The Cambridge Companion to American Poets 9781107560789, 9781107123823, 2015014841

Citation preview

The Cambridge Companion to American Poets The Cambridge Companion to American Poets brings together thirty-one essays on some ffty-four American poets, spanning nearly 400  years, from Anne Bradstreet to contemporary performance poetry. This book also examines such movements in American poetry as modernism, the Harlem (or New Negro) Renaissance, “confessional” poetry, the Black Mountain School, the New York School, the Beats, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Its reputable host of contributors approaches American poetry from perspectives as diverse as the poetry itself. The result is a Companion concise enough to be read with pleasure yet expansive enough to do justice to the many traditions American poets have modifed, inaugurated, and made their own. Mark Richardson is Professor of English at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. He is the author of The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The Poet and His Poetics (Illinois, 1997). He has also edited, with Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (Library of America, 1995), Robert Frost in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and The Collected Prose of Robert Frost (Harvard, 2007). A complete list of books in the series is at the back of this book.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

The C a mb r idg e C ompa n ion to

A M E R I CA N   P O E TS

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

THE CAMBRIDGE C O M PA N I O N TO

AMERICAN POETS EDITED BY

MARK RI CHARDS ON Doshisha University, Kyoto

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, U SA Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107560789 © Cambridge University Press 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Cambridge companion to American poets / edited by Mark Richardson. pages cm. – (Cambridge companions to literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISB N 978-1-107-12382-3 (hardback) – IS BN 978-1-107-56078-9 (paperback) 1. American poetry – History and criticism. I. Richardson, Mark, 1963– editor. P S 303.C 287 2015 811.009–dc23 2015014841 IS BN 978-1-107-12382-3 Hardback IS BN 978-1-107-56078-9 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of U R L s for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

CONTENTS

1

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments

page xi

Introduction M ark Ri ch ar d so n

1

“The First Shall Be Last”: Apology and Redemption in the Work of the First New England Poets, Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor Ch arl o t t e   Gor d on

xix

10

2

Phillis Wheatley Carl a W i l l ar d

24

3

The Historical Epic, Women’s Poetry, and Early American Verse Ke rry  L ars on

32

4

The Fire This Time: Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier Ch ri s to p h I r ms c h e r

47

5

Ralph Waldo Emerson M ark  S co t t

61

6

Edgar Allan Poe Ke vi n J.   H ay e s

77

7

Walt Whitman D avi d S .   Re y n o l d s

87

8

Melville the Poet Ro be rt   F ag g e n

104 vii

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Contents 9 Forever Young: Rereading Emily Dickinson in the Twenty-First Century M art h a N e l l  S mi t h

119

10 Paul Laurence Dunbar Joan n e Brax to n a n d L au r i  R a me y

136

11 Edwin Arlington Robinson H e n ry  At m or e

144

12 Robert Frost M ark Ri ch ar d so n

160

13 Gertrude Stein Joan Re tal lac k

172

14 Wallace Stevens E l e an o r  Co o k

188

15 William Carlos Williams I an Co p e s ta k e

201

16 Ezra Pound Al e c  M ars h

214

17 Marianne Moore Ce l e s t e G o o d r i d g e

231

18 T. S. Eliot and American Poetry Jo h n Xi ro s   C o op e r

245

19 Hart Crane’s Visionary Company Ro be rt Be rn a r d H as s

258

20 The New Negro Renaissance S t e ve n   T racy

271

21 Langston Hughes H e n ry  At m or e

286

22 Elizabeth Bishop S u san   M cCab e

300

viii Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Contents 23 Gwendolyn Brooks Jam e s S m e t hu rs t

316

24 The Three Voices of Robert Lowell S t e ve n G o u l d A x e l ro d

327

25 The Black Mountain School Al an G o l d i ng

340

26 Jack Spicer D an i e l   Kat z

355

27 Allen Ginsberg: Irreverent, Reverential, and Apocalyptic American Poet Jo n ah   Ras kin

366

28 Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry M e l an i e   W at e rs

