Hindsight
Poems by Rosanna Warren
W.W. Norton & Co.
I recently wrote an essay that touched on “academic painting”—a theory of art that dominated European painting for centuries, reaching its apogee in the mid-1800s. As the name implies, academic painting was proselytized by elite art academies and constrained to the ideals of those institutions. An artists’ individual creativity and style were downplayed in favor of an idealized, uniform aesthetic. Academic painters rendered scenes from the Bible and antiquity over and over. Their technical mastery was supreme, and there’s much to admire in the perfected drama of paintings like The Roses of Heliogabalus or The Pearl and The Wave. But there’s a reason art eventually moved in a direction that was more concordant with modern life. As the Industrial Revolution and WWI shook societal foundations, academic painting felt increasingly out of step. Its placid scenes of ancient feasts felt less appropriate during a time of chaos, collapsing governments, and widespread social disruption. As a result, the locus of art-making shifted toward new styles like Impressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism.
Rosanna Warren’s new collection of poems Hindsight reminds me—I’m sorry to say—of academic painting. Before I explain more, let me first mention that there’s much to admire in Warren’s poems. Consider the opening quatrain of “Inscription”:
and the roots of the fallen oak tree rear
in flamboyant Gothic lozenges: earth sogged
from days of rain so ghost pipes spring up,
crooking their croziers, spectral parasites.
Warren is flexing a well-honed technical mastery here. The sounds are gorgeous, and she excels at gussying up a plain image into a linguistic playground. There’s definite pleasure in such buoyant imagery.
However, I have to admit that few poems in Hindsight reached my heart. According to the book’s front flap, “Hindsight arises from a tormented time in our country’s history. Some poems contemplate the shocks of the COVID-19 assault. Others consider our nation, which is torn to pieces politically … But political fracture occurs because of more fundamental dislocations: for this book, most critically, spiritual.” What is this spiritual missing key? Given that we live in a time of isolation, suspicion, and a shredded social contract, I’d imagine the missing spiritual key is something collective. Something like togetherness, solidarity, or shared purpose. Yet Warren’s poems focus almost exclusively on individual experience.
The pandemic’s effects are evoked with a sense of domestic unease, a mild oddness in the air. Maybe this was Warren’s experience. Nothing wrong with that. But the failure to consider the specter of plague deaths or the tremendous suffering of healthcare and front-line workers left me feeling hollow. Take the opening of “Naturally”:
Rising in the dark for senior pandemic shopping,
we drive east into the spruce-silhouetted dawn
watching the sky stain slowly raspberry as the molten
copper disk of the sun floats up over the highway
…
Avoiding our masked and fumbling hominid cousins,
we forage along half-empty shelves for relics
of what our sun has fired into vegetal cells. And find
three elderly cabbages, lacking their outer leaves Browned
Warren delivers evocative images like “spruce-silhouetted dawn” and the “molten / copper disk of the sun.” But what does the poem mean here? Or rather, what does it communicate? Dawn has been experienced by humans since time immemorial. What does it mean to experience it on silenced streets during a plague year? In the middle of a climate crisis? What does a dying cabbage mean when cabbages are picked by exploited migrants and then trucked thousands of miles? Warren doesn’t answer.
Reading Hindsight made me want to coin a new term: academic poetry. Like the painting style, academic poetry is designed to dazzle insiders at elite universities. Academic poets drop references to Ancient Greek literature, the Bible, and well-regarded works of art. They talk about nature and the quotidian life of the comfortably well-off. Warren’s work is a skillful interpretation of these pre-vetted themes.
Academic poetry adheres to the preferences of New Criticism, a methodology for creating and interpreting literature that originated at elite American universities around the start of the Cold War. New Criticism is, to this day, the de facto approach to literary interpretation in the United States. It encourages “close reading” and analyzing a piece of art as a self-contained aesthetic object, not as something produced within a specific socio-historical context. For this reason, academic poetry is at once precise and vague—the words are sharp, the meaning is unrealized. You cannot have a poem bursting with meaning if you deny a poem the ability to connect to the human experience beyond the pleasantries of good sound and surprising image work. The upper echelons of American poetry are full of chilly, restrained poems of technical excellence that resist making inroads into larger social and political conversations, unless it can be parlayed back into a discussion of the poet’s individual experience.
I have little doubt that Warren approaches poetry from the perspective of New Criticism’s focus on the self-contained. Her father was Robert Penn Warren who, in addition to winning two Pulitzer Prizes and a professorship at Yale, was one of the founder of New Criticism. Many people find this approach to poetry appropriate, even preferential. Warren’s style is well-regarded within America’s highest cultural circles. I wasn’t surprised to see that selections from Hindsight appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Kenyon Review.
New Criticism has never sat right with me. How can a piece of art be considered “self-contained,” completely removed from the context that created it? It implies that art arrives from some higher plain and that man is merely trying to grasp at that perfected aesthetic. I disagree. I believe that art is an inextricable part of human nature and a necessary skill to help our species understand and survive difficult times.
Moreover, context is a key part of communication. By trying to make a self-contained aesthetic object, academic poets limit their own success. Warren’s poems communicate less because they are so rigorous, so unwilling to betray the confusion and fragility of a mind under stress. The pandemic reminded us how connected and how fragile we are. I wish we’d seen more of that in Hindsight.
