Talking the Sherlock Holmes-General George A. Custer Blues (conclusion)

Talking the Sherlock Holmes-General George A. Custer Blues

(AKA Women and Indians at the Limits of Induction)

Part Three (Conclusion)

(Parts one and two can be found at the blog posts on June 3 and June 7)


It might seem therefore that the Sherlock Holmes-General George A. Custer blues all adds up to one lesson: letting cultural stereotypes stand in the way of careful inductive reasoning is a mistake, sometimes a fatal one.

It turns out that the lesson isn’t that simple.

In fact Custer’s thinking about Indians was in many ways not one-dimensional. Politically, Custer opposed Grant’s policies of 1876 requiring the Lakotas and Cheyennes to report to reservations or be attacked. Custer testified on behalf of the idea that Indians were being abused on the reservations and that the policy was unfair, a political stand that further earned Grant’s enmity and nearly cost Custer the chance to die at the Little Big Horn. He was, that is, a fairly thoughtful observer of Indian life on reservations. He could see that reservation life was exploitative and awful, and he was willing to say so publicly in a way that risked his military career.

It was just that as a man finally most devoted to making a name for himself through the military, one used to acting under orders even if he didn’t agree with them, Custer was willing to fight the Indians if that’s what the military required. In fact he was eager to do so because he believed it would improve his public image, the thing which to him mattered most.

It’s possible to be a careful inductive reasoner who sees through the ideologies and stereotypes of others and still be full of your own unexamined stereotypes.

The case of Holmes, and Doyle who created him, is maybe even more complex, yet it too reveals a similar problem.

In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” it’s important to note that Holmes, referring to Irene Adler as “the woman,” defines her as unique. Her existence disproves Holmes’ theories about women and even shows her to be a superior inductive thinker. Yet there is no indication that Holmes believes she is one of many such women. As the exception that disproves the rule, she is also the exception that proves that the rule remains true in most cases. It’s crucial to remember that in the story, even she behaves as Holmes expects women to do. What Holmes misses is that she herself realizes that she has been caught acting as women do, and can respond by not acting that way. This realization and response leads to her success. She still behaves like a woman but is capable of rising above it when the situation demands.

Holmes, of course, is a fictional character who may not may not reflect the attitudes of the author. Given the lesson Holmes learns in “A Scandal In Bohemia,” it’s fair to say that Doyle’s attitude was not that of Holmes. And in fact the Holmes stories are full of brave, tough, intelligent, steadfast women of firm moral convictions, women who under the laws of England often find themselves at the mercy of corrupt, mercenary men but who are willing to fight back for their own liberty and lives as well as for those they love.

Of course the stories also feature women who are dangerous villains, or who are weak, cowardly, stupid or vacillating. Women are hardly idolized in the Holmes stories.

Still, by all accounts Doyle seems to have greatly admired and respected women.

Doyle was also, later in life, firmly opposed to the idea that the women he so admired should have the right to vote. In an interview of his daughter Dame Jean Conan Doyle, she suggests about her father’s often discussed attitudes towards women that Doyle believed that the division of men and women into public and domestic spheres was proper, that women should have political power but only by exercising good influences upon their husbands.

Like many Victorian men, that is, Doyle believed both in admiring women and that their proper place was the home. Dame Doyle also suggests that her father was appalled by what he considered the lengths to which the woman’s suffrage movement had gone, and particularly deplored any incidents of violence with which it was associated. In fact in some Holmes stories the women’s suffrage movement appears as another of the many dangerous political conspiracies that he personally abhorred and that made for exciting fiction: the Mormons, the Italian Mafia, and Russian Communists primarily.

And while Doyle’s portrayal of women is complex, his portrayal of cultural others is full of the standard stereotypes common in British culture of the era. Members of other cultures are frequently portrayed as passionate, vengeful, duplicitous and scheming, although some are portrayed as passionate, loving, and honest in their scheming.

It turns out, that is, that it’s possible to believe in the value of inductive reasoning and the authority of data, to reject stereotypes and write a story showing the problems of the limits of stereotypes, and even to understand how induction is often limited by ideology, and still be deeply committed to common ideological limitations and stereotypes from a given era. It’s possible to criticize stereotypes and simultaneously believe in or at least frequently portray stereotypes as the truth about people’s behavior.

It’s possible, that is, to write a literature and live a life in the belief that inductive thinking can critique ideology, and is a way of getting beyond ideology, and even to know how often inductive thinking is mired in ideology, while still revealing that ideology—that complicated nexus of beliefs, some articulated, some not, some individual, some group-oriented and historical—remains far more powerful than we know in shaping how we see the world.

