Sincerity and the Other Virtues in Poetry

     One of the oldest clichés of rhetoric is the modesty topos, [1] a convention so familiar that it must constantly assume new forms, mutating to make a fresh impact. If the old classic exordium beginning “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking . . .” is rarely heard in quite that form, it flourishes in a good many other incarnations.
     Ordinarily, one would hardly attempt to impress an audience by denying one’s own ability at what one has set out to do. Yet the speaker quite often opens by claiming to be incompetent at speechmaking hoping to gain thereby his listeners’ conviction that he will say nothing but the unvarnished truth. Socrates’ address to the jury in Plato’s Apology is one example among a great many.

They have hardly uttered a word, or not more than a word, of truth; but you shall hear from me the whole truth: not, however, delivered after their manner, in No indeed! but I shall use the words and arguments which occur to me at the moment; for I am certain that this is right, and that at my time of life I ought not to be appearing before you, O men of Athens, in the character of a juvenile orator - let no one expect this of me.

     Socrates characterizes his accusers not merely as liars but as accomplished speakers capable of delivering professionally smooth and richly figured orations while he himself will simply speak extemporaneously and thus more honestly. Though we cannot know except from his general reputation how skilled the philosopher was at public speaking, it is clear that he knew at least that the pose of modesty might be useful for his defense.
     In poetry one of the loci classici for this convention is the first poem in Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella.

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,—
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,—
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;
Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn'd brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting invention's stay;
Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows;
And others' feet still seem'd but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."

