Radical Literary Education: A Classroom Experiment with Wordsworth's "Ode" by Jeffrey C.RobinsonReview by: J. P. WardThe Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Mar. - Apr., 1989), pp. 229-231Published by: Ohio State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1982183 .

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Book Reviews 229

arts with the departure of Albers and the arrival, in 1949, of Charles Olson. A poet and literary polemicist, Olson attracted to the school a small but signifi- cant group of writers, both students and faculty. Their attempt to create a specifically American poetics paralleled the earlier experiments in visual arts. The former produced painters such as Rauschenberg, Noland, and Twombly. The latter produced the Black Mountain poets Dorn, Oppenheimer, and Wil- liams. Their voices were first heard in the Black Mountain Review, one of the seminal literary magazines of the 1950s, and their works were first published by the Jargon Society, founded by poet Jonathan Williams in 1951.

By the 1950s, almost all of the original faculty were gone. The stress of communal life, of continuous experiment, and of economic hardship had taken its toll. The school was owned and operated from its inception by the faculty. Salaries were miniscule but a share in the ownership meant some- thing. Students were involved in all of the major decisions affecting the school. Courses changed radically from year to year, often reflecting the interests of the current faculty, and long-range planning was unheard of. Each fall open- ing took a miracle. Finally, in 1956, miracles ceased when a long-time patron called in his loan, and the college folded.

In its short history, as Harris reminds us, Black Mountain College gradu- ated fewer than fifty-five students. Despite its small size (never more than a hundred students, in the last year fewer than ten), its isolation and its idiosyn- cracies, it achieved an enviable reputation as a source of creative inspiration for the avant-garde arts activities centered in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. As her book also reminds us, the College could never be deliberately duplicated. Its creation, its life, and its termination were all the result of a series of circumstances at the center of which were strong personalities. In an era in which analysis and planning dominate educational institutions, it is refreshing to be reminded of the importance of chance and conflict two great stimuli of creativity. It is also refreshing to be reminded that economic hardship and declining enrollment are not always an indication of declining quality in a college. Sometimes, in fact, they are the reverse.

Radical Literarv Education: A Classroom Experiment with Wordsworth's "Ode" by Jeffrey C. Robinson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. xix + 201 pp. $30.00 ($13.95)

J. P. WARD, University College of Swansea, Wales, U.K.

If, along one dimension at least, literary criticism is a continuum between the practical and the theoretical, one could easily suggest what would be found at the extremes of that continuum. At one end there might be a book-length study of a single short poem, and at the other end a fully elaborated theory of literature with, perhaps, not too many illustrative quotations from actual works. The remarkable thing about Professor Robinson's book is that it

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230 Journal of Higher Education

comes close to combining both. It centres on a single monumental poem, Wordsworth's immortality Ode; yet it uses that poem to elaborate a sociology and philosophy of literary education, derived from the author's eclectic read- ing in the humanities and social sciences and also his classroom experience as a teacher. This combination is possible because Robinson's historicist view of individual works is one in which he also includes his students. How they come to grips with the Ode and thereby themselves (or themselves, and thereby the Ode) is itself an example of what, according to Robinson, may be achieved if the literary historical dialectic is understood. The book should be of consider- able interest to Wordsworthians, educationists, and sociologists of literature.

The book is in seven parts, and in the first the historicist relevance for Ro- binson's immediate experiment is laid out. The historicist view of literature holds that to read a poem is never a "pure" act, but always takes place in, and itself then affects, social and historical circumstances. This view is, of course, quintessentially political, holding too that political oppression, seen here as ubiquitous, has its counter in psychic repression, and that personal liberation is ultimately a product of attainment of self-knowing political consciousness at the end of adolescence. Robinson commits himself to self-knowing in one chapter of autobiography, although one suspects it is a rather selective one.

