Introduction
The general rubric of this volume is not just John Hollander and his work but, in a sense, the field he creates. To say that that field, as represented here, stretches across the history of Western art, music, philosophy, and literature from Homer and Plato to Hawthorne and Bishop would be to offer one version of the story, but it still would not say much avol/t that story. His work at every turn insistently challenges one's ability-and, more importantly, one's desire-to impose limitations on its scope, by asking questions of itself and of its audience that we may not have thought to ask but that fold out, as if addicted to their own fierce energy, into an interpretive space where answers are convenient resting places but never enduring solutions.
All of the essayists in this collection wrote dissertations with John Hollander, as did Stephen Cushman whose poem "In Translation" appears in the third section.Their work here shares with Hollander's a strong conunitment to the idea that attention to poetry's tropes and schemes is inseparable from the historical knowledge that informs all persuasive readings of literary texts. Using this approach, in the volume's first essay John Watkins looks at how early modern poets from Tasso to Milton refashioned the figures and properties ofCirce andVenus arguing for aesthetic and political implications of the long tradition of the "goddess with the human voice." In Homer and Virgil, the liminal status of their speech and divinity sets the stage for confrontations and distinctions between central characters in the later epic poems, calling for a reconsideration of the meaning of"pagan echoes." By the time we get to Milton's COIl/liS "male fi-aud sets off female integrity," leading to the gendered republican politics that inform his treatment of Satan, Eve, and the Son. Concentrating on Spenser, Jeff Dolven looks at literary interpretation from the opposite end, so to speak, provocatively asking "how do you know when to stop reading The Faerie QHeel/.e?" Like Lee Edelman's essay in the second section, he looks at the limitations of allegorical reading, and when and how we know that the poem has entered the realm of the ordinary, or where allegory has literally become exhausted by itself
in the figure of Arthur, for example. Matthew Greenfield's "Satire and Epyllion: Hermaphroditic Forms" looks at how "the hybrid body of the hermaphrodite becomes an emblem of these uncomfortably intimate encounters bet\;yeen genres" in Elizabethan verse satire. The work of John Marston, George Gascoigne, and John Weever rely on figures from Ovid in order to describe and contribute to an ongoing war of the genres that reveals "an intimate antagonism" bet\;yeen erotic narrative and satire, each projecting an image of the other as threatening
to seduce the unwary reader. Hannibal Hamlin emphasizes Shakespeare's juxtaposition of human and divine forces in the allusive visual cues that compare Coriolanus to both Roman and biblical gods. Shakespeare scholars are more likely to track biblical allusions than to attempt to explain their presence in Corio/all 115, but considered in depth together, "these allusions to divinity, both explicit and implicit, provide a supplementary context for Shakespeare's explanation of the conflict bet\;yeen aristocratic and republican political values in terms of a conflict bet\;yeen antithetical models of godhood." The wrathfulness of the god of the Old Testament and Jesus Clu'ist fll1ally yields in the fifth act to a version ofleadership modeled on Christ's humility and humalmess, and his very recognition of mortality is what finally may cause Coriolanus' destruction. The last t\;yO essays in this section share a concern to situate literary texts within early modern Christian notions of temporality: Hamlin notes that the anachronism of allusions to the Bible would have been overlooked by Shakespeare's audience, and John Rogers begins his essay "The Timing of Redemption" by noticing the "always already" character of the Protestant concepts of sin and redemption. Rogers shows how lyric poets such as Donne and Herbert manifest "a profound and sophisticated appreciation of the ironic timing ofsin and atonement," and as in Watkins's essay, it is Milton who becomes the culminating example of how perplexing, and pressured, the search becomes for an adequate response to the tradition. Section wo of the collection contains essays on topics ranging from Tennyson to textual criticism. The study of poetry moves into the nineteenth centmy with Cornelia Pearsall's "Tennyson and the Rapture of'Tithonus'" that shows how a fascination with the mythological figure and his genealogy allows
the poet powerfully to investigate a fascination with beauty defmed as both "the complex experience of rapture" and active, deliberate reasoning and choice. Pearsall persuasively suggests that the dramatic monologue's speaker is more in control of his emotions and identification with Aurora than we initially might believe. Staying in the same century but turning to another popular literary genre, my essay looks at quotation and misquotation ofsongs in novels, and the kinds ofgeneric confrontations that are staged when characters perform or recall words and contexts that enrich not only our understanding of the social world of the novel, but the social relationships beween te)..1:s that shape literary histOlY. In "Reason is also Choice: Reflection, Freedom, and the Euthyphro Problem"John Burt looks at social life £i:om a different angle, fll1ding suggestively poetic solutions to the problem of morality and fi:eedom that Milton inherited from Plato and Aristotle, and that distinguishes American thought from the writings ofJefferson and Madison to contemporary debates about liberalism and political cornrnunity.