     The last line suggests that to this Muse pure self-expression is the sole end of poetry, a view which neglects other goals such as melodious beauty, didacticism, and entertainment while suggesting that the unselfconscious transcription of consciousness (what is “in thy heart”) is the route to poetry. This contention is patently indefensible in itself, but it may succeed in gaining the writer a reputation for direct and ingenuous self-expression.
     What can sincerity or honesty mean in a work of art? Whatever else it may be a poem is an artifice, a composed object. Sidney’s sonnet is black marks on a white page or certain patterns in sound. It is a play of fancy, framed by a story such as this: “Imagine that a person were one day to say these words . . .”
     There can be no question of facts. Art works through images and indirections, affect and associations in a manner entirely different from a scientist or a historian. It means nothing to ask whether Botticelli’s Primavera is sincere or insincere or, indeed, in some sense “true.” However, just as it is possible for a painter to depict a scene “realistically,’ though his product be but daubs on a canvas, a writer may create in the reader a sense that he is straightforward and sincere.
     In fact Sidney’s whole poem is steeped in the very sort of sophisticated rhetorical figures he claims to eschew. The sonnet form itself and the sonnet sequence this poem opens are highly conventional literary choices (though Sidney does use hexameters). The word invention bears a technical meaning in the world of oratory since the earliest manuals of rhetoric. The modesty topos is only one of a series of rhetorical pyrotechnics with antecedents going back to the ancients by which Sidney seeks to impress his readers. The anadiplosis of lines 3 and 4 and the references to allusion with its implication of art inspired by art rather than personal experience are among many other signs of the calculated design behind the poet’s pretense to simple sincerity.
     Still, many critics have valued what seems to be poetic honesty what seems to be poetic honesty. Matthew Arnold argued that “charlatanism” has no place in poetry and that the best poetry possesses a “high seriousness” that arises uniquely from “absolute sincerity.” [4] With his classical training he could not but be aware of the rhetorical sophistication of his favorite poets and he thus claimed that “the superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner.”
     The criterion of sincerity clearly has a lengthy history in European criticism associated with generally positive values. Its similitude at least may be shown to be inscribed within characteristics of the text itself. With far less theoretic ground but greater fervor some readers have considered moral characteristics that leave no trace whatever in the written word to be nonetheless relevant to its evaluation.
     In part as a testament to poetry’s role in transmitting culture from one generation to the next and a reaction to puritanical criticism from religion and philosophy, poetry has, since the earliest times, claimed to inculcate morality. Thus, an upright life or at any rate the inclusion of generally accepted morality in literary texts might seem to imply a good writer. The arts have repeatedly been condemned as immoral through the centuries, and their partisans have not been satisfied to deny that accusation; they have generally sought to maintain that the arts are a positive moral influence. [5]
     Often such discussion is sufficiently confused as to jumble the separate categories of an artist’s own personal morality and that represented in an artistic work. Politics, which in the aesthetic realm is presented primarily as moral questions, and religion, judged by the standards of beauty, provide ample territory for the erroneous judgement of art.
     This is obvious when dealing with comments from those who know nothing whatever of art. The Catholic Church had such great authors as on its Index librorum prohibitorum which was maintained from the sixteenth until past the middle of the twentieth century. When it was discontinued in 1966 Cardinal Ottaviani declared that its end was not due to liberalizing but rather to the fact that modern times had produced such a quantity of sacrilegious writing that the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith could not monitor it all. [6]
     When NEA and NEH funding was drastically cut in the nineties, the assault was led by Jesse Helms, whose political career was founded in racist bigotry. One of the chief targets of the philistines was Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” It became perhaps the most popular objet d’art among evangelical Christians in modern times -- reproductions of it appeared in right-wing Christian publications for years afterwards. Needless to say, Mr. Helms had probably not set foot in a gallery or museum in his entire adult life, and the same may be safely assumed of the outraged Christians. The very same silly drama was reenacted around Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” made in part of elephant dung, but also, since one must always up the ante, with cutouts of pudenda from pornographic materials. (Such controversy has always been good for business. Ofili’s “Mary” resold in 2015 for just short of three million pounds.)
     The very same erroneous standards appeared in Nazi Germany with the condemnation of “degenerate” and Jewish art and in the Stalinist Soviet Union after the imposition of a radically reductive “socialist realism” in 1932. Each of these represented an attempt by the state to restrict art to a simple-minded statement of the most basic socially approved values.
    Nor are all such critics know-nothing yahoos. The sensitive have questioned the stature of authors with fascist sympathies, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Ezra Pound. Thoughtful people have expressed reservations about appreciating the films of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, not because of any shortcomings in the work itself, but rather what they view as unpardonable acts by the artists.
     Such criteria can create fans as well as critics. At one of his readings, archived now on tape, Charles Bukowski entered to great applause carrying a six-pack of beer. The excitement audibly heightened as he opened a can and proceeded to drain it. Waves of applause. Bukowski leaned toward the microphone confidentially, and emitted a loud belch. The hall went wild, not because of the poet’s very real verbal art, but because he was mocking bourgeois morality and decorum.
     The opponents of oppression may also rely on non-aesthetic standards. Recently, while visiting a museum in Warsaw, we saw a work by contemporary artist Zbigniew Libera titled "Lego Concentration Camp" [7] containing neat little Lego block constructions of the familiar watchtowers and barracks. In his image Nazi guards (slightly modified figures from the Lego Police Station set) stood among and grinning skeletal inmates some of whom were placing others in the oven. (The skeletons were from the Pirate set.) To me the picture was indeed jarring with its conflation of innocence and the deepest guilt. Such a work stirs some thoughts in most viewers, including regular calls for it not to be exhibited.
     Non-aesthetic criteria may intrude from any directions. A jazz fan might have a semi-conscious preferential option for musicians who are also junkies, while some readers of Orwell are put off by his late role as a government informant on those he considered Communists or fellow travelers. A parent may approve of Narnia books because their author is a good Christian. Those fascinated by suicide may become devotees or Sylvia Plath or Kurt Cobain. Though Sir Thomas Malory’s arrests for rape and theft are mere footnotes today, surely many people would find themselves unable to stomach Lolita, one of the most beautiful books of its era, were it known that Nabokov was in fact a pedophile. (He was, of course, not.)
     In modern times advocates of art for art’s sake have often cooperated with their foes by ostentatiously behaving in ways meant to épater les bourgeoisie. Since the Romantic era, the bohemian antics of those in particular who identified themselves with the avant-garde embodied the same standards as those bourgeoises who did not understand them.
     The examples might be multiplied indefinitely, but the phenomenon is sufficiently familiar that further illustration would be redundant. Clearly art must be judged as art. Poets are experts in the use of words, not in optimum social arrangements or morality. Just as history has its own standards (in which the aesthetic plays at best a secondary role) as does physics and every other field, literature must be granted its own standards. Justice and goodness and truth are all compelling qualities in certain arenas, but not when evaluating a work of art.




1. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, “Affected Modesty,” p. 83-5 for a survey.

2. Jowett’s translation.

3. Astrophil and Stella 1

4. In “the Study of Poetry,” originally published as the introduction to T. H. Ward’s anthology, The English Poets (1880) and later in Arnold’s Essays in Criticism, Second Series. In Arnold’s time related views were espoused by John Ruskin and George Macdonald. Since that time, among the more significant critics who have sought to analyze the notion of literary sincerity are M. H. Abrams who in “Poetic Truth and Sincerity,” in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition argued that sincerity was “the primary criterion, if not the sine qua non, of excellence in poetry” during the nineteenth century. Later studies include Lionel Trilling’s Poetry and Sincerity and Susan B. Rosenbaum’s Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading. On the other hand, critics such as T. S. Eliot made “impersonal” a word of praise.

