The Fredösphere

Is it time for a Longfellow boomlet?

I was complaining to the wifeösphere about the tendency among academics to fetishize good taste.  I was thinking of a tendency to be motivated more by a fear of being laughed at rather than a desire for clear, bold expression.  The fact is, in the creative process, there's a kind of cleaning up work one can do that involves a negative activity: the removal of that which offends.  That process can injure a work.  Some highly admired artists' entire oeuvre is characterized by perfect good taste on the micro level, and a complete lack of any compelling reason to pay attention on the macro level.  Among composers in this category allow me to nominate William Schumann.  (Schumann partisans are invited to prove me wrong.  I freely admit I may be wrong.)

(Of course, it's kind of ironic that this post is one of my duller ones.)

The wifeösphere didn't buy my full argument -- was good taste the supreme objective for Andy Warhol?  Still, I don't think I'm completely off base.  I don't like the way this tendency undermines middlebrow art.  I believe art needs a ladder, a gentle continuum from low brow to high, to assist each art consumer (dang, is there a better word than "consumer"?) to work his way up the ladder as high as he can go.  I don't like the power law implications of an attitude that makes the good an enemy of the perfect.

My nephew Daniel reports his professors don't consider Longfellow worthy of study.  Yes, the guy personifies the dreaded Victorian era, and his subjects tend to the melodramatic.  But shoot, the guy had poetry oozing out of his pores.  It's interesting to note he taught at Harvard.  Could Longfellow get hired at Harvard today?

Does anyone think Longfellow deserves more attention?  Here's one.  Here's another (a non-pdf transcription is also available).  Here's the opposition research (which displays admirable restraint; the name-calling is withheld until the second paragraph).