379

29 “Street Musicians”: Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery An d re w E p s t e i n

391

30 Adrienne Rich: The Poetry of Witness W e n dy M art i n a n d A n n a l i sa Z ox -We av er

409

31 An “Empty Prescription”: Pleasure in Contemporary American Poetry D avi d   Ki rby

425

Further Reading Index

439 443

ix Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

NOT E S ON C O N T R I B U TORS

Hen ry At m o re , Associate Professor of English at Kobe City University for Foreign Studies, took his doctorate in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge. He has contributed to The Reader’s Guide to the History of Science and is the author of a number of articles in such journals as The British Journal for the History of Science, The Journal of Victorian Culture, and The College Hill Review. He also contributed two essays to Robert Frost in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and is coeditor, with Donald G. Sheehy, Robert Bernard Hass, and Mark Richardson, of The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume II (forthcoming from Harvard University Press). Ste ve n G o u l d Ax e l rod is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of Robert Lowell:  Life and Art (Princeton University Press, 1978), Sylvia Plath:  The Wound and the Cure of Words (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), and a number of essays on American writers. Joa n n e “Jo d i ” B r a x ton is Frances L.  and Edwin L.  Cummings Professor of English and Africana Studies at the College of William and Mary. Her books include Sometimes I Think of Maryland, a volume of poetry (Sunbury Press,1977); Black Women Writing Autobiography:  A  Tradition Within a Tradition (Temple University Press,1989), Wild Women in the Whirlwind:  Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance (Rutgers, 1990); and The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar (University Press of Virginia, 1993). Braxton is currently writing an autobiography. Ele an o r Co o k is Professor Emerita of English, University of Toronto. She is the author of Enigmas and Riddles in Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Against Coercion: Games Poets Play (Stanford, 1998), as well as two books on Wallace Stevens’ poetry and one on Robert Browning’s. She is currently fnishing a book on the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Joh n Xi ro s Co o p e r is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. His books include T. S.  Eliot and the Politics of Voice:  The Argument of The xi Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Notes on Contributors Waste Land (University of Michigan Press, 1987), T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets (Cambridge University Press, 1995), T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra: Critical Essays on Poetry and Music, ed. (New York University Press, 2000), Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and The Cambridge Introduction to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Ia n Co p e s take is editor of the William Carlos Williams Review, president of the Williams Society, and author of The Ethics of William Carlos Williams’s Poetry (Camden House, 2010). An independent scholar, he divides his time between Frankfurt and Los Angeles; his research interests include Basil Bunting, Thomas Pynchon, and the literature of the ocean. His is currently at work on a book titled Madness and the Sea in the American Imagination. Andrew Epstein is Associate Professor of English at Florida State University. He is the author of Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006) and the forthcoming book (also from Oxford), Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture. Robert Faggen is Barton Evans and H.  Andrea Neves Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. He is editor of The Notebooks of Robert Frost (Harvard University Press, 2006); author of Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin (University of Michigan Press, 1997); editor of The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997); author of the “Introduction” to the Fortieth Anniversary Edition of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Viking, 2002); editor of Selected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson (Penguin, 1997), and Early Poems of Robert Frost (Penguin, 1998). He has interviewed Ken Kesey, Czeslaw Milosz, and Russell Banks for Paris Review. He is also coeditor, with Donald G. Sheehy and Mark Richardson, of The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1: 1886–1920 (Harvard University Press, 2014). Ala n G o l d i n g teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Louisville. He is the author of  From Outlaw to Classic:  Canons in American Poetry (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995) and of numerous essays on modernist and contemporary poetry. His current projects include  Writing Into the Future: New American Poetries from the Dial to the Digital  (under contract with the University of Alabama Press), and Isn’t the Avant-Garde Always Pedagogical, a book on experimental poetics and/as pedagogy. With Lynn Keller and Dee Morris, he coedits the Iowa Series on Contemporary North American Poetry and Synapse, a series dedicated to experimental critical approaches to poetics. Cel e s t e G o o d ri dg e is Professor of English at Bowdoin College. Her publications include Hints and Disguises: Marianne Moore and Her Contemporaries (University of Iowa Press, 1989). xii Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Notes on Contributors Charlotte Gordon is a critically acclaimed author who has published the biography Mistress Bradstreet:  The Untold Story of America’s First Poet (Little, Brown, 2005), The Woman Who Named God: Abraham’s Dilemma and the Birth of Three Faiths (Little, Brown, 2009), and Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley (Random House, 2015). She has also published two books of poetry. She is an Associate Professor of English at Endicott College. Visit her Web site at www.charlottegordonbooks.com. Rob e rt Be rn ard Hass , Professor of English and Theatre Arts at Edinboro University, Edinboro, Pennsylvania, is the author of Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Confict with Science (University Press of Virginia, 2002), named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book in 2004. He is also the author of a volume of poetry, Counting Thunder (David Robert Brooks, 2008), and of the essay “Frost and the Pastoral Tradition” in Robert Frost in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2014). He is currently at work, wih Donald G. Sheehy, Henry Atmore, and Mark Richardson, on The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume II (forthcoming from Harvard). Kev i n J.  