Even Homer nods, and the excellent David Warren wrote a beautiful column over at The Catholic Thing which I think has some ill-considered observations.

One thing that I did not mention in my brief comment on that site is specific to the Wallace Stevens poem he discusses, there.  He takes issue with the idea that the “jar” in question can reasonably be identified as a Dominion Glass Company canning jar (“The jar was round upon the ground / And tall and of a port in air. // It took dominion everywhere”).  Now, if he has specific historical or biographical data that demonstrate that Stevens could not have meant a Dominion jar, or must have meant something else (and my cursory research has not turned up any), Warren does not share it.  Instead, he says that this reference is “a (typically Stevensian) irony.”

Irony, however, is hardly meaningless decoration in a poem like this; and to say “irony” while refusing the most obvious literal significance (that a jar with a round bottom, taller than wide, open at the top, and suggesting “dominion” is likely a jar made by Dominion Glass Company, which was in mass production in 1918) is to render the poem more opaque to reality and less definite; it is to choose the writer’s preferred meaning over the poet’s work–which is just the sort of critical error that Warren sets out to criticize.

My comment:

I fear that the estimable and enjoyable David Warren has stumbled into the trap of doing what he criticizes, preferring an elusive and allusive irony to honest criticism.

Surely, there is plenty of bad criticism out there–and plenty of bad poetry, too. In an era when criticism is written to justify the critic’s paycheck to other critics, and poetry is written to justify the poet’s MFA student loans to other MFA program participants, we are desperately in need of good criticism to answer bad poetry–and good poetry to confound bad criticism.

Warren justly argues that realist metaphysics, and ready acceptance of the gifts God gives us, are necessary to good art of any kind. Huzzah! Let us close ranks.

It seems a bridge too far, though, to suggest–and possibly I am reading Warren harder than he wants me to, I confess–that “all true critics” are mimeticists, judging art by its conformity to [consensus view of] empirical reality. Surely great art also declares realities beyond nature, gracious realities which heal and perfect nature, and which also therefore confront the wounds of nature. Would you not agree? And surely competent criticism recognizes that “literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint,” as T.S. Eliot so memorably posits. Must you not agree?

It seems to me that supine “appreciation” simply lets bad poetry, and the bad philosophy that accompanies it, go unanswered. Warren objects to criticism because there is so much bad criticism, like those who object to philosophy because there is so much “philosophy and empty deceit” in the world.

The Catholic critic and the Catholic poet will have to be more than mere mimeticists, and more than mere “appreciators,” in order to co-operate with grace and confound bad critics and poets.

The results may be jarring.