Page 15 - Litteratteur Redefining World December issue

Litterateur redefining world December 2020

"I wasn't in school to learn about literature"

The psychological pressures of college life are considerable, and there isn't space
to deal with them here. Cornell had some interesting teachers- including, eventually,
Paul de Man, who was a major influence on my understanding of criticism and on
my view of Yeats. There was also an excellent course on Dante taught by Robert
Durling, and I read Joyce's Ulysses in Arthur Mizener's course. (Mizener's take on
Ulysses was rather conservative: "I want to emphasize the wonderful traditional
novel that Ulysses really is." Not Ulysses as an experiment in liberated language.) I
wrote considerably less poetry in college than I had in high school, partly because I
was being asked to consider poetry critically, in ways that were not fully familiar to
me. What exactly did you mean by that? Was that put in only for the sound?--as if

that were some sort of terrible thing to do. Robert Durling was my freshman English
teacher, and I would show him my poetry. I remember his description of my early
work as "mellifluous Yeatsian vapidity." He smiled as he said it. But he said it. (I
remember thinking that "Thomas Wolfian vapidity" might have been more accurate.)

I had hoped that Cornell would give me what I lacked in Port Chester, an intellectual
community. It gave me something, but it didn't give me that. In my sophomore year I
took a great many English courses. I wanted to learn everything at once. What I
discovered was that, no matter the period or the writer, Chaucer or T.S. Eliot, the
same kinds of questions were being raised, questions of irony, paradox, etc. This
discovery made me realize that I wasn't in school to learn about literature. I was in
school to learn a grid which could be applied to almost any piece of writing (though
woe to the writer like Shelley to whom it didn't apply). This was a useful thing to

learn, but it lessened the authority of my instructors.

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