[The Collected Essays of J. V. Cunningham] are essentially an account of how literature is written and how it ought to be read; they are, to my knowledge, the most useful account we have, and one of the most profound. I say "literature" because, though all the essays deal with writings in verse, Cunningham's methods and conclusions (except where he discusses meter) apply equally well to prose. His work is useful for its specific conclusions, or findings, and even more so for its methods and their applicability. For Cunningham is not the sort of critic who improvises on the theme of a text, or jolts us with the power of his "readerresponse"; he is a Wissenschaftler, a scientist in the best German sense, whose science includes all the literary sensitivity one could wish, but firmly controlled by theory and method and by desire for the truth. (p. 545)

Cunningham's literary doctrines can be stated logically, as a set of axioms, definitions, corollaries, and conclusions. I can best begin, perhaps, by compressing these theories into a dense nexus of propositions, which I will then loosen up and examine part by part. Thus, literary forms are principles of order; they converge to make the structure of a literary work, and this structure is the work itself. The forms, or principles of order, come together in more or less stable configurations known as literary traditions, or styles, of which one main division, prose, is written in sentences, and the other, poetry, in sentences and lines; the poetic line or verse is furthermore determined by the principles of meter. Good poems are definitive statements worth making; and since, in turn, the aim of the formal is to be definitive, which for Cunningham implies brevity, good poems tend to be formal and brief. These are the barest bones of what Cunningham tells us about the nature of poetry; we will now examine the sinews. There is no fat. (p. 548)

Cunningham wants us to understand what any poet, classical or absurdist, is doing when he writes a poem; and in understanding this, we realize that learning to write poetry is analogous to learning a foreign language, with the difference that poetry is a language without native speakers. It is more like Latin than like French or German; we begin by deliberately learning the rules of grammar and syntax, and acquiring vocabulary, just as we learn the rules of metrical writing and acquire the special vocabulary, if any, of our poetic tradition. Only later, as we gather skill, does the process of learning begin to seem unconscious, like "second nature": we read a great deal of Frost or Stevens, picking up traits of style and thought and temperament, until what we write looks like Frost or Stevens. Or we read enough Latin so that we can instantly grasp the syntax of subordinate clauses, without having to piece it together like a puzzle; at an even higher level, we can anticipate Horacian or Ciceronian habits of style as we read, and, finally, we can write imitations of Horace or Cicero. For of course this is the old principle of imitation—the point at which the learning of style and of language intersect.

Cunningham does speak of poetic tradition in linguistic terms, but he seems to prefer analogies that have sharp edges, aimed at lacerating the soft sensibilities of the average literary student. Thus a poetic tradition is like chess or logic; we have to learn "the rules of the game."… "… The rules of poetry, or rather the rules of the various traditions of poetry, are … even more complex. Nevertheless, they are describable, and to describe the rules of the game is to define a tradition. A tradition is all the ways a particular poem could have been written; it is the potentiality of realized structures…." (p. 549)

[Cunningham's] prose style, by the way, is … concise throughout the essays, which makes it nearly impossible to paraphrase. And his critical method … also remains constant, with some allowance for variations in the kind and complexity of the subject matter. This method, whether applied to the dominant poetic styles of the Renaissance or the works of Emily Dickinson, is to abstract and state the implicit principles, or rules, of a given tradition. These rules are procedures governing, theoretically, everything in the poem, from the relative disposition of syllables to the prevailing tone and ethical quality, and including overall as well as local meaning. One difficulty of Cunningham's method, and I think this is a rhetorical rather than substantive difficulty, is that the explicit stating of these "rules … by which is stipulated beforehand what kinds of terms, of propositions and successions of propositions are admissible" gives the impression that a poet goes about his business like someone constructing a model airplane from blueprints. We all realize that no matter how high and gracefully the artifact may soar, it was put together with craft and labor; still, we also know that writing a poem, except in a few extreme and dubious cases, is not like mechanically following the directions, step by step, for the assembly of, e.g., a Petrarchan sonnet. Cunningham certainly likes to épater les critiques, and cold-bloodedness of a quasi-mathematical sort is one of his favorite devices; but this formal, abstract quality is inherent in his method, and does not invalidate that method. We do not condemn the anatomist because he presents us with a set of bones and muscles and organs rather than a living body.

