Free Outside of a Dog by Rick Gekoski

The very act and nature of reading had redefined itself since my father’s time. He had been
schooled by historicist and belle-lettriste professors (and gentlemen, and Gentiles) for whom understanding a text consisted of placing it squarely in the historical, cultural and intellectual
milieu from which it emerged, and which it might be claimed to represent. To read Shakespeare without knowing about the great chain of being, or to approach Pope lacking an understanding of the
premises of the Enlightenment, were activities associated with amateurishness, of reading for the mere fun of it. Indeed, properly understood, such pleasure was a thin and unreliable product in the
absence of its background.
    It was hardly a sympathetic milieu in which to read Eliot. The Waste Land was widely reviled by contemporary American critics, and more so by American academics of the Penn sort. In 1930,
of course the poem was still avant-garde in a way that, by 1962, it no longer was. My father would recall, with a smile and shake of the head that carried, still, an aura of astonishment, what an
impact the poem had upon him, how exciting it was to read something like that . Modern? That was the naturalist novels of Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, the mid-Western twang of Carl Sandburg,
the fine discriminations of Edith Wharton and Henry James. The Waste Land was something else, and required a new concept: ‘modern ist ’, that would do it. Though the term
first appears as early as 1879, its use to refer to the early twentieth century’s explosion of creative innovation in literature, painting and music, is more or less contemporaneous with the
publication of The Waste Land . When you wrote or painted, when you composed in this new way, you redefined not only what art was, but how it had to be described and discussed.
    A key figure in this shift of readerly perspective was I.A. Richards, the Cambridge don whose Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment defined the aesthetic of this new ahistoric
approach to the reading of poetry. Richards would distribute to his classes the texts of poems (which he called ‘protocols’) without divulging the author or the period in which they
were written. There were only the words on the page, and it was the job of each student to produce as detailed a ‘reading’ of them as possible. Under such tutelage, that extraordinary
undergraduate William Empson was soon to publish Seven Types of Ambiguity , still one of the great examples of what close reading can accomplish.
    In America, the term ‘new criticism’ (after the title of a book by Allen Tate) came to be preferred to ‘practical criticism’, though they were largely the same thing.
Exegesis and formal analysis became the modes. Just as Picasso and Braque required of their critics a fresh eye, and an accompanying new vocabulary and conceptual apparatus, so too did Joyce, Pound
and Eliot necessitate a different set of lenses and critical tools. To understand them required that one re-schooled oneself in the very art of reading. And to do that you had to learn, too, how
not to read.
    When I first read The Waste Land my response was some literary version of an anxiety attack, accompanied by an enormous exhilaration. As Eliot was to remark, ‘genuine poetry can
communicate before it is understood.’ The poem tugged at my mind fore and aft, the images recurring and reigniting as if from a bad dream, or what Eliot called ‘the octopus or
angel’ with which the poet, and the reader, struggles. The poem was like a crossword puzzle or literary quiz, which was rather fun, but the real difficulty lay in assimilating it emotionally.
It had emanated from the immense collapse that followed the First War, as well as Eliot’s own nervous breakdown, leaving that ‘heap of broken images’ that its poetic voices
struggle to preserve: jagged shards, partially apprehended echoes, scenes glimpsed but hardly comprehended, the past confused with