5. Sir Philip Sidney’s A Defence of Poetry is one prominent example.

6. L'Osservatore della Domenica, April 24, 1966. The Index had included such authors as Montaigne, Descartes, Galileo, Pascal, de Beauvoir and Sartre.

7. The Lego company, unaware of the artist’s design, had originally cooperated, donating the blocks, but, when they learned Libera’s theme, they tried to block him from showing it, but eventually conceded. Hence each box in the installation bears the line "This work of Zbigniew Libera has been sponsored by Lego." The work was banned by bureaucrats from the Polish of the Venice Bienniale in 1997. Lego later refused a request for their blocks from Ai Weiwei.

Rereading the Classics [Gogol]

     One comes upon Gogol at a considerable distance from the metaphysical rumination of Dostoyevsky, the grand plenitude of Tolstoy, or the reserve of Chekhov. Though his reach may be not so high as the one, as broad as the other, or as tight as the third, though he exiled himself for years and eventually recoiled from his own vision and, under the influence of Father Matthew Konstantinovsky, burned his continuation of Dead Souls, his narratives remain potent in this twenty-first century. Yet, from the very start, his plots are seem either all-but-nonexistent or impossibly bizarre. His characters are often formulaic, like those of Theophrastus or Ben Jonson. It is little wonder that he has been misread so often, not least of all by himself.
     Categorized as a regional writer after Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka and Taras Bulba, he was later regarded as a realist. Soviet critics liked to claim him as a satirist of decadent Czarist society in spite of his reactionary views in support of the serf system, paternalistic landowners, and an all-knowing Orthodox Church. In fact his portrait of Russian bureaucracy has more in common with Kafka’s metaphysical uses of the Austro-Hungarian administration than with, say, Trollope on what seem in his novels the victimless foibles of the Church of England and the parliamentary system. Gogol’s characters suffer.
     Yet his sentimental love for Russia is manifest. Those who call Gogol’s rhapsodies to Russia ironic or burlesque are quite right, yet they miss the genuine enthusiasm, the afflatus that launched his paragraphs to soaring heights. In fact his backward political views reflect the conviction that the system is perfect, however often its agents fail. That passionate love of his country lies beneath his work with Ukrainian materials and his later exploration of the underside of Russia, where most estates are seedy and most landowners twisted enough with self-interest to see neither themselves nor their surroundings. Both within and apart from the text he refers to the novel as a poem and an epic. Belated it may be, but very deeply Russian. The weak and flawed, often morally diseased characters are the rotted fruit, the bitter, ironic reflection of the highest aspirations to spirituality. Gogol is altogether sincere in both his love and his denunciation when he releases a marvelous montage, an out-the-coach-window series of sights, and then declares, “Russia! Russia! I see you, from my wondrous beautiful afar: I see you now. Everything in you is poor, straggling, and uncomfortable . . .” [231]
     At pains to define Chichikov as altogether ordinary at the outset of Dead Souls, our hero turns out to be vain, selfish, dishonest, cowardly, a virtual catalogue of weakness and sin. Yet he blends in well -- so very unremarkable is he that that he produces no reaction when he appears in a remote provincial town. His semi-respectable Civil Service title, his acceptable clothing, all the social clues lead to his acceptance, particularly when he plays to the worse instincts of those he meets.
     Though they do not share his shifty character, the feckless heroes of “The Overcoat” and “The Nose” are equally anonymous. They are the invisible people of the modern age. Most are vitally concerned about their reception by others, so the category of poshlust (which might most succinctly be translated “false taste” though it extends even to morality) of which Nabokov makes so much in his excellent book on Gogol. A pioneer of the modern age, he writes “The Diary of a Madman” with total the assumption that we are better than half mad already. When he tries to portray a virtuous character in Murazov, he seems lost, out-of-place, ineffectual.
