J. V. Cunningham's Counter-Revolution

Two Excerpts From The Complete Essays

This is the first entry in an ongoing NVR series about meter.

The following excerpts are from the recently published Complete Essays of J. V. Cunningham. The first excerpt is from James Matthew Wilson’s introduction to the collection. The second is Cunningham’s brief essay “The Problem of Form.” NVR is grateful to Wilson, Mary Finnegan, and Wiseblood Books for the permission to reproduce them here.

“Counter-Revolution” by James Matthew Wilson

To encounter the work of J. V. Cunningham (1911-1985) as a young writer and be transformed by it, as I certainly was, requires one already to have been, in some sense, disenchanted with the art of poetry. “There is less to be said about literature than has been said, and this book adds a little more,” runs the first sentence of his Collected Essays, and Cunningham dedicated his career as a poet and critic to saying things within and about literature while also recognizing that probably less needed to be said. “Say to her that I gave you few but true words,” he writes in one of his finest poems, the early “Elegy for a Cricket.” “A book you can’t put down before you’ve read it,” he mockingly complains of his own Doctor Drink (1950). Cunningham gives us a clear sense that terseness, brevity, the readiness to fall silent as soon as what must be said has been said, was not just a disposition of the author’s character but a personal test of his truthfulness—no, more, it was a union of the two, a way of living and, only within that life, a way of knowing and writing. Taciturnity was to him a morality.

To appreciate that morality, again, one had to have some awareness of what exaggerated, voluble, and voluminous things had been said in poetry’s favor. We mean by this, first of all, not mere falsehoods, but rather the romantic wish to say “[v]ery nice things” about the art, as Cunningham puts it: but most of those things “are not true.” A liberal humanism and romanticism rooted in the sentiments had long insisted that poetry was in essence “elevated thought, imagination, or feeling,” and that, the more strongly one felt, the better a poet one was. To see that balloon punctured, to see the gas running out for the gas that it was, was, in the sense I intend, to be disenchanted. The puncturing had taken place already in the criticism of Cunningham’s great mentor and colleague, Yvor Winters, but Cunningham’s work continued it; to change metaphors, to read his work was to turn away from the drunken ecstasies of romanticism in favor of sober clarity, even though it may be only a clear-eyed anger at what had been done in poetry’s name, what had been done to the obscuration of actual poems, of their history, and of their meaning.

In Cunningham’s lifetime, romantic enthusiasm, including the mode of it found in the New Criticism, gradually disappeared from the classroom, though it persisted in various forms in the work of later poets. What succeeded romanticism was something worse, those various hermeneutical methods that came to be called postmodern literary theory or just “theory.” “Theory” comprehended methods indeed, in the sense that they required no actual thought, but only the application of someone else’s thought to literary texts. It was criticism by recipe, a machine for the endless production of scholarly articles.

In substance, “theory” meant, first, the dissociation of writing from speech and meaning, best known as the “deconstruction” practiced by Jacques Derrida. “Theory” meant, second, the dissociation of all writing from those distinctive spheres of experience or knowing called the aesthetic, literature, or humane learning, through the “genealogical” researches of Michel Foucault. Deconstruction stripped the text of meaning and left it helpless before the willful play of its critics, who could then force it to mean whatever their derivative cleverness proposed. Genealogy stripped works of literature of their prestige as ways of encountering reality or acquiring truth or wisdom, so that the mere text could be studied as a site of ideological contestation, at once a residue, image, and a tool of the will to power. Genealogy dissolved the literary text into its possible political uses, even as it dissolved politics into methods of social control; deconstruction simply dissolved it into the will of the literary theorist. Cunningham’s fellow poet (and friend in what would become the unofficial Winters Circle at Stanford University), Helen Pinkerton, in one of her late epigrams, would liken these practices to rape:

          Abusing its otherness, its soul and wit,
          He rapes the text, claiming its benefit—
          And that, inscrutable, it asked for it.

