Song of a Reformed Headhunter

In the interview with Mark Halliday, Bidart spoke of his love during his undergraduate years for Trilling's The Liberal Imagination . He quotes from "Art and Fortune" a sentence that concludes a passage about "the beautiful circuit of thought and desire" (James' phrase): The novel has had a long dream of virtue in which the will, while never abating its strength and activity, learns to refuse to exercise itself upon the unworthy objects with which the social world tempts it, and either conceives its own right objects or becomes content with its own sense of its potential force--which is why so many novels give us, before their end, some representation, often crude enough, of the will unbroken but in stasis. Bidart comments on this passage: This image of the will "unbroken but in stasis"--after having "exhausted all that part of itself which naturally turns to the inferior objects offered by the social world"--and which has therefore ...

from Mark Halliday's interview of Frank Bidart (appendix to In the Western Night ): The notion of "action" in Francis Fergusson's The Idea of a Theater is crucial to my understanding of poetry (and of writing in general)--so crucial, that I want to get polemical about it. It source, of course, is Aristotle's Poetics , the statements that "tragedy is the imitation of an action." Fergusson cites Kenneth Burke on "language as symbolic action," and quotes Coleridge: unity of action, Coleridge says, "is not properly a rule, but in itself the great end, no only of the drama. but of the epic, lyric, even the candle-flame of an epigram--not only of poetry, but of poesy in general, as the proper generic term inclusve of all the fine arts." But the sense that a poem must be animated by a unifying, central action--that it both "imitates" an action and is itself an action--has been largely igrnoed by twentieth century aesthetics. It ...