     Gogol practices the low-mimetic as its lover, conveying the secret inner marvels of the ephemeral in spite of its sordidness and arbitrariness. He is himself his “twenty-year-old youth returning from the theatre with his head full of a street in Spain,” who hears vulgar quarrels in the street and “sees that he is back on earth, and even in the haymarket and near a pub, and once more life in its workaday clothes goes flaunting itself before him.” [140] Note that the everyday has spirit enough to “flaunt,” and so it does in these pages. Gogol ironically praises the traveler who “after a long and wearisome journey with its cold and slush and mud, sleepy station-masters, jingling bells, repairs, altercations, drivers, blacksmiths, and all sorts of villains of the road, at last beholds the familiar roof and the lights rushing to meet him.” [142], but this is not our author. To him such a sense of secure grounding in place is elusive. It reminds him of those who are praised for their descriptions of moral exemplars, while less successful authors, he among them, dare to “bring into the open everything that is every moment before men’s eyes and that remains unseen by unobservant eyes – all the terrible shocking morass of trivial things in which our life is entangled.” He declares that he is “destined by the mysterious powers to walk hand in hand with my strange heroes, viewing life in all its immensity as it rushes past me, viewing it through laughter seen by the world and tears unseen and unknown by it.” “Let us plunge all at once into life with all its muffled rattle and jingling bells.” [142-3]
     The plunge can be exhilarating. Studying the garden of the hoarder Plyushkin, he observes “In short, it was all beautiful, as neither nature nor art could contrive, but as only happens when they unite together, when nature’s chisel puts its final touch to the often unintelligently heaped up labour of man, relieves the heavy masses, destroys the all to crudely palpable symmetry and the clumsily conceived gaps through which the unconcealed plan reveals itself so nakedly, and imparts a wonderful warmth to everything that has been created by the cold and carefully measured neatness and accuracy of human reason.” [122]
     Gogol’s natural ebullience, his celebration of the world, is expressed in his catalogues. His description of the various voices of the village dogs mounts to a grand height, only toward the end to sprout a simile of human singers which gains sudden details only to conclude with an earth-shaking crescendo. [53]
     Such rhetorical thrills can sneak up upon the reader. One is told that a crowd of “black frock-coats” resembles “so many flies,” a potent suggestive image already, but immensely enriched by the set-piece that follows in which figure an “old housekeeper,” a swarm of children, and the flies themselves “already satiated” but unable to resist pestering the servant over the sugar and preening themselves only to exit, “fly out again,, and again fly in with new tiresome squadrons.” [24] It is no less than a poem embedded in prose.
     But, of course, the appeal of Plyushkin’s estate is nothing but the bizarre “beauty” of the individual personality, just as in general, the real delight of the strange spectacle of the world is regularly its characters, however briefly glimpsed: “Before, long ago, in the days of my childhood, which have passed away like a dream never to return, I felt happy whenever I happened to drive up for the first time to an unfamiliar place . . . I stared, too, at some infantry officer, walking by himself, who had been cast into this dull provincial hole from goodness knows what province or at a merchant in his close-fitting, pleated Siberian coat . . . and I was carried away in my thoughts after them, into their poor lives.” [119]
     The intoxication with the ordinary, even the somewhat substandard, is capable of achieving a sort of Zen-like fugue state in Chichikov. When he is unexpectedly delayed due to damage to his carriage “he had the satisfaction of experiencing those agreeable moments which are so well known to every traveler,” and the reader is off considering rubbish on the floor and the stupid curiosity of passers-by. He is sickened, but transfixed. He focuses on killing a fly, and the spell is soon past.
     Well aware of the inadequacy of even language, our most subtle instrument, Gogol knows that he, like Sobakevich praising the [112] powers of his deceased serfs, addresses his reader indirectly. Communication is always under suspicion, and the sense of being slightly pixilated and very likely misled is pervasive. When the whole town is on to Chichikov accusing him of deeds of their own invention as well as those he did indeed cook up, they resemble “a schoolboy who wakes up to find that his classmates, who were awake before him, have stuffed a hussar, a piece of paper filled with snuff, into his nose while he was asleep. Having inhaled the snuff with all the force of a sleeping person, he wakes, jumps out of bed, looks round him like a fool with eyes popping out of his head, and cannot grasp where he is or what has happened to him.” [198] Gogol’s readers may know the feeling.
     After reading him, step into the streets of your neighborhood. “ Seeing the whirligig of men – say what you like, it’s like a living book, a second science.” [II, 309, repeated at 348] You are less susceptible than I if everyone, not to mention the plants and paving stones, doesn’t look both exceedingly odd and ruinously mundane.

