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There is something offensive and scandalous about poetry, judging by the number of attacks on it and defenses of it written over the centuries. Poetry, Hazard Adams argues, exists to offend - not through its subject matter but through the challenges it presents to the prevailing view of what language is for. Poetry's main cultural value is its offensiveness; it should be defended as offensive.Adams specifies four poetic offenses - gesture, drama, fiction, and trope - and devotes a chapter to each, ranging across the landscape of traditional literary criticism and exploring the various attitudes toward poetry, including both attacks and defenses, offered by writers from Plato and Aristotle to Sidney, Vico, Blake, Yeats, and Seamus Heaney, among others. \"Criticism,\" Adams writes, \"needs renewal in every age to free poetry from the prejudices of that age and the unintended prejudices of even the best critics of the past, to free poetry to perform its provocative, antithetical cultural role.\"Poetry achieves its cultural value by opposing the binary oppositions - form and content, fact and fiction, reason and emotion - that structure and polarize most understandings of literature and of life. Adams takes a position antithetical to the extremes of both abstract formalism and the politicization of literary content. He concludes with an appreciation of what he calls the double offense of \"great bad poetry,\" poetry so exceptionally bad that it transcends its shortcomings and leads to gaiety. He reminds us that Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, identified angels with the settled and coercive and assigned the qualities of energy and creativity to his devils. According to Adams, poetry, in its broad and traditional sense of all imaginative writing, may be identified with Blake's devils.

There is something offensive and scandalous about poetry, judging by the number of attacks on it and defenses of it written over the centuries. Poetry, Hazard Adams argues, exists to offend - not through its subject matter but through the challenges it presents to the prevailing view of what language is for. Poetry's main cultural value is its offensiveness; it should be defended as offensive. Adams specifies four poetic offenses - gesture, drama, fiction, and trope - and devotes a chapter to each, ranging across the landscape of traditional literary criticism and exploring the various attitudes toward poetry, including both attacks and defenses, offered by writers from Plato and Aristotle to Sidney, Vico, Blake, Yeats, and Seamus Heaney, among others. \"Criticism,\" Adams writes, \"needs renewal in every age to free poetry from the prejudices of that age and the unintended prejudices of even the best critics of the past, to free poetry to perform its provocative, antithetical cultural role.\" Poetry achieves its cultural value by opposing the binary oppositions - form and content, fact and fiction, reason and emotion - that structure and polarize most understandings of literature and of life. Adams takes a position antithetical to the extremes of both abstract formalism and the politicization of literary content. He concludes with an appreciation of what he calls the double offense of \"great bad poetry,\" poetry so exceptionally bad that it transcends its shortcomings and leads to gaiety. He reminds us that Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, identified angels with the settled and coercive and assigned the qualities of energy and creativity to his devils. According to Adams, poetry, in its broad and traditional sense of all imaginative writing, may be identified with Blake's devils.

Murray Krieger’s Ekphrasis is a history, a self-consciously polemical history, of Western culture’s shifting and ambivalent commitment to the concept of the natural sign. By the concept of the natural sign Krieger means the idea that a word has a fixed, unambiguous relation to a denoted object and, grounded on a “visual epistemology,” is in a sense transparent; or it is a mimesis, a simulacrum; or it is, in the most radical version of symbolisme, a miraculous presence. By “visual epistemology,” a term Krieger adopts from Forrest G. Robinson’s book on Sidney, is meant a knowledge grounded in visual and

In 1897, W. B. Yeats published two essays on Blake. One was entitled “William Blake and the Imagination” and the other “William Blake and His Illustrations to the Divine Comedy.”¹ In juxtaposition, though Yeats did not emphasize the point, the two titles indicate something important about Blake’s notion of imagination that separates him from the so-called English Romantics who used the word: rigorous insistence on the relation of imagination to sight and to visual art. At the outset of a discussion of this matter, I should mention three things: First, Blake belonged in many of his tastes and attitudes to

To this point, my concern has been mainly offense in shorter poetic forms. In Part III, I intend to explore a variety of works that are friendly to antithetical offense or commit it. I begin with more remarks about a friend, Giambattista Vico, the philosopher who, being not at war with poetry, most radically lays out the ground for a poetic logic, and Blake, who also offers it. I proceed to long works by Blake and Joyce, emphasizing connections among the three. I then turn to the prose fiction of Joyce Cary, emphasizing the role of the dramatic in his

We have observed that some metaphysical works based on the synecdoche of macrocosm and microcosm turn out to seem poetical once they are perceived to have no scientific value.¹ Can bad poems over time sometimes turn into good ones? Witness the popularity over the past seventy-some years of the anthology of bad verse The Stuffed Owl.² It is my thesis that certain bad poems rise to greatness by committing a double offense, including the offense against poetry itself that all bad poetry commits. The great bad poem, in contrast to the embarrassingly dull, simply bad poem, causes us to confront

In 1977, Mary Louise Pratt published a persuasive summary account of arguments against the notion, popular among many critics in the twentieth century, of a special poetic language and a special nonpoetic one.¹ She declared, among other things, that any attempt to define literature in the terms of special linguistic characteristics fails because the characteristics always turn out to be present in other forms of linguistic expression. In the wake of the so-called “-linguistic turn,” it is important to be so reminded.² The foregoing offense of poetry has not sought to define poetry, only to indicate some of its means

One of the fundamental events in Finnegans Wake, as in Jerusalem, is displacement of narrative to drama. In their acts of narration, both narrators (in the case of Finnegans Wake, the dreamer) are characters in the drama of their respective acts. Jerusalem’s Blake is present, seeing and creating throughout; and the surrounding present of the text is the moving present of Blake’s utterance. It is well known among critics of Joyce that in Ulysses, the act of, or perhaps acts of, narration takes place under the aegis of what has come to be known as the “arranger,” who directs these

Inquiry into Joyce Cary’s antitheticality took us into questions of the relation of art to politics. Not deeply involved in politics as we usually think of it, he did contribute a book, Power in Men (1939), to the short-lived Liberal Book Club. Seamus Heaney, on the other hand, was born and educated in Northern Ireland, experienced the “troubles” there, and was closely associated with the Field Day Theatre group, which included a number of artistic and intellectual activists. It is not too much to say that his was the kind of situation that can create a crisis for a poet

In his interesting and entertaining History in English Words, Owen Barfield remarks that the Greek scandalizien and the Latin offendere mean “to cause to stumble,” but for us today “scandalize” and “scandal” “merely hint at the liveliness of an emotion,” while “offend” and “offense” convey “a sober warning of its probable results.”¹ I am going to adopt the words not only in the ancient metaphorical sense of “stumbling block” or “obstruction,” from which they are derived, but also and simultaneously in the senses that Barfield assigns to “scandal” and “offense,” for both senses apply to my subject. Is there something