On Poetic Judgment

One such crystalline paragon.

“You do not hold a poem up against a crystalline paragon that has always existed in your mind (though you may recognize instantly that a given poem fails to achieve something a similar poem did superbly); instead you examine the new associations a poem has provided you with (assuming it has) and decide whether they expand your mind, your self, your equipment for dealing with the world. This may not be an instantaneous process. A new poem may leave you intrigued but baffled. You may love certain details, find the rhythms seductive, but lose the thread of the argument or suspect the poem of slipping into irrelevancy at points. Only over time does it sometimes happen that you come to see how the disparate parts of the poem draw together previously unassociated perceptions to create a more comprehensive understanding of, and response to, the world in which you function. We might in fact propose this as a defining characteristic of any art: an encounter between the observer and the work is inherently unstable because it changes the observer, sometimes in unpredictable ways.”
— Jan Schreiber, Contemporary Poetry Review

In our post-postmodern age, questions of greatness and relative value are back on the table. We have moved, I hope, beyond hard-line camps of blind adherence. Instead of stumping for our respective camps, people — young people — are willing to make their ideas vulnerable to scrutiny. I'm sure there's plenty of partisan culture war left. But the question of judgment is open again, to truer exploration than it has been for decades.

Elements of Schreiber's essay are appealing: that expertise is not as important as sensibility; the humble admission that we are not, individually, up to the task of absolute judgments. But he is too focused on that lack of “absolute standards in aesthetic matters” and what it means for literary judgment. He paints a picture of the culture wars, where “reasoned debate among the proponents of one aesthetic versus another is generally impossible because the proponents are championing some of the deepest elements of their personalities, those by now almost hard-wired preferences and responses that define who they are and who they wish to become.”

Picking up from various mid/late twentieth century critics, it's not out of bounds to acknowledge that “building the work is indeed building the self” and that “for both poets and readers, the process of building the self entails the assembly and assimilation of many works.” Such malleability is not extended, though, when Schreiber talks about the inability of different camps to find avenues of discourse. Suddenly the same readers and critics who are built by the work and changed by aesthetic  judgments become “hard-wired.” It seems to me that reasoned debate is only impossible when the parties are self-righteous and un-critical about their prejudices and preferences. Just look at politics.

Well, I would hope the poetry world were better than that.

As I wrote recently in this space, aesthetics are complicated holistic responses to art, grounded in contemporary culture, historical resonance, the ethics of each subject, and the transcendental — that portion of the artist's intention or experience that affects a reader via the work's constructed elements. Aesthetics are able to change the individual, and responses change as the person does. A person reaches equilibrium in relation to a work of art and then has that plane disrupted, sometimes ruptured, by personal experience or shifting ethics or historical understanding.

What makes a poem great? How are we to judge? These are each part of a much larger question: how do we evaluate our own aesthetics? It takes the discussion far beyond the oversimple psychologizing of Schreiber.