More to the point, we do not condemn the philologist for abstracting the rules of grammar and syntax from a living language. As I have explained, Cunningham compares literary traditions with chess and logic, but he also relates language and literature intimately; it is characteristic of him that he makes regular use of the old term "philology," implying a fusion of word-study and literary criticism. It is only reasonable to regard language and poetry in this way, since they are intimately related—even, from a certain standpoint, identical, if we closely consider the act of reading a poem…. Cunningham tells us how poetry behaves, how it is constituted, what it resembles; he does not try to name its essence because he does not believe in objective essences. To write verse is to practice a technique for handling experience: "What a writer finds in real life is to a large extent what his literary tradition enables him to see and to handle." The same could be said, and has been said, about language as such. (pp. 550-51)

The differentia of the poet's language is meter. "Poetry," says Cunningham with the ancient theorists, "is metrical composition"; and "meter is the principle, or set of principles … that determines the line." (This is in potential conflict with a sociological definition he also gives: "what that society [of those concerned with poetry] regards as poetry is what I mean by tradition. What it regards as poetry will furnish the rules of the game." But currently the rules of the game, as laid down by "that society," do not normally include meter.) Everything not written in lines is prose. And the flat, minimal definition verges on the prescriptive: in answer to the essay-title "How Shall the Poem Be Written?", Cunningham says directly "in metrical language"—an increasingly rare achievement, he points out, in times like ours, when rhythmical patterns are becoming harder and harder to recognize in poetry. So much, if I may traduce William Carlos Williams, depends upon meter. Yet for Williams and virtually all young poets in America today, much more depends upon such things as red wheelbarrows and white chickens than upon meter, at least traditional meter. For it is a well-guarded secret that verse in the strict sense, hence poetry in Cunningham's sense, is no longer being written, except in a few small enclaves. What we have instead is Poetry, or, more modestly, free verse, and hardly anyone knows what that is. (p. 552)

It appears that poetic style oscillates between careful attention to meter, and careful—or perhaps lavish—attention to imagery. Poetry requires extraordinariness of language; meter can provide it, and so can imagery. Cunningham, with the Renaissance, chooses the former, and most of our contemporaries choose the latter. (p. 553)

Let us say, then, that traditional meter and responsible free verse require an inherent principle or set of principles that generates each line in the poem. For standard accentual-syllabic meter, the principles are roughly these: each line shall consist of (usually) no more than five feet; a foot is a pair of syllables, the first of which has a relatively light stress, the second a relatively heavy one; there may be variations in the patterning of light and heavy stresses within the foot (two lightly stressed syllables followed by one heavily stressed, or vice versa, and others). But Cunningham does not put it this way, for the following reason: "One rejects the textbook distinction between the metrical norm and the rhythm of a line, defined as the actual stress-contour, as a fiction, and a harmful fiction. Meter is perceived in the actual stress-contour, or the line is perceived as unmetrical, or the perceiver doesn't perceive meter at all." I find this account harmfully atomistic and misleading; in fact, I hold with the textbook distinction. It is perfectly true that "meter is perceived in the actual stress-contour" of each line, but it is also perceived within the metrical context of the whole poem—with reference, that is, to the prevailing pattern, "the metrical norm." The issue is more subtle than Cunningham allows. (pp. 553-54)

If you read a poem aloud in such fashion as to compromise between a mechanical, sing-song alternation of stress-unstress, and a perfectly casual, conversational style, you will find yourself expecting—and hearing, even when it's not present—the normal iambic movement, while at the same time you shift the weight of your voice to follow the "actual stress-contour," the variations that occur in each individual line. You hear each line both ways—against the iambic expectation, which it may or may not fulfill, and as it actually is. This counterpointing of artifice and naturalness creates most of the fine effects for which we value our eight hundred years' worth of metrical writing. Those of us who value it, I mean.

Among those who value this tradition, J. V. Cunningham is preeminent. He has stated the case for strict form as well as anyone could do, and stated it with uniquely mordant eloquence. In "The Quest of the Opal," where he meditates in the third person on his own poetry, he writes: "The author, in fact, was only satisfied with a poem when qualification complicated qualification and yet the whole contrivance seemed to achieve stability and absoluteness by a coincidence with some given and simple external form." The effect of "stability and absoluteness" is perhaps the chief desideratum for a poet who wants to combine artifice and naturalness; such poems, when they succeed, appear to be cut out of marble. And notice the word "contrivance," reminding us almost defiantly that the poet, whatever else he may be, is a craftsman. On the specific matter of rhymed versus unrhymed poetry, Cunningham writes with authority as well as precision: "This is not just a difference in effect; it is a difference in what can be said. A word to be rhymed immediately suggests its rhymes, and at the same time rules out all expressions that are not potentially rhymable." Here he echoes the title of his own poem and book Exclusions of a Rhyme—a typically provocative title in its logical, stripped-down way.

