Let's think briefly about the two panels we attended yesterday. Roger Shattuck set the tone when he described the discipline of reading as an issue of preparation and assimilation on the one hand, and as a kind of complete perceptual openness on the other. Such openness, in our normal experience, allows us to be surprised, to see actual things, perhaps, instead of their institutional categories. But literature also requires that we craft our receptivity. The surprises we prepare ourselves to undergo are achieved breakthroughs, which makes them no less unpredictable but all the more deeply affecting.
Criticism cultivates such surprising experience.
It is always illuminating to see how these demands may be exerted as elaborately in prose style as they are in verse, where we are more accustomed to submitting ourselves to the hard discipline of literary experience. It is easy to think of an ancient form such as the Alcaic stanza as a kind of voluntary background for modern adaptations. What is harder, and far more surprising, is to find in the vicissitudes of form the living pathos of history, which Auden's poem leads us to experience sensuously as well as conceptually. That morning panel was important for us, I think, because it offered the prospect of a clear common ground, a common place where we all work from what we read ourselves to what we communicate to others. Such a critical prospect, replete with the urgencies of both discipline and surprise, cannot be argued in a mainly abstract sense.