Camille Paglia Break, Blow, Burn:
Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three
of the World’s Best Poems.
Pantheon, 272 pages. $20
Does Camille Paglia contradict herself? She certainly does contain multitudes. How better to describe a homosexual atheist who has so much good to say about Roman Catholicism? A feminist who outraged feminists by claiming that, if raped, she would “dust herself off” and get on with things? A strange and controversial critic of art and culture with the almost comic brashness to call her most beloved poems the “world’s best”?
Well, a few adjectives spring to mind, but none are quite fair to the odd—albeit inconsistent—pleasure to be taken in reading her new book.
Paglia spent her girlhood in Endicott, a New York factory town, among “speakers of sometimes mutually unintelligible Italian dialects.” Her love of Italian, well known to readers of her scholarship, informs but is superseded by her love of English:
What fascinated me about English was what I later recognized as its hybrid etymology: blunt Anglo-Saxon concreteness, sleek Norman French urbanity, and polysyllabic Greco-Roman abstraction. The clash of these elements, as competitive as Italian dialects, is invigorating, richly entertaining, and often funny …
Two things (among others, no doubt) strike one about this capsule tribute. The first is its sincerity. Poets and, more unbearably, English professors assure us that they “love language,” but only the rarest among them successfully prove it, by use or appreciation. The closest many come to true love is an omnivorous indulgence: I am thinking of professors who take no greater pleasure in a close reading of, say, The Faerie Queene than of dialogue from a B-movie or TV sitcom. Paglia’s enthusiasm, by contrast, is genuine and confined mostly to works of substance.
I hasten to emphasize “mostly.” In her introduction to this volume, Paglia calls the authors of a 1950s M&M candy jingle “folk artists, as anonymous as the artisans of medieval cathedrals.” As a specimen of hyperbole, this outdoes even Roland Barthes’s comparison of early Citroën automobiles to the work of those ecclesiastical architects. It also underscores a second interesting feature of the passage quoted above: that phrase “hybrid etymology,” and its usefulness in describing the vocabulary of Paglia’s aesthetic appraisals.
Paglia is hardly unique in revering popular as well as high culture. She is unique in her ability to graft one to the other in her critical style without creating, as so many do, a lifeless or offensive hybrid. Her association of ad copy with cathedrals is at least felt, not trotted out to shock or amuse. (That is not to say she has ever refrained from being shocking.)
By that token, though not all of the forty-three poems discussed in this volume are among the “world’s best,” the reader is confident that they really are Paglia’s favorites, and grateful that she is generally lucid, diligent, and entertaining in justifying her taste. She doesn’t call the lyrics to Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock” an “important modern poem” just to shoehorn an extra woman into the canon and rankle the Great Books set. She is agenda-free. For good or ill, she means it.
Is sincerity a substitute for good taste? Of course not, but that is rather beside the point: Paglia’s taste is often very good, so her missteps are easily forgiven. Her collection begins with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, a poem I had to memorize as a child and was pleased to revisit with Paglia’s commentary. Her title, Break, Blow, Burn, comes from Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, but of her three selections from Donne, the best—with the most intriguing (not to mention creepy) exegesis—is “The Flea”:
The hapless flea will actually end up as a holy martyr to love. Its transformation begins with its theft of human blood—first the poet’s and then the lady’s, which are “mingled” like potion in a beaker (3-4).
As it magically “swells with one blood made of two,” the flea becomes their weird child (8). The couple have somehow vaulted to procreation without sexual intercourse, for which a virgin always pays a blood price.
The sexual element is often at the forefront of Paglia’s readings; yet here and elsewhere, though it may disturb, it is never banal or prurient. The same cannot always be said of her interest in the Dionysian or “erotic” in rock music or cinema. Still, her lower influences enliven her writing and criticism, even when not dealt with explicitly. She is influenced by high and low, but governed by neither. Most who attempt what she does are, in fact, influenced primarily by low, but shrewd enough to add a patina of credibility-enhancing high.
These essays, which are structured like classroom lectures, are aimed at the common reader. At their best, they make a good model for any amateur reader of the personal but rigorous way in which a text should be explicated. Complaints about who belongs (Blake, Yeats, Stevens) and who we could have done without (Plath, O’Hara, certainly Gary Snyder) are inevitable but unnecessary. Paglia’s mind is strange, indeed, but it is great fun to watch it work.
Stefan Beck is the assistant editor of The New Criterion.
