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OK, so she's really smart. But Camille Paglia brooks no B.S.
Yes, she's a scholar; she earned her doctorate in English at Yale. Yes, she's an academic, a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. And, yes, the author of "Sexual Personae" and four other books is a feminist.
But you won't often catch her defending today's scholars, academics and feminists. She thinks too many of today's female writers "whine about men or wallow in personal traumas." As for professorial types and literary critics, she vilifies any and all who would try to turn the arts into some sort of elitist, exclusive puzzle instead of doing what she sees as her mission: striving to share the thrill of discovery with the masses.
"I'm an evangelist for art," Paglia says, and that's a great description of her stance in her newest book, the national best-seller "Break, Blow, Burn," which was released in paperback last month. The subtitle explains what she's up to: "Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems." Make that "reads and analyzes." Paglia takes a classic approach, printing each poem (the selections include works by William Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath), then offering a few pages for each in which she helps the reader with explanations and interpretations.
In an e-mail interview with the Kansas City Star, she offered some insights on the book:
Q. Rather than offer the broadest approach, which would be to include just one poem from each poet, "Break, Blow, Burn" takes a deeper measure: Three poems each from the likes of Dickinson and John Donne, two each from William Blake and William Wordsworth, one from some of the later poets. Why did you decide to proceed that way?
A. Each poem in this book competed against thousands of other possible poems ... I made no decisions based on the fame of the author, only on the quality of the poem and its accessibility to the general reader. Many of these poems have proved highly successful for me over three decades of classroom experience. They've been selected to appeal to readers who may not have looked at a poem since college. One thing that's not there is the kind of contorted, pretentious postmodernism that's the toast of the Ivy League these days. Merciful Minerva, do I loathe that crap!
Q. A poem must retain some of its mystery if it is to continue to function for us on subsequent readings. For that reason, some argue that "explication of text," as you call it, can be harmful. What is your reaction to that?
A. Any critic who says that explicating a text is harmful should have his or her credentials revoked ... (W)e can't hear too much about any work of art. I have written that great works always retain their mystery: "Hamlet," for example, changes every time we return to it. Because inspiration wells up from the dream life, artists themselves don't fully comprehend the magnitude of what they have done. The problem with most contemporary literary criticism is that it knows how to trash but not how to appreciate. As a disciple of Oscar Wilde, I'm an evangelist for art. If the humanities are to survive or prove worthy of public funding, we've got to get the enthusiasts back into academe.
Q. In a 2005 Publishers Weekly article, Amy Boaz writes that you are "very concerned about America's hostility toward the fine arts." You also state in that article that it's "the critic's obligation to help art be understood by the mass audience." But many people in this country don't care about the arts, do they?
A. The arts have never taken deep root in America, which has always been a practical, commercial, action-oriented culture. The New England Puritans (whose descendants founded our first universities) were ideologically opposed to beauty, ornament and pleasure. I strongly believe that literary critics should be writing for the general audience and not for each other. ... Art belongs to all of humanity, not simply to an elite coterie. That there is an interested audience out there for art and ideas is suggested by the fact that "Break, Blow, Burn" is my fourth national best-seller in 15 years. I find few academic critics worth reading these days. I listen to talk radio instead, where the people speak!
Q. In The Western Canon, your old thesis adviser, Yale's Harold Bloom, praised Emily Dickinson for her "startling intellectual complexity." I know, from the fact that you did your senior thesis on her and from your inclusion of her poems in this book, that you value her. Why do you think she is so compelling?
A. Dickinson's genius for condensation is staggering. She can get the whole cosmos into two tiny stanzas. She didn't just whine about men or wallow in personal traumas ... She was a true intellectual who meditated on the major problems of human existence ... Her poetry is an education in writing: She shows how to exert maximum force in minimum space.
Q. Much has been made of your choice of Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock," a song lyric, for this book. What struck me, though, was the similarity of themes between Mitchell's verses and Langston Hughes' "Jazzonia." Both works ponder the power but also the struggle of creating art.
A. It was certainly polemical to begin the book with Shakespeare and end it with Joni Mitchell. Popular culture has overwhelmed the traditional high arts over the past century. I argue that T.S. Eliot's canonical modern poem, "The Waste Land," was totally wrong about the disintegration and collapse of Western culture. Hughes' ecstatic "Jazzonia," written at exactly the same moment, shows the rebirth of art in new, brazen form: Jazz and Hollywood would become America's world-conquering exports.
Q. What about Mitchell's contemporary, Bob Dylan? I'm not sure his lyrics always work on the page, much as I admire them. Can his verses be stripped of their music, the way Mitchell's "Woodstock" can? I ask this with the caveat that I think there are exceptions in his work, such as "Blind Willie McTell."
A. Twenty years ago I invented a course called "Art of Song Lyrics" at the University of the Arts to help student musicians develop their lyrics. I've found that quite a few Dylan lyrics do transfer quite well to the printed page - above all "Desolation Row," which is a masterpiece. It always takes three class days to analyze it fully. It's a dark epic of modern civilization with a surreal cast of characters and a theatrical sense of scene and gesture. "Subterranean Homesick Blues," Dylan's breakthrough radio hit, also works on the page. It's really a rap song - long before hip-hop. Dylan deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature far more than the obscure, minor novelists who keep getting it.
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BOOKS BY CAMILLE PAGLIA
"Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson"
"Sex, Art, and American Culture"
"Vamps & Tramps: New Essays"
"The Birds (a study of Alfred Hitchcock)"
"Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems"
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(c) 2006, The Kansas City Star. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
