The circular reasoning of old man Depp’s cheerleaders: Depp’s failed marriage and failing career got a boost because social media hated on Amber Heard in a jury trial saturated by social media, “proving” Depp’s failed marriage and failing career was all the fault of Amber Heard.
Wow, such a vindication for Mr. Depp.
A far more complex and interesting scenario: (because 1960s not 2020s) the Dionysian god Jim Morrison and his jealous assassin, Mick Jagger.
There’s a no-nonsense, British, punk rock, animus which doesn’t like Jim Morrison. I met an English, punk rock fan, playwright at the Iowa Workshop in the early 80s and when I said I liked the Doors, he spit out, “they’re depressing. Hello I love you, let me jump in your grave.” OK, I thought.
I remember reading (a long time ago) that Mick Jagger saw the Doors concert at the Hollywood Bowl in July 5th of 1968 and said they were “boring.” Maybe they were. Doors live shows were known to not always be good. I pretty much shrugged when I heard Mick’s opinion.
Apparently—sorting things out from fairly reliable hearsay—Jagger (with a group which included Stones producer Jimmy Miller and Marianne Faithful) flew to LA—immediately after finishing Beggars Banquet—in a mad fit of jealousy, to check out the Doors. Mick offered Jim powerful LSD in hopes of sabotaging Jim’s historical performance at the Hollywood Bowl, the prestigious arena reserved for jazz and classical music titans. Not only that, Jagger watched the Hollywood Bowl concert from the front row with Jim’s girlfriend, Pamela Courson, on his lap. Another rumor in this context: it was Marianne Faithful who brought the heroin to Paris (from where the Stones were recording Exile On Main Street in the south of France) which ended up killing Jim.
Beggars Banquet was considered a “comeback” album by the Stones, but this was p.r. hack news, typical of most rock “journalism.” The heralded “comeback” in 1968 by the Stones was nothing of the sort.
First, their 1967 album was, despite some bad reviews by those same rock “journalist” hacks, a gorgeous record, including stunning tracks, such as “2000 Light Years From Home,” the haunting quality of which the Stones would never duplicate again. 1967 is, according to many, the nadir of the Stones. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is corporate industry execs talking. Listen closely to “2000 Light Years From Home.” The drumming alone on this recording is superb, the exact feel of which was later used to energize what is considered their best song: “Gimme Shelter.” This detail alone, along with the song’s overall magnificence, makes “2000 Light Years From Home” a candidate for Best Stones Record. (Most Stones fans would laugh at this. I don’t care.) There was no need to effect a “comeback” from what they did in 1967.
Second, 1968 saw the steep decline of the Stones’ founder and multi-instrumental, musical, genius, Brian Jones—nothing “comeback” about that, either. The Stones turned back into a blues cover band after Brian Jones’ death in 1969. It’s no secret that Brian was reviled and shunned by Keith and Mick (perhaps justifiably). It’s also true the 1960s Stones catalog is stamped with the songwriting credits, “Jagger/Richards” somewhat falsely—how false is difficult to tell. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts quietly made it clear: Jagger and Richards did not write every “Jagger/Richards” song.
The Beatles gave us lots of “John songs” and “Paul songs” (even as they were marked “Lennon/McCartney”) and there are tons of anecdotes on how Beatle songs were written. On the recent Beatles documentary, we see the song “Get Back,” something Paul was fooling around with, become the song we all know—and note how the input of the other 3 Beatles was crucial, even though it is “Paul’s song” (and Lennon gets official songwriting credits with Paul.)
Stones lore, by contrast, is a songwriting mystery—there is not one identifiable song written, from start to finish, by either Mick or Keith. The Stones apparently had “ideas” the whole band worked on. There is one Stones songwriting anecdote—and only one—which gets repeated over and over again (Beatles gossip features hundreds of popular songwriting stories) and that’s Keith waking up and finding the riff to “Satisfaction” on his tape recorder. The Stones first self-written hit (released January, 1965), “Last Time” (Jagger/Richards) features an insistent riff which “makes” the song. The guitarist who plays (and wrote?) this hit-making riff is Brian Jones.
One more anecdote: Thanks to a famous French filmmaker, there’s a clip of Mick, Keith, and Brian working on “Sympathy for the Devil” from Beggars Banquet; the three are sitting in a circle with Brian and Keith each strumming an acoustic guitar to the song-in-process. Mick, sans instrument, is focused, not on Keith, but on what Brian Jones is doing.
Finally, this Stones “comeback” occurred in the following context: touring (in sports arenas while selling merchandise) not songwriting, the rock industry bigwigs figured out, was the way to get rich. This meant Jagger, dancing about in large venues like the Hollywood Bowl, was the “comeback” formula. The shy, self-effacing, genius of a Brian Jones was no longer needed. Jagger ostensibly flew to LA to meet Morrison so he could get tips on performing for large audiences—the Stones had not toured in 15 months. Morrison, lying on his motel bed, resting up for the concert on July 5, listened to Jagger say he was ashamed of his dancing. The witness to this meeting reported that Jim (a newcomer threatening to usurp Jagger as the world’s greatest lead singer) asked Mick about Brian Jones and Jagger rolled his eyes, saying Keith was now with Brian’s ex-girlfriend. The Doors were on the verge of becoming bigger than the Stones in the summer of 1968; that August, “Hello I Love You” hit no. 1, Jose Feliciano’s 1968 cover of “Light My Fire” (1967) was a top 5 hit, and the Doors would begin a successful European tour in September.
How did Morrison do on LSD with Jagger (and Pam) scrutinizing him from the front row? There were complaints he didn’t work the crowd and more or less simply sang. The press said Jim was “boring.”
Jim’s Hollywood Bowl performance was stellar. He smirked a little. If he was unnerved by Jagger and Pam in the audience, or hindered by drug use, it was difficult to tell. Jim was a shaman, oblivious to human concerns and the vain, businessman’s world of Mick Jagger—and this is perhaps one of the reasons that Jim is the greatest front man ever. This is not to take anything away from Mr. Jagger, a tremendous musical force.
