Susan B. Rosenbaum. Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture and the Crisis in Reading

Susan B. Rosenbaum. Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture and the Crisis in Reading. U of Virginia P, 2007. xii + 283 pp. $39.50. When Lionel Trilling defined "sincerity" as "a congruence between avowal and actual feeling," he was well aware that artists have not always valued such artlessness. There is, for example, an air of defiance about Ezra Pound's declaration, "I believe in technique as the test of man's sincerity." It embodies Modernism's rejection of Romantic self-expression and replaces sincere utterance with the authenticity of formal achievement. Professing Sincerity has some astute things to say about form. However, for Susan Rosenbaum, the trouble with sincerity does not lie in the demands of "technique," but in the marketplace. Those poets who valued self-expression, she argues, worried that it was compromised by selling their work. Examining sincerity, then, is one way of addressing the effect of the rise of capitalism upon notions of authorship and literary authority. She divides the book into three sections of two chapters each that juxtapose an English Romantic poet with a modern American poet. She couples Wordsworth with Frank O'Hara, Charlotte Smith with Sylvia Plath, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld with Elizabeth Bishop. In doing so, she alternates between two key moments in the history of poetic sincerity: a Romantic ideology of spontaneity and American confessional poetry of the 1960s. Significantly, Rosenbaum qualifies Wordsworth's famous remark that "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling," adding historical distance: Wordsworth understood spontaneity not in the sense of an unpremeditated action, its primary connotation today, but as a form of voluntary action, learned habits of thought and feeling. (34) On Rosenbaum's account, this spontaneity was threatened by the encroachments of city life. She reads a series of contemporary concerns about gender, commerce and prostitution into Wordsworth's account of walking through London in book seven of The Prelude. His moral aversion towards the life he encounters depends upon reading the scene before him in terms of "types." In doing so, Rosenbaum argues, he judges people as commodities and introduces a note of theatricality. Wordsworth is caught, she claims, in "the flaneur's bind:" "How can one claim sincerity when surrounded by and dependent on theatrical modes of representation?" (42). This predicament is epitomised by Wordsworth's observation of the figure of the prostitute, which comes "to represent the threat of degraded representation" (47). In contrast, Frank O'Hara Lunch Poems exult in the theatricality of New York's vibrant street life. Rosenbaum suggests that, "O'Hara uses consumer practices to redefine sincere feeling" (61). In place of "degraded representation," O'Hara perceives the scenes before him as filled with creative and homoerotic possibilities. I don't find Rosenbaum's claim that Wordsworth used his "Essay on Epitaphs" as the means to create a posthumous audience for The Prelude convincing. It elides too much of his epic poem's long and complex history. But it does provide a smooth point of transition for her examination of the way Charlotte Smith and Sylvia Plath explored elegy as a medium for sincere expression. Smith's Elegiac Sonnets make, Rosenbaum argues, a series of artful claims to artlessness. Whilst trading on the contemporary vogue for confessional poetry, Plath's late poems address the hypocrisy and voyeurism motivating her audience. For both poets the commercial status of literary authorship is troubling and yet provides an impetus to write. The chapters on Barbauld and Bishop emphasise their discomfort with this commercialism and its consequences. In particular, Rosenbaum dwells upon Bishop's unease with her friend Robert Lowell's preparedness to use his own experiences and those of his family as the basis for poetry. …