Singing Masters: Poets in English 1500 to the Present.

Russell Fraser, Singing Masters: Poets in English 1500 to the Present Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. viii + 261 pp. $44.50. ISBN: 0-472-11003-9.

A very personal book, Singing Masters devotes each of fourteen chapters to individual poets, and includes two more, broadly focused on the eighteenth century, under the titles "Rationalism and the Discursive Style" and "Wat is Augustan Poetry?" Fraser's selection of authors for whom he writes "in tribute to their life and art" represents "the distillation of a lifetime's experience of poetry" (v). His selection of poems to discuss reveals a distinct preference for shorter, non-narrative forms. Shakespeare is observed "at sonnets," and most of the book's other tributaries are best known as masters of the lyric: Donne, Herrick, Jonson, Sidney, and Marvell among the earlier moderns; Frost, Shelley, Arnold and Yeats among the later. The author of the Faerie Queene prompts Fraser's sustained attention and unqualified admiration only in the Epithalamion. Perfunctorily dismissing Paradise Lost for its artistic sins" (139), Fraser turns to Lycidas to hear Milton at his most masterful singing. Wordsworth's career is a "declining curve" (60) following the Lyrical Ba!lads, and the first version of The Prelude is redeemed by its brevity and by its author's being "only a poet" (58) rather than the Miltonic philosopher-poet of his own and Coleridge's ambition.

Rejecting the "rarified vocabulary now in vogue" (vi) in academic criticism, Fraser searches in a decidedly unfashionable way for what he calls his favorite poets and poems' "particular virtue" (8), "essence" (42), "special quality" (55), or "quiddity" (217). A few examples of his "distillations," limited to the early moderns, will illustrate their nature. For Donne, analogies often "exceed the things they mean to clarify," in contrast to Shakespeare, whose sonnets proceed in a manner "not distracted but augmented" (22). In contrast to both, emotive Herrick "had little truck with ideas" (40), and "hatred is of his essence" (42). Jonson "doesn't amplify but pares down," making his plain style "enormously persuasive, as if God were creating the world" (97). Sidney "isn't good at working out answers. What he excels at is handing down the law" (114). "Declining to assess the formulaic stuff he works with," Spenser "keeps reality over there, 'behind the shelf'" (130). Deeply skeptical but not an "intellectual poe t," Herbert "doesn't work out answers, and the investigatory manner functions largely as a blind" (193). As for Marvell, a poet of "tin ear" but "fine calibrations" (208), "sometimes like Donne he puts his mind to a problem. But he does this less to philosophize than to display his moral philosopher side" (217). Such pronouncements emerge from careful focus on selected poems imagery, structure, and versification. At his best, and that is when close readings allow us to observe the distillation process in considerable detail, Fraser facilitates our entrance into a poet's mode of thought, and every student of these poets will benefit from sharing the compelling reading experience of this very well-informed and sensitive critic.

Borrowing from Wallace Stevens, Fraser distinguishes "two ways poetry takes": a synthetic Poetry of Inflections that "depends on rhetoric rather than ratiocination," and an analytic Poetry of Innuendoes "working through figures and giving intellect priority" (vi). Poetry that participates in both tendencies he labels, borrowing from R. P. Blackmur, "the Hymn in the throat" (vii). These categories organize the book and lead to groupings that create interesting connections between Renaissance and modern poets. But the categories seem to me more misleading than helpful. The placement of Spenser and Milton under the rubric of inflections produces the most striking examples. Fraser finds Spenser "adept at a poetry of surfaces whose truth isn't educed but declared" (vii). And yet Fraser's own few pages on the Faerie Queene, in which he concedes that "always in Spenser entropy threatens" (127), demonstrate that the "educing" of dark truths is every bit as essential to this poem as its declaration of more officially sanctioned verities. Does Milton's poetry really depend upon rhetoric rather t han ratiocination, and in Paradise Lost is the artistic sin of rendering God "a bore, possibly a tyrant" (139) not part of a complex and programmatic educing of unpleasant truths about ourselves? In such cases the categories serve less to illuminate a poet's art than to reveal aspects of it that Fraser is unwilling to acknowledge as part of its quiddity.