Like Burt, David Greetham's "Contamination and / of 'Resistance'" also redraws the boundaries of what constitutes another kind of interdisciplinary polemic, arguing simultaneously with and against de Man and Derrida for the '''conflation,' indeed even the 'contamination' of textual theory and literary hermeneutics," wo fields whose strong links are sometimes easy to forget. The last two essays bring the collection into the wentieth century and beyond with their close analyses ofWallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop, on both of whom Hollander recently republished essays in The Ttl/ork of Poetry (1997). Joan Richardson's "'Music is thinking, then, sound':An Aesthetic Exercise," plays with "Peter Quince at the Clavier," Stevens's exercise around the reciprocal theme, to argue that music, in its compositional process and in its reception by the well-tempered listener, offers the perfect analogue for thinking as it is coming to be understood in evolutionary terms. In "AestheticValue and Literary Language: Bishop and de Man," Lee Edelman follows Greetham in crossing and collapsing another border, this time the space inhabited by poet and philosopher in "Santad:m," and "The Epistemology of Metaphor," in order to reaffirm how, despite hesitations about allegorization, "the aesthetic always fillds a way to load each rift with ore."
The third section investigates the work ofJohn Hollander.
INTRODUCTION
An unplanned connection between the essays within the section is the recently reissued (1999) Reflectiolls 011 Espiollage, which almost every essay refers to. By discussing influences that appear in the fIrst two sections, such as Spenser, Milton, Emerson, Bishop, Harold Bloom, and especially Stevens, the essays here unifY the volume itself. The title poem of Spectral EII/allatiolls is the subject of David Miklcs's essay, in which he explores Hollander's construal of a unique poetic identity that combines aspects ofJewish and American mythmaking. Miklcs separates that identity into its constituent parts ofJudaic traditions and An1erican tropes even as he subtly acknowledges their sUl{acing in the fiction of Hawthorne, one of Hollander's sources, as well as their overlapping concerns with the acquisition of capital, knowledge, and the problem of belatedness. Kenneth Gross also meditates on what work is in ''John Hollander's Game of Patience." He emphasizes the refraction of poetic vocation and its boundaries in the creation ofcharacters like Cupcake (whom Gross calls "one of Hollander's subtlest and most moving fIgures of poetic vocation, of its complex patience"), Image, Grusha, and Steampump in Reflectiolls 011 Espiollage. Even as "the work" of writing allows Hollander to notice the mutually informing kinds of code making and breaking that spy games share with language games, the poem contains dark moments ofintense self-questioning and expressions offears of failure that one does not fInd in other poems.
David Bromwich looks at earlier poems, especially the "element of portrait-painting" in poems like "Helicon" whose version of the college fi:iendship between Hollander and Allen Ginsberg is defIned both by content and form, and "Early Birds," which Bromwich thinks of as a later companion piece of sorts; in poems like these, he concludes: "we feel we are on the scene as a gifted contemporary pel{orms the work of listening that is another name for self-knowledge and for sanity." Comfortably moving between Hollander's poetry and his prose, Steven Meyer reports on his teaching four of Hollander's essays in a course on electronic poetry, which provide his students with a series of practical models for how to think about more traditional forms of poetry before moving on to e-poetry. Using a diaristic structure modeled on Reflectiolls 011 EspiOlwge (conveniently, his course occurs during spring semester), he discovers that the essays provide a suitable context for explor-
INTRODUCTION
ing "links between writing and computing, and by extension poetry and computing." Computing resonates with both technology a~d Ho~ander's language of tales, telling, and counting with wlllch Aidan Wasley's essay, described below, is concerned. In her personal essay Elise B. Jorgens recognizes the indispensability ofJohn Hollander's pedagogical example. Jorgens explores her career in academia, describing occasions on which she was able to incorporate music into her teaching ofliterature, using it especially to open up the nuances of Renaissance poetry to students for whom this was a new experience
altogether. She shows how her interdisciplinary approach to teaching more generally expanded the range ofstudents' interest in reading literature.
In the last essay in the collection, Aidan Wasley uncovers the deep interest in "telling" that informs and illuminates not only several ofJohn Hollander's book and poem titles, such as Ti1les 'Told ifthe Fathers, but so much more -Hollander's pedagogy, his Irony, all his writings, and indeed what we mean when we attempt to defIne the world that his being in the world has made. "Telling" is his version ofa living command akin to that given to Yeats by Auden, called upon him to "teach the fi-ee manhow to praise": containing multitudes of meanings in any one II1stance, It can encompass activities like counting, instruct
ing, bequeathing, controling, disclosing, and keeping secret. It IS at the heart of Hollander's work; it also captures what is at once liberating and daunting about the transmission of knowledge, liberating because it leaves one fi'ee to create the truth for oneself and to be free £i'om dependence on received wisdom and daunting because it recognizes indebtedness to that wis~ dom, the fear of not measuring up. Surely one fear haunting the contemporary poet is Auden's "poetlY makes nothing happen." Hollander delivers what I consider to be his deepest response .to this provocative statement in lines (quoted by both
DaVId Miklcs and Kenneth Gross) that refer to a lit candle in a pitcher: "Like a star reflected / In a cup ofwater, / It will light up no path: / / Neither will it go out." As the various essays in tillS collection implicitly show, Hollander's own work provides examples that light up no single path. One keeps going, then, perhaps because of a playful faith in the world that work creates: "In future, then, / Something would never be the same again" ("Making Nothing Happen").