One word about the Doors in general: they really were transcendent. The Doors were on another level. Not better. But significantly different. Theatrical, but not in a cheap way. Oddly, strangely, the chemistry of this foursome moved the band beyond the rock template, even though that’s mostly what they were doing. Miraculously, they were almost classical. Not faux classical—like prog rock or jazz fusion, which is not classical at all, and which the Doors themselves sometimes fell into, in undisciplined stretches on stage. On the tight-rope of near-failure, the Doors intimated the touch, the mood, the attitude, the feel, of classical music.
The New American Poetry:as American as Cold War propaganda.
The New American Poetry1945-1960, features, with the bios and the actual poems, a short preface by Donald Allen, the editor, who was, as far as I can tell, a former English teacher from Iowa and a Grove Press suit.
Mr. Allen is the man.
He makes every American, Cold War-era, avant-garde, poetry, gesture one could expect: half-truths, name-dropping, geography, it’s like jazz! (No formal, literary, apology needed.) It is what it is, daddy-o!
In his preface, Mr. Allen tells his readers it is difficult for him to put his anthology together, since so little of the poetry he includes is actually published. He all but admits the project is a fraud.
Anthologies reflect established taste. This anthology attempted to impose it, simply by offering to the public poets—except for Allen Ginsberg due to an obscenity trial—the public had not seen.
This anthology was not the Zeitgeist but the ghost of the Zeitgeist, the most insidious type of propaganda there is. The poetry was not the poets’—but Donald Allen’s.
The poets compiled by Mr. Donald Allen did not need to be good. It would be odd if they were good. The avant-garde act was the anthology itself—and this would only make sense if the poets were bad. Genius.
The first 60 pages are devoted to Charles Olson and Robert Duncan: semi-learned lunatic raving, which sets the table wonderfully, because it makes the average poets who follow in the volume seem good. More genius.
The mad house which greets the reader in the opening 60 pages of New American Poetry 1945 – 1960 also provided a wonderful opportunity for cult followers: just pretend to understand the rants of Charles Olson—the Black Mountain/Gloucester cult figure—and you, a nobody college student, who thinks Pound is cool in a comic book sort of way, now achieves sudden, secret-handshake, superiority. Still more genius.
The Top Poet of the Cool New Poetry Cult, of course, was Pound. One cannot read of the poets who gained a bit of notoriety in the period which this classic of Modernist poetry anthology covers, 1945 (when Pound was in a cage and close to being shot by soldiers who risked their lives fighting the Nazis) to 1960 (Pound won the Bollingen Prize in 1949) without scenes of religious-type visits by young poets to the hospital of the insane to see Pound (whose life was saved by the official interventions of his politically reactionary friend, T.S. Eliot.)
Ezra Pound (b 1885) himself wrote (translated, stole?) a few good poems (and there are a handful of good poems in Allen’s anthology) but good poetry isn’t the point—the gist is that Pound’s long work, the Cantos, affirms that one only need put in a great deal of educated effort towards a poetry project in any sort of haphazard manner one pleases. This is to be “modern,” allowing one to escape the inhibiting accomplishments of the past and bring oneself into the 20th century world of letters (there must be such a “world” after all) which must have its figures who spread influence—these of course cannot exist abstractly.
What I have stated truthfully and clearly in a negative manner, can—by looking at it from a slightly different angle—be flipped on its head, and seen in a positive light. I completely understand this.
Scholarship places Dante in Florence. Scholarship names Dante’s contemporary associates. Likewise, scholarship places Ginsberg in San Francisco. You see immediately where this is going.
The million anecdotes of Ginsberg—his connected friends will scribble poetry—in and around San Francisco, or New York, or any locale deemed significant, becomes scholarship, which, like a Visiting Deity, connects all and makes sacred all which my factual description offends, making me an outcast more damned than any clown who might strip naked in public poetry readings.
But to pursue the negative just a little further:
And so the question naturally arises, “who are the young, new, avant-garde poets?” I’m glad you asked, says the Iowa, avant-garde, anthologist, car salesman, hoping one doesn’t wonder what the old avant-garde can possibly have to do with the new avant-garde—if, in fact, avant-garde is a real word. Was Shakespeare or Keats avant-garde before they were published? Hush, don’t ask these questions.
For here is the real nub of the matter. The “avant-garde” or “new writing” label is of no use to those who simply love poetry, who swoon and marvel at verses Keats wrote at 20 (“I Stood Tiptoe,” “Sleep and Poetry”) and look at a little prose poem by Denise Levertov at 40 which they really want to like—but think, “well, okay, I guess this is pretty good…”
The ancient poets used all the same strategies which the “new” poets claim for themselves as “new,” whether it is suggestive imagery, metrical deficiency, a baroque manner, or plain, rude speech. To place a line of poetry in front of one’s eyes and to judge it as pleasing or not, has as much to do with the city of San Francisco or the adventures of Ezra Pound, as it does with Britney Spears or yesterday’s ball scores.
The fame of Shakespeare does not belong to the individual who was Shakespeare—who once upon a time also wrote in a “new” manner—Shakespeare is an excellence which the wider public knows and loves and understands as such. It has nothing at all to do with derobed individuals featured in Life magazine.
Here is how Donald Allen’s preface begins:
“In the years since the war American poetry has entered upon a singularly rich period. It is a period that has seen published many of the finest achievements of the older generation: William Carlos Williams’…Ezra Pound’s…H.D.’s later work culminating in her long poem…and the recent work of E.E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, and the late Wallace Stevens.”
Williams, Pound, H.D., Cummings, Moore, and Stevens all belonged to the same tiny, 1920s, circle of well-connected friends who met at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr, or Harvard—all of them—except Stevens—“won” the annual “Dial Prize,” a large sum of money handed to them individually by a wealthy patron, Scofield Thayer, whom Eliot befriended at prep school (Eliot also “won” a “Dial Prize.”) Stevens and Williams belonged to a tinier group which included the poet Louis Ginsberg (Allen Ginsberg’s dad). They were only read by, and published by, each other, until they were turned into syllabus copy in universities by a few well-placed academic carpet-baggers from the South (the Fugitive/New Critics, as it turned out). The preface continues:
“A wide variety of poets of the second generation, who emerged in the thirties and forties, have achieved their maturity in this period: Elizabeth Bishop [she knew Dial editor, Moore; taught at Harvard]…Robert Lowell…[Lowell left Harvard to study with the influential New Critics; was friends with Bishop; Lowell taught for Paul Engle at Iowa]…”
“And we can now see that a strong third generation, long awaited but only slowly recognized, has at last emerged.”