H aye s is the author of Poe and the Printed Word (Cambridge University Press, 2000)  and Edgar Allan Poe (Reaktion, 2009), a short critical biography. In addition, he has edited The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Edgar Allan Poe in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Chr i s to p h I rm s c h e r is Provost Professor of English and Director of the Wells Scholars Program at Indiana University. His books include Longfellow Redux (Illinois, 2006), Louis Agassiz:  Creator of American Science (Houghton Miffin Harcourt, 2013), and the Library of America edition of Audubon’s Writings and Drawings (1999). He is the curator of the award-winning Harvard Web exhibit “Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200.” Da n i e l Kat z is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.  He is the author of The Poetry of Jack Spicer (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene:  The Labour of Translation (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), and Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett (Northwestern University Press, 1999), as well as many articles and chapters on twentieth and twenty-frst century literature. Davi d Ki rby is the Robert O.  Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. A Johns Hopkins PhD, he is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as of three University Teaching Awards (1992, 1997, 2012) and a University Distinguished Teaching Award (2007). His collection The House on Boulevard xiii Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Notes on Contributors St.: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2007) was a fnalist for the National Book Award. Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll (Continuum, 2009), which the Times Literary Supplement called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” He is a regular reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. His recent books include two collections of poetry, The Biscuit Joint (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) and A Wilderness of Monkeys (Hanging Loose Press, 2014). See www.davidkirby.com for more information. Ker ry L ars o n is Professor of English at the University of Michigan and is the author of two books, Whitman’s Drama of Consensus (University of Chicago Press, 1988) and Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and has published articles on antebellum American literature in ELH, Raritan, and Nineteenth-Century Literature. Ale c M ars h , Professor of English at Muhlenburg College, is author of Ezra Pound:  A  Critical Life (Reaktion, 2011)  and Money & Modernity:  Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson (Alabama University Press, 1998). We n dy M art i n is Professor of American Literature and American Studies at Claremont Graduate University and holds the George and Ronya Kozmetsky Endowed Chair of Transdisciplinary Studies. Her books include The American Sisterhood:  Feminist Writings from the Colonial Times to the Present (Harper and Row, 1972); An American Triptych: The Lives and Work of Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, and Adrienne Rich (University of North Carolina Press, 1984); New Essays on The Awakening, American Novel Criticism Series (Cambridge University Press, 1988); The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson (Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Emily Dickinson (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Susan M cCabe is Professor of English at the University of Southern California. She is currently an editor for the poetry series of the University of California Press. She is the author of two critical studies, Elizabeth Bishop:  Her Poetics of Loss (Penn State University Press, 1994)  and Cinematic Modernism:  Modern Poetry and Film (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and two collections of poetry, Swirl (Red Hen Press, 2003) and Descartes’ Nightmare (winner of the Agha Shahid Ali prize, and published by Utah University Press in 2008). Lauri Ram e y is founding Director of the Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, and Professor of English, at California State University, Los Angeles. Her books  include  The Heritage Series of Black Poetry, 1962-1975  (Ashgate, 2008)  and  Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry  (Palgrave xiv Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Notes on Contributors Macmillan, 2010).  She is co-editor, with Aldon Lynn Nielsen, of a two-volume anthology of formally innovative African American poetry from the University of Alabama Press:  Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone (2006) and  What I Say (2015). She is currently writing  A History of African American Poetry, to be published by Cambridge University Press. Jonah Ras ki n is Professor Emeritus of Communication Studies at Sonoma State University. He is the author of fourteen books, including The Mythology of Imperialism  (Monthly Review Press, 2009);  Out of the Whale:  Growing Up in the American Left:  An Autobiography  (Quick Fox, 1974);  My Search for B.  