To encounter Cunningham’s work, in such an age, was to see that the romantics were overblown and self-absorbed but also that the theorists who replaced them were vacuous and guilty of rapine. Had too much not once been said in favor of poetry by mere sentimental good will, perhaps the perverse reaction of “theory” with its reduction of everything to ill will would not have occurred. In Cunningham’s work could be found the sober vision necessary to appreciate literature as an enduring good, one that kept beneath the romantic winds and turned its back in disdain on the facile debunking of the theorist.

To encounter Cunningham, the laconic poet of short lyrics and epigrams, who wrote many poems but few coming to more than a slender bundle of lines; to encounter Cunningham the scholar and literary critic who denominated his essays as works of “classical Classical Philology”; to encounter poems and essays alike, was to discover a way of living that saw through the pretensions

of the romantics and the willful depredations of the theorists. His work drew one to a clearer, more austere, more definite, more bracing, more hard-headed, and more modest understanding of poetry and the literary life. One did not even need to understand the meaning of Cunningham’s poems—and his abstract style and unusual concerns, as he confessed, rendered some of them obscure. It was sufficient to experience the gripped restraint of the lines themselves to know that they stood against much haze and bluster in favor of a more classical and jaundiced kind of perception. So we find in this memorable and transparent epigram against latter-day romanticism:

          This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained
          Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.

And so we find in this more cryptic, prototypical Cunningham verse that straddles the epigrammatic and the lyric mode:

          The dry soul rages. The unfeeling feel
          With the dry vehemence of the unreal.
          So I in the Idea of your arms, unwon,
          Am as the real in the unreal undone.

Cunningham’s taut verse loosened the arms of the dreamed up Ideal woman of poetry to see the real thing, plain though she may be, with a “dry soul.” His essays did the same. Deliberately and dryly academic in some ways, they were not academic in the sense of being at a remove from human experience. Cunningham showed a great respect for the possibilities that methods of careful scholarship opened. Much of his work takes for explicit subject one modest interpretative question or another in literary history, particularly those touching on the poetry of the English renaissance. In contrast with Winters, whose literary criticism was consistently polemical and vehement even at its most scholarly, Cunningham was more than willing simply to settle questions of fact. Despite the staid subject matter and academic method, however, Cunningham’s essays constituted a wrestling with human experience: one which insisted the road to knowledge involves neither swollen rhetoric nor a nihilistic toying with meaning’s elusiveness, but discipline, training, and a patience in going about the art of discovery. It might be best to say that his essays seek to overcome human experience, or rather, the way in which we allow our own experience to obscure the historical reality of literature’s meaning. His aim was truth.

Cunningham’s epigrammatic style in the poem often found its echo in the epigrammatic apothegms of the literary essays, formulations at once dry and wry. On a popular liberal humanist misinterpretation of Shakespeare, he observes, “we constructed the fact from our feeling.” Revisiting the phenomenon later, he says that the one who appreciates “a work of art . . . in defiance of the known historical intention of the work . . . is not integrating in his experience the experience of the past . . . he is abusing the monuments of history to inform them with his own life.” Of the literary text, which outlives us and stands outside of us, where we can see it and discuss it, he states with finality, “It is a thing external and eternal, a potentiality of experience waiting to be realized. It is the poem.” Correcting another misinterpretation that occurs when imperceptive readers encounter Andrew Marvell’s verse concerning “vegetable love,” in “To His Coy Mistress,” Cunningham sighs, “They envisage some monstrous and expanding cabbage.”

Summing up the paradox on which the work of Chaucer and all poets depends, he observes, “He was an artist, and he worked by artifice, for he knew that realism is artifice.” Speaking of modernist poetry in general, Cunningham considers another paradox: it depends on its readers’ “customary expectation to be disappointed. The new is parasitic upon the old.” In his diagnosis of Wallace Stevens’s modernist metaphysics and method, he notes, “Stevens had a homemade machine for the endless production of poems.” Opining on his own work, he says, more favorably, “verse is a professional activity, social and objective, and its methods and standards are those of craftsmanship.” And, to leave off with this list: aware that truisms will often be startling in our day because the true and obvious goes so often obscured, he writes, “a good poem is the definitive statement in meter of something worth saying.” To encounter passages such as these was to realize that, though much had been said about literature—too much in fact—the little that needed to be said had not properly been expressed. Cunningham did what he could to say that little in little at last. To discover Cunningham’s work, in sum, was to discover the poetry and criticism of a writer who was deliberately unfashionable, because fashion belonged to an age of charlatans. He was deliberately taciturn and plodding, because emotional logorrhea had already undone other minds and draped the truth beneath gaudy and falsifying glosses. To follow him on the path, however tentatively and with however many reservations, was to break bread with the modestly great; it was to learn the meaning and practice of poetry in an atmosphere of seriousness and near silence; it was to set out on pilgrimage in search of a more classical, more disciplined, more compelling and intelligent way of living, knowing, and writing in the world.