The anthology editor finds a “history” angle to puff his offering. I’m sure this patter (he was smart enough not to go on at length) impressed the undergraduates—and even impressed the graduate students (creative writing) who picked up the book. (A college book, purporting, dishonestly, to be an anti-college book.)
Back to the preface:
“These new younger poets have written a large body of work, but most of what has been published so far has appeared only in a few little magazines, as broadsheets, pamphlets, and limited editions, or circulated in manuscript; a larger amount of it has reached its growing audience through poetry readings.”
Then we get from Mr. Donald Allen a writ-large, avant-garde falsehood:
“As it has emerged in Berkeley and San Francisco, Boston, Black Mountain, and New York City, it has shown one common characteristic: a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse.”
This “one common characteristic” is not a characteristic at all.
The three generations of poetry to which Donald Allen refers in his preface lived and breathed academia and are known only because of academia; Pound and Williams were not read until they were put in a textbook, UnderstandingPoetry, edited by two New Critics, used everywhere in schools—four editions—from the 1930s to the 1970s. Were Shakespeare Keats, Poe, Byron, the Brownings, Tennyson, Dickinson, professors?
How can Donald Allen say the “one common characteristic” was a “total rejection” (“total”?) “of all (“all”?) those qualities typical of academic verse.”? What does this even mean? Which “qualities of academic verse?” Does he mean the use of words and their meanings?
I understand Donald Allen refers to “qualities” and not to plentiful associations within academia itself, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this is what he wants to imply, as well—and neither implication holds any water. To be sexy, his new poets need to be (falsely) separated from academia. But alas. They were as academic as they could be. It was precisely like Charles Bernstein, a generation later, claiming to despise “Official Verse Culture” while constantly angling for it.
Did college students keep poetry afloat in the 19th century? No—that would be the 20th century.
Here is Peter Coyote remembering the Donald Allen anthology phenomenon:
“When I was in college, my friends and I (the black turtle-neck sweater, Camel cigarette crowd), were all fledgling writers and took writing and reading extremely seriously. Our “bible” was Don Allen’s New American Poetry 1945-60. We tore that book apart, reading everything, dog-earing pages, sharing quotes, and inhaling the works of Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Michael McClure and others. When I left college I came to San Francisco State to pursue a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing, largely because Robert Duncan was teaching there.”
Allen’s “the one characteristic” assertion of anti-academia is without merit. The “one common characteristic” of Allen’s poets was not the rejection, but the embracing, of academia—whether support, influence, milieu, or “types of verse.”
He is telling an untruth, even if Donald Allen means that the poets in his anthology rejected time-honored poems which happened to be taught in school long after their authors had passed away. If this is what Mr. Allen meant, he doesn’t quite say it this way—and it would certainly not be in his best interest to say it this way. He wants to give the impression that his anthology’s poets belong to the “open road.”
It’s a myth, of course. The 20th century “open road” leads straight to graduate degrees in creative writing.
But Donald Allen knew exactly how he wanted to present his book. In a thorough, but brilliantly understated manner, he did just that, and as an editor of these poets he deserves kudos, if not cooties.
Another brilliant move was to put an American flag on the cover. America was a big and sexy place, especially in 1960, so this didn’t hurt. Only American poets were allowed in the anthology.
Mr. Allen also divides his anthology into five parts: Black Mountain, Black Mountain, Black Mountain, Black Mountain, and Black Mountain.
The essence of the five groups is captured here in a nutshell (from the preface, again):
“While both publication and instruction at Black Mountain College align Robert Duncan with the first group, he actually emerged in 1947-1949 as a leading poet of the second group, the San Francisco Renaissance…”
Some of Mr. A’s unknown poets met at Harvard— before they drifted to New York. Some went to college together in the Pacific Northwest—before they migrated to San Francisco. Some hitchhiked to Black Mountain (when they weren’t hitchhiking to see Pound) and some thumbed it back to Black Mountain. We are really not talking about a large nation, so much as a small clique, with a few women and one black man.
Young poets will drift about, but Mr. Donald Allen is clever enough to give his Grove Press flock various geographical identities, so he can assign a “San Francisco Renaissance” here and a “New York School” there, to the poets who were writing the kinds of poems which no one, except Grove press—and their own cool cat companions—wanted to read or publish.
Unpublished poets—imagine the nerd factor!—drifting about, with a few magnetic, cult-leader, mentors, Ginsberg, Olson, Duncan, keeping the classroom in line. Donald Allen made this mess seem renowned and sexy. It led to polished publications and decent jobs in academia.
Pure genius.
Nice job, Mr. Allen!
And screw you, Donald Hall, Dana Gioia and David Lehman!*
Scarriet Editors
Salem, MA June 11, 2022
*Donald Hall, with Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, edited the “rival” anthology, The New Poets of Englandand America, 1957. Dana Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter?” 1991, savaged the state of poetry in America as (just like Allen’s anthology) incestual, institutional, egotistical, and lacking critical vigor. David Lehman (BAP editor 1988 to present) is hated for those he leaves out. All are considered too mainstream.
The late Harold Bloom, 25 years ago, was asked by David Lehman—who recently ‘liked’ one of my poems on FB—to compile a Best of the Best American Poetry 1988 — 1997 and Bloom complied, but his compilation completely omitted the 1996 Best American Poetry volume by the late lesbian poet, Adrienne Rich. Bloom wrote a scathing introduction saying political correctness was ruining poetry and destroying universities.
Bloom’s 10 year BAP anniversary anthology considered 10 volumes by these 10 guest editors: John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, Charles Simic, Louise Glűck, A. R. Ammons, Richard Howard, Adrienne Rich, and James Tate, 1988 to 1997.
There are several stories here.
The headline grabber, obviously: Bloom snubbed every choice by Adrienne Rich (she did find a few good poems: Marilyn Chin, Martin Espada)—Rich, a distinguished poet who was awarded the Yale Younger Poet prize by king-maker W.H. Auden.