One conclusion here could be that inductive reasoning needs to be even more cautious and thorough, that it needs to be more relentless than ever in its dismantling of pre-determined beliefs and ideologies and theories. In so doing, it could enable us to live a life free of ideological bias, a claim, it seems, that a number of our own contemporary poets and critics are making.

But the other conclusion is that this previous conclusion is a fantasy, an ideological limitation masquerading as its opposite. In this view, a rational induction-based pragmatism can never free itself entirely of other kinds of ideological baggage. There’s no value free, neutral objectivity to be had even when one is a careful inductionist. Further, pragmatic inductionism cannot get beyond ideology because it is itself an ideology, one full of its own beliefs and methodologies based on those beliefs.

The problem with Holmes’ statement that one should never theorize without facts and therefore avoid all bias in theorizing is that the idea of being able to do so is not only already a theory, but probably also a fantasy. Inductive reading of the facts suggests that the likelihood of maintaining such a point of view in a person’s actual behavior is microscopically slim at best.

A good inductive reasoner should never believe in something that can be shown inductively to be a fantasy.

Still, the notion of a radically pure pragmatic inductionism is a theory which despite its limitations has worthwhile applications. As “A Scandal In Bohemia” shows, insisting on a pragmatic examination of our beliefs is profoundly necessary. But denying that we have values because we believe only in practicality is a conclusion that induction itself cannot support.

That said, what this story of Holmes and Doyle and Custer and induction finally shows is not simply the old point (though still necessary, it seems, given many recent discussions of poetry) that it’s impossible to escape ideology. It’s not simply that pragmatic method and an understanding of how ideology functions are useful counterbalances, in that pragmatic method can sometimes successfully critique ideology and that understanding the power of ideology can provide a useful critique of pragmatism. In fact, it shows that we can know all this and still not understand the ways in which ideology is shaping our thinking. An understanding of how ideology functions is not the same as understanding our own ideological investments.

As it turns out, what Holmes and Doyle and Custer also show us is that the ideology whose limits we may be least likely to recognize is our own.

Women and Indians at the Limits of Induction (Part Two)

Talking the Sherlock Holmes-General George A. Custer Blues

(AKA Women and Indians at the Limits of Induction)

Part Two (Part One can be found on the blog post for Wednesday, June 3)


In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the story opens with Watson discussing the admiration Holmes has for one particular woman, Irene Adler, in contrast to Holmes’ often generally dismissive view of women.

Holmes, in this story, is going to be defeated by Irene Adler, precisely because his view of women clouds his inductive capacity when he encounters a woman whose inductive and other skills are at least as great as his own.

At a key moment in the story, Holmes bases his attempts to retrieve a photograph from Adler on his stereotyped conception of women’s behavior. As he explains to Watson, “ When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing which she values most. It is a perfectly overpowering impulse, and I have more than once taken advantage of it. In the case of the Darlington substitution scandal it was of use to me, and also in the Arnsworth Castle business. A married woman grabs at her baby; an unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box. Now it was clear to me that our lady of to-day had nothing in the house more precious to her than what we are in quest of. She would rush to secure it. The alarm of fire was admirably done. The smoke and shouting were enough to shake nerves of steel. She responded beautifully. The photograph is in a recess behind a sliding panel just above the right bell-pull. She was there in an instant, and I caught a glimpse of it as she half-drew it out.”

It’s important to understand that Holmes’ generalization about women in this instance does lead to temporary success. Adler acts as Holmes suggests women do by definition. Holmes manages to witness all this because he has disguised himself as a clergyman who came to Adler’s aid and was wounded when her carriage was surrounded by street toughs (themselves actually also acting on Holmes’ orders). She brings him into her house to help him.

Holmes’ mistake is that, while watching her behavior, he is unaware that she is watching his just as capably. After the incident, Adler realizes that Holmes has figured out her secret, and she succeeds in escaping him.

Not only is Adler as capable an inductionist as Holmes, she is also equally adept at another of Holmes’ key methods for solving crimes: acting ability. Adler disguises herself as a man, a “slim youth” as Watson describes her, in order to follow Holmes and find out what he’s doing. In a letter to Holmes that he receives after her escape she notes: “But, you know, I have been trained as an actress myself. Male costume is nothing new to me. I often take advantage of the freedom which it gives.”

