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As one of the first and most eloquent spokesmen for the...)
As one of the first and most eloquent spokesmen for the New Criticism, R. P. Blackmur achieved a place of rare distinction in American letters. He preferred to think of himself as a poet, however, and this volume shows that his poetry was in its own right an enduring contribution to literature. Included here are The Second World (1942) and The Good European (1947), as well as From Jordan's Delight (1937), described by Allen Tate as "one of the most distinguished volumes of verse in the first half of the century."
Blackmur was a formalist and a master of traditional versification, a poet whose work did not show the influence of Pound and Eliot although he read them closely. His poetry impresses the reader with its strength, gravity, and musicality.
During his career, Blackmur lectured widely in the United States and abroad. He was the first man of letters to hold the Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, and he was Professor of English at Princeton University, where he conceived the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism. He was a Fellow in American Letters at the Library of Congress, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Vice President of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Originally published in 1978.
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Richard Palmer Blackmur was an American writer and educator. He taught creative writing and English literature at Princeton University.
Background
Richard Blackmur was born on January 21, 1904, in Springfield, Massachussets, United States, the son of George Edward Blackmur, variously a stockbroker, woolbroker, and self-employed businessman, and Helen Palmer, a physical therapist whose father and grandfather were celebrated preachers. With his father, a dignified and reclusive failure, Blackmur, quarreled early, and their relationship remained embittered. His childhood and adolescent life were troubled by poverty and the rancorous marriage of his parents. About 1905 the family moved to New York City, where George Blackmur worked as a broker on Wall Street. This move turned out badly, and within five years Blackmur's mother was supporting the family by operating a boardinghouse in Cambridge, Massachussets, near the Harvard Yard.
Education
Until Blackmur was almost nine he remained at home, tutored by his mother. He then enrolled in the fourth grade at Peabody Grammar School. In 1916 he went to his mother's old school, Cambridge High and Latin, from which he was expelled two years later for arguing with the headmaster. He was failing all of his subjects at the time of his expulsion, and his formal education ended at this point.
Career
From 1918 to 1925 Blackmur lived at home, keeping himself in pocket money by jerking sodas and clerking for bookstores in Cambridge and for the Widener Library at Harvard. He assuaged his loneliness by writing poetry and stories, by courting Tessa Gilbert, the daughter of the composer Henry Gilbert, to whom he made an unsuccessful proposal of marriage, and by friendship with his cousin by adoption, George A. Palmer. In 1922 Blackmur's favorite uncle, George M. Palmer, killed himself. This catastrophic event seems an appropriate emblem for the frustration and despair that characterized his young manhood. Blackmur's fortunes turned upward in 1925. With his future brother-in-law, Wallace Dickson, he opened a bookstore in Cambridge. The partnership lasted only a year but introduced Blackmur to Maurice Firuski, the proprietor of the Dunster House Book Shop in Cambridge. For two years he clerked for Firuski and served as his secretary. He also developed his taste in music under the tutelage of Robert Donaldson Darrell, the creator of the Phonograph Monthly Review, to which Blackmur contributed essays.
In 1928 Blackmur’s friends Lincoln Kirstein and Bernard Bandler appointed him editor of the Hound and Horn, the most successful and prestigious of the little magazines. Blackmur lost this job in 1930 when the magazine moved to New York, but he continued to publish in it until its demise in 1934. His literary essays - notably on T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, and Henry James - established his reputation as one of the foremost American critics. For most of the next ten years he lived in the West End of Boston and summered in the Dickson farmhouse near Harrington, Maine. Maine changed Blackmur; he became an expert gardener and subsisted largely on his garden and what he took from the sea. He cultivated an ear for country speech and an eye for country pieties, which shows profoundly in his poetry, fiction, and critical prose of this period. Twelve critical essays, mostly on modern poets, were published in 1935 as The Double Agent.
An unremitting concern with language is equally the hallmark of his first book of poetry, From Jordan's Delight (1937), whose title refers to an island off the coast of Maine. In his earliest poetry Blackmur slavishly imitated such masters as Eliot and Ezra Pound, but in the poems of From Jordan's Delight he speaks in his own voice. In the 1920's and 1930's Blackmur also worked on short stories, novels, and plays. He was disappointed in his hopes that two of his plays might be produced on Broadway. His first novel, "King Pandar, " was rejected by fifteen publishers before he ceased submitting it. His second, The Greater Torment, he broke off, having completed the first of three planned books.
Blackmur's chief labor of the 1930's was his projected life of Henry Adams, for which he received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1936-1937, subsequently renewed for a second year. For more than half of his life, he strove to complete this book; at his death, he left a torso of more than 600 pages. Although it lacks a chronological beginning and the coda Blackmur intended, it can stand as a satisfying, complete work. Only a little less ambitious was Blackmur's endeavor to write the definitive study of Henry James, the novelist for whom he cared most. In 1940 he signed a contract for the James book but only discrete essays were written. The fragmentary nature of this study is like Blackmur's achievement as a whole. His work and his life were a series of approaches or essays, in the sense that his hero Montaigne used the word.
Blackmur's years as free-lance critic and poet, living by his wits, ended in 1940 when he accepted an appointment at Princeton University. He took the job as assistant to Allen Tate in a newly constituted program in creative arts only to secure "the minimum necessities"; he expected to move on within a year. Blackmur remained at Princeton for the rest of his life, although he traveled abroad in 1952-1953 and 1956-1957 and held the Pitt Professorship in American History and Institutions at Cambridge University in 1961-1962. At first Blackmur found life in Princeton antipathetic. He had no degrees, the English department seemed hostile, and he shuttled between the department and the Institute for Advanced Study while looking for a permanent home. Nonetheless, tenure and a full professorship came the same year. Eventually Blackmur became a powerful presence in the American literary establishment, partly because he directed the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism, beginning in 1956. His students knew him as a great if often enigmatic teacher, his colleagues as a fascinating conversationalist whose conversation became monologues as he got older.
Blackmur paid a price for success; his literary career changed direction. Although for some years he continued to write poetry - The Second World (1942) and his last volume, The Good European (1947) - his poetic inspiration gradually dried up. The concreteness that marks the poems of the 1930's was displaced by a growing dependence upon abstraction and a presumption that ideas can carry the burden of poetry. Attention to ideas is conspicuous in his later criticism as well. Eleven Essays in the European Novel (1964) was based on translations. Inevitably, his practice of close reading of texts was a casualty of this reading at a remove. In The Lion and the Honeycomb (1955), Anni Mirabiles (1956), and A Primer of Ignorance (1967), the process of attenuation carries further. These books contain plenty of luminous writing, but by and large meticulous analysis has given way to the prophetic and evangelizing mode.
Achievements
Richard Blackmur was a well-known literary critic of his time. He was the first who invented the New Criticism. This method meant approaching a text with absolute patience and humility, so encouraging the words to give up their sense. The major work of Blackmur's life was Language as Gesture (1952), arguably the finest criticism ever published in America. His major poetry books: From Jordan's Delight (1937); The Second World (1942); The Good European (1947).
