Pastoral, pragmatism, and twentieth-century American poetry [1st ed] 9780230117150, 0230117155

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Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry

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Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in the burgeoning field of 20th and 21st century poetics. Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems. Topics that are bibliographic, pedagogic, that concern the social field of poetry, and reflect on the history of poetry studies are valued as well. This series focuses both on individual poets and texts and on larger movements, poetic institutions, and questions about poetic authority, social identifications, and aesthetics. Language and the Renewal of Society in Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson The American Cratylus Carla Billitteri Modernism and Poetic Inspiration The Shadow Mouth Jed Rasula The Social Life of Poetry Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism Chris Green Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry Berrigan, Antin, Silliman, and Hejinian David W. Huntsperger Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse H.D., Loy, and Toomer Lara Vetter Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in “New American” Poetry Andrew Mossin The Poetry of Susan Howe History, Theology, Authority Will Montgomery Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry Ross Hair

Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry Ann Marie Mikkelsen

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Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Ann Marie Mikkelsen

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PASTORAL, PRAGMATISM, AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY

Copyright © Ann Marie Mikkelsen, 2011. All rights reserved. Excerpts from poems and unpublished material by John Ashbery reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt., Inc., on behalf of the author, and Houghton Library, Harvard University. Excerpts from unpublished material by William Carlos Williams Copyright © 2010, by the Estates of Paul H. Williams and William Eric Williams. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Portions of Chapter 4 appeared previously as “ ‘Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!’: Wallace Stevens Figurations of Masculinity,” Journal of Modern Literature 27.1/2 (Fall 2003): 105–121. © Indiana University Press. Reprinted with permission from the publisher. Portions of Chapter 3 appeared previously as “ ‘The Truth About Us’ ”: Pastoral, Pragmatism, and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson,” American Literature 75.3 (September 2003): 601–627. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10583–6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mikkelsen, Ann Marie. Pastoral, pragmatism, and twentieth-century American poetry / Ann Marie Mikkelsen. p. cm.—(Modern and contemporary poetry and poetics) ISBN 978–0–230–10583–6 (hardback) 1. Pastoral poetry, American—History and criticism 2. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism 3. Pragmatism in literature. I. Title. PS309.P37M55 2011 811⬘.509358209734—dc22

2010028253

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: February 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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For Dan, Saul, and Abe.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction 1 Pastoral Ideology and the Pragmatic Response 2 Tramp Culture and the Cult of Pan: Robert Frost’s Pastoral of Class Mobility 3 “The Truth About Us”: Pastoral, Pragmatism, and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson 4 “Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!”: Wallace Stevens’s Figurations of Masculinity 5 “The Mooring of Starting Out”: John Ashbery’s Pastoral Origins Conclusion: Late Twentieth-Century Pastoral: Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Robertson, and the Continuity of a Mode

1 21 39 67 93 123 151

Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

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his project on pastoral has had many shepherds. When this book was no more than a vague idea, several people at the University of California, Irvine, helped me turn it into something more substantial. Laura O’Connor has been an insightful reader, adviser, and friend, always ready to offer advice from the front lines of the profession. Ever attentive to nuance, J. Hillis Miller always took the time to read and listen, even in retirement. Chris Beach, Brook Thomas, and Michael P. Clark were extremely liberal with their time and encouragement. I continue to be thankful to Cathy Jurca and Cindy Weinstein for inviting me to join their seminar on Place in American Literature at the Huntington Library, and especially for Cathy’s continued enthusiasm for my work. From the moment I heard her glorious readings of Joyce in seminar, I have considered myself lucky to count Margot Norris as a mentor. Her steady confidence and quiet determination have emboldened me and countless others. I also deeply appreciate the support of a Faculty Fellowship and a Regents Fellowship from University of California, Irvine, as well as a W. M. Keck Foundation Fellowship from the Huntington Library. As a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, I was privileged to spend many enjoyable hours in the company of Joseph Entin, Andrew Jewett, Page Fortna, Jay Grossman, David Greenberg, Eric Bettinger, Rob Chodat, Jona Hansen, Matthew Lindsey, Eileen Babbitt, Crystal Feimster, Adam Webb, and Jim Carroll. I am grateful to the Academy for hosting me for two years, and to Leslie Berlowitz, who inaugurated the Visiting Scholars program. I was especially privileged to meet Leo Marx as well as Bonnie Costello during my years in Cambridge, both of whom offer inspiring models of scholarship and generosity. At Harvard’s History and Literature program, I could not have asked for a better director than Steve Biel. I am especially grateful for the intellectual challenge and

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wonderful collegiality provided by my friends and fellow lecturers Raphael Allison, Michele Martinez, Kim Reilly, Amy Kittelstrom, and Lisa Szefel. My co-teachers John O’Keefe and Andy Muldoon deserve special thanks for their patience and good humor. Marit MacArthur, Liesl Olsen, Beth Roberts, Maria Farland, and Tim Gray offered much appreciated support over the years as fellow readers of poetry. During my years at Florida State University, I was fortunate to have exceptionally welcoming and intellectually engaged colleagues. I especially miss the good company of Robin Goodman, Barry Faulk, Andrew Epstein, Leigh Edwards, Meegan Kennedy, Nancy Warren, and Hunt Hawkins. This manuscript would have been even longer in the making without a First Year Assistant Professor Grant from Florida State during the spring of 2006. I am thankful for Jay Clayton’s hospitality and that of the Vanderbilt English department. Alistair Newbern provided an array of advice, legal and otherwise, here in Nashville, and you couldn’t ask for a better fiddler. Ed Rubin at Vanderbilt Law School kindly facilitated my work here in Nashville. At Palgrave Macmillan, an anonymous reader as well as Michael Thurston offered bracing and beneficial advice, helping me give the manuscript its final form. Many thanks to Rachel Blau DuPlessis for including me in her exciting new series. Sarah Burley, Ajitha Reddy, and Rachel Cohen have been there since the beginning. Sarah Bilston, Crystal Feimster, Jane Rosenzweig, and Kim Reilly have provided the best of companionship as well as models of scholarship. Helen Oestherheld, Melissa Sanchez, Chris Diffee, Jennifer Williams, and Erika Nanes gave me friendship and intellectual fellowship. Over all the years, my sister Erika Mikkelsen Halford was always only a phone call away. My parents, Curtis and Mary Mikkelsen, have been extremely supportive of my work and unstinting in their praise. I will always be grateful beyond words for their generosity and love. Iris Mikkelsen always believed in me and is still missed. Saul and Abe Sharfstein have transformed my life completely and always for the better. Daniel Sharfstein has made everything possible: best friend, attentive editor, fellow writer, kindred spirit, and husband. I never thought I would be so lucky.

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Introduction

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mong Robert Frost’s earliest works is a poem entitled “Pan Desponds,” a verse the poet would soon rechristen “Pan with Us” (1902). It is one of several pastoral poems in Frost’s early volumes, many of which nod to this ancient literary mode by depicting fields, gardens, shepherding, farming, and singing, while subtly emphasizing the tension between simple country folk and the sophisticated poetic voice that represents them. Although at first glance a relatively traditional verse, this lyric is also marked by certain incongruities that are particular to works by Frost and other poets who adapt pastoral themes to twentieth-century American realities. The speaker begins by describing how a god appeared in a deserted pasture: Pan came out of the woods one day— His skin and his hair and his eyes were gray, The gray of the moss of walls were they— And stood in the sun and looked his fill At wooded valley and wooded hill.1

Pan’s appearance is unusual for a classical god, his coloring especially disconcerting. Although his “gray” is ostensibly linked to the “moss,” it is more suggestive of complexions associated with age, disease, death, or industrial pollution than the merry, mischievous body commonly associated with the god of ancient Arcady. He is set apart from human society and appears to have little to do other than wander in the woods at the edges of farmland designated by “walls.” In fact, he sounds less like a divinity, even in disguise, than what contemporaries would have called a “tramp.” During the economic depressions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tramps were increasingly commonplace in rural New England, the setting of much of Frost’s work, and Frost wrote a significant number of poems

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in which tramps figure prominently. The figure of the tramp in American poetry also had an important antecedent in Walt Whitman’s portrayal of himself as a tramp-like “loafer.” Both contexts are significant for Frost’s poem. Like Whitman’s tramp, Frost’s Pan appears untroubled, even proprietary in his attitude toward his surroundings. Despite his odd pallor and state of dispossession, he is not sad, aloof, or despairing; this Pan is a classically enigmatic and playful figure. After surveying with satisfaction the deserted countryside, Pan makes a grand gesture of resigning his role as a pastoral poet, relinquishing his duties to nature itself. Acknowledging that “times were changed from what they were: / Such pipes kept less of power to stir,” Pan apparently finds no place for “pipes of pagan mirth” in a world measured by “new terms of worth.” The poems ends, however, on a decidedly ambiguous note: “He laid him down on the sunburned earth / And raveled a flower and looked away. / Play? Play?—What should he play?” Only superficially carefree, Pan’s behavior throughout the poem suggests less social irresponsibility than a calculated bid for cultural relevance. Despite his ostensible delight in finding himself alone, Pan’s actions suggests that he—historically a social god—is very much in need of an audience. The poet as observer and performer, Pan personifies the multiple roles of the modern artist. Although it seems a casual act, even Pan’s idle gesture of “ravel[ing]” is far from unstudied; a term that denotes processes of clarification and confusion at once, “ravel” suggests Pan’s functions as cultural critic and artistic innovator. Frost was not alone in identifying this obscure, itinerant figure with such cultural potency. The philosopher and psychologist William James identified similar qualities in the Whitmanian tramp, identifying him as a paradigmatically pragmatic individual, an ideally dispassionate observer of a world in need of a rejuvenating moral and critical spirit.2 Deeming Whitman’s tramp persona a “worthless and unproductive being” whose disregard for social convention “will change the usual standards of human value in the twinkling of an eye,” James offers observations that are applicable to Frost’s tramplike Pan, whose odd “ravel[ing]” evokes similar feelings of challenge and unease in readers. Frost and James’s parallel invocations of the poet as tramp are telling and significant, indicating modern manifestations of the pastoral mode at the dawn of a new American century. In retrospect, the twentieth century seems to have been anything but pastoral. In the wake of the frontier’s “end,” cities grew and rural populations thinned. Yet even as the Anglo-Saxon farmer and his family became less central to the nation’s understanding of itself, pastoral imagery and narratives retained a hold over the cultural imagination. To the extent that

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pastoral was and always has been about conceptions of the ideal self and citizen (traditionally white, middle-class, and male in the United States) and that self’s relation to the community or body politic as a whole, pastoral could and did adapt to new realities. Over the course of this book, I argue that Pan and twentieth-century American pastoral figures like him embody the modern poet as “representative man,” and that this modern pastoral poet closely resembled the figure of the poet as described by pragmatist philosophers William James and John Dewey. For James and Dewey both, the poet was a creative force who embodied the very essence of pragmatic thought, and each explicitly associated the poet’s perspective with their visions of re-imagining of the ideal American self and community. Drawing upon explicitly pastoral rhetoric in their philosophical approaches to modern ethics, James and Dewey’s pastoral pragmatism influenced and developed in tandem with what I term the “pragmatic pastorals” of their literary counterparts. Frost’s lyric, for example, suggests an array of readings that invoke pragmatic principles. Never a fixed entity, Frost’s Pan constantly calls attention to his shaping by and his concurrent shaping of turn-of-the-century American culture, the flow and flux of subject/object relations. After all, Pan’s disturbing grayness could be read both as an indication of his integration into his New England environment, complete with entrenched fieldstone walls, and as a reminder to readers that the environment itself was being altered as the result of industrialization in cities such as Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Frost spent much of his youth. Far from spontaneous, Pan’s music is derived from his experience in the world, experience that Dewey characterized as crucial to creating local and everyday life and art. Similarly, his piqued refusal to “play,” far from genuine, functions as a kind of manipulative withholding, his threatened withdrawal enabling him to test pragmatically the “value” of his art. Pan repeatedly gestures toward the artist’s inevitable integration into the modern marketplace and public sphere rather than any sort of imagined removal. Far from an antique remnant of a bygone pastoral age, Frost’s Pan is clearly “with us” and a part of our world, if we will have him. Indeed, the crucial question the poem concludes with and refuses to answer implies the presence or absence of an audience capable of assimilating Pan’s art. The unanswered questions as to whether or not Pan should “play,” and if so “what should he play,” suggest that no one may wish to or even be capable of hearing his music—or, to the extent that Pan is a version of the poet himself, Frost’s poems. Complicating this scenario, it is a separate lyric speaker apart from Pan who actually “speaks” this poem. With his careful rhymes, neat stanzas, and decorous references to “sylvan

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signs,” among other markers of gentility, the omniscient speaker of the poem (written in a form of free, indirect discourse) poses an intriguing contrast to the unruly Pan, who appears to be characterized by a more colloquial diction (he declares a bird’s song “music enough for him, for one”) and overly dramatic posturing. The poem’s speaker and Pan both vie for the reader’s attention and affiliation, each claiming the mantel of the modern poet. The tension between these lyric subjects speaks to real questions poets were beginning to ask themselves at the beginning of the twentieth century as the United States population became more literate and cosmopolitan in its tastes. Which voice best speaks to or for the modern public? What kinds of voices do modern audiences expect to hear in modern poems: voices like those of the people, or those more educated and refined? Who are the American people, anyway? Where do they reside, and what voices matter to them? The implied singing contest between the two voices (also typical of traditional pastoral) calls for some process of judgment while holding any final resolutions at bay. Declining to take sides, provoking questions rather than providing answers, Frost’s poetic and social subject position seems to hover somewhere between the two voices implied in this poem. These voices in turn should be understood as constituted by a complex web of tensions between high and low, elite and mass culture, the masculine and the feminine, all of which collectively encode the wider social system that modern pastoral poetry continually addresses. The poet’s articulation of identity with regard to “low” and often potentially transgressive individuals such as the tramp, his contingent relation to an increasingly stratified public sphere and marketplace, the nature of the poem itself as a work of art with varying “values”—all the concerns suggested by “Pan with Us” are echoed by a range of American poets. Invoking a modern, experimental approach to aesthetics and truth, a diverse array of early- to mid-twentieth-century poets—including Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, and Gertrude Stein—were able to reimagine relationships between the sophisticated poet and the relatively voiceless, less privileged other. The result is a poetics that interrogates the nature of the ethical individual and good society. Significantly, some of these texts are dialogic or dialogues of some kind, calling attention to the presence of multiple, at times competing, voices within a single text, as well as their role within a poetic discourse explicitly engaged in issues of national definition. Although previous accounts of American pastoral have pegged the mode’s obsolescence to the end of the frontier and a predominantly rural society by the 1890s, relegating modern pastorals to nostalgic posturing

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or stances of environmental activism, I argue that a socially conscious pastoral poetry was in fact reinvigorated by turn-of-the-century cultural, economic, and political shifts and the increasingly nuanced distinctions among individuals and social groups that they engendered.3 As American society grew more hierarchical and complex, it became all the more important to distinguish oneself from the crowd, to mark off the poet from the people, even as such individuals also registered desires to identify—for reasons ideological, aesthetic, and practical—with less privileged groups increasingly defined by class, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality.4 White male poets’ adaptations of the pastoral mode enabled them to gesture toward their former centrality to American culture while negotiating the terms of their continued engagement with an increasingly diverse public sphere.5 Over the course of this book, I examine instances of the pastoral mode from the turn of the twentieth century until a couple of decades from its end, arguing that pastoral has been uniquely suited to articulate the relatively elite poet’s perspective on the development of a modern political economy as well as the new modes of democracy that this phenomenon entailed. Since Virgil’s Eclogues, pastoral has foregrounded the economic and ethical situation of the poet and artist, questioning his ability to comprehend and sing of situations other than his own. In “Eclogue I,” the Roman Civil Wars recently have ended as the poet Tityrus and shepherd Melibeous converse, only to discover that Tityrus has been allowed to keep his lands and has successfully petitioned for his freedom from vassalage. In contrast, his fellow shepherd declares of himself and his less fortunate neighbors that “We are leaving the borders of our country and its sweet fields” while “you, Tityrus, relaxed in the shade, teach the woods to echo the name of fair Amaryllis.” As Annabel Patterson has pointed out, this eclogue begins with a tension between the privileged “you” of the poet Tityrus and the “we” of the community and “common communicative ground” from which he is already estranged. The ethical challenge of these lines is one to which Tityrus is questionably responsive as he fails to address or acknowledge the plight of his countrymen in the ensuing conversation. At issue in the Eclogues as they unfold is “whether poetry has a social function,” and if so what it is.6 Fellow critics of pastoral such as Raymond Williams and, to a lesser extent, Paul Alpers have also stressed this ethical dimension of pastoral, its concerns with class and social inequity as well as “representative anecdotes” of the human condition.7 Addressing several major twentieth-century American poets rather than the classical, Renaissance, or European authors who form the crux of Patterson, Williams, or Alpers’s arguments,8 I argue that despite discrepancies among their poetic practices, politics, and regional affiliations,

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these poets resorted to the pastoral mode in order to question their roles in a democratic, yet still unequal, society. The Elision of American Pastoral Twentieth-century American pastoral as a literary, social, and cultural phenomenon has gone virtually unread for several decades. While in recent years critics have devoted attention to American nativism, regionalism, and environmental concerns under the rubrics of the new historicism,9 feminist and gender studies,10 and ecocriticism,11 the related topic of modern American pastoral has attracted little attention and the term frequently has been misused.12 Fortunately, commentaries on the pastoral mode by prominent early- and mid-century literary and cultural theorists convey clearly what many contemporaneous poets understood the mode to do. In excavating and juxtaposing writings by John Dewey, William Empson, and John Crowe Ransom, I lay the groundwork for reexamining Leo Marx’s dominant account of pastoral, situating it in relation to a new perspective on the mode. Distinguished by the poet’s self-conscious, metaphorical use of the mode in order to comment upon the ideal life, the good society, the artist, and the ethical self, the scope of these pastoral poetic texts extends beyond the evocation of “native,” rural, or “natural” scenes to constantly interrogate the origin and purpose of poetry. Over the course of the next several chapters, I argue that the pastoral mode of these American poets is best described as a “pragmatic pastoral.” Typical of a rising middle class that attempted to answer questions regarding “truth” and “value” through the “scientific method” as devised and promulgated by an intellectual elite led by James and Dewey, these poets deployed their writing as a kind of ethical barometer during a century of intense strain and transition within American society. For much of the twentieth century, poets, like philosophers, social scientists, and literary critics, were part of a growing middle-class academic establishment whose claim to specialized professional powers formed the crux of their authority.13 It is not coincidental that many of the poets I examine were professionals as well as poets: Williams was a doctor, Stevens was a lawyer and insurance executive, Frost established the university-sponsored position of “poet in residence,” and Ashbery was an art critic and translator. Their status served to affirm their places within a rapidly changing social environment, their roles as educated men unquestioned. Yet during the early years of the century especially, many questioned how to value “white collar” work, its function in relation to traditional “blue collar” work or physical labor, as well as the ways in which such work shaped the personality, ethics, and tastes of this emerging

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and increasingly dominant class. The kinds of questions about class and status that pastoral traditionally raises (is the farmer a better man for his labor in the land? what is the right relationship between the poet and the landscape?) have gone unasked for several decades, however, as analyses marked by Marxist or socialist concerns went out of favor after the 1930s, not to be readdressed for several decades. Yet these kinds of questions about status, difference, and privilege with regard to class as well as gender, race, and sexual orientation were essential to the kind of work these poets were doing as they interrogated the nature of the modern American self and society. It is helpful, therefore, to return to the early decades of the twentieth century in order to reinscribe the outlines of this modernist, pragmatic, pastoral perspective as it was coalescing, itself the result of professional, critical inquiry into the nature of pastoral tropes in art and literature. Key texts by John Dewey, William Empson, and John Crowe Ransom offer context for the mode as it emerged during this period and provide intellectual background that explains its lack of reception during much of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Establishing how pastoral should be defined in art and literature and explaining the ideological implications of the mode, these commentators implicitly and explicitly identify pastoral as a mode of cultural critique. In Art As Experience (published in 1934; delivered as lectures at Harvard in 1931), Dewey offers a devastating reading of a banal pastoral artwork:14 The city man who lived in the country when he was a boy is given to purchasing pictures of green meadows with grazing cattle or purling brooks—especially if there is also a swimming hole. He obtains from such pictures a revival of certain values of his childhood minus attendant backbreaking experiences, plus, indeed, an added emotional value because of contrast with a present well-to-do estate. In all such cases the picture is not seen. The painting is used as a spring board for arriving at sentiments that are, because of extraneous subject-matter, agreeable. The subject-matter of experiences of childhood and youth is nevertheless a subconscious background of much great art. But to be the substance of art, it must be made into a new object by means of the medium employed, not merely suggested in a reminiscent way. (Dewey 1934, 113–114) For Dewey true art—and by implication, a better kind of pastoral art— requires “activity” in which the viewer’s emotions, intellect, and physical sensations collectively interact with each other and the aesthetic object. Rather than personal and private, “good” pastoral art is public and responsive. The ideal artist and audience for such art is aware of its public and

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communal imperative, its function in helping to make sense of relationships among human beings. Even if their economic situations were similar to the “city man . . . given to purchasing pictures of green meadows,” the ideal artist and audience would have a more sophisticated perspective on art’s function. Dewey’s critique of this collector is in large part a sociological summary of how historical and economic conditions shape personal taste. Dewey was among the first to acknowledge that the complex webs of social organization could be embodied in an individual’s reactions to a work of art. Forty years later, this situation would be examined by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose similar conclusion in Distinction (1979) is now a critical commonplace: every person is subject to and comprehends his own experiences through “classifications” and a resulting “taste” by which he intellectually internalizes and physically embodies his class and social status.15 Indeed, Dewey’s own aesthetic judgment is most tellingly rhetorically encoded in the passages laced with his intellectual contempt, even disgust, for the simpleminded collector. His reading of the painting and its owner thus implies the possibility of an alternative and preferred pastoralism as well as the extent to which even that pastoral will be limited by one’s life experiences. Not coincidentally, the first major modern critical text on pastoral— William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), published soon after Dewey’s Art As Experience—pays close attention to precisely such issues. A child of relative wealth who matriculated to Cambridge in the mid-1920s, Empson was a moderately liberal young man whose politics were sharpened by career crises (precipitated by a sex scandal) and his experiences living in the increasingly fascist Japan of the 1930s, where left-leaning teachers and students were persecuted for their beliefs.16 Some Versions of Pastoral focuses mainly on seventeenth- through nineteenth-century British texts, but it begins with a timely discussion of American and British proletarian literature, a few instances of which Empson deems “covert pastoral.” According to Empson, a text remained “proletarian” so long as the narrators or speakers presented themselves as working class, but a text became an instance of “covert pastoral” whenever the author, protagonists, or speakers were not themselves working class but depicted the lives of their social inferiors.17 Pastoral is only pastoral when written from a perspective of privilege, although in Empson’s schema the rights of the privileged tend to breed responsibility. In keeping with his identification with privileged leftists, Empson characterizes the ideal pastoral protagonist as a kind of maverick hero, the poet as social critic and outcast.18 Complementing this relatively revolutionary assessment of the mode, Empson also makes the claim that

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pastoral traditionally aspired to “imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor,” high and low (Empson 1935, 11). As he famously—or infamously— put it, pastoral involves a “double attitude of the artist to the worker, of the complex man to the simple one (‘I am in one way better, in another not so good’)” (Empson 1935, 14). While Empson’s theories of pastoral may have been easily adaptable to the pastoral poetics of his contemporaries, he eschewed any direct mention of their work. At least one reader was curious about this omission, although the reader was not one of Empson’s liberal British friends. Instead, he was at the center of a generation of American critics whose far more limited conception of pastoral would shape its reception in the United States for decades to come. In the essay “Mr. Empson’s Muddles,” New Critic John Crowe Ransom, like Empson a poet as well as a critic, downplays the political dimensions of Empson’s book but nonetheless, and somewhat surprisingly, addresses its claims sympathetically. Ransom begins his review predictably by bemoaning what he terms the “extravagances” of Empson’s criticism, drawing attention to Empson’s tendency to offer “multiple meanings” of a poem rather than deciding on a single “logic” or “unity” that would explain the text in its entirety.19 According to Ransom, this “psychological” rather than “logical” approach to criticism is typical of the manner in which “Mr. Empson likes to show a poet clinging to both his alternatives,” although without a clear decision, in Ransom’s view, the “poem simply does not advance to the stage of logic and truth” (“Muddles,” 338). To the extent that pragmatists and liberal fellow thinkers were revising the very nature of concepts such as “logic” and “truth” in order to reveal their historical and social contingency, Ransom identifies his deep objection to Empson correctly. Even as he despairs of the open-endedness of Empson’s “psychological” readings, however, he approves of the ways in which they “increase immensely the range of the experience” of reading the poem, even if they eventually stray beyond what he believes the poem can logically bear (“Muddles,” 324). Moreover, Ransom is equally disdainful of the critic who would reduce poems to fit “his own cozy little apartment.” This line of critique culminates in Ransom’s pertinent observation that Empson’s approach was in fact extremely well suited to modern poetry—perhaps, implicitly, more so than his own formalism. Why didn’t Empson read more modern poetry by “Yeats, Auden, Spender, and Lewis,” Ransom wonders, especially given that these poems would lend themselves to Empson’s proclivity for teasing out multiple readings (“Muddles,” 334)? Less doctrinaire than most readers might expect, Ransom accurately identifies the open-ended, psychological, pragmatically inquiring nature of Empson’s readings, while anticipating how modern literature could be read in such a light.20 Despite the subtlety

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of Ransom’s response in this instance, however, other of his writings—especially those privileging an “ironic” high modernism21—came to characterize his legacy as well as the work of his disciples, whose cultural dominance in the United States has delayed the reception of pastoral’s ideological complexity in the American context. Such New Critical readings were so pervasive that they appear even in the work of critics ideologically opposed to the formalist project. In Leo Marx’s seminal study of American pastoral, he defines the mode in terms of its contrast between a naïve or “simple pastoralism” and a privileged, more ironic or “complex pastoralism.”22 According to The Machine in the Garden (1964), while “complex pastoralism” involves invoking “the image of a green landscape . . . as a symbolic repository of meaning and value,” it soon “acknowledge[s] the power of a counterforce, a machine or some other symbol of the forces which have stripped the old ideal of most, if not all, of its meaning” (Marx, 362-3). The authors Marx examines tend to react to such changes with thinly veiled despair or an embittered acquiescence that echoes the “ironic” stance toward literature and life admired by Ransom and others, even as Marx’s approach allows room for a degree of social commentary. In general, however, this narrative of national and generic progression makes any kind of pastoral that does not conform to the complex and ironic model difficult to read, as it by default appears to be utopian or politically naïve and therefore culturally backward. In effect, Marx’s keenly perceptive and highly influential characterization of American pastoral nonetheless elides a significant, persistent, and alternative pastoral tradition in American literature of the twentieth century. The disjunction between Empson’s and Marx’s accounts of pastoral and their emphasis upon the ideological dimensions of the mode prefigure the directions that pastoral criticism took in the American and British academies. Reinserting Empson’s text and its reception into the American scene helps to clarify what was at stake in Ransom’s ambivalent review as well as how his response was typical of an era that initially acknowledged but later suppressed politicized readings of poetry.23 As part of an extended push back against such academic formalism in recent decades, critics of “modernism” have sought to dispel New Critical chestnuts concerning the integrity of the literary text as a precious object or “urn” above the vicissitudes of social, economic, and political forces. As Lawrence Rainey, Thomas Strychacz, and Mark McGurl, among others, have noted,24 the notion of a “great divide” between modernism and mass culture as well as modernism and postmodernism, particularly as articulated and debated by Andreas Huyssen and Fredric Jameson, is marked less by antagonism than mutuality, the higher necessarily defining itself in terms of the lower, for example by adopting

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strategies of the marketplace and advertising, mass media and popular culture.25 Yet returning to Empson’s work of the 1930s also crystallizes how and why pastoral poetry of the period itself must be understood historically: the pragmatic pastoral as I understand it was constituted by American poets who, like their British counterparts, were part of a society with increasingly complex social dynamics. These poets were highly self-conscious of the fact that theirs was a world in which poets and critics alike defined their labor, values, and aesthetic tastes in terms of the labor, value, and aesthetic tastes of the working classes as well as women and others whose lives were systematically devalued by virtue of their race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Pastoral poetry of the twentieth century should be understood as not only historically embedded in this fashion but also a conscious production of poets and figures of privilege who, like Empson and Dewey, had political and personal convictions that led to the depiction of social inequality and injustice. This book will offer a newly historicized and politicized reading of American pastoral, informed in part by Empson’s earlier work as well as Raymond Williams’s readings of British pastoral poetry, while extending the scope beyond concerns of class. My reading of pragmatism therefore differs significantly from those of the most prominent American commentators on pragmatism and poetry. Richard Poirier and Jonathan Levin, for example, present cases for reading modern poetry in a predominantly apolitical Jamesian light while tending to ignore the politically progressive aspects of those texts.26 In another prominent case, philosopher Richard Rorty champions Dewey’s philosophical approach, but he mischaracterizes Dewey’s heirs as the “liberal ironists” of the present, rather than those who emulate the politically committed life that Dewey himself embraced.27 Such perspectives are typical of a neo-pragmatism that has inherited many of the assumptions of the New Criticism, indebted to a textual formalism that dissuades critics from openly political speculations. In contrast, critics such as Cornel West, Ross Posnock, Frank Lentricchia, Steven Mailloux, Giles Gunn, and David Kadlec have accounted for an ideologically complex and socially relevant version of pragmatism in American literature and culture that informs this book.28 Perhaps most influential to my understanding of pragmatism, however, has been the work of historians such as James Kloppenberg, Robert Westbrook, and James Livingston, who continue to provide engaging analysis of the historical and intellectual contexts in which Dewey and James wrote and lived.29 Similarly, criticism by Cary Nelson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Alan Filreis, Michael Davidson, and Michael Thurston has demonstrated how twentieth-century American poetry must be read in terms of its cultural

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and political context.30 This diverse range of scholarship helped to limn the outlines of this project throughout, offering models and examples as well as inspiration. Empson’s Legacy: The “Muddles” of Modern Pastoral The pragmatic pastoral mode that I excavate in the following pages is marked by its investment in the social and the human in all of its forms. The twentieth-century pastoral in the United States insists upon, even revels in, its depictions of the “low” in relation to the “high,” the bodies and minds of ordinary people necessary to the depiction of democratic life. Yet even as they invigorated the poet as pragmatic creator and proved necessary sources of “authentic” material, portraits of individuals at the bottom of American society emerged as potentially destabilizing to the poet as professional artist. Empson’s frequently cited characterization of the modern pastoral poet as simultaneously “better” than and “not so good as” the working man he depicts reverberates throughout these texts. Over the course of this book, I try to give some theoretical and historical context to this fraught, ambivalent relationship that Empson could not, while fleshing out the ways in which these two entities, the poet and the people, often melded together in the pastoral imagination. The result is a pastoralism that allows more than ever for the disorder that shapes order, the “dirt” and “filth” that defines the pure and clean. Modern poets’ attitudes toward “low” figures are fluid, contradictory, and difficult to classify. Poets drawn toward pastoral often found themselves balancing desires to solidify their own social status with a pragmatic commitment to denaturalize the economic and social constraints of others. Not coincidentally, the terms that Ransom used to describe the troubling pluralistic tendencies of Empson’s critical writings—“muddles” and “extravagances”—parallel a common tendency of modern pastoral texts to allude to sites, persons, and situations that represent disruptive forms of excess and provoke sensations of discomfort. In a characteristically pragmatic turn, these texts are not uniformly critical of such presences but just as often employ what Linda Hutcheon terms a “transideological irony” in relation to them, indicating disgust or contempt at the same time as they suggest sympathy or empathy.31 Complicating the scene further, elements of the low or disgusting frequently are depicted as aspects of the poet’s own self, rendering the self the object of the poet or speaker’s own alternately appalled and accepting gaze. For example, Frost advocated a potentially destabilizing “extravagance” in farming, personal finances, and poetry composition that is linked to the bodies

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of “tramps.” In Stevens’s poetry, the figure of a “fat” man and later “fat girl” emerges as a simultaneously desired and reviled excess that is both constitutive of and threatening to the poet. For Williams, a literal “excrement” is linked to descriptions of his beloved “beautiful thing,” who in turn is an essential counterpart to the poet’s alter ego of “Dr. Paterson.” John Ashbery depicts potential “perverts” and hints at a suppressed homosexuality in his early pastoral poems, and Gertrude Stein similarly alludes to lesbian sexuality in terms of country life (“cows”). What links these terms is the ways in which they are deployed as metaphors for the poet’s self or part of that self, whether as a kind of psychological trait or behavior, physical trait, polluting association, or epithet that renders that person socially suspect or marginal. What is perhaps most striking about these pastorals is that class is far from the only form of social privilege addressed. While class is the concern uppermost for Frost; gender, race, and sexuality as well as class figure prominently in the pastorals of Williams; variations on white masculinity give rise to Stevens’s pastoral; and sexual orientation is the primary form of disruptive otherness addressed by Ashbery and Stein. What unites these pastoral texts is their collective focus upon the high/ low, self/other distinctions of pastoral and the ethical provocations these juxtapositions create. Their shared emphasis upon excess and the taint of pollution that it suggests is not incidental but integral to the articulation of a pragmatic pastoral mode. Pragmatism emerged during a period in American history when industrialization, waste, and overconsumption began to alter the physical landscape as well as the constitution of the self and community. Recent critical work on filth, waste, and disgust in nineteenth-century European contexts provides a fruitful parallel for this claim. Drawing upon the anthropological and psychoanalytic work of Mary Douglas, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, and Mikhail Bakhtin, recent historicist work by critics such as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, William Cohen and Ryan Johnson, Dominque LaPorte, David Trotter, and William Ian Miller have created a precedent for understanding a rhetoric of waste and excess in the context of the emergence of the bourgeois subject and democratic society in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and France.32 According to Stallybrass and White, during the eighteenth century “bourgeois democracy” “encoded in its manners, morals and imaginative writings, in its body, bearing and taste, a subliminal elitism which was constitutive of its historical being” and that defined this being in relation to real and figurative waste.33 In a similar vein, Miller, a legal scholar, claims that “disgust,” coined in English in the seventeenth century, is distinctly antidemocratic in its assertion of absolute purity and impurity, unlike the related feeling of

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“contempt,” which in democracy alone can emanate from lower as well as higher social orders.34 The American situation several decades later contains clear parallels, as the American political economy went through transitions seen nearly a century earlier on the continent while coming to terms with a changing population that challenged traditional conceptions of the productive citizen.35 High rates of immigration, urbanization, and industrialization, the transition to corporate capitalism, as well as the movement of women and people of color into the workforce and public sphere radically destabilized eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of American citizenship, subjectivity, and society in ways that can be considered analogous in some form to the earlier European situation.36 These shifts were especially ominous to white middle-class men, for whom such individuals and groups represented threats to “masculinity” and traditional concepts of virtuous citizenship as characterized by the farmer or pioneer. At the purely material level, waste and garbage became a ubiquitous sight on city streets, as increased consumption led to mass disposal of outdated commodities.37 The connection between the material and the social has long been visible to poets and social critics alike. As David Trotter notes, “mess theory” has something to do with “democracy, which would be hard to imagine without litter, or without the historically specific form of disgust aroused by (and in) the spectacle of widespread social mobility.”38 The pragmatic and scientific dimension of waste identification is also pertinent. As Tim Armstrong has observed, a general fascination with waste and waste products was concurrent with the rise of “scientific” modes of thought in early twentieth-century American society. Modernist texts, according to Armstrong, educate readers to identify and categorize scientifically their own body’s behavior as well as those of others, understanding all bodies operating beyond the purview of “science”—often those coded as feminine or racially or sexually other—as wastefully productive, generating materials that may overwhelm rather than fuel the social economy.39 However, subject to reevaluation as positive elements (aspects of the self, a beloved, or respected entity), these presences in pragmatic pastorals emerge as more similar to “mess,” which Trotter discusses as a more contingent, less disturbing form of waste that can be recodified as useful matter and even part of the self.40 Arising in response to the artificial and often unethical nature of older social and cultural divisions, pragmatism at its most progressive could find the “waste” of society to be regenerative rather than polluting. The product of a pragmatic perspective on experience that emphasizes the need to “reevaluate” values both negative and positive, the transitive, fluctuating manifestations of waste as various kinds of “mess” are crucial to the modern incarnation of pastoral.

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Mapping the Pragmatic Pastoral Even as the pragmatic pastoral mode can and must be defined in relation to previously defined contemporary cultural phenomena, it is also an ancient, recognizable mode with continuities stretching back to the work of Virgil and Theocritus. My book begins with a chapter describing an abbreviated history of American pastoral, its roots in classical models as translated into distinctly American concepts of citizenship and subjectivity, and the transformation of this nexus of culture and ideology in the early years of the twentieth century. I discuss the pragmatic and progressive response to the so-called end of the frontier, a response that resulted in not only the redefinition of American society but also the need to theorize new concepts of personality and democratic community that could account for these changes. This postfrontier pragmatic methodology, I argue, is integral to the development of modern pastoral poetics. The chapters that follow trace the pragmatic pastoral sensibility of major American poets, revealing the persistent pastoral mode that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and continued at least into its latest decades. While the aim of my project is to situate these chapters within this overall historical context, at the same time I do not pretend to undertake the same kind of deeply historicized projects as have Alan Filreis or Michael Thurston. While I admire their work immensely, my aim is to present a more panoramic understanding of pastoral’s persistence over time and over the course of widely divergent poetic careers. While some chapters mention specific events that influenced the perspective of a particular poet—the Lawrence and Paterson textile mill strikes for example—more often I discuss the emergence of pastoral in relation to notable and documented historical trends to which the poet is expressly responding, such as the increased visibility of women in the literary marketplace or the pathologizing and criminalization of homosexual men and women. I am most interested in the ways in which a pastoral sensibility first forms and then coalesces over the course of a poet’s career, often intensifying at specific points in a lifetime, as it does for Frost in the early 1900s, for Williams and Stevens during World War II, for Ashbery during the cold war of the 1950s through the early 1970s, for Stein just before World War I and in the 1920s and 1930s. Along these same lines, this book seeks neither to produce an exhaustive assessment of the “pragmatic” characteristic of each poet’s work nor to prove that each poet was, technically, a pragmatist. The avoidance of blow-by-blow assessments of how each particular poem or pronouncement can be read in terms of James or Dewey’s writings is intentional. None of these poets was a philosopher, and their direct engagements with James and

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Dewey, when they can be identified, were usually brief. Like most of their contemporaries, they experienced pragmatism in large part as a philosophy that suffused contemporary reassessments of the ideal self and community. Instead, my purpose is to document whenever possible the specific instances in which poets read or were influenced by James or Dewey’s writings, and just as importantly to use these moments of intellectual contact to depict the extent to which these poets’ worldview or perspective corresponds to or even anticipates James and Dewey’s pragmatic conclusions. These readings then set the stage for examining individual pastoral poetics more broadly in the context of a pragmatism that I understand to be a constitutive aspect of early- and mid-twentieth century approaches to subjectivity, experience, aesthetics, and democracy. Chapter 2 exemplifies both of these approaches as, working roughly chronologically, I turn first to the career of Robert Frost, characterizing his pastoralism as a variant of a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century “tramp poetics.” Reproducing the concerns of a wave of tramp literature in which homeless, working-class men were depicted as both criminals and victims, barely human industrial “waste” and quasi “prophets” of a new era in labor relations, Frost’s early poetry of the 1890s through the 1910s repeatedly depicts the lives of tramps from the perspective of both propertyowners and the homeless themselves, bringing into question the ethical parameters of the human community as well as the nature of the modern “extravagant” self, stripped of his traditional role as “producer” and virtuous citizen. Reading Frost’s tramp poetics in the context of William James’s occasional writings on tramps and their relation to his pragmatic method, I argue that some of Frost’s tramp pastorals can be taken as critiques of James’s own occlusion of class in his philosophy and thus as anticipating aspects of Dewey’s more politicized pragmatism, while other poems remain politically ambiguous. Chapter 3 discusses pastoral’s role in the career of William Carlos Williams, with special attention to his epic poem Paterson. Engaged with Dewey’s thought during his lifetime, in particular by the essay “Americanism and Localism,” Williams deployed the “local” first in several early “pastoral” poems from the 1920s but most profoundly in Paterson, the product of over thirty years of work but not written and published until during and after World War II. In Paterson localism is expressed in the form of a city and its environs, the long and complex history of which has culminated in crowded urban landscapes populated by immigrants, workers, and other individuals—such as working women and wealthy homosexuals—that Williams’s contemporaries associated with various forms of “dirt.” Rather than dismissing such characters, however, Williams—who as an artist often

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felt himself to be similarly culturally marginalized—urges his readers to “embrace the foulness” of modern life and to reconsider the ideological assumptions behind epistemological categories such as “dirt” or “excrement” that he links to objects of desire such as the “beautiful thing” as well as the city’s immigrant population. Although Williams’s poetics frequently betray the poet’s ambivalence concerning his relation to the residents of his city, the cumulative effect is to expand the reader’s sense of how poetry and community formation are linked. Chapter 4 turns to the work of Wallace Stevens, exploring his references to the body and the physical life in his poetics, linking his relatively undiscussed earthiness with his understanding of the pastoral mode. What emerges is a surprising resistance on Stevens’s part to popular, muscular models of representative masculinity, and consequent interest in what the poet terms “the normal,” resulting in a strain of pastoralism that first took form in the 1920s and coalesced in the late 1930s and early 1940s in the midst of World War II. Reading Stevens’s 1943 essay “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” in the context of William James’s anxieties concerning American masculinity and morality in “The Moral Equivalent of War,” as well as John Dewey’s later defense of pragmatism’s moral complexity and political commitment, I argue that Stevens absorbed a pragmatic perspective on physical experience of the world. The essence of this sentiment is manifested by “fat” in the form of “everyday” people, variations on the poet’s own alter ego such as “fat Jocundus,” and ultimately his own daughter—that “fat girl” as “green” and “fluent mundo”—in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (1942). Although Stevens’s racialized depictions of “fat” betray its limited locality in the form of “native” white Americans, it can also be seen as a fruitful way to depict a “hopeful waste” in the world. Implicitly rejecting the “anorexic” poetics of other modernists such as Eliot and Pound, who referred with disgust to what they regarded as an overly chaotic, feminized, consumerist environment, Stevens offers instead a creative if at times ambivalent approach to such social and aesthetic realities. Chapter 5 examines the work of John Ashbery, whose poetics and politics, like those of Stevens, have traditionally been understood as highly urbane and essentially inscrutable. Born in 1927, Ashbery confronted not the pressures of urbanization and industrialization, but a cold war ideology that invoked the rhetoric of the “frontier” in order to facilitate social homogenization and repress the kind of liberal political dissent formerly associated with pragmatism. Ashbery’s frequent recourse to the pastoral mode in poems from the late 1940s and early 1950s such as “Eclogue,” “A Pastoral,” and “The Mythological Poet” entails a surrealistic, campy poetics that dramatizes and inverts the invasive, punitive measures society takes against

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“perverted” voices and bodies that would subvert the masculine, heterosexist mainstream. Alluding to the logic of masochism, Ashbery’s early pastoral poetics suggests the dangers to selfhood, ethics, and love inherent in cold war culture for gay men. Later pastorals from the 1960s and 1970s such as “Spring Day” and “Soonest Mended,” written after the death of his father and a 10-year sojourn in Paris, suggest grounds for a more hopeful, equitable social vision in which danger and violence may be thwarted by gestures toward intellectual and sexual intimacy. Fueled by the postwar collapse of barriers between the public and private realms, these later works foreground traditional pastoral themes newly politicized in their link to homosexual identity: paeans to love and friendship, the erotic life and conversation. The sixth and concluding chapter links Gertrude Stein’s pre–World War II erotic pastoral mode and theory of “landscape” to the pastoral poetics of postwar female poets Lyn Hejinian and Lisa Robertson. Rather than undermine my argument concerning how male poets employed the pastoral mode, this conclusion begins by tracing the ways in which Stein invoked pastoral in order to create a masculine mask for her desires and to articulate poetics that were proof of her necessarily male “genius.” This chapter is meant to underscore the gendered authorship of pastoral poetry through the first half of the twentieth century while observing at least one new direction for pragmatic pastoral in the last few decades. Although poets such as Marianne Moore occasionally referenced tropes associated with the American landscape and nature, and H.D. immersed herself in nature imagery linked to Greek themes, only Stein explicitly made American and European aspects of the mode central to her work over the course of her career. Directly influenced by William James and indirectly by John Dewey, Stein formulates a pragmatic pastoral in texts such as “Melanctha” and Lucy Church Amiably that is linked to her unique sense of consciousness and sexuality, covertly embodying while effacing an early articulation of lesbian subjectivity and incipient feminism. Citing Stein’s example, Hejinian and Robertson perpetuate and complicate her work in poems like “The Green” and XEclogue, explicitly linking Stein to the relatively recent emergence of feminist American pastoral modes as well as a cosmopolitan pastoralism. In bringing together such diverse poets as Frost, Williams, Stevens, Ashbery, Stein, Hejinian, and Robertson, I hope to emphasize the extent to which a pragmatically and especially a Deweyan pastoral mode has proved a plausible means of forging a new discursive model for the modern poetic speaker and citizen. The appeal of a pragmatic philosophical and political perspective to such varied poetic temperaments reflects the degree to which pragmatism saturated American intellectual life throughout the early- and mid-twentieth century and, despite its limitations, offered a comprehensive

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model for understanding the modern experience well into the century’s later decades. In a literary environment committed to “making it new,” pragmatism’s creative, generative perspective upon the self and society was an easily assimilated methodology. After World War II, when pragmatism as such seemed to lose ground, its persistent if tacit appeal to artists and thinkers and eventual resurgence in the 1980s speak to the need for such an American mode of cultural and social critique. My hope is that this account of a pragmatic pastoral tradition assists in reconstructing an alternative poetic tradition in which politics and economics were felt to be integral to discussions of culture and aesthetics. While the direct consequences of this historical embeddedness have not always been politically liberating for poets or those marginalized voices they have depicted, these new versions of American pastoral did function in the service of a belief that poetry should speak to power, and that it might even be heard.

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CHAPTER 1

Pastoral Ideology and the Pragmatic Response

P

ragmatic pastorals offer a poetic response to William James’s innovative perspective on subject/object relations and John Dewey’s efforts to connect the potential for democracy directly to issues of aesthetics and discourse. Their pragmatic template for twentieth- century thought is not only essential to the methodology of modern pastoral poetry but also crucial to the development of modern intellectual life in the United States. Early in the century, James and Dewey were already developing comprehensive models of inquiry that problematized the disjunction between the individuals who constituted the nation and those who wielded power. Dewey’s writings provoke and propagate the idea of a public sphere in which expanding political and social rights make visible and debatable issues that had formerly been considered intimate, domestic, or private.1 In the throes of the Progressive Era and after its peak, Dewey developed a new form of pragmatism that directly engaged with the national sense of crisis and continued to resonate long after his death in 1952 in the work of C. Wright Mills and Sidney Hook, among others, until its reemergence in the varied neopragmatisms of today. Insofar as it invokes and seeks to transform a tradition of imagining the American self and community that can be traced back to the eighteenth century, Dewey’s—and to an extent William James’s—pragmatism seeks to figure itself as the modern equivalent of the civic humanism implied in earlier versions of American pastoral ideology. It is within this context that Dewey and James came to influence modern poets as diverse as Frost, Williams, Stevens, Ashbery, and Stein.

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This chapter sets out the historical context in which pragmatism emerged, the postfrontier economic, political, and cultural conditions to which James and Dewey directly responded, and the reception of these philosophers’ radical ideas and distinctively pastoral rhetoric by their peers and students. The next section maps out the central tenets of pragmatism, focusing first on James’s approach to subject/object relations, truth and experience, as well as his more occluded perspective on social relations. Then I turn to Dewey’s theory of experience and nature, his emphasis upon ideal forms of democratic community and the role of the arts in shaping and critiquing society, as well as his doubts concerning the potential for “communication” in all of its forms to eradicate inequality. Outlining the major principles of this philosophy as well as its roots in reshaping American pastoral ideology, I provide the historical and intellectual framework for the chapters that follow. In those chapters, I claim that the pragmatism of pragmatic pastoral poetry emerges in at least three ways. First, it pursues an ethical mode of inquiry into the problem of inequality, as in Frost’s depiction of “Pan” or the poet himself as a tramp, although it may not come to any definite conclusion or political judgment. Second, it reevaluates traditional lyric forms and voices, especially in ways that question the privileges habitually ascribed to male lyric subjectivity, as in Stevens’s “Bantams in Pine Woods.” Third, pragmatism functions in the strategic, experimental deployment of diction and syntax that force the reader in turn to conduct her own active inquiry into how meanings and values (and thus the self) are culturally constructed and might be remade through discourse. While these pragmatic elements are proper to many texts one might consider modern or postmodern, what marks these texts as pragmatically pastoral is their direct invocation of the pastoral mode as a signal of their conscious intervention into national debates as to the nature of the new ideal self and good society, as well as the indebtedness—direct and indirect—of most of these poets to the work of Dewey and James. While there is a significant degree of continuity among these poets’ work, equally satisfying and surprising is the range of approaches to pastoral as each reimagines multiple possible American scenes and new fields of experience. Pastoral and Pragmatism Historicized The pastoral mode has long been a uniquely powerful means of commenting upon and re-imagining American society. Influential accounts of American history and culture have repeatedly invoked the concept of the “garden,” “virgin land,” or “nature’s nation” in order to describe the “American incarnation” of the pastoral ethos.2 More recently, pastoral has again become

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central to debates in American studies classrooms by virtue of a revived interest in environmental studies as well as in the concept of the “frontier,” a central feature of the American pastoral mode.3 The physical embodiment of the ground where self and other, culture and nature meet, blur, and blend, the “frontier” recently has been replaced by “borderlands,” a term more suggestive of the nuances of identity and geography that typify such regions. For late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians working in the wake of Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 address and essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” a frontier pastoralism essentially defined the American self and community. Turner’s essay affirmed earlier accounts that saw the frontier as the distinctly American pastoral space to which individuals came as pioneers and settled to create agricultural communities, as is imagined in William Cullen Bryant’s 1832 poem “The Prairies”: I listen long To [the bee’s] domestic hum, and think I hear The sound of that advancing multitude Which soon shall fill these deserts. From the ground Comes up the laugh of children, the soft voice Of maidens, and the sweet and solemn hymn Of Sabbath worshippers. The low of herds Blends with the rustling of the heavy grain Over the dark-brown furrows.4 As Bryant’s poet listens, visualizes, and sings of the landscape’s transformation, he makes possible what was widely felt to be a natural and inevitable process. His presence is crucial, in fact, to this social progression. But by the late nineteenth century, Turner’s pronouncement of the frontier’s end had become a new cultural and historiographical truism that encoded a range of concerns regarding how the United States would define itself upon becoming a fully colonized land mass.5 Given the nation’s growing imperial interests and implicit extension of its “frontiers” beyond the North American continent, the loss of a literal frontier would have seemed to make the concept irrelevant. The reverse, however, has been the case. Even as the physical frontier disappeared, the concept of the “frontier” remained potent for twentieth-century intellectuals, including historians as well as poets, philosophers, and sociologists. Their use of “frontier” rhetoric can be understood, to an extent, both to complicate and reflect a wider popular usage of the term. In a 1994 article, Patricia Limerick points out that while in recent years the “f-word” has come under attack in academia for its “ethnocentrism and vagueness” as well as its masking of imperialism’s

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violence, it has maintained a central place in popular culture. Examining 100 years of advertisements and journalism, she concludes that “the American public has genuinely and completely accepted, ratified, and bought the notion that the American frontiering spirit, sometime in the last century, picked itself up and made a definitive relocation—from territorial expansion to technological and commercial expansion.”6 Building on Limerick’s claim, I suggest that a parallel appropriation of a pastoral frontier rhetoric occurred in the social sciences as well as in popular and elite literary and cultural spheres through much of the twentieth century, with repercussions that can still be felt today. Both the social sciences and major strains of modernist literature were the product of a liberal ideological movement that coalesced precisely as the physical frontier was ending. Pragmatism, the most prominent and lasting intellectual means of reevaluating establishment mores, was explicitly considered by its founders to be a “pioneering” philosophy. James and Dewey each understood himself to be forging new models of the self and community that would recapture the lost qualities of virtue and ethics associated with precapitalist yeoman farmer and republican citizen. Intentionally employing frontier rhetoric, they replaced images of individuals clearing and laboring upon the land with visions of subjects experiencing and experimenting within the vagaries of a pluralistic society, integrated into rather than authoritatively shaping their environment. This new vision of the ideal American self armed not only pragmatists but also poets and artists with powerful cultural tropes reoriented toward the ethical and communitarian rather than the material and individualistic. The rhetoric and methodology of pragmatism were framed in terms of and in reaction to what came to be called the nation’s “pastoral ideology,” a concept that encompasses the general tendency in American political and cultural life to ascribe to the pioneer and farmer (closely aligned in eighteenth-century America) moral virtue and, later, economic integrity. Since the eighteenth century, pastoralism in American culture has been linked to the republican ideal of the virtuous citizen and society, also known as a form of “civic humanism.” During this period writers and philosophers such as J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and Thomas Jefferson felt confident in characterizing Americans’ relationship with nature as economically stable and morally sanctioned, based on legal and spiritual terms. Crevecoeur writes of how the instant I enter on my own land, the bright idea of property, of exclusive right, of independence, exalt my mind. . . . What should we American farmers be without the distinct possession of that soil? . . . This formerly

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rude soil has been converted by my father into a pleasant farm, and in return, it has established all our rights; on it is founded our rank, our freedom, our power as citizens, our importance as inhabitants of such a district.7 Jefferson’s emphasis is more religious in tone as he observes that “[t]hose who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he had made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”8 It is these people who are “the most virtuous and independent citizens” (Jefferson, 181). These early articulations of American republicanism attempt to account for the moral dimension of citizenship, a kind of virtue that is at once private and public. This virtue, whether granted through possession of or labor in (another form of possession) the land, distinguishes such ideal citizens from those we now associate with the far less morally inflected concept of “possessive individualism.”9 As C.B. Macpherson has argued, “possessive individualism,” his term for the liberal-democratic theory of individualism, sees the individual as “neither . . . a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social whole, but as an owner of himself ” (Macpherson, 3). This model for the self, developed from the British empirical tradition of Locke, Hume, and Bentham, but subsuming the ethical imperative to an economic one, became predominant by the mid-nineteenth century as the individualist and pioneer (differentiated, to an extent, from the farmer) became models for the national subject. As the nation transformed itself from a former colony into an international presence in its own right, questions of ethics came to be considered “domestic” issues, relegated to the home front rather than integrated into public and economic life.10 This disruption of the humanist pastoral tradition was a phenomenon that American philosophy and literature both embraced and attempted to keep at a distance. According to Michael Gilmore, American transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson tended to mystify the relationship between man and nature, thereby implicitly justifying individualist ambitions, while at the same time protesting specific instances of moral depravity on the part of business interests or the nation as a whole.11 A society whose prerogative in the world was rooted partly in a sense of moral superiority derived from its democratic principles and partly in its economic prowess, the United States struggled to maintain a vision of the virtuous citizen that was at once loyal to its idealized pastoral experience of community and at the same time compliant with its more mercenary practices. By the early twentieth century, as the traditional political economy based on property ownership gave way to corporate capitalism and a consumer

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society, new models for the self and society supplanted earlier assumptions concerning the relation of land and labor to virtue. The historical narrative is well known. As industrialization and urbanization pushed workers to the cities, these forces spawned a class of middle-managers, men who, rather than owning their own businesses, worked for larger corporations. Displaced from the land itself as well as alienated from the actual products they were helping to create, such individuals have been the source of perpetual anxiety from the nineteenth century to the present. Whether in the form of the “97 pound weakling” of 1920s advertisements or C. Wright Mills’s “cheerful robot” of the 1950s, such men have been regarded as economic and ethical eunuchs, stripped of their muscular and moral power. As historians such as Anthony Rotundo, Michael Kimmel, Gail Bederman, and John Kasson have shown, the cults of manhood and masculinity that developed at the turn of the century and continue to hold sway today (in the form of poet Robert Bly’s Iron John movement or fight clubs, among others) have been responses to a widespread sense that the model male self and citizen formerly represented by the yeoman farmer and pioneer was in crisis.12 Yet while the resulting lack of a model male self—for the representative citizen was usually presumed to be male—appeared to many proof of a social nadir, to others this period of social flux presented an opportunity to revisit and redefine gender, class, racial, and sexual categories. By the turn of the century, philosophers, poets, and commentators of all kinds began a dialogue in which the nature of the new ideal, representative self and the community of which it would be a part was debated and its parameters reformed. For Dewey, as for many artists and intellectuals of the period, the modern “frontier is moral, not physical.”13 With the end of the geographical frontier, the need for new models for self and community was brought into relief and became an energizing rationale for the rise of the new culture of “science.” Pragmatism was developed as a response to early twentiethcentury social, economic, and cultural shifts and attempted (and continues to attempt) to create room for both public and private virtue in the newly representative and ethical citizen and community. As James Livingston conceptualizes it, pragmatism emphasizes a discursive mode of subjectivity or social self in which “the distinction between knower and known, self and other, subject and object—or the relation between personality and property, freedom and necessity, consumption and production—must be re-created and embodied in time and in social forms, not assumed to be fixed, or given by the past.”14 Pragmatists and progressives emphasized relationships beyond those that were economic and proprietary in nature, with strictly vertical lines of responsibility and ownership, instead emphasizing a more

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flexible, horizontal sense of social and financial obligation. As members of a democracy increasingly defined by intangible and mutually entangled expressions of ownership, American citizens were simultaneously urged to feel as never before an enlarged sense of responsibility toward all members of the community. However, while offering a useful and compelling description of pragmatic principles, Livingston’s account neglects to consider how many citizens felt overwhelmed by the prospect of contending with the proverbial masses and terrified by the potential consequences of protesting the status quo. Narrowly individualist models of society and subjectivity persisted, resisting the kinds of social mobility and political transformation implicitly promised by new modes of thought. The transition between old and new ways of thinking was hesitant and gradual precisely because the shift was so profound. In Dewey’s view, the entrepreneurial pioneer and his perceived heir— the capitalist who lacked a moral and aesthetic sense (the two were always entwined)—were the object of extreme emotions. Such individuals’ antiquated strain of “idealism” was nothing less than “noisy and nauseating.” Although Dewey acknowledged the presence of a “genuine idealism of faith in the future, in experiment directed by intelligence, in the communication of knowledge, in the rights of the common man to a common share in the fruits of the spirit,” he nonetheless acknowledged that this true pragmatic impulse was often “paralyzed.” Lacking the capacity of “discrimination” that pragmatism teaches, the American people, Dewey predicted, “shall oscillate between wholesale revulsion and the sloppy idealism of popular emotion.”15 Dewey’s choice of words is intriguing, revealing the extent to which he experienced a literal nausea at the mechanical workings of capitalism and a popular culture that substituted “sloppy” thinking for the true, pragmatic “discrimination” necessary to recognize and internalize new truths. James, Dewey, and their contemporaries rejected this abjecting mode of existence and the mess it had made of American society by appropriating the rhetoric of the frontier existence in order to sell, in effect, their new ethical, scientific approach. Cashing in on the popular taste for frontier rhetoric and imagery, pragmatists appropriated the remnants of a powerful American pastoral ideology despite the fact that—or precisely because—it represented elements of American society that they were attempting to eradicate.16 Dewey’s Individualism Old and New (1930), written later in his career for a broad public audience, provides his most explicit characterization of pragmatism in terms of “frontier” rhetoric. Directly stating the need to replace the old “rugged—or is it ragged—individualism” with a new version of the self, he cites the need for a “new individualism,” “a new psychological and

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moral type.”17 Dewey describes the contemporary sense of crisis in a series of revealing terms: The wilderness exists in the movie and the novel, and the children of pioneers, who live in the midst of surroundings artificially made over by the machine, enjoy pioneer life idly in the vicarious film. I see little social unrest which is the straining of energy for outlet in action; I find rather the protest against the weakening of vigor and a sapping of energy that emanate from the absence of constructive opportunity; and I see a confusion that is an expression of the inability to find a secure and morally rewarding place in a troubled and tangled economic scene. (Individualism, 40) Lacking the “constructive opportunity” equated with the frontier, the modern individual has lost manly “vigor” as well as the capacity to build a life that is “morally rewarding.” Although his problems are due to the “economic scene,” the modern man presumably hopes to live a more ethically as well as a more materially satisfying life. Whereas the “pioneer” or old individualism was twisted “to conform to the practices of a pecuniary culture,” Dewey hopes for something better in a modern, pragmatic, moral self and community (Individualism, 9). Rather than a “physical wilderness,” he avers, “our problems grow out of social conditions. . . . The adventure of the individual . . . is an unsubdued social frontier” (Individualism, 45 –46). Only by embracing scientific method and pragmatic philosophy, he concludes, can modern Americans hope to replace the pioneer with a new ideal citizen, who in turn might shape a better national community. Even as he expresses hope for the future, though, Dewey is not wholly optimistic. All too often, he finds the older individual is idealized rather than discarded as the cultural remnant (or “rag”) that it is; people tend to be suspicious of science or use it for private and financial rather than publicly minded and ethically driven purposes. More generally, throughout his work Dewey adopts rhetoric with similarly pastoral tensions between the known and the unknown, self and other, past and future. In terms that evoke the distinction between what the Puritans referred to as the “howling wilderness” and the “city on the hill,” Dewey describes the world as “a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable,” a theater in which language and art are crucial to negotiating the boundary between the seemingly “formal and recurrent” and the “contingent and ongoing.”18 James, too, emphasizes the intrepid exploration of the “possible” at the frontiers or margins of a universe that is “unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking beings are at

