The New York Review of Books with the notice of the Francis Throckmorton Oates ’07 Chair in Poetry at Muggleton College, featured an essay-review of Helen Vendler’s Poets Thinking by the Mt. Holyoke professor Christopher Benfey, which begins with an illustrative anecdote that endeavors to dismiss the importance of intellectual complexity to poets and poetry, odd for an essay putatively concerned with the muse of cerebration. Though Prof. Vendler, sponsor of Marjorie Graham’s spectacular career in the poetical dramatization of scrupulous non-thought, or the kinetic courtship and cultivation of self and soul that can interminably precede the idea that never crystallizes, though perfect, climactic crystallization might exist, might occur, somewhere, yet must not exist, nor occur, here, must never copulate nor collide nor suffer commitment to empirical consequence, hirsute or glabrous, surely knows something, surely has extracted winning colors from the circulating iridescence of this and the last century’s poetic moment, much a crudely opinionated tactilean like myself, doomed to prefer slobbering his spumoni in the dish to pondering a rainbow in the mist, cultivating ever more vaporously the metaphysics of relentless vulnerability, renewable virginity and concomitant universal virtue, the exquisitely ugly solitude of choice, chosing to service, marry or buy, than the peasant who wrestles a sow to earth, crushes the fern and distresses the moss could ever be patient enough to discern.

Prof. Benfey, Vendler's puff and the NYRB's hireling, assiduous as a reptile entering a hole without soiling his hands — his essay takes a venomous, evidently echoic swipes at the late, gentle-hearted Cleanth Brooks calls him 'histrionic' — likewise knows how to find fudge in the behinds he kisses and nudges, not to mention butter for his occasionally rock-hard scones, an ignoramus like myself would be licking, slopping and pricking in vain.

In Prof. Benfey's illuminating story, the painter Paul Degas, having attempted some sonnets, complains to the poet Stephane Mallarmé, that he has lots of ideas, but after hours and hours, can accomplish very little. Mallarmé rejoins, "avec sa douce profondeur," (with gentle profundity, according to me, though it was Prof. Benfey's flourish), that 'It is not with ideas that you make a poem, my dear Degas, but with words!'

Neither Professors Benfey nor Vendler are indifferent to ideas, but as I progressed with uneasy resistance through Benfey's article, subversively entitled, "The Art of Consolation," I wondered where this bland subordination, if not dismissal, of the initiatory concept and ideas, left Prof. Vendler's preferred modernist and everybody's favorite poet, Wallace Stevens, who charged his imaginary epigone at the outset of "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," 'It must be abstract!'

Stevens continues:

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.

I confess myself initially bamboozled by this directive, educated to the extent I was within the sturdy parameters of the New Criticism at Penn State and Iowa. In an earlier poem, "Winter Bells," Stevens acknowledged, 'The Jew did not go to his synagogue/To be flogged,' and indeed, I did not go to college to be educated. I had attended an all-boys high school, Central in Philadelphia, and had never shared a class nor seen on campus glebe big and small-bosomed girls walking around in skirts as high as their knees. Girls were phenomena who demanded the foundational reconstruction of my epistemological priorities. Nevertheless, I retained enough to agree with John Frederick Nims, for example, in his properly revered and indispensable Western Wind, and confidently instruct poetry students — I never left the glebe — for years to come, 'It must be concrete!' i.e., it must be tactile and must connect, copulate, be fruitful and multiply.

Indeed, though I would still passionately theorize the benefits of physical imagery, I view the perilous infringements and ambiguities of the empirical as subsets of Stevens two other theoretical commonplaces, 'It must give pleasure!' and 'It must give change!' The role of intuition and intellect, one guiding the other, in locating the abstract core of a poem, and asserting articulate sovereignty, became central to my poetry writing practice and proselytics, Stevens' corollary reins on the apocalyptic horses of artistic hyper-consciousness, pleasure and change, equally central, like God in three persons, father, son and holy ghost.

Damn the poetry professor who'd irreparably demoralize and gratuitously alienate Muggleton students by instructing their endeavors with a command remotely resembling Stevens' too exhilarated, syntactically circular piece of pedagogy. What student of the muses would not be wounded at the hairy roots of their expensive amor-propre at being commanded at all, let alone termed an ephebe: "Does that mean feeble-minded, Professor?"