I ask because I’ve been reading two books address that question.

On my Nook, I just finished Tony Judt’s The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century and have been reading (in a more traditional form) Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual.

I was, I am ashamed to confess, mostly unaware of the stories and works of Leon Blum and Raymond Aron (like many young men with intellectual pretensions and a smidgen of angst, I feel deeply and platonically in love with the idea of the Albert Camus – the tormented figure on the cover of my edition of his collected journals from 1945-1951 [see picture]: the aggressive sex appeal of Humphrey Bogart and the tormented moral questioning of Soren Kierkegaard).

Edward Said was someone I had read, but never in depth (a fact that this slim volume cannot be said to have remedied).

Whereas Said is explicitly attempting to impose stricter criteria on the intellectual (in an age where every blow hard on Fox News thinks himself to be a public intellectual), trying to take that title away from those whose actions have thrown away the right to call themselves one, Judt takes a less questioning view of the idea of the intellectual. Ultimately, he does not question that those who put themselves forward as intellectuals are exactly that. What he does do is put these three figures (Blum, Camus, and Aron) up as sort of “super-intellectuals.” Figures who somehow exceeded or at least operated outside the traditional lines that mark the French public intellectual. He even denies that Albert Camus was truly a public intellectual (not an intellectual, but a public intellectual) but rather part of a tradition of les moralistes – of moralists. Camus as a tormented Rousseau to Sartre’s self-confident Voltaire.

Said’s main beef is with professionalism, which he sees an insidious force that works to (my words, not his) neuter intellectuals (which point, Said would no longer consider them intellectuals).

It’s a hard road he calls for. One of the pitfalls of professionalism is specialization, which is singled out as a means by which a potential intellectual, with the potential to shake things up, is moved to an area of safety (safety from the perspective of those who might be called out by an “un-neutered” intellectual). This is a hard road, because he calls for the intellectual to be as close as possible to being an Renaissance man – someone who has made reasonably deep studies in a number of different fields. Arguably, it has been impossible for nearly two centuries to be a true Renaissance Man. Not since Goethe has the available scope of human knowledge (at least in the Western world) been sufficiently manageable for one man to be able to write innovative treatises on both the science and mathematics of meteorology and chromatics and to also be a world class novelist, poet, and essayist.

What Said is calling for is resistance to some of the specialization one sees in the literary and philosophical fields that, of necessity, limits wider vision.

But both Judt and Said see their respective figures (three specific figures in Judt’s case; a more nebulous construct in Said’s, though he seems to view Noam Chomsky as a sort of ideal intellectual) as being outside the dominant intellectual sphere.

For some reason, pastoral poetry has been in my thoughts these last couple of years. It’s genesis, I put down to my (re)discovery of Wordsworth a while back.

But much of what I’ve written here was been somewhat critical of contemporary pastoral poetry. I tentatively agreed with the idea that pastoral poetry that does not also participate in a certain eco-poetic-politics is insufficient – the idea that it is not enough to write about the nature when so many dangers to it exist. The example given (not by me) was that it is insufficient to write about the songbird and not about the bulldozer nearby that threatens it. Adam Johnson called it “ecological orientalism.”

I have also jumped on the bandwagon of those who look at W.S. Merwin and see someone whose writing since The Lice and The Carrier of Ladders leave something to be desired. I bring that up because, The Lice, in particular, is such a great example of eco-poetics: pastoral poetry that encompasses the man made dangers threaten the natural world. His more recent writings, while still perhaps good, lack the urgency and conviction of those early eco-poetics. They are, in short, what I find to unpalatable about contemporary pastoral poetry.

But my feelings may change. Even now, I reserve the right to change and evolve.

For example, I used to lump Charles Wright in the same category as Merwin. Wright’s first book was published between The Lice and The Carrier of Ladders, so I think we can safely place them in the same generation of poets. And he has also indulged in his fair share of pastoralisms. But I read him and see someone who, while not writing within the Snyder-esque, deep ecology vein of early Merwin, still finds a way to make his pastoral indulgences relevant. He also gives the aging poet some hope, having not clearly peaked by his forties and continuing to evolve and improve over the years.

I bring this up more to question myself. I am not sure how real the distinctions I make really are and much I am merely justifying unjustifiable prejudice. Because I must be nearly the only person to prefer Wright to Merwin (I know plenty of poets who lean more towards the avant-garde who can’t stand them both and my classically quietist and septagenerian father just loves Merwin and couldn’t care less about Wright).

Oh well. As long as I continue to find Billy Collins offensive, I will know I haven’t completely lost my way.

The Atlantic‘s five part series on poetry continues with this piece on “slow poetry.” I skipped over the third in the series, which discussed “flarf.” Why? Because, frankly, I have little interest in flarf. I don’t deny its aesthetic value, merely that those aesthetics have yet to grow on me.

Slow poetry – that sounds like something more up my alley.

Of course, it quite self-consciously reflects the “slow food” movement. The idea of slow, close reading and respect for local small presses is something I can get behind.

He also discusses (all too briefly) the difference between “nature” poetry and contemporary “ecopoetics.” The argument being that traditional, pastoral poetry is insufficient for the poet writing today. If you write about nature without writing about the human threat under which nature lives, you are just engaging in a paternalistic program (he calls it “ecological orientalism”).