Bloom could have included one or two poems and moved on, but the most famous literary critic of his day decided to make a statement. Series editor Lehman suggested what he thought were worthy poems from 1996, but succumbed to Bloom’s editorial fiat. Lehman has turned out to be a wise editor for BAP. He doesn’t encourage controversy, but he doesn’t run from it, either.
Are you sitting down? Here is Bloom, from his introduction:
“That 1996 anthology is one of the provocations for this introduction, since it seems to me a monumental representation of the enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of overwhelming us. It is of a badness not to be believed, because it follows the criteria now operative: what matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of the would-be poet. I ardently wish that I were being hyperbolical, but in fact I am exercising restraint…”
“Sincerity, as the divine Oscar Wilde assured us, is not nearly enough to generate a poem. Bursting with sincerity, the 1996 volume is a Stuffed Owl of bad verse, and of much badness that is neither verse nor prose.”
“[Literary] Criticism…is dying…replaced…by ‘cultural criticism,’ a would-be social science.”
“When I was a young teacher of poetry at Yale, the English Romantic poets were Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Keats, as well as Blake and Shelley, whose place in the canon I helped restore. On hundreds of campuses now, these poets have to share attention with the ‘women Romantic poets.'”
Bloom doesn’t help himself here. Why can’t women poets (or poets of color, etc) be studied, too? Poems ought to matter as much as poets—there is no such thing as a small group of poets—even if it’s the magnificent Coleridge, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Blake—who wrote only perfect poems. Women writers sold as well as their male counterparts in the 19th century. If Shelley is being canceled, that’s one thing; to ostentatiously lock the clubhouse door—on some lesser known women poets (some of whom are worth reading)—seems a bit much.
“I have seen my profession dying for over a quarter century now, and in another decade it may be dead.”
“Walt Whitman was not only the strongest of our poets…but…the most betrayed…Whitman’s poetry does the opposite of what he proclaims its work to be: it is reclusive, evasive, hermetic, nuanced, and more onanistic even than homoerotic, which critics cannot accept, particularly these days when attempts are made to assimilate the Self-Reliant Whitman into what calls itself the Homosexual Poetic.”
“Authentic American poetry is necessarily difficult; it is our elitist art, though that elite has nothing to do with social class, gender, erotic preference, ethnic strain, race, or sect. ‘We live in the mind,’ Stevens said, and our poetry is either Emersonian or anti-Emersonian, but either way is informed by Emerson’s dialect of power:”
And here Bloom quotes a passage from Emerson’s “Experience” which takes no prisoners in its radical assertion that within the sanctity of the self, everything is allowed. Emerson: “We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others. We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others, is experiment for us. It is an instance of our faith in ourselves, that men never speak of crime as lightly as they think: or, every man thinks a latitude safe for himself, which is nowise to be indulged to another. The act looks very differently on the inside, and on the outside; in its quality, and its consequences. Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles: it is an act quite easy to be contemplated…For there is no crime to the intellect.”
Whoa. Mr. Emerson. Are you really saying this?
But let us be alive to what Emerson (and Bloom, who astutely rode to profit two or three important ideas) is saying here: 1) Human beings are wicked 2) Poetry’s highest calling is to energize itself by both using and getting to the bottom of, human wickedness. Poetry is best when it is an uncompromising vessel for every kind of expression, encouraging a divine individuality of which the “good” and the “fit” and the “beautiful” have no necessary part (though they may). This echoes Plato’s embrace of “madness” as ultimately necessary for creativity (and love).
Poe thought Emerson, and broad, cultural, poetry formulas like this, crazy, recommending instead “method” in the hands of a calm practitioner—think of the “escape from personality” per Eliot. “Beauty” (non-violent madness) was necessary in poetry for Poe—“beauty” wasn’t just one arrow in the quiver; it was the arrow. Emerson, seen through the Poe lens, was hyperbolic and unrealistic, like an ugly guy trying to get laid, enforcing fantastic laws on the universe. One can see here the Poe/Emerson divide which was so important to Bloom (who also apparently thought of himself as an ugly guy trying to get laid). Bloom embraced Emerson-as-Faust—and had zero patience for Poe’s buzzkill.
Bloom couldn’t reconcile.
Back to Bloom’s introduction:
“Every attempt to socialize writing and reading fails; poetry is a solitary art, more now than ever, and its proper audience is the deeply educated, solitary reader…”
The “solitary art” for the “solitary reader” recalls what Bloom just said above: his “onanistic” (it means masturbation) description of Whitman.
Bloom prefers the poetry of the private and squishy, objecting to broader political amorousness. The Yale professor is quite certain that concern for the “injured” belongs to him. Is he right?
“The Resenters prate of power, as they do of race and gender: these are careerist stratagems and have nothing to do with the insulted and injured, whose lives will not be improved by our reading the bad verses of those who assert that they are the oppressed.”
Bloom ends his introduction by quoting from “The Poet,” in which Emerson lauds “insanity,” “questionable facts,” “angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and…departure from routine.” According to Emerson, the best is when the poets, “liberating gods,” have it that “dream delivers us to dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.”
The radical individualist will have his private, drunken, transcendent dream. This is the essence of Bloom and Emerson (kind of like geniuses on LSD). Here, then, is their democratic, demonic, elitism of lonely difficulty, where the morals of political correctness declaimed by those like Adrienne Rich are cast out as too “sincere” (Wilde).
Bloom is correct. One cannot have the wayward freedom of the private dream and moralizing politics at the same time; they are too antithetical.
But, in the end, there’s nothing really politically intransigent or personally bitter about this quarrel. (As far as I can tell, Rich never responded to Bloom’s attack.) It’s an academic disagreement only, except Bloom’s academy isn’t some 19th century prison: Bloom protests too much; his and Emerson’s pleas for “drunkenness” are more than satisfied in the Humanities, today—which is no longer a Latin-and-Greek, theological, boot camp. Bloom’s political beliefs (leftist, liberal) mirror Rich and the “Resenters”—who, according to Bloom, hate real poetry.