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work.”19 Quintessentially, American pastoral conceptions of the ethical self laboring in nature are unmistakably alluded to in these characterizations of philosophical inquiry as the work of an intrepid explorer. Pragmatism was also received as a new mode of the frontier myth by younger generations of critics who understood Dewey and James’s desire to rearticulate the ideal American self and community. “Young Americans” such as Randolph Bourne began their careers deeply influenced by Dewey. Bourne sought to established a “Beloved Community” characterized by “small-scale communities knit together by shared cultural traditions, mutual aid, and a sense of the common good” (Blake, 7, 3). “Ours is the first generation of Americans consciously engaged in spiritual pioneering,” Waldo Frank mused in Our America (1919), while Van Wyck Brooks urged in 1917 that the nation adopt “a program for the conservation of our spiritual resources,” implying that stewardship rather than exploitation of nature should be the appropriate metaphor for human relations.20 Similarly, Lewis Mumford, influenced by British freethinker Patrick Geddes, aspired to construct a “green politics.” “Infused with the spirit of science,” Mumford encourages readers of The Story of Utopias (1922) to be members of “eutopias,” which he offered as a more European model of community: “the aim of the real eutopian is the culture of his environment, most distinctly not the culture, and above all not the exploitation, of some other person’s environment.”21 And although his tone in Utopias is nostalgic and even antimodern in its reverence for a medieval European past, Mumford’s cultural critique becomes—despite his disavowals of Dewey—even more pragmatic in The Culture of Cities (1938), as he addresses the complexities of the modern city and technology while explaining the benefits of what Dewey called “the local,” the direct, everyday human interactions that nourish democratic society. Taken collectively, the Young Americans can be understood as typical of a moment that was shaped initially by their intellectual mentors and subsequently propagated by a wide array of writers. While Dewey retained his belief in pragmatism as the best response to an ethically unmoored society, former pupils such as Bourne, Mumford, as well as the poet and cultural critic John Crowe Ransom disparaged the pragmatic frontier discourse and its model for the modern citizen and society. Collapsing pragmatism with utilitarian and market driven “sciences,” these attacks suggested that pragmatism had acquiesced to the hegemony of capital it was meant to work against. By 1917 Bourne declared that Dewey’s belated response to the atrocities of World War I left the impression of one “grappling, like the pioneer who challenges the arid plains, with a power too big for it.”22 In The Golden Day (1926), Mumford idealizes the antebellum period of American letters as a time of great creativity and promise,

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now belied by the industrialist mentality that had adopted the mantle of the pioneer. “Pioneer society, having no past, and no continuity, could have no future either,” he declares, adding skeptically that one could “recover great tracts of pioneer and industrial America from the pragmatists, the pioneer especially in James, the industrialist in his great pupil, Dewey.”23 While Dewey is too concerned with “preparation for something else,” James is characterized as “digging and dogging at the universe” (Mumford, 258, 95 –96). John Crowe Ransom sums up this line of thought with his observation that such intellectuals are “pioneering on principle,” without any end in sight.24 Yet even these prominent reactions against pragmatism, in conflating it with an amoral version of the pioneering, pastoral spirit of American culture, speak to the extent to which pragmatism had become integral to modern discussions of American pastoral ideology—that is, who the representative, ethical American should be and what kind of society he should work to create. The disdain for pragmatic methods in most cases reflects a distrust of a philosophy that either worked too hard or simply failed, in the opinion of these younger thinkers, to reveal the links between public and private practices, present actions and future consequences. These reactions also imply, to varying degrees, the resilience of an older model of American citizenship that calls for personal intellectual cultivation, a mode of development that would preserve space for private, though not necessarily public, virtue. Taken as a group, such reactions have long been held as emblematic of a modernist tradition that eschews politics or has covertly reactionary leanings. As the extent of their immersion in pragmatism reveals, however, even such apparently determined rejections offer proof of the extent to which they shared James’s and Dewey’s deep investment in theorizing the mutual relationship of art, personality, and society, as well as their mutual understanding that such discussions could not be divorced from the frontier rhetoric of the American pastoral. James, Dewey, and the Advent of Radical Thought The pragmatic method as developed by William James and John Dewey was crucial to the formation of the modern pastoral poetic mode insofar as it was the primary theorization of the progressive sensibility that informed the literature and politics of the early- and mid-twentieth century—a sensibility that many prominent artists and intellectuals felt themselves to share. In their attempt to delineate the distinctions and bridge the gap between the pioneer and pragmatist, materialist and ethicist, James and Dewey responded to a national sense of crisis concerning the nature of the modern self and modern

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experience—a crisis that was felt acutely by poets who hoped to find a surer footing in the American cultural scene. While Dewey’s appropriation of frontier rhetoric is more obvious, before him William James’s explications of the very nature of pragmatism helped to establish images and associations that would make Dewey’s more obvious conflations of the two discourses self-evident. Drawing upon his psychological studies and the work of Charles Peirce,25 James’s theory of “radical empiricism” as articulated in Pragmatism (1907) refers to experience as a meandering country “stream” that is “multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful, and perplexed.”26 The self and the world are both subject to this state of flux and continuous indeterminacy, which James repeatedly couches in metaphors of the natural world. As he turns to the nature of knowledge and truth, his rhetoric becomes more abstract, but retains an emphasis upon the individual’s exploration of uncharted intellectual territory. Truth itself is not fixed but instrumental, James warns: “the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons”; “truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events” (James, 37, 92). What we end up determining to be the truth is a form of “meliorism,” for these truths will embody our beliefs about what will improve the world. While James assumes that pragmatism entails a faith that is pluralistic, he also affirms that such is not necessarily the case (James, 71). On the one hand, he argues that pragmatism always accedes to the fact of its incomplete knowledge of the world, leading us to believe that “all our theories are instrumental, are mental modes of adaptation to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world-enigma” (James, 87). Even so, James himself cannot suppress his own disbelief that “our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe” (James, 133). James’s desire to believe in a higher power despite his belief in the goods offered by pluralistic thinking illustrates his ultimate conviction that competing goods will always exist and pose potential conflicts for the individual. According to James, a moral being must continually make difficult, even impossible choices, a stance that has led historians such as James Kloppenberg to dub him an “ironic” pragmatist.27 In light of this position, James was far less sanguine about the possibility of avoiding conflict or violence than his younger colleague, John Dewey, a situation James again expressed in terms of human beings’ relationship to the natural environment. As James notes in his 1910 essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” while war itself could not be avoided, those energies could be more productively turned toward war against “Nature,” specifically the joining of upper-class youth with their working-class counterparts in the

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ranks of those manning “coal and iron mines,” “freight trains,” “ and “fishing fleets.”28 Not coincidentally, such service would be not only morally beneficial, revealing in essence how the “other half” lives, but also it would toughen up an elite, white, Anglo-Saxon upper class increasingly perceived as weak and soft, their luxuries coming at the price of workers’ exploitation. Dewey’s response to James’s essay is perhaps one of the most telling indicators of the difference in their temperaments and the general import of each one’s philosophy. In a 1915 letter, Dewey described James’s essay as a mere “remedy for neurasthenics,” adding, his thing on war seemed to me to show that even his sympathies [were] limited by his experience; the idea that most people need any substitute for fighting for life, or that they have to have life made artificially hard for them in order to keep up their battling nerve could have come only from a man who was brought up an aristocrat and who had lived a sheltered existence. I think that he had no real intimation that the “labor problem” has always been for the great mass of people a much harder fight than any war.29 Dewey found James’s proposition elitist, opining instead that society’s many peacetime injustices and inequalities took precedence over reorienting the passions of the upper classes. While James himself was committed to democratic tenets, Dewey’s philosophy was more consistently predicated upon a commitment to universal democracy that clearly embodied his concern for those left out of the traditional political economy. Building on James’s thought, Dewey presented a pragmatic vision of “experimental empiricism” that is similar to his mentor’s while reflective of his own biases concerning what form “meliorism” should take. It was Dewey’s conceptions of experience, the self, and society that were the most widely promulgated throughout the first half of the twentieth century and so serve as the touchstone of many of my arguments concerning pragmatism, although James’s writings and concepts provide necessary cultural background and sources of intellectual influence as well. Like James, Dewey posits a postdualist vision of experience in which the self is immersed in his environment—much like the farmer or pioneer in relation to his land—in such a way that the self cannot be abstracted or understood beyond his embedded experience. In Experience and Nature (1929), Dewey explains that all experience is “double-barreled,” “it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality.”30 Like James, Dewey perceives the world to be “a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable,

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uncannily unstable” in which immediate experience is consistently altering the very nature of our selves (Experience, 41). Unlike James, however, Dewey’s ethical vision involves an essentially optimistic perspective upon “nature.” “Nature” for him implies a world of experience that contains an inherent order, a world, therefore, in which there are no conflicts between competing goods that cannot ultimately be resolved. Dewey’s developing vision of the modern self thus echoes both the relatively fixed republican ethos of the early years of the nation while allowing for the frontiersman’s progression toward a natural democratic ideal. According to Dewey, experience “carries principles of connection and organization within itself,” forms that ultimately lead man to the development of “creative democracy.”31 Only in this ideal form of social order are all citizens enabled to fulfill their full personal and political potential. Interested in “an opening and enlarging of the ways of nature in man,” Dewey urges us to “discover in thoughtful observation and experiment the method of administering the unfinished processes of existence so that frail goods shall be substantiated, secure goods be extended, and the precarious promises of good that haunt experienced things be more liberally fulfilled” (Experience, 76). And while Dewey admits that “the process of state formation [is] thus an ongoing, experimental process,” certain aspects of this ideal state suggest his investment in specific kinds of core social entities (Experience, 301). In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey would make more explicit his conviction that the stable small town remained the ideal community within which true discourse and relationships could be nurtured: “Democracy must begin at home,” he proclaimed, “and its home is the neighborly community.”32 Unlike James, the urban ironist, the more optimistic Dewey’s loyalties lay with smaller, local communities, rural and urban alike, that would form the basic levels of organization in his radically democratic “Great Community.”33 In his focus upon the local, Dewey also anticipates the body of cultural geography and similar work that reinforce his assumption concerning the relationship between place and space and distinctive forms of subjectivity and community.34 Unlike so many of his fellow social scientists, however, Dewey’s vision of the good society entails knowledge not only of philosophy, economics, and political science, but also of the literary arts, poetry in particular. In Experience and Nature, Dewey outlines how language functions with regard to the individual. He insists that the concept of “subjectivity” must be revised with the recognition that “this world of inner experience is dependent upon an extension of language which is a social product and operation.” Failure to acknowledge this fact would lead to “the subjectivistic, solipsistic and egoistic strain in modern thought” (Experience, 173). The self is the product

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of language and society and all of the historical contingencies that shape each. Discourse, man’s means of shaping as well as being shaped by the world, is “both instrumental and consummatory,” something that leads to other modes of experience and something that is potentially fulfilling in and of itself (Experience, 183). Arts such as poetry enable the “solvent union of the generic, recurrent, ordered, established phase of nature with the phase that is incomplete, going on, and hence still uncertain, contingent, novel, particular” (Experience, 359). In so doing they give both immediate pleasure and “continuously renewed delight” as a consummatory experience that is “indefinitely instrumental to new satisfying events” (Experience, 283). Poetry is the key to human beings’ continued development toward pragmatic social and ethical ideals. It is in Art as Experience (1932) that Dewey articulates a specifically pragmatic aesthetics. In this crucial volume he explains that his task is “to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.”35 Drawing on a pragmatic vision of the subject’s relation to her environment, Dewey articulates an elaborate theory of a world in which natural “rhythms” and “impulsions” culminate in aesthetic experiences that manifest “what actual experience actually becomes when its possibilities are fully expressed” (Art, 280). The imaginative vision of art addresses social life by eliciting “the possibilities that are interwoven with the texture of the actual,” enabling the viewer or reader to see the full potential of experience present and future, and to act to develop her own potential accordingly (Art, 345). As such, art promotes the formation of creative democracy, a state that harmonizes “the development of each individual with the maintenance of a social state in which the activities of one will contribute to the good of all the others.”36 Poetry and literature are especially potent forms of aesthetic experience, insofar as “the expressions that constitute art are communication in its pure and undefiled form,” and literature is presented in a “medium” “already formed by communication,” or language (Art, 244). Even the critic is granted a role in this process, for in interpreting “the moral function of art” he furthers art’s role in “remov[ing] prejudice,” and “tear[ing] away the veils due to wont and custom” (Art, 324). Dewey’s connection between art and democracy proved significant and inspiring, as it provided an opportunity for a diverse range of individuals to establish themselves as citizens by virtue of their aesthetic activity. In his emphasis upon knowledge and creativity as the basis for ethical and political legitimacy, Dewey sought to extend the promise of full citizenship beyond the proprietary upper and upper-middle classes through education.

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But he was careful to note that art and democracy are not necessarily secure in the world as it stands. Wary of the harmful effects of industrialized labor while not entirely damning of it, he warns that art will be endangered until “the mass of men and women who do the useful work of the world have the opportunity to be free in conducting the processes of production and are richly endowed in capacity for enjoying the fruits of collective work” (Art, 344). Throughout his career Dewey sought to establish an uneasy truce with the economic and historical forces that made pragmatism possible yet threatened to eclipse its activist, democratic potential with their own brand of social determinism. As a result, Dewey’s philosophy, while primarily associated with a liberal, progressive agenda, contains certain transideological valences that speak to the complications of forming a universally “meliorist” vision for humanity.37 Dewey’s most troubled musings on modern society emerge in The Public and Its Problems (1927), written in response to Walter Lippmann’s The Phantom Public (1925). While Lippmann discusses the impending irrelevance of representative democracy, Dewey’s rebuttal stresses that due to the forces of industrialization, the state, developed to meet the needs of a republican, agrarian society, is unable to meet the needs of the new and multiple “publics” that have arisen. If the public is to survive at all, he suggests, immediate action must be taken. Artists and local environments are each essential to the development of the publics and communities of which Dewey’s “Great Community” will be comprised, but, as Robert Westbrook notes, Dewey is unable to formulate precisely how either can function to produce the kinds of publics that will recognize their needs clearly enough to have a real effect upon the state. In the end, Dewey’s conclusions are hardly optimistic, as the state appears too entrenched and the publics too large and unwieldy to be transformed in the service of real democracy.38 What emerges is a general desire for clear discourse to function within multiple publics as a means of creating social consciousness and forcing political action: “The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, persuasion” (Public, 208). How this discourse and consciousness are arrived at is left unresolved, but Dewey does conclude, in words suggestive of William Carlos Williams’s later dictum regarding art and news: “Artists have always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not the outward happening itself which is new, but the kindling by it of emotion, perception, appreciation” (Public, 182–184).39 Similarly, in Art as Experience he cites Shelley’s description of the poet as the world’s “unacknowledged legislator”; for Dewey “the first intimations of wide and large redirections of desire and purpose are of necessity imaginative” (Art, 349). Even as he looked to poets for political inspiration, however, Dewey reiterated his fear

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that the imaginative and artistic impulses of the working class would be suppressed, “the processes of production” imposing upon the masses a latter-day caste system. In Dewey’s ideal world artists and their audiences would form a new basis for the representative citizen, forging among themselves a moral and aesthetic authority that they could use to influence society as a whole.40 The positive aspects of this scenario are clear: the model subject and self is educated, intellectual, creative, and possesses an intuitive ethical sensibility. Membership in such communities is flexible and voluntary. To an extent, the model is even practical, as over the course of the twentieth century the economic sector has called for an increasingly educated workforce to meet the needs of a consumer-driven economy. Problems do hover on the horizon of this democratic vista, however. Dewey presumes a natural (indeed, predetermined) emergence of consensus concerning social goods, but is unclear as to how publics themselves should be formed. Dewey also appears to assume a linguistic clarity and faith in “communication” that anticipates Jürgen Habermas’s later formulation of the “formal pragmatics of communicative action.”41 Recent pragmatic philosophers and literary critics Cornel West, Frank Lentricchia, and Ross Posnock, as well as historians James Kloppenberg and Robert Westbrook, appear to have inherited Dewey’s assumption, all finding in pragmatism means to produce democratically constructive dialogue,42 while others, such as Richard Rorty, echo the early Habermas in their formulation of an “ironic” pragmatism that merely offers intellectual satisfaction to the educated elite and falls short of effectively advocating truly democratic principles.43 The poets I examine in the chapters that follow come to their own conclusions regarding poetry’s ultimate democratic potential, most implying a powerful link between politics and aesthetics while noting the limitations of the union. The pragmatists’ own invocation of pastoral frontier rhetoric provides a strong example of how culturally familiar tropes and genres may be used to attract and communicate with audiences who might otherwise be wary of innovative ideas. Yet James and Dewey’s appropriation of an antiquated discourse reveals both the possibilities and pitfalls of such a gesture: while educated and careful readers would quickly comprehend the distinctions between old and new ways of thinking, less insightful readers might fail to grasp the intellectual leaps, the ways in which literal terms become figurative. A “pioneer,” once an immigrant leading his wagon over the Continental Divide, becomes a scientist behind the wheel of his Ford, researching rural poverty. The “frontier,” rather than a porous borderland where Federal powers ended and Native American communities began, becomes the intellectual space where knowledge is endlessly produced and reassessed, truths emerging

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in place of ignorance, ethics complicating expedience. Poetry, necessarily metaphorical, proves an ideal genre in which to engineer such slippages, its linguistic felicities permitting juxtapositions of images and ideas that in turn provoke thought and emotion. Even so, vexing issues remain: how to get people in proximity to poetry, how to make poetry for and of them? Gently but insistently posing such questions, pragmatic pastorals gesture toward the utopian ideals of modern public sphere theory while acknowledging the limitations of public discourse, their voices echoing across fields both literal and figurative.

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CHAPTER 2

Tramp Culture and the Cult of Pan: Robert Frost’s Pastoral of Class Mobility

I

n the fall of 1894 after a spat with his future wife, Elinor White, Robert Frost bought a one-way train ticket and set off on an ostensibly suicidal trip to the Dismal Swamp on the Virginia-North Carolina border. By the time he decided against throwing himself into the murky waters, he found he didn’t have enough funds to make his way back home to Lawrence, Massachusetts. Assessing his situation, Frost embarked on a series of adventures that read, in retrospect, as if purloined from turn-of-the-century headlines and popular fiction about the menace of tramps, the unemployed and homeless men who haunted urban and rural America in the wake of the major depressions of the late nineteenth century. “Nearly out of money,” biographer Lawrence Thompson narrates, “Frost decided to try his luck at leaving Elizabeth City [N. C.] hobo-fashion, by stealing a ride in a freight car.”1 Sleeping for a while, Frost awakened to find himself at a lumber camp, where he hopped another train to Washington, D.C. There Frost “spent that evening in a hobo jungle just outside the capital, studying the grizzled and shabby veterans who crouched or sat around a little fire made of sticks and branches.” As Thompson relates the scene, “there was poetry of a sort for Frost to hear that evening, ballads and songs, one of which he learned by heart” (Thompson, 185–186). Frost’s initial encounter with tramps was marked by offers of advice, male camaraderie, and the communal recitation of songs and poetry that evidently made a deep impression on the lonely young man.

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Frost’s attempt to blend in with these exotic strangers, however, was quickly stymied. Soon, the tramps began to inquire about the quality of Frost’s traveling gear and clothing, as well as the whereabouts of any money he might have on him. “No longer interested in suicide,” a disquieted Frost fled the encampment, asking the nearest policeman if he might be locked up in jail, at the time a common form of overnight lodging for tramps. “Years later he liked to boast that he had spent his first night in Washington behind bars in a jail,” (Thompson, 187) the story becoming a humorous tale of the poet’s youthful indiscretion. Exhilarating and frightening, Frost’s experiences with tramps reflected a fluctuating public consensus that rendered tramps both sympathetic and threatening characters. Time and again, in poems written over the course of his long career, Frost would return to the subject of tramps, retaining a complex and evolving perspective on the migrant poor. Far from anomalous, Frost’s story of his own tramping experience as well as his early efforts at what was known as “tramp poetry” were typical of an elite literary culture entranced by the phenomenon of the unemployed. Within these romanticized narratives, tramps tend to be depicted as residual frontiersman whose rejection of industrial and corporate culture is evidence of an inherently independent American ethos linked to cultural production.2 In texts such as Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey’s Songs of Vagabondia (1894), for example, vagabonds or tramps are pastoral figures who reject hard work for a life of ease and pleasure, declaring themselves “Free as the whim / Of a spook on a spree,” not “mere commodities” “[r]anged upon shelves,” “[w]e are not labeled, / We are ourselves.”3 Calling themselves “Black Richard or Bliss,” these “vagabonds” are implicitly racially marked, emphasizing a dual rejection of the traditional role of white producer as well as the modern plight of the mechanized worker. Tramp poetry first gained ground in the 1890s and continued to hold appeal for a mass audience well into the 1930s, and Frost worked within and against its conventions throughout much of his career, beginning with his earliest publications. Carman himself praised Frost’s first published poem, “My Butterfly,” which appeared in The Independent, a well-known liberal New York newspaper whose editor, Susan Ward, showed the poem to the older poet (Thompson, 166).4 In Frost’s own first attempt at a Carmanesque lyric, “Pan with Us” (1902),5 Pan is neither black nor white but “gray,” his strange skin color beginning to suggest the racialized difference of Carman and Hovey’s vagabonds while indicating that Frost’s own work would shy away from the nostalgic, implausible, racialized realm of “vagabondia.” Instead, Frost’s early pastoral tramp poetics invoke classical pastoral figures and tropes in order to reimagine a new, postfrontier American reality,

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addressing the experience of social marginalization attendant upon tramp life as epitomized by the white tramps he encountered in the Washington D.C. “hobo jungle.” Fusing aspects of tramp narratives that appeared in dime novels and journalistic exposés with popular poetic renditions of the tramp as a kind of modern “Pan” or idealized pastoral artist, Frost was able to produce ideologically ambivalent depictions of poverty and the plight of the modern poet, the latter’s position both collapsed into and juxtaposed with the social marginality of the tramp. The connection between the underprivileged and poetic practice is exemplified early in Frost’s career, in “The Mill City” (1905), a grim sonnet that depicts sympathetically the ranks of mill workers from which so many tramps of the period came. Describing a “drear city by a stream” whose “denizens were sad to me,” the speaker reflects upon his blindness with regard to their condition: “I could not fathom what their life could be.” Like “drowned men,” these laborers have been overcome by a darker strain of the “stream of experience” so vaunted by James—represented for them by the “river” that powers the mill. The concluding sestet suggests the speaker’s complex situation with regard to these people and their relation to his poetic practice: Yet I supposed that they had all one hope With me (there is but one). I would go out, When happier ones drew in for fear of doubt, Breasting their current, resolute to cope With what thoughts they compelled who thronged the street, Less to the sound of voices than of feet.6 The first line break suggests either that the speaker himself is their “one hope,” or that they, like him, have only “one hope.” So constructed, the poem teeters between the poet’s desire to speak for the “voices” of this crowd and his sense of his own distance from their fate. He can only “suppose” what they feel, he is both like and unlike them, better and not so good, foregrounding the pastoral class tensions Empson later identified. To the extent that he is not of them, he is “resolute to cope” with the “thoughts” their very presence “compelled,” acknowledging that they do in fact demand a response from the speaker and poet—rather than passive, their presence is active. This activity is reinforced by the poem’s reference to “feet,” which provoke a response from the speaker that competes with and almost overwhelms the “voices,” although they are still present. In effect, the speaker imagines himself transposing the rhythm of the crowd, its physicality of being, directly into his own poetic labors, his voicing of their experience

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implicitly replacing their own voices, ironically “drowned” out by their own weary shuffling. Whether or not the result is a poetry in which “thoughts” of social equity or justice justify the “hope” of the city’s “denizens” is left unresolved, although the verse does suggest that the presence of the working poor is not blithely co-opted nor its rhythms appropriated without awareness of their economic situation. It is the poet’s own “feet,” however, that ultimately shape the regular meter of this poem and serve to stress his own aesthetic awakening even as he laments the workers’ fate. The poem’s preoccupation with walking anticipates a number of poems that depict tramp figures, now loosed from the tighter rhythms of the city crowd and forced to wander in search of food and shelter. In poems written from the 1890s through the 1910s, Frost depicted itinerant men as real rather than romanticized figures, their presence provoking honest questions regarding the parameters of the national community and the obligations of the self to others. While his work was occasionally confused with that of other poets writing in the tramp-style,7 Frost’s work was nevertheless distinctly more troubling and sophisticated than that of self-styled poet “tramps” such as Harry Kemp, W.H. Davies, or Vachel Lindsay.8 Instead, Frost’s tramp poetics dovetailed with depictions of tramps in the work of William James, while implicitly conducting their own Deweyan pragmatic critique of James’s romantic depictions of the homeless. Although Frost’s later poems, with the notable exception of “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” tend to disavow the complex and conflicted class affiliations of Frost’s early years, their very existence hinted at a continued grappling with underlying social issues intensified by the Great Depression. Tramping in Context Frost’s early pastoral tramp poetics must be read in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates concerning the status of the homeless and migrant workers. The presence of tramps embodied concerns about the ethics of community and civic responsibility as well as the gulf that had opened up between the white, middle-class managerial class and the working class. For Chicago School sociologist Robert Park in his classic treatise “The Mind of the Hobo” (1925), “the hobo” was characterized by a “restlessness” that marks him as “a belated frontiersman, a frontiersman at a time and in a place when the frontier is passing or no longer exists.”9 But in a nation still recovering from the Civil War and frequent economic depressions, tramps were far from the American ideal and often embodied a masculinity “out of place,” a kind of social “disorder.”10 Directly after the war, public sentiment regarding tramps was surprisingly hostile,

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revealing what would become a growing anxiety regarding class divisions and inequality. As Walt Whitman observed in notes for a (never delivered) lecture on The Tramp and Strike Questions, “[i]f the United States, like the countries of the Old World, are also able to grow vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably waged populations. . . . —then our republican experiment, notwithstanding all its surface-successes, is at heart an unhealthy failure.”11 This perspective was not monolithic or immune to historical events, however: while tramps were widely maligned in the 1870s as irresponsible men who rejected domestic life, by the 1880s public opinion had begun to shift in the wake of successive economic depressions and the problem of “unemployment” was acknowledged for the first time in American history.12 By the 1890s, aspiring journalists and social observers such as Jack London as well as Stephen Crane, Walter Wyckoff, and Josiah Flynt donned rags and took to the rails in order not only to document but also physically to embody a widening social phenomenon that threatened to destabilize the modern industrial economy with strikes and protests.13 Often voyeuristic, the accounts of these middle-class writers tended to co-opt a virile workingclass masculinity in order to shore up middle-class authority, their narratives’ subsuming of “class difference . . . into cultural difference” relegating tramps to simply another group within a pluralistic society.14 Yet the late nineteenth-century tramp was hardly a “univocal figure,” and was just as often depicted as Christ-like or even an inheritor of the ideals of the Union Army in texts that appealed to working-class audiences.15 The white, male inheritor of the mantle of the “producer,” for which the Union had fought and who had been subsequently disenfranchised by the new economic order, the tramp could be considered malign or pathetic to the degree audiences shared his alienation from corporations and new industrial realities. Laboring at the “wageworkers’ frontier,” tramp culture in fact constituted a new era in labor relations that ended only with World War II.16 As Tyler Hoffman and Donald Sheehy have observed, Frost’s ideological orientation toward the working poor was likely rooted not only in his travels and reading but also in his experiences as a mill worker and inhabitant of Lawrence, Massachusetts, a major textile center and site of labor unrest during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.17 During his formative years in the city, Frost developed distinctive, if at times contradictory views on the working and unemployed poor. Frost’s family, while clinging to a shabby middle-class gentility through the meager earnings of Frost’s schoolteacher mother and contributions from his paternal grandfather, favored liberal politics in a manner typical of a period in which the lines between the lower-middle class and working class often blurred.18 Frost’s mother

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was an ardent supporter of socialist Henry George, a family acquaintance from their years in San Francisco.19 Although better educated, Frost’s family lived in rented lodgings in close proximity to the city’s working class. While Frost insisted on referring to himself as a “rebel” rather than a radical, and ridiculed socialism and other liberal causes favored by friends such as Louis Untermeyer,20 his experiences with working-class tramp figures and the immigrant laborers of the Lawrence textile mills (political allies under the auspices of the International Workers of the World, also known as the IWW or “wobblies”) from the early 1890s onward led him to depict such figures with surprising frequency and complexity (Untermeyer, 31).21 The infamous Lawrence Strike of 1912 crystallized some of these feelings for Frost, the young poet noting with a typical ambivalence that he “felt almost sorry to be so far from Lawrence when the syndecalist strike was on” (Letters, 48). Effectively controlled by migratory laborers by 1908, the IWW’s efforts during the strike emphasized issues that would later come to dominate Frost’s own poetry, helping to reveal the inadequacies of a deeply unequal society and making visible the mutable “value” of an individual’s labor.22 In its drive to return the “surplus” value of his labor to the working man, wresting it from the control of the corporation, the IWW’s agenda brought into the foreground conflicting ideas regarding production, consumption, waste, and subjectivity at the turn of the century. Generating more income and leisure time for the working class, labor unions helped breed new habits of consumption that in turn fueled the development of a consumer society and perceived workingclass “extravagance” antithetical to the proletariat utopia envisioned by the IWW’s most ardent members.23 While labor unions sought to counteract the direst poverty and win a living wage for their members, they ended up literally buying into a consumerist ethos that channeled political into cultural capital. Constituting a new economic and ethical challenge to the dominant order, forcing Americans to literally reevaluate their traditional assumptions about subjectivity and community, the presence of tramps also registered in the nation’s newest philosophy, pragmatism. On several occasions, William James refers to the tramp as a protopragmatist, and Frost’s consistent depiction of the tramp as the counterpart of—and competitor for cultural capital with—the middle-class poet or philosopher can be convincingly read in the context of Frost’s enthusiasm for the writings of William James. As several critics have noted, James’s early volumes Psychology: Briefer Course (1892), The Will to Believe (1897), and Talks to Teachers and Students on Psychology (1899) as well as Pragmatism (1907) were important texts for Frost, who taught Psychology and Talks to Teachers while an instructor at the Plymouth

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Normal School in New Hampshire.24 But it is significant for Frost’s early poetry that James tended to have a “blindness” regarding the plight of the working poor, fixating instead upon the psychological and spiritual needs of the middle and upper classes, especially intellectuals. In Psychology, for example, “the tramp who lives from hour to hour” is enlisted as an example of a mental limitation curiously akin to that of the “bohemian whose engagements are from day to day,” both figures’ aversion to “considerations of the more remote” consequences of their actions evidence of a lessened capacity for ethical behavior, especially with regard to sex and responsibility for family members and other human beings.25 James’s characterization of the tramp echoes complaints from the 1870s and 1880s that the tramp was irresponsible, having abandoned rather than been forced from his role as primary breadwinner for his dependant family.26 Similarly, in the chapter on “The Consciousness of the Self,” the “material aspects of the self” are imagined as forms of personal property without which “we are all at once assimilated to the tramps and poor devils whom we so despise, and at the same time removed farther than ever away from the happy sons of earth who lord it over land and sea and men in the full-blown lustihood that wealth and power can give[.]”27 Here, the tramp is associated with an abject state of poverty and lack of property, his very self made vulnerable by his lack of possessions, modern subjectivity implicitly aligned, in contrast, with a “lustihood” and manliness equated with wealth. In their rejection of the tramp as irresponsible and unmanned, James’s early writings reflect a contemporary reluctance to accept the reality of unemployment and its devastating effects upon the working-class. In texts such as “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” (from Talks to Teachers, based on lectures given in 1892) and Pragmatism, James presents a more conciliatory, at times romanticized, view of tramps as Whitmanian loafers and ultimately archetypes for the pragmatist himself. Reflective of a general softening of public attitudes toward tramps by the 1890s and early 1900s, James’s references to tramps were also influenced by his development of a more socially conscious philosophy. “On a Certain Blindness” dwells at length upon Robert Louis Stevenson’s tramplike figures of “The LanternBearers,” young boys who carry lanterns under their cloaks on the way to evening escapades, the lamps functioning in James’s narrative as a metaphor for the secret inner light of all human beings.28 Continuing a few passages later, he asserts: “Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp or loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation, an occupation which will change the usual standards of human values in the twinkling of an eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of power, and laying low in a minute the distinctions which it takes a hard-working conventional man a lifetime to

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build up” (OCB, 851). The tramp emerges here as the protopragmatist, the individual capable of revealing the elusive, transitory nature of “value” and in the process enabling the creation of a “new centre and a new perspective” upon human existence. Significantly for Frost, the tramp is immediately conflated with the poet in James’s work, who is epitomized for James by Walt Whitman himself. The good gray poet is deemed a “contemporary prophet,” one who “abolishes the usual human distinctions, brings all conventionalisms into solution, and loves and celebrates hardly any human attributes save those elementary ones common to all members of the race. For this he becomes a sort of ideal tramp, a rider on omnibus-tops and ferry-boats, and, considered either practically or academically, a worthless and unproductive being” (OCB, 851). Characterized as aloof from the crowds that he observes and is inspired by, the poet is depicted in terms reminiscent of Baudelaire’s flâneur, the urban spectator whose “special purpose” was described by Walter Benjamin as “endow[ing] [the] crowd with a soul.”29 Unlike his European counterpart, however, James’s Whitman only sees in the crowd an affirming vision of the civic body, never an alienating vision of modernity. James’s portrait of the tramp as democratic seer anticipates later writings in which the tramp poet and dreamer is similarly idealized rather than scorned, his former irresponsibility transformed into an intense receptivity to others that is distinctly ethical. While his homelessness and lack of social ties supposedly free him to see into the lives of others, however, little account is made of his physical needs or financial demands. The tramp is imagined as wanting nothing, content to roam and see at will, an unreal indigent who subsists upon “gleams” and “light” rather than bread and milk. In “abolishing . . . distinctions” among men, he denies his own claims upon society, even as his supposedly “worthless and unproductive” character becomes crucial to the emotional and spiritual reproduction of American society. Ultimately, James’s tramp has more than a little in common with the tramps impersonated by contemporaries such as London, Flynt, and Wyckoff, in that his supposed repository of insight has been co-opted for the middle classes by a professional observer who labors in the name of science and truth. His mental labor accrues value in proportion to the tramp’s refusal to acknowledge traditional concepts of material value, thus precluding the possibility of economic compensation for the latter’s work, his civic participation limited to a “sympathetic” contribution of perspective that is willingly appropriated by a spiritually impoverished and implicitly more deserving middle class. Like Frost’s plodding mill workers and their unemployed brethren, such figures are in danger of losing their “voices” and “feet” both to the poet’s art, their cultural contributions and ethical challenge wholly submerged in the text.

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Pragmatic Critique and the Origins of a Tramp Poetics To the extent that Frost’s tramp characters evolved from their roots in the same kind of late nineteenth-century tramp literature that so inspired James, they elicit the nascent democratic impulses of James’s writings while developing them in ways that came to anticipate and coincide more closely with the pragmatic approach of John Dewey.30 Frost’s tramp poetry does not simply celebrate the dissolution of traditional standards of value but also presents the anxieties and cultural difficulties involved in translating such philosophical (and implicitly economic) transvaluations into new visions of the ethical individual—especially the artist—in society. The similarities in their perspectives are indicated in part by Dewey’s own assessment of Whitman, whom he deemed the “seer” of “democracy,” his life “a life of free and enriching communion.” Like all great artists, Whitman for Dewey was one of the “real purveyors of news,” able to “kindl[e]” through his work the “emotion, perception, and appreciation” necessary for transforming the essence of a reader’s or viewer’s experience in the world. “If the Great Society is to become a Great Community,” and a true “Public” come into being, Dewey warned, such Whitmanian figures were essential: “a subtle-delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it.” Only when “the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means of life and not its despotic master,” he concluded.31 In many respects, Frost’s tramp poetics address precisely the tension between industrial society and democracy, the machine and human life and ethics, that Dewey saw as the target of pragmatic inquiry and action. Frost’s poetics specifically anticipate Dewey’s perspective on the function of harsh physical labor in the modern age as well as the philosopher’s conception of the “rhythms” of everyday and aesthetic experience. As Dewey later observed, “changes in industrial conditions” too often led artists to develop eccentric and “isolated means of ‘self-expression,’ ” rather than art that is fully integrated into its environment.32 The problem with modern industrial society is that “[t]he psychological conditions resulting from private control of the labor of other men for the sake of private gain . . . are the forces that suppress and limit esthetic quality in the experience that accompanies processes of production” (Art, 343–344). The philosopher stressed the need for poets to be free to experience an “environing world that makes possible the existence of artistic form” through its natural “rhythm” (Art, 147), going so far as to imagine poetic meter itself as arising naturally from “the participation of man in nature’s rhythms” which “induced him to impose rhythm on changes where they did not appear” (Art, 148). Frost, too, felt

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the interplay of natural and poetic rhythms to be the underlying principle behind all poetry, and his poetry expresses similar reservations about the effects of industrialized society upon poetry. However, while Frost’s early poetry repeatedly suggests that the working poor deserve compassion and charity, he just as often invokes such presences in order to characterize the “natural” rhythmic origins of his own poetics, as in “The Mill City.” A similar dynamic enlivens “The Self Seeker” (1913), a poem inspired by the experiences of Frost’s friend Carl Burrell, also an aspiring poet and autodidact whose itinerant work habits in some ways resembled those of a tramp and whose disabling accident marred Frost’s honeymoon visit to Burrell’s hometown. The poem chronicles the conversation leading up to and including the visit of a company lawyer to a disabled mill worker’s bedside in order to make a small settlement. Sardonically declaring that “I’m going to sell my soul, or, rather, feet,” the disabled worker (known as the “Broken One”) provokes the indignation of his friend Will (based on Frost himself), who protests: “With you the feet have nearly been the soul” (Collected, 93). Once again, temporary factory workers are imagined as having “feet” that are expressive of a spiritual and implicitly poetic element, the perfect iambs of the line stressing the coherence of person and vocation. The point is brought home by a discussion of the “Broken One”s favorite hobby, the seeking and gathering of wild orchids—what Frost elsewhere refers to as Burrell’s “poesies” and clearly a version of “poesy” itself.33 Casting the hopeful botanist and metaphorical poet in the role of the factory worker and recreational tramp, and casting himself as the friend whose anger at the company’s meager compensation anticipates the anger of striking workers over industrial accidents and low pay, Frost reveals how closely intertwined are the fates of the middle-class poet and the working classes. Carl’s fate was not, Frost knew, so removed from his own; the two had been schoolmates in Lawrence and Frost was saved from such penury only by a generous inheritance from his grandfather. The “Broken One”s loss of his feet, however, suggests a grim fate for the poet were he, too, forced to labor in a factory and not free to literally “Will” his work into being, even if the latter were to mean that he, like “some stockholders in Boston,” would profit from others’ pain (Collected, 100). Feet and the sound of feet were equated for Frost both with poetic meter and with the kind of physical and ethical restlessness that animated his work. The very act of tramping, both in the form of the long walks that Frost enjoyed throughout his lifetime and in the more ominous incarnation this habit took in his journey to the Dismal Swamp and back, reinforced Frost’s sense that poetry was directly linked to physical experience in a social universe, poetry’s rhythms developing from the poet’s immersion

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in a “stream” of life that was no mere metaphor. Just as Virgil’s Tityrus is forced to look on as his fellow shepherd Melibeous is condemned to walk into exile, Frost’s “Will” observes the “Broken One,” and his speaker listens to the “denizens” of the mill city, provoking the reader’s judgment as to how the poet can or should respond to inequality and dispossession. Yet poetry speaks, for Frost, through feet whose rhythms smooth or disjointed, easy cadences or abrupt interjections, bespeak the impossibility of finding voices that fully express the experiences of others. As Frost once wrote in his journal: “Poetry is measure in two senses. It is measured tread [,] but it is also a carefully measured amount of all you have to say. I should have to say [,] any economies in verse to keep from falsity of thoroughness.”34 Stressing that “what you with[hold] is as effective as what you throw in” (an echo in turn of Pan’s strategy of reservation), Frost allows his lines to contain the tread of the rural and working poor who populate so many of his best poems, while omitting what might interfere with his own voice. The true poet, Frost wrote to John Barlett, “must learn to get cadences by skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre.”35 In effect, poetic feet represent and distort real feet, cadences or “treads” just as the “machine” has hobbled “the Broken One,” who in turn seems unable to break away from the machine, erotically drawn to “embrace the shaft” and ride it out to its perverse climax. The result is the “music” of the mills, which one “ought as a good villager to like,” the grotesque sound of the modern political economy—and modern poetry—turning experience into art (Collected, 93, 94). In its depiction of industrial life and its attendant migrant or tramp labor, both of which are in turn linked to the “feet” undergirding the poet’s work, Frost’s poetics ironically embodies Dewey’s conviction that art should not be removed from but acknowledged as necessarily integrated into modern society. For both Frost and Dewey, the artist’s task in a democracy “is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience” (Art, 3). However, in a complication of Dewey’s distrust of industry, Frost depicts the mills and their environs as inevitable, their music, along with the tread of tramps, contributing to rather than suppressing art, albeit with ethically unsettling consequences. Rather than merely passive figures, ready for appropriation by a middle-class audience, Frost’s impoverished characters and voices provoke unresolved discomfort in Frost’s speakers and readers. Their “voices” and “feet” work with and against the poet’s “voice” and “feet” to create a poetry of the new industrial order that belies the soothing, depoliticized “happy-go-lucky” strain of pragmatic “anarchism” James perceived as well

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as picturesque turn-of-the-century depictions of tramps as carefree spirits. It is thus that Frost’s poetics creates “new experiences” that give voice to those “otherwise dumb, inchoate, restricted, and resisted” through a kind of work that is neither traditional labor nor escape but a new form of discourse that is both necessary and a version of what he later termed “extravagance” (Art, 133). The Extravagance of the Middle Class In 1962, Frost gave a talk entitled “On Extravagance,” in which he declared that, despite his New England upbringing, “I never took any stock in the doctrine that ‘a penny saved is a penny earned.’ A penny saved is a mean thing, and a penny spent is a generous thing.”36 While Frost may well have imagined this stance as wittily heretical in 1962, in the 1890s through the 1910s the term “extravagance” initially was associated with Henry George’s theorization of the habits of both “tramps” and “millionaires,” marking a relatively new phase in the American political economy best encapsulated in Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). In documenting “conspicuous consumption,” Veblen dwelled on the phenomenon of “conspicuous leisure,” noting that “wherever the canon of conspicuous leisure has a chance undisturbed to work out its tendency, there will therefore emerge a secondary, and in a sense spurious, leisure class—abjectly poor and living a precarious life of want and discomfort, but morally unable to stoop to gainful pursuits.”37 While neither a millionaire nor tramp, Frost’s self-presentation and poetics suggest a middle-class persona that contained attributes of both, tacitly reminding readers that such extreme forms of “extravagance” and “leisure” existed only in relation to—and indeed were the social inversion of—the concurrent realities of undervalued physical and intellectual labor. Typical of a new breed of middle-class poet, Frost sought to affirm the value of his mental labor and aesthetic product in terms suitable to a consumerdriven economy that made leisure possible while constantly negotiating its kinship and obligations to working-class labor and the bodies to which it was attached. Hardly a millionaire, Frost nonetheless feigned a shabby gentility in his interactions with neighbors and friends.38 Soon after Frost’s first books of poetry appeared in the United States, he reinforced his newly middle-class status by taking the casual if studied stance of the gentleman poet during at least one of his initial interviews with American papers. Finding Frost at home at his farm in Franconia in February 1917, a reporter from The Boston Post was more than delighted to play along, quoting Frost to the effect that “I suppose I’m just a bit lazy . . . so I’ve had a lazy, scrape-along life, and

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enjoyed it.” Noting how his family “smouldered” by way of existence, Frost is depicted describing himself as “not really poor or lacking anything, but constantly on the verge of having something.”39 Whether or not Frost actually described himself as “lazy” (additional correspondence suggests that the reporter himself supplied the word), the word coheres with Frost’s reluctance to be seen as a common laborer or producer and so have his poems perceived as ordinary objects, even as he describes himself as not unlike those poor who merely “scraped along.” His “smouldering” suggests a precarious state of existence, evoking a constant using up or spending linked to “extravagance” or consumption while also suggesting a “lack” of “something” the family does not quite have and perhaps even a certain resentment regarding their relative poverty. This telling self-characterization recalls and complicates readings of the “slow smokeless burning of decay” of “The Wood-Pile” (1914; likely begun 1906–1910), now one of Frost’s best known poems.40 In the poem, the speaker sets out on a long, aimless walk only to encounter an abandoned pile of wood in the middle of the forest. A mystery revolves around who “could so forget his handiwork on which / He spent himself, the labor of his ax,” as to forgo compensation for his own toil (Collected, 101). On the one hand, if taken as a figure for the potentially neglected poem, the woodpile symbolizes Frost’s disdain for a literary marketplace that undervalued his contributions and thus his preference for a self-imposed wastefulness (foregoing publication).41 On the other hand, the use of wood chopping and woodpiles as metaphors for labor and value also serve to emphasize the nature of physical labor sought by and demanded of the migrant poor, illuminating the ways in which Frost’s anxieties concerning intellectual labor and class status were linked to his depictions of work, the refusal to work, and the inability to work. As Frost likely knew from his reading and personal experience, middle-class reformers often turned to wood chopping and similar tasks as “work tests” for tramps seeking shelter in the 1870s and 1880s.42 Such work tests were part of what Wai-Chee Dimock has termed a late-nineteenthcentury “economy of pain” in which charity work is circumscribed by a logic of “limited liability” dictated by capitalism.43 In “The Wood-Pile,” the “work test” or image of wood consumption is crucial to situating Frost’s own middling and mediating role in an economy of charitable obligations and limitations, suggesting both the ways in which he identified with the labor (or lack thereof) of the transient worker and the ways in which his art had to be distinguished from the threat such endeavors posed to his sense of self and class position. On one level, the discovery of the rotting woodpile echoes the speaker’s own waste of time as embodied in the long walk that has taken him to this remote location. The poet appears to have emerged

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from this “tramp” as effortlessly as the stacked wood, the value of each act denied a simple monetary equivalent. The speaker tips his hand, however, in his commentary upon the only visible presence in the poem, a bird who hovers around the pile behaving “like one who takes / Everything said as personal to himself” (Collected, 100–101). The bird’s tizzy of “fear” upon the intrusion of the speaker, comically made visible in the form of its “white feather,” the universal token of cowardice, enables the speaker conveniently to recognize, displace, and dismiss any and all “fears” onto this fragile, elusive body whose song traditionally represents that of the poet. The result is a poem that ensures a safe and satirical distance from the “pain” and “fears” of others while reassuring the speaker that such fears were never “personal to himself” to begin with. In a similar manner, several early poems depicting tramps also hint at and attempt to dispel such “fear” as it threatens to disrupt the poems’ economies of meter, form, and affect as well as the integrity of the poet himself. The resulting poems depict the Frostian persona as aligned with the “pains” both of those giving and receiving charity. In many cases, the poems tend to blur and destabilize the boundary between the two figures, giver and recipient, revealing a complex social reality of rural New England that exposes the fragility of the social order and attributions of value underlying that order. In the spirit of an irony “that doesn’t iron out anything,” Frost’s early tramp poetics tend to delay the articulation of any ethical imperative while implying that a society without any such network of social obligations would be in constant threat of ethical as well as economic impoverishment (Untermeyer, 378). Although Frost himself was an ardent walker accustomed to lonely rambles, he was extremely vigilant regarding the menace that others’ trampings might prove to himself and his family. Just before moving to his first farm in Derry, New Hampshire, “anticipating tramps and prowlers, he . . . purchased a revolver in Lawrence” (Thompson, 278). Yet it was also during his years at Derry that Frost had yet another, not entirely negative, experience with tramps, an experience that was to influence poems written over the course of his career. According to a story Frost related to Thompson late in his life, one evening a tramp stopped “at his farmhouse and asked if he could sleep in the barn overnight”: It was late in the fall, the night was cold, and the tramp looked as thought he might set fire to the barn, after dark, if the answer was no. With mixed feelings of fear and pity, Frost had let this tramp sleep on a bed of rugs and blankets in the kitchen beside the stove. He gave the man food that night, and breakfast in the morning. After the stranger was gone,

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Frost puzzled over his own inner turmoil: All men are created equally free to seek their own rights in their own way, but how does one draw the line between the rights of the property owner and the rights of the tramp to make a claim on the sympathy (or fear) of the property owner? (Thompson, 377) Although this story was told at the end of Frost’s career and undoubtedly the interpretation he offers to Thompson is influenced by his later views on property rights, the essence of the anecdote rings true. Despite Frost’s gloss on the incident, it appears that his initial reaction was fairly generous, despite the Frost family’s own meager means during this period, and the “line” that he would draw between one’s set of rights and the claims of another was by no means clear-cut. “Love and a Question,” a poem directly influenced by the Derry tramp, begins to address precisely such questions of obligation. A deceptively traditional-looking ballad chronicling the trespass of a mysterious “Stranger” into the honeymoon of a young couple, it depicts an old man who “bore a green-white stick in his hand, / And, for all burden, care” (Collected, 17–18). He brings his case before the young bridegroom, unwilling to directly beg, “He asked with the eyes more than the lips / For a shelter for the night.” The poem appears to set the stage for the man’s intrusion into the domestic space in an act not unlike and perhaps in replacement of the sexual exchange that was to occur that evening. Instead of immediately letting the man in, though, the bridegroom hesitates, stepping outside to consider the “question” of the title. The encounter is characterized, ostensibly, not by fear but by the pangs of guilt and longing, the “woes” of another balancing against the “love” of the pair. The poem’s energy is derived from the central question of what is owed the tramp or beggar figure and where he fits into not only the domestic economy but the “bridal house” itself insofar as it stands for the traditional family and larger community and culture. The tramp is a figure to whom one should give, according to the tenets of Christian charity, “a dole of bread, a purse,” and on whose behalf certain acts of performative discourse can be enacted (“a heartfelt prayer,” “a curse”), but the poem allows that it is questionable if he should be admitted into the primal scene of the tribe. At a certain point, ethical fastidiousness appears to give way to closely held feelings regarding “love’s” relationship to “woe,” the limits of charity and community reached at the moment misfortune threatens to overwhelm the community with the “burden” of their “care[s].” Indeed, the abjecting presence of the tramp is figured as potentially forestalling sexuality, procreation, and the reproduction of traditional “values.” As the groom deliberates,

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the immense “value” of the wedding night is figured as his desire to have the bride’s “heart in a case of gold / And pinned with a silver pin,” her worth signified by her encapsulation within and penetration by precious metals. Within the economy of the community, her “value” is confirmed and redeemed precisely by her sexual penetration, which has become equivalent to her aestheticized representation by the groom. The presence of the tramp threatens to disrupt this ritual with his impoverishment, his lack of worth and “cares” literally devaluing the evening as well as deforming the poem itself, which lacks any clear resolution. The question of whether to admit him is never answered, although his presence implies that former assumptions about “values” must be reevaluated upon encounters with the homeless. Traditional genderings of worth as attached to the private and domestic sphere come under increasing pressure and scrutiny in such poems, in which the “homeless” nature of the modern industrial world intrudes upon the fairy-tale-like scenario suggested by the poem’s antiquated form. The poem encodes a pervasive sense of collapsing spheres and the lack of a coherent discourse within which to frame answers to the ethical questions posed by the characters. The poem’s lack of closure speaks to the extent to which such dilemmas remained unresolved for Frost throughout his career. The poem “Death of the Hired Man” (pub. 1915; written 1905) restages this situation with a number of variations, this time setting a wife’s sense of ethics against her husband’s (Collected, 40–45). Although Frost’s initial difficulties publishing this poem suggest that some read it as a commonplace tale of tramping, it bears far more careful consideration than sentimental tramp ballads. More of a traditional pastoral eclogue, the poem depicts in blank verse a conversation between a farming couple regarding a migrant worker, Silas, who has long assisted in their harvest. Near the end of his life, he has come home to die at their farm, despite the fact that he has a brother who is a “director in the bank” somewhere. The wife, Mary, insists that they allow him to stay, noting that “ ‘[w]orthless though he is, / He won’t be made ashamed to please his brother.’ ” “ ‘Be kind,’ ” she insists, when her husband protests that Silas is useless around the farm. Warren, the husband, recalls instead how “off he goes always when I need him most. / He thinks he ought to earn a little pay, / Enough at least to buy tobacco with” even if he has done little or no work. He represents Silas as an unfaithful and unreliable worker, whose ethos is essentially that of the hobo or tramp, eschewing the role of male producer to live in the moment, exercising the unethical lack of foresight William James once so deplored. Easily bought off by a few extra pennies “in haying time,” he is eager to return in winter, when it is cold but there is little work. Upon returning this year, Silas has insisted to Mary that he has really come to “ditch the meadow,” although she immediately

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understands that this promise of labor is a fictive gesture designed to mask their personal sense of obligation to him with an economic one. Respecting his need for “self-respect,” Mary recounts how she patiently listens to his plans, although “he jumbled everything. I stopped to look / Two or three times—he made me feel so queer—/ To see if he was talking in his sleep.” Pained by his condition, Mary sees their obligation to him not as necessary payment for past contractual relationships, but as a humanitarian compensation for a subjective incoherence and disorientation that is just as much the product of modern labor as impending death. Aside from his “one accomplishment,” “build[ing] a load of hay,” Silas has “nothing to look forward to with pride, / And nothing to look forward to with hope, / So now and never any different,” Mary observes. His sole talent an increasingly antiquated, physical method of creating form, Silas has become a victim of the abstraction of labor, his practical “value” as an employee receding by the day. The crux of the situation revolves around whether or not to let Silas stay, and whether or not Warren and Mary’s farm, as a microcosm of the community and nation, can be considered his home. Silas’s “hope” is that he will be able to die in the place in which he feels most comfortable, part of a community to which he once, apparently, belonged, becoming in effect the extended family of an apparently childless couple. When Mary explains that “he has come home to die,” Warren “mocked gently” the word “home,” observing that “he’s nothing to us, any more / Than was the hound that came a stranger to us / Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.” “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in,” he offers ironically. “I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t to deserve,” Mary counters indignantly. This well-known exchange reflects a universe in which homelessness makes more visible the increasingly precarious status of home itself, its fragility demonstrated by the couple’s own lack of accord on its definition. Describing Silas as “broken,” an appellation he shares with the “Broken One” of “The Self-Seeker,” Mary insists that Warren go welcome him. When Mary calls to him a short while after he has left the room, “dead was all he answered.” In contrast to her husband’s (which many read as Frost’s) irony, Mary’s instinctive generosity forms the ethical focal point of the poem. The mature, creative counterpart to the passive, voiceless bride of “Love and a Question,” Mary’s arguments take the form of a story or narration of Silas’s condition, through which she hopes to elicit her husband’s compassion. The fact that she has already let Silas into the home and made him comfortable, however, also imply that the husband’s consent is a formality—unlike the new bride and even Warren, Mary is an agent of charity whose emotional pains upon encountering Silas justify her actions to herself. Frost abruptly ends

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the poem with Silas’s death, however, thus precluding any further obligation on the part of the couple. This relatively easy conclusion to the tale prevents continued disruption of Mary and Warren’s domestic life, but it does not resolve the differences his presence has provoked. Later in his career, Frost suggested that this poem could be understood as presenting the “Republican” stance of the husband and the “Democratic” stance of the wife, noting that few have noticed the “Democratic” aspect to his work.44 Given Frost’s ambivalent responses to New Deal policies, such a reading augments the reader’s sense that the poem contains no simple resolution.45 Warren has the last word, and it is unclear whether Silas’s death has moved him, although his gestures toward his wife (he “slipped to her side, caught up her hand and waited”) suggest that he comprehends her pain at the event. The poem ends with an abjecting specter of death hanging over the two, the wife’s question regarding Silas’s state ostensibly “answered” (the last word of the poem) but the larger issues left hanging. The poem ends with the suggestion of Silas’s cooling corpse within the domestic space, its presence taking the place of the filial order the childless Mary might have hoped to create. In “The Fear” (1913), the representative nature of the tramp, poet, and rural family itself are all brought into question as a means of signaling the extent to which the nation can offer a secure model for the self or inclusive standard of community and valuation. Like “Love and a Question,” this poem was based on an incident that occurred around the turn of the century to a neighbor of friends with whom the Frosts vacationed in the summers of 1906 and 1907.46 This eclogue in iambic pentameter describes a man and wife returning home late at night only to feel a profound sense of unease, as if they were being watched from the darkness. The wife is certain she senses someone about, while her husband attempts to dismiss her fears. Undeterred, she suggests that someone in particular may be threatening them: “Let him get off and he’ll be everywhere / Around us, looking out of trees and bushes / Till I shan’t dare to set a foot outdoors” (Collected, 89–92). The watching figure is ascribed a power of surveillance that is terrifying and specific, designed to turn this woman’s home into a virtual prison. The woman’s suggestion that she alone address him, that she has intimate knowledge of his psychology and that this is “[her] business,” leads the reader to suspect that he is a former husband or lover possibly come to take revenge (as is the case in the story that supposedly inspired the poem). The wife’s resistance to such intimidation real or imagined speaks to her refusal to be the object of another’s monitoring. But upon calling into the night “What do you want?” she receives a surprising response: “Nothing.” “The voice” turns out to be a man with his child, who justifies their presence with the explanation: “Every child should have the memory / Of at least one long-after-bedtime walk.” He

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attempts to show her the child, but realizes that she can’t “see” this proof of his innocence, that he is not a “robber.” Somewhat comforted, the wife calls toward her husband, only to drop the lantern that she had been carrying. The poem ends with a pair of disturbing lines: “The swinging lantern lengthened to the ground, / It touched, it clattered and went out.” Robert Frost, who frequently signed his letters “Rob’t,” short for both his first name and “robbed” (a point he makes explicit), here situates himself as a middle-class vacationer who has intruded upon the remote rural life of a couple and disturbed their peace of mind (Untermeyer 71). The character here assumes at first that it is he who has been deprived of a certain “worth,” mistaken for a “tramp” or robber who might be covetous of the couple’s space or valuables. In fact, however, his whimsical “tramping” or nighttime stroll does reveal a kind of devaluation that might be construed as a robbery of the traditional American family. The man and wife’s situation is presented as emblematic rather than exceptional, a typical rural encounter in which the suggestion of infidelity suggests the farmer’s decreasing sense of worth.47 Furthermore, it is the middle-class visitor who is capable of reproduction, not the apparently childless farmer and wife, and the visitor as well who has determined that the value of the rural life lies in its capacity to generate abstract “memories” of “natural,” aesthetic experiences, not an actual physical product. Within such a world, outsiders can only be feared as those who will take advantage of dissatisfactions, emotional and physical, and to steal from the formerly representative self, male or female, the remnants of its identity. The walker offers in response to the wife’s queries “Nothing,” precisely because he has already appropriated from the environment everything that he wanted: the experience of being in the world with his child. Because he is not a real tramp but an ersatz middle-class tramper, he has no use for any social goods that the rural couple might offer, depriving them in advance of the opportunity for hospitality, to present, however grudgingly, food, coins, or a place to rest. Cut off from the community, they can only be stolen from, their paranoia anticipating the fears of radical impoverishment: indeed, many tramps came from precisely such rural areas and situations, forced off the land by decreasing crop and land values. In the poem’s final lines, the couple’s encounter with the walker and child magnifies their dimming vision, their diminished capacity to be reliable observing subjects and citizens themselves. The surrounding void of the night air leaves room for speculation as to how connection between the personal and political, so irrevocably linked here, might be reformed. The last early poem to deal extensively with a tramp presence, “The Hill Wife” (1916), depicts, like “The Fear,” another lonely country wife coming into direct contact with a stranger whose demeanor provokes a sense

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of insecurity and danger. The poem consists of five sections, the third of which, “The Smile,” was originally published separately in 1914 and differs in form and tone from the rest of the poem. While the first, fourth, and fifth sections consist of variations on ballad form reminiscent of “Love and a Question” and the second section is in a more naturalistic iambic tetrameter, “The Smile” consists of twelve lines of rhyming iambic pentameter more closely akin to the blank verse of “The Fear” and “The Death of the Hired Man.” Nearly a sonnet, its tone is nevertheless far less soothing and meditative than “Love and a Question,” instead suggesting an almost paranoid stream of consciousness regarding a departing tramp. Although the speaker appears to address the Hill Wife’s husband, the monologue may be purely internal: I didn’t like the way he went away. That smile! It never came of being gay. Still he smiled—did you see him?—I was sure! Perhaps because we gave him only bread And the wretch knew from that that we were poor. Perhaps because he let us give instead Of seizing from us as he might have seized. Perhaps he mocked at us for being wed, Or being very young (and he was pleased To have a vision of us old and dead). I wonder how far down the road he’s got. He’s watching from the woods as like as not. (Collected, 123) Like “The Fear,” this poem presents a woman’s perspective on a perceived danger that is equally physical and social. The Hill Wife’s fear is rooted in the “smile” of the tramp, offered in exchange for the “bread” the couple had offered him. Immediately rejecting the possibility that the tramp might ever be “gay” or carefree—despite popular poetry implying the opposite—the wife perceives the tramp to be a danger straight out of sensational news accounts typical of the 1870s and 1880s. A despoiler of the domestic scene, the tramp is imagined as malevolent and mocking, and a potential rapist even, a far cry from the gentle, elderly “stranger” of “Love and a Question.” These conclusions, however, appear dubious to the reader precisely because the speaker’s perspective is limited by a poverty, like that of the wife in “The Fear,” that precludes her from the ability to feel pain for others—or perhaps enables her to feel too much. Nearly as, if not more, socially isolated than the hobo at her door, the rural wife engages in a perverse kind of projection that inverts her limited knowledge of the homeless man into his supposedly

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intimate knowledge of the couple. His imagined perspective on their poverty makes explicit the theme suggested in previous poems: that the traditional rural domestic unit has lost its value and ability to produce and reproduce itself. As later sections of the poem make clear, the wife herself, on the verge of leaving her husband, also may be about to become homeless. Drawing on turn-of-the-century attitudes that blended fear of and compassion for the homeless, Frost’s early tramp poems reveal a poet struggling to come to terms with the realities of a new political economy and its consequences for the homeless and working poor as well as those ostensibly better off. Revealing the relative and outdated value of traditional truths concerning the home, Frost’s tramps provoke discussion of charity and suffering on the part of givers and recipients. As the lines between the rural family, middle-class vacationer, and tramp blur, the poems suggest that the true “labor” of poetry is precisely this kind of ethical work, which is both an “extravagance” and of solid social value. The result is a pastoral mode in which the transition from agricultural to industrial labor provokes resistance and outrage, even as its inhabitants adjust to what “The Self-Seeker” describes as the new “music” of the village. Straining against while submitting to these rhythms, the modern poet depicts the world as he sees it, rife with pain and compassion, social flux forcing ethical dilemmas to which he presents no easy solution. Late Frost and the Forgotten Man In 1935, Frost met with an aspiring poet, Oliver Waye. The author of a poem entitled “The Forgotten Man,” originally published in Today (a previous incarnation of Newsweek) on December 23, 1933, Waye had met with some limited success. In what was apparently his best-known poem, Waye depicts the “forgotten man” as a tramp, maligned as “a thug and a Red,” an “atheist misbegotten.”48 A politically threatening figure, this character is completely unlike the “forgotten man” made famous by Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 radio address, in which the then presidential candidate rallied listeners on behalf of the hardworking “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” likely an honorable veteran and farmer no longer able to make his own way without federal assistance.49 In Waye’s poem this sympathetic personage is translated from a recognizable man into an abstract symbol or “Specter” of “Pestilence,” “Famine,” and “Decay.” Whatever ideological affinities he may once have possessed are subsequently dissolved into vague notions of “Freedom and Liberty” as well as “Love,” “Fate,” “Passion,” and “Hate.”50 Ideologically incoherent, the poem appears to have “forgotten” its own “man,” morphing from a liberal call to arms into a pile of political and poetic clichés.