Holmes is defeated by a woman with the capability of disguising herself as a man. A woman who has all the talents he has, with one great advantage over him. She does not underestimate her opponent, as he has, based on stereotypes of gender. As she implies in her letter, gender is less a condition of biological fact and limitation than one of costume and performance. She defeats Holmes because she understands gender better than he does.

Holmes’ astonishment at her ability and her defeat of him genuinely leads him to rethink his attitude towards women. Watson concludes the story by noting, “And that was how a great scandal threatened to affect the kingdom of Bohemia, and how the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman's wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her photograph, it is always under the honourable title of the woman.”

Custer encountered a similar problem to Holmes, a moment when his inductive abilities were undone at least partly by stereotyping an opponent. His mistake took place in the real world and the consequences were much worse, leading to his own death and that of more than 200 of his men.

Up to the day of his death at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Custer’s role in the Indian Wars had been complicated and troubled by some of his behavior and by political difficulties. He was suspended from command for a year after being accused of going AWOL to visit his wife. After the end of the Civil War, Custer had supported the policies of President Andrew Johnson, earning him the longtime enmity of the General who soon became President, Ulysses Grant. In Washington DC, Custer was at a one point accused of perjury. It was only by begging Brigadier General Alfred Terry for reinstatement that Custer was allowed to lead the 7th Cavalry to the Battle of the Little Big Horn. In fact some people have suggested that Custer’s desire to regain his command, his image, and freedom from Terry’s patronage contributed to his reckless approach on that particular day.

There was however at least one other key difference that contributed to his fate. Custer did not think of the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors he was facing in the same way he thought of the Confederate Troops he had faced during the Civil War. Perhaps because of bravado, but more so probably because he really did believe it, Custer claimed that he could "could whip any Indian village on the Plains" with the 7th Cavalry. He even turned down an offer from General Terry for an additional four companies from the 2nd Calvary. Custer believed he didn’t need those troops because he was only fighting Indians.

Custer was less thoughtful about his inductions in this particular war context. He allowed his ideological convictions about Indians to overcome his usual reasoning. If he had been facing an army of white men, he likely would have behaved differently.

It might seem therefore that the Sherlock Holmes-General George A. Custer blues all adds up to one lesson: letting cultural stereotypes stand in the way of careful inductive reasoning is a mistake, sometimes a fatal one.

It turns out that the lesson isn’t that simple.

(End of Part Two)

Talking the Sherlock Holmes-General George A. Custer Blues (Part One)

Talking the Sherlock Holmes-General George A. Custer Blues

(AKA Women and Indians at the Limits of Induction)

Part One

In the story “A Scandal In Bohemia,” Sherlock Holmes tells his friend Watson, “You have not observed. And yet you have seen.” According to Holmes, while Watson is surrounded by the same sense data as Holmes, he does not register and process the details. Watson, unlike Holmes, is insufficiently attuned to his own senses and the data obtainable from it.

Holmes’ great attention to sense data is one of his key detecting skills and is displayed at the beginning of most Holmes stories. In a common opening to the stories, he notices people’s physical features, expressions, clothing and possessions and draws many inferences about those people based on what he notices. He is similarly observant about all aspects of material reality and uses his observations of them throughout the stories to determine how crimes have been committed and who committed them.

Although the Holmes stories speak of this process as deduction, in fact it’s an act of induction: Holmes reaches likely conclusions based on his prior observations.

As he also tells Watson in that same story, "I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” Holmes only theorizes when the data is sufficient to support his ideas. Although he acknowledges that error is possible in drawing conclusions, the conclusions he draws are nonetheless based only on facts, never on pre-defined suppositions or ideologies. Given a small margin for error, his conclusions are therefore themselves almost always facts as well. One might say that—in theory—Holmes never theorizes. Instead he moves from one clue to another until he can draw a correct conclusion.

After graduating last in his class of 34 cadets from the U.S. military academy in 1861, George Armstrong Custer would almost certainly have played no major role in U.S. history had the Civil War not just broken out, leading to a need for officers, even those who had performed in school as pathetically as class clown Custer had.

Once in active service, however, Custer distinguished himself quickly. He first made a name for himself in the Peninsula Campaign of 1862 after overhearing General Barnard say, in considering how to cross the Chickhamony River, “I wish I knew how deep it is.” Custer astonished everyone by riding his horse right into the river. “That’s how deep it is, General,” he is reported to have said from atop his horse mid-river. He was soon thereafter allowed to lead an attack across the river.