Adrienne Rich, in her introduction, lays out the method for her selections in the very first paragraph:
“This is a gathering of poems that one guest editor, reading through mailboxesful of journals that publish poetry, found especially urgent, lively, haunting, resonant, demanding to be reread.” (Italics mine)
What could be more bland? “mailboxesful of journals that publish poetry…” It sounds quaint. Especially next to this by Bloom, which is how his introduction begins, and which made Rich smile, I’m sure:
“My epigraph [They have the numbers; we, the heights.] is from Thucydides and is spoken by the Spartan commander at Thermopylae. Culturally, we are at Thermopylae: the multi-culturalists, the hordes of camp-followers afflicted by the French diseases, the mock-feminists, the commisars, the gender-and-power freaks, the hosts of new historicists and old materialists—all stand below us. They will surge up and we may be overcome; our universities are already travesties, and our journalists parody our professors of “cultural studies.” For just a little longer, we hold the heights, the realm of the aesthetic.”
Wow. 25 years ago—this actually rang across the book marts and the halls of academe.
Bloom ends his first paragraph by defining his criterion for the 75 poems he chose (leaving out Rich’s selections):
“These pass my personal test for the canonical: I have reread them with pleasure and profit.” (Italics mine)
Neither Bloom nor Rich is an Einstein. This is not Baudelaire. Or Edgar Poe. Or T.S. Eliot. This BAP battle has one professor imagining himself as a Spartan commander against another professor who thinks L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poems written by people of color would be an improvement for a Best American Poetry volume. (She writes “Language” with the stars. Do people still do that?)
Here’s Rich, again, from her introduction:
“We need poetry as living language, the core of every language, something that is still spoken, aloud or in the mind, muttered in secret, subversive, reaching around corners, crumpled into a pocket, performed to a community, read aloud to the dying, recited by heart, scratched or sprayed on a wall.”
What say you, commander?
Rich and Bloom are both Emersonian—so no sparks flew, or could fly. Rich’s hip, “living language” pastiche is just Waldo sounding a little more like Paul Simon.
Still, there is a gulf, and here it is:
Bloom wants to preside over the chaotic dream of poetry and be its psychiatrist/critic—the Resenters (they care about freedom, too) don’t want to give Bloom that power; he represents to them exactly what their politics-meddling-with-poetry represents to him; both sides are radicals who differ only where the limited authority should be placed; Bloom wants it placed in him—who will decide which difficult, radical-individual, dream is in fact a good poem; Rich wants authority situated in a set of politically enlightened principles under which poetry can aspire, but not compete.
The final consideration is: how are Bloom’s selections? In his introduction, Bloom names four “major” poets represented in his Best of 1988 to 1997 anthology: Elizabeth Bishop, Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, and May Swenson—who are no longer living, adding Ashbery and Ammons (then living) as worthy to be in their company.
But as Marjorie Perloff (she agreed with Bloom that Rich’s 1996 volume was aesthetically weak) pointed out (I paraphrase her) in her general response to Bloom in the Boston Review:
1) In his introduction, Bloom did not bring himself to mention any other poets in his Best anthology, focusing instead on Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Stevens, Hart Crane, and especially Emerson. (Bloom loves to quote the dead—who invariably make his points far better than he does.)
2) Bloom, like Rich, is mostly a culture critic, and therefore deserves blame for what he laments: the decline of hard-nosed, close-reading, aesthetics.
Two good points from Marjorie Perloff.
Bloom champions Ashbery—which would seem, at first blush, a little strange. Professor Bloom began his career defending Blake and Shelley; the traditional canon suits him, Bloom quotes Tennyson in his Best introduction as an example of beautiful poetry which transcends politics; Emerson, whom he adores, is always making easily understood (if sometimes snide and psychotic) points; and Shakespeare leads the Bloom parade—so what is it which attracts Bloom so much to this grinning, nonsensical, prose poetry, jokester, Ashbery? Isn’t Bloom afraid the Ashbery hipsters are laughing at him, and not with him?
Bloom was wise to include Ashbery in his canon.
First, Ashbery is apolitical. Bloom had to like that.
Second, Bloom’s avant-garde creds rose enormously by embracing the Harvard poet, who was liked by W.H. Auden. With Ashbery on his side, Bloom, from a distance at least, looks less like a dour, old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy.
Third, Ashbery is never guilty of the dreaded “sincerity”—in his poems, John Ashbery, the real person, is always hiding. If you hide who you are, well of course you can never be sincere. Ashbery learned this hide-John-Ashbery trick from the beginning and stuck to it—in a steady, unassuming manner, to the end of his career.
Finally, Ashbery’s stream-of-conscious, meandering, prose, poetry, is rhapsodic rather than digressive. Especially in lengthier pieces, the line between rhapsodic (good) and digressive (bad) is very fine, indeed; to pull off the former takes a real, but difficult-to-define, skill.
If this is a legitimate poetic talent—I’ve put my finger on it precisely with these two opposite terms (rhapsodic, digressive) which nevertheless hint at being one—then here is where the whole modern poetry experiment (dubious everywhere else) succeeds: in the strange rhapsody of Ashbery.
We can see this quality clearly in one of Ashbery’s shorter poems, selected by Bloom:
The Problem Of Anxiety
Fifty years have passed since I started living in those dark towns I was telling you about. Well, not much has changed. I still can’t figure out how to get from the post office to the swings in the park. Apple trees blossom in the cold, not from conviction, and my hair is the color of dandelion fuzz.
Suppose this poem were about you—would you put in the things I’ve carefully left out: descriptions of pain, and sex, and how shiftily people behave toward each other? Naw, that’s, all in some book, it seems. For you I’ve saved the descriptions of finger sandwiches, and the glass eye that stares at me in amazement from the bronze mantel, and will never be appeased.
This might be the best poem in the whole volume, but I also love “litany” by Carolyn Creeden, “Histoire” by Harry Matthews, “Manifest Destiny” by Jorie Graham, “Prophecy” by Donald Hall, “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa, “Morning, Noon, and Night” by Mark Strand, “One Train May Hide Another” by Kenneth Koch, and “When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone” by Galway Kinnell.
There is something to be said for the compilers art, for these extraordinary poems come from poets who also have published (never mind written) poems which are less than good.
The vanity of poets (who think all their poems are good) will get in the way of truly good poems, such that it may be said the honest anthologist is really the one person to whom poetry gives itself.
One “major” poet of Bloom’s, who to this author is overrated, is Ammons—his long poem included, “Garbage,” feels digressive, not rhapsodic. The reason? It’s sincere (Oscar Wilde—and Bloom agreeing with him—get this right).