Traven  (Metheun, 1980);  Natives, Newcomers, Exiles, Fugitives:  Northern California Writers and Their Work  (Running Wolf Press, 2004);  For the Hell of It:  The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman  (University of California Press, 1998);  American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation  (University of California Press, 2006);  Field Days:  A  Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California  (University of California Press, 2009);  A Terrible Beauty: The Wilderness of American Literature  (Regent, 2014). He is also the editor of  The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution  (University of California Press, 2008). A  performance poet, he has published seven chapbooks, including “More Poems, Better Poems,” “Auras,” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Women: Portraits of a Generation.” Joa n Re tal l ack is John D.  and Catherine T.  MacArthur Professor Emerita of Humanities at Bard College. Her  Gertrude Stein:  Selections  (University of California Press, 2008)  includes an extensive essay on Stein’s life and poetics. She also wrote the introduction to the 2012 Yale critical edition of Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation. Retallack’s most recent poetry volume Procedural Elegies / Western Civ Cont’d /    (Roof Books) was an ARTFORUM best book of 2010. Her other poetry includes Memnoir (Post-Apollo, 2004), How to Do Things with Words  (Sun and Moon Classics, 1998),  and  Afterrimages  (Wesleyan University Press, 1995). She is the author of  The Poethical Wager (University of California Press, 2003)  and  MUSICAGE, her conversations with John Cage (Wesleyan University Press, 1996).  Davi d S .   Re yn o l d s is Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), winner of the Bancroft Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award fnalist; Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), winner of the Christian Gauss Award; Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson (HarperCollins, 2008), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), winner of the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. xv Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Notes on Contributors Mark Ri ch ard s o n is Professor of English of Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan. He is author of The Ordeal of Robert Frost (University of Illinois Press, 1997); coeditor, with Richard Poirier, of Robert Frost: Poems, Prose, and Plays (Library of America, 1995); editor of The Collected Prose of Robert Frost (Harvard University Press, 2007); coeditor, with Robert Faggen and Donald Sheehy, of The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume I: 1886–1920 (Harvard University Press, 2014); and contributing editor of Robert Frost in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2014). At present he is at work, with Donald G. Sheehy, Robert Bernard Hass, and Henry Atmore, on The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume II (forthcoming from Harvard University Press). Mark S co t t , Professor of English at Nara Women’s University, is author of two volumes of poetry, Tactile Values (New Issues, 2000) and A Bedroom Occupation (Lumen Books, 2007, with a preface by Richard Howard). He has published essays in literary criticism on Emerson, Frost, Bernard Berenson, and other writers, and he contributed two essays to Robert Frost in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Jam e s S m e t h u rs t is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946 (Oxford University Press, 1999)  and The Black Arts Movement:  Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). He is also the coeditor of Left of the Color Line:  Race, Radicalism and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2003) and Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Mart h a N e l l S m i t h is Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. She established the Dickinson Electronic Archives in 1997 and now serves as founding director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. Her latest contribution to Dickinson digital scholarship, Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences:  A  Born-Digital Textual Inquiry (University of Virginia Rotunda Press, 2008), was done in collaboration with Lara Vetter. Her books include Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Dickinson (Paris Press, 1998), Comic Power in Emily Dickinson (University of Texas Press, 1993), Rowing in Eden (University of Texas Press, 1992), and, with Mary Loeffelholz, A Companion to Emily Dickinson (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). Ste ve n T racy is a Fulbright Senior Specialist, Chu Tian Scholar at Central China Normal University, and Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has authored, edited, coedited, or provided introductions for thirty-one books; provided more than seventy contributions to book publications edited by others; and written more than ffty CD liner notes. His latest book is Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature xvi Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Notes on Contributors (University of Alabama Press, 2015). A singer–harmonica player, he has opened for B. B. King, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, James Cotton, Canned Heat, Johnny Winter, Roy Buchanan, and others. Mel an i e W at e rs is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Northumbria University. Her books include Feminism and Popular Culture (I. B. Tauris, 2013), Poetry and Autobiography (Routledge, 2011), and Women on Screen: Feminism, Femininity and Visual Culture (Palgrave, 2011). Carl a W i l l ard is Associate Professor of American Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. She has published essays on African American literature in such journals as American Literature and American Quarterly. Ann al i sa Zox- We av e r is a freelance writer and editor. Her recent publications include “Gertrude Stein ‘Facing Both Ways’ ” in Women, Femininity, and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789–1914 (Ashgate, 2014); “Annie Lapin: An Intimate Paintbrush” in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Claremont, 2012); and Women Modernists and Fascism: Female Modernists and the Allure of the Dictator (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