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Whether or not Frost liked this particular poem, he seems to have been struck by his meeting with the young man, which he described in a letter to Louis Untermeyer: The tramp was worthy. He had a very convincing contempt for people who live in houses and know where the next meal is coming from. Anger was his motive—anger at imperfection. You might not expect it from my impassive exterior, but I have always had the same anger. But I refuse to be driven to suicide or desertion by it. Ridgely Torrence was telling me how he sat with [Edward Arlington] Robinson not so many years ago (thirty), and Robinson was weeping face in hands for want of being read as a poet. My fury is for more important things and is moreover too tight. All the same no deserter comes near me without my sympathy. (Untermeyer 266) While characterizing himself as unlike the “tramp” or social “deserter,” Frost nonetheless implies an affinity between the young man’s anger and his own—both directed at a world that is often unjust and “imperfect.” Yet the world’s imperfections, it quickly emerges, are more cultural than social, more related to neglect by the literary establishment—or anger at those who misread him—than economic inequality. Although an “impassive” Frost protests that he cared for “more important things” than his own fame as a poet and implies that Waye’s youthful inclination to “desert[]” had merely his “sympathy,” Waye’s poetry and presence evidently touched a nerve. Always sensitive to implications regarding his literary celebrity and the relative value of his verse, Frost by the late 1910s began to downplay social and political questions in his own tramp poetry. Consequently, Frost’s late poems and plays—such as “The Lockless Door,” “Trespass” (1939), “The Literate Farmer and the Plant Venus” (1941, likely written 1932–1936), “An Unstamped Letter in our Rural Mailbox” (1944), as well as the dramas “A Way Out” and “The Guardeen”—generally depict tramps not as Rooseveltian “forgotten men” but as poets in disguise, radical Jamesians, oddly sympathetic criminals, or students on vacation. The tramp is either linked to the middle-class poet or effaced and replaced by urban, professional figures whose wanderings at first challenge but ultimately confirm the values of rural Frostian poet-figures. In each permutation, these characters serve to eclipse the presence of the actual poor, whether local or itinerant, enabling Frost to avoid the questions of social equity and charity that had preoccupied so many of his earlier tramp poems. During this period of his greatest popularity, Frost tends to reinforce what Joan Rubin terms “genteel” values as encoded by the middlebrow culture in which Frost played a

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prominent role.51 Considered in their historical context, Frost’s late tramp poetics reflect the gradual easing of the tramp crisis during the 1920s, the changing nature of unemployment during the Great Depression (typified by migrant families rather than single men), and finally the relative disappearance of obvious unemployment during the post–World War II era. The one prominent exception to such socially disengaged late tramp poetics, however, is the poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time” (1934) in which the speaker’s more nuanced reflections upon tramps affirm some continuity with earlier tramp poems, suggesting that Frost’s engagements with social issues would never be simple to historicize or categorize. In “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” the speaker articulates a vision of tramps that contains elements of Frost’s earlier compassionate stance toward the unemployed, expressed in tandem with his later articulations of the poet’s rights and values. The result is a fusion of early- and mid-career attitudes that is as unusual in Frost’s work as it is indicative of his idiosyncratic personal and poetic development. The poem begins with a transition from winter to spring, from solid ground inclined to “frost” to a “mud” that brings “two strangers” (Collected, 251). Seasonal and social instability are linked as the contingent, ethically disturbing mess of modern life impinges upon the poet’s reverie. The speaker, a Frost-like figure, is chopping wood in his yard when two tramps come along, apparently in genuine need of employment and compensation. The scene is reminiscent of “The Wood-Pile” while delving more explicitly into how physical and poetic labor mirror each other, the wood in question now the property of the speaker rather than mysteriously appearing in the woods. Knowing instinctively that one stranger wishes “to take my job for pay,” the speaker at first rejects the man’s unspoken but implied request with a self-serving pronouncement: The blows that a life of self-control Spare to strike for the common good, That day, giving a loose to my soul, I spent on the unimportant wood. Perversely, the tramps’ interest in the speaker’s work only increases his desire to continue with it, as he relishes the sight of his natural surroundings and his physical presence in the natural world: The weight of an ax-head poised aloft, The grip on earth of outspread feet, The life of muscles rocking soft And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

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As did the “work test” in the late nineteenth century, here chopping wood becomes a means of evaluating who is “worthy” of another’s time as translated into the value of money. In order for the poet to prove worthy of the reader’s time, however, he must at first deny the tramp the opportunity to “work,” thus foregrounding the relation between consumption and charity. In a perverse reenactment of scenes in which tramps were forced to cut wood for food and shelter, however, the speaker-poet transforms the act from a painful to a pleasurable one, from labor to leisure. The act becomes unmistakably erotic, a wasteful, masturbatory performance of “extravagance” designed to impress and taunt the tramps, themselves probably “not long since in the lumber camps.” In an imitation of homosocial bonding rituals, the speaker is sure that the tramps “judged me by their appropriate tool,” their attention to his work and assessment of his handling of the “ax” rhetorically recasting them as consumers of his gratuitous performance rather than deserving producers or laborers in their own right. As did Roosevelt in his address to the “forgotten man,” Frost imagines a world in which such men are enabled to consume, thus stabilizing the nation’s economy and the well-being of the artist at the same time. Yet rather than dehumanizing the tramps as “primitive, barely human creatures,” as Robert Faggen suggests, the speaker’s decision to keep working is vexed precisely by his recognition of their human presence and “right[s]” as “forgotten men” in search of work that would enable them to perform additional acts of material production in addition to cultural consumption. It is only in the context of acknowledging their “right” to the labor, their potential to offer “logic” in support of their claim, that the speaker must press his case. Their presence is both an occasion to express sympathy as well as an opportunity to articulate the poet’s own cause. As is made explicit in the beginning of the second half of the poem, the speaker acknowledges that whatever he might intend to do with his labor and time: They knew they had but to stay their stay And all their logic would fill my head: As that I had no right to play with what was another man’s work for gain. It is clear that “theirs was the better right—agreed.” Even so, having submitted to the tramps’ claim to ethical authority, the speaker’s final lines both postpone the fulfillment of his part in the social contract and articulate an explicit grounding for the poet’s counter-right to engage in a kind of productive leisure or “play” that typifies the middlebrow idealization of genteel letters as practiced by the poet. It is precisely the ethical tension between

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these options that gives the last lines of the poem their ironic power and that indicates the beginning of a mid- to late-career tendency to extend and complicate the poet’s earlier sympathies: But yield who will to their separation, My object in living is to unite My avocation and my vocation As my two eyes make one in sight. Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes, Is the deed ever really done For Heaven and the future’s sakes. These well-known lines have often been read as evidence of Frost’s lack of interest in what Richard Poirier characterizes as “downward comparisons” with those individuals associated with dirty, potentially unproductive lives.52 Read from another perspective, however, these lines also can be understood as emphasizing the need for the poet to articulate his poetics precisely in relation to the labor of the working poor. In a sense, Frost’s poetry only has value insofar as it rhetorically, if not materially, provides for the needs of the poor, an act that concurrently affirms the poet’s own craft.53 Although it seems clear that the speaker will indeed soon cede his labor to the tramps’ “right,” the speaker’s desire to unite “love” and “need” is real and not without its own ethical overtones. In fact, the speaker’s vision of a world (literally “united” by “my two eyes”) in which aesthetic and affective fulfillment will lead to political and social recompense parallels Dewey’s contemporaneous argument concerning the connection between art and democracy. In the ideal society, according to Dewey, there is no separation of “ ‘practice’ from insight, of imagination from executive doing, of significant purpose from work, of emotion from thought and doing” (Art, 20–21). Instead, the philosopher idealizes the ways in which production and consumption are fused in the creative act of the middle-class artist in an act that is both aesthetic and ethical. Read in the context of Dewey’s politicized aesthetics, Frost’s investment in “mortal stakes” in this poem makes a great deal more sense, as does its emphasis upon “Heaven and the future’s sakes,” the latter phrase suggesting Frost’s own version of the “Greater democracy” that Dewey saw as the end of artistic and intellectual labor. Whether the tramps are as capable as the poet of taking part in such a world remains in question, however. Frost’s tendency to invoke tramps in order to articulate both class sympathies and class insecurities make a great deal more sense when understood as the product of formative, turn-of-the-century discourses about the function

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of the poet in society, the nature of work, the limits of charity, and the true nature of the “forgotten man.” That Frost would continue to address tramp poetics as late as “A Bed in the Barn” (1944–1947), a brief lyric that returns to the scenario of “Love and a Question” only to ridicule a tramp’s “rigmarole / of self respect to shame the soul” suggests that Frost’s own sense of “self respect” and social status was always less sure than others knew. Ever aware of the ways in which his university appointments made him vaguely obligated to rich acquaintances for his endowed positions, Frost remarked in a 1960 interview with Richard Poirier: “Sounds as if I’d been a beggar, but I’ve never been consciously a beggar. I’ve been at the mercy of. . . . I’ve been a beneficiary around colleges and all. And this is one of the advantages of the American way: I’ve never had to write a word of thanks to anybody I had a cent from. The colleges came between” (Interviews, 231–232). While implicitly opposing his position to those “beggars” who were the beneficiaries of private contributions on the street or in rural homes as well as those benefiting from government largesse, such as the WPA and other Roosevelt programs, Frost’s self-description crystallizes his uneasy sense of himself as a “beggar” whose productivity that could not readily be assessed and yet was socially necessary and even ethically defensible. Safely ensconced within a university system that both underwrote and undermined the middlebrow gentility he counted on to make his poetry sell and his own stock go up (both figuratively and literally, as Frost owned stock in Holt, his publisher), Frost constructed late career tramps or “beggars” that aided him in enacting a “rigmarole / of self respect” before his readers. In contrast, Frost’s more nuanced consideration of these issues in “Two Tramps in Mud Time” addresses the inconsistencies of his self-invention in a far more intellectually honest way, in keeping with the ethical ambiguities of his early tramp verse. Focused upon class distinctions within a democracy, Frost’s pastoral tramp poetics is paralleled by the pastoralism of his contemporary, William Carlos Williams. Although Williams and Frost seldom saw eye to eye during their lifetimes—Frost pointedly ignoring his rival while Williams observed that “the bucolic simplicity of Frost seems to me a halt”—Ezra Pound anointed them both early in their careers as progenitors of a new American poetics.54 Despite their personal differences, they had a great deal in common. Like Frost, Williams grew up in an industrial city, Paterson, New Jersey, prone to divisive labor politics. As Lawrence did for Frost, Paterson and its surroundings provided Williams with material crucial to constructing an innovative pastoral mode as well as a “new measure” attuned to the age and locality. Although formally more radical than Frost, Williams’s cadences also seek to echo and define the voices of the working poor in relation to the

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defining, if erratic, rhythm of the poet’s paces through the city’s streets and parks. Multiple “Idylls” depict not only the working poor, including “Pan” himself, but also women, homosexuals, and African-Americans in ethically troubling ways. “Embracing the foulness” of modern American life, Williams links his poetics directly to “filth” much as Frost could not help but return repeatedly to the “mud” of the transients who haunt his work. Coalescing during the 1920s and again during the 1940s, Williams’s pastoral also is aligned with a Deweyan pragmatism, tending to maintain and strengthen the poet’s conviction in a progressive social vision more obvious than Frost’s. Overlapping and diverging in their pastoral poetics, both Frost and Williams succeed in revitalizing the mode and making it pertinent to early and mid twentieth-century questions of individualism and community.

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CHAPTER 3

“The Truth About Us”: Pastoral, Pragmatism, and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson

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et in the depressed New Jersey city where William Carlos Williams lived and practiced medicine, Paterson opens with a pastoral landscape scene. The poem’s protagonist, Dr. Paterson, configured in mythic proportions, lies in the valley below the local falls, stretched alongside the female “mountain,” who is described as having “[p]earls at her ankles, her monstrous hair / spangled with apple-blossoms.”1 Interspersed with the lyrical descriptions of these sleeping giants is a prose narrative of a nineteenthcentury shoemaker who, while eating mussels he had collected for food, discovered “many hard substances” that he initially “threw . . . away” (Paterson, 9). When he brought these to a jeweler, they were found to be extremely valuable, and upon gathering more he found “[o]ne pearl of fine luster [that] was sold to Tiffany for $900 and later to Empress Eugenie for $2,000 to be known henceforth as the ‘Queen Pearl,’ the finest of its sort in the world today” (Paterson, 9). Typical of the collagelike form of the poem, these first pages juxtapose beautiful and grotesque images and stories, linking art and environment, literature and history, treasure and waste. The mountain scene, seemingly odd piece of historical trivia, and the voices that follow depict the locality of Paterson and its inhabitants, mythical and actual, in a radical reincarnation of the pastoral mode. Pearls initially appear upon the body of the female mountain, Dr. Paterson’s initial object of love and desire. This first embodiment of the “Kore” or “beautiful thing,” moreover, is only one of many incarnations.

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By Book Three (1949) this central source of value has taken the form of a working-class African-American woman who is treated by Dr. Paterson after she has been repeatedly raped in a disputed middle territory claimed by rival gangs from Paterson and Newark (Paterson, 104–105). Her status within the book is surprising, potentially offensive, and yet reflective of Williams’s insistence upon disturbing settled aesthetic and social concepts of purity, value, and truth. The Kore is granted value by virtue of the poet’s fascination with and desire for her. Similarly contingent is the value of the pearl: valued for its structural integrity, its spherical shape, and most often for its “pure” white color, it is no more than the product of the mussel’s bodily secretions. Easily deemed excremental if classified by its physical origin, the pearl is discovered accidentally while eating, its narrow miss of a far less appetizing fate presenting Williams with the opportunity to underscore its transformation from pollutant to treasure. The Kore in Book Three, seemingly devalued culturally and socially by virtue of her race, gender, and violation, is esteemed by the doctor precisely because of these associations with marginalized aspects of American culture. It is she whom Dr. Paterson calls upon in a manner both disdainful and worshipful, not only to “[t]ake off your clothes and purify / yourself” but also to “let me purify myself /—to look at you, / to look at you” (Paterson, 105). It is the dark, female, violated body that occupies the position of privilege, however problematically, within this pastoral poem.2 Although some readers consider Dr. Paterson’s gesture racist and sexist essentialism, it also exemplifies Williams’s redefinition of the valued self and his desire to confront readers with the culturally relative nature of social and aesthetic value. Like Frost, Williams reimagines the American pastoral scene, its representative subjects and community, in terms of figures marginal to it. Instead of tramps—or degraded versions of a formally central male American subject—Williams turns to people traditionally isolated by their gender, race, or sexual orientation from the narratives of the self that American pastoral traditionally depicts. Williams’s Kore is emblematic of a radical new use of the pastoral form that, in its depiction of “local” environments of early- and mid twentieth-century New York and New Jersey, conveys a purposefully conflicted, often indeterminate politics. Although completed in various stages in the 1940s and early 1950s, Paterson’s roots lay in several attempts by Williams to depict his hometown in early poems such as “The Wanderer” (1914) and “Paterson” (1926).3 On the publication of Williams’s first Complete Collected Poems in 1938, “The Wanderer,” with its germs of Paterson, was placed last in the volume, forming an explicit poetic bridge between the poet’s early aspirations and the important work to come.

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Written during and after World War II, the book-length poem is the result of years of work and a variety of influences dating back to early in his career—influences that coalesced shortly after the period during which Frost was writing some of his early tramp poetry. Although Paterson’s mid-century timing may seem surprising, Williams told people that the late 1930s felt much like the tumultuous early years of the twentieth century—in ways both promising and disappointing.4 In a letter of 1938, Williams writes: “The times are too like those of 1913 [the year of the Paterson Silk Strike] to suit me. At that time it looked as if they were really building up to a period of major expression. They did not let it occur. As then there are too many who do not want the artist to speak as only he can.”5 More openly moved by the local labor unrest of the 1910s than Frost, Williams felt compelled to depict the event and its cultural repercussions later in his career. An aesthetic response to a world whose potential for liberal reform he saw drained away into the effort to keep fascism at bay by the 1940s, Paterson reimagines how the progressive energies of 1913 might be recuperated and redeployed as the nation came to rebuild itself during and in the wake of near universal catastrophe.6 At the same time, the poem contains evidence of the poet’s despair at the state of the nation as well as his doubts regarding the basic principles of a democratic aesthetics. Even so, it is persistent in its evocation of a poetic universe in which the artist has a crucial social role linked to the lives of the ordinary men and women about whom he writes.7 The chapter begins by moving from readings of Paterson, Book Four (1951) that illuminate links between pollution and pastoral in the text, to discussions of Williams’s links to John Dewey’s theory of the “local” and the connections between “art” and “experience.” Under Dewey’s influence, Williams forged a pastoral poetics that emphasizes the diverse nature of American society while acknowledging the poet’s sense of himself as both a cultural outsider and an aesthetic and social arbiter of some power. Returning to early lyrics such as “Pastoral” and “Idyll” as well as Book Four, I consider how various characters’ perspectives on their polluted pastoral surroundings challenge a normative model of subjectivity in the modern United States. The final two sections of the chapter focus on Williams’s privileging of marginalized voices in the remainder of Book Four and in Book Two (1948), where his revisionary characterizations of female and homosexual voices, as well as an extended meditation upon the working class, including participants in the 1913 Silk Strike, result in pastoral interludes that subtly redefine the parameters of the poetic subject and representative American self.

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Filth, the “Local,” and Pragmatist Aesthetics In Book Four of Paterson, Williams’s hopeful yet troubled aesthetic is evident in a series of idylls depicting amorous, often disturbing, and sometimes comic encounters between a middle-aged, gay, wealthy woman; her younger employee, a nurse; and Dr. Paterson himself. Not coincidentally, Book Four came under critical attack from readers such as Randall Jarrell, who had praised Books One (1946) through Three. According to Williams, Jarrell “couldn’t take the identification of the filthy river with the perversion of the characters”; later critics echoed Jarrell, seeing its pastoral vision as a “suicidal nightmare of modern history.” In response, Williams defended his work by qualifying terms such as “filthy” and “perversion” and, in the process, clarifying Paterson’s purpose: “If you are going to write realistically of the conception of filth in the world, it can’t be pretty. What goes on with people isn’t pretty. . . . What in the world is an artist to do? He is not a moralist. He sees things, reacts to them, must take them into consideration.”8 For Williams, both assumptions about pollution (“the conception of filth”) and “What goes on with people” are the stuff of an intriguingly open-ended poetics that resists conventional morality. Instead of understanding his interest in pollution as part of a quest for linguistic purity, a means of identifying what to exclude from his work, I take rather literally Williams’s call for his readers to “embrace the foulness” of the world (Paterson, 103).9 Pollution beliefs and the pastoral mode have a natural affinity, as both are concerned with establishing and evaluating boundaries of civic and ultimately aesthetic bodies. In the case of Paterson, Williams’s pastoral poetics reveal the extent to which custodians of traditional, patriarchal American society believe that “dirt is essentially disorder,” and regard dealing with and potentially eradicating such entities as “a positive effort to organize the environment.”10 Their concern for a pure civic body can be understood as an analogue to Mary Douglas’s description of pollution rituals concerning human orifices as the sociological counterpart of “a care to protect the political and cultural unity of a minority group.”11 Yet, as Williams’s poetry reveals, the peculiar status of entities associated with “dirt” in society— such as women, homosexuals, the working poor, and immigrants—entails that they can be excised only with great difficulty and potential loss to the greater body that is the nation. Williams’s pastoral poetics is most radical, perhaps, in its recognition that not all deemed “filth” or “dirt” is necessarily “polluting,” in part because determinations of “pollutants” are so relative and ideologically based. The Kore, therefore, is depicted as both part of the socially disadvantaged community that Dr. Paterson serves, as well as an embodiment of his aesthetics. The result is a text that is ambiguous in its

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determinations of how dirt becomes polluting, and the (at times limited) conditions under which dirt may be redeemed. Williams was extremely self-conscious about his subject matter in Paterson and throughout his career could be both humorous and defensive about his poetic choices at the levels of form and content. While Williams praised Marianne Moore in 1923 for “wiping soiled words or cutting them clean out,” getting rid of their “greasy” former contexts and “aroma,” Williams himself seemed to be more interested in delving into what was conventionally deemed the seamier side of life and language.12 When in 1925 Ezra Pound asked him for a few poems for publication in England, Williams replied mischievously that he would try to get together some “safe stuff” for him, “a sort of Caroliensis Palgraves Golden Treasury—nothing allowed to enter which isn’t of the purest ray serene, with clean ass, snotless nose and circumcised.”13 His interest in and allegiance to this dimension of experience can be attributed at least in part to his sense that critics tended to classify him with all of the other “undesirables,” like his avant-garde contemporaries known as the “Ellis Island” school of art.14 When asked in an interview about the critical reception he and his American compatriots of the 1920s encountered as compared to the acclaim that greeted the expatriate T.S. Eliot, Williams remarked mockingly, and perhaps bitterly, “[W]e were writing poems from the dungheap—the Ashcan school.”15 Whereas Eliot’s overtly ironic and apocalyptic perspective upon “The Waste Land” of modern life appealed to many critics, those same readers were at a loss when it came to Williams’s nuanced representations of daily life in urban and suburban New Jersey. Williams’s pastorals comprise a zone that encompasses the potentially polluted, porous borders of the self, community, and poetic narrative, which the poet discusses in terms of a pragmatic, Deweyan conception of the “local.”16 As Williams explains in a 1921 manifesto (“Yours, O Youth”), he initially set out to promote “contact” in his poetry, a term that suggests both physical contact as well as a “taking on of certain colors from the locality by the experience” of specific places, namely, for Williams, the mid-Atlantic seaboard of the United States.17 He makes clear years later in a 1944 letter (while composing Paterson) that the concept of the local was borrowed: “there is no universal except in the local. I myself took it from Dewey. So it is not new.”18 John Dewey, the source of this idea and many of Williams’s other perspectives upon ethics, the self, and society, had a profound and lasting influence upon Williams, as has been noted by recent criticism by John Beck, David Kadlec, and Alec Marsh.19 Emphasizing the local, Dewey attempted to forge a vision of how individuals in communities—rural, suburban, and urban alike—can function as arbiters of American subjectivity, aesthetics, and ethics.

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Dewey’s theory of locality is progressive and proimmigrant, citing the importance of art in the formation of modern citizens and vice versa. In “Americanism and Localism” (1920), a text with which Williams was familiar, Dewey notes that while local newspapers are filled with “earnest editorials on the importance of Americanization and the wickedness of those who decline to be either Americanized or to go back to where they came from,” the objects of this anxiety are themselves more than likely so imbued with “the pervading spirit of localism”—that is, so absorbed by the routines of their lives—that they cannot be bothered to deal with the paperwork necessary to become naturalized citizens.20 Dewey goes on to note that such people “are too busy making the American language to devote much time to studying the English” (“Americanism,” 538). Dewey’s argument regarding the role of the working class (especially as comprised of newcomers to American language and culture) and similarly marginalized individuals is reiterated in Art As Experience. Here he affirms that just as “the mass of men and women who do the useful work of the world” should have the “capacity for enjoying the fruits of collective work,” so should art reflect this democratic ethos: “the material for art should be drawn from all sources whatever and . . . should be accessible to all” (Art, 344). One of the functions of art as he envisions it is “to sap the moralistic timidity that causes the mind to shy away from some materials and refuse to admit them into the clear and purifying light of perceptive consciousness” (Art, 189). Over the course of Paterson, Williams echoes Dewey’s open disdain for those who would enforce arbitrary or habit-formed standards of cultural purity upon a nation whose culture is constantly being remade. Instead, Williams’s texts suggest a democratic, pragmatic aesthetics, depicting the impurities of the poet’s own life as well as the lives of local inhabitants ranging from African-Americans, to working-class women, to affluent lesbians, to the ethnic working poor. Self-consciously invoking a “conception of filth” in relation to pastoral, Williams challenges his readers to object to the poem as a literary travesty, a despoliation of perfection and the poetic itself, an unwelcome incursion into the cultural, and all that that term signifies in terms of political, social, and economic orders and privileges.21 Even before Paterson, many of Williams’s pastoral lyrics from the 1910s through the 1920s involve the emergence of filth, the unwashed body, and the excremental. The early poem “Pastoral” (1914) begins with “[t]he old man who goes about / Gathering dog lime,” and whose humble life is deemed of greater consequence than that of “the Episcopal minister / Approaching the pulpit / Of a Sunday.”22 Another early “Idyll” (1914) depicts the speaker snug in bed, thinking of “[t]wo unfortunates / Cowering in the wind” outside during a storm. It is especially when “thinking / Of the freezing poor” that the

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speaker “consider[s] [him]self / Happy—” (Collected, 48). A later poem also entitled “Pastoral” (1917) imagines “little frogs / with puffed-out throats, / singing in the slime” (Collected, 97) while the haunting “To Elsie” (1923) exposes the “truth” emerging from her “broken / brain” as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky and we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth while the imagination strains after deer going by fields of goldenrod in the stifling heat of September . . . (Collected, 218) The “truth” that Elsie offers, with her “ungainly hips and flopping breasts” and her love for “cheap / jewelry,” is a perspective from the bodily and the subaltern, a view in which dirt and pastoral, “excrement” and “earth,” are imbricated in ways that are both devastating and revelatory. A “pure product[] of America,” Elsie’s radical inversion of national mythology and reality haunts the speaker and reader alike. It is the crucial tensions she exposes between body and mind, the private and the public, the self and the community that Williams hints at throughout his career and illuminates most decisively with Paterson. While Dewey’s conception of the local was clearly formative for Williams’s late poem, Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics was another likely source as the poet sought to articulate the relationship between poetry and society, the word and reality. In the mid-1950s, not long after the five main books of Paterson were completed, Williams recalled the origin of his interest in pastoral poetry in terms that suggest both his sense of his own marginalized subject position and an essentially pragmatic aesthetics. The passage begins with an ostensibly modest assessment of his literary bona fides: Without knowing Greek I had read translations of The Odes of Theocritus and felt myself very much attracted by the pastoral mode. But my feeling for the country was not as sophisticated as the pastorals with their picturesque shepherdesses. I was always a country boy, felt myself a country boy.23 Like Keats, one of his earliest poetic influences, Williams presents himself as at a remove from the original Greek and all that it represents in terms of

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aristocratic education and classical European values. Rather than fret over the vulgarity of admitting his distance from the original Theocritus, however, he savors his position as a simple “country boy” who knows the value of his approach to the natural world. The ethnically mixed Williams (his mother was from Puerto Rico), may even have imagined himself as one of those paradoxically “pure products of America,” like “Elsie” an indigenous racial hybrid living at the margins of society. In this “unsophisticated” vision of himself as the anti-yeoman-farmer, Williams is the not-quite-native “country boy” as apparent outsider and secret insider. The remainder of the passage, however, becomes increasingly abstract and complex as Williams describes an aesthetic vision that defies dualistic conceptions of the world in an approach typical of pragmatism. To me the countryside was a real world but nonetheless a poetic world. I have always had a feeling of identity with nature, but not assertive; I have always believed in keeping myself out of the picture. When I spoke of flowers, I was a flower, with all the prerogatives of flowers, especially the right to come alive in the Spring. (Poem, 21) Such poetry, in the words of the 1923 Spring and All, “has to do with the crystallization of the imagination—the perfection of new forms as additions to nature” (Collected, 226). Rather than central, the “I” is occluded here, the poetic and “real” worlds blurred. When the poet “spoke of flowers,” he enters a new poetic dimension, one that is at once “real” and yet not a material foundation for a fixed set of subject/object, human/environmental relationships. Instead, his only “realism” is “of the imagination. It is only thus that the work escapes plagiarism after nature and becomes a creation” (Collected, 198). Or as he later wrote in an essay on Marianne Moore: “There is a special place which poems, as all works of art, must occupy, but it is quite definitely the same as that where bricks or colored threads are handled.”24 Williams’s work involves the creation of a poetic world in which the speaker is what he speaks, in which the poet enters into a zone of flowers and filth, of things that are the word, the human, and yet also potentially something entirely else. The poet writing poetry produces something manifest in the world, declaring his right to be and create someone or thing not easily evaluated in conventional dualist terminology. Similarly, in Art As Experience, Dewey stresses art’s continuity with the everyday world, art as process rather than product, and the artist as the one who expresses the natural continuity between nature and culture, the ordinary and the aesthetic, the ugly and the beautiful. Just as Williams understood poetry to be an imaginative dimension linked to the real world, so too

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did Dewey see nature’s and the artist’s “forms” as points on a continuum of experience. Rather than an object separate from the world, art is a kind of activity, a way of being. As Dewey writes years earlier in terms that recall Williams’s: “Common things, a flower, a gleam of moonlight, the song of a bird, not things rare and remote, are means with which the deeper levels of life are touched so that they spring up as desire and thought.” “This process is art,” and the artist is the one best able to convey the experience of “kindling by [such outward happenings] of emotion, perception and appreciation.”25 As Williams suggested in the title of Spring and All, ordinary life is the means by which art “springs” into being, the artist himself part of a kinesthetic process uniting poet and world that Dewey terms “kindling” and Williams terms a “feeling of identity with nature.” Like Williams, Dewey is careful to point out that the very activity of true art is revealed in artists’ tendencies to use “that which is usually found ugly to get esthetic effect” (Art, 173). Rather than unnatural, this attention to the ugly is a form of attention to nature’s own rhythms, enabling the artist to “exhibit dislocations and dissociations of what is usually connected,” in the process “bringing to definite perception values that are concealed in ordinary experience because of habituation. Ordinary prepossession must be broken through if the degree of energy required for an esthetic experience is to be evoked” (Art, 173). Both an aesthetic and social process, the depiction of “bricks and threads” as well as “flowers,” poor Elsies and other unconventionally “beautiful things” is integral to a Deweyan aesthetics that plays an important role in Williams’s poetic imaginings. Corydon, Phyllis, and the Sheep Extrapolating from and embroidering upon pragmatic politics and aesthetics, Williams’s pastoral vision emphasizes the fluctuating nature of the modern United States, its capacity to contain and value individuals and artists alike working at the nation’s social and cultural margins. Rather than nostalgic, as readers such as John Beck have recently claimed, Williams’s pastoralism is pragmatic and politically indeterminate, although leaning toward a progressive worldview.26 His poetics tend to point to and question the categorization of indeterminate or leftover entities—such as Elsie—instead of bemoaning their mere presence. Such “dirt” in Paterson inevitably serves to undermine, invigorate, and destabilize various cultural assumptions concerning the nature of “poetic” content as well as the poet’s own control and authority. In the first section of Book Four, for example, a text that has troubled many of Williams’s critics past and present, “Corydon,” an older, sophisticated,

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Europeanized American socialite, attempts somewhat clumsily to seduce “Phyllis,” the young, relatively uneducated, “rustic” American nurse.27 Despite Williams’s stated aversion to homosexuality, in these women he seems to have created individuals whose sexuality is one aspect of their complex lives rather than a simplistic mark of their marginality.28 Yet while the scene’s pathos and humor suggest Williams’s capacity to depict both Corydon and Phyllis sympathetically within his narrative, their representation contains no assurances that Williams is without ambivalence regarding their sexuality and access to poetic authority. Ultimately, it is the tension between Williams’s desire to deploy these women as examples of his reevaluative pastoral mode and his desire to foreground his mastery of the same that makes the scene so emotionally arresting. Book Four’s introductory “Idyll” begins with a line both affectionate and disdainful, apparently murmured by Phyllis, but perhaps by Dr. Paterson or the “poet” himself: “Two silly women!” (Paterson, 149). The following line, “(Look, Dad, I’m dancing)” appears to comment both wistfully and ironically upon the situation, in which Phyllis is rubbing the back of the temporarily crippled Corydon. Confined to her apartment for a few days, Corydon develops a distinct perspective upon her environment. When her nurse returns after an absence, she describes the view from a window in terms that are decidedly comic and self-consciously poetic. Indeed, it soon becomes clear that Corydon is beginning to read aloud from her own verse: That is the East River. The sun rises there. And beyond, is Blackwell’s Island. Welfare Island, City Island. whatever they call it now, where the city’s petty criminals, the poor the superannuated and the insane are housed. Look at me when I talk to you. —and then the three rocks tapering off into the water. all that’s left of the elemental, the primitive in this environment. I call them my sheep. (Paterson, 151–152) Corydon’s description is at once patronizing and pathetic as she commands and then begs the attention of her small audience. Her tone may be ironic as she observes the slightly worn New World in the form of the destitute of Roosevelt Island, yet she appears to find a curious solace in the adjacent scene of pastoral serenity: the three rocks, pure and white, uncomplicated and “elemental,” the quintessential colonialist narrative of the New World as an uninhabited Eden. It is difficult to know how exactly the reader

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or audience should respond to this odd performance. Not unexpectedly, Phyllis seems baffled by her employer’s view of the river. The nurse’s only reply at the moment consists of “[s]heep, huh?” But in the next passage she has further opportunity to comment skeptically upon her patient’s attempt at verse. Writing to her father, she describes the apartment, her duties, and the conversation, exclaiming: But she’s a nut, of the worst kind. Today she was telling me about some rocks in the river here she calls her three sheep. If they’re sheep I’m the Queen of England. They’re white all right but it’s from the gulls that crap them up all day long. (Paterson, 152) This bluntly critical, yet not unfunny, observation seems prompted not only by the remark’s incongruity but also by Phyllis’s discomfort with her employer’s cultural sophistication and cosmopolitan education. There seems to be a fundamental distinction between the relatively naïve young woman and her overly informed companion, a distinction that readers as diverse as Paul Mariani, Joseph Riddel, and Benjamin Sankey have taken to embody not only the difference between innocence and corruption, but also the implied (homo)sexual perversion of the Old World and the “normal” heterosexual nature of the New World.29 Like so many of Williams’s pastoral poems, however, Book Four is more complex than it appears. Such politically suggestive interludes of Paterson reveal the extent to which Williams’s ambitions extend beyond linguistic games or familiar clichés of nationhood into new ground, questioning the cultural bases of assumptions concerning valuation as they have been encoded into aesthetic modes like the pastoral.30 For it is Phyllis’s remarks, not Corydon’s, that embody the essence of what many of Williams’s critics found so disturbing or perverse about this Book. Phyllis is vulgar and immoral, more than happy to point out “crap” when she sees it, a sullen debunker of all that is poetic and naïvely pastoral. Corydon, on the other hand, is the poet in this scene, the one who attempts, however unsuccessfully, to locate a fragment of mythic presence in the landscape. For example, it makes sense that Corydon wishes to see “the three rocks” as innocent “sheep,” an undifferentiated group of literary symbols not coincidentally adjacent to that island with its three arbitrary names (“Blackwell’s Island. Welfare Island, / City Island”), the home of urban criminals, the aged, and the poor. In juxtaposing these images, Corydon unwittingly (or perhaps quite consciously) sheds light upon the real nature of whiteness, its function as a purely symbolic counterpoint to everything that is not racially white (along with all that that entails) and is therefore associated with dirt.31 The

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potential threat that the inhabitants of the island might present to an ideal community is apparently excised from her pastoral narrative (it becomes simply “whatever they call it now”), just as Corydon herself—a poet and a lesbian—knows she might be excluded from a contemporary’s vision of a “pure” America. Like Williams, she is both insider and outsider, unveiling the social fictions that contribute to her own disguise, but unsure exactly how far to take her exposé. Phyllis’s observation that the rocks are white precisely because they are covered with seagull “crap” lends yet another layer to the image, reversing the relationship between purity and filth, exposing the truth that already lies on the surface of the scene. Pastoral defined in European and American texts by the supposedly harmonious (though often tense) relationship between self and other, the poet and society, gives way to pastoral as gritty reality at the margins of the city, in the land between it and the suburbs themselves. It is no longer the Garden of Eden that the New World resembles, but the garbage-strewn fields of the Meadowlands. Williams does not mourn this development; instead, he reveals the historical potential of the genre to encompass the world as it stands. He implicitly rejects understandings of pastoral as a narrative of utopia or an ironic commentary upon its loss. Pastoral is invoked only to be exposed as the true domain of the excremental and extra, the leftover or excess of a scene or narrative. Instead of depicting a story of origins, pastoral emerges in this “idyll” as a genre of ambivalence, indeterminacy, and filth. The extent, however, to which this text successfully models the social or political inclusion of characters such as Corydon or Phyllis—the homosexual or working poor—remains undecided. Although Dewey emphasizes the importance of poets speaking for marginal groups and individuals, indeed stressing the extent to which “artists have always been the purveyors of real news,” Williams’s text brings into question the extent to which he was willing to jeopardize his own project in the course of empowering others.32 Ultimately, Paterson is a text about Dr. Paterson’s journey through his local landscape, and its reevaluation of polluting entities a means of enabling his progression. It may well be that his locality as it extends to marginal figures such as Corydon, Phyllis, and the Kore is an amalgamation of characters whose collective abjection grants the speaker the capacity to “embrace” their “foulness,” thereby foregrounding his power to “represent” their lives. The emergence of such voices in their own right, it is suggested, might potentially silence the speaker and delegitimate his claim to a form of cultural authority. Indeed, Williams’s defense of Paterson as an exploration of the “conception of filth” as such can be taken to undermine his attempt to depict individual characters or address specific instances of exclusion on the basis of sexuality,

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class, race, or gender. Despite the obvious limitations of his project, however, Williams’s attempts to create multidimensional, complex characters with whom his own persona interacts on a relatively equal social plane suggests a willingness to take risks few other poets were willing to take. Not easily dismissed as depraved or unbalanced, the pastoral speakers emerge in these idylls as voices of conscience, not yet fully realized in the world as such but present in significant aesthetic iterations. An American Beauty In Book Four, Williams produces his most forceful case against cultural clichés of value and purity. The association of nature, beauty, leisure, pollution, and indeterminacy with the feminine and subaltern, first introduced in Book One and later with the Kore, are reinforced and complicated in Book Four, a book whose working theme was “the positive acceptance and use of knowledge.”33 Early in the Book the curious dynamics of a love triangle emerge: as Corydon attempts to seduce Phyllis, the young nurse becomes involved in a vaguely adulterous affair with the poem’s libidinous and literary protagonist, Dr. Paterson. Yet Phyllis, the shared object of desire, proves to be an ambiguous figure. She correctly perceives “the elemental, the primitive” for what it is—“crap”—and, as mentioned previously, has been read as representative of the clear-sighted, primitive, virginal New World. The point elided in most criticism, however, is that it is precisely her perception, innocence, and virginity that are continually brought into question in her exchanges with her pursuers. As a not-quite “pure” country girl who has come to the city, she embodies a sexual and territorial ambivalence that confounds Dr. Paterson and Corydon alike. Despite much interrogation on the subject from both her would-be lover and her employer, Phyllis is coy and defensive about her sexual experience (“What’s it to you?”) (Paterson, 170). While she does not quite embody the previous mysterious Kore or “beautiful thing,” the two figures are not entirely dissimilar. In earlier drafts, both “beautiful thing” and Phyllis are similarly marked: by scars on their thighs (Paterson, 126).34 While the Kore is an ambivalent figure of pollution who forces Paterson to reevaluate his conceptions of “purity,” Phyllis is perhaps the victim of parental incest (she writes to her father, “only I won’t wrestle with you all night on the bed any more because you got the D.T.s . . . your [sic] too strong for me”) and perhaps still a virgin whom Paterson paws but never penetrates (Paterson, 150). She and the Kore represent elements of disorder that both intimidate and liberate the male protagonist. The disorder of the “Idylls” extends beyond Phyllis’s contradictions to Corydon as well, a woman who embodies for Williams both sexual and poetic

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ambivalence. When writing Section I of Book Four, Williams remarked that this “old gal” had quite “won [him] over” in spite of himself.35 Reading her imperious yet plaintive exchanges with Phyllis, it is easy to see her unlikely charms. When commenting upon her own body, she describes herself selfdeprecatingly as “more horse than woman.” She continues, “Did you ever see such skin as mine? Speckled like a Guinea hen” or “more like a toad, perhaps?” (Paterson, 157). Acknowledging the “truth” about her body, Corydon then playfully suggests that she and her companion exchange roles—“You be Corydon! And I’ll play Phyllis. Young! Innocent! One can fairly hear the pelting of apples and the stomp and clatter of Pan’s hoofbeats. Tantamount to nothing” (Paterson, 158). Corydon is both appalling and appealing, a woman who cheerfully admits to looking part human and part animal, and an actress with the capacity to “play” both male and female roles at will. A woman who is attracted to other women, she is the embodiment of a physical and sexual indeterminacy that is the epitome of dirt to Williams, yet undeniably winning to the poet and his readers. Manipulative, yet lonely and eager to please, Corydon’s rendition of femininity and homosexuality ultimately form one outlet for an aspect of Williams’s personality and verse. It is significant to keep in mind that Corydon is first and foremost a poet, perhaps even a version of Dr. Paterson himself. Both his poem and hers (in the context of its reception by Phyllis) function in similar modes, at once pastoral and polluted, critical of the dehumanizing aspects of modern life while implicitly representative of a pragmatic, humanizing response. Corydon’s poem is based largely upon an early manuscript that Williams never published, “A Pastoral,” and only belatedly becomes her own. It begins as a conversation between the two women, set as verse presumably by the “poet.”36 But once it emerges as Corydon’s own text, she too emerges as a fully realized artist, down to such painful details as constant rejection from her audience and almost incapacitating self-doubt. As she reads the poem, the comic and uncomfortable responses she evokes from Phyllis anticipate a general reader’s reactions and help to establish a tentative bond of empathy among all concerned. The first formal reading of the poem is incomplete, as the nervous and tipsy Corydon insists upon starting where she left off “(about the rocks and sheep, begin with the helicopter),” but then is continually interrupted both by Phyllis and the poetic narrator himself (Paterson, 161). The verse is comprised of apocalyptic images describing the search for the body of a lost “Hindu princess” in the river, lest the gulls feed on it and its identity and its sex, as its hopes, and its despairs and its moles and its marks and

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its teeth and its nails be no longer decipherable and so lost. (Paterson, 153, 161) Meanwhile, gulls hover around the “three harbor stones” invoked previously as “sheep”—so far “useless,” “unprofaned” (Paterson, 161). The stones serve as the locus of purity once again, the site at which identity can perhaps be anchored while the body itself—here marked as exotic, aristocratic, racially other, and female—is threatened with digestion and decomposition. Phyllis’s characteristic reaction to this first section, however, destroys both the illusion of the purity of the poetic enterprise and its allegory. “It stinks,” she declares, pointing out once again the offensive nature of the gulls and rocks as well as expressing her uncensored opinion of the apocalyptic lines. While Corydon’s poem expresses the desire, paradoxically, to preserve identity in a “forever present,” clinging to the three rocks in a doomed attempt at closure, Phyllis insists upon opening up the text to the pollution and disorder that Corydon both invokes and then attempts to suppress (Paterson, 161). The nurse foregrounds the extent to which the gratuitous othering of the supposed Princess and her organically transgendered body is a fiction, the gulls themselves a natural means of transforming her into the excremental layer that covers the three rocks. In the context of this reception, Corydon’s own sense of otherness is implicitly disrupted as well, her poetry having excavated the myth of a coherent, American identity inimical to the presence of a female body whose decomposition grotesquely refracts Corydon’s sense of her variable sexuality. Although Corydon may not appreciate the implications of Phyllis’s communication, they have been decisively and somewhat humorously made clear. Corydon then restages this scene of aesthetic rejection as she imagines a more Europeanized pastoral interlude in which Phyllis will succumb to her wealth and charms, a scene that Phyllis eventually counters with her own American version of the pastoral narrative. First, persistent in her attempts to seduce her young employee, Corydon invites Phyllis to “[c]ome with [her] to Anticosti,” presumably to go fishing (Paterson, 167). The older woman establishes herself as the Old World poet who would initiate her love affair in a place she refers to as “paradise,” although her prospective lover insists that the name sounds more like “pizza” (Paterson, 162). They would retreat to this place not unlike (and a sly parody of) Yeats’s Innisfree, where Corydon will preserve Phyllis from harmful gossip and even from her own desire: “that these spiked rumors may not tear / that sweet flesh” (Paterson, 167). But Corydon cannot help but fall into a series of poetic imitations at this point, unable to imagine a pastoral or poetic ideal that is not well trampled. On the trip itself, Corydon speaks mostly French instead of her native

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language, while Phyllis is somewhat isolated by her uneducated American vocabulary. This attempt at a classical pastoral scene inevitably—and not unexpectedly—falls short, the Garden of Eden opening to reveal a complex and frustrating Tower of Babel more representative of the contemporary national reality. The American version of the ideal is similarly reevaluated and complicated when Phyllis attempts a rebuttal to her experiences abroad. Back home at last, Phyllis announces to Paterson that she wants to “go . . . West next fall” with her friend, “that tall / dark girl with the long nose” (Paterson, 168). At this point, it is Phyllis who seems to be establishing her own pastoral narrative, enacting the American cliché of the explorer accompanied by a “native” guide, while giving it the twist of a new gender and, possibly, sexual orientation. Whether or not her trip will come to pass, however, is doubtful, for a few lines later she teases Paterson, telling him to take her out “[a]fter I’m married,” assuming that she will marry and remain in New Jersey (Paterson, 169). It turns out that Phyllis may be fated to change, to gain a partial new identity and perhaps undergo some emotional development—but all will occur within the scope of the local. No escape into a spatial preserve beyond the state and time itself is possible for either Corydon or her nurse. Through these snippets of dialogue Williams revises pastoral narratives of both the Old World and the New, in the process forging a distinctively twentiethcentury pastoral mode. Instead of rejecting all aspects of modern urban life, Williams offers pragmatically pastoral accounts of life in the city and suburbs that embrace the “filth” of society and human nature while they excoriate those forces that attempt to determine and demean human existence. What remains is a narrative in which all the characters, as troubled as they are, attempt to form bonds with each other and the potential reader, in the process resisting factors that would inhibit communication. These “idylls” give Corydon, Phyllis, and Dr. Paterson a much-needed poetic space in which to experiment emotionally and begin to learn to make mature human connections. As Corydon’s poem progresses between its initial pastoral phase and its final pastoral imitations, for example, it lingers in the metropolis, within earshot of newsboys near houses “[u]nfit for human habitation” just before the tunnel descends under the river. It is at this point that Corydon declares rather impressively that love is “begrimed, befouled” (Paterson, 164). But it is unclear what function this rather predictable depiction of city life serves, and whether love is in as dire straits as the poem says. When the topic of spoiled love comes up, Corydon interrupts her own lines, musing, “I’d like to spill the truth, on that one” (Paterson, 165). When asked why she doesn’t, she growls, “This is a POEM!” as if delimiting the amount of polluted truth

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a proper poem or pastoral could decently allow for, as opposed to the newspapers and general “hubbub” of the city crowds (Paterson, 164). Indeed, in earlier drafts it is the word “beshitted” that she wishes to include in her verse, but Williams decided against.37 Corydon somewhat comically acts as her own censor as she once again calls attention to the ostensible juxtaposition of genre and reality, the polluted nature of her pastoral realm. Corydon’s fastidious reaction to modern life as the embodiment of “filth” associated with the working-class life also adds yet another aspect of abjected “locality” to the idyll, distracting attention from her own marginality while further undercutting the possibility of a homogeneous civic body. Yet her self-consciousness and almost absurd decorum also succeed, ultimately, in undermining the ferocity of the surrounding lines. Grim scenes of mechanistic fury—“directed missiles” shuddering animal-like in their cages, human beings degraded to so many indistinguishable “canned fish” at the factory lunch hour—all seem overly dramatized and unreal. This scene is the predictably hellish embodiment of “how the money’s made, money’s made” in the technologically advanced consumer society of mid century, but such impersonal generalizations inevitably dull in comparison with the more vivid, human scenes involving the characters of Paterson. Corydon can barely finish the description, on the verge of tears “for what I know. I feel so alone” (Paterson, 166). Her tears are patently for herself, however, and not those of whom she writes; her capacity to encompass the entirety of a locality is limited. Throughout the poem, descriptions of dehumanization and working-class desperation are invariably cut short and juxtaposed with scenes that emphasize the perverse, passionate, and frustrated attempts of Corydon, Phyllis, and Dr. Paterson to gain physical and spiritual sustenance from each other. Factory and city tableaus are interspersed with quirky exchanges between Phyllis and Paterson, including one involving some clumsy fondling and another in which she contemplates “go[ing] on the stage.” Paterson’s mocking response (“Why don’t you? . . . / though the legs, I’m afraid, would / best you”) underscores the intimacy these characters have established with one another and the defensive, at times cruel, humor they use to deflect attention from their weaknesses (Paterson, 166). The presence of such interludes draws attention back to the poem’s focus upon the sexual and personal entanglements of the characters, and the many ways in which their concerns are universal rather than marginal. At this point in the “idylls” it is clear that neither Corydon, Phyllis, nor Paterson are individuals who could be carelessly despised by a reader who has “a developed understanding with considerable humility of what’s going on,” in Williams’s words.38 Rather, the dialogue between Corydon and Phyllis and Phyllis and Paterson suggests a

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self-knowledge that enlarges their capacity for human “contact” despite their potentially hostile and at times unpleasant physical environment. The locality of their lives is vindicated as material proper to a new kind of pastoral that emphasizes the individual rather than her supposed social worth. Although Book Four has often been read as a commentary upon the harsh and dirty world of the city, as an embodiment of the poet’s despair at the state of American society, the human universe evoked in these pages is undeniably lively and sympathetic. Despite the apocalyptic overtones of “Corydon, A Pastoral,” the idylls themselves allow for a playfulness, thoughtfulness, and candor among Corydon, Phyllis, and Paterson even as they fail to achieve their desires. Their much-touted failures to find love are incomplete failures at that, for each has established relationships, however tentative, with one another. I would even argue that it is precisely the characters’ inability to sever destructive emotional ties (to “divorce”) that keeps them from progressing, as in the case of Phyllis and her drunken, abusive father. All three live in a world in which such patriarchal figures have become untenable, and societal norms for all are shifting. The characters are understandably anxious and expecting the worst. Yet, instead of allowing them merely to escape their lives, their pastoral interludes at the edges of the city permit them to encounter each other, their desires and fears, within a fragile narrative structure that allows for their excesses and uncertainties to have free play. While hardly the stories of carefree shepherds and their loves, these pastorals do suggest human beings struggling to discover what Williams once termed “the truth about us,” although the truths are seldom beautiful (“To Elsie,” Collected, 218). In the end, it is precisely this reorienting of “truth” with regard to conventional standards of “beauty” that marks Paterson’s continuity with and revision of the pastorals of old, and the coalescence of a new pastoral mode in twentieth-century American literature. Vulgarity and the ‘Aristocratic’ New Measure Williams’s interrogation of the relationships between beauty and ugliness, value and pollution, pastoral and urban life continues throughout the whole of Paterson, emerging clearly in section I of Book Two before section I of Book Four. Like Book Four, Book Two explicitly invokes the pastoral mode; it was originally conceived of as a modern “Saturnalia” based upon Catullus’s love poetry and as a modern version of Theocritus, according to Williams’s early notes.39 However, the poem also undoubtedly has its source in a slightly later Latin poet, Virgil, insofar as it focuses upon class differences and Paterson’s specific and most discouraging historical experience with class struggle: the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913.40 The Strike, a seminal event of the Progressive

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Era that received national coverage (like the Lawrence Strike), ended after several months with few concessions from the mill owners and a sense of defeat on a large scale for the striking unions (including the I.W.W.) and their liberal sympathizers. Drafts of Book Two indicate that its original title or theme was “the strike” and that in an early draft Paterson’s initial musings concerned this issue; several lines from the poem are actually lifted in full from the “Strike” section of Williams’s 1914 poem, “The Wanderer.”41 This traumatic historical event, combined with the Book’s “Sunday in the Park” setting and themes of love and lovers, strongly suggests that the poet is attempting to delineate forms of “contact” similar to those that we find among Corydon, Phyllis, and Paterson later in the poem. As in Book Four, Williams struggles to imagine a relationship between the self and other that moves beyond mere exploitation and appropriation. While Book Four tends to eschew issues of class, Book Two directly addresses this issue so integral to pastoral and much of Williams’s work: the relationship between the complex poet and supposedly simple working man. As he phrased it in a 1947 letter, Book Two was intended to address the Paterson strike directly, including “the economic distresses occasioned by human greed and blindness.” Yet in its depictions of “the social unrest that occasions all strikes” he confesses, “the aesthetic shock occasioned by the rise of the masses upon the artist receives top notice.”42 In large part, Williams’s interest in the striking masses and especially their effect upon the poet echo the concerns of Robert Frost, whose hometown of Lawrence, Massachusetts, was the site of the other major strike of the 1910s. As in Frost’s early poetry about tramps and mill workers, Williams’s troubled efforts to imagine ethical relationships among human beings serve as the focal point of the poem. Despite optimistic rhetoric of the 1910s that celebrated the possibilities of a new “social self” relatively uninhibited by economic realities, Williams is reluctant in the post–World War II era to embrace this perspective, choosing instead to illuminate the complexities of inequality. Crucial to the pastoral dynamics of section I, Book Two, are tensions between the poet’s socially marginal source of energy and his desire to create from the scene of their apparent “waste” a poetry of ethical and aesthetic force. Ultimately, Williams’s transformative consideration of these often foreign-born, working-class individuals and their relation to a new poetic technique forces the reader to confront social and economic inequities perhaps critical to the production of poetry in the modern world. Book Two begins with reference to a conjunction of time (“Sunday”) and place (“in the Park”) that suggests both leisure time and the initiation of the pastoral mode. It is a time and place at which the laboring masses of the city can leave behind their jobs, strictly defined social roles, and

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culturally predetermined concepts of value, waste, and production. It is the proverbial “day off ” that is in essence a “wasted day” from the perspective of industry, the day on which “nothing” is produced except perhaps a sense of “otium” or well-being—a sense of pleasure in individual existence that cannot be commodified as such. It is a “flower of a day” that the people will both enjoy and potentially ruin in their use of it (Paterson, 44). Section I begins not with the masses, however, but with Dr. Paterson, who is intent upon going “outside / outside myself,” into a world that is both not of him and yet born of his words and imagination as he “instructs his thoughts / (concretely)” upon the “body” of the female “Park” (Paterson, 43). The reader is induced into the realm of the imagination and the pastoral at once, the latter serving as a metaphor for Williams’s own subaltern or “polluted” poetics as centered in this femininized, working-class space. Paterson embarks upon his walk by following a group of young picnickers up a hill, observing “the ugly legs of the young girls, / pistons too powerful for delicacy! / the men’s arms, red, used to heat and cold, / to toss quartered beeves” (Paterson, 44). In these lines taken from “The Wanderer,” the mechanized bodies of the workers, while hardly suggestive of people accustomed to leisure, become reminiscent of the goatherds and farmers of Virgil or Theocritus’s poetry as they take a few hours to relax before returning to their work. Their period of leisure marks the time for poetry, music, and dance—and is therefore the appropriate moment for the poet to enter into the scene. As the poet approaches and hovers near the picnickers, however, he does not seem to be in a state of physical or emotional well-being. Despite his traditional role as the promulgator of pleasure and wisdom, his capacity to evoke memories and music, and his supposed integration into the community, he, too, seems stuck within the physicality of his body and its mechanized movements. He describes “Walking” as a fixed series of gestures of the foot, thigh and arm to be accompanied by a complete diagram “(6B)” (Paterson, 45). This sense of alienation from his own body, not unlike that which he detects in the workers at rest, is followed by a passage of prose, a portion of a letter from a woman with whom Paterson has recently cut off a correspondence. She writes to him that as a result of his rejection of her, she has felt a “complete damming up of all my creative capacities in a particularly disastrous manner.” She continues, For a great many weeks now (whenever I’ve tried to write poetry) every thought I’ve had, even every feeling, has been struck off some surface crust of myself which began gathering when I first sensed that you were ignoring the real contents of my last letters to you, and which finally

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congealed into some impenetrable substance when you asked me to quit corresponding with you altogether without even an explanation. That kind of blockage, exiling one’s self from one’s self—have you ever experienced it? (Paterson, 45) Just as he enters the world of imagination and pastoral—as he enters a world both of himself and not of himself—Paterson begins to consider the potentially disorienting effects of language and poetry. Just as these can enable one to realize oneself in the imagination, so do they have the capacity to dismantle one’s conception of selfhood as codified in the “real” world. Whereas he is first struck by his physicality and his ability to break it down into a series of machinelike movements, he is then struck by the thought of a woman and poet whose inability to write causes her to feel an alienation from the self, even that it is vulnerable to being “struck” away in pieces like a “crust.” In each case the smooth integration of the body and spirit is undercut by an experience of the self as other, an unraveling of the pure experience of subjectivity into a set of disjointed physical or intellectual sensations. The poet’s disintegration as he enters into the pastoral realm of the poem speaks to a more general sense of fragmenting identity as the interlude proceeds. Incorporating yet countering the myth of the decline of the American republic, Paterson proceeds to offer a vision of a population that turns out to be less a group of stable, mechanized producers than ambivalent and incontinent consumers. Most at home in the processes of relaxing, wasting time, eating, making love, and excreting, they are a version of pure humanity that is constantly in flux, caught up in a web of desires and bodily functions that disperse the subjective self and its fleshly body over time and space. They are the citizens of the future and the poet’s audience, but the poet’s attitude toward them is as much marked by frustration as hope. It is such men and women who, despite their “minds beaten thin / by waste,” (Paterson, 51) must form the basis for the beginning of a new age with its new measure. Invoking the need for “invention” and “change,” the poet sings of how “unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new / line.” For, “without invention the line / will never again take on its ancient / divisions when the word, a supple word, / lived in it, crumbled now to chalk” (Paterson, 50). The “supple” voices and bodies that help him to create this “new line” are precisely those of the “wasted” individuals whom he observes making love under the trees, vulgar yet earnest, “[n]ot undignified” despite their “pitiful” aspects (Paterson, 52). The poet cannot pick and choose his era or his subject—instead, he must work with the world as it appears to him in all its ordinariness and chaos. As a result, his relationship to the working-class picnickers is marked by a flexible, accepting sense of irony regarding the

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true nature of what has been deemed “waste” in society. This perspective is implicitly opposed to “scholarship,” which in an earlier draft Williams noted: “passes them by and can’t / say one clear word to the purpose concerning [these people], / except irony. Scholarship prying among / the words the needed words.”43 Unlike the ostensibly apoliticized poetry admired by his scholarly contemporaries, the New Critics, Williams’s distinctive ironic approach allows for aesthetics that can have a political effect. The politics of Williams’s embrace of the mill workers is complicated, however, by the poet’s disquietude about his own subject position and its relationship to his poetic authority. After all, it is what he describes as the “contrast between the vulgarity of the lovers in the park and the fineness, the aristocracy of the metrical arrangement of the verse” that contributes to the scene’s unmistakably pastoral tensions between the refined and uncouth— tensions that are immensely fruitful if of indeterminable “value.”44 The poet’s relationship to these working-class frolickers is one that serves mainly to bolster his implicit claim that as a poet he produces something of worth. It is the workers who historically have had a more direct, unmediated relationship to the products of their work and the land, a relationship that is highly suggestive of moral authority as well. It is they who are literal producers of a community, those who at one time could have claimed to have a direct social “value” by virtue of their labor. At the same time, however, the poet’s use of a lower-class dialect is not necessarily an appropriation that will reinforce his claim to any authoritative cultural identity. The voices that he adapts are “foreign” to mainstream America, the workers laboring in factories that only alienate them from their own products and bodies. In the end, the workers are depicted as more like the poet in their state of incoherence than unlike, his appropriation of their voices seeming less an artistic poaching than an empathetic gesture of quasi-solidarity. Read from either angle, the result is a text whose multiple ironies suggest its concurrent desires to express liberal social sentiments while affirming a bourgeois conception of the artist. Despite the intermittently vexed relationship of poet and worker, however, a more hopeful and assured perspective emerges as Paterson continues on his path through the park. As he moves on from his earlier, bleaker observations of the crowd and individual lovers, he offers more positive, sexualized images of physical and bodily congruence. He is caressing the “park” herself with his footsteps; when he crosses an old meadow, he notes the phallic observation tower in “its pubic grove” (Paterson, 53). Several lines later, he turns to two anecdotes concerning dogs, anecdotes that once again demonstrate the liberating potential of pollution or the bodily force itself in reaction to the reifying forces of social determination. The first dog is a collie whose owner combs her hair carefully “until it lies, as he designs, like