I have consistently made joint reference to his poems and his essays and this is not accidental. The attitude to be found in both is one and the same. His scholarship takes poetry for subject, but his poems often enough take scholarship for subject in turn. Among the last essays collected in this volume, we find Cunningham providing prose commentaries on his own verse. As he himself put it, “verse and prose are different dialects of a common language.” His work in verse and prose were two ways of speaking within a single way of life; they were complementary means toward a single end. To encounter the fullness of Cunningham’s language, to encounter the poet whole, we must also come to know the scholar. Academic though his essays’ subjects often are, and as strictly historical as their claims most certainly are, they manage to become also more or less veiled expressions of his grappling with experience as a poet. The poet was inseparable from the critic, and the critic helps us better to appreciate the poet. The critic and the poet are one.

Drawing to a close his thoughts on the modernist literary revolution that had come to be represented by the mandarin authority of T. S. Eliot, Cunningham states plainly, “we need a counter-revolution.” To read the epigrams and essays of Cunningham is to know the bliss of dawn of the counter-revolution.

James Matthew Wilson is the author of fifteen books, including his most recent book of poems, Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds (Word on Fire, 2024).

“The Problem of Form” by J. V. Cunningham

I shall stipulate that there is a problem of form in the poetry of our day, but I shall treat form, for the moment, as an undefined term, and I shall not until later specify the nature of some of the problems. I am, at the outset, interested in pointing to certain generalities, and to certain broad, simpleminded, pervasive attitudes and dualisms, of which the problem in poetry is to a large extent only a localization. These will give in outline the larger context of the problem.

To begin with, it is apparent that in our society we have too many choices. When we ask the young what they are going to do when they grow up, we should not be surprised or amused that the answers are whimsical and bewildered. The young poet today has a large and not too discriminated anthology of forms to realize: only illiterate ignorance or having made the pilgrimage to Gambier or to Los Altos will reduce the scope of options to manageable size—and even then there will be a hankering for further options. On the other hand, the young poet 250 years ago had it easy in this respect. He wrote octosyllabic or decasyllabic couplets, and the rhetoric and areas of experience of each were fairly delimited. For recreation he wrote a song in quatrains, and once or twice in a lifetime a Pindaric ode.

We come now to those attitudes and dualisms that make the problem of particular forms peculiarly our problem. We are a democratic society and give a positive value to informality, though some of the ladies still like to dress up. We will have nothing to do with the formal language and figured rhetoric of the Arcadia, for that is the language and rhetoric of a hierarchical and authoritarian society in which ceremony and formality were demanded by and accorded to the governing class. Instead, we praise, especially in poetry, what we call the accents of real speech—that is, of uncalculated and casual utterance, and sometimes even of vulgar impropriety. Now, if this attitude is a concomitant of the Democratic Revolution, the value we give to antiformality, to the deliberate violation of form and decorum, is a concomitant of its sibling, the Romantic Revolution. The measured, or formal, the contrived, the artificial are, we feel, insincere; they are perversions of the central value of our life, genuineness of feeling. “At least I was honest,” we say with moral benediction as we leave wife and child for the sentimental empyrean.

If informality and antiformality are positive values, then the problem of form is how to get rid of it. But to get rid of it we must keep it; we must have something to get rid of. To do this we need a method, and we have found it in our dualisms of science and art, of intellectual and emotional, of regularity and irregularity, of norm and variation. We have been convinced, without inquiry or indeed adequate knowledge, that the regularities of ancient scientific law, of Newton’s laws of motion, are regularities of matter, not of spirit, and hence are inimical to human significance. And so we embrace the broad, pervasive, simpleminded, and scarcely scrutinized proposition that regularity is meaningless and irregularity is meaningful—to the subversion of Form. For one needs only so much regularity as will validate irregularity. But Form is regularity.