It was this moment of reckless induction that first gained attention for Custer and defined the key characteristic of his military career. As Evan Connell pointed out in his account Son of the Morning Star, Custer made his military fame through one battle tactic only. In battle, Custer charged. Yet as others have pointed out, the charges he led were always meticulously and inductively planned. Custer always studied details of the battlefield and enemy closely before deciding whether a charge was possible, and if so, where would be best to charge.

But make no mistake: Custer was committed to charging. Despite the fact that his flamboyant, foppish dress (he preferred cinnamon-scented hair oil that made his long blond hair sparkle as it hung down in ringlets below his hat) often alienated soldiers under his command, he won them over by his willingness to stand at the front of the charges he led, instead of lurking behind the troops as other military leaders often did. Custer managed to succeed repeatedly with his capable battlefield inductions and thoughtfully reckless charges. Careful inductionist that he was, however, he acknowledged that his success and survival were in some ways a matter of luck.

Both Holmes and Custer, in their entirely different and obsessive ways, are pragmatic inductionists.

One key difference, among many, between these men is that Holmes, as a fictional character, never had to put his methods to the test in the real world. Not so for Custer, unfortunately.

It’s incorrect, however, to think of Holmes as a superhero detective who solves every case and makes no mistakes and has no weaknesses. Along with the emotional torment he goes through when lacking an engaging case, Holmes turns out despite his belief in facts to have his biases and ideological pre-suppositions.

Perhaps his key bias is against women. In fact, the story “A Scandal In Bohemia” is designed for Arthur Conan Doyle to teach both Holmes and his readers a key lesson: generalized biases against others, stereotyping and dismissing their abilities based on considering them part of a general category of human beings, is an error. And it’s an error that careful attention to the principles of induction can correct.

In “Scandal,” the story opens with Watson discussing the admiration Holmes has for one particular woman, Irene Adler, in contrast to Holmes’ often generally dismissive view of women.

Holmes, in this story, is going to be defeated by Irene Adler, precisely because his view of women clouds his inductive capacity when he encounters a woman whose inductive and other skills are at least as great as his own.

(End of Part One)

Good Americans Hate Cities

There has been a lot of furor lately over the comments of Horace Engdahl, the lead judge of the group who decides the Nobel Prize, made several weeks ago about American literature, calling it too parochial, isolated, and ignorant in contrast to the greater cosmopolitanism of various European literatures. He later backpedaled a bit, saying that he was speaking of no particular author but just American literature in general. But aggressive debate has continued, with many Americans defending American literature and saying Engdahl knows nothing about it, while other critics (see for instance the ongoing discussion on Johannes Goransson’s blog) see in that defense a continuation of an American bullying refusal to engage with literature of other cultures and languages.

I’m not interested in taking a stand on American literature in some general way as much as I am in noting that American parochial anti-cosmopolitanism does indeed exist. In fact it has a long and particular history, one that in the literary furor nobody seems to be talking about in much detail.

For reasons that might seem obvious, early European settlers of America were themselves often anti-European. There’s nothing like desiring or needing to run from a place to turn somebody against it, and early Euro-American culture is full of Europeans who despise Europe, even while a whole range of other attitudes also remain possible.

In fact the rhetoric of colonial America often claims to be in absolute opposition to the principles of Europe. One of these basic principles has to do with cities. European cosmopolitanism was often seen by early Americans as the source of European moral and political corruption. In contrast, colonial Americans often defined themselves in terms of rural virtue. The good, independent farmer whose virtue comes from the land is a stock figure in American culture. Maybe no text defines this figure better than the 1782 book Letters from an American Farmer by John Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, a French aristocrat who came to America, changed his name from Michel Guillaume to John Hector St. John, and worked for a few years as a farmer before eventually returning to France and living out his days there, to some extent against his will.

What’s important to note about Crevecoeur is that Europeans can have pro-rural, pro-American, anti-cosmopolitan ideas about Europe too. The idea of rural virtue as an antidote to the decadent city is one developed by Europeans and their Euro-American descendants.

Nonetheless, much of American culture is based in the distrust of cities and remains that way to this day. For instance, one of the things that was so radical about the work of Walt Whitman that we might now forget is not simply that he celebrates American urban immigrant culture, but that he writes about the city at all. In the 1850s the city wasn’t considered by American poets to be a suitable subject for poetry, since the city lacked morally elevating principles. In fact cities are notably absent from most of early American literature, occasionally making an appearance in a book like Charles Brockdon Brown’s 1799 novel Arthur Mervyn, which discusses Philadelphia mainly as a vast gothic breeding ground of contagious illness, not to mention criminality and promiscuity.