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ripples in white sand giving of its clean-dog odor” (Paterson, 53). They stand on a stone bench that Williams may have meant to stand for a temple of Venus, and the dog’s beauty and passivity have often been taken to represent a version of the aesthetic ideal for which the poet searches. However, any such reading of the scene is complicated by the anecdote that follows a few lines later, a comic letter written by one woman to another, apologizing that she has allowed the reader’s dog, “Musty,” to become impregnated while she was in her care (Paterson, 54). These two female dogs, one pristinely kept by her male owner, the other momentarily neglected by her female keeper, provide a humorous and telling comparison within the narrative. Once again the ideal is contrasted with what is debased in Williams’s scheme, but in this instance it is immediately apparent that the “polluting” force, in this case of “musty” female sexuality, also serves as a source of liberating laughter. The extreme, yet hilarious earnestness of Musty’s keeper serves as a counterpoint to the collie’s obsessive groomer as the poet comments upon the necessary and procreative incursion of disorder. A clean, effete model of “Beauty” is made to stand aside and share the stage with humor and physicality as manifested in disorderly and sensory “pleasure,” as Williams again shifts the place of the “good” in his metaphysical equation. These copulating dogs return later in the poem as the symbols of the “pleasure” that the “Park” simultaneously must allow for but in theory prohibits: “NO DOGS ALLOWED AT LARGE IN THIS PARK” (Paterson, 61). It is “pleasure” itself that emerges as the crucial element in the poem, the human element always evoked by pastoral resurfacing to remind the reader what the real purpose of aesthetics, “culture,” and ultimately even real justice must be. The poet is heavily indebted to his indifferent and reluctant audience for this revelation of “joy,” leaving the poem open to be read in part as a notice of gratitude. Williams’s simultaneously essentializing yet highly detailed descriptions of these weekend scenes allow him to account meticulously for a community that functions most productively when open to the very elements that it legislates against. His “new measure” contains room for the old rules to be reevaluated and rewritten, although as a matter of course no rules could ever fully regulate the eruptions of pleasure in this text. In turning the lives, language, and lifestyle of these rough lovers into the stuff of poems, Williams defiantly reidentifies poetry with joy and leisure time, the multiple lives of individuals to whom poetry itself may be foreign but who embody nonetheless the nation’s future cultural potential. He mocks those who would find “the center of movement, the core of gaiety” in an aesthetic realm so far removed from the real world that its language is false and incomplete (Paterson, 56). Instead, he ironizes the possibility of finding such a center: his “Pan” is “dead pan,” a young man playing guitar

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while his friends enjoy their food and wine. The scene is classical yet modern at once, a hybrid nexus of irregular syntax (“Come on! Wassa ma’? You got / broken leg?”) and vivacious dancers (an old woman “lifts one arm holding the cymbals of her thoughts”) (Paterson, 57). It is the “air of the Midi / and the old cultures” yet it is the “present” all at once (Paterson, 57). Time has not stood still but instead moves forward to expose the undercurrents of change in the midst of seeming peace and prosperity. A woman, impatient with her countrymen’s refusal to dance, cries out “Excrementi” (Paterson, 57). Her brusque disapproval, however, is aimed at their reluctance to enact their pleasure in the ancient “measures,” stepping along to the music of the New and Old Worlds. They are too tired, too “wasted” by their day to engage in any but the smallest of efforts. But the final view of these lolling youth is not unkind, leaving them “on the rocks celebrating / the varied Sundays of their loves with / its declining light—“ (Paterson, 58). Although the moment is as fading and elusive as a “lost / Eisenstein film,” it becomes simultaneously indelible as encoded in the poet’s verse (Paterson, 58). As he walks on from this scene, Paterson again passes a pair of dozing lovers. Despite a “useless voice,” they too, it appears, have begun to sense “a music that is whole, unequivocal” even if it is “in [a] sleep” from which they do not awaken (Paterson, 60). The latent music and poetry of section I, Book Two exist in the cry of “Pleasure! Pleasure!” that is not so much the poet’s but the crowd’s “own” as the poet renders it back to them (Paterson, 60). They are both emotionally “relieved” and moved to physically “relieve” themselves at this realization in yet another one of Williams’s obscene puns. Directed up toward the “conveniences,” the picnickers must stumble over the worn rocks and denuded trees in order once again to pollute and despoil the environment (Paterson, 60). Williams does not linger over the destruction, however, but instead points out that even “deformity” is “to be deciphered (a horn, a trumpet!)” through “an elucidation by multiplicity” (Paterson, 61). This process, not constructive in a conventional way, may entail “a corrosion, a parasitic curd,” but will also serve as “a clarion / for belief, to be good dogs” (Paterson, 61). Yet the last element of this recipe for poetry seems to suggest that the poet is once again playing with his readers’ expectations of poetic and pastoral order, for he knows all too well that even “good dogs” forget their training more often than not. The poet, instead of leading us towards a post-Edenic land of milk and honey, instead produces a text that is the by-product of its age, a sour “curd” that in turn becomes the basis for a new sensory experience. It seems that no single method of composition, of systematic rule following, can accomplish what “natural” processes of decomposition and recombination will allow for: the continuous rejuvenation of the community and the poet. It is the

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poet, perhaps, who should really be guarded against, for it is he who is “at large” in the park, in his mind, and in his own poetic world, and it is his travels beyond prepragmatic constructs of the “self ” that make this vision of the community possible. Williams’s Paterson provides no definitive answers to social or aesthetic problems—it only offers alternatives and a zone of the imagination in which to implement them. Although issues of class, race, and gender occupy him throughout the poem, the sections that specifically invoke pastoral serve as the best means of viewing the connection between his poetic project and a national one. In the realm of the imagination, continuous with the “real” world, the poet is able to become whoever and whatever he wants, be it a “flower” or a worker on holiday. Although the tensions of the “real” world trail the poet into his text, even these can be put to work, class dynamics employed to expose the possibilities and limitations of reimagining the self. He seeks in “contact” with his fellow man the kind of communal ties that pastoral ideology used to provide but can no longer account for with its hallowed mystique of yeomanry, property, and “soil.” In desiring the “bloody loam” where his friend Pound would have the “finished product,” Williams exposes his willingness to engage with the “filth” of the nation, both physically and intellectually (Paterson, 37). Ultimately, Paterson’s project appears to be open in form but inevitably restricted by time, as it moves toward at least an initial ending in a large, gaseous “blast.” Appropriately enough, however, this vaguely obscene “eternal close” serves only as a precursor to yet another beginning, as the next Book builds upon the “curd” and “turds” of the previous one. The aesthetic energy created by pollution, by a dog on the loose, in the best case reverberates beyond its pastoral incarnation out toward the world of the “real,” spreading chaos and pleasure wherever it runs. Leaving the park and idylls behind, the poet rushes out to build their equivalent in his community of readers. Having created a flow of words where there had been blockage, even if the mass were to be deemed excremental, Williams succeeds in Paterson in letting loose a new vision of poetic language upon American letters. Not all were ready to receive the torrent, but many were. Among Williams’s many readers and acquaintances was Wallace Stevens, with whom Williams had a relatively direct and competitive relationship. Tellingly, one of their more tense literary exchanges involved the pastoral depiction of American localities and individuals. In the fall of 1945, Allen Tate’s Sewanee Review published Stevens’s “Description without Place,” originally delivered as the Phi Beta Kappa poem for Harvard’s 1945 commencement. Musing upon tropes such as a “queen” whose “green mind made the world around her green,” the poem references Marvell’s pastoral “green thought in a green shade”

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to reflect upon the nature of “seeming,” the inevitable difference between “desire” and “reality” in poetic descriptions. A veritable “theory of description,” the poem was immediately read and loathed by Williams, who took its reference to the “Spaniard” who “lives in the mountainous character of his speech” to be a slur upon himself, ultimately reading the poem as proof of Stevens’s reluctance to join with him in inventing a grounded, local, post–World War II American poetics.45 In response, Williams composed his own poem, “A Place (Any Place) to Transcend All Places,” which was published by John Crowe Ransom’s Kenyon Review in 1946. A paean to the mélange that is New York, the poem celebrates the “hodge-podge” created by the “draining places” from which its inhabitants came, a polluted pastoral site of “weeds and grass.” Calling attention to what is “obscene and abstract as excrement—,” it is what “no one wants to own / except the coolie / with a garden of which / the lettuce particularly / depends on it—if you / like lettuce, but / very, very specially, heaped / about the roots for nourishment.”46 A pointed rebuke to Stevens’s apparently otherworldly poem, Williams’s verse reads as almost a literal attempt to rub his fellow poet’s nose in the reality of contemporary life. Upon closer examination of Stevens’s text, however, it can be argued that, like so many other poets and critics, Williams simply misread Stevens’s complex relationship to “place” and the nature of waste and excess in the modern world. Rather than a rejection of the world, “Description without Place” can also be read as a celebration of all that is associated with summer, greenery, and a “queen” or “queens” who evoke an atmosphere of “anticipation,” “revelation,” and “reconciliation” not dissimilar to the poetic future Williams hoped to bring about. Although Williams had difficulty discerning the similarities between their work, closer examination of each poet elicits a common desire to renegotiate the relationship between the everyday and the aesthetic, the lowly and the high, the people and the poet.

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CHAPTER 4

“Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!”: Wallace Stevens’s Figurations of Masculinity

I

n a 1935 letter to Ronald Lane Latimer, Wallace Stevens makes a rare direct mention of pastoral. Although Stevens wrote several early poems with titles such as “Eclogue” (1909), “The Silver Plough Boy” (1915), and “Ploughing on Sunday” (1923), and referred pointedly to poets as “shepherds” in early correspondence, nowhere does he address the topic at any length.1 In the Latimer letter, Stevens reflects upon whether or not one’s everyday life and poetry might be of a piece, and by way of example cites a study by an art historian that attributes the linearity of Dutch painting to the flat Dutch countryside. Stevens then appears to dismiss the topic, observing: “You know, the truth is that I had hardly interested myself in this (perhaps as another version of pastoral) when I came across some such phrase as this: ‘man’s passionate disorder’, and I have since been very much interested in disorder.”2 While the “this” that is the “version of pastoral” has a slightly indeterminate referent, it seems to refer to the very idea of order, that is, the direct correspondences between life and art, the world and the imagination, the poet as man and the poet as creator of a linguistic universe, that intrigued Stevens throughout his career. Despite Stevens’s avowal of disinterest in the topic, it would emerge repeatedly in his poetics as a crucial counterpoint to the very “disorder” he imagined to have displaced it.3 Even the rather precise example of pastoral “order” that Stevens uses to make his point resonates on several different levels in terms of Stevens’s own biography and its possible links to his poetics. The example of a Dutch painting, coupled with references to Stevens’s own compulsive orderliness in the same letter, bring to mind the poet’s youthful fascination with his Dutch

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and Germanic background, which he first teasingly celebrated in a 1909 letter to his future wife, Elsie Kachel: “I said I was German to the uttermost. . . . Peasants are glorious. Think. Who inhabited Arcady?” (Letters, 120).4 This stolid peasant figure was often an attractive one for Stevens, and sufficiently “pastoral” insofar as it evoked hearty shepherds in the countryside. However, the image of boisterous men in the fields seems at odds with Stevens’s concurrent sense of himself—noted in his journal in 1902—as a relatively refined poet, distinguished from the urban riffraff, for whom “an Arcadian flute is better after all than a metropolitan corn-cob” (Letters, 58). Stevens would later describe this opposition as a contrast between the older “outsider” returning to the land of his youth and the “native” or “insider” who never left.5 Both of these model, “pastoral” selves, however, were a far cry from the “Crack-A-Jack” lawyer and successful businessman that his father admonished him to become, just as neither quite fit the “strenuous” type of man Stevens attempted to embrace on long weekend walks throughout rural Pennsylvania and New Jersey during the early 1900s and 1910s, when he would “cover[] about twenty miles or more” in an effort to escape the effects of too much “tobacco + food” (Letters, 20, 69). Stevens’s letters and poetry from the turn of the century through the 1940s reveal a poet concerned with stressing his “manhood” and affiliation with “virile” “manpoets,” yet confronted with a bewildering variety of modern masculine identities to emulate. The notion that pastoral suggests a certain natural “order,” after all, in which a man could easily locate his proper role and place in society, is contradicted by the context of the reference: the “pastoral” mentioned in the letter evokes not only poetic order but the orderly landscape painting as observed by a male art critic—surely not the most “manly” of occupations in a nation terrified that its elite males were becoming increasingly effete and unfit to save their society from genetic “degeneration.”6 The many models of masculinity encoded in Stevens’s direct and oblique references to “pastoral” reflect his desire to reconcile within himself many versions of the modern man and to figure himself as a model, representative American male, speaker, and citizen. The most frequent form that this selfimagination took in Stevens’s famously abstract prose and poetry is, perhaps surprisingly, the body. While at times conforming to the ideal male bodies most in vogue from the 1890s through the 1940s, the imagined, often vague poetic bodies of his texts also suggest the physical manifestation of alternative, at times racialized and feminine, orders and creative disruption. Among the most intriguing, and disorderly, of self-images for Stevens are those of the “Large Man,” “Jumbo,” or the “Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!” body of “Bantams in Pine-Woods,” all of which recall a personal physicality that both embarrassed him (“That monster, the body!”) and was an anomalous

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point of pride and affection (“that monster” was easily sated by “capon and fresh peach pie”) (Letters, 176). Even as Stevens worried over the implications of his large build in terms of looking the part of the poet—who was traditionally associated with leaner, smaller, more traditionally aristocratic frames—he also saw his height and girth as evidence of an appetite for a real world that could be touched, smelled, and ultimately, tasted and feasted upon in both affirming and ominous ways. Within the context of Stevens’s poetry, suggestions of overly large male bodies manifest the poet’s faith in tangible experience of the phenomenal world that pragmatists held to be the basis for all thought, philosophy, and, of course, poetry. “Fat” emerges as a trope that for Stevens evokes a panoply of experiences suggestive of both order and disorder, the masculine and feminine, the poet and the people he would represent. A response to overly “masculine” bodies, the “fat” body is a pastoral sign of the common man, albeit in a limited sense: Stevens implicitly considers the common man to be kin to his own country cousins, white “natives” in their proper, rural environments. Although Stevens’s invocations of racialized large bodies are largely caricatures, Stevens’s ultimate acceptance of a “fat girl” as a possible poetic heir signals an acceptance of a selfhood and poetic vocation that could be open to the “feminine” and all that it represents. The result is a pastoralism that embraces aspects of the self that other modernists considered polluting and disorderly, a healthy-minded—if still racially limited—approach to life and what Stevens termed “hopeful waste.” In the following pages, I begin with a reading of “Bantams in PineWoods,” using the poem as a lens to illuminate changing conceptions of masculinity and fat in the cultural context of early-twentieth-century American society. Stevens’s multiple perspectives on the poetic self, I suggest, entails the articulation of a poetics of “fat” that reflects his ambivalent experiences of his own expanding body. I then discuss Stevens’s unconventional poetics within the context of his reaction to World War II, which triggered the poet to frame his poetics not only in terms of (and often in opposition to) earlier masculine ideals but also with regard to the pragmatic philosophy of William James. In the third and final section, I examine the poet’s characteristic deflation of more “muscular” male figures in favor of “fat” ones in poems dating from the mid 1930s through the early 1950s and appearing in volumes ranging from Harmonium to The Auroras of Autumn. Products of a specific season of plenitude and incipient change and associated with Stevens’s own roots in rural Reading, Pennsylvania, these “fat” bodies emerge as alternatives to fixed, unproductive versions of the masculine “hero.”

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Boxing, Fat Men, and the “Rogue Elephant in Porcelain” While a great deal of ink has been spilled over Stevens’s investment in conceptual figures such as the “dandy,” “man number one,” the “hero,” the “major man,” “medium man,” the “subman,” and the “giant,” little attention has been paid to the physical aspects of these figures or the rare but revealing images of male bodies in Stevens’s work.7 The specific nature of the masculine ideal has gone unquestioned in the bulk of Stevens criticism: it is taken for granted that a real man must be muscular and physically masterful, and that Stevens himself must have admired such a physique exclusively. Yet from the publication of Harmonium on, criticism at times assigned Stevens a more ambiguous gender identity, emphasizing his dandyish, implicitly feminine “grace and ceremony.”8 Stevens and his interest in men “virile” and otherwise, therefore, must be understood as the product of an American society in which masculinity was an extremely fraught and contested cultural site.9 By the late nineteenth century, what had been a firm, character-driven “manliness” had become a more amorphous, anxiety-laden “masculinity” that was dependent upon its opposition to women and those racial and ethnic “others” perceived to be cultural, social, and political threats.10 Prominent Americans such as Theodore Roosevelt began to advocate the “strenuous life” for men as an alternative to the sedentary lifestyles of the growing middle class. This group included many salaried breadwinners, men such as Stevens, a lawyer for an insurance company. Whereas in previous decades the ideal bodies of both men and women were both slighter and larger—the delicate body associated with a higher social class and intellectual capacity while larger girth was linked to social stability and respectability—by the early twentieth century a distinctly muscular “bulk” had come into fashion and would remain so for the next several decades. Just as the expanding, “brain-trained” middle class had previously aspired to be like their slender betters in the mid-1800s, by 1920 they feared becoming the “ninety-seven pound weakling” of the ubiquitous Charles Atlas advertisements (Green, 252). “Bantams in Pine-Woods,” first published in 1922, suggests a vision of masculine rivalry and aggression that is both a spoof of contemporary standards of “manliness” and a curious reenactment of the same. The poem’s unexpected energies and celebration of “fat” as a trope for those energies situate it as a precursor of a range of mid-century poems in which similar eruptions occur. Traditionally, the poem has been read rather literally, as a lighthearted, parodic approach to the young Wallace Stevens’s anxiety as an apprentice poet (a “virile” “inchling” and small “bantam” bird) confronting a larger “cock” and “ten-foot poet.” Eleanor Cook has emphasized the “phallic

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subtext” in Stevens’s play upon the word “cock,” and Rachel Blau DuPlessis makes a compelling argument for reading the poem as Stevens’s response to the threat of Vachel Lindsay’s potentially emasculating “colored” power.11 These readings all maintain the fiction that the bantam birds or “cocks” in question represent Stevens and some other individual. In contrast, I argue that the “cocks” in question are not only pragmatic variations upon the male poet’s possible physiques and experiences, but that the protagonists quickly become indistinguishable, their aggressive posing belied by the persistence of a “fat” body that undermines the contemporary masculine ideal in surprising ways. In order to dispel what would become the “hero” and “virile poet’s” “masterful” body, however, Stevens first playfully invokes it by referencing a very specific kind of physical, “manly art”: the highly popular sport of boxing and prizefighting. As boxing emerged as a middle-class activity and entertainment during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the term “bantam” came to be used to describe the lightweight class of fighter. At a cultural level, boxing allowed for the popular adulation of the “Heroic Artisan,” a working-class, often ethnic figure, while allowing middle- and upper-class men the opportunity to prove their mettle and reassert the “virility” of the Anglo-Saxon.12 Within the context of boxing, “Bantams in Pine-Woods” can be understood as a kind of public challenge or even the kind of “trashtalk” common among practitioners of the original “manly art” (as well, at times, among writers: witness Stevens’s unfortunate provocation of a fistfight with Hemingway in Key West in 1936).13 The speaker inaugurates his address with a series of taunts: Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan Of tan with henna hackles, halt! Damned universal cock, as if the sun Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.14 The mocking diction and tone ostensibly serve to differentiate two “bantams” that the poem’s title, curiously enough, indicates are indistinguishable (in an equally vague if somewhat pastoral “pine-woods”). As readers we are encouraged to imagine a dialectical, pastoral, and distinctly masculine tension between large and small, simple and complex, strong and quick-witted characters, although other features of the poem belie this narrative cliché. According to this fiction as suggested in the opening lines, the speaker’s bravado is addressed to a figure in a “caftan,” an allusion to the somewhat exotic and even feminine dressing robe adopted by boxers. The figure’s absurd moniker, however, designates him as the “Chieftain” of an unreal,

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highly rhetorical world. The odd chiasmus of phonemes in the first line (the “tain”/”tan” and “can”/”can” “Chieftain” and “Iffucan” mirrored by “Azcan” and “caftan”) accentuate his hypothetical, conditional properties (“if you can,” “as [I] can”) as well as his status as a self-reflective, self-regarding figure whose power and masculinity are as stylized as the “can-can” of French dancing girls or the costumed Native American “chieftains” whose iconic photographs gained cultural currency even as their bodies were quickly disappearing from the continent. Riffing upon the “Ashcan” school of painters such as George Bellows (who often painted boxers), the reference to “Azcan” also recalls grandiose and glamorized scenes of working-class triumph— even if those triumphs were often small compensation for the grimmer realities of political and social losses. That Stevens begins the poem with such an elaborate invocation suggests his investment in exposing the illusory features of such contests of strength, while concurrently exploring the ways in which masculinity was itself a “figure” with varyingly “real” correlates. For example, in the next stanza this “[d]amned universal cock,” as arrogant “as if the sun / Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail” may seem “universal” and apparently “representative,” but his world is clearly not the real world, with its fanciful slave or antique “blackamoor” and impressive “blazing tail” (a “tall tale” of sorts?). Here, the rhetoric of medieval chivalry, closely aligned with the cultural and racial anxieties that spawned the rise of boxing, is invoked to depict a pauper turned prince, the working-class body elevated as a knightly, masculine, specularized— and thus implicitly femininized—cultural ideal. All of this talk climaxes with an attempt to deflate the proposed antagonist in favor of the speaker’s own brand of masculinity, which he attempts to assert in the next stanza. “Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal. / Your world is you. I am my world,” the “bantam-weight” snarls in a fit of inarticulate indignation. Once again the contrast between Jack and the Giant, small and large, quick and dull is suggested, but the antipathy never seems to materialize convincingly, in part because the speaker’s diction here is stilted and abrupt, his formerly rich vocabulary impoverished as it approaches the true nature of the “bantams.” In fact, the patent illogic of the poem overtakes its diction in the magical third stanza: both figures are in their own “world[s]” in a chiasmus that has each mirror the other (“Your world is you. I am my world.”). In effect, each is a version or reflection of the other, just as the Chieftain originally appeared to be a comical doubling or exaggeration of himself. The now abjectly “fat” “other” emerges as a version of the “bantam’s” own self: a monstrous “ten-foot poet among inchlings.” The image was undoubtedly an extremely personal one for Stevens, a man whom Carl Van Vechten described in 1914 as a “rogue elephant in porcelain.”15 At this point in the

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poem, it is the “fat” male body that must now be dealt with in place of the formerly (it was implied) muscular fighter and performer. Over the next two stanzas, it becomes clear that the presence of “fat” is curiously and often humorously productive for the poet. In his attempt to exorcize this possible physical self and nemesis, the speaker appears to succeed only in reasserting its presence, the “fat,” an archaic term for a large jar or vat, remaining its “portly” self much as its namesake in Tennessee (“Anecdote of the Jar”): You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat! Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines, Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs, And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos. Indeed, the “bristling,” newly bearded bantam has a rural, Appalachian tongue or “tang” that can take shape only around the figure of this “cock,” the Pennsylvania Dutch poet apparently given voice when presented with something appropriately masculine and substantial to address in himself. The other “bantam” or “bantams” seem inconsequential in contrast with this figure, not to mention textually indeterminate in number (why “their Appalachian tangs”?), as the speaker collapses with his putative subject. This ambiguity regarding the speaking self and his elusive fellow “cocks” reinforces the implication that these displays of masculinity are themselves a charade, an elaborate “cock-fight” with rhetoric, rituals, and regalia that are borrowed and anachronistic. Absent these distractions, it is the “fat” male body that continues to resonate as the focal point of concerns as to the true substance of “masculinity” (is it “muscle” or “fat”?) and Stevens’s ability to work creatively with such cultural tropes. The fat body itself was newly perceived to be a “disfigured” body by the turn of the century, a disruptive presence whose overactive orifices and lack of self-control suggested a larger kind of social disorder—yet it also was (and is) alarmingly ordinary.16 At one level, it is precisely this disruptive ordinariness, this capacity to assert reality and bodily experience over theoretical norms, which makes the trope of the fat man an attractive one for Stevens. A fat man is a man who understands the simple pleasures of life, a poet who in 1940, just prior to World War II, admires “a photograph of a lot of fat men and women in the woods, drinking beer and singing Hi-li Hi-lo,” an image that convinces him “that there is a normal that I ought to try to achieve” (Letters, 352). Yet the “portly” body also suggests a port, or place of shelter and civility, in a more disturbing sense: in a world where the rules of sport must compensate for a lack of rules in the marketplace, the powerful fat

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man oversees the continuance of traditions intended to regulate and control his fellow men. Even as the fat man with his mysteriously breathy, joyful, or jeering “hoos” may inspire affection or a respectful “fear,” it is unclear that he is a vision of the masculine self that Stevens truly intended to exorcise (“Begone!”). Rather, the puffed up “bantams” in their rural “pine-woods” can be understood as reflecting the poet’s insights into the illusory nature of masculinity and the uneasy peace that he continually made with a world whose physical, ethical, and aesthetic standards were ever-shifting and often not in accord with his own experience. What “Bantams in Pine-Woods” most aptly illustrates is the ultimately unsatisfactory nature of the “hero” or ideally masculine body, which Stevens constantly invokes and then deflates in his poetry in favor of the “large” or “fat” man. At the other end of the spectrum from both the weakling and strongman, the fat man is the man whose bulk is decidedly not muscle, his size alone inspiring both respect and ridicule. While the “large” man may at first seem a version of the “masculine” “hero” so many Stevens critics have invoked, his cultural history is quite different from that of his more studied, self-absorbed, and later vaguely fascist, cousin.17 It is significant that the very term “fat” began to take on negative connotations during the early decades of the twentieth century, and additional epithets were coined rapidly, among them “dumpy,” “tubby,” “porky,” and “jumbo” (from the Gullah for elephant) (Schwartz, 89). The young Wallace Stevens, upon seeing the notoriously large President Taft in a 1910 New York City parade, had a characteristically ambivalent reaction: “His Excellency looked stupid to me. His eyes are very small—his hair is white with a yellow tinge. He is very heavy but not in a flabby way, specially. I say he looked stupid; but at the same time, we all know him to be a man of much wisdom, patience and courtesy” (Letters, 167). While an individual such as Taft would formerly have attracted no censure for his size in the nineteenth century, the President became a touchstone for national jokes concerning weight by the end of his administration, his bulk contrasted with the younger and more fit Theodore Roosevelt. “Fat implied not the assertion of power but its false promise,” a point brought home by the athletic former Rough Rider’s crusades against corrupt trusts and the large monopolists who controlled them (Schwartz, 90). By the 1920s, attitudes toward overweight bodies stressed their inefficiency, their deviancy from “Yankee” frugality in a period of wartime conservation, and their overall irregularity in an era of mass production and postwar ideological conformity. Insurance companies, such as the one for which Stevens himself worked, promulgated weight charts to be used to assess the health of potential clients. Americans began to diet in large

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numbers by the 1920s, closely following new fads as they attempted to stem a tide of consumption, constipation, and heart disease: “Reducing has become a national pastime . . . a craze, a national fanaticism, a frenzy,” a journalist observed in 1925 (Schwartz, 173). Stevens, too, was caught up in the phenomenon, writing to Louis Untermeyer in 1926, “At the present time all my attention is devoted to reducing” (Letters, 247). While the six-foot poet was told to lose about 20 of his 229 pounds at a young age, by the mid-1930s he weighed 234 and acquaintances estimated his weight at 250 and even 300 pounds by the late 1930s and early 1940s (when he wore a size 48 jacket).18 Stevens was denied a life insurance policy on the basis of his weight, and struggled to maintain a strict regimen within the household.19 Yet even as Stevens was extremely self-conscious about his size—at one point refusing to do a reading due to “the mingled problems of obesity and minstrelsy,” recalling in 1948 that he “felt more like an elephant at every step” while walking down the aisle to the lectern at a previous engagement (Letters, 583)—he also loved to indulge in favorite foods. Stevens’s early journals and letters are filled with detailed descriptions of meals, and his youthful enthusiasm for gourmet treats evidently continued throughout his life. When a French bakery opened in Hartford in 1947, Stevens observed with delight and chagrin that “to start the day so full of these [brioches] that every time one breathes one whistles does not help to get things done”(Letters, 561). Other letters regale his correspondents with the delights of corn–on–the cob, blueberries, fruit, Turkish figs, Spanish melons, oysters, Parmesan cheese with softboiled eggs, wines, and other foods both rare and commonplace. Fat was a trope with a special resonance for Stevens, who associated his own girth with his Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry and what it suggested of the “normal” life of “fat men and women in the woods” that he aspired to capture in his poetry, even as it simultaneously recalled the consumer goods in which the relatively wealthy insurance executive could indulge.20 Despite the traditional association of “fat” with monstrosity—Stevens already referred to his body as “that monster” quite early in his career—and gluttony, as well as with mid-twentieth-century consumerism and overproduction, Stevens seems to have dispensed with such cultural tropes and substituted a curiously positive valence for the “fat” or “large” man (Schwartz, 18). While, on the one hand, Stevens’s conflicting attitudes toward “fat” begin to suggest its association with a “grotesque otherness” or lowness that Peter Stallybrass and Allon White discuss as crucial to defining “bourgeois sensibility,” at the same time “fat,” in its shifting alignments with both wealth and poverty, epitomizes a modernity in which life has become, as David Trotter puts it, “messy,” the self “contingent” and subject to changing norms that denaturalize the very essence of “waste.” The result is that Stevens’s poetry

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avoids a more predictable “disgust”—with all of its antiegalitarian connotations—instead exuding a circumscribed tolerance of “otherness” tempered by a nostalgic “desire.”21 Comprising a pragmatic response to the “virile poet” he would ostensibly champion during World War II, Stevens’s poetics of “fat” constantly functions to destabilize bodies whose “mastery” of self and others he deems incipiently fascistic or antidemocratic. In sharp contrast to what has been termed the “anorexic” aesthetic of colleagues such as Eliot and Pound (whose work he disliked),22 and more like William Carlos Williams, Stevens produces a representative poetic self that, pragmatically rooted in his personal experience, suggests a more expansive although still limited approach to the numerous and supposedly “irregular” bodies of the national population, especially those of women and the rural “native” white population associated with his childhood.23 The intellectual origins of this pragmatic approach to the body and experience infused Stevens’s work from the beginning and can be located in his encounters with the theories and texts of philosophers such as William James and John Dewey. The Virile Poet and the Pragmatic Presence in Wartime Concurrent with the national interest in sport and physical fitness was the rise of pragmatism, the basic tenets of which Stevens absorbed from the writings of James while an undergraduate at Harvard from 1897 to 1900. Concerned, as were their nutritionist and bodybuilding contemporaries, with the health of the nation, James and Dewey addressed the intellectual, political, and cultural dimensions of the good democratic citizen. Like their more overtly materialist counterparts, James and Dewey believed in the holistic nature of the body and spirit, stressing the role of the entire human being (physical and intellectual) in the construction and reconstruction of social institutions and political ideologies. Exemplifying this approach is James’s 1910 essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in which the philosopher proposed that “instead of military conscription” there be “a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature.” By temporarily working side by side with the lower classes, James argued, upper-class men would learn from experience not only the need for a better, more democratic society but also how to become men imbued with “ideals of hardihood and discipline.”24 James’s essay was clearly the product of an era in which the manliness of the upper and middle classes was in doubt, and his essay was meant both as a rebuke to warmongers (such as Theodore Roosevelt) with whom he disagreed as well as a confirmation of contemporary fears that American men were lacking in basic physical and intellectual requirements.

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Despite such protests, however, pragmatism was often aligned with feminine energies, both in James’s own rhetoric and in the context of midcentury debates concerning pragmatism’s efficacy in the political sphere. As Patricia Rae has noted, in Pragmatism (1907) James presents his scientific method as a feminine entity, “tough-minded” yet unmistakably female.25 In a passage at odds with his later reflections upon the effete men of the upper classes, James personifies pragmatism as a “she” who “ unstiffens” the traditional theories produced by men: “She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof.” This presence is not only feminine but also inherently egalitarian: “Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the senses and to count the humblest and most personal experiences.” Already we can see “how democratic she is. Her manners are various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature.”26 Tellingly conflated with a maternal, nurturing presence in these final sentences, pragmatism emerges as a natural outgrowth of democracy itself, the “mother,” in turn, of a new, modern generation and intellect. By the early 1940s, however, opponents of pragmatism or “naturalism,” as it came to be identified, criticized it for advocating a rootless relativism linked to pacificism and overintellectualism and thus, implicitly, a lack of masculine values.27 At the moment the nation needed to present an intellectually and physically imposing response to the Axis powers, pragmatism was deemed by some influential commentators to be insufficient for the task. In the infamous 1943 “Failure of Nerve” controversy (published in the Partisan Review, where Stevens also published on occasion), Sidney Hook and John Dewey defended pragmatism against attacks by conservative thinkers who accused James and Dewey’s scientific method of indirectly aiding Nazism and other repugnant ideologies precisely because they refused to provide a firm and absolute set of standards through which such enemies could be systematically opposed. In response, John Dewey linked his critics to forces that would stifle democracy in the name of their own rigid ideological and theological agendas: “Democracy cannot obtain either adequate recognition of its own meaning or coherent practical realization as long as antinaturalism operates to delay and frustrate the use of methods by which alone understanding of, and consequent ability to guide, social relationships can be attained.”28 To the mid-century pragmatist, the antinaturalists were forces that required a dangerous passivity of the populace, while naturalism or pragmatism fostered active engagement with the political process. To pragmatists, the ideal individual was not an orderly and obedient soldier but an intellectually voracious aesthete. Significantly, Wallace Stevens read Dewey’s article and described it as “valuable,” likely admiring in it both the

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Jamesian philosophy he was first introduced to at Harvard and absorbed over the years as well as the more explicit Deweyan impulse toward political engagement that the poet struggled with during the 1930s (Letters, 441). While this exchange may seem peripheral to Stevens’s own poetics, just a few months after the publication of this exchange Stevens gave a rare talk on the nature of the poet and his social responsibilities: “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet.” Early twentieth-century prototypes for both the muscular male and the pragmatist are prominent in Stevens’s discussions of the ideal man in this crucial essay, delivered at a 1943 Mount Holyoke conference that included many exiles from the war in Europe.29 Making pointed reference to James and his concerns regarding turn-of-the-century masculinity, the essay resituates the philosopher within a mid-twentieth-century discussion of the poet during a time of violence, implicitly suggesting a way to reintegrate the feminized, experientially based practice of pragmatism into a wartime poetics. While much has been written on Stevens’s early relationship to James, it is the poet’s later discussion of the philosopher that is one of his most striking reflections on pragmatism’s weaknesses and strengths.30 Foregrounding conflicting images of the men necessary to shape the ideal poet’s physicality, the essay can be read as a response not only to James but also to Dewey and the recent “Failure of Nerve” controversy. The crystallization of these concerns appears halfway through the essay as Stevens addresses the title theme. Here he presents at least two forces involved in the production of an adequately “masculine” figure who can write the appropriately “heroic poem.”31 First he discusses the ideal poet as part of a literary lineage in which “the centuries have a way of being male,” this maleness due in part to the influences of “philosophers and poets” capable of the “hard” and “rigorous” thinking necessary to birth the true “intelligence” of the period (“Youth,” 52). The result of such men’s intellectual labor is a poetic truth that “is the truth of credible things,” objects and ideas that can be assessed and evaluated by “credible people” who attest to their solvency. The economic rhetoric is Jamesian and pragmatic in its references to “credit” and “credibility,” affirming, as James notes in Pragmatism, that “Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system” (Pragmatism, 95). Even as the essay lionizes such individuals, however, equally telling is Stevens’s praise for the “mundo of the imagination” at the expense of the “gaunt world of reason,” rhetoric that elevates a healthy “mundo” and all that evokes a non-Anglo, Southern European (perhaps Spanish or Italian) sensuality and ethnic vitality above the “gaunt” world of mere thinkers (“Youth” 57–58). Equating the “morality of the poet’s radiant and productive atmosphere” with the “morality of the right sensation,” this key section of the essay firmly links the lofty realms of philosophy and ethics to the

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sensuality of physical experience, connecting high and low, intellectual and physical, imagined and real worlds. Underscoring his ambivalent attitude toward the pure intellectual, Stevens posits a caricature of the metaphysician as an unattractive alternative to the future poet. Citing a letter from William James himself, Stevens emphasizes how the philosopher perceived his own physical and mental shortcomings as preventing him from experiences of the world more accessible to “real” men. Stevens cites James carefully to reiterate this point: ‘Most of them [i.e. metaphysicians] have been invalids. I am one, can’t sleep, can’t make a decision, can’t buy a horse, can’t do anything that befits a man; and yet you say from my photograph that I must be a second General Sherman, only greater and better! All right! I love you for the fond delusion.’ (“Youth,” 58–59) While James depicts himself a mere “invalid” as compared to the vigorous war hero General Sherman, Stevens figures the “youth as virile poet” in terms that are scholarly yet concurrently evoke the physical and everyday mental vitality to which James aspired. In the sentences that follow, Stevens presents the youth as a future hero, “standing in the radiant and productive atmosphere,” “examining first one detail of that world, one particular, and then another,” concluding that “poetry is only reality, after all.” A purer and more masculine pragmatist than his mentor, he is still like the Jamesian pragmatist insofar as he is a “tough-minded” pluralist capable of comprehending multiple points of view (Pragmatism, 10). “In the twinkling of an eye” and using literally God-like powers, he “invents language,” “crushes men,” and “rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact.” Like a good pragmatist he undermines “absolutes” as well as “facts” that may well be a matter of perception and alter over time and through experience. Yet the rhetoric of strongmen abounds: an implicitly physically gifted being, a virtual superhero-in-training, this individual “exercises” himself in order to “help to lift” the “heaviness of the world,” which he is able to do thanks to the “abnormal ranges of his sensibility,” which enable him to “accumulate” more and more profound experiences more rapidly than the “normative type” of poet (“Youth,” 63, 66). His “virility” is characterized precisely by “that special illumination, special abundance and severity of abundance, virtue in the midst of indulgence and order in disorder” that make him not only more imaginative but also, implicitly, a better, more representative modern man in a century marked by abundance, indulgence, and disorder (“Youth,” 66). Stevens concludes by affirming the necessity of this model man and poet on the grounds that even as he exercises imaginative powers

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he is more likely to “dwell” outside the imagination and hence retain the essential “masculine nature that we propose for one that must be the master of our lives” (“Youth,” 66). Yet, having dispensed with the pure intellectual and championed the virile youth’s intellectual heroics, by the end of the essay Stevens alters course again, reemphasizing the importance of an intellect and physicality linked not only to male minds and bodies but those of women as well. In so doing, he echoes James’s femininized conception of pragmatism as well as an essential tenet of Dewey’s pragmatic aesthetics of the 1930s. The key moment occurs in the last of three references to the virile youth’s companion: a “sister of the Minotaur.” Half woman, half monster, she is crucial to the poet’s work. Initially introduced as an entity “still half-beast and somehow more than human,” she is subsequently cast off as a “mystic muse” and “monster” whom the young poet in the process of “purification” no longer requires (“Youth” 52, 60). The essay concludes, however, by reinvoking her presence, the virile youth addressing her in order to affirm that not only is he “part of what is real” and “part of the unreal,” but also the “truth of that imagination of life in which with unfamiliar motion and manner you guide me in those exchanges of speech in which your words are mine, mine yours” (“Youth,” 67). Her reemergence in the essay’s final sentences speaks to the extent to which the impure, “monstrous” and “feminine” emerge as crucial forces for the midcareer poet.32 Rather than affirm the “virile” poet, the essay ends by covertly legitimizing the appeal of the femininized Jamesian pragmatist who unites experience of the real and unreal, physical realm and imagination. In his insistence that “the truth of that imagination of life” can only be shaped by “those exchanges of speech in which your words are mine, mine yours,” Stevens also recalls Dewey on art: “The expressions that constitute art are communication in its pure and undefiled form” (Art, 244). Poetry is present in words exchanged between individuals, the poet and the “sister” who is also a part of him. Ultimately, the virile poet’s unique understanding of the laws and limitations of real and imagined worlds seems to result not from his unadulterated masculinity but from the pragmatic sensibility he inherited from his effeminate intellectual fathers. Stevens’s final thoughts on the connections among poetry, communication, and ethics in the essay also make greater sense in light of Dewey’s assertion of art’s ethical dimension. According to Dewey, true experience and poetry can only result from a world in which the flesh and spirit, intellect and body of the “live creature” enable “a transformation of interaction into participation and communication.”33 Stevens concludes his reflections on the relationship between the poet and his community by articulating a

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poetics of “morality” that has much in common with Dewey’s more overtly politicized aesthetics. In several key lines Stevens directly addresses the “character of the crisis through which we are passing today, the reason why we live in a leaden time,” citing a note from a book on Gide: “ ‘the main problem which Gide tries to solve—the crisis of our time—is the reconciliation of the inalienable rights of the individual to personal development and the necessity for the diminution of the misery of the masses’ ” (italics Stevens’s). Stevens comments, “When the poet has converted this into his own terms, the figure of the youth as virile poet and the community growing day by day more colossal, the consciousness of his function, if he is a serious artist, is a measure of his obligation. And so is the consciousness of his history” (“Youth” 64). The essential issue is to what extent the poet is “obligat[ed]” to his community, how his “personal development” is implicated in his recognition of his social and historical function. For Dewey, similarly, “consciousness is not a separate realm of being but is that manifest quality of existence when nature is most free and active.”34 The individual cannot be separated from “activity” in the world, or the imagination from the real, a situation echoed by Stevens’s intimation that the “community” is constantly “growing” more “colossal,” its sheer mass unavoidable, its condition shaping the poet’s personality. In the end, Stevens’s depiction of the artist in masculine and feminine terms is made possible by precisely the kind of environmental “disorder” that makes the virile poet’s special capacity for “order” visible in the first place. As Dewey notes in Art As Experience, it is precisely the tension between order and disorder, rather than the mastery of the latter, that is necessary for the “live creature” to have a productive existence: “The live creature demands order in his living but he also demands novelty. Confusion is displeasing but so is ennui. The ‘touch of disorder’ that lends charm to a regular scene is disorderly only from some external standard. From the standpoint of actual experience it adds emphasis, distinction” (Art, 167). In tacit accordance with this principle, Stevens evokes in his poetry and letters a nuanced vision of the male body and intellect that gives life to this pragmatic perspective upon experience in the world and modern democracy. Indeed, dissolution and failure rather than coalescence and ascendancy mark the overly muscular heroes of Stevens’s own poetry from the late 1930s and early 1940s, their impotence anticipating the eruption of new sources of selfhood that would emerge in its place. The resulting pragmatic, alternative male body is disorderly and chaotic, at times feminine as well as racially other. As such it suggests new parameters—and some limitations—for the ideal poetic speaker as well as the representative voice and man.

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The Poet as Native Speaker Stevens’s “fat” characters are generally situated in the “fat” season, summer, which in turn is associated with fertility, the feminine, and pastoral comforts.35 Throughout his career Stevens suggests characteristically contradictory attitudes towards this season and its denizens, contrasting them at times with the autumnal season of the tragic. It is a contrast that is inherently pastoral, juxtaposing the contrasts proper to the mode, simpler times and men juxtaposed with apparently more complex and difficult counterparts. Eventually, the seasons tend to blend and blur in his work: Stevens’s is ideally a late-summer pastoral, a poetics of seasonal change caught between “tinsel in August” and the “Sep-tem-ber” “the wind spells out” (Collected, 351, 265). This in-between quality extends to a two-fold state of mind, recalling terms that Stevens employed in an essay on John Crowe Ransom: once one has “ceas[ed] to be native[]” of a place, one becomes an “insider[] and outsider[] at once.” Such a person is “not content merely to acknowledge [the] emotions” that scenes of his hometown arouse, but must “isolate them in order to understand them.” Likely an “artist,” “while his activity may appear to be that of the outsider, the insider remains as the base of his character.”36 Not unlike William Empson’s “complex” individual in his perspectives on the world, such a man must attempt to understand himself and his environment both as it was and as it would become. Often, Stevens implicitly invokes this model when discussing the ideal and “normal” man, the seasonal metaphors underlining the transience of an aggressive “masculinity” and its dispersal into a mellower, more affirming “fat.” It is this transience that is foremost in the poem, “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War” (1942), in which an abstract yet muscular “hero” gives way to a scene of consumption among local townsfolk, a scene that in turn evokes a season of surfeit. Not unlike his wartime still lifes, which Bonnie Costello has described as “thresholds” between “the private ‘climate’ of meditation to the ‘climate’ of the times,” Stevens’s invocation of the pastoral, its “summer” respites and holiday disorder, enables him to recall the rhetoric of soldierly masculinity while interrogating its relation to images of locality and community.37 The result is a commentary upon the proper poetic body and site of aesthetic production. The muscular (and decidedly fleshly) body in question is typical of the bodies of Stevens’s later work, which, like their earlier counterparts in “Bantams in Pine-Woods,” tend to give way to more disorderly models. At first, however, the hero “seems” To stand taller than a person stands, has A wider brow, large and less human

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Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body Of a primitive. He walks with a defter And lither stride. His arms are heavy And his breast is greatness. All his speeches Are prodigies in longer phrases. His thoughts begotten at clear sources, Apparently in air, fall from him Like chantering from an abundant Poet, as if he thought gladly, being Compelled thereto by an innate music. (Collected, 277) Uncannily like the “virile poet” he would describe a year later, this figure is decidedly both “masculine” and a poet, but he is also more a prophet than a pragmatist, a seer with access to “clear sources”—unlike the empirical rationalist of the 1943 essay. Indeed, this figure seems a version of the antinaturalist fascist Dewey railed against, or a foundationalist and mystic like the terrifying Captain of the “The Masculine,” whose apocalyptic vision of male aggression and egotism taken to its illogical conclusion leads to “an end without rhetoric” in “Life on a Battleship” (1939).38 In “Examination,” though, the hero’s strict creed is quickly belied by the “profane parade” Stevens imagines in stanza XI: But a profane parade, the basso Preludes a-rub, a-rub-rub, for him that Led the emperor astray, the tom trumpets Curling round the steeple and the people, The elephants of sound, the tigers In trombones roaring for the children, Young boys resembling pastry, hip-hip, Young men as vegetables, hip-hip, Home and fields give praise, hurrah, hip, Flesh on the bones. The skeleton throwing His crust away eats of this meat, drinks Of this tabernacle, this communion, Sleeps in the sun no thing recalling. (Collected, 278) In this scene of chaos, excess, and fertility, the hero’s conditional existence is simultaneously made flesh and dispelled in a whirlwind of merrymaking: “the basso / Preludes a-rub, a-rub-rub” and “the elephants of sound, the tigers / In trombones” are “roaring for the children.” The very “sounds” so crucial to poetry are characterized as “elephants,” and even the onomatopoeic

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terms of the musical instruments suggest flesh pressed against flesh: “a-rubrub.” The people of the town are depicted as a nicely prepared meal and a parody of mechanized overproduction: “Young boys resembling pastry, hiphip / Young men as vegetables, hip-hip,” while the very “home and . . . fields give praise.” It is a time of “Eternal morning” and “Flesh on the bones,” as even the “skeleton” “eats of this meat, drinks / Of this tabernacle, this communion.” Rather like the “fat men and women in the woods, drinking beer and singing Hi-li Hi-lo,” these ordinary people are ostensibly on parade to celebrate the “hero” himself, but the celebration of an idea quickly dissipates into a scene of revelry and amnesia: “no thing recalling.” Stevens concludes the poem in stanza XVI by announcing that “Each false thing ends,” appearing to comment on the inevitable lapse of such “false” summer scenes into “veritable” autumn (Collected, 280). Yet, after linking autumn to the “familiar Man” and summer to the “hero,” then seeming to dispel the latter (both the imagined muscular ideal and the ordinary people who sloppily celebrated his existence), the speaker next questions the privileging of the newly invoked “familiar” or “veritable Man.” Are autumn and its man really “true,” or are they merely apparently true, or “veritable”? A pragmatic perspective insists that the dialectic the poet has inherited and replicates here be put to an “examination” itself. Not surprisingly, the poem ends with a compulsive return to an image of “Summer,” this time as a vaguely feminized, perhaps “false” creature: “jangling the savagest diamonds and / Dressed in its azure-doubled crimsons,” so that it “May truly bear its heroic fortunes / For the large, the solitary figure” (Collected, 280–281). Like Chief Iffucan, the season is an enigmatic, almost preposterous, exotic entity, overly elaborate in dress, a walking spectacle of the culture of consumption. Yet, also like Iffucan, this exoticized, dandyish, feminized “it” has a certain gravity and expansiveness—even pathos—as it merges rhetorically with the other entity of the concluding lines. This alternative entity is suggested when the speaker refers to “its azure-doubled crimsons” and “its heroic fortunes,” but no clear, verifiable referent for “it” emerges from rhetoric. “It” seems to invoke both the feminine “Summer” and the mysterious “large, solitary figure” that haunts the final lines of the poem, the fat man eerily incarnate. In the final lines the speaker weighs his appreciation for what may seem “false” with what has not yet been proven “true,” assessing actual and “veritable” seasons and men, leaving the reader with a vague presence, stark against the blankness of the page. Stripped of any identifying musculature, the individual seems suddenly ordinary, even “familiar,” himself, a hulking presence in the midst of an abstract revelry that evokes both the masculine and feminine, summer itself and its stranger, imagined reflection.

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This oddly feminine yet “large” man, haunting yet comforting, can be traced back through previous poems and into later ones as well. This figure constantly emerges as the best alternative to superficially ideal or “representative” men, suggesting the need for a poetic figure whose “manhood” is only enhanced by its openness to a more fluid, implicitly feminized, world. In the years previous to his reflections on the wartime “hero,” in the midst of the Depression, Stevens addressed the topic of the poetic, representative man in “Owl’s Clover,” the 1936 text in which the poet most directly takes up the question of the chaotic urban masses and their relation to the poet. In the first sections of the poem, Stevens offers an almost bewildering variety of model men. The ideal is now no longer the “buckskin” pioneer, but possibly the “sculptor” whose work speaks to the masses on “summer Sundays in the park,” or perhaps the “subman” (OP, 75–101).39 The last section, “Sombre Figuration,” presents the “subman” as a possible re-creator of a despoiled world depicted in section two of the poem (“Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue”) as largely “waste,” albeit both a “hopeless waste of the past” and a “hopeful waste to come,” its light revealing “faint, portentous, lustres . . . of what will once more to rise rose” (Opus, 81).40 The “subman” “dwells below,” “in less / Than body and in less than mind, ogre, / Inhabitant, in less than shape, of shapes / That are dissembled in vague memory / Yet still retain resemblances, remain / Remembrances” (Opus, 97). The “subman,” while not quite human, is the original “native” of the imagination, but it is unclear to what extent he is a “native” of the earth itself. For even the true “native,” “The man . . . for whom / The pheasant in a field was pheasant, field,” now “[l]ives in a fluid, not on solid rock,” like all men in a pragmatic, modern age (Opus, 97). Only in a distant, mythic past might the “man and the man below” have been “reconciled”; presently neither model is quite adequate for the poetic task to which the speaker would set them. The “subman” dispensed with, the “sculptor” reappears, but his vision is potentially manifested in a grotesque statue of muscular marble: “a ring of heads and haunches, torn / From size, backs larger than the eye, not flesh / In marble, but marble massive as the thrust / Of that which is not seen and cannot be” (Opus, 100). A parody of classical representations of youthful, virile male bodies, this statue “scaled to space” would be a monument to an idea that never should be given a physical form. Set in a “true perspective,” the statue is proper only to “hum-drum space;” the stone embodiment of the people’s hero a ghastly failure (Opus, 100). In place of these would-be artists and creators, a familiar presence emerges, but he is initially presented in terms that have caused many critics to question his efficacy. In the final lines of the last stanza of “Sombre Figuration,” Stevens imagines a figure he terms “Jocundus.” The opposite

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of the “black-blooded scholar,” “Jocundus” is a “medium man among other medium men,” an apparently wasteful creature who lives “for the gaudium of being,” “indifferent to the poet’s hum.” He exists in a time that at first seems dystopic, “Without imagination, without past / And without future”—yet in this state “Night and the imagination [are] one” (Opus, 101). The speaker’s tone is a nuanced manifestation of the alternatives presented, at once speculative and passionate, precise and rhetorically elusive as the speaker evaluates the attraction of this merry, comedic figure who is both suggestively ordinary and the namesake of an obscure Roman-era martyr. Reappearing in “The Glass of Water” (1942), “fat Jocundus” is a central rather than marginal figure in these texts, but his status with respect to the poet’s cultural and ideological project is far from agreed upon. While Milton Bates suggests that Jocundus is the antipoet, wholly “indifferent to the poet’s hum,” Joseph Riddel describes Jocundus as an antiquated poet, a “seeker after the center, not the surface” unlike “The Glass of Water’s” more successful maker of forms, the “lion” of “light” (Bates, 214; Riddel, 155). What “fat Jocundus” represents most suggestively in the “The Glass of Water,” however, is the poet as metaphysician, now given shape in a decidedly “portly” body rather than a muscular one. He appears in the midst of a poem about abstraction, a Falstaffian anchor to a discourse upon the nature of true being: The metaphysica, the plastic parts of poems Crash in the mind—But, fat Jocundus, worrying About what stands here in the center, not the glass, But in the centre of our lives, this time, this day, It is a state, this spring among the politicians Playing cards. In a village of the indigenes, One would have still to discover. Among the dogs And dung, One would continue to contend with one’s ideas. (Collected, 197–198) While others are interested in forms for their own sake, Jocundus is caught up in “worrying / About what stands here in the center, not the glass,” that particular, “plastic” object or state. He seeks ideas about objects rather than the objects themselves, yet he is also Stevens’s figure for the common man, the ordinary made manifest. Odder still, within the logic of the sentence, Jocundus himself is frozen in time, without a verb to mobilize him, or else turned into an “it,” but modified by the phrase: “It is a state, this spring among the politicians / Playing cards.” As such, Jocundus is transformed from what he was into a joker himself, a trickster face card in Stevens’s

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rhetorical gaming, an idea as much as a person. He can be understood as kin to the ambiguous “it” of “Examination of the Hero,” evoking a world of goods and services. Alternatively, he is suggestive of the portly and untrustworthy “politicians,” not unlike Taft, who deal routinely in illusory perceptions of the self: for example, passing themselves off as locals or insiders when they are in fact a privileged elite. In a last sleight of hand, Jocundus could also be understood as associated with the “village of the indigenes” or natives, to which the poem abruptly transfers us. A realm associated with the previous incarnations of the “fat” Jocundus, it is a site of “dogs and dung” but also where one “would continue to contend with one’s ideas.” Even in the most “natural” and “original” of locations, the true poet must examine both the ordinary and the realm beyond, sifting through his experiences in search of those fragile “truths” and “fictions” that provide temporary solace. As such, Jocundus is the poet heartily embodied as the elusive and disorderly “fat” figure, a trope for the comedic, role-playing imaginer and source of poetic language. This elaboration upon the Jocundus of “Sombre Figuration” allows the reader to see the connections between a figure for whom “night and imagination” are “one,” and the poet who seeks a deep, if domestic order in dreams and “[his] ideas,” whether at home in the “village” or among “politicians.” In a series of shorter poems such as “Asides on the Oboe” (1940), “Jumbo” (1942), and “Large Red Man Reading” (1950), successive versions of “fat Jocundus” emerge with a certain regularity. Like Jocundus, these figures absorb and incorporate into themselves elements of the mass culture and population that surround them, whether in the form of a feminized spectacle or quasiracial caricatures. In “Asides on the Oboe,” the speaker proposes a man who is at once fiction and the originator of fictions: “the impossible possible philosopher’s man” (Collected, 250). He is “the man who has had the time to think enough, / The central man, the human globe, responsive / As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass, / Who in a million diamonds sums us up” (Collected, 250). He is a being who reflects the self, is one’s reflection, and is also a “globe” that absorbs and contains the world, including the self. He is both exceedingly ordinary, and “impossible,” the imagined “rational man” of the economist, or the ideal “pragmatist” and citizen who sees, reflects upon, and responds to his world. Also, like the spectacular, exotic Iffucan, he is the quintessential object of the subject, a “mirror” and a “million diamonds,” deceptively reportorial or dazzlingly distortive. In a world of fictions, his artifice is nearly indistinguishable from reality and even an improvement upon it: “in his poems we find peace.” Even in wartime, he persists in his task, he “suffer[s]” as do “we,” and in the wake of tragedy “we and the diamond globe at last were

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one.” He is a “glass man” not unlike Emerson’s “transparent eyeball,” the medium by which the world becomes the poem of its possibilities. Not “impossible” at all, he is the necessary transmitter and mediator of our “mythologies of self.” In “Jumbo,” Stevens explicitly invokes a comic, popular term for “fat” that contrasts with the fragile but enduring “globe” of the “philosopher’s man.” A relatively recent coinage for “fat,” derived from the Gullah for “elephant” and evocative of the “hooing” Iffucan as well as the riotous crowds with their circus animals and “trombones,” “Jumbo” opens up a world of rhetorical possibilities for the poet. More specifically, in adopting an implicitly African-American version of the “fat” man, Stevens is able to appropriate a racialized rhetorical and physical power for himself, while obscuring the distinctions between self and other that such racialized caricatures putatively reinforce. The effect of this gesture is to acknowledge the presence of racial otherness as desirable only insofar as it is colonizable, the speaker denying it any viability or voice beyond his own buffoonish impersonation. The first stanza suggests a creature breaking out of a contained space that seems simultaneously natural and artificial, a native environment and a cage: “the tree were plucked like iron bars / And jumbo, the loud general-large / Singsonged and singsonged, wildly free” (Collected, 269). The tone is gleeful and playful, as Stevens explicitly links exotic, animalistic “jumbo” to his former poetic self, Crispin, mock inquiring: “Who was the musician, fatly soft / And wildly free, whose clawing thumb / Clawed on the ear these consonants?” (Collected, 269). The distinctive “C” sounds—recalling Stevens’s poem “The Comedian as the Letter ‘C’ ”—hint that the true presence here is Stevens himself, the “transformer” himself, “himself transformed,” whose “single being, single form / Were their resemblances to ours.” Self-reflective and transforming, a capacious mirror for the audience he resembles and reassembles, he is also our comforting “companion in nothingness.” “Loud, general, large, fat, soft,” from certain perspectives he might seem unattractive and ordinary, but this “secondary man” is also denoted “wild and free.” A Picasso-esque “blue painter,” a Lincoln-esque “hill scholar,” he is the ideal combination of artist, intellectual, and politician. At the same time, he is the “bad-bespoken lacker, / Ancestor of Narcissus,” one who can’t speak well at times, who craves his own beauty as reflected in the natural world (Collected, 269). He senses an internal “lack” that drives him to love these natural mirrors—and it may be precisely this porous sense of self that is the root of his powers. An amalgamation of men both black and white, he is the forger of an almost composite self, and as such is both master of and subject to his fluctuating environment. Less ominously, he is “prince of the secondary men” and

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hence like the “subman,” a sort of collective unconscious for humanity. But he is also more than that, an “imager” who is resolutely embodied, a creature of this world as well as the imagination. As such, Jumbo is not unlike the “Large Red Man Reading,” or, the “large red man” of “Reading,” Pennsylvania. This presence is evoked in terms both intellectually abstract and emotionally precise, drawing on the pragmatic potential of the “human globe” while suggestive of “Jumbo’s” racialized subjectivity. It is he who “sat there reading, aloud” the “poem of life” that draws the “ghosts” back to earth, longing for their solid bodies. The speaker recounts: “They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,” and “cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves / And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly / And laughed” (Collected, 423). Listening to the “vatic lines,” “the literal characters” of “poesis,” they assume the reality of which the large man reads. “In those thin, those spended hearts” and in “those ears” the lines “took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are / And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked” (Collected, 424). Here the “imager” offers these ghosts what they had “lacked,” now well-bespoken he grants and gives, creating a fiction of a reality they are unable to experience directly. In the world of the poem, the “night” and “imagination” are again “one,” the ghosts gain back their human forms, and “lack” is replaced by “what will suffice.” The poet proffers sustenance in the form of bodies, emotions, and implicitly the ability to articulate desire. His “largeness” and “red” flush, moreover, are not incidental to these gifts. His expanded human capacity as both the complex “reader” and the simpler resident of “Reading,” as both the urbanite acquainted with other colors of men as well as the rural white insider, enables him to recall these presences, perhaps the ancestors he so carefully inscribed into his genealogy. The “red” people who his predecessors displaced, however, are not thus implicitly enfranchised, but serve instead as mystical mediums for their own colonizers. This exclusive gesture, while not terribly surprising, casts a slight pall as the poet offers a virtual “Thanksgiving” to his extended family: in place of their “spended” hearts he offers a cornucopia of experience, a feast for his extended—though not the whole human—family. These presences return in their most important form in “Credences of Summer” (1947), a homage to Reading and the poet’s at times ambivalent memories of his childhood there. Read in the context of poems in which “fat,” “summer,” and bodily experiences are celebrated, it can better be understood as a definitive statement upon the significance of the poet’s “native” land. While some critics have suggested that “Credences”

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is a meditation upon the limits of pastoral—and as such inferior to its counterpart, “The Auroras of Autumn”—such readings neglect the poem’s pragmatic tendency to reevaluate and reimagine the parameters of the poet’s creative locus.41 Regarded in the context of poems and letters that offer similar visions of the poet’s conflicted relation to the physical world, the various pleasures of the poem are more easily apparent, and Stevens’s own appreciation for it elucidated.42 This poem in turn illuminates one of Stevens’s most memorable poems, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” and the “fat girl” around which it coalesces. The daughter of “fat Jocundus” and his bride from Reading, both a product of their worldview and her own person, she remains one of Stevens’s most poignant creations and in some sense most fully embodies the radical potential of “fat” to recenter and creatively undermine inherited “orders.” “Credences” begins with the poet describing a world of “midsummer” that is at once the very essence of the real and the point from which imagination springs: “This is the last day of a certain year / Beyond which there is nothing left of time. It comes to this and the imagination’s life.” The speaker breathes life into an intimate, loving scene of “father standing round, / These mothers touching, speaking, being near, / These lovers waiting in the soft dry grass” (Collected, 372). Immersed in the world he once was “native” to, the speaker forestalls its examination and his inevitable shift into the position of “outsider”: “Postpone the anatomy of summer, as / The physical pine, the metaphysical pine” (Collected, 373). Here the parodic “pine-woods” of Harmonium have turned back into themselves, the rhetorical figures of “cocks” and “bantams” exchanged for their simpler, less aggressive forefathers. Such a world has limits, however; as “the fertile thing that can attain no more,” it may also forestall the production of poetry itself. Trapped in a world of reminiscence, the speaker struggles halfheartedly to move from “green’s green apogee” to a site more suited to the poet’s “clairvoyant eye” (Collected, 373–374). But here the “secondary sounds” that the “secondary man” might pick up upon are absent; present only are the “last sounds,” and a hollow “good” that is accepted simply because it is “what is.” This is a universe in which a “rock” appears as “truth,” and a “youth, the vital son, the heroic power” may emerge in tandem with the villagers who unthinkingly believe in him (Collected, 374). This world with its healthy, if thoughtless inhabitants at first appears to be a world stripped of desire: “They sang desiring an object that was near, / In face of which desire no longer moved” (Collected, 376). In succeeding lines, however, the fruitfulness of this world is suddenly heralded, as the tone shifts again and the uses of such sites are affirmed. Trumpets,

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those triumphal noisemakers, joyfully proclaim “what is possible,” “the visible announced.” This trumpet “supposes that / A mind exists, aware of division,” presumably the complete mind of the poet, “grown venerable in the unreal” (Collected, 376). The poet is figured as a “cock bright,” which is exhorted to “[f]ly low . . . and stop on a bean pole” (Collected, 377). Suddenly, the natural world he hovers over takes on a new vitality as this “soft, civil bird” witnesses the “decay” of one “complex,” a process that in turn gives rise to “another complex of emotions, not / So soft, so civil.” The “cock” then will “make a sound, / Which is not part of the listener’s own sense,” and perhaps not even a word yet, but it is something new and, like the poem of the “impossible possible philosopher’s man,” “responsive.” Sharing a key consonant with “Crispin” and echoing previous Stevensian figures for the expansive and expanding poet, the “cock” signals the return of the poet to this landscape as both native son and lofty, if slightly absurd (perched on his “bean-pole”) observer . These sounds and creative gestures immediately prefigure the poem’s conclusion in section X, in which the whole world of “midsummer” has become an artificial “summer play,” its people “characters / Of an inhuman author” (Collected, 377). The world of the ordinary and everyday, what had seemed a self- enclosed world without room for rhetoric or desires, has given way to its mirror opposite. Within the economy of the poem, this seemingly fixed and suffocating realm has become the impetus for poetry after all. In this sense, the poem itself has come to serve as a container for the real and imagined in one, as the colorful “mottled mood of summer’s whole” is dreamed up before the reader’s eyes. This emphasis on sight and passive observance gives way to an even more auspicious emphasis on “speaking” in the final stanza, as the “characters” take on a life of their own, artifice suddenly turning back into the real as if both were part of a plastic, liquid continuum. “[T]he characters speak because they want / To speak, the fat roseate characters,” but their world is not the stifled “midsummer” of the early sections of the poem. Rather than blissful, they are only “free, for a moment, from malice and sudden cry,” the “complete[ness]” of their scene a temporary state. Although they “speak,” they give voice to “their parts as in a youthful happiness” [italics mine]: happiness and youth, it is suggested, are things of the past (Collected, 378). As autumn approaches, loss and desire take the place of surfeit, but imagination could not have been reborn without its temporary idyll. Despite the speaker’s ambivalence regarding the world these “fat” “roseate characters” inhabit, he figures it here as a necessary landscape to which the poet—as “soft” or “not / so soft civil bird”—may return in the appropriate season.

