An Old Letter to My Old English Prof
The 1991 voice of one crying in the wilderness of graduate school
I came across this letter today in an old folder. I wrote it as an act of desperation more than 30 years ago during my second year in the University of Chicago’s PhD program. It was addressed to one of my favorite English Professors at Vassar College with whom I studied both Victorian literature and Romantic Poetry. It’s a bit histrionic as many of my letters were. Nonetheless, I think it’s an interesting artifact of 1990s English studies, one that reveals just how long that field has been dominated by forces some outside the academy only recently discovered.1
I don’t recall if I actually ever sent it. I certainly never got a response. I wonder what she would have said. It might not have been to my liking. We didn’t always see eye-to-eye politically.
Still, Ms. Darlington, if you’re still out there, I’d be curious to know what you think or what you think you would have said . . . .
Dear Ms. Darlington,
I hope I'm not imposing on you by sending this letter. I know you are a busy person, and I am no longer one of your students. But I feel the need to communicate with someone who I think might be sympathetic to my situation, and whether or not I am correct, my instinct tells me you might be such a person.
I don't want to be melodramatic, so I'll get straight to the point. I'm very confused about our profession. I know that's a vague statement, but I don't know how else to sum up what I am experiencing.
To bring you up to date, I am now a 2nd-year PhD student at the University of Chicago. I transferred here after earning my master's in English at New York University. As in college, my interest remains in 19th-century British literature and most especially Wordsworth and Blake.
I remain interested in the Romantics because I continue to believe in the Romantic ideology. I think these poets changed the world for the better and still have vital truths to convey. The problem is that no one else here seems to think this way,2 not just about the Romantics, but about all writers. All the interest seems to be directed at "exposing" the hidden, economic, political, and power agendas of the poets and novelists.
I guess my question for you is, was I, and am I, naive? Did you and do you believe there was wisdom and pathos in the Romantic endeavors, or did I misconstrue my experience in your class and at Vassar? If that statement sounds the least bit accusatory, I don't mean it to. It's a sincere question.
I'm finding it very difficult to discover anyone here who does not see the Romantic movement (or any other literary movement of the 19th Century) as anything more than a phenomenon of capitalist culture--the germ, if you will, of a liberal, bourgeois aesthetic, a mask obscuring exploitative capitalist interests.
I'm sure I wasn't mistaken about my experience at Vassar, but what I see here is so contradictory it compels me to doubt my construction of the whole thing. I remember when you covered Mathew Arnold in Victorian Poetry. You told us you cried when you read "Sorab and Rustrum." When I studied Arnold here, my professor was at pains to point out how, in "Dover Beach," Arnold's wife never says a word, and he thoughtlessly projects onto her his concerns about the receding tide of faith, turning her into an object, obliterating her individuality. I thought it was a love poem and an elegy, of sorts, for a passing age. When I was at Vassar, you were the head of the Women's Studies Department, but I don't recall you ever treating Arnold this way.
Are things different now? I know these are questions we have to answer for ourselves, and yet I need to know if I am the only one who continues to think this way. Is it wrong to "believe in" the poets and to build a critical and pedagogical method upon such a belief? Must we instead merely "historicize" them?
I remember that you warned me against graduate school. I didn't really understand why at the time. Was it because you foresaw that I would confront this sort of atmosphere? I have great difficultly accepting the critical frameworks of Marxism, Psychoanalysis, and Post-Structuralism, although I realize they all offer some useful insights into literature. I am convinced the most proper framework for understanding Romanticism is a Romantic framework. At this time, in our profession, can one proceed along such lines?
I don't feel like I can raise these questions in this way with my professors here, and I hope you're not offended by any parts of this letter. But if you could find the time, could you please respond with a short note? I trust your insights and have always respected your judgment. Since leaving Vassar, I have, on occasion, contacted Professor Brisman with questions about the professional side of academics, and her advice has been extremely helpful. I have a great respect for all the professors I had at Vassar. But I feel you are particularly suited to respond to these sorts of questions.
I would be grateful for any sort of reply you might make,
Yours Truly,
Tom Balazs,
Class of '86
In the end, I realized I could not specialize in Romantic Poetry at the University of Chicago because the only way to do so was to process my favorite writers through distorting theoretical lenses. One professor told me flat out, “No, you cannot do a Blakean reading of Blake.”
Instead, I turned my attention to British modernism, a period about which I had great ambivalence, disliking many of the modernist innovations, experimentations, and attitudes. But I found a professor at the U of C who was explicitly trying to recoup a “humanist” approach to literature at a time when the very word “humanism” was in disrepute as a false, late-capitalist, patriarchal assertion of universalism. She introduced me to “relational psychoanalysis,” which enabled me to approach literature with empathy and biographical context while providing me with the requisite “theoretical lens.” It wasn’t exactly a happy ending, but it got me to the finish line.
”
It’s not that people weren’t informed about all this. Allen Bloom wrote “The Closing of the American Mind” four years earlier. But the cultural elites largely dismissed Bloom as some sort of reactionary crank.
Though at least one writer today does. See Klavan: The Truth and the Beauty.
Great letter ! Politicizing literature is not a way to install love of the subject, in my view.
I always loved “On Dover Beach” and agree that it is love poem though one that cries for the loss of faith and for holding close those one loves. I don’t see this as ignoring his wife or objectifying her.
Deconstructing always seems to me an exercise in a “better than though “ approach , and am glad that in my university days in the late 40’s it was not yet known..
Sigh. In grad school, I actually enjoyed close-reading, especially the psychoanalytic approach Bill Veeder used. But, like you, I found that constantly tearing books down got tiresome. I chose to write my (unfinished) dissertation on Defoe in part because I didn’t like his books very much, and so I didn’t mind picking them apart. (Another reason was that he wrote so quickly that he was kind of sloppy, so somehow it didn’t feel like he would mind as much.)
For the reasons you cite, I am so grateful that my son, who loves history, chose not to do a history PhD, and my daughter, who loves literature, will be starting a job this summer instead of going to grad school.
Btw, was the professor Lisa Ruddick? I always thought she was not just brilliant but also humane, and it’s easy for me to imagine that she could have helped you find an approach that both you and the department would find acceptable.