critical blindspots

The kind of conservative critic who wouldn’t have recognized most of the canon had he lived during the times when the works were written.

stands and stands

There will be poet challengers to certain canonical poets, but some of challenged poets will never be tilted or knocked off their pedestals.

laid out in there

Old anthology with a charnel house for a contents page.

drip, drip...

A critic who believed in trickle-down literature.

known unknown

One of those poems many readers knew about but the anthologies had yet to acknowledge.

singular path

Cut your own idiosyncratic path through literature.

retrospective advantage

Often when someone longs for ‘the spirit of the past’, they forget that spirit was a critical distillate made during a successive age.

brokedown horses

A bright critic who hitched his wagon (note: dead metaphor) to the wrong authors.

big data

The day may be coming when canonicity is measured by tallying Google searches.

under construction

They need to build new wings on the edifice of the canon.

not going anywhere

A poem secure in the canon solely on aesthetic grounds.

unintendedly of consequence

Accidentally it became lasting art.

canon content

The canon is made of many great poems and a certain number of academic study pieces.

not harriers

Critics who are like vultures picking over the same canon carcasses.

little to unlearn

[Basil Bunting’s] reading (meaning here his perusal of books) was not uncommonly wide, it was even more uncommonly exact and readily recalled. Always intense and personal his response to any writing was determined by the pleasure and interest it afford him. The absence of this factor makes the academic study of literature a hollow sham, its presence a test of character and truthfulness. Bunting’s taste was formed early: he had a lot to discover but little to unlearn. His revaluation of the canon was more radical than Pound’s and less erratic.

—Kenneth Cox, “Basil Bunting,” The Art of Language: Selected Essays by Kenneth Cox (Flood Editions, 2016), edited and introduced by Jenny Penberthy.

contested space

One might ask: Was ever a country’s canon created from contest winners?

latticework canon

As poems multiply and lodge themselves in various media, each of us creates a latticework of connections—a poem here, a poem there, a poem over there—that will in time become one's personal canon.

incarcerated

A poem locked in the prison of the canon.

tradition in process

Eliot writes that obtaining the tradition “involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twentieth-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” He saw the past “altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” The canon is steadily undergoing formation, both vertically and—more recently—horizontally. The future will applaud our generation’s widening the stream. We must not, however, as we widen the course of the canon, make its bed shallow. Despite the labor necessary to appreciate them, those dead white guys are great. Sometimes in spite of themselves. Sometimes, I suspect, not even knowing, before they wrote the work, the truth the work reveals.

Too often we ignore the fact that tradition is process. Believing that tradition is created in retrospect, we search tirelessly for the great but unpublished black lesbian poet of the seventeenth century. Perhaps someday someone will find her, and that discovery will force us to make new maps of the literary landscape. What will be changed, however, is not the landscape of the seventeenth century, but that of the generation that discovers her. For tradition, as process, is formed as we go forward. There is no doubling back, no taking that other fork in the road, no rewinding the tape.

—Marilyn Nelson Waniek, “Owning the Masters,” The Gettysburg Review (Spring, 1995)

gender gerrymandering

Remember that time you picked up an anthology and three-quarters of the poets included were women. No, because it didn’t happen. It’s either a 100% women, as in a specifically woman-centric antholology, or it’s well under 50% women.