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The “Fat Girl” May Yet Sing Even before “Credences of Summer,” “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (1942) permitted Stevens to reorder and reimagine the poet’s relation to physical and aesthetic worlds, prefiguring the ultimate and necessary emergence of a complementary “disorder”—his truest “angel.” Just as late summer, with its intimations of autumn, is the site of poetic production, so is the “fatness” associated with its inhabitants a sign of stasis shifting toward alteration, the native fading into the outsider, the masculine bleeding into the feminine. All are subtle variations that provoke the speaker’s pained exclamations at the world’s beauty, which is a function of precisely such change. While predating “Credences” as well as “The Figure of the Poet as Virile Youth,” “Notes” contains Stevens’s most memorable attempt to resolve his own anxieties about “fat” and its counterpart in the “hero,” both of whom are imagined as the poet’s heirs. As if anticipating the ambivalence in his depiction of William James and the virile youth, rather than beginning with the hero and disrupting his presence with a “fat” or “large” presence, here the speaker initially ends the poem with a wholly feminized “fat.” The result is a tender meditation on her presence in which he acknowledges her as both part of yet foreign to his own self. Months afterward, however, Stevens added an additional last section of the poem in which he turns halfheartedly to the soldier as his new counterpart and ideal reader. The relative success and failures of these two endings to the poem ultimately emphasize the singular importance of “fat” to Stevens’s entire corpus. Once it is gone, so too are the “fictions” that Stevens had always implicitly acknowledged to be the realm of the feminine and the night; without their music the only sound is a stale rattling of sabers. Before the poem moves towards this climax and anticlimax, Stevens presents a series of deceptively programmatic descriptions of the poet and the origins of poetry. He first instructs a young “ephebe” to “become an ignorant man again,” to approach the “difficulty of what it is to be” without the too-bright rhetoric of the “sun” that often obscures rather than illuminating experience (Collected, 380). Rejecting the all-encompassing light of a singular, totalizing philosophy, such a youth should approach the world with a fresh perspective, pragmatically ready to weigh truth in light of his experience. The speaker celebrates the poet who “refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea,” the poet who hears the “hoobla-hooblahoobla-how,” of the exotic “Arabian” or the curiously foreign “hoobla-hoo” of the more common “wood-dove” (Collected, 383). These voices of the “first idea,” suggestive of pure “otherness” and Romantic attempts to resolve the self’s relation to the “other” in transcendental “chant[ing],” are part of

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same essence as the “howls” and “hoo” of what Stevens termed elsewhere the “obese machine” of the ocean, its fluidity a reminder of life’s “strange relation” to art (Poems, 382–383). The interconnection of these elements is reinforced in the person of “major man” as “MacCullough,” an apparently ordinary individual who, influenced by the movements of the sea, may absorb its tendency to break down forms, setting “language” itself at “ease” (Collected, 386–387). The speaker is careful to note that the poet is not a divine or transcendent figure but a human seeker, who “goes from the poet’s gibberish to / The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.” “He tried by peculiar speech to speak / The peculiar potency of the general, / To compound the imagination’s Latin with / The lingua franca et jocundissima” (Collected, 397). Not surprisingly, in his plays upon language both common and refined, the poet ends up alluding to “fat Jocundus” and his ilk, shortly to be embodied in the poem’s culminating image. The “fat girl” spins into the orbit of the poem as it concludes, constituting, with the “soldier” of the last section, one of the speaker’s two most important poetic and possibly real legacies. One of the few definitively “fat” female entities in Stevens’s poetics, this girl is obviously the child of her father—“Chief Iffucan,” “fat Jocundus,” the “transformer” himself.43 Stevens, the father of an only girl, could hardly have separated the “feeling” here from the “fiction that results from feeling,” which is precisely the point of this section. Like the previous “fat” figures, she is full of promise: “my summer, my night” (Collected, 406). Yet she is also immature, on the brink of a distinctly pastoral alteration: found “in difference,” “a change not quite completed.” The speaker addresses her lovingly, recognizing her as both self and not self: “you are familiar yet an aberration.” He attempts to remain merely “civil” in his speech towards her, but at the same time he is anxious to “name you flatly, waste no words.” The futility of this gesture, however, is implied in the rush of words that follow, as the speaker begins finally to recognize the fully realized, feminine, almost foreign nature of this new self. She is radically real and present. The poet cannot help but dwell upon her domestic, everyday forms, how she appears when “strong or tired, / Bent over work, anxious, content, alone.” While obviously fond of her, the poet is also bemused by her effect upon him: she is “the irrational / Distortion, however fragrant, however dear” (Collected, 406). The puzzle of her powers, though, turns out to be the key to his—and possibly one day her—poetics: “That’s it,” he realizes, “the fiction that results from feeling” is proof that “the irrational is rational,” the world and imagination, female and male, are one. He imagines how “we” will one day hear this at the Sorbonne, father and daughter returning home from the “lecture” at “twilight.” The moment as imagined is tender and surreal. In that

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impossible possible moment, the poet and father, “flicked by feeling,” will “call [her] by name, my green, my fluent mundo.” But in the very moment of naming, of attempting to immortalize the moment and person in the poem and in time, the idyll turns cold and unreal. The girl suddenly transmogrifies into another realm entirely, perhaps into the workings of a pocket watch, or into the translucence of a lyric: “You will have stopped revolving except in crystal,” she is told. The poem ends abruptly on a note of beauty and suppressed anguish, as the poet anticipates not only the loss of his child and his own body to time, but also the evaporation of an imagined Paris in which love is unchanging and poetry radically alive. Written during World War II, the poem both is an elegy for a Europe Stevens was never to know and for the passing childhood of his daughter. Shortly after this poem was written, Holly moved out of the direct sphere of his influence, resisting his requests that she return to college at Vassar and asserting a selfhood that could not be congruent with Stevens’s own. Leaving school to commit herself to the work for the war effort and soon marrying a man Stevens disliked, she exemplified a headstrong femininity her father both admired and sought to control.44 The experience must have been at once painful and illuminating for this distant yet generous father. Even as he anticipates such a loss, however, it is encoded in terms that imply her underlying, affirming continuance: in a well-known letter, Stevens defines the “fat girl” as “the earth” or “globe” itself—her passing therefore may be only rhetorical, a fiction that evolves with the poet’s desires.45 Originally, the poem ended with these evocative lines. In the final section, likely added years later, the poet attempts to affirm his legacy to his spiritual “sons” rather than his daughter, those boys who were enduring an equally decisive coming of age during this time. Milton Bates has recently read this section of the poem as Stevens’s affirmation of the soldier’s likeness to himself in his rejection of “determinist” and “historicist” accounts of history.46 Reading these lines, however, I find the shift to these exhortations incomplete and unconvincing. The poet tries to transform himself from the Virgilian shepherd “underneath / A tree” into the Virgil of the Aeneid, chanting of “war.” The speaker tries to affirm that his “war” “depends on yours,” the violence and ethical demands of the war infusing his poetry, which in turn helps to form the soldier: “The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines” (Collected, 407). The speaker tries to imagine how “simply the fictive hero becomes the real,” transformed by the “proper words” and “faithful speech” that see him through death or on to the next battle (Collected, 408). In this context the poet is still a healthful figure, anxious to share the poetry that has been the stuff of life for him, but equally aware that “proper words” can lead a soldier on to death. He offers a vision

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of the world in which complex and simple, mind and nature, attempt a fusion, but the result instead is a tension, a sense that the poet and soldier are not one and may even be antagonistic, their “wars” having very different ends, the violence of war drowning out even the most “faithful speech” in its honor. The essential power of Stevens’s poetry can even be said to be less in evidence in this section, his best “fiction” (or is it?) that of the “fat girl,” despite his surface reluctance to acknowledge this truer heir. Despite himself, Stevens consistently affirms a democratic, pluralistic universe of plenty and abundance, or at least adequate sustenance. While he doubts the efficacy of the “fat,” feminized world of “midsummer,” he consistently returns to it as a site in which the “possible” has its roots. “Fat Jocundus” embodies both the end of desire and its eternal generation, bringing together “night” and the “imagination” in a fluid state of “one[ness]” that reflects a truer, underlying order that is also a kind of disorder. The contradiction of Stevens’s fascination with order and “man’s passionate disorder” is ultimately this: that they themselves are one, the universe simply the fluidity of experience itself, subject to shaping and transformation as the poet speaks. The “gibberish of the poet” and of the “vulgate” are not opposed but variations on a tune to be piped on the “Arcadian flute” that is also a “metropolitan corn-pipe.” At an especially difficult time in his country’s history as well as in his own life and career, Stevens constantly called upon these “fat” presences, these variations on the self, to belie the potential fascism of the virile youth, tempering his intellect with pragmatic experience in the world and the companionship of a sister-poet who is both other and part of him. Disruptive to the end, “fat” progresses from a trope for the comic self to a metaphor for the self’s limited but fertile origins, to a sign for the bodies of the self’s physical and aesthetic heirs. Expressing both satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the self, these tropes for the body also allow Stevens to protest the predominance of an aggressive and highly performative masculinity that often had little to do with an individual’s intellectual or moral fiber. A reminder of his ethnic roots and an idealized American society, as well as an at times clumsy harbinger of a nation that might admit greater gender equality, Stevens’s fat body served as a metaphor for a sensibility both traditional and pragmatic. Emblematic of the “hopeful waste” Stevens once saw in the world, his aesthetic of “fat” serves as a comedic yet wise response to a world that could be both banal and unbearably tragic. Questioning mainstream masculinity as a true measure of the ethical self, Stevens’s wartime poetics prefigured a cold war poetics in which pastoral continued to be a useful mode through which to propose alternative male bodies and subjectivities. Declining to identify with the “soldier” and his postwar variants, John Ashbery embraced the legacy of Stevens, Frost,

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and Williams as he constructed pastorals figuring alternative masculinities as normative aspects of the self. Coming of age directly after World War II, Ashbery self-consciously constructs a poetic subject that embraces not only homosexuality but also aspects of the feminine and mass culture. Far from discontinuous with Stevens’s “modernism,” Ashbery’s “postmodern” pastoralism of “mixed feelings” echoes and augments Stevens’s uneasy acceptance of “Jumbo” and the “fat girl,” similarly attuned to the possibilities of selves and a poetics that defies a narrow “realism” in favor of what Ashbery once termed Stevens’s “gorgeous aberrations.”47 In a 1964 review of an art show in Paris, Ashbery once referred to a piece in terms of Stevens’s “Anecdote of a Jar,” noting: “it organizes its ‘slovenly’ environment, including you the viewer, emptying it of meaning and at the same time hinting at another kind of meaning, beyond appearances.”48 This description of such “strange” “experiment[s]” can also be understood to express a point of confluence between Ashbery and Stevens, insofar as both produce poetry that ostensibly “organizes” what is disordered or “slovenly” in the environment and audience. In each case, despite highly polished surfaces, the poets allude to half-hidden means of remaking the self, encouraging the reader to rediscover the layered, mirroring realities that constitute experience and connect it to the imagination.

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CHAPTER 5

“The Mooring of Starting Out”: John Ashbery’s Pastoral Origins

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he third poem in John Ashbery’s first volume of poetry, Some Trees (1956), is entitled “Eclogue.” Rather than depicting a pleasing landscape or leisurely afternoon as its classical title suggests, however, the poem consists of a hostile dialogue between “Cuddie” and “Colin,” evidently father and son. In antiquated diction, “Cuddie” threatens “Colin” with a kind of community violence: “peons” who “rant in a light fume” as they gather at the “water’s edge.”1 Colin replies with an equally cryptic rejection of his father and an appeal that he be planted “far in my mother’s image / To do cold work of books and stones,” invoking a maternal, avenging angel who would allow him to “depart unhurt.” The poem then ends abruptly, reading much like notes for an unperformed play. Haunting yet comic, deeply personal but not without a note of the parodic, “Eclogue” warns readers away rather than inviting them in to an aesthetic idyll. Like other pastorals by Ashbery, “Eclogue” has a vexed and not especially nostalgic relationship to the literary, social, and political past. Consistent with other American pastorals of the twentieth century, it suggests a conflict over standards of masculinity as well as potential violence at the margins of a community. Yet the scene and dialogue are utterly surreal; if meant to be taken as socially or culturally representative they do not read as such in any conventional way. Instead, the poem demands to be read on entirely new grounds, as Ashbery reimagines the pastoral mode in order to forge a new American lyric subject and convey a postwar American reality. While in keeping with the pastoral legacy of Frost, Williams, and Stevens, Ashbery’s cold war pastorals present an increasingly complex social

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universe. A world in which the lines between publicity and privacy became increasingly blurred while myths concerning manhood and national security were simultaneously reinforced and cagily revamped, cold war America embraced a suggestively pastoral rhetoric of “new frontiers” and private “gardens.” In poems such as “Eclogue,” Ashbery’s surreal responses to the exclusive and policing function of these tropes during this period unsettle the newly coalescing parameters of the ideal male subject and his community, publicizing the gradual emergence of a marginal male subjectivity whose compulsion toward order is matched only by his drive toward play, disorder, and, ultimately, love. The result is a pastoral poetics that affirms the genre’s traditional emphasis upon distinguishing the self and other, complex and simple person, poet and “peon,” while suggesting junctures at which such roles bleed into each other, ultimately creating fissures in the ideological construction of the self and nation. Like the socially deviant, sexually suggestive, and ambiguously gendered tropes of the “tramp,” the “beautiful thing” as “excrement,” and the “fat man,” the “pervert” of Ashbery’s poetics is a figure whose desires at once evoke the homosexuality proper to the social universe of Virgil’s “Eclogues” and expose American pastoral’s continuing function in calibrating the nature of the ethical self and just society. Eschewing private shame for a semipublic performance of gay subjectivity, Ashbery invokes the pastoral mode in order to dismantle and reconstitute the parameters of the ideal man and representative speaker, in the process forging a discursive poetics whose very sinuousness erotically belies its concurrent instinct toward order and form. The chapter begins by examining the cold war ideology that framed Ashbery’s coming of age as a poet, including the conflicting models of masculinity he encountered as a young man. Ashbery’s resulting turn toward surrealistic techniques emerges as a means of countering the ideological emphasis on “realism” during the period, and parallels his encounters with male intellectual role models—including veterans of World War II—whose sense of self and sexuality exceeded such “containment narratives.” Pragmatically Deweyan in its critique of narrow conceptions of subjectivity, aesthetics, and community, Ashbery’s poetics suggests an alternative vision of reality and experience in an era in which pragmatism itself was largely dismissed and ignored. Self-consciously refashioning an “alternative subjectivity” for the poet, Ashbery’s poems can be understood in terms of a contemporary discourse of “masochism” and its relation to gay identity as it coalesced from the 1950s through the 1970s. With this framework in mind, I turn to Ashbery’s first and fourth volumes—Some Trees (1956) and The Double Dream of Spring (1970)—in which his investment in pastoral is most noticeable. Composed as he was initially yet warily establishing himself as a

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young poet, the pastorals of Some Trees are evocative of strange yet familiar rural sites often linked to childhood and threatened by violence. The Double Dream of Spring, in contrast, is comprised of poems written after Ashbery’s return to a socially and politically revitalized United States after a 10-year sojourn in Paris. In this volume, Ashbery posits pastoral idylls as potential sites of aesthetic, erotic, and personal healing less circumscribed (although not uninformed) by threats of violence and pain than shot through with a campy, if at times wistful, playfulness. Collectively, these readings help to trace a personal and poetic odyssey that, although only marginally visible to many of Ashbery’s critics, continues the revitalization of a distinctly American pastoral mode as cultural critique. Dreams of New Frontiers and the Coldest Warriors From the 1940s through the 1960s, as John Ashbery came of age, American culture underwent a period of consensus, limited dissent, and self-censorship in which the nation’s energies were focused on self-definition and the continuation (or reinvention) of national myth and tradition. Postwar American rhetoric was filled with pastoral references to “new frontiers,” a phrase meant to suggest hope and opportunity as well as the fulfillment of democracy’s more extravagant promises. But the word “frontiers,” with its nineteenthcentury overtones, also suggests the existence of borders and conflict, the need for guards and soldiers to maintain and extend the “garden” of a civil society. As Americans attempted to enact frontier myths of patriarchal authority, economic independence, and personal virtue within the confines of the newly prominent and idealized domestic realm (often taking the form of a suburban “garden” home), their efforts often fell short. Inevitably, as Elaine Tyler May has discussed, the family itself became an extension of the larger political culture rather than the site of privacy, individualism, and retreat.2 The conflict between conceptions of the domestic space as frontier battleground and personal garden foregrounds an analogous and related debate over the nature of the culture’s heroes or “representative men.” As Suzanne Clark argues, a mythically pure, “frontier”-oriented masculinity became linked to the production of narratives that would propagate the official “realism” of cold war ideology.3 The Cold Warrior was a fusion of John Wayne and Theodore Roosevelt, firm in his resolve against the communist enemy and its allies. Gay men and women were regarded as threats to national security and the reality of their existence denied and suppressed. Resistance to such inscriptions of postwar subjectivity was relatively scarce and covert: the old Left had crumbled, its most ardent spokespeople often turned into its sharpest critics as they struggled to disavow former affiliations

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with radical politics. Artists and intellectuals appeared to turn inward toward personal, psychoanalytic, religious, and ostensibly apolitical themes, spurning the naturalist and socially aware narratives of the 1930s and early 1940s. If the types of dissent associated with radical, pragmatic thinkers such as John Dewey had not entirely disappeared, they nevertheless took new forms as the political and cultural landscape shifted. In this context, the surrealism of a pastoral such as “Eclogue” can be understood as a pragmatic response to cold war efforts at political, cultural, and social containment. If, as Alan Nadel notes, such “containment” narratives entailed the “general acceptance . . . of a relatively small set of narratives by a relatively large portion of the population,” as carefully constructed “metanarratives” culled “substance” from “waste,” “history” from everyday events, then Ashbery’s often enigmatic use of pastoral functions to dispel the hegemony of strictly realist narratives, disrupting the dominance of an intolerant and contradictory pastoral ideology.4 In order to recuperate what lay outside of official “realism,” Ashbery turns toward private, uncodified, “wasted” experiences and moments that supplement and undermine the private/public divide, effectively mirroring—and exposing—the ways in which cold war “frontier” ideology attempted to publicize and scrutinize private life from the outside in.5 In countering the cold war’s corruption of art into propaganda, its appropriation of the private sphere for the public, Ashbery implicitly adopts a pragmatic approach toward his art. According to Dewey, art’s relation to the ideal democratic community is regenerative rather than structural: “in the degree in which art exercises its office, it is also a remaking of the experience of the community” (Art, 81). Undermining the hierarchical order and fear-induced conformity of cold war America, Ashbery’s surreal pastorals elude easy categorization, stressing the dynamic ways in which “the poem, or painting, does not operate in the dimension of correct descriptive statement but in that of experience itself” (Art, 85). Drawing upon his own experience while refusing to identify it as such, maintaining art as a process rather than a destination, Ashbery constructs unlikely idylls in which “actuality and possibility” are “integrated,” “remaking” American culture from the perspective of the artist and individual (Art, 297). Ashbery’s readers immediately recognized—but often misread—the disturbing effect of his antirealist or surrealist technique. In his preface to Some Trees, W. H. Auden (one of Ashbery’s major early influences) places Ashbery squarely within a historical, surrealist and implicitly pastoral literary tradition, noting that writers from “Rimbaud down to Mr. Ashbery” seek a return to a “golden age” of myth and ritual as evoked in the modern world only by “childhood” and “daydreams.”6 Ashbery’s well-documented interest in the surrealism of figures such as Joseph Cornell, Giorgio de Chirico, and

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Raymond Roussel, however, never suggests that he saw the technique, in the visual arts or literature, as a means of escape.7 Rather, Ashbery’s perspective on art and experience more often implies their mutual entanglement. In a 1967 review of a surrealism show at the Knoedler Gallery in New York, Ashbery recommends to viewers that one ought to approach the show not as a collection of lovely antiques from the 1920s, but as the declaration of independence on which our present democracy (“the Republic of Dreams,” in Louis Aragon’s phrase) is based. The space of dreams— deep, shallow, open, bent, a point which has no physical dimensions or a universal breadth—is the space in which we now live. All of the artists here . . . helped conquer more territory for art. . . . [T]here is no real alternative to innovation, and the artist, if he is to survive, cannot leave art where he found it. Dreamers are insatiable expansionists, and the space of dreams rapidly becomes overcrowded.8 Rather than distinguish surrealism from politics, Ashbery links the two, first positing surrealism as the basis for contemporary democracy (in a gesture perhaps as much ironic as patriotic), and then characterizing surrealists themselves as pioneers, parodying the cold war “expansionists” with their own “dreams” of world domination. As Ashbery and John Dewey both understood, the spillover from art and dreams necessarily flows into the space of the social and political, edging into and eroding fixed conceptions of reality and order. “The first intimations of wide and large redirections of desire and purpose are of necessity imaginative,” Dewey writes, stressing the function of literature especially in eliciting “the possibilities that are interwoven with the texture of the actual” (Art, 349, 345). Like Whitman before him as well as the Confessional poets whose careers paralleled his own, Ashbery was well aware of the ways in which the distinctive form of lyric had the potential to redefine the parameters of the self as well as society.9 If, as Auden acknowledges in his introduction to Some Trees, Ashbery could not help but write knowing that in his age “[m]en really speak in prose” while only in a past age did “[t]he real man speak[] in poetry,” then Ashbery’s lyric poetry must also be understood as the manifestation of an alternative male subjectivity that is at once publicized and private, aestheticized and politically potent in his work.10 In the wake of a tense relationship with a father who apparently embodied aspects of the all-American male, Ashbery turned toward a different series of male role models once he entered college.11 As a young man in the 1940s and 1950s, Ashbery’s good friends and Harvard classmates included war veterans Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, both more literary aesthetes and comedians than models

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of stoic virtue and pioneering fortitude. Despite his comfort among such friends in college and later in New York City, having registered as gay with the draft board, Ashbery was aware that his sexuality made him a potential target, recalling that “it was a very dangerous and scary period.”12 Echoing while transforming that sense of fear, the eerie aggressions of poems such as “Eclogue” invoke “deviant” or “perverse” masculinities that, according to Kaja Silverman, pose “a tacit challenge not only to conventional male subjectivity, but to the whole of ‘our’ world . . . they call sexual difference into question, and beyond that, ‘reality’ itself.”13 Silverman’s discussion of alternative subject formations during the postwar era illuminates the sexually subversive artistic milieu in which Ashbery found himself in the late 1940s and early 1950s and whose energies he drew upon to imagine his pastoral selves.14 In contrast with the overtly masculine, “swashbuckling energy, wide-open spaces and ‘O Pioneers!’ stance of much American Abstract Expressionism,” which Ashbery found to “ring a trifle hollow,”15 the urban sophisticates who made up Ashbery’s social circle were marked by their relative acceptance of alternative or experimental sexualities.16 Favoring friendships both platonic and erotic between men and men as well as men and women, Frank O’Hara, Jane Freilicher, Kenneth Koch, Larry Rivers, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, Anne and Fairfield Porter, James Schuyler, and their acquaintances formed a social and cultural circle around New York City and its environs that offered an implicitly pragmatic alternative to restrictive mainstream and art-world assumptions concerning gender, sexuality, and aesthetics.17 Even as they hint at aggression and violence, Ashbery’s pastorals and early writings are also marked by a strangeness and humor that recall a “camp” sensibility associated with postwar, gay urban culture. Linking camp to William Empson’s definition of “urban pastoral,” Susan Sontag emphasizes how camp juxtaposes “innocence” with urban sophistication, embracing a “spirit of extravagance” while subtly ridiculing it. Delighting in consumerism and specularity, as well as artifacts of mass culture considered vulgar, extreme, overly feminine, and in poor, if sincere, taste, camp is “the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience.” As such, camp is also the ground where the private (camp sensibility as associated with gay urban culture) meets the public (in the form of art), Sontag’s resistance to the political dimensions of camp notwithstanding.18 Ashbery’s own early attempts at theater are hilarious incarnations of this approach, drawing on and parodying the gendered clichés of popular film and middlebrow culture such as westerns and detective thrillers.19 Parading a cast of Canadian Mounties, scheming Indians, and damsels in distress, parodying a frontier ethos that was as familiar to his audience as it was ridiculous,

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“The Compromise” (1960) ends with the author intruding and addressing the audience, unable to decide how to make the heroine choose between two masculine types: “the man of action or the melancholy dreamer.”20 The tables are turned, however, when the characters decide for themselves to simply end the play, the heroine standing between the two men who “both fondle her,” while bidding each other “Auf wiedersehen, and all that sort of thing” (“Compromise,” 118). In “The Philosopher” (1964) Ashbery mocks the prototype of the (tacitly gay) intellectual, the kind “who ‘goes too far’ and ultimately sacrifices everything human to his desire for knowledge and power.”21 Drawing upon Clifton Webb’s urbane “Waldo Lydecker” in the film Laura, a portrayal heavily marked by Hollywood code for homosexual characters and later considered a key example of filmic “camp,” Ashbery presents a dubious Professor Whitney Ambleside squaring off against John, the conventionally masculine reporter, for the loyalty of the lovely Carol. As in “The Compromise,” the dilemma is never resolved, this time in favor of having the characters adjourn for dinner.22 Ashbery himself links “camp” to “irony,” describing the latter as “a kind of defense against dealing with the problems that life imposes and which are out of one’s grasp,” and therefore like what “is meant by ‘camp’ in a literary sense.”23 In both cases, the artist or author takes on a skeptical attitude toward the world around him, mobilizing taste, intelligence, and sensibility in order to contain that which threatens him. While engaging with camp’s pastoral contrasts between the simple and complex, self and other, conventional and “camp” or “gay” forms of masculinity, sexuality, and heroism, Ashbery develops an attitude toward modern subjectivity that acknowledges its culturally produced and contingent nature, his pastoral poetics modeling the representative man and speaker as a figure marked primarily by his alterity rather than his centrality.24 The Pastorals of Some Trees The historical and personal contexts that shaped Ashbery’s work have been considered previously, but the distinctly pastoral nature of cold war American culture and Ashbery’s response to it has gone unnoticed.25 The link between Ashbery’s poetics and his sexuality has been addressed productively by John Shoptaw, David Herd, Catherine Imbriglio, and John Vincent, among others,26 all illuminating the struggles of a poet grappling with social and aesthetic codes that could be both repressive and covertly liberating. Yet in his sideways engagement with the predominant tropes of the postwar United States, Ashbery’s pastorals offer his most pointed rebuke and transformation of a national poetic tradition, evoking a pragmatic, alternative

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male subjectivity and camp sensibility, publicly reenacting primal scenes that are at once individual and national, located in the body and formally— often pleasurably and at times frustratingly—displayed in the poem. It is through this strain of poetry that Ashbery most decidedly returns home to what he terms “the mooring of starting out,” and in doing so evokes landscapes such as those surrounding his rural hometown of Sodus in upstate New York—the place where he, as he wrote to an old friend, “felt much more exiled . . . than I have ever felt anywhere since.”27 Intent upon reimagining a painful past and reinscribing it as prologue to his future, Ashbery shapes a poetics in which memory and imagination reveal the limitations and possibilities of an experience that is as representative as it is personal. Although Ashbery often denies the autobiographical aspects of his work, he does write suggestively about the ways in which words and meanings migrate in his poetry, linking the personal and the aesthetic in his own words. He notes, “[o]ne thing that I’ve noticed about my own poetry is the prevalence of indirect movements such as in the words ‘seep’ or ‘leach,’ or, in other words, where things get from one place to another in an unorthodox way. This might be part of the impulse that also results in talking about marginal places.”28 Commenting on his own proclivity for terminology that suggests liquid or fluid out of place, Ashbery suggests a link between alternative poetics, alternative subjectivities, and a literary mode he often employs to evoke his hometown near the Great Lakes. Ashbery’s rhetoric also suggests a poetic process in which apparent disorder is given a degree of form and shape by “unorthodox” movements, recalling Eve Sedgwick’s psychoanalytic account of lyric poetry as a means by which the young poet, unconsciously mimicking primal scenes of corporal punishment, asserts a potentially violent rhetorical power over his personal past and literary inheritance. Containing and mastering some “earlier, plurivocal drama or struggle: among tones, among dictions, among genres,” this process also entails a “leakage of involuntarity of meaning” which she links to anal eroticism or a “sexual politics of the ass.”29 Positing that that “the ‘problem’ of men’s anal eroticism is . . . arguably inextricable from modern Western processes of meaning,” homosexuality subverting the hegemony of a heterosexual and patriarchal social and symbolic order (Sedgwick, 129), Sedgwick’s account dovetails with Silverman’s description of the subversive power of “deviant” and “masochistic” masculinities, both reinforcing a connection between poetic form and biography, art and experience. To the extent that Sedgwick’s account suggests that poetic form specifically lends itself to the establishment of control (violent childhood discipline displaced by aesthetic discipline30) while allowing for productive movements among various kinds of literary languages encoded by “tones,” “diction,” and “genres,” it also

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helps to account for Ashbery’s distinctive poetic style, its surrealism as well as its syntactical slipperiness, his capacity to suggest pastoral convention even as he mocks, adapts, and transforms it. Ashbery’s provocative, partly tongue-in-cheek meditations upon the modern self, sexuality, and the self’s relation to (or status as) the marginal “other” enable him to recast traditional pastoral themes in early poems such as “Eclogue,” “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” and “A Pastoral.” While “Eclogue” refers to a natural landscape briefly and elliptically (“this land of whistling goats”), landscape is not a primary preoccupation of Ashbery’s early pastorals.31 Instead, the cryptic, lyric exchanges of “Eclogue” begin with reference to a “secret” that is “slowly” becoming known, private knowledge turning public.32 “People and sticks go down to the water,” Cuddie warns his companion, “How can we be so silent? Only shivers / Are bred in this land of whistling goats.” The initial tones are of threat and intimidation with a suggestion of lewdness (those old “goats”), but the antiquated references and odd epithet (“this land of whistling goats”) also call the reader’s attention to the lines’ almost comic staginess. Colin’s response quickly reveals Cuddie to be his “father,” of whom he has “long dreamed” “to accost me in dull play,” yet even these words continue to suggest the scene may be a farce of familial violence, a “dream” turned “dull play.” The question that immediately follows is more difficult to parse as fully satiric, however: “If you in your bush indeed know her / Where shall my heart’s vagrant tides place her?” Colin inquires. Whether or not the question is a genuine one, or merely rhetorical, its studied vagueness is dangerously evocative, threatening Cuddie with the unmasking of his own secrets. The “bush” in question may refer to a natural hiding place or wood, but an alternative referent to human hair is highly sexually suggestive. Both meanings tie the father to the landscape and a threatening sexuality, while the son’s “heart” is the site of elusive, liquid, “vagrant tides,” impossible to pin down and an uneasy medium in which to place the mysterious “her.” Indeed, Cuddie seems anxious to destroy at least some aspect of his amorphous son, subsequently inciting Colin to the site of his possible destruction: “the water’s edge” where the “peons” are archly described as “rant[ing] in a light fume.” Near this site where “Madness will gaze at its reflection,” selves seem to double and multiply, fracturing and displacing any sense of subjective coherence or integrity. Colin’s reaction is manifested by the “pain come near me,” which rather than bursting his “heart,” forces it to give birth to yet another “tiny crippled heart,” “spiked like some cadenza’s head.” This doubled, armored grotesquerie is both testament to and defense against the punishment he has unwittingly incurred, and which Cuddie again gestures toward, suggesting a “dip in raw water” that might either cleanse or

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obliterate “these few thoughts and fleshy members,” a “refresh[ment]” he paradoxically links to “evil.” Abruptly, the reappearance of “she”—quickly revealed to be the mother—changes the dynamics of the scene, raising the possibility of salvation through an alternative self-identification. But Cuddie replies to Colin’s request for deliverance with his now typical malevolence, while Colin is reduced to enigmatic, italicized addresses to an unseen audience: “She burns the flying peoples. . . . And spears my heart’s two beasts.” Interspersed with these exclamations are Cuddie’s final invocations of violence and “old advice,” both of which threaten to “cover with its mauves” his intended victim. While Colin has the last word, announcing, “And I depart unhurt,” the poem suggests otherwise, foregrounding a severe disjuncture between the performance of the eclogue as a “dull play” and the emotional realism of the scene as an ambivalent performance of gender roles and sexuality. The reality suggested in this masquelike interlude can be understood at some level as biographical. Ashbery dedicated Some Trees, after all, “to my parents,” a gesture that invites readers to understand his contentious relationship with his father, as well as his fond but complicated relationship to his passive yet loving mother, as underlying histories in this pastoral scene. Ashbery’s homosexuality is likely the “secret” referred to in the opening lines, his multiple “heart[s]” turned “beasts” distinguishing him from his parents, signaling his “flourish” of both sexual difference and aesthetic distinction. The first of many early pastoral poems by Ashbery, “Eclogue” provides a key to the drama that each reenacts, at once compulsively and playfully, in the service of a sexually motivated self-discipline that ultimately enables the expression of gay love. Confirming Dewey’s assertion that “esthetic emotion is . . . something distinctive and yet not cut off by a chasm from other and natural emotional experiences” (Art, 78), Ashbery’s haunting pastorals of Some Trees evoke a surreal childhood marked by its continuity with real trauma. Yet Ashbery is always careful to maintain a balance between the public and private, literary and personal. In “The Picture of J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” he mischievously manipulates Marvell’s conventions of heterosexual love poetry, positing lyric universes in which violence, trauma, and a sexualized self move from the margins to center stage. In doing so, he constructs a quasi-masochistic pastoral poetics in which the threat of violence is problematically linked to an eroticized redemption, which in turn is linked to the alternative spaces and selves the poet would have us move toward if not yet settle into. Like “Eclogue,” this poem slips among a number of aesthetic modes, moving from pastoral to surrealist, mock-metaphysical, archaic, didactic, and finally what can only be called protoconfessional (predating

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Confessionalism’s heyday by about a decade). The overall effect is of an exercise in shifts of mode, tone, and diction, as well as a meditation upon human sexuality, the passage of time, and the evolving nature of a very personal “I.” The title evokes the pastoralism of Marvell, whose “The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers” is an ode to the beauty of a young girl whose impenetrable virtue is both example and threat to nature and man alike. Rather than a paean to light and virtue, however, Ashbery’s poem begins with “darkness” and heavily sexual overtones (“darkness falls like a wet sponge”) (Trees, 27). The poem recounts what may well occur later in T.C.’s idyll, when virtue is lost, nature takes its course, and she enters into the perilous world of adult sexual relationships. In the opening lines of the poem, “Dick” has “clap’d” Genevieve and later given her a slapstick (if a bit sadistic) “swift punch / In the pajamas,” discarding her with the Shakespearean imperative: “Aroint thee, witch.” Sexual pleasure gives way to pain, as the woman is punished for an implicit transgression, possibly developing the “clap” as well for her trouble. The diction shifts from the antique to the colloquial and back again as the speaker navigates his way around a story that is both old and perpetually renewed. In the next stanza, Genevieve admits to having been appeased with “certain handsome jewels,” her affiliation with consumerism and sensuality (“Her tongue from previous ecstasy / Releases thoughts like little hats.”) standing in stark contrast to the male sensibility evoked in the concluding couplet of the section. During “summer” there are “monks . . . playing soccer,” their all-male pastoral removed from Genevieve’s sexual incontinence. Violation, shame, and confusion are the primary emotions of this initial scene, even as they are tempered by humor and absurdity. Heterosexuality and the social exchanges and violence that it engenders upon its supposedly weaker half appear to be the focus of the speaker’s repulsion, or at least the subjects of an ironic commentary. The second section of the poem is by turns a meditation on the relative nature of “virtue,” and a reinforcement of an anti-woman ethos, warning of “dirty handmaidens / To some transparent witch” (Trees, 28). Their “dream[s]” are of a “white hero’s subtle wooing,” whose imagined attentions are somehow linked to a “gift” that will be “force[d]” upon them. Heterosexual fantasy is revealed to mask sites of implicit sexual coercion, the “white hero” a harbinger not of the “white world” of “music,” but of something more sinister. The final couplet again invokes an economy of exchange, albeit a forestalled one: “That beggar to whom you gave no cent / Striped the night with his strange descant.” Here again, the final lines appear to offer an aesthetic alternative, almost as foreign as that of the sporty “monks,” to a heterosexual, and implicitly tainted, universe. Rather than entangled, here

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song and money are juxtaposed, the almost traditional Romantic/Modernist “beggar” creating his eccentric music outside the confines of mainstream consumer culture as it is linked to the girls’ facile adolescent dreams. In contrast, the final section (III) shifts the reader abruptly to a mode that appears to be protoconfessional, the speaker beginning as if previously interrupted (“Yet I cannot escape the picture / of my small self in that bank of flowers”) in a soliloquy upon his childhood. The tone and diction are intensely personal, and a sharp contrast with the intentionally archaic, elusive, and mannered rhetoric of the two previous sections. The first stanza begins with an urge to “escape” that is already thwarted; however, the speaker’s younger self is trapped in a “picture” as surely as the characters of the previous sections were captured in their gendered social rituals and the poetic conventions that encode them. The speaker associates himself with a “fungus” among the “phlox,” one of nature’s less seemly orders (and perhaps one of those aberrations that Marvell imagined “little T.C.” to correct when she gave the tulips scent and stripped the roses of their thorns). Unlike his counterparts in the previous sections, this boy is “accepting / Everything, taking nothing,” wary of engaging with the all-too-human way in which things “stink” and become “sick” with the passage of time, “the loveliest feelings” both “find[ing] words” and being “displaced” by others (Trees, 29). The speaker insists upon “calling this comic version of myself / The true one,” distancing himself from yet anchoring himself in the child who refuses to grow up, while emphasizing the role of language in accessing and inevitably altering this simpler self (which “was wrong” to refuse the world around him). “Calling” upon himself in an uncanny naming that is also an interpellation of sorts, the speaker discourses upon the true nature of “virtue” and “change,” deeming them “really stubbornness,” and “horror.” Unlike “little T.C.,” “little J.A.” has already exceeded the confines of the lyric—but not into the death that threatens his female counterpart if she persists in resisting nature’s orders and cycles. Instead, as the object of his own gaze, he becomes the passive and specularized object of his own affection, his own best student in the ways of life, love, and poetry. The final couplet here again seems to posit a possible realm of escape for this “comic” self, but unlike the pastoral realm of the monks, or the beggar as solitary modernist singer, the world evoked here appears in lines enjambed from the previous stanza, a part of rather than a counterpoint to the photographic reality that precedes them. “And only in the light of lost words / Can we imagine our rewards,” we are told, “light,” exchange, and language ending the poem just as “darkness” and violence began it. Even the fact that such redeeming “words” are already “lost” seems somehow belied by the presence (and half-rhyme) of “rewards” (also suggestive of “re-words”)

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as Ashbery playfully demonstrates how the poem itself can “virtuously” enact its own fear of “change” by denying its own end and the words that inevitably are yet to come. The poem’s effort to put “feelings” into “words” itself betrays any attempt to forestall their multiple implications and future readerly transactions. Patterns of words that both delimit and expand the horizons of the speaker also are foregrounded in “A Pastoral.” A sestina, the poem celebrates and problematizes its own highly artificial universe, a self-contained, arbitrarily constructed aesthetic realm whose realism is always already in question. Insofar as it suggests myths of the “deep south,” the poem begins by invoking a Faulknerian aura of decadence and decay, where “vice” and “license permeate[]” the land and its waters (Trees, 72). The locus of these excesses is the “showboat,” with its “simple” “shows,” “handsome / And toy horns,” and “tried and true melodies.” Clichés and odd syntactical arrangements flow into each other with a surreal grace as the reader enters into this peculiar linguistic predicament. Initially, the speaker appears ambivalent about this floating palace with its shopworn tunes—the poem, after all, begins with “Perhaps no vice endears me to the showboat”—but the ambiguous construction of the initial line also leaves open the possibility of his complicity with its peculiar magic, especially by the end of the stanza as his “capers” and “misdirected” “animals” appear on the scene. Moreover, the speaker quickly allows himself to be sidelined by more elusive, potentially dangerous figures, such as the “who” that is “hating and laughing, risen with animals,” or the “lad” that “intends to file with the green deep south.” Coy and flirtatious, this “lad” “stirs the rocks and keeps them handsome,” a gigolo of sorts in these shallow, shady waters. But his spell proves fragile as a mysterious “they” and “them” surface to “side with the foreseeing of animals,” censoring with “melodies” from an ominous “corral” that would teach “which flowers to press back into the shade.” The initial speaker returns with a vengeance at this point, yet while aligned with the “shade” that would be tamed, he is also determined to “mobilize that handsome / Energetic enemy of the deep south,” perhaps inciting him to engagement and exposure. By the end of the fourth stanza, a showboat already has “fled” and “worms” have infiltrated the realm of the animals. By the fifth stanza “the days are guarded” and only a “miserable showboat” left, “unwatched by animals.” This purposely enigmatic poem permits both the construction and the dispersal of this “handsome” scene with its “lad” and “animals,” “vice” and “capers.” Indeed, the “showboat” takes on many qualities of the sestina itself, “simple, not yet easy,” a poem as plaything with an old “melody” suggestive of a dance. Alluring but complicated, the “showboat” is an ever-displaced and floating site in which conventional sexuality and narrative both are untethered from

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the shore. As such, however, it is an easy target for its foes, to the extent that even the speaker’s allegiances are questionable. As a result, the reader is never sure how to position herself with regard to this strange apparition, the poem’s interlocking words and stanzas resisting precisely the kind of scrutiny, both critical and moral, that they appear to invite. As if anticipating this readerly impasse, a certain didacticism emerges at this point, an omniscient speaker appearing to warn readers of the “melodies / That cleave to the heart,” which are in league with the “animals / Strangers are” (Trees, 73). A surface moralism implies that we cannot forgive these “handsome” emissaries of “terror,” haunting and beckoning us forward with the “crook’d finger of a disappearing showboat.” The boat itself is anthropomorphized, implicitly fused with the mischievous “lad” or one of his “handsome” counterparts. Yet the envoy then appears to refute these warnings as mere hysteria, fusing and recasting all the end words of the poem from the perspective of a curiously naïve or perfectly debauched “psalmist,” who may be a humorous substitute for the poet. In his blanket appreciation of the scene he thinks “the deep south a wonderful showboat” and upon meeting the “animals” in the “shade” said, “You are my melodies, and you are handsome.” The entire scenario is redeemed at this point as the poem ends only to begin again, the envoy sending us off toward the “shade” and “animals,” inviting us again to find them attractive and alluring, the very stuff of song rather than “strangers.” The campy showboat scenario—immortalized by Edna Ferber’s novel and its adaptation as a Broadway musical—allows for speculation upon forbidden love, performativity, and secret identities all within the context of aesthetic spectacle.33 The speaker hints at homosexual liaisons and social repression, delivering what might have been a sordid tale within the exceedingly formal and official lines of a courtly poetic form. In essence, the “deep[ly]” private aspects of what goes on down “south” are paraded about for the world to see, encoded in an elaborate but ultimately transparent social text. The poem itself has become a form of “showboating,” the interior life implicitly publicized for those who wish to read of it, its queenly affectations hardly inscrutable to the right audience. Although the poem itself never mentions water, the “showboat” enters our consciousness by floating between the currents of what we think we know and what we think we should not. An open secret, the “showboat” mimics the riverboat (formerly so crucial to the economy of the rural South) with its performance of modern superfluity, flaunting the mobile vantage point from which the future of such sites must be reimagined. Ashbery’s poetry permits the reader to linger in its strange spaces while pointing to their ultimate fragility, their connection to the flux inherent

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in human experience. Encouraging what Dewey termed a kind of “surrender” to art, Ashbery’s lyrics also create islands of safety, acknowledging a state that the philosopher described as an “adequate yielding of the self . . . possible only through a controlled activity that may well be intense” (Art, 53). Protecting and identifying with his reader’s potential vulnerability and social isolation, Ashbery implements a situation in which “the artist embodies in himself the attitude of the perceiver while he works” (Art, 48). His tone is often intimate and searching, marked by a plural first person or second person address that draws the reader more closely into his universe. “The toothless murmuring / Of ancient willows, who kept their trouble / In a stage of music” permeates “The Mythological Poet,” surrounding “we” who were on a picnic, absorbing music that “brought us what it seemed / We had long desired” (Trees, 34). As in previous poems, the possibility of aesthetic and emotional surfeit is presented, only to be pulled away. The sensual, physical, and feminine threaten this idealized order as the “green sides” of this world “founder[],” upon contact with “a world of things, that rages like a virgin / Next to [their] silken thoughts.” The “new / Music, innocent and monstrous,” makes the patriarchal, chivalric, “jousting willows” “sick” (Trees, 35). But the second section of the poem appears to counteract this scene, introducing a “mythological poet” who peremptorily “accepts / Beauty before it arrives.” Unlike the aging willows, however, the poet is already a dandy, feminized and implicitly homosexual, “Fabulous and fastidious.” For his presumption he is deemed merely an “ornament, a kind of lewd / Cloud placed on the horizon.” A passive, marginal element, his interests tend toward “dust, candy, perverts,” elements “[c]lose to the zoo,” “the panting forest,” and “the great and sullen square.” His locality extends from the caged and bestial to the erotic (where he is “inserted” in the forest) and the public (where he is “openly walking”). Despite his implied depravity, however, he is undeniably charismatic, a flâneur and voyeur whose vitality is antithetical to the posturing of the “toothless” “ancient willows.” Compelling even in his apparent dissipation, the poet as “pervert” has “eloped with all music / And does not care,” citing “a final diversion, greater / Because it can be given, a gift / Too simple even to be despised.” Speaking in riddles, this “mythological poet” appears both Delphic oracle and crook. Speaking of “diversion[s]” and a gift that is “simple,” he suggests something beyond mere music. What he offers is a vision equally naïve and decadent, deriving its value from this unlikely pairing. Citing the “roaring / Centurion of the lion’s hunger,” the speaker imagines a moment (“oh”) in which the poet as “pervert” and a mysterious “child” (possibly the reader) might “join hands, in the instant / Of their interest, in the shadow / Of a million boats; their hunger / From loss grown merely a gesture?” (Trees, 36)

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In this vision, the complex man unites with the child, not in an act of pederasty but in gentle token of their shared “hunger from loss,” a joint yearning for what the zoo and its inhabitants can only hint at. Their elusive attraction seems linked to the “lion’s hunger” as it takes on its own figurative life as a “roaring Centurion.” A soldier and man of endurance, masculine, fierce, and handsome, the “centurion” is everything the child cannot yet be and the pervert may never become. Yet this entity is far from solid, perhaps a mere illusion or play of words shaped to stave off desire (“hunger”) itself. Within the confines of his implied cage, the ravenous lion itself is merely a spectacle for the pervert and child to gaze upon, astonished that he may echo rather than embody the object of their own inchoate hunger. In a world of “boats” and “interests,” exchange and degradation, the “gesture” between the two acknowledges a deeper, universal need for human contact both emotional and physical, for bonds more profound than leonine posturing. At this point the music of the poem rejects the “trouble” of the old willows in favor of the “innocent and monstrous” together, the perverse “mythological poet” aiding and abetting the cause of a primordial music that does not merely lament the past in a park, but moves in a variety of marginal and public spaces alike. This may be a music of uncertain, misplaced desire and affection, but it is nevertheless a music that encompasses a range of human experience both elided and present in the oldest of songs. “The Mythological Poet” offers up a pastoral scene at once classical and contemporary, hinting at the power of spontaneous intimacy and readerly, aesthetic interactions as antidotes to coercion, while reminding us of the unpredictable erotic undercurrents of violence real and staged. Unlike the “ancient willows,” the trees of “Some Trees” initially seem responsive and encouraging of human love, whatever form it might take. Protective and friendly, “each / Joining a neighbor,” these “amazing” trees engage from the beginning in a gracious specularity and “performance” (Trees, 51). The first three lines of the poem are enjambed as if to replicate the effusiveness of their life force, “still” upon the page, but moving outward over it to remind the reader of their latent energy. Although their power is conditional (“as though”), their message appears to have been received. When two potential lovers, at odds with “the world,” attempt to meet, it is the trees who remind them that “their merely being there / Means something; that soon / We may touch, love, explain.” The trees affirm the very idea of meaning and being itself that “love” in turn magnifies, allowing us to “touch” and “explain” in every human language. The poem intensifies at the prospect of this moment, and “we are surrounded” by the presence of a “comeliness” that is “silence already filled with noises,” like “a canvas on which emerges / A chorus of smiles, a winter

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morning.” Life in aural and visual forms, chaotic and aestheticized, radiates from this encounter. The final lines of the poem retract hesitantly from the imagined moment, however, as if wary of the “puzzling light” that would illuminate this love, anticipating how in “moving” one might avoid exposure, alluding instead to the refuge found in “reticence,” “accents” that function as “their own defense.” In contrast to the “amazing” “speech” as magical, “still performance” (almost reminiscent of Noh theater) that the trees initially had seemed to offer, the speaker implies that a different kind of rhetorical play may undo the very idea of love and meaning the pastoral glade provided. A place that had seemed removed from the world merely may have shielded the lovers temporarily from its gaze. The initial tone of ease and awakening has been tempered by a sense of imminent siege: “we are surrounded.” The “silence already filled with noises” is ominous, the “chorus of smiles” in “winter” may be false and cold. The “puzzling light” and “moving” suggest disorientation, while the final couplet invoking “days” of “reticence” broken by “accents” that only “seem their own defense” implies that there may be little to forestall an imminent offensive. Written while Ashbery was a student at Harvard, the lines suggest two students meeting furtively in the Yard or by the Charles, alone among the crowds of their peers, barely able or willing to take a “chance” on each other. The poem suggests grounds for articulating their possible love, but cannot permanently shelter them in a wider social landscape. Caught between two worlds, the speaker is tortured by the possibility of one and the probability of the other. In imagining his escape he cannot help but inscribe his imprisonment. Whether the exercise is more pleasurable than painful has yet to be determined. As in so many of Ashbery’s early pastorals, the speaker’s desire for intimacy—emotional, sexual, intellectual—is thwarted even as it is proffered, but the dream reverberates regardless. Double Dreaming of America Self-imposed exile ended for Ashbery in the summer of 1965, when he returned to New York City and the United States permanently a few months after his father’s death the previous December. The Double Dream of Spring (1970), the book of poems written after that return, chronicles this homecoming and in doing so makes the most explicit and repeated use of pastoral since Some Trees. Ashbery’s return to pastoral in this volume has a great deal to do not only with living in America again but with the death of his father, and more specifically, the ways in which this death further allows or enables Ashbery to continue to come into his own as a

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poet, man, and representative speaker.34 Writing a friend from his youth whose own father died, Ashbery later recalled, “I have been through that and ‘know the feeling,’ an unexpected and very disquieting aspect of which is suddenly being yanked back into one’s childhood.”35 The effects of such temporal displacement and geographical reorientation are difficult to trace precisely, but seem to have been expressed in various ways. In a general sense, these poems encode Ashbery’s return to his “genius loci,” the “indigenous” American landscapes and culture that comprise the “common or mill run of things” underlying the essence of his art (Art, 8, 10–11). At home again, Ashbery’s poetics suggest an intense experience of his environment that enables what Dewey termed a “transformation of interaction into participation and communication” (Art, 22). In these poems the tight control over form appears to subside, as Ashbery at some points moves away from the shorter lyrics of his youth and toward longer, more discursive structures. Yet Ashbery does not relinquish his interest in shorter forms, or in the various modes of poetic control that so often seem disguised as a lack thereof. The result is a string of pastoral poems that employ descriptions of rural retreats, childhood, trees, and country life generally as antidotes and sites of resistance to a crumbling cold war ideology with its oppressive standards of masculinity and sexuality.36 In poems such as “The Task,” “Spring Day,” “Soonest Mended,” “Variation, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox,” and “Rural Objects,” Ashbery explores variations on his own themes of discipline, difference, and discourse, creating a midcareer pastoral mode that is more effusive and hopeful than its previous incarnations. The work of a poet at home for perhaps the first time in his native country, these poems reveal a voice more central than marginal to the American scene, a prodigal voice accepting and transforming his cultural inheritance. The Double Dream of Spring begins with “The Task,” a title that refers to William Cowper’s eighteenth-century pastoral poem, which itself begins as an ode to a sofa before commenting more substantively upon the loss of rural England—a collapse of the banal and the profound that Ashbery undoubtedly appreciated. The modern namesake, likewise, begins with a wary if not slightly mocking tone, observing a “they” who “are preparing to begin again: / Problems, new pennant up the flagpole / In a predicated romance.”37 The distancing “they,” however, may only be a disguise for a “we” or even an “I” who himself is beginning again in his native land, turning back toward the old but new flag, about to reignite a problematic “romance” with his native language, landscape, and tribe. The next stanza picks up on this sense of unease with references to “fugitive lands,” and an “Everyman” who “must depart / Out there into stranded night, for his

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destiny / Is to return unfruitful out of the lightness / That passing time evokes.” He must recognize “cloud-castles” for what they are, as “the way is clear / Now for linear acting into that time / In whose corrosive mass he first discovered how to breathe.” The prodigal son has returned and is determined to both explore and explode the “mass” of the past, relearning how to “breathe” if he has to in confronting this scene of rebirth. The implicit trauma of this approach is reinforced by the speaker’s anticipation of parental disapproval and discipline. For in returning to the site of the self’s origins, one also returns to “the filth you’ve made,” the ways in which “you” have exceeded, defied, despoiled the very idea of the person others intended you to become, as the parental scolding implies. “Yet if these are regrets they stir only lightly,” Ashbery affirms, turning instead to scenes of his rural childhood: “the children playing after supper, / Promise of the pillow and so much in the night to come.” “I plan to stay here a little while,” he announces, to collect not only such “moments of insight” as such memories afford, but also to attain “the reaches,” to dispel a “last level of anxiety that melts / In becoming, like miles under the pilgrim’s feet.” This volume, he suggests, will enact such a journey in a quest for grounds upon which to reimagine himself, often returning to the pastoral locales of youth in order to explore the parameters of language and memory that enable one to come into being. “Spring Day” opens, appropriately enough, with “immense hope” as well as “forbearance,” “doubts,” and “cold hope” (Dream, 14). “Night” follows “day” in a vague, perhaps rhetorical “city,” as a “sleeper” fends off “clubs and knives” in the dark. The speaker suggests both danger and resilience as he moves from a surreal urban to an epic rural scene. In the next lines, the array of emotions sweeps the reader along toward the moment when “tears ride freely, laughs or sobs,” a cathartic outburst that brings the poet to a prophetic scene reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson: “The giant body relaxed as though beside a stream.” As in the beginning of Paterson, Book I, a giant awakens to some mysterious “force,” realizing a “secret sweetness” that seems to predate even “life.” This original man then speaks himself of a “they” “long in coming,” possibly soldiers or even gods who both “mattered nothing” yet “were presumed dead, / Their names honorably grafted on the landscape / To be a memory to men.” A seemingly heroic lineage is established, whose “shell” has been a shelter of sorts, but now “we break forth like a river breaking through a dam,” the giant avers, first pausing and then telling of a “terrible” “progress” that will be as “turning fresh knives in the wounds / In that gulf of recreation.” Whether that violated gulf is the site of pleasure or creation or both, however, is ambiguous. The paternal figure continues, chronicling the past and near future, evoking an “us”

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who are despoilers and destroyers, who would ruin the “bare canvas” of the landscape as “gulf” or “frightened plain,” imposing a truly wanton aesthetics. Having done with his pronouncement, the “mountain” then “stopped shaking,” and eases into a state of almost sexual release: “arched into its own contradiction, its enjoyment” (Dream, 15). This epic, terrifying, and suggestively physical scene and pronouncement then flow into suggestions of a very personal yet universal past involving childhood and memory. Over the course of the same sentence we move from the “mountain” to a domestic world where the “lights were put out,” and “memories of boys and girls / Who walked here before the great change” are called to mind. The mythic alterations of the previous lines contrast with the smaller dramas of the following lines, in which “the air mirrored us, / Taking the opposite shape of our effort” while “casting us further and further out.” The careful “comment and corollary” of childish, bookish learning offers a tempered contrast to the paternal story of violent change, a universal adolescence briefly offering an alternative to parental destruction. Rather than tearing into the “canvas” of the world, the children accept the world as their “mirror.” Even as the very air solidifies by reflecting the parameters of their selves as well as the limitations of their agency, the children verging on adulthood recognize this process as the means toward another set of possibilities. Ashbery sketchily evokes what those possibilities might be in the final, lovely yet enigmatic lines. The speaker wittily jolts the reader awake (“Wha— what happened?”) into a new temporal and spatial dimension, “with / The orange tree” and its curative “summer produce” that could heal even “history” if we wished it to. From this vision the poem tumbles forward, into a “storm[]” and “wind” and then “another dream.” With an energy designed to carry along the fragile, emerging selves of the previous stanza, “we” “roll” into “another dream” and end up with a mysterious “you” whom the speaker addresses with a keen adoration: “Gracious and growing thing, with those leaves like stars, / We shall soon give all our attention to you.” Its leaves shiny and aglow, this apostrophized being could be an orange tree, cousin to one of the sheltering trees of “Some Trees” or “Civilization and Its Discontents,” a sheltering spirit of love. As it is clearly also of the conscious realm (a “you”), however, it could also be taken for the youth or poet himself as tree spirit, now patron of his own idyll. With his “fruit” he, too, could partake in the rewriting of history, remaking the world in the “leaves” of books that catch and hold our attention like “stars,” demanding we gaze often, again and again, into their universal light, or, conversely, the particular and beautiful faces of our past as they are filtered through the cinema of our consciousness. Only by such acts of imagination as situated in a site of pastoral

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origins, the poem suggests, can we begin to remake the myths of the past in the image of the future. The evocative yet pleasingly absurd juxtapositions of “Spring Day,” in which history and dreams flow into each other so thoroughly, are succeeded by an equally curious assemblage of characters and voices in “Soonest Mended,” one of the best known poems from the volume. After beginning with a relatively somber reference to “our technological society” and our need to be rescued from it like passive “heroines,” then shifting impishly to the hesitant “Angelica” with her “colorful but small monster” from the “Ingres painting,” the speaker alludes to a cartoonish “Happy Hooligan in his rusted green automobile” (Dream, 17). Yet in a signature gesture, “Soonest Mended” quickly turns from such a mix of high- and lowbrow references back to the more abstract sense of “summer” evident in “Spring Day,” appealing to the desire “[t]o step free at last . . . to be small and clear and free,” which is somehow related to “summer’s energy” as it “wanes.” These sharper pangs of late summer are also kin to, and perhaps echoes of, a more general, almost Stevensian desire for substances, selfhood, and meaning, all rhetorically linked by references to fertility and harvest: “underneath the talk lies / The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose / Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor” (Dream, 18). The speaker gestures somewhere “underneath” mere “talk,” as if we could bypass language for a purer human dialect, and in doing so reminds us of how often human interactions and communication take place on multiple levels, beyond what has actually been said. So often “meaning” eludes even the best “talkers,” our sophistication undone in the face of what is “untidy and simple.” Yet the speaker also suggests that there are dangers in lingering over these desires, our status as spectators to our own lives: this idealization of the unsaid but felt, a “truth” that is the very “being of our sentences,” may become “a kind of fence-sitting / Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal.” The speaker questions the value of a sensual but disordered adolescent world in which “[n]one of us ever graduates from college.” Never the college heroes or “players,” “we” would be “merely spectators” of life, although “subject” to the rhythms of its games. By this point, the poem has become a hypothetical dialogue between the speaker and a “you” who seem alternately at odds and in agreement over these matters, the speaker straining to bring their thoughts into accord as he appears to conclude, somewhat surprisingly, that “probably thinking not to grow up / Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate” (Dream, 19). For the time being, such “maturity” seems a necessary counterforce to being simply a “good citizen,” always following the rules, accepting compromise and “the charity of hard moments as they are doled out.”