In all these discussions of form, there are two points of view to be distinguished, both of which Cunningham understands profoundly: the poet's and the reader's. For the poet, rhyme and strict meter are heuristic devices; they are, in the words of Yvor Winters, "forms of discovery." For the reader, and that includes the poet as reader of his own finished work, rhyme and meter lend the "stability and absoluteness" mentioned above—a thinghood, a sense that the words could not have been otherwise. But writing formal poetry is also a traditional act as well as a technique for controlling rhythms precisely. It means and announces "I value the past and belong to it in this way." We hear, and I believe it, that most contemporary poets do not feel rooted in a social or religious tradition; they want to renounce and escape the past. So of course they renounce meter. Cunningham is perfectly contemporary, but in quite a different way.

In a traditional way, for one thing. His present moment is not sui generis, it contains the past…. If we put … [certain of his statements together], we have Cunningham's formula for excellence in poetry: "The aim of the formal is the definitive … the concern for definitiveness is a prejudice for brevity … a good poem is the definitive statement in meter of something worth saying." Here we have it: finished, formal, metrical and symmetrical, definitive, brief, and worth saying. Most contemporary poets, who write in free verse and colloquial language, aim for the authority of raw experience; for Cunningham, a good poem has the authority of a bear trap or a Q.E.D. It is a clincher. (pp. 555-57)

Since Cunningham's theory of literary values is a deductive system, closely reasoned and founded on solid axioms, it has great power and coherence; but it also has limitations. The limitations appear especially when the critic encounters modern novelists and story writers. For example, in an interview recorded not long before he won the Nobel Prize, Isaac Bashevis Singer says, "I do the story, and I leave the rest to the reader, or to the critic—let them draw their own conclusions…." A critic of J. V. Cunningham's persuasion might be disturbed by this easy-going attitude toward authorial control and self-consciousness, toward "the author's intentions as realized in the particular text"; but I would not care to deduce that The Magician of Lubin (I haven't read it) is a bad book. It seems to be a truth of human nature that we don't always know what we're doing or saying or even writing. This seems especially to be the case in the modern period, where literature—and not just drama or fiction—makes very heavy use of indirection, the obliquely suggestive, and apparent randomness.

Yet these modern works can make sense. To do them justice we need a broad critical theory that does not surrender to a fashionable anarchy of values (cf. the Cunningham epigram "This Humanist whom no beliefs contrained / Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained"). I suppose that an adequate approach must aim for a scrupulously historical reading of the text "on its own terms," a reading that the author himself would recognize, and at the same time allow that the text may contain implicit meanings of which the author was unaware; language is far too complicated to be controlled absolutely and always, especially with reference to discoveries that have not yet been made. (pp. 557-58)

Unlike those who insist on "innovative" ideas in literary studies—an attitude that too closely resembles the Detroit attitude toward making and selling cars—Cunningham insists that "one does not make progress in this field"; the point is to understand the poem itself, which involves recovering old meanings and values, not promoting one's own. And just as the critic should adhere strictly to the text, so should the writer be true to experience. For Cunningham, life and literature, ethics and aesthetics, are inextricably wedded, to the great benefit of both. Coherence is a chief hallmark of Cunningham's mind—coherence of a very high order, since the materials he harmonizes are many and complicated. His poems are often glosses on his scholarship, or vice versa…. His style in both prose and verse is that of a distinguished epigrammatist; as a scholar, more specifically, he is a master of the summary, the sudden generalization, the ironic aside, the condensed insight, the dazzling précis of intellectual history; he can give odd bits of minute philological analysis bearing clearly on a central point, or judiciously qualify a thesis, or deftly set up an idea or opponent for destruction; he draws easily from his immense learning to adduce parallel texts from the author or period; he handles logic and theory with absolute sureness; and he does all this in the most concise scholarly prose I have ever read. (pp. 558-59)