So we come to definition. The customary distinctions of form and matter, or form and content, are in the discussion of writing at least only usable on the most rudimentary level. For it is apparent to any poet who sets out to write a sonnet that the form of the sonnet is the content, and its content the form. This is not a profundity, but the end of the discussion. I shall define form, then, without a contrasting term. It is that which remains the same when everything else is changed. This is not at all, I may say, a Platonic position. It is rather a mathematical and, as it should be, linguistic notion: a2 — b2 = (a-|-b) (a — b) through all the potentialities of a and b. The form of the simple declarative sentence in English is in each of its realizations.

It follows, then, that form is discoverable by the act of substitution. It is what has alternative realizations. And the generality or particularity of a form lies in the range or restriction of alternatives. It follows, also, that the form precedes its realization, even in the first instance, and that unique form, or organic form in the sense of unique form, is a contradiction in terms. For it is the essence of form to be repetitive, and the repetitive is form. It follows, further, that there may be in a given utterance simultaneously a number of forms, so that the common literary question, What is the form of this work? can only be answered by a tacit disregard of all the forms other than the one we are momently concerned with.

It is time for illustration. Donne has a little epigram on Hero and Leander:

          Both robbed of air, we both lie in one ground,
          Both whom one fire had burnt, one water drowned.

What are the forms of this poem? First, both lines are decasyllabic in normal iambic pattern. Second, they rhyme. Third, it is phrased in units of four and six syllables in chiasmic order. Fourth, there are three “both’s” and three “one’s” in overlapping order. Fifth, the whole story of the lovers is apprehended, summarized, and enclosed in the simple scheme or form of the four elements. Finally, it is recognizably an epigram. Now Sir Philip Sidney, a few years earlier, in one of the Arcadia poems has the following lines:

          Man oft is plagued with air, is burnt with fire,
          In water drowned, in earth his burial is?

The lines are decasyllabic in normal iambic pattern. The adjacent lines do not rhyme, for the form of the poem is terza rima, an alternative form. It is phrased in units of six and four in chiasmic order. The first line repeats “with,” the second “in.” Man, not Hero and Leander, is apprehended in the scheme of the four elements, and in both cases the order of the elements is not formally predetermined. Finally, it is not an epigram, but part of an eclogue.

I have illustrated in these examples and in this analysis something of the variety of what may be distinguished as form: literary kind, conceptual distinctions, and all the rhetorical figures of like ending, equal members, chiasmus, and the various modes of verbal repetition. That some of the forms of Sidney’s lines are repeated in Donne’s, with the substitution of Hero and Leander for man, shows they have alternate realizations, and that so many operate simultaneously shows, not that a literary work has form, but that it is a convergence of forms, and forms of disparate orders. It is the coincidence of forms that locks in the poem.

Indeed, it is the inherent coincidence of forms in poetry, in metrical writing, that gives it its place and its power—a claim for poetry perhaps more accurate and certainly more modest than is customary. For this is the poet’s Poetics: prose is written in sentences; poetry in sentences and lines. It is encoded not only in grammar, but also simultaneously in meter, for meter is the principle or set of principles, whatever they may be, that determines the line. And as we perceive of each sentence that it is grammatical or not, so the repetitive perception that this line is metrical or that it is not, that it exemplifies the rules or that it does not, is the metrical experience. It is the ground bass of all poetry.

And here in naked reduction is the problem of form in the poetry of our day. It is before all a problem of meter. We have lost the repetitive harmony of the old tradition, and we have not established a new. We have written to vary or violate the old line, for regularity we feel is meaningless and irregularity meaningful. But a generation of poets, acting on the principles and practice of significant variation, have at last nothing to vary from. The last variation is regularity.

You can purchase a copy of The Complete Essays of J. V. Cunningham here.

J. V. Cunningham (Thomas Victor, Library of Congress)