Jane Jacobs, in her 1961 book The Life and Death of American Cities, details how the history of urban planning in America is founded in and determined by anti-urban attitudes. That is, the people involved in planning American cities up even into the 1960s did so from the perspective that the city was immoral and that good city planners should make cities feel more rural. Instead of building cities on the idea that urban spaces prosper when neighbors interact on the streets, American cities are often full of anti-urban spaces that try to foster an illusion of privacy but instead mainly destroy street life and turn streets into often dangerous, isolated places.

Another important element contributing to American isolationism is the literal geography of the United States, especially as that geography interacts with the history of the belief that U.S. rural democratic goodness is opposed to European cosmopolitan authoritarian corruption. Both the size of the United States and its distance from other countries that speak other languages mean that it’s more possible for people in the U.S. to grow up without interacting at all, or more than barely, with people who speak languages other than English. Certainly I grew up never hearing any language other than English spoken by anybody I knew well or even casually. I heard Spanish on several trips to Mexico and French once on a trip to Quebec. Although I took six years of French and two of German, I can barely speak a word of either of those languages. In the kinds of schools I grew up in, taking language classes was considered by other teenagers something for sissies, of course. But it also went hand in hand with comments about “When am I ever going to use any of this actually?” I had no opportunities to go to Europe as a boy (in fact I first went when I was 33) , and spending a few days in Mexico or Canada as a boy with my father hardly constituted any kind of major immersion in another culture. I’m not always sure whether people understand the degree of linguistic isolation that exists in many parts of the United States even now. Europeans, of course, other than the most isolated rural ones, are in general much more used to the idea of being around multiple languages. At their worst they tend to see American ineptness with other languages as a kind of moral failing, which in some ways it may be. But it’s also a result of a real linguistic isolation that Europeans don’t have in as significant a degree.

Add all these things together, and one has a country that to this day is often very resistant to the idea of influence from the outside world. Admittedly I find it odd to consider that American isolationist rhetoric hasn’t changed all that hugely in over 300 years, and that it hasn’t significantly changed as the United States has developed from a small country to the world’s predominant military power. But it hasn’t. Rhetoric about good country people is essential to ideas of American exceptionalism—the idea that the past and destiny of the United States make it uniquely the best nation in the history of the world. It’s really both astounding and not surprising, actually, to see some of our current candidates for president and vice-president use the same rhetoric about America and the outside world that they might have used several hundred years ago.

One last point. U.S. isolationism is not only subject to political manipulation, it’s also volatile. While the Republican party is generally more likely to call up this rhetoric and make use of it, isolationism now and then swerves to embrace a more democratic, populist perspective that has sometimes put liberals in office. Consider this: of the 70 to 80 percent of Americans who now feel that the war against Iraq has been a mistake, it’s still only the same 35 to 40 percent of us who feel it is a mistake because of what it's doing to Iraq. Another group of a similar size is more likely to believe that the war is a mistake because it’s a waste of U.S. money and U.S. lives in a country far away that we shouldn’t have cared about in the first place. In other words, if the war against Iraq does finally end, the fact that many U.S. citizens would prefer not to even know that a place like Iraq exists may play a significant role in ending it.

The Leaning Golden Virgin at Albert

It’s not so much that people forget the past as that they’ve never known about it in the first place.

Of course, the past can never demand that we remember it, since it’s no longer there. Only from the vantage of the present can anyone insist on the value of the past.

Still, social institutions, and the common social attitudes and behaviors related to those institutions, form the ground from which most activity and thinking in the present takes place, and because those institutions come from the past, the past greatly shapes not only what we think but even what we can imagine. The past is the only point of comparison we have for anything taking place in the present. In some cases the past remains literally active, in the way for instance outdated laws remain enforceable or landmines can remain deadly in a field long after a war has ended. Anything that we experience or believe we know will always be connected to what others we have encountered have experienced or believe they know, which is to say, connected to the past.

But there is very little in the past that requires us to recognize this connection. It’s easy to know little or nothing about anything that has happened to anybody else at any time. The insistence of many people on the moral significance of the past (from whatever perspective) hardly means that the significance they insist upon will be recognized by others.

There’s also nothing about the past that requires we remember it in the way people in the past remembered the past. There’s nothing that automatically determines what our connection to the past must mean in the present. In the present, one can choose to think about the past or not, and one can choose to think about it in the way one chooses. And although even the possible range of choices is greatly shaped by the past, it’s not controlled by it.