xvii Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

AC K N OW L E DGM E N TS

“Canzone: of Incense” and “The Decadence” by Ezra Pound from Collected Early Poems, copyright © 1976 by the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Excerpt from Guide to Kulchur, copyright © 1970 by Ezra Pound, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Excerpt from “The Serious Artist” by Ezra Pound, from The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, copyright © 1935 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Lines from “Commission,” “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” “Tenzone,” and “The Rest” by Ezra Pound, from Personae, copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Excerpt from William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, and from Williams, Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams, copyright © 1954 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Excerpt from William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, copyright ©1951 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Lines from ‘‘By the road to the contagious hospital,’’ ‘‘The Poet of Flowers,’’ ‘‘The Uses of Poetry,’’ and ‘‘To a Poor Old Woman,’’ by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems:  Volume I, 1909–1939, copyright ©1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Lines from “To All Gentleness,” by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems:  Volume II, 1939–1962, copyright ©1953 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Overland to the Islands” by Denise Levertov, from Collected Earlier Poems 1940–1960, copyright © 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1979 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Overland to the Islands” from Collected Earlier Poems 1940–1960 by Denise Levertov reprinted also by permission of Pollinger Limited (www.pollingerltd.com) on behalf of the Estate of Denise Levertov. Lines from “Howl,” “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” xix Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Acknowledgments

“A Supermarket in California,” “Kaddish,” “America,” “A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley,” “Autumn Leaves,” “Malest Cornifci Tuo Catullo,” and “I’m a Prisoner of Allen Ginsberg,” from Collected Poems 1947–1997 by Allen Ginsberg, copyright © 2006 by the Allen Ginsberg Trust. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Lines from “Soonest Mended” from The Double Dream of Spring, by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1970 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. Lines from “The Skaters” from Rivers and Mountains, by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1966 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. Lines from “The New Spirit” from Three Poems, by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1972 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. Lines from “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers” and “Two Scenes” from Some Trees, by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1956 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Goodbye Christ,” “Young Gal’s Blues,” “Small Memory,” “Salute to the Soviet Armies,” and “Stalingrad,” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Hughes quoted also by permission of David Higham Associates. Lines from “Self in 1958,” “Housewife,” “The Operation,” and “For Mr. Death Who Stands With His Door Open,” by Anne Sexton reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright © by Anne Sexton. Selections from The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, edited and with an afterword by Peter Gizzi, copyright © 1998 and used by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Jack Spicer, selections from My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, copyright © 2008 and used by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC: Excerpts from “In the Waiting Room,” “The Man-Moth,” “Quai D’Orléans,” “The Imaginary Iceberg,” “The Map,” “Objects and Apparitions,” “Gentleman of Shalott,” “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” “Sandpiper,” “One Art,” “The End of March,” “Paris, 7A.M.,” “A Miracle for Breakfast,” “The Fish,” “Crusoe in England,” “January First,” “One Art,” and “The Weed” from Complete Poems 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Excerpt from “In the Village” from The Collected Prose by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1984 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Excerpts from “Accuracy, Spontaneity, xx Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Acknowledgments

