental variant, its phase of totalitarianism)—
the twentieth century whose ¤rst half gave us so many extraordinary poets
and artists and composers and architects and dancers that it blows the mind,
and whose second half, if less dazzling, is fascinating for its working out of
the problems the early century produced. Then too it is our century and,
again in the words of Frank O’Hara, “I am ashamed of my century / for be-
ing so entertaining / but I have to smile.”^1
But throughout graduate school and for the ¤rst ten years of my academic
career (1965–1975), my af¤liation was with the world of academic scholar-
ship. I had been taught in graduate school to “back up” every statement
with a footnote, to provide the necessary evidence to buttress an argument,
and especially to observe academic decorum. This meant that as critics we
never declared X’s argument “wrong” and certainly not “preposterous” or
“silly”; rather, we would say, “I wonder if Harold Bloom’s reading of Wallace
Stevens’s Auroras of Autumn takes into account that... ,” or “Thus far, no
critic has noticed that A. R. Ammons’s poetry is informed by... ,” and so
on. As academics, we were taught to write straightforward, coherent prose in
which “B” follows logically from “A.” Clarity, the telling example, and thor-
ough documentation using the PMLA style sheet—these were, and largely
continue to be, the order of the day.
My ¤rst two books, and certainly my articles for scholarly journals, fol-
lowed these prescriptions to the letter. When I was writing my dissertation,
Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats, I used to go to the Library of Con-
gress and ferret out obscure scholarly articles in German that might have
something to do with the theory of rhyme. Or if I wrote on the elegies of
Robert Lowell, I began with Theocritus, looked up the etymology of the
word elegy as well as its history, and then read whatever my fellow scholars
might have said on the subject, no matter how obscure the monograph or
journal in which they had published their ¤ndings. Indeed, to ¤nd a topic for
a paper meant, as we had been taught in graduate school, to ¤nd an origi-
nal angle. Thus, when I wrote on the “consolation theme” in Yeats’s great
elegy “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” I argued that the reason this
particular poem didn’t seem all that mournful—indeed, seemed rather brac-
ing and self-con¤dent—was that it presented the poet himself as wise witness
and survivor, superior, in fact, to the young Robert Gregory who was osten-
sibly the poem’s subject. The editor of Modern Language Quarterly was satis-
¤ed that mine was an original reading of the poem—not too original, of
Writing Poetry/Writing about Poetry 259