'The Aesthetic Blush'

One of my favorite essays was written about prose by a poet. No paradox there. Apart from the strictures of meter and rhyme, there’s no good reason prose can’t be composed as musically and concisely as poetry. Years ago, Dave Lull sent me a link to Donald Justice’s “The Prose Sublime,” first published in the Michigan Quarterly Review in 1988 and collected in A Donald Justice Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (1991). It’s an essay I periodically reread, in part because Justice cites the occasional excellence of the prose of Sherwood Anderson, an early enthusiasm of mine. I also like that he explicitly rejects “purple prose,” the flowery stuff soft-headed writers think is poetic. One quality of good prose is that it adheres, like lichen to a rock, to precise thought. 

I want to point out the witty subtitle Justice gives his essay: “Or, the Deep Sense of Things Belonging Together, Inexplicably.” Justice is suggesting that our expectations of prose are modest or even nonexistent compared to poetry. Prose is deemed utilitarian, a purposeful avoidance of frills. It means business. Poetry is lightweight and frivolous. But one of our deepest sources of joy is language excellently deployed, regardless of the form. “The reaction to prose as to poetry,” Justice writes, “proves in experience to be much the same, a sort of transport, a frisson, a thrilled recognition, which, ‘flashing forth at the right moment,’ as Longinus has it, “scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt.”

 

 Some of our best writers of prose were poets. I’ll cite only Yvor Winters, Louise Bogan and J.V. Cunningham. Take this from Cunningham’s “The Journal of John Cardan” (1961), collected in The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham (2024). Note the absence of gushing and the tight focus:  

 

“So we save ourselves from the sentimental death of the hearts, and at the same time protect ourselves from engrossment in our wayward wishes. For a man must live divided against himself: only the selfishly insane can integrate experience to the heart’s desire, and only the emotionally sterile would not wish to.”

 

And this: “No dignity, except in silence; no virtue, except in sinuous exacting speech.”

 

Justice’s subtitle reminds me of Guy Davenport’s Objects on a Table (1998), subtitled Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature. In his study of still-life painting, he refers to his four lectures as a “disarray of perceptions and conjunctions in which the unlikelihood of harmony vies with the promise of coherence.” This, incidentally, nicely describes Davenport’s customary artistic strategy (in essays, stories, poems and paintings). We might call his a unifying imagination. He doesn’t fall for the modern temptation to see chaos everywhere – nor does Justice. Davenport juxtaposes disparate objects, words and images, and finds in them a humble, reassuring, sometimes poignant balance. Sensibilities like Davenport’s and Justice’s don’t settle for lazy, passive nihilism. Here’s how Justice closes his essay:

 

“[C]onnections, if any, remain unstated, likewise meanings. As used to be remarked of poems, such passages resist paraphrase. Their power is hidden in mystery. There is, at most, an illusion of seeing momentarily into the heart of things – and the moment vanishes. It is this, perhaps, which produces the aesthetic blush.”