From “Garbage:”
…(I hope) to live from now on on in elegance and simplicity—
or, maybe, just simplicity—why shouldn’t I at my age (63) concentrate on chucking the
advancements and rehearsing the sweetnesses of leisure, nonchalance, and small-time byways: couple
months ago, for example, I went all the way from soy flakes (already roasted and pressed)
and in need of an hour’s simmering boil to be cooked) all the way to soybeans, the
pure golden pearls themselves, .65$ lb. dry: they have to be soaked overnight in water and they
have to be boiled slowly for six hours—but they’re welfare cheap, are a complete protein,
more protein by weight than meat, more”…
This is too sincere by half. Ammons is sharing. This is not rhapsodic. It’s digression.
Why Bloom could not tell the difference I am not really sure. But since Bloom was not a poet himself, and found no elegance except in quoting others—either the dead, or his colleague W. Jackson Bate, from whom he lifted his anxiety of influence theory—perhaps the Yale professor was finally an emotional, miserable, copying machine?
If we don’t separate out Ammons, we can’t see Ashbery clearly. The rhapsody of Ashbery and the digression of Ammons get confused. Aesthetics is blurry without the surgeon’s knife. Casual readers don’t get together and consult each other. Poems don’t talk. The Critic is necessary.
In a bit of irony, I am going to quote a definition of poetry from the 19th century, which answers to that rhapsody we sometimes get from Ashbery, a definition which Edgar Poe, of all people, said of it that this definition of poetry “embodies the sole true definition of what has been a thousand times erroneously defined.”
Here is the definition. It happens to likewise come from an anthologist in a preface to a poetry anthology:
“He who looks on Lake George, or sees the sun rise on Mackinaw, or listens to the grand music of a storm, is divested, certainly, for a time, of a portion of the alloy of his nature. The elements of power in all sublime sights and heavenly harmonies, should live in the poet’s song, to which they can be transferred only by him who possesses the creative faculty. The sense of beauty, next to the miraculous divine suasion, is the means through which the human character is purified and elevated. The creation of beauty, the manifestation of the real by the ideal, ‘in words that move in metrical array,’ is poetry.”
The author of this poetry definition is a man who called Whitman’s poetry “filth” and betrayed his friend, Edgar Poe.
Rufus Griswold.
If you don’t think the lyric Ashbery poem quoted above is sublime in the way Griswold describes, what do you think the “dark towns” are meant to invoke, or the unseen “you,” and what do you think the “eye” represents? As for “metrical array,” it is there, too: spondees pair up brilliantly with anapests in Ashbery’s sonnet-like work.
Well this is nuts. Bloom and Griswold, (along with Emerson) will long be remembered as deeply hostile to Poe. But here is Bloom, with the help of Griswold (and Poe nodding in agreement) hoisting Ashbery high over Adrienne Rich, guest editor of BAP 1996—who did not include Ashbery, or Ammons in her selections. But what I have outlined is really no crazier than anything poetry has given us since America became a nation (one which Rich did not like), including Spartan commander Bloom (from the “heights”) glowering down at professor Rich, the “people’s” 1996 BAP guest editor.
Are all the poems in the 1996 BAP, Rich, ed. inferior to those in the Best of BAP 1988-1997, Bloom, ed.? It would make things easier for critics if it were true. Suffice it to say there are poems Bloom chose from the first 10 volumes—he tended to choose longer poems (going for “difficulty,” I imagine)—which, like “Garbage” by Ammons, have their moments, but which ultimately strike me as pedantic, digressive and yawn-producing (though perhaps this merely indicates I’m not able to appreciate poetry on the “heights.”)
I think it’s safe to say that poems (which are not book-length epics) should be good to us immediately—we shouldn’t need to read a poem on and on for a “story” to develop.
Aesthetics should hit us in the face, and then, and only then, can the story “develop” in a way that pleases us.
Or, how about this? Arresting start, turn, great end: the sonnet.
There’s not much in the way of sonnet-like poems in these competing BAP volumes—except the Ashbery poem quoted (the “Naw” is the turn) from Bloom’s selection. “Like Most Revelations” by Richard Howard (16 lines) is admirable, but the turns are multiple and a little abstract. Richard Howard might be called Oscar Wilde-lite; he had some of the manner but not all of the wit of the great Wilde; unfortunately for 20th century poetry, there is not so much a difference—as the 20th century (great in the horrors of war, certainly) holds its own, but is mostly the 19th century—watered down.
Wouldn’t that be something if the “champion” in this instance were a traditional form poem—by John Ashbery? (Though the wise money is on Kinnell or Carolyn Creedon—stunning poems, really.)
Adrienne Rich’s 1996 volume avoids what Rich explicitly doesn’t like: “the columnar, anecdotal, domestic poem, often with a three-stress line,” like the poem by W. S. Merwin, “Lament for the Makers” which Richchose. Or Ammons, which she did not. Her selections, compared to Bloom’s, are shorter, edgier, conversational, graffiti-like, shape-y, too consciously attempting not to be digressive, perhaps.
Rich or Bloom? Academic brevity or academic length. It’s basically Emerson, either way.
“That we are not a poetical people has been asserted… Because it suited us to construct an engine in the first instance, it has been denied that we could compose an epic in the second. Because we were not all Homers in the beginning, it has been somewhat too rashly taken for granted that we shall be all Jeremy Benthams to the end.” –Edgar Poe
William Hazlitt (1778–1830) is a ghost who haunts Scarriet. This brilliant writer, who is mostly out of print, hated the Tories, loved liberty, lived in the United States as a boy (a beautiful Unitarian church in Boston was co-founded by William Hazlitt Sr.), glimpsed Napoleon (he was a fan), and published an essay called, “On the Pleasure of Hating.” Adam Smith taught his father, Jeremy Bentham was his landlord (where Milton once lived); Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats were friends. He was an excellent portrait painter. Women troubles, vindictive Tory magazines, and a less than tactful personality severely damaged his reputation.
In this essay, I’ll quote Hazlitt liberally on utilitarianism. Two resurrections at once.
Utilitarianism, a political philosophy mostly forgotten, gained traction all over the world as the American and French revolutions were defining democracy for the ages. It is safe to say one really cannot be a modern political thinker unless one has been tortured by the whole question of Utility, as it applies to logic and politics itself.