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Instead, the speaker suggests coupling traditional trappings of adulthood with a methodical “careless[ness],” manifested in sowing seeds but crooked, remembering only “to forget,” and always returning “[t]o the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.” He appears to advocate approaching life as a process of never-ending beginnings, of returns to origins, even as they shift and fade like memories of so many hazy school days. Never fixed, our lives are instead at a “mooring,” floating over the surface of experience, subject to its currents and never quite where they were when we started out. Capable of approaching the world from many directions, the subjects produced over the “course” of such voyages are variable over time, sensitive to alterations in themselves and others. Approaching Dewey’s dictum that art “serves life rather than prescribing a defined and limited mode of living” (Art, 135), the imagery suggests a poetics always shifting in relation to the poets and readers’ experiences and alterations. Ultimately, this vision of life as a “learning process,” coupled with the poem’s reliance on the “being of our sentences,” suggests that poetry itself is one of the best means of “preparing,” serving as both the repository of and antidote to memory. Celebrating new formations of selfhood and conceptions of “citizenship,” poetry is a means of addressing a universe of “heroines” rather than heroes, subjects who sublimate aggression into language, and individuals who value the emotional and intellectual life over thoughtless action. Similarly, poems such as “Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox” and “Rural Objects” reiterate and reformulate pastoral as a trope not only for the origins of selfhood but of being itself as an antidote to a violent cold war ideology whose hegemony the counterculture was beginning to erode. Signaling an incipient “liberation of the human spirit,” these poems redeploy a pragmatic perspective at the same historical moment of the late 1960s when Dewey’s own work was beginning to be reread and reassessed (Art, 339). Rather than employ pragmatism as a corrective to economic inequality, however, younger admirers began to see it as a native response to the centralization and abuse of political power Dewey had predicted many years before.38 Trees figure predominantly in the first poem, as the speaker plays upon an eerily complacent truism gleaned from Wilcox regarding individual agency, the planting of trees, and the pleasure such trees afford to armies: “For the pleasures of the many / May be ofttimes traced to one / As the hand that plants an acorn / Shelters armies from the sun” (Dream, 24). The rather dubious ethics of sheltering armies, and Wilcox’s naïve juxtaposition of pleasure and violence are implicitly teased out over the course of the poem, extending a commentary on poetry’s relation to war and masculinity. First, the speaker, too, luxuriates, albeit self-consciously, in “the feeling” “of never wanting to leave the tree, / Of

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predominantly peace and relaxation.” This is the site of complete fulfillment, where rather than soldiers we have “our brothers all around” even as “truly, young adulthood was never like this.” A homosocial paradise, the trees offer a physical and spiritual grace, even if “one must move forward” from this place and “divest oneself of some tested ideals.” Pragmatically, the speaker allows for the possibility that “even finding nothing to put in their place is a good experience.” Where this line of thought takes him, however, is toward confronting the apocalyptic possibility that even the “trees should shrivel in 120-degree heats, the acorns / Lie around on the worn earth like eyeballs, and the lead soldiers shrug and slink off.” What had been an idealized state of “delight,” “consideration” and “affirmation” turns dystopic, “acorn” seeds turned to dull “eyeballs” with no transcendental, Emersonian powers, and even the haven for young men proves only to have been an imaginary one, the “brothers” merely “lead soldiers,” the companions of a solitary child. The emptying out of pastoral myths linked to war continues throughout the poem as the speaker appears to shift but the poem’s emphasis does not. The next section begins with parodic couplets in which a dandified voice declares: “So my youth was spent, underneath the trees / I always moved around with perfect ease.” The arch, fey lines easily convey the speaker’s fatuity while continuing to betray a certain pastoral wistfulness that exceeds the conventions of this doggerel and suggest the ideological origins of the verse’s appeal (Dream, 25). This speaker longs only to return from his grand yet compulsory European travels, to find “home” in “a hole of truth in the green earth’s rug” where “Once you find it you are as snug as a bug.” Although this advice is hardly more reliable than Wilcox’s paean to passivity and simple acts, it clearly implicates the poet in the fabrication of narratives of both passivity and agency. In these lines Ashbery parodies both Wilcox’s facile condoning of a vaguely imagined, epic violence, as well as the kind of simplistic American nativism that glorifies the United States, duping citizens into believing themselves safe from nuclear horror by digging “holes” in the earth. The rest of the poem shifts into prose at this point, moving through scenes of a vaguely urban consciousness, including that of a grown man returning to the neighborhood where he played “stickball in the vacant lot across the street” in the poem’s one suggestion of a metropolitan idyll. His memories of the games are both violent and uneventful (“he’d go home tired and bleeding” but other times they were “a nice bunch of guys”), suggesting a rather melancholy, even darkly sexual, undercurrent to contemporary life that contrasts with the platitudes of the childish esthetes evoked in the poem’s opening lines. His reflections upon the schoolyard scene end abruptly as “time farted,” two lines of doggerel intervene, and the poem ends

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with one last scene in which a student approaches the paranoid, delusional professor “Gustavus Hertz” who screams that he will “tell you nothing!” and to “Go away!” Any transcendental quest for knowledge is again interrupted as the text degenerates into the kind of campy satire Ashbery employed in his early plays. In both play and poem, Ashbery mocks the ideology that links men to violence and land, perpetuating myths of camaraderie and friendship. Such relations are implicitly rejected in favor of a reader who shares the speaker’s politics, humor, and literary sophistication; unlike Hertz and his potential acolyte, the poet does not reject his pursuer, although he does test and tease him. It is their intimacy, ultimately, that may prove most pastoral in the poem, proffering the kinds of interpersonal connection that the other idylls do not. The poem, in sum, exemplifies an urbane sensibility that works with pastoral tropes in order to defuse and delimit mainstream ideology in favor of new forms of knowledge and subjectivity. “Rural Objects” challenges the reader to question the worth of any idealized narratives of self and being, especially when those narratives are based on nostalgic references to a past that Ashbery has already dispelled and reformulated. The speaker begins by inviting “you” to share in his supposed understanding “About being there in the time as it was then? / A golden moment, full of life and health? / Why can’t this moment be enough for us as we have become?” (Dream, 43). This “moment,” however, was predicated upon its ability to shape “how the future would behave” indefinitely—as if the frontier rhetoric of the past would somehow ensure the continuity of American postwar culture. Instead, such ideology is exposed as a fiction and “we” are left in a world in which our difference rather than our sameness is what defines us: “And now you are this thing that is outside me / And how I in token of it am like you is / In place.” Even as “I” and “you,” however, “we” exist in a strange continuum with each other, still similar, if in some ways objectified (“this thing” “it”). We are subject to “reassembl[y],” and are the stuff of “dreams” and their “back yard[s],” contained, suburban spaces that nonetheless suggest a realm of play and discovery. Rather than sit contented with the past, we may seek to move “closer,” to exist in a state of anticipation and expectation, but may also “return to the fork in the road / Doubtless to take the same path again?” Ultimately, the speaker questions the extent to which reexamining our assumptions about the past and present may actually influence us to behave differently, or if habit or inertia will overwhelm us (a quandary that also preoccupied William James). Such habits, for example the reversion to pastoral itself, are slyly manifested as the speaker turns to consider the nature of time passing from another perspective. While resorting to pastoral childhood memories of a “deserted lake” and “mountain ash,” both recalled “as you are older and in a

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dream,” the speaker now asks after purpose: “to whom is all this?” (Dream, 44). He suspects that “we are being called back / For having forgotten these names / For forgetting our proper names,” guilty of some “crime” that has to do with having left behind the ghosts of former selves and ways of life. While patterns of behavior and language can be questioned, the speaker suggests, such revolts can feel like “crime” even when they are warranted challenges to the status quo. The poem at this point invokes pastoral imagery in order to make a point about the mode’s ideological flexibility, as well as the costs of dislodging it from the dominant narratives that have so monopolized it during the past decades. The rhetorical situation of the first half of the poem is itself overthrown, however, in the next stanza, which begins: “This is how the singer spoke, / In vague terms, but with an eternity of thirst.” Suddenly the reader is meant to understand the preceding stanzas as spoken by another, stranger voice, not a familiar speaker’s at all. The conspiratorial tone associated with these transgressive refigurings of childhood must now be considered a ruse of sorts, leading us to wonder if we were somehow exposed or complicit in an unsanctioned rebellion. The sense of exposure is belied, however, by the fact that the subsequent lines themselves are part of a strong literary tradition, almost Stevensian in tone and thematically akin to “The Idea of Order at Key West.” In the new context, though, the singer merely “spoke,” her song replaced by mere words that do not satiate even her own “thirst” (the words “single pink” in these lines imply the singer’s gender, although it is not certain). Moreover, the singer’s words seem to have no universal, connective powers: the next stanzas all depict scenes of human disconnection, what is “sad and real”: the “commercial school,” “accounting,” and “anxiety.” These culminate in even the speaker accusing “you” of being right to “pillage and obstruct” before shifting to a “she” who “Stared at her toes.” Silent, obstructionist herself in her refusal to engage, this unexpected “she” still seems to provoke the poem’s last parries, the “argument” as to how “it’s just a cheap way / Of letting you off,” although “it” and how it excuses “you” are both vague (Dream, 45). The pastoral idealization of the past may be at stake—or the childhood memories that the speaker cannot help but fall back on—but neither seems to have successfully aided in avoiding responsibility for an unspoken task. Instead, the argument appears averted, temporarily at least, with images that anticipate Ashbery’s “A Wave”: “blue objects protruded out of the / Potential, dying and recoiling, returning as you meet them / Touching forever, water lifted out of the sea.” In its suggestion of eternal return, this seascape again takes us back to Stevens and Key West. The diction is full of productive contrasts: “protrusions” “dying and recoiling” foreground life and

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death. They “return” and are “touching forever” until the water itself is “lifted out of the sea,” an image that suggests the desired and desiring dimensions of the poem itself. In a sense, the poem can be said to end by refusing to end, by turning back upon itself and its arguments of difference and disjuncture with a rhetoric of oceanic expansiveness. The emphasis falls on a holistic reintegration of poet and poem, reader and text, subject and experience, resulting in a “remaking of impulsion and thought,” a process that perpetually gives rise to new poems in turn (Art, 349). Rather than finding a neat but banal resolution to modern anomie and disjuncture, the poem shifts from the land to the sea, from interrogating fixed ideas to presenting fluid, borrowed, and revised images of self and time. The self and the song do not function to grant each other either coherence or order; instead, in Ashbery’s vision the mysterious background becomes an expansive foreground, the ocean moving in all directions simultaneously, its various and multiplying currents reflecting a constantly fluctuating experience of language and the world. Coda: The Vermont Notebook Although a vaguely pastoral impulse survives in Ashbery’s more recent volumes—perhaps most humorously in Can You Hear, Bird ’s (1995) “Military Pastoral,” a campy send-up of military discipline complete with “buttocks,” “thrifty paysannes,” “village streets,” an observant “thrush,” and obligatory “laurels” that await the beleaguered “Blubberface” and his comrades39 —the poet rarely returns to such recognizable pastorals in his recent work. Rather, it is in Ashbery’s early- and mid-career pastoral meditations on the way we were and continue to be, the ways in which childhood and maturity are linked, that he demonstrates pastoral’s capacity to express the poet’s search for the mutable origins and essence of the poetic and public self. Ashbery’s fascination with pastoral reached a peak by the mid-seventies and waned after this point. One of his last major pastoral projects is The Vermont Notebook (1975), an experimental text in which the porous depiction of subjectivity immersed in experience confirms a pragmatic perspective that Ashbery traces back to Gertrude Stein and William James. As Ashbery observes, “it’s one of the few things I’ve written that seems to have been influenced by Gertrude Stein. Although I’ve read her a lot, I’ve never heard her voice come into my work, except occasionally here and there.”40 In this pragmatically Steinian, surreal, pastoral experiment, specific rural sites such as “Vermont” dissolve into lists of objects and people, generic sites, activities, brand names, colors, games, crimes, cities, newspapers, as well as names of poets and artists—many Ashbery’s personal friends—and kinds of fabric. Other series evoke a vague narrative or scene, some in lists and others in

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dense prose-poetry that evokes both “jewelers” and the “dump” in a single passage reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’s excremental “pearl.” The dump becomes a metaphor for the listing and spillage of words in the text so far, as Ashbery also revises Wallace Stevens’s iconic “Man on the Dump”: “As I swear the dump is my sweet inner scape self so do I condone the dump for having nothing left for me only the will to go on dumping creating it out of its evacuation. I will go to the dump. I am to be in the dump. I was permanently the dump and now the dump is me, but I will be permanently me when I am no longer the dump air. The dump air lasts.”41 Always playful, the speaker figures himself as endlessly evolving and devolving into garbage, accumulating and sloughing off aspects of the self—including multiple poetic precursors—until he is practically nothing, dispersed into a pungent residue of “dump air” and language itself. Collectively, the text appears to be a grab bag of experiences and voices, tied together by an overarching, quasi-Whitmanian consciousness whose continuity cannot be confirmed. What unites these memories of presence, however, is a sense that they are marginal and questionable, their very existence perhaps imagined and easily discarded. In the “The Fairies’ Song,” these marginal narratives are linked explicitly to marginal people: “sometimes one of us will get included in the trash” (Vermont, 93). “There are long rides around doubtful walked-in spaces, / Dreaming of manure piles under the slop and urge of a March sun,” as well as “limpid pools of quiet” and “insipid flowering meads / Wastes of acting out daytime courtesies at night.” The Vermont Notebook can be read as the accumulation of such people and their “waste[ful]” activities, be they rural or urban, straight or gay, given to reflection or not, beholden to “acting out” their traditional roles or willing to shed them at “night.” Although appearing at first glance to be an opaque time capsule of words, the collage of The Vermont Notebook ultimately illuminates a way of life and its denizens by refusing to capture them in traditional guises or forms. Significantly, the pastoralism of The Vermont Notebook crystallizes the logical extreme to which Ashbery’s early poetics would take him, while signaling the end of a period in which he made pastoral an obviously important aspect of his work. As he came of age as a poet, Ashbery turned to pastoral as a means not of escaping from reality but of immersing himself more fully in a world in which the real and surreal, personal and political, everyday and aesthetic often cannot be easily distinguished. This postwar world, his poetics suggests, has all too much in common with the world his modernist predecessors struggled to apprehend, while also beginning to bend and break open, impelling the center toward its peripheries.

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CONCLUSION

Late Twentieth-Century Pastoral: Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Robertson, and the Continuity of a Mode

F

rom his first semester at Harvard in 1946, Navy veteran and future poet Frank O’Hara was captivated by the work of Gertrude Stein, who died that same year. In English A, he wrote an essay on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which he described to his parents as “one of the most interesting things I’ve ever read by anyone.”1 In the poem “Memorial Day 1950,” O’Hara would describe the early stages of his work as including “several last things / Gertrude Stein hadn’t had time for.”2 Clearly, O’Hara saw links between his poetics and hers, and one of these links was a highly eroticized form of pastoral. O’Hara’s “Concert Champêtre,” or “rustic harmony,” for example, is a humorous and amorous poem in which the speaker encounters a “cow” with curiously human qualities (Poems, 15). A “grand” “giantess of good,” she dwells among “bees.” It is at her invitation that the speaker takes a roll in the “clover,” and begins a conversation about his own cow story, at the prospect of which she responds with a “bit[e]” and postcoital cuddling (“she crooned / silently and threw a leg / over my shoulder”). The speaker’s attitude towards her is fond if at times vaguely hostile; the last words of the poem refer colloquially to his own about-to-berecounted tale: “It will kill you.” As he sees it, he will get a laugh, but also may appall and offend in some devastating way. Gertrude Stein, the regal queen of modernism, the author of texts such as the playful “Bee Time Vine” and “As a Wife Has a Cow a Love Story,”

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and a lesbian whose private life was carefully guarded from public scrutiny, fits nicely into O’Hara’s poem as a maternal presence who invites the young poet into the realm of the physical and the lyrical, the sexual and the comic, affirming identifications beyond the heterosexual. Like his friend and contemporary John Ashbery, O’Hara found pastoral to be a necessary mode in which to express the sensations of love and loathing that accompanied the postwar gay experience. Writing decades earlier, Stein was far more circumspect in depicting her own sense of otherness. Her use of pastoral both resembles and departs from those of her male peers and literary heirs, and she indeed might have been “killed” by the kind of public acknowledgement of difference that was so invigorating for O’Hara. Precisely because her sense of gender and sexuality was so fraught, her pastorals reinscribe the mode from a site that is both curiously conventional and utterly other. However, the continued attraction of Stein’s pastoral poetics for later twentiethcentury poets, often women or gay men, suggests that her pastoral mode was not only fruitful but was an important model for a new series of pastoral innovations. Over the course of this book so far, I have posited a modern pastoral mode in which male poets articulate an ethical individualism strongly influenced by James and Dewey. They employ the mode to imagine new relationships with those marginalized by virtue of their class or economic condition, gender, sexuality, race, or ethnicity, while confronting their own proximity to the edges of American society. These pragmatic pastorals are inflected by a genuine orientation toward not only “public culture,” but also a politicized public sphere,3 their goals at times overlapping with the goals of more openly political texts such as the proletarian literature of the 1930s, as well as texts we associate with the avant-garde.4 Responding to a newly troubling divide between the privileged and underprivileged, center and margin, these twentieth-century pastorals have sought to reenvision the dynamic between self and other, the poet and the people. Modern pastorals are marked by their tendency to explore and even explode these dichotomies, bringing into question how privilege and power are constructed and maintained. In this final and concluding chapter, I explore the resurgence of a pragmatic pastoral mode in American poetry at the end of the past century, focusing on its early turn-of-the-century origins and later flowering in avant-garde and postmodern poetry circles in texts by women poets, including Stein as well as Lyn Hejinian and Lisa Robertson. Informed by postmodern conceptions of self that explode the gendered binaries of the past, these texts are directly and indirectly shaped by pragmatic conceptions of subjectivity. The resurgence of pragmatism or neo-pragmatism in the 1980s in the work of philosophers such as Richard Rorty and Cornel West, literary

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critics such Richard Poirier, Ross Posnock, and Giles Gunn, and historians such as James Kloppenberg and Robert Westbrook suggests that the concerns both material and intellectual that preoccupied poets at the turn of the last century continue to drive American academics, poets, and the public even as we mark the recent millennium.5 The influence of these thinkers in creating a climate hospitable to pragmatic concerns as well as the continued relevance of James and Dewey themselves upon contemporary poets solidify claims for a revitalized pragmatic pastoralism. The continuity among the work of Stein, Hejinian, and Robertson is the result, ironically, of the success with which Stein disguised the subversive nature of her work, aligning her public and poetic personas with ostensibly masculine conceptions of “genius” and sexuality. In pastorals such as “Melanctha” (1909) and Lucy Church Amiably (1927), Stein employs the mode in ways not unlike those of her male contemporaries, querying truisms of gender and sexuality while discussing nature, landscape, romance, identity, history, gender, and economics.6 Due to her own self-censorship as well as a critical reluctance to address such issues, however, Stein’s radical critique of traditional, patriarchal pastoral orders was not fully received by her intellectual heirs until much later in the twentieth century. Drawing upon Stein’s pastoral poetics, Hejinian and Robertson invoke her example more frequently and explicitly than either O’Hara or Ashbery. Overtly interested in pastoral’s potential to destabilize aesthetic and social conventions, these women poets are confident of their centrality to a North American tradition of letters while aware of the ideological complexity of their cultural inheritance.7 A member of the Language school of poets, Hejinian frequently references pastoral rhetoric in her voluminous writings on poetics as well as in instances of her own poetry (e.g., “The Green”). Robertson, a Canadian poet, invokes Stein in the erotic collages of her book-length XEclogue. Even as their projects complement Ashbery’s in their evocations of sexual difference and complications of a postwar “masculine” perspective on experience, these pastorals by women suggest a productive new orientation for the mode. And while their avant-garde, late-twentieth-century feminist pastorals are most directly influenced by Stein’s example, they are also made possible by—indeed are the logical fulfillment of—the pastoral visions articulated by Frost, Williams, and Stevens. Exploring the ways in which pastoral has been adapted by one early- and two late-twentieth-century women poets, this book concludes by underlining the mode’s persistent relevance to the American scene. Twentieth-century American pastoral is a continuing project, implying a political, social, and cultural atmosphere in which the marginal has become more central, even as tolerance and equality remain elusive goals.

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Gertrude Stein’s Geography of History Shortly before she was supposed to graduate from medical school at Johns Hopkins, Gertrude Stein left her studies, having concluded that women could in fact accomplish little once outside the classroom: the “American woman confuses ‘her education her cleverness and intelligence for effective capacity for the work of the world.’ ”8 On the surface, Stein denied the causes of science and progress linked to early feminism, but her apostasy was neither complete nor lasting. Over the years, she repeatedly returned to the progressive tenets of modern “science” in order to formulate responses to what she once termed “Patriarchal Poetry.” Through her writing, Stein, like the New Women she professed to scorn, was able to fuse public and private elements of her life so as to elicit new—although often limited—aesthetic and ethical possibilities. To the extent that “genius . . . was . . . synonymous with maleness” for Stein, it is no surprise that early in her career she often adopted male-identified or male roles in fictionalized accounts of her life. Q.E.D. (1903–1905), begins with an epigraph from a scene in Shakespeare’s As You Like It that epitomizes her early, self-veiling use of the pastoral mode. In the scene the crossdressing Rosalind is stranded in a wood with various mismatched lovers as well as a shepherd, all comically vowing undying “adoration, duty, and observance” to one another until an impatient Rosalind likens their voices to “the howling of Irish wolves against the moon.”9 Stein’s choice of this scene to preface a private autobiographical drama only published later in life hints at her identification with Rosalind’s masculine subterfuge as well as her own early identification with the pastoral mode. Just as significantly, radical depictions of gender and sexuality as well as race and nationality intertwine in a text Stein herself believed to be her first major literary accomplishment, inaugurating her pragmatic use of pastoral. Stein dons the persona of Jeff Campbell in Three Lives’s “Melanctha” (1909),10 a retelling of Stein’s affair with May Bookstaver (the novella’s subtitle is “Each One As She May”). Jeff and Melanctha are AfricanAmerican lovers who struggle and repeatedly fail to make known their feelings for each other, their affair taking place “in the bright fields” and around their neighborhood at the city’s margins.11 Their story unfolds, as do many modern pastorals, at the edges of urban life rather than its white, middle-class, ideological center. The prose style is melodious and rhythmic, reminiscent of song, characterized by a revolutionary syntax that is Stein’s first attempt at what she would term in “Composition as Explanation” a “prolonged present” that would become a “continuous present.”12 With its emphasis on “beginning and beginning and beginning,” the narrator lingers

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over love’s frustrations much as do the singing shepherds of Virgil’s Idylls, chronicling the hesitancies, recklessness, and disaster resulting from feelings that are “less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing.”13 Although Jeff and Melanctha eventually find some comfort in their relationship, their happiness is soon marred by her “wandering,” his misunderstanding, and Melanctha’s eventual death, the story becoming a pastoral elegy of sorts for a woman who refuses to conform to turn-of-thecentury racial, sexual, or gender norms.14 In its presentation of the bisexual Melanctha and her friend Jane Harden as well as its depictions of AfricanAmerican lives as representatively American—albeit often in the form of broad racial caricatures—“Melanctha” decenters some stereotypes even as it deploys and reinforces others. An experimental chronicle of a failed, youthful love affair, “Melanctha” was a turning point in Stein’s literary career. When Stein returned to the pastoral mode in the poetic prose of Lucy Church Amiably (written 1927, published 1930), her approach involved a new emphasis on what she termed “landscape,” a quality whose desired effect she declares similar to what she wished to achieve in “Melanctha” with the “prolonged” or “continuous present.”15 As Stein discussed the phenomenon in a lecture entitled “Plays” (1935), while the “continuous present” served to approximate the impassioned yet static nature of Melanctha’s life and relationships, so did “landscape” suit the story of Bilignin (a town near the French country house Stein shared with Toklas) and its surroundings, the site that would constitute the grounds of Lucy Church Amiably. Although Stein soon turned to writing plays, this overtly pastoral novel or prose poem was her first attempt at representing what it was about “landscape” that she found so appealing, and her multiple attempts to theorize this technique reveal the centrality of a pastoral poetic to her work as a whole. As she describes the texture of the prose-poem The landscape has its formation and as after all a play has to have formation and be in relation one thing to the other and as the story is not the thing as any one is always telling something then the landscape not moving but being always in relation, the trees to the hills the hills to the fields the trees to each other any piece of it to any sky and then any detail to any other detail, the story is only of importance if you like to tell or like to hear a story but the relation is there anyway.16 Both the “continuous present” and “landscape” foreground a state of being or existence, patterns of mutual relations among objects and people (or people as objects, as the stereotyped and thus virtually immobile plot-wise characters of Melanctha and Jeff so often seem to be), and the eschewal of

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a conventional, linear narrative or “story.” The emphasis is upon the spatial or relational rather than the temporal, immersion in experience itself rather than its codification into precoded symbols, meanings, and narratives. Even so, while ostensibly eschewing the kind of information normally conveyed in a story in which “any one is always telling something”—“landscape” for Stein also is strongly linked to the “play” with all of its connotations of performance and publicity, both situated in time and in relation to the kind of mass audience that Stein craved. In The Geographical History of America (1936), Stein introduces a related concept that both clarifies and complicates her references to “landscape.” She refers to the concept of the “masterpiece” as a work of art that tends to “always flatten it out, flatten human nature out so that there is no beginning and middle and ending.”17 Similar to a “landscape” insofar as both are the site of the spatial and a flattening out of time, the “masterpiece” creates room for what Stein terms “romance.” “Romance” is the realm of “human mind” rather than “human nature,” the latter being aligned with “history” and “identity” (Geographical, 183). Stein’s careful attempt to theorize a pastoral realm of “human mind” apart from “human nature,” of “romance” or an idyll apart from “history,” however, is less an honest appraisal of her own technique than typical of the way in which her self-protective impulses to deny certain aspects of history often end up subsumed within pastoral texts such as Lucy Church Amiably that speak of histories, experiences, and personalities which belie Stein’s abstractly rigid doctrines.18 In a revealing contrast, in a third theorization of her aesthetic process in that text (in the lecture “Poetry and Grammar,” part of the same series as “Plays”), Stein describes Lucy Church Amiably as the site of “real narrative” as distinct from “newspaper narrative.” The poetry of this text, Stein now claims, is an attempt to “replace[] the noun by the thing in itself,” so that poetry would now “have to deal with everything that was not movement in space.” “Lucy Church Amiably had been an attempt to do it,” she states, implying that this poetic text would address not only spatial but temporal concerns, forming a new poetic narrative mode that would nonetheless exceed conventional means of storytelling.19 Stein’s privileging of a kind of literary space as “landscape” which, as she also assesses it, ultimately addresses its temporal dimension, makes a great deal more sense when considered in the context of her own relation to history, specifically her intellectual grounding in William James’s conceptions of consciousness and space in Principles of Psychology.20 In terms of her poetics, Stein’s characterization of “landscape” as a set of linguistic objects existing in space can be understood as not dissimilar to what James described as the “substantive,” as opposed to the “transitive,” state of mind, the former

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of which he describes as mental “resting-places” analogous to the use of a “period” at the end of a sentence. Suggestively, James describes such “resting places” as pastoral, quasi idylls, “usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing.”21 What is most significant about this state, however, is that it is extremely difficult to represent, with the result that “sentences with absolutely no meaning may be uttered in good faith and pass unchallenged”: Discourses at prayer-meetings, reshuffling the same collection of cant phrases, and the whole genus of penny-a-line-isms and newspaperreporter’s flourishes give illustrations of this. “The birds filled the treetops with their morning song, making the air moist, cool, and pleasant,”is a sentence I remember reading once in a report of some athletic exercises in Jerome Park. It was probably written unconsciously by the hurried reporter, and read uncritically by many readers. (Principles, 168–169) Culminating with a pastoral scene of birdsong and presumably male athletic competition, James emphasizes how the expression of such “feelings of relation” subtly defy conventional newspaper narratives and may even be almost poetic in effect, much like Stein’s own texts. Tellingly, however, for James such linguistic felicities are not the same thing as art, which requires form and forethought: “the artist notoriously selects his items, rejecting all tones, colors, shapes, which do not harmonize with each other and the main purpose of his work” (Principles, 171). Citing this kind of selection as a positive effort toward order, James links aesthetics to the realm of the ethical and thus the historical and public: “an act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible” (Principles, 172). Although Stein’s idealization of “landscape,” “masterpieces” and new “narratives” consisting of “things” in place of nouns may evoke the sensation of immediate experience, they too are anything but artless. Moreover, Stein’s and James’s complementary references to newspapers suggests that such “substantival” scenes are necessarily entangled with the “transitive” and temporal: media, sport, religion—the full texture of everyday life in James’s account. The results are texts that bear out John Dewey’s more explicit commentary upon aesthetics and ethics, revealing a previously unnoticed confluence of Stein’s and Dewey’s thought that is less unlikely than one might think. According to Dewey’s Experience and Nature and Art As Experience, texts written, not coincidentally, under the influence of Albert Barnes, a friend and correspondent of Stein’s brother and former confidant, the art collector and theorist Leo Stein, art is both “consummatory”—providing

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aesthetic pleasure in a state analogous to the “substantive” stage of consciousness—as well as “instrumental” and “productive,” leading to further, what James might call “transitive,” states of consciousness.22 Such consummatory moments are far from isolated aesthetic events, moreover, but are “ends” connected to human “values” (Experience, 396). Most pertinent to Stein’s aesthetics, Dewey insists that the aesthetic object functions as more than an “act of expression” on the part of the artist and is not fully realized until received by the reader or viewer, at which point traditional subject/ object relations break down: “In art as an experience, actuality and possibility or ideality, the new and the old, objective material and personal response, the individual and the universal, surface and depth, sense and meaning, are integrated in an experience in which they are all transfigured from the significance that belongs to them when isolated in reflection” (Art, 297). The function of texts is far from private and autonomous, but rather public and social. According to Dewey, not only is art meant to be perceived, but its ability to be received by a reader is integral to its ethical function. While Stein might not have agreed openly with Dewey’s conclusion that “the first intimations of wide and large redirections of desire and purpose are of necessity imaginative,” her literary creations bear out her own desires and purposes in complex and revealing ways that open her texts to readers interested in how experience and subjectivity inflect the writing, reading, and interpretation—by authors, critics, and laypeople alike—of literature (Art, 349). A traditionalist in many matters, Stein was somewhat notoriously in favor of an American “rugged individualism”—it is no surprise that Stein loved to read genre fiction such as Westerns—and the very term “landscape” has immediate associations with a Romantic, frontier-oriented theory of subjectivity that involves the perceptual and colonizing mastery of an environment.23 Yet Lucy Church Amiably provides numerous examples of the ways in which Stein’s attempts to render one “landscape,” perhaps the fields near Bilignin, end up invoking multiple sites, histories, and states in a manner consistent with other aesthetically and ethically innovative twentiethcentury pastorals. A “vital rediscovery of the pastoral,” according to Donald Sutherland, the text brings together elements both lyrical and prosaic in the interest of presenting a radical perspective on everyday life.24 The main characters, for example, have names such as Lucy Church, John Mary, and Simon Therese, which, as critics have noted, collapse male and female, human and nonhuman (the title reference is to an actual, physical church in the town of Lucy).25 Stein feigns identifying these characters in terms of their families and affairs, but no clear narrative lines emerge. Instead, the reader is left with characters whose gender, sexuality, and social standing

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are difficult to pin down, although they all seem wealthy and idle. There is an aura of the “amiable” about the book as a whole, derived in part from its references to “romantic nature” abstracted from the destructive forces of temporality. Personal, contingent, and distinctly Steinian anxieties surface quickly though: “A genius says that when he is not successful he is treated with consideration like a genius but when he is successful and has been as rich as successful he is treated like anybody by his family.”26 Written as Stein’s reputation was growing and about to be cemented with the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1933, Lucy Church Amiably could be understood as expressing Stein’s own dissatisfaction (coded male) with the effect of her fame upon her personal life. Similarly, although the landscape is supposedly French, American elements persist, such as tobacco (“Tobacco can be grown also in the place of a fear that it may be too late various things”), cacti (“Suppose eight more are cactuses and have rosy flowers”), and the California town of Piedmont (“how many wonder if Piedmont is a name that means near the water between a bay and an ocean”) (Lucy, 16, 53–54, 97). Even Stein’s sister, Bertha, despised by Stein for her conventionality, makes an appearance: “Bertha is the name of Bertha as if it were used and as if it were used” (Lucy, 119). When relationships between the amorphous characters begin to take shape, they do so in terms that suggest Stein’s keen sense of the history of language and genre, as well as the ways in which these translate personal into social events. For example, while pastoral traditionally celebrates human love and sexuality, Lucy Church Amiably makes prominent reference to a “marriage contract” that turns out to be an inversion, or perversion, of such official documents: They marry. If she made it easy to read the marriage contract a contract to marry. If she made it easy to for the imitation and the other one who could call following false cock false cock and no answer. And by the best embroidery which is white with a delicate touch. And so they marry marry marry three. When this you see you can marry me. When this you see you can marry me marry marry undeniably marry and see see that orchids are brown and withal withal withal intent. (Lucy, 27) Rather than having another (implicitly a man) administer the document, it is a “she” who does so. In addition, it is “she” who is in charge of how “easy to read” the “marriage contract” will be, and she who may determine if it takes place at all (the entire proceeding is conditioned by “if”).

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The proceedings are unusual to say the least, involving not only traditional “white” and “embroidery” (a specialty of Alice’s) but also a “false cock,” to which the male-identified but physically female Stein sets a coy “no answer.” Ignoring impediments, “they marry marry marry three” in a ritualized repetition of a conventional service, the narrator performing the consent of both parties as well as that of the officiant. Traditional gender roles are dissolved as the text replaces a heterosexual “two” with an ambiguous “three” in which no clear female or male parties can be identified. In a comic twist, the act of reading itself becomes part of the celebration, for in “see[ing]” this page we too are given permission to “marry,” although the accompanying “orchids” may be “brown” rather than their usual exotic hues, their suggestive folds more reminiscent of flesh than flora. Although Stein considered the locality of Bilignin to have been consecrated by the presence of the French poet Lamartine and his paeans to idealized love, her vision of pastoral beauty is considerably more earthy. Herself confidently large, with a “massive, heavy fat” that “she always seemed to like,” exuding a charismatic attraction in all her “ampleur,” Stein “had none of the funny embarrassments Anglo-Saxons have about flesh. She gloried in hers.”27 Embodying an excessive physicality that was the antithesis of the modernist male aesthete, Stein was not shy about the physical world in her writing. As such, she exemplifies what Tim Armstrong refers to as a “set of bodily relations . . . typified by a pleasure in the production of waste which signals a refusal to the aesthetics of efficiency.”28 Rather than dwell upon a masculine efficiency and idealization of a “pure” autonomous self, Stein here codifies a version of herself in terms of a distinctly feminized languor and sensuality, sensations traditional to the realm of the pastoral. “Imagine she says. Imagine what I say,” we are instructed: “Add cows to oxen goats to sheep add cows and oxen and goats to sheep. Add oxen and cows and chickens and sheep to fields and she will be satisfied so she says. She will be satisfied” (Lucy, 49). To many of Stein’s readers, especially those acquainted with “As Every Wife Has a Cow A Love Story” with its blatantly sexual overtones, “cow” is the pastoral code word for “orgasm,” and its presence in Lucy Church Amiably the inevitable manifestation of lesbian sex. Even the advertisement for the book, promising the reader all sorts of natural delights such as “falling water,” “a river a gorge an inundation” and “a remarkably meadowed mass which is whatever they use not to feed but to bed cows,” clearly appears upon rereading to be a highly eroticized rendition of the local topography rather than a naïve description of a natural environment.29 The very fact that such an advertisement even exists for Lucy Church Amiably points toward yet another layer of history attached to this text, indicating the major significance this deceptively flat, modest volume of

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“romantic beauty” gradually took on for both Stein and Toklas. After completing the novel, Stein had difficulty finding a publisher, especially after her Useful Knowledge (1928) failed to sell. As a consequence, Toklas, under Stein’s direction, took it upon herself to form their own publishing company, which Stein dubbed “Plain Edition.” After careful research into distribution and marketing tactics, Toklas issued the book in the form Stein proposed: “Gertrude Stein wanted the first book Lucy Church Amiably to look like a school book and to be bound in blue.”30 Simple, childish, the color of purity, the book would be a neat compendium of country pleasures whose complications were carefully disguised. The book’s publication was evidently deeply gratifying to Stein, who saw it as a vindication of her genius and its imminent recognition by the reading public. According to Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, on seeing her book in store windows, the author reportedly felt “a childish delight amounting almost to ecstasy. . . . she spent all her time in her wanderings about Paris looking at the copies of Lucy Church Amiably in the windows and coming back and telling [Alice] about it” (Selected, 903). The encoded pastoral romances of the book give way in the Autobiography to the decidedly public romance of Stein of gazing rapturously at the product of her genius and most likely at her own reflection in the glass simultaneously. Toklas, who largely engineered the production of the small volume, thus brought her lover to spasms of “delight” that were decidedly not “childish.” Although Lucy Church Amiably was not the commercial breakthrough that the Autobiography was to be in a few short years, its publication proved to both women that rather than being dependent on male publishers (with the exception of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap) they themselves could begin to control Stein’s publicity. History and identity proved, in the end, to be inextricable from the pastoral text of Lucy Church Amiably as well as from material conditions of its release. Fittingly, the text itself appears to anticipate this turn of events, even going so far as to describe its eponymous protagonist, too, in terms of a public and financially remunerative “romance”: “Lucy Church was astonished to know that they loved her so was astonished to know that to pay her to pay her to pay her to so pay her for the paper to pay her they loved to pay her. They did love to pay her they loved to pay her for the paper” (Lucy, 200).31 Lucy Church’s delight in her own literary propagation can be understood as a manifestation of Stein’s midcareer determination to make her person and her work public and successful, to be both a woman and a genius at once. A delayed return to the optimism of her youth, in which mentors such as William James, Hugo Münsterberg and others supported her research and encouraged her in her scientific endeavors,32 Lucy Church Amiably is a site in which Stein questions the supposedly “scientific” assumptions

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regarding gender and sexuality that were used to keep women out of the public sphere.33 Like many professional women of her generation, however, Stein was more interested in skeptical inquiry than in politics, reluctant to turn her professional gains into political arguments. As a result, the innovative conclusions of Stein and others as well as the rights that logically followed from such studies were not fully received by larger audiences until much later in the century.34 In the 1950s poets such as Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery (who in 1957 described Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation as “a hymn to possibility”) received her work warmly, while in the 1970s through the 1990s poets such as Lyn Hejinian and Lisa Robertson would take her pastoral project forward toward a new millennium.35 Landscape Ventures Stein’s version of pastoral, while generally disregarded beyond a small circle of Stein critics, has not gone completely unnoticed. While poets like O’Hara and Ashbery noted Stein’s pastoral treatment of homosexuality, poets such as Hejinian and Robertson have been especially intrigued by Stein’s adaptation and complication of pastoral gender conventions. Hejinian, a poet identified with the Language school of writing prominent since the 1970s in the San Francisco Bay area and New York City, has explicitly aligned herself with Stein’s avant-garde poetics as well as the scientific impulse she detects in Stein’s pastoral “landscapes.”36 Not just aesthetic or methodological, Hejinian’s affiliation with Stein is also personal and political. Hejinian’s reception of Stein’s work as well as readings that limn Stein’s influence upon texts such as “The Green” reveal the continuity between their poetic projects, as do Hejinian’s own readings of the works of William James. Absorbing his radical empiricism directly, Hejinian reveals her aesthetics and ethics to be decidedly “neo-pragmatic.” Articulating a politicized aesthetics that marks her as the heir of Stein, James, and Dewey, Hejinian’s poetry and spatialized understanding of language itself lends credence to the concept of a continuous American pastoral tradition that encodes a distinctly late twentiethcentury social landscape. Introducing her essays “Two Stein Talks” (1986), Hejinian begins by mentioning how her father—who grew up in Oakland, California, as did Stein—wrote to Stein in 1933 praising her work. Alice Toklas responded to his letter, thanking him and sending along Stein’s “greetings and to Piedmont too.”37 Stein’s affable response to her young admirer and explicit acknowledgement of their shared native environs near Piedmont (also mentioned in Lucy Church Amiably), was the beginning of a lifelong admiration that he passed down to his daughter. Hejinian, in turn, saw her father’s

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regard for Stein as a sign that women, too, could be important writers (“Talks,” 83–84). Hejinian grew up to attend Radcliffe, Stein’s alma mater, and became a major avant-garde American poet. When she describes what she learned from Stein in more detail, she describes it as a method, derived from William James, that is decidedly scientific: a focus on “not truth but understanding,” a “shift of emphasis from perceived to perceiving, and thus to writing, in which acts of observation, as complex perception, take place.” In a turn that foreshadows a shared interest in a pastoral poetics, Hejinian professes herself especially intrigued by the link she perceives between “grammar” and “landscape” in Stein’s work, which she then considers in terms of her own practice. “It is the convergence of these elements—that is, time and space—with language that provides the excitement of grammar,” she notes, observing that Stein’s work provides an important model insofar as it “distributes value or meaning across the entirety of any given work; the emphases are panoramic” (“Talks,” 116). In a gesture that elucidates Stein’s subtle poetics, Hejinian immediately divines the ways in which both time and space energize “grammar,” with results linked to the pastoral terminology of “landscape” and “panoram[as].” Hejinian herself has been received as postmodern in the sense that her work, like that of her peers, “wants to open the field so as to make contact with the world as well as the word,” according to Marjorie Perloff.38 Hejinian’s references to Stein and “landscape,” however, suggest an alternative genealogy for her revisionary pastoralism. While Perloff’s rhetoric here recalls Charles Olson’s manifesto “Projective Verse,” with its call upon poets to “venture into FIELD COMPOSITION” and for the poet to “put himself into the open,” Hejinian’s work inverts Olson’s determination to write from the (implicitly male) body poetry that manifests “the breath, the breathing of the man who writes,” conveying the “high energy-construct” necessary to this evidently strenuous, not to mention phallicly suggestive verse (as evoked by such key terms as “projectile,” “percussive,” and “prospective”).39 While Stein at one level accepted (even as she elsewhere mischievously dismantled and reassembled) the romance of masculine individualism, Hejinian is more overt in her own landscape poetics. Opting instead for a different kind of “open” form, she describes her poetics in terms of its “resistance to closure,” insofar as her ideal is “to achieve maximum vertical intensity (the single moment into which the Idea rushes) and maximum horizontal intensity (Ideas cross the landscape and become the horizon and the weather).”40 In this pastoral vision of the text, “Ideas” exist within a dynamic of time and space that is at once linguistic and experiential. In part a reaction—like Olson’s—against the classic “I”-centered, nature-oriented lyric form so common in mainstream American poetry (whose perceptual and

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metaphysical assumptions Olson at times shares), Hejinian’s poetics also partakes of a shared desire to upset binaries of “form-content, male-female, now-then, here-there, large-small, social-solitary, etc.” lending itself instead to “deliberate and complex disintegration, dispersal, elaboration.”41 That these impulses can take the form of a pastoral text and are articulated in a decidedly pastoral rhetoric is significant and as yet unexplained in any critical account of her work. Hejinian’s text, “The Green” (1994), exemplifies the kind of Steinian landscapes she reads and reproduces, albeit with an attention to the history and politics of her project that Stein never made explicit.42 The first thing that one notices about the poem is that, like much of Stein’s work, it looks like prose. Playing against the traditional “line” and all of its connotations of “lines of sight, lines of investigation, horizon lines, cartographer’s lines, and . . . lines of travel—routes, paths, etc.” the poem suggests a different kind of literary landscape.43 While the title of “The Green” suggests a pastoral idyll, or at least a country scene, it begins on a humorous, even unnerving, note: “I am nearsighted and therefore cannot tell, though I would, whether the shapes in a field across the road are rocks, or shrubs, or cows.”44 Although there seems to be an “I” who is a speaking subject, the first thing that we learn about him or her is that his or her sight is unreliable. Their language (like all of ours) is limited by physical and spatial conditions, and will just as often reflect the speaker’s misperceptions as his or her insights. Although “landscape” is often a “reassuring” element in a work, as Hejinian notes, while temporality “exerts a particular pressure” resulting in “restlessness and sometimes anxiety,” here the poet inverts the anticipated affect of each element, ascribing an indeterminacy to landscape much as Stein could not help but bring “human nature” into her pastoral “masterpieces.”45 Other similarities between Hejinian’s and Stein’s approaches to landscape and pastoral abound. Hejinian, like Stein, plays with traditional pastoral topoi, calling attention to a seemingly natural scene or field, as well as domestic animals such as “cows” (which recall Stein’s eroticized animals). But the next line disperses any fixed images or assumptions about literary modes the reader might be attempting to form. As a speaker notes, “There are many figures in this scene which might form separate scenes” (“Green,” 127). The vagueness of reference, with its unspecified “figures” and “scene,” both of which might form “separate scenes,” is reminiscent of Stein’s grammatical play in its resistance to forming a singular coherent narrative or image. For example, the repetition of the word “scene” brings into question the referent of the word, which, as a homonym of “seen” suggests something perceived earlier and reconstructed, or an image that conforms to certain conventions of “scenes,” and as such is inherently preconstructed, almost

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theatrical. However, while the text indicates that several stories may be unfolding here, their purpose is simply as backdrop: as readers we will never have intimate access to them. Or if we do, our access will always be mediated by language and our own preconceptions of how “landscapes” and “scenes” work. The emphasis on the spatial relationships brings us closer into the process of the poem, but often so close that we cannot see the field for the individual blades of grass. The emphasis on relations among objects in space in “The Green” extends for Hejinian to an implied relationship with her reader that, like Whitman’s, aspires to be non-hierarchical, improvisational, and ethical. Part of a strong community of writers in the Bay area, many of whom actively protested the Vietnam War and the “pervasive hypocrisy of the 1950s and 1960s,” Hejinian clearly sees her work as a “utopian undertaking” to destabilize the presumed “naturalness” of language as well as the oppression toward women and other marginal social groups that it encodes. Accordingly, her poetry works at the “borders” of culture where it often produces a “dream landscape” that, like “the border landscape,” is unstable and perpetually incomplete. It is a landscape of discontinuities, incongruities, displacements, dispossession. The border is occupied by ever-shifting images, involving objects and events constantly in need of redefinition and even literal renaming, and viewed against a constantly changing background.46 The text of “The Green” bears out this desire to fuse the aesthetic and the ethical in its idiosyncratic gestures towards description. To an extent, the shift from a rhetoric of “dreams” to that of “borders” reflects a wider scholarly and cultural shift from studies of a quasi-mythical “frontier” to that of more historically accurate—if more complicated and amorphous— “borderlands.” The sentences play with the reader’s expectations of what kind of environment is being imagined, leaving room for the reader to fill in spaces or blanks. For example, early in the text a speaker continues as if previously interrupted: “At the head of what is known as endlessly receptive the river crosses an occasional rain. The symmetry is broken by the wind. My attention trails off to the nether side of the clay mustard jar in which the collection of pencils is kept.” In the first of these sentences the location resists definition, leaving room for imagination, improvisation, and future revision to a text that is itself “endlessly receptive” (“Green,” 127). The subject of the sentence appears to be the “ river,” but then the nonsensical occurs: the river crosses “an occasional rain,” bringing into question perceptions of movement and depth, as well as the capacity of “normal”

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syntax to relate the variety of human experience or the true nature of any landscape or scene. The “symmetry” of the next sentence seems to have no preceding referent, and it is left unclear what the “wind” has “broken.” The initial suggestion of Romantic harmony is subverted by a mildly vulgar joke as the poet pokes fun at our desire to locate the transcendent in a poem. The sentence that follows then moves us towards the accidental and seemingly banal, the speaker (if it is even the same one) turning her or his attention to a “clay mustard jar” in which “the collection” looms large, the use of the definite object giving it seemingly undue grammatical weight. The passive verb construction (“is kept”) leaves the ownership and purpose of the pencils up in the air, calling attention to the kind of narrative detail that one often expects from a description of a landscape. In addition, the domestic nature of the “clay mustard jar” also brings into question the speaker’s location, which at first seemed to be outdoors, but suddenly suggests a kitchen with vaguely feminine and literally “earthy” touches. The fluid shifts among syntax, scenes, reference, tones, and subjectivity implied in these sentences are all indebted to Hejinian’s investment in a specifically American, pragmatic, postfrontier poetics of description that is antithetical to Enlightenment science and empirical reportage. With such concerns in mind, over the years Hejinian has read the travel journals of Lewis and Clark and William Bartram, Owen Wister’s The Virginian and Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, and William James’s Essays in Radical Empiricism. Teaching several of these texts in a course entitled “Romantic Theory and American Event,” she developed a theory of the poet as a “barbarian”: one who works against what is unjust in civilization with an endlessly productive poetic language “which generates an array of logics capable, in turn, of generating and responding to encounters and experience.”47 The inclusion of James in this course is directly indebted to Hejinian’s stress upon a pragmatic or neo-pragmatic understanding of experience and knowledge that both connects her work to Stein’s and underlines the persistence of a pragmatically inflected American poetic tradition. In “The Quest for Knowledge in the Western Poem,” written in 1992 originally for presentation at the Naropa Institute’s Summer Writing Program, Hejinian addresses concepts such as the “ ‘discovery of America,’ ” the West, and the “frontier,” emphasizing how “geophysical unfamiliarity” and “physical dislocation” can give rise to experiences not dissimilar to those idealized by pragmatic philosophers such as James, whose scientific methodology

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emphasizes such processes of discovery and immediate, intimate experience of the world.48 Stressing “I was born in the West,” Hejinian calls attention to her native locality, California, and to the gradual imposition upon this formerly remote American province of Western conceptions of subjectivity and knowledge in which self and object, self and other are strictly delineated, often with disturbing consequences (“Quest,” 212). Turning to the Rodney King beating and the ensuing riots in Los Angeles, she reflects upon a culture in which “immobilized, static, blameworthiness is extracted from (or given in place of) history,” overly clear and often wrongheaded conclusions or forms of “knowledge” drawn from complex interrelations of persons and events, videotaped images and courtroom deliberations. In contrast, she posits a model of knowledge and knowing drawn from James’s Essays in Radical Empiricism: “ ‘Why insist,’ asked James, ‘that knowing is a static relation out of time when it practically seems so much a function of our active life? . . . When the whole universe seems only to be making itself valid and to be still incomplete (else why its ceaseless changing?) why, of all things, should knowing be exempt?’ ” (“Quest,” 224). In her juxtaposition of contemporary race relations, national politics, Jamesian pragmatism, and the history of poetics, Hejinian implicitly stresses the ideological underpinnings of James’s own philosophy, especially as received by contemporary interpreters and progressively-minded neopragmatists such as Hilary Putnam, James Kloppenberg, and Cornel West, among whose number she should be counted.49 A postmodern poet like colleagues Ron Silliman and Charles Bernstein—the latter characterizing his “indigestible, intransigent” writing as an antidote to “thought control” and “reality control”50 —Hejinian leans toward what Kloppenberg describes as an “older variet[y] of pragmatism descended more directly from James and Dewey,” rather than a purely linguistic postmodernism derived from pragmatic principles (Kloppenberg, 116). Sharing James and Dewey’s “ideals of democracy” and “commitment to communities of inquiry rigorously testing all truth claims,” Hejinian’s poetic “restlessness” and commitment to a “language of inquiry” within both a community of poets and a wider, transnational literary and social world (witness her interest in Russian literature) all suggest a modern neo-pragmatism closely aligned with its oft-cited roots in James and, implicitly, Dewey (Kloppenberg, 116). While Hejinian does not cite Dewey directly, his vision of art’s relation to society and democratic community provides the natural political extension of James’s writings that Hejinian herself articulates. Hejinian’s avant-garde poetics is inextricably bound to the realm of the political, the public, and all that cultural convention suggests is beyond the realm of the late modernist lyric, with its connotations of a private realm

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or garden conducive to personal insight.51 Yet in a counterintuitive critical move, Hejinian understands Stein herself—especially in texts such as Stanzas in Meditation (1933)—to have been “not a political writer,” a position ostensibly due to Stein’s distrust of the public sphere, which the earlier poet associated with “identity,” a self whose publicity (like Stein’s own after the publication of the Autobiography) endangered the “entity” or “human mind” at its most free.52 Instead, she celebrates the terms of Stein’s “continuous present” as the basis for an everyday, feminine, household-oriented “happiness”—derived from Hannah Arendt and denoting “the sheer bliss of being alive”—that she understands as manifesting a quasi-existential “will to live” and generated by an endlessly productive and recurrent paradox or “aporia.”53 Even as Stein consistently paid encoded tribute to both the banality and pleasures of the everyday as well as a convention-defying “romance” within a radically unconventional household or domestic space, the fully historicized and political nature of Stein’s textual innovation is curiously elided in Hejinian’s contemporary reception. Implicitly, however, Hejinian still draws upon Stein’s example in forging pastoral poetics that reveals the seemingly feminine and domesticated landscape to be potentially transgressive and politically disruptive. Whether recognized directly or not for her contribution, Gertrude Stein had cleared this path long before, leading readers down circuitous paths that began in the south of France and continued in California. Beginning and Beginning and Beginning Again Lisa Robertson, a poet associated with the avant-garde Kootenay school of writing in Vancouver, has recently produced work that is both explicitly pastoral and radically intimate, representing at least one more way in which a progressive pastoral tradition has persisted. Writing from beyond the borders of the United States, Robertson’s work is evidence of a transnational pastoral mode that the Parisian Stein also represents, writing simultaneously from within and without the Anglo-American tradition. Foregrounding the erotic dimensions of pastoral, Robertson positions herself within a Steinian lineage that culminates in what can be termed an urban or cosmopolitan pastoral, speaking to new visions of community that exceed and defy traditional concepts of national affiliation.54 The Epigraph to Robertson’s volume XEclogue (1993; revised 1999) is taken, not surprisingly, from Stein: “Nature is not natural and that is natural enough.”55 From the beginning, Robertson calls upon Stein in order to dispel the myth of “natural” origins, the attribution of Truth and History to Nature, Nature as Logos. Rather than situate her work in a recognizable

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physical terrain, she identifies it in terms of another text. Intrigued by “Gertrude Stein’s sentence,” Robertson alludes to the spatial dimension of texts, their function as points of reference in and of themselves, aesthetic style as substance.56 At the same time, she uses Stein in order to grant herself the authority to create a new nature, one that is “natural enough”—one of many alternative natures, incomplete, in process, open to possibility, revision and reform. And Stein is not her only influence: in a final “Note” to the text, Robertson invokes Frank O’Hara and Virgil, among other writers, musicians, and artists such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (whose “City Eclogues” Robertson deems formative), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Patti Smith, Annie Lennox, Marguerite de Navarre, and Christine de Pisan. The list is wide-ranging historically and generically, as well as international, in scope, citing popular music, philosophy, correspondence, novels, poetry, and landscape history from English, French, Latin, and American sources. Physically, the book is characterized by irregular typography and absence of pagination that speaks to its wide-open boundaries, its eclectic derivations from a variety of sources whose collective influence helps to forge a sustained critique and unraveling of pastoral’s inherent tensions between nature and culture, high and low, masculine and feminine. The poem itself begins with a prologue, “How Pastoral,” in which Robertson somewhat satirically chronicles the disruptive impulses underlying the text. “I needed a genre for the times that I go Phantom,” she declares, “I needed a genre to rampage Liberty, haunt the foul freedom of silence.” Eschewing a feminine passivity, she will “rampage” “Liberty” herself, thereby denaturalizing the term’s associations with the female, abstract, and ultimate good. The syntactic hiccup by which “rampage” takes an object in “Liberty” already speaks to the kinds of ruptures this shadow writing may produce. Her intention, apparently, is to become a ghost in the workings of pastoral itself, haunting its manifestations in “historical innocence,” “Nature,” “homeland.” Eschewing these forms of “nostalgia,” she leans toward a “new world” born mysteriously of “her” (Liberty’s?) “fruiting skin”: “so elegant, so precise, so evil, all the pleasures have become my own.” Radically unmoored from North American and gendered conceptions of citizenship and virtue, the volume invokes not only “happiness” but “pleasure” in place of “liberty,” while maintaining its claims to “life.” Recasting the rhetoric of American democracy from a slight distance and across a national frontier, Robertson invites the reader into a locality experienced with a curious intensity, her poetry a profane, vaguely pornographic paean to lust and mortality, love and language. Robertson has taken the path of Hejinian and fused it with the erotic pastoral strain found in poets like Frank O’Hara, sketching a map for how

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they might be brought together and fused with still other pastoral gestures. She exults in “the Latinate happiness that appears to me as small tufted syllables in the half-light, greenish and quivering as grasses.” The “happiness” here is as erotic as that of Whitman’s “grasses” and curiously formal, pedantically calling attention to “syllables”: it is “Latinate.” “Latinate,” however, could also refer to Virgil’s Latin and the pastoral pleasures of which his shepherds sang. The “quivering,” “tufted syllables” refuse to stay in place, bending under the implied breath of speaker as seductress. Such immediacy and intimacy are typical of this book-length poem. Robertson offers up the fantastic and fanciful in letters and transcribed dialogues, fragments of correspondence between “Nancy” and a “Lady M” set amid stanzas and blocks of proselike passages that also contain the “Roaring Boys” and their retinue. As “phantom” the speaker adopts, for instance, a “sub-Garbo hauteur,” channeling a figure known for her subtle and sensual performance of gender as well as her extremely well-publicized desire for privacy. The overall effect is of a headiness, a disorienting immersion in language that is still deeply politicized, a playful form of cultural critique. With its gestures towards both hetero- and homosexual love, including its tongue-in-cheek X-rated title, Robertson’s Xeclogue, as well as later texts such as “Utopia/” “Palinodes” and The Weather, may well fall into a genre that has recently made its way into the critical discourse of modern poetry, an urban or more precisely “cosmopolitan pastoral.” Timothy Gray, for example, has discussed Frank O’Hara’s persona and poetry in terms of urban pastoral, while Terence Diggory has claimed Allen Ginsberg’s work for this tradition.57 Both arguments indicate that this pastoral strain is in certain ways like traditional pastoral—a form that encodes the simultaneous invoking and eliding of difference between privileged and nonprivileged, enabling speakers and readers to move among varying modes of subjectivity, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality within a newly capacious and at times disorienting urban space. Drawing upon Stein as well as Annette Kolodny’s early feminist critique of pastoral,58 Robertson berates “history diffused as romance; a genre’s camouflaged violence,” yet ends with an “Epilogue” that references a “bus” in her “dream of an intersection,” and a “we” who, as the “cabinet swung open” “felt a strong burst of vitality.” Adopting a plural speaker and a virtual coming out of the closet into an urban locale, Robertson alludes to the modern city as a physical space and intellectual nodal point, where history unravels and some form of refuge might be found. The postmodern urban city haunts XEclogue as often as the “natural” world, its subjects and communities leaving barely discernable traces to be deciphered. Critics of Robertson’s related work on landscape, urban

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architecture, weather, and space have invoked her investment in “emergent discourses of cosmopolitanism,” linked to poems that function as a “city, or as public architecture . . . the poem as polis.”59 While less overtly pastoral than XEclogue, these poems share that text’s investment in denaturing the subject’s experience of the world, filtering the material environment through layers of consciousness, pulling and stretching at skeins of history and sediment, revealing the contingency of selfhood and place. To the extent that subjectivity is mutable in Robertson’s pastoral texts, she gestures toward a cosmopolitan “postethnicity” similar to that proposed by David Hollinger, in which individuals and communities are marked by voluntary affiliations rather than fixed identities.60 A darker side of this project also emerges, however, for like O’Hara and Ginsberg, the unruly, fractured and at times endangered speakers of Robertson’s poem appear most at home in the city precisely because it offers anonymity as well as diversity. Equally reminiscent of what Homi Bhabha has termed “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” such a poetics speak from a local, minoritarian perspective upon global cosmopolitanism and the nature of modern citizenship.61 In both cases, the cosmopolitan nature of the modern city offers a refuge not unlike that formerly reserved for rural retreats. The sloughing off of rigid conceptions of subjectivity and citizenship allows for greater personal freedom even as it also allows for the political vulnerability and potential victimization that accompany a lack of formal affiliations. Ideally, these new, “cosmopolitan,” pragmatically pastoral texts will continue to evoke the historicized, politicized nature of experience in the world, the “nature” inherent in all aspects of everyday life and loves, arguments and desires, in sites rural and urban and in between. After all, it was precisely a turn-of-the-century sense that the structural fabric of the everyday had permanently altered, that only a pragmatic method and the arts could guide us toward the ethical frontiers of the present and future that impelled so many poets to reinvent pastoral yet again approximately 100 years ago. The grim realities of Lawrence and the lonely farms of New England, the urban parks of Paterson, the suburbs of Connecticut and environs of Reading, the apple farms of upstate New York, and the localities of Oakland and Bilignin all proved testing grounds within which one way of life met another, populations altered and were refigured, the poet observed and could not help but participate. John Dewey’s exhortation to remember that “imagination is the chief instrument of the good,” though dated in its optimism, nevertheless continues to affirm a potent understanding of art’s embeddedness within our very social structure and the nature of human experience in the world (Art, 348). If literature indeed “conveys the meaning of the past that is significant

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in present experience and is prophetic of the larger movement of the future” (Art, 345), then the illumination of a twentieth-century pastoral poetics reminds us of a past meaning that had been lost as well as the capacity of what Raymond Williams termed “residual” cultural practices such as pastoral to maintain an “alternative or even oppositional relation to the dominant culture” that is neither nostalgic nor unresponsive to that dominant culture.62 In a corrective to Williams’s observation that ideas of “rural community” too often tend to be a “leisure function of the dominant order itself”—an observation that complements Dewey’s own remarks regarding bad pastoral art decades earlier—the cumulative effect of the pastorals both rural and urban that I have examined here suggest a literary mode that may have qualities of both the “residual” and what Williams terms “emergent,” pragmatically determining “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship.”63 Over the course of the preceding chapters, I have sought to make visible both broad contours and specific examples of pastoral as a modern creative and critical practice within the United States. That the very concept of the nation—its citizens and the nature of its civil society—was and continues to be in flux is crucial to my understanding of the pastoral poetics I have examined. As we look toward the future, it is clear that the pragmatic pastorals of the early, mid-, and late-twentieth century have been continually reconstituted. As rights for women, African-Americans, other minority and ethnic groups, and homosexuals have increasingly been encoded in law—if not always instituted in practice—so has pastoral come to reflect a culture that anticipates surfeit as often as want, alternatives rather than injustice. Whether or not pastoral is deemed to have taken on new life beyond the United States, the possibility pushes us again to reconceptualize the physical and political sites within which cultural meanings are produced and to recognize our function as readers and critics in making their values and possibilities more visible. Pastoral entails alternative visions of history wedded to intimations of possibility. Yet, as Ashbery’s early pastorals suggest, simple pleasure, love, and basic rights to personhood can never be assured and are always in a kind of danger. Even as more obvious forms of social disarray slip away from general consciousness for many Americans, they persist and always will, returning with a regularity that is neither surprising nor predictable. After September 11, 2001, a different kind of pastoral will be necessary to write about the pleasures of New York City, as those pleasures might now have a melancholy edge, reminding us not only of the necessity of reconceiving the meaning and purpose of national borders, but also of the ethical abyss to which an excessive individualism or unilateralism can bring us. After

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Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court ruling that finally struck down state antisodomy laws, a gay pastoral tradition might take on a different tone, still mindful, perhaps, of our law as both amendable and vulnerable. The pastoral poetics of the future can speak to such events and their everyday iterations, confronting myths of destiny with the experience to know we might still choose our destinations.

