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• W1588890122 abstract "Reviewed by: What's the Import?: Nineteenth-Century Poems and Contemporary Critical Practice Kent Puckett (bio) What's the Import?: Nineteenth-Century Poems and Contemporary Critical Practice, by Kerry McSweeney; pp. 177. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007, $45.00. Kerry McSweeney's What's the Import? offers a methodological alternative to what he sees as a problematic transformation of literary studies over the past three decades (3). Where literary critics tend to rely on theory-based interpretive discourse or cultural studies contextualization (3, 5), McSweeney argues for what he calls aesthetic criticism. Claiming that recent discussion of nineteenth-century poetry restricts itself to cognitive and hermeneutic styles of reading, McSweeney draws on philosophical aesthetics (notably the work of Jerrold Levinson) to go not against but beyond interpretation and to understand the poem as an object demanding a response that is simultaneously affective, perceptual, and cognitive. In readings of poems by William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Emily Dickinson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, and others, McSweeney models what he sees as the critic's responsibility: to take the individual poem on its own terms. McSweeney surveys a range of critical approaches (from New Criticism to New Historicism) to show that the sense that poetry must be made to mean something has obscured what poems do and what poetry as a special activity is good for: at its best, poetry offers an aesthetic resolution of what remains unresolved at the level of meaning (148). It is this play between what, following Edgar Allan Poe, he calls the indefinitiveness of meaning and the definitiveness of effect that characterizes good poetry (47). Poetry succeeds where it gives expression to what must remain unsayable: the endlessly complicated mix of affective, ethical, and sensory experiences that is our [End Page 192] relation to the world. The critical attention that McSweeney takes as appropriate to this idea of the poem might be best described using a phrase that he uses in relation to Michael Field: hard looking (33). Where theoretical, political, and interpretive preconceptions distort the reader's view of the poem, hard looking—which we might take as an implicit answer to close reading—allows the aesthetic critic to feel or, to use McSweeney's term, to perform the particularity of the poem at hand. As useful as this sense of the poem as aesthetic object is, the tilt of McSweeney's argument leads him to rush through some issues. Is it simply the case that contemporary critical practice in general fails to attend to the aesthetic particulars of nineteenth-century poetry? To think so, it seems to me, is to overlook a number of critics who work self-consciously between social life and aesthetic form (I'm thinking, for instance, of work by Isobel Armstrong, Yopie Prins, Marjorie Levinson, Caroline Levine, and Herbert Tucker). Also, if it is the goal of the aesthetic critic to attend to the tension between formal resolution and interpretive irresolution, why not look to variously inflected theoretical work in poetics that similarly troubles our sense of poetry's ends? I wonder what McSweeney would do, for instance, with Giorgio Agamben's The End of the Poem (1999), Nicolas Abraham's Rhythms (1995), or Susan Stewart's Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002). McSweeney sometimes seems, in other words, to go too far in leveling the unruly field of poetics in particular and contemporary critical practice in general. If, however, his view of the field can seem restrictive, it allows McSweeney to engage in a feisty evaluative mode that is increasingly rare in academic writing. He writes that one critic deals in broad-brush generalizations (4), another obliterates a poem that he reads (6), and another is desensitized . . . to the musical suggestiveness of a particular poem (25). Critics are, in McSweeney's view, often dead wrong about what they read. This willingness to evaluate is applied equally to the poems with which he deals. One poem by Field is an embarrassing anomaly (35). J. Stanyan Bigg's An Irish Picture (1862) is an essentially flawed artwork (72). And though the ending of Walt Whitman's The Sleepers (1855; 1881) is a..." @default.
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• W1588890122 title "<i>What's the Import?: Nineteenth-Century Poems and Contemporary Critical Practice</i>, by Kerry McSweeney" @default.
• W1588890122 doi "https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2008.51.1.192" @default.
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