The paradox (Bentham and Mill, typical of the stubborn British, obstinately did not think it one) of Utlity is inescapable.
Utility is scientific democracy—calculating the most pleasure for the most people.
The triumph of utilitarian logic unfortunately cancels everything individual, local, Romantic, and usefully mad.
The philosophy of Bentham sees Hobbes and Hume trample Socrates and Christ into dust.
Hazlitt was certain Bentham was wrong. This ruined Hazlitt’s career.
Bentham’s philosophy was the excuse for the over-reach of Empire (Hazlitt lived and worked in the belly of the beast) as well as the logical engine of increasing democracy (and fashionable hedonism). Opposing Bentham left Hazlitt and other Platonists like Coleridge and Keats high and dry. Blackwood’s clobbered both Keats and Hazlitt. The Tories, with their hatred of Napoleon and fear of the French Revolution, finally carried the day.
Hazlitt would be a conservative today. He was a liberal in 19th century Britain.
Here’s where I flash-forward to the present, to remind us of how utilitarianism, though largely forgotten, continues to shape democracy and liberalism as we understand them. It is still the paradox which cannot be escaped.
In 2022, colonialism not only persists, its effects seem to be growing. “White privilege” and “cultural appropriation” are considered extremely dangerous and extremely real, as if the labor of small white nations—15th century Portugal and Spain, (joined by the Dutch and the English in the 16th century)—ruling the entire world were now closer than ever to occurring.
Blacks in the United States feel more disenfranchised, more ready to blame whites than ever. The two political parties in the United States, Republicans and Democrats, increasingly appear on the brink of civil war, their voters as different as night and day, their leaders threatening to jail each other.
It is very much like the passionate Whigs and Tories, the Catholics and Protestants in Renaissance England—torn by vicious civil war as a prelude to Britain almost taking over the globe.
Even as the left accuses the American conservatives (average law-abiding citizens who pay their taxes) of racism, white supremacy and fascism, and even as the right accuses liberals (average law-abiding citizens who pay their taxes) of mass psychosis and treason, there is a nagging suspicion among a few of us that indeed the white people are finishing what they started in the late 15th century—when Columbus and Magellan discovered where India, China, Indonesia, Japan, Oceania, the West Indies, and the Americas were—and the British East India Company (with one minor setback in Yorktown) said, “well, look what we’ve found.”
Even when whites fight each other, terrible as this is to admit, they win. The British and Americans, sworn enemies, as we all know, eventually become friends. English is the globe’s language. Germany kicked up a devastating fuss in the 20th century—turning the United States into a Superpower, a platform—from which a New World Order of Woke Corporations consolidating left and right, public and private, government and business; old opponents now indistinguishable, is poised to take the colonial model even further. The United States is a kind of meaner, leaner British Empire 2.0 for the 21st century.
The British Empire had no trouble losing its identity in pursuing open borders (the price you pay when taking over the world).
Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson, conservative, U.S. patriots, (some say racist jingoists) sounded the alarm against America submerging its identity in open borders, per the old British Empire.
Foolish Ann and Tucker: if the people you favor— those whom you consider Americans—won’t breed, America has no choice but to import foreigners at a sufficient rate. The liberal today intuitively understands this. The principled conservative does not.
Liberalism can indeed be traced to Jeremy Bentham, (with whom Edgar Poe strenuously disagreed) and Bentham’s once-famous philosophy of Utility. Utilitarianism is pragmatism which thinks outside the box. War, inflation, and disease can very well be good things in the Darwinian universe of utilitarianism.
Birthrate is the sort of hyper-practical consideration which may occasionally escape the notice of patriots—but not utilitarians. Birthrate is fast becoming the Musk v. Gates, not-so-secret, political buzzword of our age. Think of all the controversial and vital ramifications associated with that one word.
Deliberate policy failure at the top cripples lives at the bottom and shocks the understanding of the middle classes. A Malthusian nightmare inhibits Godwin’s utopia as calculated by Bentham—and only Hazlitt, the aesthetic journalist of full-blown wariness and common sense, can figure it out.
More than ever, we need profound and oracular wisdom to sort out for us the policy disasters which manage to burn to the ground both “right” and “left” solutions. The mind is squeezed. The art critic, the journalist, the poet, even the philosopher, are frozen. Chomsky and Nixon have become the Byron and Wordsworth of our soul. We have been Benthamed.
Hazlitt made vivid and pertinent remarks on Bentham as he strongly disagreed with him (all quotes are from William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age):
“Mr. Bentham is one of those persons who verify the old adage, that ‘A prophet has most honour out of his own country.’ His reputation lies at the circumference; and the lights of his understanding are reflected, with increasing lustre, on the other side of the globe. His name is little known in England, better in Europe, best of all in the plains of Chile and the mines of Mexico. He has offered constitutions for the New World, and legislated for future times.
**
“Mr. Hobbhouse is a greater man at the hustings, Lord Rolle at Plymouth Dock; but Mr. Bentham would carry it hollow, on the score of popularity, at Paris or Pegu. The reason is, that our author’s influence is purely intellectual. He has devoted his life to the pursuit of abstract and general truths, and to those studies—“That waft a thought from Indus to the pole”— and has never mixed himself up with personal intrigues or party politics.
“Mr. Bentham is very much among philosophers what La Fontaine was among poets:—in general habits and in all but his professional pursuits, he is a mere child. He has lived for the last forty years in a house in Westminster, overlooking the Park, like an anchoret in his cell, reducing law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine. He scarcely goes out, and sees very little company.
**
“His eye is quick and lively; but it glances not from object to object, but from thought to thought. He is evidently a man occupied with some train of fine and inward association. He regards the people about him no more than the flies of a summer. He meditates the coming age. He hears and sees only what suits his purpose, or some “foregone conclusion;” and looks out for facts and passing occurrences in order to put them into his logical machinery and grind them into the dust and powder of some subtle theory, as the miller looks out for grist to his mill!
**
“The gentleman is himself a capital logician; and he has been led by this circumstance to consider man as a logical animal. We fear this view of the matter will hardly hold water. If we attend to the moral man, the constitution of his mind will scarcely be found to be built up of pure reason and a regard to consequences: if we consider the criminal man (with whom the legislator has chiefly to do), it will be found to be still less so.