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Introduction 1. Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, 32, lines 1–5. 2. James, “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals,” Writings 1878–1899, 851. 3. Little has been published on twentieth-century American pastoral. Marx’s seminal The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, effectively ends with a discussion of The Great Gatsby, while major recent accounts of pastoral such as Patterson’s Pastoral and Ideology and Alpers’s What Is Pastoral? discuss Frost and Stevens briefly but in little detail, focusing instead upon European examples. Recent articles on “urban pastoral” in the poetry of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Gary Snyder, James Schuyler, and Allen Ginsberg, while useful, have not established thoroughly the distinctive American qualities of these text. See Gray, “Semiotic Shepherds: Gary Snyder, Frank O’Hara, and the Embodiment of an Urban Pastoral,” Contemporary Literature 39, 523–559, also “New Windows on New York: The Urban Pastoral Vision of James Schuyler and Jane Freilicher,” Genre 33, 171–198; Diggory, “Allen Ginsberg’s Urban Pastoral,” College Literature 27, 103–118; and Vendler, “New York Pastoral: James Schuyler,” Soul Says: On Recent Poetry. Some interesting new perspectives on pastoral are included in a recent issue of Triquarterly 116, but again none offers a historically attuned case for how American pastoral of the twentieth century is distinct from other pastoral modes. 4. It was also by the late nineteenth century that class-driven formulations of highbrow and lowbrow culture were articulated, as Lawrence Levine has documented, leading to acknowledged distinctions between the cultural life of the elite and the pastimes of the working poor. See Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. 5. On African-American literature and pastoral, see Outka, Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance, Mance, Inventing Black Women: African American Women Poets and Self-Representation, Johnson, Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature, and Dixon,

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6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

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Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature. Dixon claims that—in contrast with their white counterparts—pastoral traditionally has been a vexed genre for African-American writers, as rural spaces tend to evoke a collective memory of slavery. Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery, 1, 2, 5. See Williams, The Country and the City, and Alpers, What Is Pastoral?. See also Donna Landry, Gerald McLean, and Joseph P. Ward, eds. The Country and the City Revisited: The Politics of Culture, 1550–1850. Other major accounts of the European pastoral mode include: Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal; Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric; Iser, The Fiction and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology; Toliver, Pastoral Forms and Attitudes. Walter Benn Michaels posits a desirable, pure “native” Americanness, while the pastorals I examine problematize the native/outsider dynamic. See Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism , The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. See also Trask, Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought; Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State; Mary Esteve, The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature; Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Unlike regionalist texts, pastorals tend to be written to and from the cultural center, although like regionalist literature the complexities of modern pastoral have long been ignored. See Stephanie Foote’s admirable essay, “The Cultural Work of American Regionalism” in A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America, ed. Charles L. Crow. See also Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth- Century America; Sundquist, “Realism and Regionalism,” in The Columbia History of the United States; Fetterly and Pryse, Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture and American Women Regionalists, 1850–1910: A Norton Anthology; Zagarell, “Country’s Portrayal of Community and the Exclusion of Difference,” New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs; and Foote, Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth- Century American Literature. On the regionalism of the 1930s, a related topic that I will address later, see Robert L. Dorman, “Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945,” in The New Regionalism; see also Lauren Coats and Nihad M. Farooq, “Regionalism in the Era of the New Deal,” A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America; and Szalay, New Deal Modernism. See also Lentricchia on gender and modern American poetry: Modernist Quartet. Ecocriticism tends to focuses upon the depiction of nature as an “other” with whom human beings attempt to forge an ethical relationship. Pastoral is not nature poetry; georgic is the more appropriate term for this modern phenomenon. For general applications to American literature see Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination and Writing for an Endangered World as well

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13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

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as the various approaches contained in The Eco- Criticism Reader, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Recent critiques of postwar American poetry from this perspective include Rasula, This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry; Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets; Dean, Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious: Inhabiting the Ground; Quetchenbach, Back from the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century; and Langbaum, The Word from Below: Essays on Modern Literature and Culture. On Anglo-American pastoral and the concept of an ecocritical “post-pastoral,” see Terry Gifford’s Pastoral as well as his Reconnecting with John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice. In recent years there has been a gradual resurgence of interest in pastoral generally, inspired in part by Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral, but also evidenced by recent studies such as Mathilde Skoie and Sonia Bjornstad Velaquez’s Pastoral and the Humanities: Arcadia Re-Inscribed, William Barillas’s The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland, as well as an issue of Triquarterly edited by Susan Steward and John Kinsella devoted to the pastoral in modern poetry [Triquarterly 116 (Summer 2003)]. See generally Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America for an account of the rise of the professions during this period. John Dewey, Art As Experience 19. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as Art. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, 466–467. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as Bourdieu. John Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins, 128. Empson’s characterization of pastoral contradicts Michael Denning’s characterization of a proletarian pastoral tradition, although there is some potential for overlap. While Denning tends to advocate texts written by members of the working class and Empson would automatically disqualify such texts, he would not do so if the author somehow identifies him or herself with a more bourgeois or middle class position and foregrounds, for example, his education. See Denning, “ ‘The Tenement Thinking’: Ghetto Pastorals,” in The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, 230–258; Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, 6–11. Empson, 200, 209. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Empson.” Ransom, “Mr. Empson’s Muddles,” Southern Review 4: 322–339. Further references to this essay will be cited parenthetically as “Muddles.” On Ransom’s unacknowledged range of readings, see Ann Mikkelsen, “ ‘Roger Prim, Gentleman’; Gender, Pragmatism, and the Strange Career of John Crowe Ransom,” College Literature 36: 46–74. Ransom’s discussion of irony in literature can be found in essays such as “Thoughts on Poetic Discontent,” The Fugitive 4.2: 63–64, and reappears in

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22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

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his discussion of the failed idealism of the Southern Agrarians in “Art and the Human Economy,” Kenyon Review 7: 686–687. For Ransom the ironic state of mind is the most mature and healthful, as contrasted with earlier, youthful states of idealism and dualism. Marx, The Machine in the Garden. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Marx.” For discussions of the conservative, even reactionary politics of the New Critics and Southern Agrarians, see Walter Kalaidjian, “Marketing Modern Poetry and the Southern Public Sphere,” in Marketing Modernisms: Self-promotions, Canonization, and Rereading, 297–319, and Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature. Although I see room for reading Ransom’s poetics and poetry in a more nuanced manner, the overarching claims of these essays are compelling. Alternatively, in her “Formalism and Time,” Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 March 2000: 229–251, Catherine Gallagher offers a compelling critique of Ransom’s poetics that acknowledges his reluctant acknowledgement of the temporality of the textual object he sought to capture and describe, while in “The New Critics and the Text Object,” ELH 63.1 (1996): 227–254, Doug Mao offers a nuanced account of the New Critical concept of the text as “object.” See Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture; Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism; McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James. See also Jani Scandura and Michael Thurston, eds. Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital. In her latest book, 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics, Marjorie Perloff sloughs off what she refers to as the “tired dichotomy” between modernism and postmodernism, arguing that “the real fate of first-stage modernism was one of deferral,” to be continued in a “materialist poetic” she associates with Language poetry and sees as opposed to the “ ‘true voice of feeling’ ” or mainstream “lauraeate poetry” typical of postwar poetry that perceived itself, wrongly, to be antimodernist (1, 3, 4). See also Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism and Berger, Theory of the Avant- Garde,. For additional critique of the traditional modernism/postmodernism divide and all that it entails, see Schwartz, “The Postmodernity of Modernism,” The Future of Modernism, 9–31. See Jonathan Levin’s, The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism & American Literary Modernism, which tends to expand upon the apolitical pragmatism of Richard Poirier’s Poetry and Pragmatism. See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Rorty stresses the role of the liberal, intellectual “ironist,” but this figure is incommensurable for him with real political efficacy. See Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens; West, The American Evasion of Philosophy; Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual and The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of

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29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

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Modernity; Gunn, Thinking Across the American Grain; Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture; and Mailloux, Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism. See Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thoughts, 1870–1920 and The Virtues of Liberalism. See also Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy. See Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945; DuPlessis, Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934; Davidson, Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in cold war Poetics; Filreis, Modernism from Left to Right: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism; and Thurston, Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry Between the Wars. See also Sadoff, History Matters: Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of American Culture. I adopt the concept of “transideological irony” from Linda Hutcheon’s Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. Hutcheon affirms that “irony can and does function tactically in the service of a wide range of political positions, legitimating or undercutting a wide variety of interests” (10). Transideological irony foregrounds irony’s normative “dynamic and plural relations among the text or utterance (and its context), the so-called ironist, the interpreter, and the circumstances surrounding the discursive situation” (11). See Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Pollution and Taboo; Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection; Freud, Three Essays of the Theory of Sexuality; Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky; Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression; Trotter, Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth- Century Art and Fiction; La Porte, The History of Shit; Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust; Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, eds. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson. For a sociological perspective upon waste that corroborates the idea that “value” can be transformed over time and culture, see Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Stallybrass and White, 202. Grounding their claims in readings of Bakhtin’s theory of carnival—whose politically emancipatory potential they are careful to circumscribe, noting that usually the “weak” are the victims of such revelry—as well as Freud’s explication of disgust and desire in his Three Essays of the Theory of Sexuality, Stallybrass and White demonstrate how disgust is constitutive not only of modern subjectivity but also of poetic authorship itself. “The ‘poetics’ of transgression,” they conclude, “reveals the disgust, fear, and desire which inform the dramatic self-presentation of that culture through the ‘scene of its low Other” (Stallybrass and White, 202). Such assertions are similar to those of Douglas, whose Purity and Danger articulated the analogy between “dirt” and “disorder” in a social unit and identified pollution rituals as the sociological counterpart of “a care to protect the political and cultural unity of a minority group.” (Douglas, 124). They also parallel those of Kristeva, whose

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36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

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focus is upon the “mother”—rather than excrement or its equivalent in the Freudian nurse or “low” sexual object—as the “abject” entity who “threatens one’s own and clean self, which is the underpinnings of any organization by exclusions and hierarchies” as well as “the symbolic order itself ” (Kristeva, 65, 69, 13). Miller, 254. On waste and the American Romantics, see Michael Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace. Gilmore notes that at one point in his career Emerson’s “revulsion from commodity is so great that he even identifies the visible creation with scum or dross, and implicitly with excrement” (27). For a general account of this shift in the American economy and culture, see Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds. The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980. See also Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 2d ed.; Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism; Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Class Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York. See Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash for a useful discussion of the evolution of garbage in American society. Cecelia Ticchi also discusses the function of a discourse of “waste” as opposed to a rhetoric of “efficiency” in a newly technologized, utilitarian, turn-of-the-century America in Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America. Trotter, 30. Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body. Even more suggestively, Armstrong connects such apprehensions of the body back to Bourdieu via pragmatism: “modernist interventions in the body are pragmatic, moving into the world of embodied thinking which Pierre Bourdieu calls the habitus . . . .” (7). Provoking disgust rather than horror, mess has to do with “the gradual fading . . . of doctrines of determinism” and the rise of democracy (Trotter, 30).

1 Pastoral Ideology and the Pragmatic Response 1. For thorough discussions of this phenomena, see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” The Phantom Public, 109–142; also Ryan, “Gender and Public Access: Women’s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America,” Habermas and the Public Sphere, 259–288. 2. See Marx, The Machine in the Garden; Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth; Miller, Nature’s Nation; Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, the Continent. 3. For a prominent example of the more recent environmental history, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, and Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. For a more recent account of the function of nature and

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4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

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place in American culture see Ticchi, Embodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Places. See also Hallock, From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral, 1740–1826; Comer, Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing; Handley, Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West; Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870–1906; Fresonke, West of Emerson: The Design of Manifest Destiny; Johnson, Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature. Bryant, “The Prairies,” The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 2714. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” The Frontier in American History, 1–38. Limerick, “The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century,” The Frontier in American Culture: An Exhibition at the Newberry Library, August 26, 1994–January 7, 1995: 72, 87. Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth- Century America, 54. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 170. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Jefferson.” See Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth- Century America for a discussion of “pastoral ideology” and the “frontier myth.” See Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke for the definition of “possessive individualism.” See Bloch, “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs 13: 37–58, for a discussion of how virtue came to be associated with the private, domestic sphere rather than the public and political. See Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace. In a typical reading he recounts how, “Disavowing, on the one hand, the commercial outlook of the times, Emerson, on the other, purifies and sanctions an aggressive, ‘capitalistic’ ethos of mastery over nature” (30). See Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era; Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917; Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America. See Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 533, for an account of the speech in which these words appear. Further citations of this text will be indicated by “Westbrook.” It is also interesting to note that in his account of American pragmatism, Cornel West constantly employs the rhetoric of the “frontier” in order to discuss the work of John Dewey. See West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940, 209. This text is crucial to my understanding of the links between

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15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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changing perceptions of property and the self and to my dating of this pastoral phenomenon in poetry from the turn of the century. Dewey, “Pragmatic America,” The New Republic, XXX (April 12, 1922): 185– 187; reprinted in Pragmatism and American Culture, 60. These mixed feelings towards America’s pastoral legacy were and are very much the result of concurrent desires for modernization and longings for traditional forms of social life, both of which intensified at the turn of the century. As intellectual and cultural historians have long observed, cultural debates from at least 1900 onward have focused in large part upon developments in modern American concepts of “personality” and “community.” Warren Susman originally chronicled the shift from “character” to “personality” over the course of the century in Culture As History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century, 271–286. R. Jackson Wilson and Jean B. Quandt have stressed, respectively, the “failure of individualism” in nineteenth-century thought and the related profound significance of “communitarian thought” in early twentieth-century American culture, see Quandt, From the Small Town to the Great Community: The Social Thought of Progressive Intellectuals; R. Jackson Wilson, In Quest of Community: Social Philosophy in the United States, 1860– 1920. T.J. Jackson Lears has documented a turn-of-the-century antimodern desire for a more authentic selfhood and traditional society; see No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920. Casey Nelson Blake has presented a compelling argument for reading young American intellectuals Randolph Bourne, Lewis Mumford, Waldo Frank, and Van Wyck Brooks in terms of their shared “communitarian vision of selfrealization through participation in democratic culture.” Sharing pragmatism’s historical moment, such conceptions of the self and society also were articulated in terms of Turner’s argument. See Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford, 2. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Blake.” Dewey, Individualism Old and New, 5, 41. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as Individualism. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 41, 359. James, Pragmatism, 127, 16. Frank, Our America, 9. Brooks, “Toward a National Culture,” Seven Arts I:547, as cited in Nelson, 125. Mumford, The Story of Utopias, 301, 302, 307. Bourne, “John Dewey’s Philosophy,” The Radical Will: Randolph Bourne, Selected Writings 1911–1918, 335; Bourne, “Twilight of Idols,” The Radical Will, 336–337. Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study in American Experience and Culture, 186. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Mumford.” Ransom, “Reconstructed but Unregenerate,” I’ ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition , 8. Although Ralph Waldo Emerson certainly wrote on political issues, his articulation of a proto-pragmatic thought and aesthetics simply did not address, for

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26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

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historical reasons, the shifts central to James and Dewey’s work. In this sense, my understanding of pragmatism’s post–Civil War genealogy is in keeping with Louis Menand’s account of pragmatism’s roots in The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. In contrast, many American cultural and literary critics who discuss the Emersonian lineage of pragmatism, such as Richard Poirier, do so in order to avoid questions of ideology, which I see as central to pragmatism’s ultimate implications as a philosophy and practical methodology. William James, Pragmatism, 28, 14. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “James.” See Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 116, for a discussion of James and Dewey as ironist and optimist respectively. My understanding of pragmatism and liberal thought during this period is strongly informed by Kloppenberg’s work. James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” The Writings of William James, 669. John Dewey to Scudder Klyce, note enclosed with letter of 29 May 1915, The Correspondence of John Dewey, vol. 1 1871–1918, 3rd ed. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 8. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Experience.” Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York, 1920) Middle Works, 131–2, cited in Kloppenberg, 76. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 213. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Public.” My discussion of this book is informed in part by Westbrook’s reading of Dewey’s stance on democracy and community. See Westbrook, 314. Westbrook emphasizes the connection that Dewey felt to Thomas Jefferson’s understanding of the American community and democracy, a point that is not insignificant to my understanding of Dewey as a latter-day pastoralist. See Westbrook, 438, 454. See, for example, Yi-Fu Tuan’s landmark text Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, which inaugurated this genre of criticism in the United States. Dewey, Art as Experience, 3. My discussion of this text also has been influenced by Westbrook, 393. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Art.” Dewey, Ethics (1932) in John Dewey: The Later Works, vol. 7, 350, as cited in Westbrook, 416. I generally understand pragmatism to entail a democratic, progressive agenda, as is suggested by Westbrook and Kloppenberg in addition to a number of literary critics including Frank Lentricchia, Cornel West, Ross Posnock, and Giles Gunn. Westbrook, 300–318. Perhaps one of Williams’s best known lines is an excerpt from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” Williams, The Collected Poems, 318. This idea resurfaces in Rosa A. Eberly’s Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres, in which she uses Dewey in order to take issue with Habermas’s negative assessment of modern culture. Eberly posits that ordinary readers enact the formation

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of public spheres in their articulated and published reactions to controversial texts. 41. Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society. 42. See Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking,” and Robert Westbrook, “Pragmatism and Democracy: Reconstructing the Logic of John Dewey’s Faith,” The Revival of Pragmatism, 83–127; 128–140, for overviews of pragmatism’s lineage in the twentieth century, as well as a refutation of Rorty’s conception of Dewey, respectively. 43. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

2 Tramp Culture and the Cult of Pan: Robert Frost’s Pastoral of Class Mobility 1. Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 185. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Thompson.” 2. On London’s tramp writings, see Kenneth Kusmer, Down & Out, On the Road: The Homeless in American History, 178–180. 3. Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey, Songs of Vagabondia, 2, 3. 4. In addition to articles about lynching, government corruption, and accounts of tramping by figures such as William Aspinwall, the Independent also published a fair amount of poetry. William Aspinwall was a real tramp whose correspondence with reformer John James Cook was published serially by Cook in 1901–02. Harry Kemp’s autobiographical account of tramp life, which later became Tramping on Life: An Autobiographical Narrative, was published in The Independent on June 8, 1911. Frost’s indebtedness to late nineteenth-century verse by women is chronicled in Karen Kilcup’s Robert Frost and the Feminine Literary Tradition and in Paul Giles’s “From Decadent Aesthetics to Political Fetishism: The ‘Oracle Effect’ of Robert Frost’s Poetry,” American Literary History 12: 713–744 5. All dates for Frost’s poems are based upon those in Jeffery S. Cramer, Robert Frost among His Poems: A Literary Companion to the Poet’s Own Biographical Contexts and Associations. 6. Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays , 509. Further citations of this volume will be cited parenthetically as Collected. 7. When Ezra Pound tried to place Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man” with the magazine Smart Set in the summer of 1913, he was informed by the magazine’s editor that they had decided against the poem “because things like that were a dime a dozen, in fact he had just printed a poem about a hired man written by the newly discovered Ohio-born ‘tramp poet,’ Harry Kemp.” See Thompson, 437. 8. While living in England, Frost was keenly aware of the wide popularity of the self-declared “super-tramp” poet, W.H. Davies, whom Frost disliked on both professional and personal grounds. As Tyler Hoffman has observed, Frost criticized Davies as “ ‘an unsophisticated nature poet of the day— absolutely

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9. 10.

11.

12.

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uncritical untechnical untheoretical.’ ” See Hoffman, Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry, 15. For more on Frost’s attitude toward Davies, see Walsh, Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost, 1912–1915, 153. See also Frost, Robert Frost and Sidney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship, 39, 51. See also Hooper, Time to Stand and Stare: A Life of W. H. Davies, the Tramp Poet, 81–84. For Frost’s views on Lindsay, see Frost, The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, 64–66. For examples of Lindsay’s tramp poetry, see “The Tramp’s Excuse and Other Poems” and “Rhymes to be Traded for Bread” in The Poetry of Vachel Lindsay, ed. Dennis Camp. Frost also was suspicious of Carl Sandburg’s populist stance, forged in part by Sandburg’s own, more successful attempts at youthful tramping. For Sandburg’s account of his tramp experiences, see Always the Young Strangers. While both Lindsay and Sandburg made appearances at Chicago’s Dill Pickle Club, a social club for tramps, Frost never mentions the venue nor would have been likely to perform there. See DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America, 100. By the late 1910s and early 1920s, Frost also became familiar with (and disparaged) the work of Maxwell Bodenheim, yet another “tramp poet.” For examples of Bodenheim’s tramp poems, see “Dialogue between Past and Present Poe,” Advice and “Poet-Vagabond Grown Old,” in Minna and Myself. At the time of Frost’s death his personal library contained volumes by Carman, Kemp, Davies, Lindsay, Sandburg, and Bodenheim as well as a volume edited by Stephen Graham entitled The Tramp’s Anthology. See Tutein, Robert Frost’s Reading: An Annotated Bibliography. Robert Park, The Collected Papers of Robert Ezra Park, vol. 2, 95. On “disorder” and “matter out of place” as kinds of “dirt,” see Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, 35. Michael Trask’s Cruising Modernism also addresses Park’s text in order to point out how new disciplines such as sociology tended to “embrace . . . the irrational and perverse as constituents of the social world,” arguing that “the disobedience and lawlessness that social theorists located in the erotic realm had a close affinity to the disobedience that contemporaries saw as the defining attribute of the class other” (4, 10). Whitman, Specimen Days, 330. In a footnote to the same essay, dated February 1979: “I saw today a sight I had never seen before—and it amazed, and made me serious; three quite good-looking American men, of respectable personal presence, two of them young, carrying chiffonier-bags on their shoulders, and the usual long iron hooks in their hands, plodding along, their eyes cast down, spying for scraps, rags, bones, &c.” (330). On the history of tramps, see Depastino and Kusmer; on the “discovery” of unemployment see Ringenbach, Tramps and Reformers, 1873–1916: The Discovery of Umemployment in New York. See also Miller, On the Fringe: The Dispossessed in America, 25–50; Bruns, Knights of the Road: A Hobo History. For a cultural history of the tramp in the U.S., see Cresswell, The Tramp in America, and for an early critical account of the tramp in American literature see Seelye, “The American Tramp: A Version of the Picaresque,” American Quarterly, 15, 535–553.

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13. See Toby Higbie, “Crossing Class Boundaries: Tramp Ethnographers and Narratives of Class in Progressive Era America,” Social Science History, vol. 21, no. 4, 559–592, especially 572, also Kusmer, 8. In addition to London (see note 2) prominent tramp narratives of the period included: London, The Road; Flynt, Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life; Wyckoff, The Workers: An Experiment in Reality, The East; Stephen Crane’s articles “New Lawlessness” and “The Men in the Storm,” can be found in The New York City Sketches of Stephen Crane, and Related Pieces, 315–22, 283–93 as cited in Kusmer, 300. 14. See Eric Schocket, “Undercover Explorations of the ‘Other Half,’ or the Writer as Class Transvestite,” Representations, 64: 110–11, 126. 15. See Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working- Class Culture in America, rev. ed., 150, for a discussion of depictions of tramps aimed at a working-class audience. 16. See Depastino, 58, on the tramp as disenfranchised “producer”; see Depastino, 64, on Carlos Schwantes use of the term “wageworkers’ frontier.” 17. See Hoffman, 1–28; see also Hoffman, “Robert Frost and the Politics of Labor,” Modern Language Studies 29: 109–135; Donald G. Sheehy, “Stay Unassuming: The Lives of Robert Frost,” The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost, ed. Robert Faggen, 7–34. As Roy Rosenzweig notes in Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 “the nineteenthcentury American working-class experience [is] an intensely local experience” (3). 18. For a discussion of the rise of the middle class in the early nineteenth century and its coalescence in the late decades of the century, see Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism, Chapter 1, 8. See Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900, 296, for a reference to Stephen Ross’s discussion of blurring class lines in the late nineteenth century. 19. In texts such as Progress and Poverty (1879) and Social Problems (1883), George was one of the first to recognize the phenomenon of unemployment and one of original protesters against a culture of “tramps and millionaires,” a critique directed at those George perceived as having amassed too much land, thereby forcing honest producers off the land and into the cities. Favoring a “land tax” that would rectify the situation, George’s theories likely influenced Frost’s initial perspective upon tramps. See Henry George, Social Problems, chapter 13; see also George, Progress and Poverty, books VI–VIII. 20. Although Ezra Pound praised Frost’s work, the terms in which he did so—and Frost’s violent objection to them—are revealing. Writing to fellow poet F. S. Flint, Frost complains: And yet compare the nice discrimination of his review of me with that of yours. Who will show me the correlation between anything I ever wrote and his quotation from the Irish, You may sit on a middan and dream stars. You may sit on a sofa and dream garters. But I must not get libre again. But tell me I implore what on earth is a middan if it isnt a midden and where the

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21. 22. 23.

24.

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hell is the fitness of a word like that in connection with what I wrote on a not inexpensive farm. Frost’s distress at Pound’s comparison of his poetry with that of the country Irish and his bitter if not violent observation concerning the “midden,” or manure or waste pile in relation to his relatively gentlemanly brand of farming, begin to suggest some of the anxieties surrounding class, nationalism, cultural production, and waste contained in his writings on tramps. See Ezra Pound, “A Boy’s Will,” Poetry 2 (May 1913): 72–74, as cited in Robert Frost: The Critical Reception, ed. Linda Wagner-Martin, 2. In a letter of January 2, 1915, addressed to Sidney Cox, Frost worries about the potentially negative effect of the somewhat notorious impresario’s good will. He complains that Pound will “make me an exile for life” by including him in his London circle of “American literary refugees.” He continues, “Another such review as the one in Poetry and I shan’t be admitted at Ellis Island” (Letters, 147). While during his years in England, Frost could ironically call attention to his somewhat humble position as an aspiring poet by referring to his family’s address as “The Bung Hole” (derived from The Bungalow). See Selected Letters of Robert Frost, 71. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Letters.” My knowledge of turn-of-the-century Lawrence is based in large part on Donald B. Cole’s Immigrant City: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845–1921. My discussion of the IWW is indebted to Melvin Dubofsky’s We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World. As Roy Rosenzweig has pointed out, by the early nineteenth century the term “extravagance” was commonly associated with critiques of the working class and their newly won freedoms, such as opportunities for social drinking in saloons and the general demand for amusements such as parks and eventually moving pictures (Rosensweig, 47). Concurring with Hoffman’s assertion that Frost drew upon the works of James as well as Henri Bergson not only to “keep in step with other modernist artists” but also “by his awareness of the democratic politics implicated in their writings,” I also emphasize the ways in which both James’s and Frost’s writings on tramps encode the ethical challenge presented by unemployment and the phenomenon of mass homelessness (Hoffman, 30). While acknowledging Frank Lentricchia’s observation that Frost’s Jamesian aesthetics must be read as “arguments over what shape the American social future should take” as well as Robert Faggen’s discussion of Frost as a pragmatic Darwinian whose pastoral vision consists of “an ongoing battlefield in which hierarchies are made and unmade,” I see Frost’s tramp poetics as a complication of James’s more apolitical and at times naïve writings on the working (and nonworking) poor. See Lentricchia, “Lyric in the Culture of Capitalism,” American Literary History 1: 67; Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet; Faggen, Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin, 24. In addition, whereas Richard Poirier reads Frost as a linguistic skeptic in a pragmatic Emersonian vein, divorced from all historical and political realities, and Frank Lentricchia’s early work emphasizes Frost’s Jamesian,

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25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

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post-Kantian tendency to emphasize the role of “active consciousness” in shaping our experience of the world, I suggest that Frost’s poetics gesture beyond the parameters of formalist and phenomenological forms of pragmatism to emphasize the self ’s interactions with the world, the nation, and his immediate or “local” community. See Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing ; Lentricchia, Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self; Levin, The Poetics of Transition. William James, “Psychology: Briefer Course,” Writings 1878–1899, 107. On the tramp as irresponsible, see Kusmer, 11. James, “Psychology,” 176. James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” Writings, 847. Further citations of this essay will be cited parenthetically as “OCB.” The book from which “The Lantern Bearers” is excerpted also contains Stevenson’s account of his own tramping adventures in the United States, which culminate in his physical collapse in California. See Stevenson, Across the Plains: Leaves from the Notebook of an Emigrant between New York and San Francisco. On Beaudelaire’s flâneur see Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Illuminations, 195, note 1. Although Frost’s private library contains a copy of Dewey’s work and Frost was acquainted with the philosopher during his lifetime, this connection has never been explored. Frost’s personal library, currently owned by New York University, contains Dewey’s The Philosophy of John Dewey; at one point Frost documents meeting Dewey in Florida and indicates at least an acquaintanceship. For Frost’s account of meeting Dewey, see Robert Frost and Sidney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship: “Kathleen and I went down to Key West to see old friends. It is a cramped little island. We had a talk with John Dewey there. He’s eighty-five.” (251–2). Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 184. Dewey, Art As Experience, 9. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as Art. Frost makes a subtle allusion to Burrell in a letter that situates a curious discussion of English masculinity in the context of flowers and nature in general, the distinctly pastoral and hence nationally representative settings that were hallmarks of his own poetry. In the letter addressed from “The Bung Hole” Frost reflects upon how: [T]he English—they all have time to dig in the ground for the unutilitarian flower. I mean the men. It marks the great difference between them and our men. I like flowers you know but I like em wild, and I am rather the exception than the rule in an American village. Far as I have walked in pursuit of the Cypripedium, I have never met another in the woods on the same quest. Americans will dig for peas and beans and such utilities but not if they know it for posies. I knew a man who was a byword in five townships for the flowers he tended with his own hand. Neighbors kept hens and let them run loose just to annoy him. (Letters, 71)

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

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What is most intriguing about Frost’s suggestion that he (and Barrell) might be perceived as homosexual, or the kind of posy called a “pansy” (and all it would connote for him concerning wasteful or nonprocreative sexual and other energies), is that it seems oddly lacking in the kinds of anxiety that one might expect this kind of self-description to generate. The term “pansy” came to refer to homosexuals during precisely this period, according to the OED, with the first published references dated around 1929, but its vernacular surely predated its printed usage. Frost’s use of the term “posies” also links flowers to poetry (or “poesy”) itself. Robert Frost, Prose Jottings of Robert Frost, 65. The brackets are the editorial markings applied to Frost’s “jottings” by the volume’s editors. Letters, 80. Frost, “On Extravagance,” Collected, 902. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 42. Nevertheless, Frost was constantly in debt and while living in England was observed by Frank Flint to be living in near poverty. See Walsh, Into My Own, p. 117. Frost, Interviews with Robert Frost, 14. As such, this Frostian “extravagance” is unlike the apolitical Frostian “extravagance” as discussed by Richard Poirier. At the same time, this pose is intended to augment the verse’s value. Despite—or as a complement to—his pose as a gentleman farmer, Frost liked to imagine himself as “[his] own salesman,” putting himself or rather his poems “on the market” as would an experienced speculator or person of means (Untermeyer, 29). In novels such as William Dean Howells’ The Minister’s Charge (1887) a young New England poet comes to Boston only to end up penniless and a resident of the Wayfarers’ Lodge, where along with tramps he is compelled to chop wood for room and board. See Howells, The Minister’s Charge. See Dimock, “The Economy of Pain: The Case of Howells,” Raritan 9: 99–119. See Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, 234. See Szalay’s New Deal Modernism for a revisionary perspective on Frost and the New Deal, particularly in the context of poems such as “Build Soil.” One evening while out walking with his son, Carol, Frost encountered a woman in a carriage who accused him of prowling. According to a neighbor, the woman was a former neighbor who had gone to Boston as a nurse, married, but then run away with a patient back to her native farm. Ever since, she had lived in fear of her husband coming after her and her lover. (Thompson 344–45) For an intriguing discussion of Frost’s relationship to contemporary farming, see Farland, “Modernist Versions of Pastoral: Poetic Inspiration, Scientific Expertise, and the ‘Degenerate’ Farmer,” American Literary History 19, 905–36. See Waye, The Forgotten Man and Other Poems, 26.

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49. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, radio address, April 7, 1932, . To prevent increasing homelessness among farmers and honorable war veterans, Roosevelt called for a national program to protect farms and homes from foreclosure while increasing the purchasing power of the working classes through the lowering of tariffs on imports. Inverting the concept of the “forgotten man” as promulgated by Social Darwinist William Sumner in 1883—the “industrious” working-class laborer unfairly taxed to support “paupers” whose vice and “extravagance” made them the undeserving recipients of government charity—Roosevelt’s “forgotten man” of the 1930s was an impoverished figure toward whom the nation had distinct obligations. Sumner, “The Forgotten Man,” Sumner Today: Selected Essays of William Graham Sumner, 3–26. Originally delivered as a speech on January, 30, 1883. 50. Waye, 26. 51. See Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture. 52. Poirier, Robert Frost, 272–275. 53. See Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism, 227–233 for a discussion of how Frost can be understood as one of a range of writers who internalized a New Deal logic in which art becomes “not a system of commodities at all, but an administratively coordinated process of production” that as an end in itself, insured, in effect, a federal buyer according to the state’s new logic of universal insurance as a form of and means to ideological legitimacy (6). 54. William Carlos Williams, letter to Kay Boyle, 1932, Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, 132.

3 “The Truth About Us”: Pastoral, Pragmatism, and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson 1. Williams, Paterson, 8. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Paterson.” 2. This Kore is a distinctly modern version of the Greek Kore figure, traditionally a virgin who, despite her violation, is essentially uncorrupted (and often associated with both Demeter and Persephone). See Ochs, Behind the Sex of God: Toward a New Consciousness—Transcending Matriarchy and Patriarchy, 78–79. 3. Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, 263. 4. Mariani, 408. 5. Letter to Charles Henri Ford, March 30, 1938, Williams, Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, 169. 6. Williams’s provocative decision to write Paterson, an epic with prominent pastoral interludes, during World War II can be compared with the work of fellow poets who turned to the lyric and its “first-person singular depth of feeling,” as analyzed by Lorrie Goldensohn in Dismantling Glory: TwentiethCentury Soldier Poetry, 2. See also Keith Alldritt in Modernism in the Second World War: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Basil Bunting and Hugh

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7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

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MacDiarmid; and Susan Schweik, A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War. A previous version of this article was published as “ ‘The Truth About Us’: Pastoral, Pragmatism and Paterson,” American Literature 75.3 (September 2003): 601–627. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. Williams characterized Randall Jarrell’s negative reaction to Book Four and his own response in I Wanted to Write a Poem, 79. Peter Schmidt much later comments upon Paterson’s nightmarish qualities in “Paterson and the Epic Tradition,” Critical Essays on William Carlos Williams, 172. Geoffrey Hartman reads Williams as interested primarily in textual purity in “Purification and Danger 1: American Poetry,” Criticism in the Wilderness, 117–121. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 2. Douglas, 124. Williams, “Marianne Moore,” Selected Essays, 128. For other perspectives on dirt in Williams’s work in addition to Hartman’s see Smedman’s article “Skeleton in the Closet: Williams’s Debt to Gertrude Stein,” William Carlos Williams Review, 21–35, and see Altman, “The Clean and the Unclean: Williams Carlos Williams, Europe, Sex, and Ambivalence,” William Carlos Williams Review, 10–20. Smedman tends to see Williams, like Stein, as interested in filth as such, while Altman reads Williams in the conventional “modernist” mode, locating filth in Europe and aligning his own work with the clean elements of the New World. Mariani, 246. See Tashjian, William Carlos Williams and the American Scene, 1920–1940, 100–105. Williams’s worries were not unfounded—for example, one of Williams’s sons recalled being queried by a Rutherford townsman about his father and how those “shitty” verses of his were coming along (Tashjian, 20). William Carlos Williams, Interviews with William Carlos Williams, 64. Lawrence Buell offers an assessment of Williams as “bioregionalist” in an ecocritical take upon the concept of localism. See “Whitmanian Modernism: William Carlos Williams as Bioregionalist,” Writing for an Endangered World, 109–120. William Carlos Williams, “Yours, O Youth” from Contact in Selected Essays, 32. William Carlos Williams, Selected Letters, 224. Paul Mariani repeatedly calls attention to John Dewey’s influence upon Williams: “Williams’s basic affinity with Dewey’s liberal philosophy—his dissatisfaction with all forms of oppression, like procrustean educational practices, the recidivism of many of his colleagues in the medical profession who had steadfastly refused to allow women a choice in the use of contraceptives, his own refusal to turn the other way when he saw evidences of wife beating and child abuse—all this had come through untouched, despite his political

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20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

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differences with Dewey. In ‘47, these were still avant-garde ideas in his part of the world, as avant-garde as his search for a new measure” (Mariani, 544–45). More recently, John Beck has explored the “ideological confluence” of Dewey’s and Williams’ work in Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics, as has David Kadlec in Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture. While Beck’s argument is often congruent with my own—with exceptions—I find Kadlec’s claims for pragmatism’s “anarchist” tendencies to be out of keeping with either James or Dewey’s politics or practices. In Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson, Alec Marsh presents a useful analysis of Williams’s Jeffersonianism and Dewey’s influence on Williams. John Dewey, “Americanism and Localism,” Characters and Events: Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, 538. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Americanism.” See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 for a discussion of the history of the word “culture.” William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I 1909–1939, 42–43. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Collected.” Williams, I Wanted To Write a Poem, 21. Further references to this book will be cited parenthetically as Poem. William Carlos Williams, “Marianne Moore,” Selected Essays, 125. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 183–4. Beck characterizes all of Williams’s pastoralism and pragmatic localism as “nostalgic,” including his desire for “contact” (87) and his characterization of the poor in “To Elsie” (90). Beck seems to contradict these conclusions, however, in his more favorable reading of Paterson’s impetus “toward a retrieval of what he considers locally appropriate, not to restore a golden age, but simply in order not to abandon what might in fact be most suited to the environment: service, duty, free and open exchange, communal solidarity, dispersed rather than consolidated power.” (152). For another critique of Beck on Dewey, see Astrid Franke, “William Carlos Williams and John Dewey on the Public, Its Problems, and Its Poetry,” REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 269–292. Their names are traditional pastoral appellations. See Altman, “The Clean and the Unclean: William Carlos Williams, Europe, Sex and Ambivalence,” 10–20 for a more detailed discussion of Williams’s feelings regarding homosexual behavior he witnessed in Europe. See Mariani’s biography of Williams for a rendition of this traditional reading of the scene (614–617); even Joseph Riddel’s otherwise innovative reading of Paterson as “the poetic deconstruction of history . . . and a reconstitution of history as poetry, as the search or the ‘effort’ toward ‘virtue’ ” reproduces this same assumption about the Corydon and Phyllis relationship and the ironic nature of American pastoral. Riddel, The Inverted Bell: Modernism and the

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30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

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Counterpoetics of William Carlos Williams 237–241. See also Sankey’s discussion of Book Four in his A Companion to William Carlos Williams’s Paterson. While Phyllis and Corydon have been read all too often solely as crude New World/Old World allegories of purity and pollution, it is clear that both emerge as intricate, sympathetic characters who transcend such stereotypes. What is significant is that readers in the past (such as Schmidt and Jarrell) have so readily accepted the potentially homosexual nature of their relationship as proof that Corydon especially embodies a type of “dirt.” Other readers are more sanguine about Williams’s rude incursion into the “cultural,” and all that term signifies in terms of political, social, and economic privilege. For Joseph Riddel, the “dissonance” of Book IV is a symptom of the “dissonance” of language itself and therefore of the text’s deconstructive tendencies (Riddel, 237). J. Hillis Miller stresses the radical nature of Williams’s poetic ontology, its suspension of subject/object relations in the interest of establishing a space that is purely linguistic, or a moment of pure, atemporal naming. See Miller, Poets of Reality, 381. Yet Miller, like Hartman, is overly invested in perceiving Williams’s poetics as striving towards a kind of linguistic purity, ignoring the central role of dirt and pollutants as aesthetic and ethical catalysts. Both neglect to take into consideration the role of the pastoral mode in Williams’s work. Only Peter Schmidt has addressed the role of pastoral in Williams’s work, but his argument primarily concerns the idealization of American industry by Williams and the Precisionist school of artists. See “Some Versions of Modernist Pastoral,” Comparative Literature, 383–406. It is interesting to note that Williams included one more description of these islands and their neighborhood in an earlier draft of the poem: it was near here that the British imprisoned “Nathan Hale (in an outhouse).” The emergence of the American revolutionary within the excremental zone is a perfect example of how Williams associates pollution with those people and elements that disrupt traditional distinctions within and among nation-states, in addition to other kinds of political and cultural boundaries. See Williams’s papers at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Previously unpublished material: Copyright © 2001 by Paul H. Williams and the Estate of William Eric Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., agents. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 184. Williams’s perspective here can be said to resonate closely with his friend Kenneth Burke’s definition of comic “acceptance” insofar as both “provide [a] charitable attitude towards people” that promotes dialogue, pushing readers to work toward a “maximum consciousness” through their observations of human relationships in all their complexity and foolishness. See Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 166, 171. See also Brian Bremen’s William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture for an insightful and sustained consideration of the confluences of Williams and Burke’s thought. See Williams papers at the Beinecke Library for a reference to Phyllis as having “big thighs, the left one / scarred.” Previously unpublished material: Copyright

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35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

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© 2001 by Paul H. Williams and the Estate of William Eric Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., agents. Sankey, 172. In a 1951 letter to Robert Lowell, Williams writes in reference to Corydon: “I like the old gal of whom I spoke, she was at least cultured and not without feeling of a distinguished sort. I don’t mind telling you that I started writing of her in a satiric mood, but she quite won me over. I ended by feeling admiration for her and real regret at her defeat” (Selected Letters, 302). In a June 19, 1951, letter to Marianne Moore, Williams defends Corydon on similar terms: “I rather like my old gal who appears in the first pages of Paterson IV (if she’s one of the things you object to); she has a hard part to play, and to my mind plays it rather well. As far as the story goes, she represents the ‘great world’ against the more or less primitive world of the provincial city. She is informed, no sluggard, uses her talents as she can. There has to be that world against which the other tests itself ” (Selected Letters, 304). Sankey, 175. See Williams’s papers at Beineke Library, Yale University. Previously unpublished material: Copyright © 2001 by Paul H. Williams and the Estate of William Eric Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., agents. In notes on this section of Book IV, Williams wrote that he intended this section to display Corydon’s humanity: “Corydon’s poem is to be fully developed: it shows her intelligence, her appreciation for a situation, a developed understanding with considerable humility of what’s going on—overcome by her sense of loss—and her force of character in her lust (defeated) It is a real defeat for her as she is the one who suffers, not Phyllis.” See Williams’s papers at Beinecke Library, Yale University. Previously unpublished material: Copyright © 2001 by Paul H. Williams and the Estate of William Eric Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., agents. See Sankey, 70. For background on the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913 and the Pageant, see Tripp, The I. W. W. and the Paterson Silk Strike; Martin Green, New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant; Norwood, About Paterson: The Making and Unmaking of an American City. See also Paul R. Cappucci, William Carlos Williams’s Poetic Response to the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike. See Williams’s notes, “Paterson: Book II,” Beinecke Library, Yale University. Previously unpublished material: Copyright © 2001 by Paul H. Williams and the Estate of William Eric Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., agents. To Babette Deutsch, July 28, 1947, Selected Letters, 259. See Williams notes, “Paterson: Book I,” Beinecke Library, Yale University. Previously unpublished material: Copyright © 2001 by Paul H. Williams and the Estate of William Eric Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., agents. Sankey, 71.

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45. This incident and Williams response both are described by Alan Filreis in Wallace Stevens and the Actual World 181. Filreis also reads Stevens’s “Description without Place” as far more politicized than have most previous critics, specifically in its attention to the phenomenon of postwar, cross-cultural readership. 46. William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems, 163–166. The poem first appeared in the Kenyon Review 8 (Winter 1946): 55–58.

4

“Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!”: Wallace Stevens’s Figurations of Masculinity

1. “Eclogue” appears only in a letter of April 10, 1909 to Elsie Moll (Stevens’ future wife). See Letters of Wallace Stevens, 138–139. “The Silver Plough Boy” was originally included in Harmonium but omitted from future editions. See letter to Alfred A. Knopf, October 16, 1930, Letters, 259. Significantly, “The Silver Plough Boy,” like Frost’s Pan, is a racially marked pastoral figure (a “black figure” who “dances”) that Stevens experimented with in this one poem only to discard it in most later poetry for “fat” pastoral figures. As I note in my discussions of “Jumbo” and “Red Man Reading,” however, “fat” retains a racial connotation for Stevens in some instances, although it is more often associated with a “native” whiteness. For “The Silver Plough Boy,” see Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 17. 2. Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, 300. Further references will be noted parenthetically as “Letters.” 3. A previous version of this chapter was published as “ ‘Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!’: Wallace Stevens Figurations of Masculinity,” Journal of Modern Literature 27.1/2 (Fall 2003): 105–121. © Indiana University Press, 2004. This article is reprinted with permission from the publisher. 4. In yet another disorderly twist to Stevens’s attempts at genealogy, according to Bart Eeckout, “How Dutch Was Stevens?” Wallace Stevens Journal, 37–43, Stevens’s best claim to Dutch ancestry was likely not Dutch at all but Belgian or German. 5. See Stevens’s discussion of these terms in the context of his essay on John Crowe Ransom, “John Crowe Ransom: Tennessean,” (1948), Opus Posthumous, 247– 249. This essay will be discussed later at more length. 6. See Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport and American Society for a discussion of these concerns. 7. For example, see Joseph Riddel’s chapter “The Hero’s Head” in The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens; also Milton J. Bates, “Supreme Fiction and Medium Man” and “Major Man,” in Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self; and James Longenbach, “The Fellowship of Men that Perish,” and “It Must Be Masculine,” in Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. 8. See Gorham Munson’s well-known attack on Stevens, “The Dandyism of Wallace Stevens,” originally published in The Dial (November 1925), 78–82. Recently, several critics have begun to discuss the gendered aspects of Stevens’s

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9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

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sense of self, including Jacqueline Brogan (The Violence Within The Violence Without: Wallace Stevens and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Poetics) and Patricia Rae (The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound and Stevens), and Frank Lentricchia (Modernist Quartet). See Kimmel’s Manhood in America, Rotundo’s American Manhood, as well as Green’s Fit for America. See Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization, 6–19, for an account of this distinction. Helen Vendler suggests the former reading, stressing that Stevens “identifies with the bantam,” a smaller lyric animal approaching a grander epic tradition. See “Wallace Stevens,” in The Columbia History of American Poetry, 379–380. See also Eleanor Cook, Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens, 70; and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “ ‘Hoo, Hoo, Hoo’: Some Episodes in the Construction of Modern Whiteness,” American Literature 67:678–680. See Kimmel, Manhood in America, 138, for a discussion of this phenomenon. See Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America for a history of the sport and the ways in which it reflected contemporary anxieties regarding class, race, and gender. By late adolescence, Stevens worried about his body’s physical condition, writing to his father during college that he longed for summer activities that would enable “muscular development” (Letters, 19). Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 75–76. Further references will be cited parenthetically as Collected. Carl Van Vechten, “Rogue Elephant in Porcelain,” The Yale University Library Gazette 138: 42. See Rosemarie Thomson’s “Introduction” to Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, especially pages 33–36 and 41–44, for a discussion of physical disability as a kind of “dirt” and creative disorder as well as its relation to the kind of normative subjectivity and citizenship proposed by Emerson. Stevens himself was diagnosed as an “acromegalic type,” a condition “in which the thorax, head, and extremities continued to grow long after normal development has stopped.” Such a disease probably heightened Stevens’s sense of his body as grotesquely, even freakishly large. See Joan Richardson, Wallace Stevens, A Biography: The Later Years, 1923–55, 45. See Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat, 89. Further citations will be parenthetical. See Richardson, Wallace Stevens, The Later Years, 45, 118; Letters, 749. Further references to Richardson’s biography will be noted parenthetically as “Richardson.” The domestic sphere for Stevens, as for all Americans, soon became key to the control of appetite and waist size: “the muscle of domestic science was flexed in the kitchen . . . here one fought off the fear of abundance and the golem of waste” (Schwartz 82). In 1931 he even sent Elsie and Holly to a special Vassar conference on “Euthenics,” a series of courses designed to help housewives improve

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Notes

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

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their childrearing and domestic skills by applying the “naturalist” conclusions of philosophers such as John Dewey. In addition to courses on the psychology of the child, Elsie likely attended courses on “Physiology and Nutrition,” with a strong emphasis on “maintenance of weight,” as well as “Food Selection, Preparation, and Service.” [For information on this course, see the Bulletin of Vassar College 21 (Jun.-Aug. 1931), Subject File 26.5, VC Vassar Summer Inst., 1931, courtesy of Vassar College Library, Archives and Special Collections.] Although Elsie was universally acknowledged to be an excellent cook of the elaborate dishes typical of the era and their social class, she evidently was quite involved in Stevens’s efforts to reduce and maintain his weight. Stevens mentions at one point “the value of my wife’s interest in calories and things of that kind,” and one of the family’s few intimates in the 1930s remarked upon the special dinners Elsie served: everything was “very healthful but very simple,” there were “no rich sauces or anything like that” (Letters, 619). Josephine M., Holly Stevens’s nanny from 1933–1935, recalled these meals. See Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, 233. Stevens clearly saw his weight problem as hereditary, writing to his cousin Emma Jobbins: “although I am perhaps overweight, I am not nearly as much overweight as a Stevens usually is at my age” (Letters, 807). See Trotter, Cooking with Mud, 30; Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 183–84, 187, 191–2, on carnival and the relation of the post-Romantic writer’s “bourgeois sensibility” to the crowd, the “nostalgic” appeal of the low. See Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 251, on disgust as antidemocratic. Steven’s interest in fat men and women serves as an important counterpoint to contemporaries such as Pound and Eliot’s idealization of the poet as anorexic. See Heywood, Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture, 56. See also Ellmann’s The Hunger Artists and Armstrong’s Modernism, Technology and the Body, especially “Chapter Two: Waste Products.” While I do not agree with Alan Filreis that Stevens’s vision of the “hero” becomes decisively “more democratic” over time, I do agree that Stevens’s expansive sense of what was physically “normal” made him vaguely, if not decisively, sympathetic to the American population in general. See Filreis, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, 34. See James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” The Writings of William James, 660–671. Patricia Rae notes James’s gendered description of pragmatism in The Practical Muse, 146. James, Pragmatism, 38–39. While James was dead at this point, Dewey was alive but only accepted the necessity of the war after Pearl Harbor, committed to the pacifist and prodemocracy ideals he had embraced in the wake of World War I. As he phrased it: “it is quite conceivable that after the next war we should have in this country a semi-military, semi-financial autocracy, which would fashion class divisions

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28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

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Notes

on this country for untold years. In any case we should have the suppression of all the democratic values for the sake of which we professedly went to war” (Westbrook, 511–12). Dewey, “Anti-Naturalism in Extremis,” Partisan Review X: 26–7. Al Filreis has characterized this speech as Stevens’s attempt to “ground himself in the politics of wartime exile” (Filreis, 99). See Filreis, “Chapter 2: Formalists Under Fire,” 98–115, for an extended discussion of this conference. Other readings of Stevens in a pragmatic context include Poirier’s Poetry and Pragmatism; Lentricchia’s Ariel and the Police, and Levin’s The Poetics of Transition. None addresses the physical dimensions of Stevens’s pragmatism, however, or link this concern to Stevens’s citation of James during the early years of World War II. Wallace Stevens, “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” The Necessary Angel 66, 46. Further references will be noted parenthetically as “Youth.” As Stephen Burt has noted, Stevens also eschewed imagery of the virile youth in favor of images of the poet at middle age. See “The Absence of the Poet as Virile Youth,” Wallace Stevens Journal 29: 81–90. Dewey, Art As Experience, 22. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as Art. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 392–3. In “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” the speaker refers to himself as one of “two golden gourds distended on our vines, / Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost, / Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.” In “The Comedian as the Letter C” Crispin recalls “That earth was like a jostling festival / Of seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent, / Expanding in the gold’s maternal warmth.” He also reflects upon the relationship between objects, such as the “good, fat, guzzly fruit,” and the various linguistic terms used to signify their presence. In “Banal Sojourn” “Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew,” and in “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery the speaker refers to both “the rabbit fat, at last, in grassy grass,” and “this fat pastiche of Belgian grapes,” which “exceeds / The total gala of auburn aureoles.” See Stevens, The Collected Poems and Opus Posthumous. Stevens, “John Crowe Ransom: Tennessean,” Opus Posthumous, 248. Bonnie Costello, “‘Planets on Tables: Still Life and War in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens,”Modernism / Modernity 12: 445. Stevens, Opus Posthumus, 106–09. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as Opus. Helen Vendler discusses “Owl’s Clover” and the inadequacy of the “pioneer” figure in On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems, 92–3. Vendler’s discussion of the “subman” is also useful (85). James Longenbach quotes Stevens paraphrasing his discussion of waste in these lines: “it is a process of passing from hopeless waste to hopeful waste. This is not pessimism. The world is completely waste, but it is a waste always full of portentous lustres. We live constantly in the commingling of two reflections, that

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Notes

41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

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of the past and that of the future, whirling apart and wide away.” See Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things, 180. My reading here stands in direct contrast to Helen Vendler’s dismissal of these lines as sentimental (On Extended Wings, 244). When recommending favorite poems to be included in an Italian edition of his work, to be edited by Renato Poggioli, Stevens listed: “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts,” “Credences of Summer,” and “Large Red Man Reading” (Letters, 778). Holly Stevens struggled with weight issues during her adolescence. See Joan Richardson, Wallace Stevens: A Biography: The Later Years, 1923–1955, 129. For Stevens’s views on Holly’s marriage to John Hanchak, a Polish man he thought socially and ethnically beneath her, see Richardson, Wallace Stevens: A Biography: The Later Years, 233. In a letter to Henry Church, Stevens writes: “The fat girl is the earth: what the politicians now-a-days are calling the globe, which somehow, as it revolves in their minds, does, I suppose, resemble some great object in a particularly blue are” (Letters, 426). Milton Bates, “Stevens’s Soldier Poems and Historical Possibility,” Wallace Stevens Journal 28: 206. John Ashbery, “Introduction to a Reading by James Schuyler,” Selected Prose, ed. Eugene Richie, 209. John Ashbery, “Michelangelo Pistoletto,” Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957–1987, ed. David Bergman, 159.