Notes on Recent Reading 7 [Nabokov, Austen, Grettis Saga]

Pnin [Nabokov]

     Joseph Conrad became so naturalized in English that the reader cannot tell he is not using his native language, whereas Vladimir Nabokov, for all his stylistic sophistication, retained the tourist’s sense of wonder and amusement, writing a singularly exotic prose studded with rare words, unconventional usages, and luxuriantly burgeoning sentences.
     In Pnin both the author and Cornell University are reduced ironically to low mimetic mode, and the book is often highly comic without sacrificing plausibility or subtlety. Satire of American culture, without history or formality, is balanced by satire of the backward-looking world of the Russian émigrés who have little else. Realizing that communication is always imperfect, he focuses on misinterpretation, incorrect usages, mistaken identities, a labored explanation of a cartoon, the absurdity of a basketball net.
     One finds Nabokov jabbing at his bêtes noires: Bolshevism, Freud, and abstract art, and intimately caressing his loves: butterflies, chess, people of all sorts, and, most of all, language. Nabokov is a great writer and Lolita is his masterpiece, but in Pnin as well the reader encounters such marvelous gifts as this: “Technically speaking, the narrator’s art of integrating telephone conversations still lags far behind that of rendering dialogues conducted from room to room, or from window to window across some narrow blue alley in an ancient town with water so precious, and the misery of donkeys, and rugs for sale, and minarets, and foreigners and melons, and the vibrant morning echoes.”


Mansfield Park [Austen]

     Timid and sensitive nearly to the point of neurasthenia, priggish in her deep opposition to amateur theatricals, a persecuted damsel of the sort that has always been popular (apart from Samuel Richardson, one might think of Yuan drama or the covers of thirties pulp magazine), Fanny Price distresses even many confirmed Austen fans. By introducing a family from a lower social milieu, Austen added little but a tinge of the sordid from which not only Fanny and William, but Susan as well, need fortuitous assistance to escape. The real tensions in the books are between the amoral, eighteenth-century wit valued in sophisticated circles and the earnest uprightness of Edmund and Fanny. We can only miss the impertinent cleverness of the author who is herself evidence that nature can combine a good character and an epigrammatic skill.
     The leading couple come together only in the very last pages as they discover their common taste for discussing the faults of others. Edmund’s infatuation with Mary Crawford, durable through many months, vanishes entirely and suddenly. It takes no longer for his elder brother Tom, through, sympathetic magic perhaps, to turn from a thoughtless self-centered wastrel to a man of integrity. For Sir Thomas, tasked with an indolent wife, disagreeable relatives, and the pesky problems of managing his distant West Indian slaves, propriety had been a trusty foundation, but he resolves his personal deficiencies through his proximity to the newlyweds.
     We don’t see the deus ex machina, but it is surely there. Is all her piety, her superiority to society’s judgments consistent with her stress on “breeding”? In the story how one is brought up seems to all but determine one’s fate. Surely, I am not the only modern reader to wonder about Fanny’s word-choice when, concerned about Mary’s corrupting Edmund, she says, “God grant that her influence do not make him cease to be respectable.” Can one read those words without feeling a bit of a chill?


Grettis Saga

     Last of the great Icelandic sagas, that extraordinary efflorescence, dozens of prose narrations, based in history but not shy of legend and folk-tale motifs, produced in a small and poor country. The stoical understated northern sensibility, reflecting a world of privation and casual violence, shaped a number of works of tragic depth, including Njal’s Saga and Grettir’s.
     Virtually any line from these works provides a microcosm of their society. Grettir the Strong is respected for his physical prowess, just as if he had been a similarly powerful baboon or a forest stag. Even apart from war and raiding, these Northmen are never far from a brawl as they can be extremely sensitive on points of honor, and the traditions of feuding mandate danger points among family and loyalty groupings that extend for generations. Some elements of law and even democracy did mitigate the bloodshed, but it was often prudent, it seems, to bring a well-armed party even when attending the Althing.
     Grettir, himself, is ill-starred, and his fortunes fall particularly after his struggle with the revenant Glam (who had been weird even before his killing by a monster). Just as his opponent is stronger than most men, Glam’s animated corpse “possessed more malignant power than most fiends,” and it curses Grettir with terrible words. From childhood he had been a trial to his father, lazy, unproductive, and bad-tempered. His earlier scrapes had been the result of an impulsive nature, easily offended, old feuds, and a strain of reckless cruelty. After this critical struggle, however, not only is his might limited, but bad luck will govern his fate, condemning him to outlawry, exile, and solitude. Worse, the spectre tells him, “These eyes of mine shall be ever before your vision. You will find it hard to live alone, and at last it will drag you to death.” After this, the fierce warrior is afraid of the dark.
     Part of the reader’s immersion in early Icelandic society is the result of the saga’s inclusion of many proverbs and verses of skaldic poetry (our hero, for all his rough-and-ready fighting, has been an accomplished poet since childhood). If, as the author had it “One man’s tale is but half a tale,” Grettir, though lacking spirituality or the lighter strains of music, is a moving and fully-fleshed hero, the more rather than the less for his substantial faults.