“Every pleasure, says Mr. Bentham, is equally a good, and is to be taken into the account as such in a moral estimate, whether it be the pleasure of sense or of conscience, whether it arise from the exercise of virtue or the perpetration of crime. We are afraid the human mind does not readily come into this doctrine, this ultima ratio philosophorum, interpreted according to the letter. Our moral sentiments are made up of sympathies and antipathies, of sense and imagination, of understanding and prejudice. The soul, by reason of its weakness, is an aggregating and exclusive principle; it clings obstinately to some things, and violently rejects others.
**
“Mr. Bentham’s plan would be a feasible one, and the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, would be the best possible ground to place morality upon. But it is not so.
**
“All pleasure is not (morally speaking) equally a good.
**
“There are some tastes that are sweet in the mouth and bitter in the belly; and there is a similar contradiction and anomaly in the mind and heart of man.
**
“It has been made a plea (half jest, half earnest) for the horrors of war, that they promote trade and manufactures. It has been said, as a set-off for the atrocities practiced upon the negro slaves in the West Indies, that without their blood and sweat, so many millions of people could not have sugar to sweeten their tea.
**
“You may as well preach philosophy [utilitarianism] to a drunken man, or to the dead, as to those who are under the instigation of any mischievous passion. A man is a drunkard, and you tell him he ought to be sober; he is idle, and you recommend industry to him as his wisest course; he gambles, and you remind him that he may be ruined by this foible; he has lost his character, and you advise him to get into some reputable service or lucrative situation; vice becomes a habit with him, and you request him to rouse himself and shake it off; he is starving, and you warn him if he breaks the law, he will be hanged. None of this reasoning reaches the mark it aims at. The culprit, who violates and suffers the vengeance of the laws, is not the dupe of ignorance, but the slave of passion, the victim of habit or necessity. To argue with strong passion, with inveterate habit, with desperate circumstances, is to talk to the winds.
**
“The charm of criminal life, like that of savage life, consists of liberty, in hardship, in danger, and in the contempt of death: in one word, in extraordinary excitement; and he who has tasted of it, will no more return to the regular habits of life, than a man will take to water after drinking brandy, or than a wild beast will give over hunting to its prey.”
Hazlitt is saying to Bentham “you can’t legislate morality,” which is Shelley’s message in his “Defense of Poetry” and Poe’s throughout his works—according to Poe, didactic approaches are less successful than reverse-psychology; the human soul is not a machine.
This doesn’t stop Bentham’s logic holding sway, however, in abstract realms, which is more than sufficient to both confuse and shame our selfish, illogical souls. It takes a great deal of individual conviction to resist utilitarianism; it is one thing to say “passionate criminals won’t heed your utilitarian logic,” and quite another to contemplate one’s own intransigence in the face of pure logic’s pure good. It is our fate, since Bentham, to understand we are always wrong in whatever political stance we take: either the “many” are deprived of pleasure, or the “many” see to it that everything we hold dear, including our own unique soul, has no validity.
It isn’t a question of which side is right—it is the realization that both sides are wrong, and how this realization politically paralyzes every sensitive and thinking person.
The only major difference between the previous U.S. president and the current one on race is that Joe Biden is allowed to be racist; whites promote racism against themselves because they know a race war ultimately benefits themselves—thanks to those like Biden who damn themselves with a smile; just as in the same manner inflationary, eco-conscious, anti-business environments favor the biggest and strongest companies: “survival of the fittest” is the ultimate foil against any utilitarianism which might trouble the conscience of those who lobby for uniqueness and freedom.
The winning formula: Divide-and-Conquer Empire, pushes right past both Utility and its opposite, Romanticism, while stealing energy from both.
The fracture, the divide, which most of us know as political reality, the deal sealed by belonging to one of the two sides (Whig, Tory; Liberal, Conservative), is but the prerequisite landscape of the higher political adventure most of us fail to see, or understand.
Politics is finally the sneering: “What are you (victim of political strong-arming, propaganda, or corruption) going to do about it?”
Therefore the enlightened who want to effect reform flee to religion and art—unless these are crushed by politics, which is the case today; and so politics becomes once again the arena, and art climbs back to significance on the back of politics (lose/lose since art, by definition, is not politics) or by an artistic breakthrough of some kind, which unfortunately we are not seeing today.
Free speech, real debate over ideas, is as enlightened as the art of discourse and rhetoric is going to get. Remember when religion, politics, and literature existed almost as one entity, (thanks to writers like Hazlitt) in Great Britain during the early 19th century, during (was it coincidence?) the poetry renaissance of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Byron? Much of this was due to the response, then, of the most materially advanced nation on earth—a fiercely party-divided Britain, to the American and French revolutions.
Recall that Hazlitt told us the stay-at-home-former-priest Jeremy Bentham, the most influential philosopher outside of Britain, had no party affiliations.
A similar figure was Thomas Malthus, a priest and literary figure whose economic theories were off-the-charts influential and controversial. “If you have too many children they will starve to death” clashed with “death is the result of not having children.”
Hazlitt, in the calmest and most logical manner possible, destroys Malthus. He not only caught the famed economist in a plagiarism; Hazlitt toppled Malthus precisely where his famous pessimistic formula lives: “There is evidently no inherent difference in the principle of increase in food or population; since a grain of corn, for example, will propagate and multiply itself much faster even than the human species. A bushel of wheat will sow a field; that field will furnish seed for twenty others.” (The Spirit Of the Age) Everyone says we had to wait for 20th century improvements in farming techniques before the anti-utopian Malthus could be decisively debunked, but Hazlitt (ignored on this count) simply and prophetically wasted no time.
Titanic ideas both inform and transcend party politics. In the name of free speech, we should, as both citizen and critic, embrace heavy debates, and not run from them. Hiding from these debates in the momentary safety of political party affiliation is finally cowardly and unenlightened. And not good for art, either.
One important caveat, however: when I say “embrace” these debates, I do not mean embrace the lunacy, exactly, which the last few hundred years of rhetoric in the West has produced. We need to look at where these ideas come from precisely to “dial down” the crazy. Bentham is inescapable—which is why we need to unpack and disarm him.
Scarriet 