Mystery,” and “The Drunkard” from Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke Box by Elizabeth Bishop, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn. Copyright © 2006 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Excerpts from “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” “Commander Lowell,” “Sailing Home from Rapallo,” “Skunk Hour,” “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” “Unwanted,” “Concord,” “Near the Ocean,” “Central Park,” and “Reading Myself” from The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell by Robert Lowell. Quoted by permission of David Higham. Gertrude Stein, Wars I  Have Seen (London:  Brilliance Books, 1984); “The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans,” in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. with introduction by Carl Van Vechten (New York: Random House, 1946); The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (Dalkey Archive Press, 1995); “Ada,” from A Stein Reader, ed. and introduction by Ulla E.  Dydo (Northwestern University Press, 1993); “Picasso,” Joan Retallack, ed., Gertrude Stein:  Selections (University of California Press, 2008); How Writing Is Written, Volume II of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Black Sparrow Press, 1974), Gertrude Stein, How to Write, preface and introduction by Patricia Meyerowitz (Dover, 1975); Gertrude Stein, “Patriarchal Poetry,” from Gertrude Stein:  Writings, 1903–1932, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (The Library of America, 1998); Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation:  The Corrected Edition, ed. Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina with introduction by Joan Retallack (Yale University Press, 2012). “Personism:  A  Manifesto,” “In Memory of My Feelings,” “Homosexuality,” and “Poetry” from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara by Frank O’Hara, copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara, copyright renewed 1999 by Maureen O’Hara Granville-Smith and Donald Allen. Used by permission of Alfred A.  Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. “Domination of Black,” “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself,” “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “The Snow Man,” “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “The Planet on the Table,” “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” “Angel Surrounded by Paysans,” “Credences of Summer,” “Late Hymn from the Myrrh-Mountain,” “The Auroras of Autumn,” “The Poems of Our Climate,” “Analysis of a Theme,” “The Sun This March,” and “A Woman Sings a Song for a Soldier Come Home” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third-party use of this material, outside xxi Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Acknowledgments

of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House LLC for permission. The line from “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev,” the lines from “Sibling Mysteries,” from The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1978 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Excerpt from “Power and Danger: Works of a Common Woman,” from On Lies Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1979 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. The lines from “1948: Jews,” the lines from “Eastern War Time,” from An Atlas of the Diffcult World:  Poems 1988–1991 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1991 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. The lines from “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” the lines from “Juvenilia,” the lines from “Aunt Jennifer’ s Tigers,” the lines from “Moth Hour,” the lines from “On Edges,” the lines from “Implosions,” the lines from “The Blue Ghazals,” the lines from “Readings of History,” from Collected Early Poems: 1950–1970 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1993 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright (c) 1967, 1963, 1962, 1961, 1960, 1959, 1958, 1957, 1956, 1955, 1954, 1953, 1952, 1951 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright (c)  1984, 1975, 1971, 1969, 1966 by W.  W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Excerpt from “Anger and Tenderness,” from Of Woman Born:  Motherhood as Experience and Institution by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1986, 1976 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W.  W. Norton & Company, Inc. Excerpt from “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” excerpt from “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity,” from Blood, Bread, and Poetry:  Selected Prose 1979–1985 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1986 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. The line from “The Stranger,” from Diving Into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1973 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. The lines from “Diving into the Wreck,” the lines from “The Phenomenology of Anger,” the lines from “Power,” the lines from “Twenty-One Love Poems,” the lines from “The Spirit of Place,” the lines from “Coast to Coast,” the lines from “Sources,” the lines from “Yom Kippur 1984,” the lines from “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve,” from Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 2013 by The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright (c) 2011, 2007, 2004, 2001, 1999, 1995, 1991, 1989, 1986, 1981 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright (c) 1978, 1973 by W.  W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W.  W. Norton & Company, Inc. xxii Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

