Europeans have often seen Americans as optimists and themselves as "realists." It is true that in the United States, the sense of exceptionalism — a term revived in the recent presidential campaign — seems to have driven hyperbole to new heights. In the academic sphere, grade inflation has been increasing since the late 1960s (at elite institutions more than elsewhere). Student evaluation forms have as many as eight categories, the highest indicating "top 5 percent" and "top 1 percent" (also called "truly exceptional"). Certainly, no one gets into graduate school with "satisfactory," which, by the logic of inflation, has long been understood to mean "poor." (In fact, when the College Board "recentered" SAT scores in 1995, resulting in an average score increase of about 100 points, "poor" became "good," and "good" became "excellent.") And consider the American military, in which virtually every soldier is evaluated as "outstanding." Perhaps, in a culture of hyperbole, a certain value fatigue sets in, and one longs for deflation as a correction. For my part, over the past few years of editing a large reference work on American poetry, I've found an unexpected pleasure in the merely satisfactory. Of the hundreds of entries my associate editors and I received from scholars of American poetry of all periods, some of the most satisfying discussed pre-20th-century poets and included characterizations like the following: Nathaniel Evans (18th century) is "noted by most historians as a 'fledgling versifier' whose occasional verses were wholly 'unremarkable.'" Elizabeth Akers Allen (19th century) "was considered a minor Victorian poet even by her contemporaries." Her sentiments were "expressed competently, but with no attempt at innovation in style or content." William Byrd's (18th-century) "contribution to poetry is not at all significant." Indeed, "he published merely a few short, uninteresting poems." In our present-day culture of inflation, such humble assessments are appealing. Faint praise is sometimes appropriate. Charles Henry Phelps's "Love-Song" (1892), a political overture to Canada, makes a poor bid for immortality: "Why should we longer thus be vexed? Consent, coy one, to be annexed." But even William Cullen Bryant, surely a bright star of 19th-century poetry — the prodigy who, at 17, wrote "Thanatopsis" — is treated with disdain: "By the end of the 20th century, most critics pronounced him 'minor' when they took note of him at all." My own favorite entry, on Gertrude Bloede (19th century), sums up a poet's bad dream of posterity: "Interest in her work, always limited, declined after her death." Curiously, it is almost impossible to find such modest assessments when one turns to contemporary poetry. Indeed, the problem of neglect or insignificance evaporates in a situation in which, in spite of the vast numbers writing (800 to 1,000 books of poetry are published in the United States per year; thousands of other poets publish in journals and quarterlies), we have no minor poets. Everyone today, like those above-average children of Lake Wobegon, is brilliant and sui generis. . . .
Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=lgpr5t1c6f9r0prghwmp5ytxyds9tmnf.
No comments:
Post a Comment