Against this historicist view is the establishment position of the institution and, originally, New Criticism, which Robinson disavows. The New Criticism view, in its strongest version, would hold that a poem is an autonomous ob- ject, of fixed and permanent cultural value, created by an original genius and possessing a chaste quality beyond the power of desire. Clearly, Robinson's point is that the institutional description of the poem, not the poem itself, is what prevents the student from being able to want the poem, to desire it; instead, the student is required to "master" the poem, a mastery which is really no mastery but institutional (and exam-passing) subservience.

In the next four parts Robinson reports and self-critically explores how he tried to get his students through this barrier to an intersubjective relationship with Wordsworth's Ode. This is occasionally a touch turgid and obscure, but for the most part brings current historicist and psychoanalytical perspectives to bear on his students' actual difficulties and learning experience with sensi- tivity and perception. In Part I1 the class first engages with the poem itself. The poem's supposed transcendental quality is found to be ambivalent, and Wordsworth's repeated questioning yields not answers but a dissolving. Fi- nally I myself, while interested, found this idea hard to swallow the "endless imitation" theme of stanza 7 is tied to a subversion of the idea of originary genius. In the next part Robinson and his students look at the ode genre from Horace to Collins; in Part IV Wordsworth's successive revisions of the Ode are examined (I found this part unconvincing, too, although partly, I admit, through my own scepticism about literary scholarship's current obses- sion with surviving fragments and early drafts); and in Part V Wordsworth's own biography is adduced. This last leads to a surprising confrontation in Part VI with William Hazlitt, and here Robinson moves toward some kind of conclusion.

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Book Reviews 231

Hazlitt, it seems, "at once troubled and exhilarated" (p. 172) the students, for Hazlitt in his famous conjoint criticism of the Ode with Romeo and Juliet declared that Wordsworth's placing of radiant childhood innocence in a former existence was an evasion of the fact of adolescence. There is no child to get hold of in the poem at all; the poem is emptied (a Bloomian conception this I think), because, in it, the real loss which comes when adolescent fantasizing must turn into adult critical consciousness is simply transferred back out of human life altogether. But how then is the Ode a great poem? For Robinson does on several occasions reveal his great regard for the Ode (cf. especially pp. 103-4); and this remains even though, from his experiment's nature, the dif- ferent result of bringing the poem "down to the size of an object in history" might have been expected.

This question of how the work of art survives and (metaphorically if you like) transcends history has always been a difficulty. It troubled Karl Marx himself. I wish Robinson had not made quite so much of adolescence and had given more due to how poems actually get written. Robinson's stress on desire has a more traditional Freudian and indeed American cast than is prevalent in criticism now. Thus Lacan and Kristeva are not mentioned in the book, only the seminal adolescent psychologists Erikson and Blos, who, in my under- standing, are somewhat outdated now by the new understanding of adoles- cence as social relationship. In transferring the Ode's "something that is gone" back to a prior existence, Wordsworth surely found a symbol for the final disappointment of all desire on this earth, whether of adolescents, the op- pressed, or anyone else.

Equally I find myself guarded about the book's suspicion of poetry's power to console. This is of course a Trilling-Arnold conception, and admittedly, Robinson acknowledges a deep debt to Trilling, although he does not mention Arnold. The problem may arise from too close a tying of great-poem with great-poet. The historicist is necessarily suspicious of the notion of the mighty seer. But poems are not written exclusively either by masterful rational choice or by an overwhelming inspirational thrust from psychic depth. There are elements of language skill, random selection, chance, wit, and indeed cheat- ing, whose origins then remain permanently untraceable. I do not think this is an exclusively romantic view; Sidney called the result "delight." It is significant that throughout his book Robinson moves warily between theoretic and ironic uses of the word "beautiful." This is not criticism; he seems aware of the ambivalence and indeed writes about it with a delicate touch and subtle sense of distinction. I wish only that he had engaged with the conception more directly.

But perhaps all this is cavilling too much. Robinson has undoubtedly re- ported a story of much cultural significance and educational value, and with honesty and depth. I hope more such books will be written; I find myself going constantly and with profit back and back over what Robinson has said.

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