Still, there are certain features of the past more likely to impress themselves upon the present, simply because more people in the present feel a connection to that feature of the past, or because a few people feel that connection very strongly and make it known. Connections of this kind can also include a powerful need to reject some particular idea or moment from the past, although such rejection often calls simultaneously for remembering. The most obvious examples are genocides, which we are often called to remember so that they never happen again.

Two common social tendencies now are for people to believe in the values they claim the past represents or to judge the past’s limitations. Both use the past as a ground for assertions about the present. It’s only a truism to say that we can tell a lot about a given society from how people in it think about the past. Nonetheless, mainly, at this time, the past is treated as something to believe in or to critique. As, that is, progress, which can only be positive or negative, something to be for or against, in various ways and degrees.

What seems easiest to neglect about the past is therefore not the dominant paradigms of how people understood themselves in some particular place in time, or how the past looks from the vantage of the most commonly shared paradigms in the present for judging the failures of the past. The first is true because many people still understand themselves in a way close to those past dominant paradigms, and the second because people’s desire to imagine a future different from the past leads them to highlight what seems the past’s greatest shortcomings.

Instead, it is the subtle shifts in how the past becomes the present, or how a part of the past fails to survive into the present, thus making the present irretrievably different from the past, that today are easiest to know nothing about, since such instances may not constitute either a support of past values or a critique of them.

What often gets lost therefore is the strangeness of the past and the strangeness of the present and how the strangeness of the past changes into the strangeness of the present. Believing in the past, or critiquing it, often become ways of normalizing the strangeness of past and present. Often there is a particularity and oddity about the past that resists human paradigms for understanding it. Our concepts of history can never fully reclaim the past, but instead shape what we choose to think of as significant about it. The rest vanishes, until a time when someone thinks of it as significant again.

I’ve been considering the strangeness of the past, and how it becomes the strangeness of the present, and how easy it is not to know about any of that, while reading Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (thanks to Clint Burnham for suggesting it to me). The book explores changes in behavior and thinking caused by World War I, mainly but not exclusively those changes that occurred in British life. Here are some of the strange elements of the past that Fussell mentions that I had not forgotten but never known, although now that I do know them they seem telling more than surprising. All of them have in them something of the strangeness of the past, although none are too strange to be understood.

“Now volunteers were no longer sufficient to fill the ranks. In October Lord Derby’s ‘scheme’—a genteel form of conscription—was promulgated, and at the beginning of 1916, with the passing of the Military Service Act, England began to train her first conscript army, an event which could be said to mark the beginning of the modern world.” (11)

“Another index of the prevailing innocence” [before WWI] “is a curious prophylaxis of language. One could use with security words which a few years later, after the war, would constitute obvious double entendres. One could say intercourse, or erection, or ejaculation without any risk of evoking a smile or a leer. Henry James’ innocent employment of the word tool is as well known as Browning’s artless misapprehension about the word twat. Even the official order transmitted from British headquarters to the armies at 6:50 on the morning of November 11 1918, warned that ‘there will be no intercourse of any description with the enemy.’” (23)

“As these examples suggest, there were ‘national styles’ in trenches as in other things. The French trenches were nasty, cynical, efficient, and temporary. Kipling remembered the smell of delicious cooking emanating from some in Alsace. The English were amateur, vague, ad hoc, and temporary. The German were efficient, clean, pedantic, and permanent.” (45)

“The 1916 image of never-ending war has about it, to be sure, a trace of the consciously whimsical and the witty hyperbolic. But there is nothing but the literal in this headline from the New York Times for September 1, 1972: U.S. AIDES IN VIETNAM/SEE AN UNENDING WAR. Thus the drift of modern history domesticates the fantastic and normalizes the unspeakable. And the catastrophe that begins it is the Grear War.” (74)

The history of poetry and the moment of composition

While you’re actually writing a poem, how conscious are you of the history of poetry? Are you constantly thinking about how your poem will relate to the poems that have come before, or do you not think about that at all? Are you somewhere in between? Are you overwhelmed by the anxiety of influence, indifferent to it, perhaps hostile?

I’m not looking for right and wrong answers here; I’m just curious. Although I do think the answers will tell us things worth considering.

I don’t mean history more generally, by the way, just the history of poetry. And I don’t mean what you think about before or after writing, I mean literally while involved in the process of composition. And lastly I don’t mean in terms of the history of your own poems, but the history of poems written by others.

I would also welcome answers about this relative to fiction writing and the history of fiction, or song writing and the history of music.