5

“The Mooring of Starting Out”: John Ashbery’s Pastoral Origins

1. John Ashbery, Some Trees, 12–13. 2. See Elaine Tyler May’s account in Homeward Bound: American Families in the cold war Era, 10, of how cold war ideology infiltrated even the most intimate aspects of family life during the post-World War II era. 3. See Suzanne Clark, Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West for a discussion of cold war “frontier” rhetoric. 4. Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age, 4. 5. There has been an important critical exchange regarding whether or not Ashbery is a public or a private poet, with Douglas Crase suggesting that Ashbery is indeed “not . . . our most private poet, but our most public,” see “The Prophetic Ashbery,” Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery, ed. David Lehman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), and S.P. Mohanty and Jonathan Monroe affirming that Ashbery is a poet of the “everyday” and as such of the “self-world relationship,” see “John Ashbery and the Articulation of the Social,” Diacritics 17: 37, 41, both arguing against critics such as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, who would have Ashbery understood as a “Romantic” poet concerned only with “successive state[s] of mind or spirit” (Mohanty, 38). While

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6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

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Mohanty sees Ashbery’s “new realism” as “dissolving boundaries between life and art by questioning the ontologizing of both Art and Self,” however, I understand this “new realism” to be historically grounded in Ashbery’s experience of cold war culture. W. H. Auden, “Foreword,” Some Trees, 11, 13. My reading of W. H. Auden’s response to Ashbery draws in part upon John Shoptaw’s observations concerning Auden and surrealism in Ashbery in On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry, 35–36. Auden’s response to Ashbery’s work was mixed. In an interview with Sue Gangel, Ashbery remarked that he felt Auden chose Some Trees “though I think somewhat reluctantly, actually, from the Preface he wrote. I think he respected something in it but didn’t understand it very well. In fact, in later life, I heard that he told a friend that he had never understood a single word I had ever written.” See Sue Gangel, “An Interview with John Ashbery,” San Francisco Review of Books 3 (Nov. 1977): 11; reprinted in American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work, 11. Auden’s existentialism, with its emphasis on the despair and futility of human existence, may also have prevented him from reading Ashbery’s work as other than escapist. On Auden’s existentialism, see George Cotkin, Existential America, 54–5. Although Cotkin argues that American versions of existentialism tended to adopt a more progressive, politicized edge, I find that his argument shortchanges the persistent inf luence of pragmatic thought upon American intellectual life, a point that Hazel E. Barnes, a key translator and interpreter of Sartre’s work, is quite explicit upon (see Cotkin, 153–155). See Ashbery’s frequent writings on surrealism, especially that of Cornell and Chirico in Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957–1987, 1–19. Reported Sightings, 12. As Deborah Nelson argues, even as certain privacies associated with male dominance over property and the domestic sphere were eroded in the context of cold war paranoia, lyric redeployments of privacy during this second half of the twentieth century paralleled the establishments of new forms of privacy situated in gender and sexuality (rights to abortion and birth control, gay rights). See Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in cold war America, 1–41. Auden, “Foreword,” Some Trees, 11. See David Lehman, The Last Avant- Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, 92, as well as Mark Ford, “The Boyhood of John Ashbery: A Conversation,” PN Review 29: 14–21, for Ashbery’s account of his childhood and relationship with his parents. See Douglas Shand-Tucci’s The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture, 206, for a reference to Ashbery’s coming out to his mother. Ashbery as cited in Gooch, City Poet: the Life and Times of Frank O’Hara, 190. John Shoptaw comments most extensively upon Ashbery’s cold war experiences as a gay man, as does Catherine Imbriglio in “ ‘Our Days Put On Such Reticence’: The Rhetoric of the Closet in John Ashbery’s Some Trees,”

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13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

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Contemporary Literature 36, 249–288. In Statues of Liberty: The New York School of Poets, 2d ed., Geoff Ward suggestively discusses the influence of the New York School poets upon younger poets in terms of a quotation from Walter Benjamin: “The poets find the refuse of society on their street and derive their heroic subject from this very refuse. This means that a common type is, as it were, superimposed upon their illustrious type” (187–88). Invoking the framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Silverman celebrates “specular” and “masochistic” subjectivities for undermining the misrecognitions that constitute the symbolic order and thus language and ideology, rejecting the alignment of phallus and penis, patriarchal law, heterosexuality, and absolute authority. See Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 1. David Savran has questioned the emancipatory potential of Silverman’s conception of masochistic masculinity, but his discussion of the Beats’ macho posturing in Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture in fact brings the decidedly different approach of the New York School artists into broad relief (37). “Jean Fautrier,” Reported Sightings, 136. See, Leja’s Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s 8, 10, 203–274, for a discussion of how the Abstract Expressionists’ fascination with the primitive and unconscious aspects of man ended up bolstering rather than undermining a mainstream “Modern Man” ideology. Interestingly, Leja discusses Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct (1922), which he sees as an important text for qualifiers of Modern Man discourse, see pages 217–221. Leja emphasizes how Dewey’s work stresses science and education over primitive drives, noting that Dewey’s allowance for “ ‘human desire and choice’ ” “went against the grain of the resolutely individualist orientation of Modern Man discourse” (219). On this circle generally, see Andrew Epstein’s Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” Against Interpretation, 279, 283, 286. My understanding of Ashbery’s use of camp parallels and conflicts with Marjorie Perloff ’s reading of Ashbery’s use of parody, although both are aligned with the “other tradition” that, as Perloff notes, is described in Three Poems as “a residue, a kind of fiction that developed parallel to the classic truths of daily life (as it was in that heroic but commonplace age) (TP, 55–56) as cited in Perloff, “ ‘Mysteries of Construction’: The Dream Songs of John Ashbery,” The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, 260. Perloff ’s discussion of Ashbery’s surrealism is also very helpful. Andrew Ross argues that Ashbery was never quite comfortable with camp, see “Taking the Tennis Court Oath,” in The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Susan M. Schultz, while Ian Gregson suggests that while Ashbery may employ camp and that it may have its political uses, Ashbery’s version of it is repetitive and lacks a real politics, see The Male Image: Representations of Masculinity in Postwar Poetry, 180.

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20. Ashbery, “The Compromise,” Three Plays (Calais, Vt: Z Press, 1978), 117. 21. See John Ashbery Papers, 1927–1987, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Letter to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, October 22, 1957, AM 6, Box 24. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. 22. Ashbery, “The Philosopher,” Three Plays, 160. 23. “John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch (A Conversation),” (Tucson, Ariz.: The Interview Press, n.d. [c. 1965]), 7, Quoted in notes made by David Lehman (“Notes on Ashbery on Ashbery”) in the John Ashbery Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, AM 6 Box 31. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. 24. My account of Ashbery’s radical marginality is in this sense opposed to Robert von Hallberg’s understanding of Ashbery as a white, male poet who writes “with an eye on the center.” See Von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980, 9, and Ch. 2. 25. In contrast, James McCorkle describes Ashbery’s pastoral as “an assertion of the convention of the dialogue as typified by Virgil’s Eclogues and as such emphasizing “exchange rather than interpretation” “reciprocity and the apprehension of differences,” thereby underscoring “the vital role of love and eros in reading and, by extension, in human relations.” See “The Demands of Reading: Mapping, Travel and Ekphrasis in the Poetry from the 1950s of John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop,” in The Scene of My Selves: New Work on the New York School of Poets, ed. Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller, 84. Helen Vendler has not read Ashbery within a pastoral context, although she does see his friend and contemporary, James Schuyler, in this light. In “James Schuyler: New York Pastoral,” Soul Says, Vendler associates pastoral with “leisure, the sexual life” as well as a domestic world linked to “the found, the cared-for, and the homemade,” but Vendler does not pursue any of the historical or social resonances of these observations. 26. Shoptaw characterizes Ashbery as “misrepresentative” insofar as he aspires to speak as a democratically representative poet while employing “homotextual” techniques such as “distortions, evasions, omissions, obscurities and discontinuities” in order to mask what is referred to in the poem “A Boy” as his “true fate” (Shoptaw, 1, 4). Herd argues that Ashbery belongs in a pragmatic literary tradition derived from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and William James in which “the object of literary understanding is not the text but the world,” and perceives Ashbery’s poetics to manifest a Habermasian desire to “make communication possible in liberal-democratic society” (Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry 13, 19). While Shoptaw sees Ashbery’s poetry functioning as a kind of code in which the private self is obscured by the intentionally difficult, public voice, Herd reinforces that the poetry is a “medium of communication not expression,” thereby explaining Ashbery’s own much-quoted antipathy towards ostensibly personal or confessional poetry (21). Imbriglio and Vincent address Ashbery’s sexuality more directly, focusing upon Ashbery’s

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27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

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“reticence” as a rhetorical technique of the “closet,” and emphasizing the lack of “closure” in his poetics as a rejection of “confining notions of identity,” respectively (Imbriglio, 260; John Vincent, “Reports of Looting and Insane Buggery Behind Altars: John Ashbery’s Queer Poetics,” Twentieth Century Literature 44: 158). Sodus had a persistent hold upon Ashbery’s imagination. Writing back to an admirer, Betsy Myers Exner, on March 10, 1978, Ashbery wrote: “I was touched, charmed and pleased by your letter. At the same time I thought it was funny that you have difficulty reading my work because I come from Sodus. I felt much more exiled there in my home town that I have ever felt anywhere since. I’m glad we’re both out of there though I must say I rather enjoy going back to see my mother, who lives in Pultneyville now, and driving around the country side remembering those dim dopey days.” Responding to a letter to Mr. Hod Odgen, 30 October 1977, an old friend from Sodus days who wrote soon after Ashbery was awarded three major literary prizes, the poet wrote: “Again, it was really nice to hear from you—that remote past when we knew each other is still very much alive for me.” See the John Ashbery Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, AM 6 Boxes 23, 25. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. “John Ashbery: The Imminence of a Revelation,” Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets, ed. Richard Jackson, 70. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “A Poem Is Being Written,” Representations 17: 117, 126. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Sedgwick.” On Chester Ashbery’s violence, see Lehman, Last Avant- Garde, 92. Ashbery himself apparently denies such reports of his father’s behavior toward him. Whether or not such beatings did take place, however, certainly fears of such violence from a father or any other male figure would be entirely plausible for a young gay man during the 1930s and 1940s. Landscapes are part of but not central to Ashbery’s pastorals, although landscape as the site of expanded, coterminous time and space does serve a purpose in establishing a pastoral atmosphere. See Bonnie Costello’s “John Ashbery’s Landscapes,” The Tribe of John, ed. Susan Schultz, 60–80, for a highly insightful and provocative discussion of Ashbery’s use of landscape as a metaphor for knowledge. John Ashbery, Some Trees, 12–13. Further references to this text will be noted parenthetically as “Trees.” The reference to Ferber’s work is not unlikely, as the book Showboat was a bestseller in 1926, was quickly followed by a Hammerstein and Kern musical version in 1927, and was adapted repeatedly to film in 1929, 1936, and 1951. Ashbery, a fan of American cinema, would undoubtedly have been acquainted with at least the film versions of this story of love and miscegenation. Charles Berger also notes the significance of The Double Dream of Spring in terms of Ashbery’s homecoming in “Vision in the Form of a Task: The Double

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35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

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Dream of Spring,” Beyond Amazement, ed. Lehman, although his emphasis is upon the more traditional lyric aspects of Ashbery’s work in this volume. Ashbery wrote to Charles Newman with condolences upon his father’s death, in a letter dated “Twelfth Night, 1976.” See John Ashbery Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, AM 6 Box 25. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. As such, Ashbery’s counterculture era poetics differ substantially from those discussed by Cary Nelson in Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry; or the postmodernist poetics discussed by Charles Alteri in Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the 1960s (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979); or James Longenbach in Modern Poetry After Modernism. John Ashbery, The Double Dream of Spring, 13. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as Dream. See the discussion of Dewey and his attitude toward World War II in my chapter on Stevens. John Ashbery, Can You Hear, Bird?, 70. Sue Gangel, “An Interview with John Ashbery,” 16. A point also made by Shoptaw, 15. See John Ashbery, The Vermont Notebook, 31. Further references to this text will be cited parenthetically as Vermont.

Conclusion: Late Twentieth- Century Pastoral: Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Robertson, and the Continuity of a Mode 1. Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara, 99. 2. O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, 17. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Poems.” 3. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 3, 5. 4. See generally Nelson, Repression and Recovery and Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left and Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 44–62. 5. See Dickstein, The Revival of Pragmatism for a representative sampling of such neo-pragmatic approaches. 6. The socially and culturally radical nature of Stein’s work generally has been discussed by Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis; DeKoven, A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing; Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form, and Damon, The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry, among others. 7. Note also the identification of pastoral in the work of Barbara Guest; see Vickery’s “ ‘A Mobile Fiction’: Barbara Guest and Modern Pastoral,” Triquarterly 116 246–61. 8. See Wineapple’s Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein, 151. 9. Stein, Writings 1903–1932, 2.

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10. Wineapple, 175. 11. Stein, “Melanctha,” 390. 12. Stein, “Composition as Explanation,” Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, 517, 518. 13. Stein, “Melanctha,” Selected Writings, 376. 14. Stein, “Melanctha,” Selected Writings, 417. On pastoral elegy see Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats, 14–37, especially his discussion of repetition on page 23. 15. Very few critics address Lucy Church Amiably at length. One exception is Victoria Maubry-Rose’s deconstructive account of the text in her doctoral thesis: The Anti-Representational Response: Gertrude Stein’s Lucy Church Amiably. Another recent exception is Jennifer Ashton’s From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century. 16. Stein, “Plays,” Lectures in America, 125. 17. Stein, The Geographical History of America, 194. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “GH.” 18. In From Modernism to Postmodernism, Ashton argues that “the ‘business of Art’ and ‘the business of living’ are for Stein thoroughly opposed,” but I argue that Stein’s enigmatic descriptions of her own work suggest otherwise (62). 19. Stein, “Poetry and Grammar,” Lectures in America, 245. 20. Stein’s debt to James’s pragmatism has been documented extensively. Representative readings of Stein in this light include those by Lisa Ruddick (Reading Gertrude Stein), Jonathan Levin (The Poetics of Transition), and Richard Poirier (Poetry and Pragmatism). More recently, see Liesl Olson, “Gertrude Stein, William James, and Habit in the Shadow of War,” Twentieth Century Literature 49: 328–59; Stephanie Hawkins, “The Science of Superstition: Gertrude Stein, William James and the Formation of Belief,” Modern Fiction Studies 51: 60–87; and Stephen Meyer, “Writing Psychology Over: Gertrude Stein and William James,” Yale Journal of Criticism 8: 133–163. 21. James, “Principles of Psychology: Briefer Course,” Writings 1878–1899, 159–160. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Principles.” Lyn Hejinian makes notes of the correlation of these concepts in her writings on Stein. See note 36. 22. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 365. Further citations of this text will be noted parenthetically as “Experience.” Barnes and Leo Stein met in Paris in the early 1910s and Stein was crucial in helping Barnes develop his art collection. See Greenfield, The Devil and Dr. Barnes, 43–46. Barnes was interested in Jamesian as well as Deweyan pragmatism and became good friends with Dewey after enrolling in his Columbia seminar in 1917–18, eventually becoming largely responsible for Dewey’s education in aesthetics (Greenfield, 56, 63). Dewey dedicated Art As Experience to Barnes. It was Barnes, presumably, who put Dewey and Leo Stein in touch, a connection revealed by Stein’s letters. According to Stein, he read Art As Experience and judged that

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

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“although Dewey’s book was both comprehensive and sound it was inevitably all familiar to me,” see Stein, Journey into the Self, 152. Evidently Stein felt Dewey’s aesthetics to be largely shaped by his own and other contemporaries’ insights. In his own The ABC of Aesthetics, Stein tried to develop a psychology of aesthetics that blends Jamesian and Freudian insights. As he notes, “Since the aesthetic object is constituted by, and is made known through, the self, we cannot possibly know much about aesthetics unless we understand the self,” see Stein, The ABC of Aesthetics, 29–30, 99. Wineapple argues that Leo’s theories of aesthetics, as influenced by James, not only led him in a different intellectual direction from Gertrude but that this intellectual divergence prefigured their personal rupture. Despite Wineapple’s assessment, however, Gertrude Stein’s protectively coded yet deeply personal texts and highly subjective self-critiques suggest an underlying affinity between the aesthetic philosophies of the two siblings. See Gass’s introduction to Stein’s The Geographical History of America, 11–15, for a discussion of Stein in the context of the “frontier.” Sutherland characterizes Lucy Church Amiably in these terms in Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work, 138. See Bridgman’s reading, for example, in Gertrude Stein in Pieces, 191. Stein, Lucy Church Amiably, 9–10. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Lucy.” From Dodge’s Intimate Memories; as quoted by Janet Malcolm, “Gertrude Stein’s War,” The New Yorker. Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body, 66. DeKoven begins to address this point in A Different Language, 133. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Writings 1903–1932, 900. As Bridgman points out, however, the publishing venture was not entirely a success: both Stein and Toklas thought the volume “badly printed,” poorly bound, and beset with typographical errors (Bridgman, 190). Rosalind Rosenberg’s Beyond Separate Spheres heavily influences the ensuing discussion of women scientists during this era. The argument for John Dewey’s influence upon feminists of the early and later twentieth century also has been thoughtfully detailed by Charlene Haddock Seigfried. See “John Dewey’s Pragmatist Feminism,” Feminist Interpretations of John Dewey; and Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric. More recently still, James Livingston has made similar connections in Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History. See Rosenberg, xxii. Ashbery, “The Impossible: Gertrude Stein,” first published in Poetry 90 (July 1957), reprinted in John Ashbery: Selected Prose, 12. In this alignment of her poetics with Stein’s, Hejinian is typical of many language poets who see Stein as having originated a skepticism regarding “logical continuity,” forcing readers to “read writing, not read meanings,” according

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37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

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to Davidson in “On Reading Stein,” The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, 198. Critical accounts of the Stein/LANGUAGE poet connection include most prominently Perloff ’s “The Word as Such: LANGUAGE Poetry in the Eighties,” The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition. More recent commentary on the connection includes that by Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity; Harryman, “Rules and Restraints in Women’s Experimental Writing,” We Who Love to be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics, 116–124; and Mix, A Vocabulary of Thinking: Gertrude Stein and Contemporary North American Women’s Innovative Writing. Hejinian, “Two Stein Talks,” The Language of Inquiry, 83–4. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Talks.” Stein refers repeatedly to the influence of James upon Stein, including the correlation between Jamesian and Steinian conceptions of substantive and transitive consciousness. Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect, 181. Olson, “Projective Verse,” Selected Writings, 16, 19. Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure,” Language of Inquiry, 44. Also on Olson’s phallic rhetoric, see DuPlessis, Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work, 84. Hejinian, “Strangeness,” Language of Inquiry, 140. I have been able to locate no secondary criticism on “The Green” specifically, although several critics write about other Hejinian texts including My Life, Writing Is An Aid To Memory, The Guard, and Oxota. Hejinian, “Line,” Language of Inquiry, 131. Hejinian, “The Green,” The Cold of Poetry, 127. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Green.” Hejinian, “Language and ‘Paradise,’ ” Language of Inquiry, 67. Hejinian, “Barbarism,” Language of Inquiry, 323, 321. Hejinian comments upon her reading and teaching in the preface to “The Quest for Knowledge in the Western Poem,” 210, and the preface to “Barbarism,” Language of Inquiry, 318. Hejinian, “The Quest for Knowledge,” Language of Inquiry, 210. Further references will be cited parenthetically as “Quest.” See Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?” in The Revival of Pragmatism, 84, for an account of such politically invested pragmatist as opposed to contemporary pragmatists who deny the philosophy’s ideological investments. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Kloppenberg.” See Silliman, The New Sentence, 7–54; and Charles Bernstein, “The Dollar Value of Poetry,” The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, 140, also note Section 2, “Writing and Politics,” 119–192. See Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect, 168–9, for a definition of the “late modernist lyric.” Hejinian, “A Common Sense,” Language of Inquiry, 366.

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53. Hejinian, “A Common Sense,” 370–78. 54. Also, Alpers mentions Robertson’s work in “Modern Eclogues,” Triquarterly 116: 44, and Alpers in turn cites Freidlander’s “Nature and Culture: On Lisa Robertson’s XEclogue,” 1995. , which evidences a great deal of confusion over Robertson’s choice of the pastoral mode. 55. Robertson, XEclogue. The volume contains no pagination. 56. Robertson acknowledges her interest in “Gertrude Stein’s sentence,” later linking Stein to her interest in the history of “landscape” as a concept in “Stuttering Continuity (or, Like It’s 1999); An Interview with Lisa Robertson at Cambridge,” Open Letter 13, 69, 81. On Roberton’s use of a similar technique in “Utopia/,” and its linkage to spatial conceptions of the poem, see Davidson, “Picture This: Space and Time in Lisa Robertson’s ‘Utopia/,’ ” Mosaic (Dec. 2007) 87–102. 57. Gray, “Semiotic Shepherds: Gary Snyder, Frank O’Hara, and the Embodiment of an Urban Pastoral,” also Gray’s article on James Schuyler and Jane Freilicher, in which he makes a somewhat more conventional argument for the centrality of “otium” to their work: “New Windows on New York: The Urban Pastoral Vision of James Schuyler and Jane Freilicher,” as well as “ ‘A World Without Gravity’: The Urban Pastoral Spirituality of Jim Carroll and Kathleen Norris,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 47, 213–52; see too Diggory’s “Allen Ginsberg’s Urban Pastoral.” 58. See Kolodny’s “Unearthing Herstory: An Introduction,” in The Ecocriticism Reader, 170–181. From The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. 59. See Davidson, “On the Outskirts of Form: Cosmopoetics In the Shadow of NAFTA,” Textual Practice. 733–756; Collis, ‘ “The Frayed Trope of Rome”: Poetic Architecture in Robert Duncan, Ronald Johnson, and Lisa Robertson,” Mosaic 35: 143–162; See also the Chicago Review special issue on Robertson, Chicago Review 51–52 (Spring 2006) 97. 60. See Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, 7. 61. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, xvi–xvii. 62. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 122. 63. Raymond Williams, 123.

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Index

Abstract Expressionism, 128, 201n16 aesthetics, 16, 34–35 Ashbery and, 125, 127–28, 149 Dewey, 47, 71, 157–58 Hejinian and, 162, 165–66 James, 157 Stein and, 157–58 Stevens and, 92 Williams and, 70–71, 77, 88–91 African-Americans, 65, 68, 72, 114, 154–55, 172, 175–76n5 Alpers, Paul, 5 What Is Pastoral?, 175n3 Altman, Meryl, 191n12 ambivalence Ashbery and, 135 Williams and, 17, 78–80 American culture pastoral mode and, 22–23 postwar, 125–29 American pastoral, 175–77nn, 182n16 defined, 6–12 history of, 15, 181n9 see also specific authors Anderson, Margaret, 161 “anorexic” poetics, 17, 102, 197n22 apocalyptic images, 80–81, 84 Aragon, Louis, 127 Arendt, Hannah, 168 Armstrong, Tim, 14, 160, 180n39 art and artists Ashbery and, 126–30, 137, 144

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camp and, 128 cold war and, 126 Dewey and, 22, 33–36, 47, 49, 69, 72, 74–75, 106–7, 126–27, 137, 144, 157–58, 167, 171–72 Frost and, 2–3, 47–50 Hejinian and, 167 social conditions and, 8 Stein and, 157–58 Stevens and, 93, 106–7 Williams and, 67, 69, 72, 74–75, 69, 80, 88 see also poet; poetics and poetry Ashbery, John, 4, 6, 13, 15, 17–18, 123–49, 172, 175n3, 199–204nn “A Boy,,” 202n26 Can You Hear, Bird’s, 148 “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 142 “The Compromise,” 129 Dewey and, 21 The Double Dream of Spring, 124–25, 139–48, 203–4n34 “Eclogue,” 17, 123–24, 126, 128, 131–32 Frost and, 121–22 James and, 21, 202n26 “Military Pastoral,” 148 “The Mythological Poet,” 17, 137–38 O’Hara and, 152 “A Pastoral,” 17, 131, 135–36

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Index

“The Philosopher,” 129 “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” 131–35 “Rural Objects,” 140, 144–48 “Some Trees,” 138–39, 142, 200n6 Some Trees, 123–39 “Soonest Mended,” 18, 140, 143–44 “Spring Day,” 18, 140–43 Stein and, 162 Stevens and, 121–22 “The Task,” 140–41 “Variation, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox,” 140, 144–45 The Vermont Notebook, 148–49 “A Wave,” 147 Williams and, 122 women pastoral poets and, 153 “Ashcan” school, 98 Aspinwall, William, 184n4 Atlas, Charles, 96 Auden, W.H., 9, 126–27, 200n6 autobiography Ashbery and, 130, 132 Stein and, 154 avant-garde, 152–53, 162–63, 167–68, 192n19 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 13, 179n33 banal pastoral, 7–8 Barnes, Albert, 157, 205n22 Barnew, Hazel E., 200n6 Bartlett, John, 49 Bartram, William, 166 Bates, Milton, 112, 120 Baudelaire, Charles, 46, 188n29 beauty (“beautiful thing”) Ashbery and, 124 Stein and, 160 Stevens and, 119 Williams and, 17, 67–68, 75, 79, 84, 89 Beck, John, 71, 75, 192nn Bederman, Gail, 26 Bellows, George, 98

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“Beloved Community,” 29 Benjamin, Walter, 46, 201n12 Bentham, Jeremy, 25 Berger, Charles, 203n34 Bernstein, Charles, 167 Bhabha, Homi, 171 Bilignin, France, 155, 158, 160, 171 Blake, Casey Nelson, 182n16 Bloom, Harold, 199n5 Bly, Robert, 26 Bodenheim, Maxwell, 185n8 body, 14, 17, 180n39 Ashbery and, 130 Hejinian and, 163 James and Dewey and, 102 Stein and, 160 Stevens and, 17, 94, 96, 98–100, 102, 108–9 Williams and, 68, 72, 73, 80–82, 86–89 Bookstaver, Mary, 154 borders, 23, 165, 172 Boston Post, The, 50 Bourdieu, Pierre, 180n39 Distinction, 8 Bourne, Randolph, 29, 182n16 Bridgman, Richard, 206 Britain, 11, 13, 25 Brogan, Jacqueline, 196n8 Brooks, Van Wyck, 29, 182n16 Bryant, William Cullen “The Prairies,” 23 Buell, Lawrence, 191n16 Burke, Kenneth, 193n33 Burrell, Carl, 48, 188n33 Burt, Stephen, 198n32 California, 167 camp sensibility, 125, 128–30, 136, 146, 148, 201n19 capitalism, 14, 25–27, 51, 181n11 Carman, Bliss, 185n8 Songs of Vagabondia, 40 Catullus, 84 Chicago School, 42

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Index childhood, 132, 134, 137–38, 140–42, 146–47, 148 Chirico, Giorgio de, 126 Church, Henry, 199n45 citizenship, 14–16, 172 Ashbery and, 143, 144 Dewey and, 34–36 new models of, 24–30, 102 Robertson and, 171 civic body, 21, 24, 42, 46, 83, 172 Civil War, 42, 43, 183n25 Clark, Suzanne, 125 Cohen, William, 13 cold war, 15, 121–22, 200n9 Ashbery and, 17–18, 123–40, 144–45, 199n2 communitarianism, 182n1 community, 7, 13, 23–24, 26–29, 182n16, 183n32 Ashbery and, 123, 124 Dewey and, 21, 29, 33, 35, 167 Frost and, 42, 44, 53–57, 65 James and, 29 Mumford and, 29 Stevens and, 106–7 Williams and, 17, 65, 90–91 see also civic body; farming; society; urban life Confessional poets, 127, 133 consumers (consumption), 14, 25–26 Ashbery and, 128, 133, 134 Eliot and Pound and, 17 Frost and, 44, 62, 63 labor unions and, 44 Stevens and, 17, 101 Veblen and, 50 Williams and, 83, 87 Cook, Eleanor, 96–97 Cook, John James, 184n4 Cooper, James Fenimore The Pioneers, 166 Cornell, Joseph, 126 corporate culture, 14, 25–26, 40, 43 see also capitalism

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cosmopolitan pastoralism, 18, 170–72 Cotkin, George, 200n6 counterculture, 144, 204n36 “covert pastoral,” 8 Cowper, William, 140 Cox, Sidney, 187n20 Crane, Stephen, 43 Crase, Douglas, 199n5 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de, 24–25 Letters from an American Farmer, 166 Davidson, Michael, 11, 207n36 Davies, W.H., 42, 184–85n8 democracy, 5, 12–16, 25, 27, 29, 180n40, 182n16, 183n32 Ashbery and, 126–27 cold war and, 125 Dewey, 21–22, 32–36, 47, 49, 63, 72, 103, 126, 167 femininity and, 103 Frost and, 47, 49, 63–64 Hejinian and, 167 James and, 32, 46, 102, 167 Lippmann and, 35 Robertson and, 169 Stevens and, 121 Whitman and, 47 Williams and, 69, 72 see also citizenship Democratic Party, 56 Denning, Michael, 177n17 Depression, 1, 42–43, 61, 69, 111 Dewey, John, 3, 6–8, 11, 15–17, 21–22, 24, 26–36, 126–27, 152–53, 171–72, 181n13, 183–84nn, 197n19, 201n16 “Americanism and Localism,” 16, 72 Art As Experience, 7–8, 34–36, 69, 74–75, 107, 157–58, 205–6n6 Ashbery and, 124, 132, 137, 140 Experience and Nature, 32–34, 157 feminism and, 206n33 frontier and, 26–31, 36

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Index

Dewey, John—Continued Frost and, 16, 47, 49, 63, 188n30 Hejinian and, 167 Individualism Old and New, 27–28 James and, 31–32, 42 The Public and Its Problems, 33, 35–36 reassessment of, 144 Rorty and, 11 Stein and, 18, 157–58, 205n22 Stevens and, 17, 102–4, 106–7, 109, 197n27 Whitman and, 47 Williams and, 16, 65, 69, 71–75, 78, 191–92n19 WW II and, 103–4 Diggory, Terence, 170 Dimock, Wai-Chee, 51 dirt (filth), 12, 13, 179–80nn, 185n10 Ashbery and, 141 Frost and, 65 Stevens and, 196n16 Williams and, 16–17, 65, 70–83, 91, 191n12 see also excrement discourse (communication; conversation; dialogue), 4, 26–27 Ashbery and, 18, 140, 143 Dewey and, 35, 36 Stevens and, 196n16 Williams and, 83–84 disgust (nausea), 12–14, 179n33, 180n40 Dewey and, 27 Eliot and Pound and, 17 Stevens and, 102 disorder (chaos), 12, 179–80n33, 185n10 Asbery and, 122, 124, 130, 143 Dewey and, 107 Stevens and, 93–95, 99, 107–9, 111, 116, 118, 121, 122 Williams and, 79–81, 89, 91 see also chaos; mess dissent, 125, 126

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Dixon, Melvin, 176n5 Douglas, Mary, 13, 70 Purity and Danger, 179n33, 185n10 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 11, 97 Eberly, Rosa A. Citizen Critics, 183–84n40 ecocriticism, 6, 176–77n11, 191n16 economic conditions, 12, 24–26, 180n36 cold war and, 125 Dewey and, 8 Frost and, 59 Williams and, 85 see also capitalism; Depression; poverty; social classes education, 34–36 Eliot, T.S., 17, 102, 197n22 “The Waste Land,” 71 elite culture, 4, 32, 36, 40 see also high and low culture “Ellis Island” school, 71 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 25, 114, 145, 166, 180n35, 181n11, 182–83n25, 196n16, 202n26 Empson, William, 6–14, 108, 128, 177n17 Some Versions of Pastoral, 8–9 environmentalism, 5–6, 23, 180n3 ethics, 5, 6, 13, 24–25 Ashbery and, 18, 124 Dewey and, 71, 106–7, 157–58 Frost and, 16, 47, 54–55, 59, 62–63 Hejinian and, 165 James and, 157 Stevens and, 106–7, 121 Williams and, 71, 85 ethnicity, 11, 72, 96, 121, 170, 172 excess, 13, 137, 172 Ashbery and, 135 Stevens and, 92, 109 Williams and, 78, 92 see also extravagance; waste excrement, 180n35

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Index Ashbery and, 149 Stevens and, 113, 124 Williams and, 17, 68, 72–73, 78–81, 83, 87, 92, 193n31 see also dirt; waste Exner, Betsy Myers, 203n27 experience, 16 Ashbery and, 126–27, 130, 144, 148 Dewey and, 22, 32–33, 74–75, 144, 157–58 Frost and, 41, 48–49 James and, 31, 41, 49 Stein and, 156–58 Williams and, 74–75 “experimental empiricism,” 32 extravagance, 44, 187n23 Ashbery and, 13, 128 Frost and, 12–13, 16, 50–59, 62, 189n40 Stein and, 13 Stevens and, 13 Williams and, 13 see also excess Faggen, Robert, 62, 187n24 “Failure of Nerve” controversy, 103–4 farming, 12, 14, 23–24, 190n49 Dewey and, 32 Frost and, 12, 59, 189n47 fascism, 69, 109, 121 fat Ashbery and, 124 Stein and, 160 Stevens and, 13, 17, 94–102, 108, 110–13, 116–22, 124, 195n1 “fat girl,” 13, 17, 95, 116, 118–22 father, 127, 131–32, 139–40, 203n30 Faulkner, William, 135 femininity (female), 14, 103, 106 Ashbery and, 122, 137 Frost and, 4 Hejinian and Stein and, 168 Pound and Eliot and, 17 Robertson and, 169

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Stevens and, 17, 94–96, 98, 106–7, 110–11, 113, 119–22 Williams and, 68–69, 79–82, 86, 89 feminism, 6, 18, 154, 170, 206n33 feminist pastoral modes, 18, 153 Ferber, Edna Showboat, 136, 203n33 Filreis, Alan, 11, 15, 195n45, 197n23, 198n29 Flint, F.S., 186n20, 189n38 Flynt, Josiah, 43, 46 forgotten man, 59–60, 62, 64, 190n49 formalism, 10, 11 Frank, Waldo, 182n16 Our America, 29 Freilicher, Jane, 128, 208n57 Freud, Sigmund, 13, 180n33 Thee Essays of the Theory of Sexuality, 179n33 frontier, 23–24, 181n9 Ashbery and, 125 cold war and, 17, 124, 125, 126 Dewey and, 24, 26–31, 33 end of, 4, 15, 22–24, 26–27, 40–41 Hejinian and, 166–67 James and, 24, 31 pragmatists and rhetoric of, 27–30, 36–37, 181n13 Stein and, 158, 206n23 tramp and, 40, 42–43 Frost, Elinor White, 39 Frost, Robert, 1–4, 6, 13, 15–16, 18, 21–22, 39–65, 122–23, 153, 184–90nn Ashbery and, 121–22 “A Bed in the Barn,” 64 “The Death of the Hired Man,” 54–55, 58, 184n7 Dewey and, 16, 21, 47–49, 188n30 “The Fear,” 56–58 feminists and, 153 “The Guardeen,” 60 “The Hill Wife,” 57–58 James and, 16, 21, 44–46, 187– 88n24

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Index

Frost, Robert—Continued “The Literate Farmer and the Plant Venus,” 60 “The Lockless Door,” 60 “Love and a Question,” 53–56, 58, 64 “The Mill City,” 41, 48 “My Butterfly,” 40 “On Extravagance,” 50 “Pan with Us,” 1–4, 22, 40–41, 49 “The Self Seeker,” 48, 55, 59 “The Smile,” 58 “Trespass,” 60 “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” 42, 61, 64 “An Unstamped Letter in our Rural Mailbox,” 60 “A Way Out,” 60 Williams and, 64–65 “The Wood-Pile,” 51, 61–62 Gallagher, Catherine, 178n23 Gangel, Sue, 200n6 garden, 22, 124, 125 Geddes, Patrick, 29 gender, 6–7, 26, 54, 170 Ashbery and, 128, 132, 134, 200n9 Hejinian and Robertson and, 152, 162 James and, 197n25 Stein and, 18, 152–54, 158–59, 160, 162 Stevens and, 96, 121, 195–96n8 Williams and, 13, 79, 82, 91 George, Henry, 44, 50, 186n19 Gide, André, 107 Giles, Paul, 184n4 Gilmore, Michael, 25, 180n35, 181n11 Ginsberg, Allen, 170, 171, 175n3 Graham, Stephen, 185n8 Gray, Timothy, 170, 208n57 “Great Community,” 33, 35 Greeks, 18, 73–74 Gregson, Ian, 201n19

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Grey, Zane Riders of the Purple Sage, 166 Guest, Barbara, 128 Gunn, Giles, 11, 153 Habermas, Jürgen, 36, 183n40, 202n26 Hartman, Geoffrey, 193n30 H.D., 18 Heap, Jane, 161 Hejinian, Lyn, 18, 152–53, 162–69, 207–8nn “The Green,” 18, 162, 164–66, 207n42 “The Quest for Knowledge in the Western Poem,” 166–67 Robertson and, 169 “Romantic Theory and American Event,” 166 Stein and, 162–68, 205n21, 206–7n36 “Two Stein Talks,” 162–63 Hemingway, Ernest, 97 Herd, David, 129, 202n26 heroes, 108–9 Ashbery and, 129, 144 Stevens and, 100, 104, 197n23 heterosexuality Ashbery and, 130, 132–34, 201n13 Robertson and, 170 Stein and, 160 see also homosexuality; sexuality high and low culture, 12, 13, 175n4 Empson, 9 Frost and, 4 Robertson and, 169 Stevens, 92 see also elite culture; mass culture history, 13, 15, 172 Hejinian and, 164 Stein and, 156, 159–61 Hoffman, Tyler, 43, 184n8, 187n24 Hollinger, David, 171 Hollywood, 129

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Index homosexuality, 7, 11, 15, 18, 172–73 Ashbery and, 13, 18, 122, 124–25, 127–32, 136–38, 162, 202n26 cold war and, 125 Frost and, 189n33 O’Hara and, 152 Robertson and, 170 Stein and, 13, 152, 162 Williams and, 16, 65, 69–70, 76–77, 78, 80, 82, 192n28 Hook, Sidney, 21, 103 Hovey, Richard Songs of Vagabondia, 40 Howells, William Dean The Minister’s Charge, 189n42 human Stein and, 156, 158 Williams and, 82–85, 89–90 humanism, 25 Hume, David, 25 Hutcheon, Linda, 12, 179n31 Huyssen, Andreas, 10 ideal self, 3, 8–9, 16, 124 see also citizen; self Idealism, 27, 41 ideology Ashbery and, 124–25 Empson and, 10 Hejinian and James and, 167 Imbriglio, Catherine, 129, 200n12, 202n26 immigrants, 14 Frost and, 44 Williams and, 16, 17, 70, 72, 85 imperialism, 23–24 Independent, The, 40, 184n4 individualism, 25, 27, 125, 152, 172 Dewey and, 27–28 “possessive,” 25, 171, 181n9 Stein and, 158, 163 tramp and, 40 Williams and Frost and, 65

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235

industrialization, 13–14, 17, 26, 30, 40, 43 Dewey and, 35, 49 Frost and, 3, 47, 49–50, 59 Lippmann and, 35 inequality Dewey and, 22 Frost and, 22, 44 Williams and, 85 innocence, 79, 80, 128 International Workers of the World (IWW, “wobblies”), 44, 85, 187n22 “ironic” high modernism, 10 “ironic” pragmatism, 31, 33, 36 James, William, 2–3, 6, 11, 15–17, 21–22, 24, 27, 29–33, 36, 49–50, 95, 102–5, 152–53, 183nn, 197n25 Ashbery and, 146, 148, 202n26 “The Consciousness of the Self,” 45 Dewey and, 31–33 Essays in Radical Empiricism, 166–67 frontier and, 30–31, 36 Frost and, 16, 44–45, 47, 187–88n24 Hejinian and, 162–63, 166–67 “The Moral Equivalent of War,” 17, 31–32, 102 Mumford and, 30 “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” 45, 188n28 Pragmatism, 31, 44–45, 104 Principles of Psychology, 156–57 Psychology: Briefer Course, 44–45 Stein and, 18, 156–58, 161, 163, 205n22, 207n37 Stevens and, 95, 102, 104–5, 118–19, 197–99nn Talks to Teachers and Students on Psychology, 44 The Will to Believe, 44 WW II and, 103 Jameson, Fredric, 10

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Index

Jarrell, Randall, 70, 191n8, 193n30 Jefferson, Thomas, 24–25, 183n33, 192n19 Jobbins, Emma, 197n20 Johnson, Ryan, 13 Kadlec, David, 11, 71, 192n19 Kasson, John, 26 Keats, John, 73 Kemp, Harry, 42, 184n7 Kenyon Review, 92 Kilcup, Karen, 184n4 Kimmel, Michael, 26 King, Rodney, 167 Kinsella, John, 177n12 Kloppenberg, James, 11, 31, 36, 153, 167, 183n27 knowledge Dewey and, 28, 34 James and, 31 Williams and, 79 Koch, Kenneth, 127–28 Kolodny, Annette, 170 Kootenay school, 168 Kore, 68, 70, 78, 79, 190n2 Kristeva, Julia, 13, 179–80n33 labor, 16, 26 Dewey and, 32, 47 Frost and, 44, 51–52, 61–64, 69, 85 James and, 32 Williams and, 69, 85 labor movement, 43–44, 69, 85 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 160 land and landscape, 13, 25–26 Ashbery and, 131, 203n31 Bryant and, 23 Hejinian and, 163–66, 168 Roberston and, 170–71 Stein and, 18, 155–59, 162, 164–65, 168 Language school, 153, 162, 207n36 LaPorte, Dominque, 13 Latimer, Ronald Lane, 93 Laura (film), 129

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Lawrence, Massachusetts, 3, 44, 64, 171, 187n21 Strike (1912), 15, 44, 85 Lawrence v. Texas, 173 Lears, T.J. Jackson, 182n16 leisure, 79, 86 Leja, Michael, 201n16 Lennox, Annie, 169 Lentricchia, Frank, 11, 36, 187–88n24 lesbians Stein and, 13, 18, 152, 160 Williams and, 72, 76–78, 80 see also homosexuality Levin, Jonathan, 11, 178n26 Levine, Lawrence, 175n4 Lewis, Cecil Day-, 9 Lewis and Clark, 166 liberal ironists, 11 liberal politics, 17, 24–25, 35, 44, 69, 85 Limerick, Patricia, 23–24 Lindsay, Vachel, 42, 97, 185n8 Lippmann, Walter The Phantom Public, 35 Livingston, James, 11, 26–27, 181–82n14, 206n33 localism Dewey and, 29, 33, 35, 69, 71–73 Hejinian and, 167 Mumford and, 29 Robertson and, 169 Stevens and, 91–92 Williams and, 16–17, 68–73, 78–79, 82–84, 91–92, 191n16, 192n26 Locke, John, 25 London, Jack, 43, 46, 184n2 The Call of the Wild, 166 Longenbach, James, 198n40 love, 172 Ashbery and, 18, 124, 136, 138–39, 142, 203n33 Stein and, 159, 160 Williams and, 79, 82–85, 87, 89–90, 90 Lowell, Robert, 194n35

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Index Macpherson, C.B., 25 Mailloux, Steven, 11 Mao, Doug, 178n23 marginality, 19l, 152–53 Ashbery and, 124, 131, 137, 202n24 Dewey and, 78 Frost and, 41 Williams and, 17, 68–69, 73, 74, 78, 83, 85 Mariani, Paul, 77, 191n19 market, 4, 11, 29, 99–100 Marsh, Alec, 71, 192n19 Marvell, Andrew, 91, 132–34 “The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers,” 133–34 Marx, Leo, 6 The Machine in the Garden, 10, 175n3 Marxists, 7 masculinity (male), 14, 26, 103 Ashbery and, 18, 122–25, 127–31, 138, 140, 144–45 cold war, 125 crisis in, 14, 26, 28, 94, 102 Dewey and, 28 Frost and, 4 Hejinian and, vs. Stein and Olson, 163 James and, 17, 45, 102 Robertson and, 169 Stein and, 18, 153, 154, 158 Stevens and, 17, 84–101, 103–11, 119, 121 tramps and, 42, 45 masochism, 201nn mass or popular culture, 10–11 Ashbery and, 122, 128 Dewey and, 27 Stevens and, 113 May, Elaine Tyler, 125 McCorkle, James, 202n25 McGurl, Mark, 10 Menand, Louis The Metaphysical Club, 183n25 mess, 13–14, 180n40 Dewey and James and, 27

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Stevens and, 101 see also disorder Michaels, Walter Benn, 176n9 middle class, 6–7, 43, 96, 186n18 Frost and, 50–51, 57, 59, 60, 63 James and, 45 Miller, J. Hillis, 193n30 Miller, William Ian, 13 Mills, C. Wright, 21, 26 mirrors Ashbery and, 122, 126 Stevens and, 113–14, 122 modernism, 9–10, 14, 30, 122, 149, 151–52, 167, 178nn Mohanty, S.P., 199–200n5 Monroe, Jonathan, 199n5 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley “City Eclogues,” 169 Moore, Marianne, 18, 71, 74, 194n35 morality, 17, 24–25, 31 Dewey and, 34–35, 107 Frost and, 60–61 James and, 17 Stevens and, 107 see also ethics; value mother, 103, 132, 180n33 Mumford, Lewis, 182n16 The Culture of Cities, 29 The Golden Day, 29–30 The Story of Utopias, 29 Münsterberg, Hugo, 161 Nadel, Alan, 126 national mythology, 73, 125, 172 native-born, 17, 102, 108–17, 119 nativism, 6 naturalism, 103, 126, 197n19 nature and “natural,” 22, 24–25, 29, 176–77n11, 180–81nn Dewey and, 29, 33, 74–75 Frost, 47–48 James and, 31–32 Robertson and, 168–69, 171 Stein and, 168–69 Williams and, 74–75, 79, 90–91

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Navarre, Marguerite de, 169 Nazism, 103 Nelson, Cary, 11 Nelson, Deborah, 200n9 neo-pragmatism, 11, 21, 152–53, 162, 166–67 New Critics, 9–11, 88, 178n23 New Deal, 56, 189n45, 190nn New England, 1, 3, 50, 171 new historicism, 6 Newman, Charles, 204n35 New Women, 154 New World, Old World vs., 43, 76–79, 81–82, 90, 193n30 New York City, 92, 100, 127, 128, 162, 172 New York School, 201nn New York State, 68, 130, 171 “97 pound weakling,” 26, 96 Oakland, California, 162, 171 Odgen, Hod, 203n27 O’Hara, Frank, 127–28, 151–53, 162, 169–71, 175n3 “Concert Champêtre,” 151 “Memorial Day 1950,” 151 Olson, Charles, 163–64 “Projective Verse,” 163 ordinary or everyday life, 12 Ashbery and, 149, 199n5 Dewey and, 21, 75 James and, 21 Roberston and, 171 Stein and, 158, 168 Stevens and, 92, 93, 95, 99, 117 Williams and, 69, 75 otherness, 13, 176n11 Stein and, 152 Stevens and, 101–2, 118–19 Williams and, 81 outsider, 94, 116 Pan Frost and, 1–4, 22, 40–41 Stevens and, 195n1

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Williams and, 80, 89–90 Park, Robert, 185n10 “The Mind of the Hobo,” 42 Partisan Review, 103 pastoralism, resurgence of interest in, 177n12 see also American pastoralism; pragmatic pastoralism; and specific authors Paterson, New Jersey, 64, 171 Silk Strike (1913), 15, 69, 84–85, 194n40 “Patriarchal Poetry,” 154 patriarchy Ashbery and, 125, 130, 201n13 Stein and, 153 Williams and, 84 Patterson, Annabel, 5 Pastoral and Ideology, 175n3 Pennsylvania, 94, 95, 99, 101, 115 Perloff, Marjorie, 163, 178n24, 201n19, 207n36 “personality,” 182n16 Pierce, Charles, 31 pioneer, 14, 23–29, 36–37 Ashbery and, 127–28 Dewey and, 27–28, 32 Mumford and, 30 Ransom and, 30 Williams and, 82 Pisan, Christine de, 169 play, 124, 125 pleasure, 172 Robertson and, 169–70 Williams and, 89–91 poet, role of, 3–6, 11, 12, 49, 152 Ashbery and, 124, , 137–38, , 140 Dewey and, 35–36, 78–79 Empson and, 8, 12 Frost and, 2–3, 6, 41–42, 46, 48, 50–52, 56–57, 59–64 Hejinian and, 166 James and, 2, 46

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Index Stevens and, 92–95, 102–6, 104, 108–17, 111–15, 117, 119 Williams and, 78–80, 82–83, 85–88, 90–91 see also art and artists poetics and poetry Ashbery and, 129, 130 Dewey and, 33–37, 47–48, 73–75 Frost and, 12–13, 47–49, 59 Stevens and, 95, 102, 106–7 Williams and, 69, 73–75, 87, 89–91, 91 Poirier, Richard, 11, 63, 64, 153, 187n24, 189n40 Poetry and Pragmatism, 178n26 politics, 11, 18–19, 30, 152 Ashbery and, 17–18, 127, 144–45, 149 Dewey and, 17, 35–36, 144–45 Frost and, 16 Hejinian and, 162, 164, 167–68 Ransom and Empson and, 10 Roberston and, 171 Stein and, 162, 168 Stevens and, 17 Waye and, 59 Williams and, 68, 88 pollution, 13, 179n33 Stevens and, 95 Williams and, 68–71, 78–82, 84, 86, 88–89, 91–92, 193n30 Porter, Anne, 128 Porter, Fairfield, 128 Posnock, Ross, 11, 36, 153 postmodernism, 10, 122, 152, 163, 167, 170–71, 178nn postwar era, 18, 61, 85, 92, 123, 149, 152 Pound, Ezra, 17, 64, 71, 91, 102, 184n7, 186–87n20, 197n22 poverty, 9, 41, 44, 49, 57–61, 101, 190n49 see also economic conditions; working class pragmatic anarchism, 49–50, 192n19

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pragmatic pastoralism defined, 3, 6–7, 12–15 historical context of, 22–30, 182–83nn mapping, 15–19 new discursive model and, 18–19 see also specific authors pragmatism American intellectual life and, 18–19 American pastoral ideology and integration of, 30 art and democracy and, 35–37 continued influence of, 19, 153, 166 defined, 11–12 femininity and, 103, 106 frontier rhetoric and, 27–28 masculinity and, 102 radical thought and, 30–37 redefinition of community and, 29–30 resurgence of, in 1980s, 19, 152–53 see also specific authors and issues private-public links, 30 Ashbery and, 18, 124–28, 131, 132, 136, 200n9 Dewey and, 7–8, 21, 36, 158 Frost and, 54–59 Hejinian and, 167–68 Stein and, 154, 158, 161–62, 168 Stevens, 196–97n19 Williams and, 73 privilege, 8–9, 11, 152, 170 production, 16, 26, 43–44 Frost and, 63 Stevens and, 110 Williams and, 86–88 Progressive Era, 21, 84–85 progressive politics, 26–27, 30, 65, 69, 72, 75, 168 proletarian literature, 8, 152 protoconfessional mode, 132–34 public sphere, 4, 14, 36–37 see also private-public links Puerto Rico, 74 Puritans, 28

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purity, 13–14 Dewey and, 72, 78 Williams and, 13–14, 68, 72, 77–81, 193n30 Putnam, Hilary, 167 Quandt, Jean B., 182n16 race, 7, 11, 14, 96–97 Hejinian and, 167 Stevens and, 17, 94, 98, 107, 113–15, 195n1 tramps and, 40 Williams and, 13, 68, 74, 77–79, 91 “radical empiricism,” 31, 162 radical thought, 30–37, 44, 60, 70–71 Rae, Patricia, 196n8, 197n25 Pragmatism, 103 Rainey, Lawrence, 10 Ransom, John Crow, 6–7, 9–10, 12, 29–30, 177–78nn “Mr. Empson’s Muddles,” 9 Stevens and, 108 Williams and, 92 Reading, Pennsylvania, 95, 115–16, 171 realism Ashbery and, 124, 126, 128, 135, 149, 200n6 cold war and, 125, 126 Dewey and, 32–33 James and, 31 Stevens and, 92–93, 95, 106, 116–17 Williams and, 74–75, 91, 92 relationships, new, 26–27, 84, 85 “representative anecdotes,” 5 “representative men,” 125, 129, 140 Republican Party, 56 republican ethos, 24–25, 33 see also citizen; democracy Riddel, Joseph, 77, 112, 192n29, 193n30 Rimbaud, Arthur, 126 Rivers, Larry, 128

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Robertson, Lisa, 18, 152–53, 162, 168–71 “How Pastoral,” 169–70 “Palinodes,” 170 Stein and, 162, 168–69, 208n56 “Utopia/,” 170, 208n56 The Weather, 170 XEclogue, 18, 153, 168–71 Robinson, Edward Arlington, 60 Roman Civil Wars, 5 Romantic-Modernist aesthetic, 134 Romantics, 180n35 Roosevelt, Franklin, 59–60, 62, 64, 190n49 Roosevelt, Theodore, 96, 100, 102, 125 Rorty, Richard, 11, 36, 152 Rosenberg, Rosalind, 206n32 Rosenzweig, Roy, 186n17, 187n23 Ross, Andrew, 201n19 Ross, Stephen, 186n18 Roth, Philip American Pastoral, 177n12 Rotundo, Anthony, 26 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 169 Roussel, Raymond, 127 Rubin, Joan, 60 rural life, 172 Ashbery and, 140 Frost and, 4, 49, 56–59 see also farming Sandburg, Carl Always the Young Strangers, 185n8 Sankey, Benjamin, 77 Saturnalia, 84 Savran, David, 201n14 Schmidt, Peter, 191n8, 193n30 Schuyler, James, 128, 175n3, 202n25, 208n57 Schwantes, Carlos, 186n16 science, 6, 14 Hejinian and, 163 Stein and, 154, 161–62 Sedgick, Eve, 130

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Index Seigfried, Charlene Haddock, 206n33 self, 3, 7, 12–14, 16, 21–31, 152, 182n16 alienation from, 86–87 Ashbery and, 18, 122, 124, 124, 127, 131, 141, 144, 148, 148–49 crisis of modern, 30–31 Dewey and, 21, 28–29, 32–34, 71 Frost and, 42, 56–57 James and, 29, 31, 45 postmodernism and, 152 Stein and, 160 Stevens and, 94, 95, 101, 102, 114, 121–22 Williams and, 69, 71, 73, 78, 85, 87, 91 September 11, 2001, 172 Sewanee Review, 91 sexist essentialism, 68 sexual difference, 14, 26 Hejinian and, 153 Robertson and, 153 see also femininity; gender; masculinity sexuality, 7, 11, 170 Ashbery, 13, 18, 125, 128–29, 131–33, 135–37, 140, 200n9 Frost and, 54 Robertson and, 168–70 Stein and, 18, 151–54, 158–60 Williams and, 13, 78–80, 82–84, 88–89 see also heterosexuality; homosexuality Shakespeare, William As You Like It, 154 Sheehy, Donald, 43 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 35 Sherman, Gen. William Tecumseh, 105 Shoptaw, John, 129, 200nn, 202n26 Showboat (musical), 203n33 Silliman, Ron, 167 Silverman, Kaja, 128, 130, 201n13 Smedman, 191n12

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Smith, Patti, 169 Snyder, Gary, 175n3 social class, 5–8, 11, 13, 26, 186n18 Frost and, 13, 42–43, 51–52, 64, 63–64 Williams and, 13, 79, 84, 85, 91 see also middle classes; poverty; working classes social consciousness, 35, 45 socialism, 7, 44 society (social order), 4–6, 8, 10–12, 14–15, 17, 22, 24, 26, 30 Ashbery and, 18, 124, 127, 143 Dewey and 32–36, 171–72 Empson and, 11 Frost and, 42, 52–56, 60, 64 James and, 22 Marx’s pastoralism and, 10 Stein and, 158–59 tramps and, 42–43 Williams and, 78, 84 see also citizenship; community; localism; private-public links soldiers, 120–22 Sontag, Susan, 128 spectacle, 128, 136 Spender, Stephen, 9 Stallybrass, Peter, 13, 101, 179n33 Stein, Bertha, 159 Stein, Gertrude, 4, 13, 15, 18–19, 151–70, 204n6, 205–6nn “As a Wife Has a Cow a Love Story,” 151, 160 Ashbery and, 148 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 151, 159, 161, 168 “Bee Time Vine,” 151 “Composition as Explanation,” 154 “continuous present” in work of, 154–56, 168 Dewey and, 21, 205–6n22 The Geographical History of America, 156 geography of history and, 154–62

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Stein, Gertrude—Continued Hejinian and, 162–66, 168, 206–7n36 James and, 21, 205n20, 207n37 Lucy Church Amiably, 18, 153, 155–56, 158–62, 205n15 The Making of Americans, 166 “Melanctha,” 18, 153–55 “Poetry and Grammar,” 156 Q.E.D., 154 Robertson and, 168–69, 170, 208n56 Stanzas in Meditation, 162, 168 Three Lives, 154 Useful Knowledge, 161 Stein, Leo, 157–58, 205–6n22 The ABC of Aesthetics, 206 Stevens, Elsie Kachel, 94, 196–97n19 Stevens, Holly, 120, 196n19, 199nn Stevens, Wallace, 4, 6, 13, 15, 17–18, 21, 91–123, 153, 195–99nn “Anecdote of a Jar,” 122 Ashbery and, 121–22, 143, 147, 149 “Asides on the Oboe,” 113 “The Auroras of Autumn,” 116 The Auroras of Autumn, 95 “Bantams in Pine Woods,” 22, 94–100, 108 “The Comedian as the Letter ‘C’,” 114 “Credences of Summer,” 115–18 “Description without Place,” 91–92, 195n45 Dewey and, 17, 21, 102–4, 197n27 “Eclogue,” 93, 195n1 “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War,” 108–9, 113 feminist pastorals and, 153 “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” 17, 104–8, 118 “The Glass of Water,” 112 Harmonium, 95–96, 116 “The Idea of Order at Key West,” 147

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James and, 17, 21, 102, 104, 119, 197n27, 198n30 “Jocundus” figure, 111–14, 116, 119, 121 “Jumbo,” 94, 113–15, 122, 195n1 “Large Red Man Reading,” 94, 113, 115, 195n1 “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” 198n35 “Life on a Battleship,” 109 “Man on the Dump,” 149 “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” 17, 116, 118–19 “Owl’s Clover,” 111, 198n39 “Ploughing on Sunday,” 93 “The Silver Plough Boy,” 93, 195n1 “Sombre Figuration,” 111–13 Williams and, 91–92 World War II and, 103–4 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 188n28 “The Lantern-Bearers,” 45 Steward, Susan, 177n12 Strychacz, Thomas, 10 subaltern, 79, 86 subjectivity, 14–16, 26–27, 170 Ashbery and, 124, 129, 148 Dewey and, 32–34, 36, 71 Robertson and, 171 Stein and, 158 tramps and, 44 Williams and, 69, 71, 87 women poets and, 152–53 subject-object relations Dewey and, 32–33, 158 James and, 21–22 Sumner, William, 190n49 surrealism, 17–18, 124, 126–27, 131–33, 135, 149, 200nn, 201n19 Susman, Warren, 182n16 Sutherland, Donald, 158 Szalay, Michael, 190n53 Taft, William Howard, 100 Tate, Allen, 91

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Index Theocritus, 15, 73–74, 84, 86 The Odes, 73 Thompson, Lawrence, 39, 52–53 Thomson, Rosemarie, 196n16 Thurston, Michael, 11, 15 Ticchi, Cecelia, 180n37 Today, 59 Toklas, Alice, 155, 161–62, 206n33 Torrence, Ridgely, 60 tramps, 16, 47–50, 69, 184–90nn Ashbery and, 124 Frost and, 1–2, 4, 13, 16, 22, 39–46, 49–65, 68, 85 George and, 50 James and, 42, 44–46, 50 Waye, Oliver, and, 59 Whitman and, 2, 46 Williams and, 68 “transideological irony,” 12, 179n31 transideological valences, 35 transnational pastoral, 168 Trask, Michael Cruising Modernism, 185n10 Triquarterly, 175n3, 177n12 Trotter, David, 13, 14, 101 truth James and, 22, 31 Ransom and, 9 scientific method and, 6 Williams and, 68, 73, 82–84 Tuan, Yi-Fu Space and Place, 183n34 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 182n16 “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 23 unemployment, 43, 45, 61, 185n12, 186n19 Untermeyer, Louis, 44, 60, 101 upper-classes (rich), 9, 31–32, 34–35, 45, 50, 101–2 urban life, 14, 26 Ashbery and, 128–29, 145, 146 Frost and, 41–42, 60

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Mumford and, 29 Robertson and, 168, 170–72 Stein and, 154 Stevens and, 111 Williams and, 16–17, 71, 82, 84–86 value, 6 Frost and, 55 Williams and, 68, 79, 84, 86, 88 Van Vechten, Carl, 98 Veblen, Thorstein The Theory of the Leisure Class, 50 Vendler, Helen, 196n11, 198n39, 199nn, 202n25 Vietnam War, 165 Vincent, John, 129, 202n26 violence, 123, 125, 128, 130–34, 138, 144–46, 203n30 Virgil, 15, 49, 84, 86, 120, 169–70 Eclogues, 5, 124, 202n25 Idylls, 155 virtue, 26–27, 30, 181n10 Ashbery and, 133–34 cold war and, 125 See also citizen; ethics; morality Von Hallberg, Robert, 202n24 war, 31–32, 121–22, 144–45 Ward, Geoff, 201n12 Ward, Susan, 40 waste, 13, 14, 16, 179n32, 180nn Ashbery and, 126, 149 Frost and, 51–52 IWW and, 44 Stevens, 17, 92, 95, 101, 121, 198n40 Williams and, 67, 85–88, 90, 92 Waye, Oliver, 59–60 “The Forgotten Man,” 59 Wayne, John, 125 Webb, Clifton, 129 West, Cornel, 11, 36, 152, 167, 181n13 West, 158, 167 see also frontier

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Westbrook, Robert, 11, 35, 36, 153, 181n13, 183nn White, Allon, 13, 101, 179n33 whiteness, 13–14, 40, 42, 76–78, 195n1 Whitman, Walt, 2, 43, 45–47, 127, 185n11 Ashbery and, 149, 202n26 Hejinian and, 165–66 Leaves of Grass, 166 Robertson and, 170 The Tramp and Strike Question, 43 Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 144–45 Williams, William Carlos, 4, 6, 13, 15–17, 21, 35, 64–65, 67–91, 122, 123, 141, 149, 190–95nn Ashbery and, 122, 141, 149 “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” 183n39 Complete Collected Poems, 68 Dewey and, 16–17, 21, 35, 191–92n19 feminist pastorals, 153 Frost and, 64–65 “Idyll” (1914), 69, 72–73 James and, 21 “A Pastoral,” (early unpublished), 80–81, 84 “Pastoral” (1914), 69, 72 “Pastoral” (1917), 73 “Paterson” (1926), 68 Paterson, 16–17, 67–73, 75–91, 192–95nn; Book One, 70, 79, 141; Book Two, 69–70, 84–90; Book Three, 68, 70; Book Four, 69–70, 75–84, 191n8 “A Place (Any Place) to Transcend All Places,” 92

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Spring and All, 74–75 Stevens and, 91, 92, 102 “To Elsie,” 73–75, 84, 192n26 “The Wanderer,” 68, 85, 86 “Yours, O Youth,” 71 Williams, Raymond, 5, 11, 172 Wilson, R. Jackson, 182n16 Wineapple, Brenda, 206n22 Wister, Owen The Virginian, 166 women, 11, 14–16, 96, 161–63 Ashbery and, 133 rights of, 172 Stein and, 152 Stevens and, 102, 106 Williams and, 16, 65, 70 see also feminism; femininity working class, 6, 11, 40, 42, 44, 177n17, 186nn, 187n23, 190n49 Dewey and, 35, 36, 72 Empson and, 8–9, 12 Frost and, 41–46, 48–50, 51, 59, 63–65 James and, 31–32, 45, 45, 102 Stevens and, 98 tramp and, 43 Williams and, 16, 64–65, 69, 70, 72, 78, 83, 85–88 World War I, 15, 29, 197n27 World War II, 15, 17, 19, 43, 95, 102–4, 108, 120, 124, 197–98n27 WPA, 64 Wyckoff, Walter, 43, 46 Yeats, William Butler, 9, 81 Young Americans, 29

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