M A R K R I C H A R DS O N

Introduction

People who write about American poetry sometimes start sounding presidential. Grand narratives and continuities are on offer, in which we might, by taking thought, assume a part. Once that happens, it’s easy to regard what we’re a part of as exceptional. I shall avoid grand narratives and American exceptionalism in introducing this book.1 We have certainly had our oracular poets and politicians (Emerson, Whitman, Lincoln, Ginsberg, Pound, King, Rich, et  al.). It was inevitable that possible Americas should shimmer in mirage before us, when the actual one was so often so sordid. “What to the American slave is the 4th of July?” asked Frederick Douglass in July 1852. “A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham . . . a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” “Go where you may, search where you will,” he says in conclusion, “roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the every-day practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”2 Yet what better patriot, and prose-poet of democracy, can our nation boast than Douglass? He was a believer. In addressing the citizens of Rochester, Douglass naturally fell into a characteristically American genre: the jeremiad – the “frst literary innovation” of the New England colonists and their most “enduring” legacy.3 Nothing could be more American than to say America reigns in shameless hypocrisy without a rival. Into the lists add the poet James Monroe Whitfeld in his “America” (1853), William Vaughan Moody in his “Ode in a Time of Hesitation” (1901), Allen Ginsberg in his “America” (1955), and Robert Lowell in “For the Union Dead” (1960), to name only four. Efforts to provide the nation with a proper epic date from its inception. Greece had Homer, and Rome, Virgil. A Columbiad was in order. Joel Barlow 1 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.001

Mark Richardson

provided it, taking pains, in prefacing his 1807 edition, to distinguish it from the Iliad, the existence of which he rather regrets (“Its obvious tendency was . . . to inculcate the pernicious doctrine of the divine right of kings”), and to distinguish it also from the Aeneid (“Virgil wrote and felt like a subject, not like a citizen”).4 The effect of such poems as The Columbiad was as often to obscure American history from view as to illuminate it; as much to redescribe it tendentiously as to defne it, especially with regard to those two wonders of the nineteenth-century white imagination: the “vanishing” Indian (see William Cullen Bryant’s “The Prairies,” “For which the speech of England has no name”) and the contented slave (see Henry Timrod’s “The Cotton Boll”). Barlow’s Columbus is a genius, “prudent and humane” in his treatment of indigenous peoples in the Caribbean (13), and who, had he not been thwarted by Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella, would have laid the groundwork for a benevolent European presence in the Americas, “fostering” the native “tribes” with “paternal toil” (21). So begins the poem, so began the whitewashing. Still, as Kerry Larson makes clear herein, several notable women penned their own epics, as in antiphony, making our “national” poetry more complex. Grave apprehensions as to whether America had duly distinguished itself from the Old World already infect Barlow’s Columbiad, where the institution of slavery is condemned as exotic, a thing to be purged lest the Revolution remain incomplete: “Too much of Europe, here transplanted o’er, / Nursed feudal feelings on your tented shore, / Brought sable serfs from Afric . . .” (300). In 1954, at the Congresso Internacional de Escritores e Encontros Intelectuais, held in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Robert Frost really said nothing new: Our basic principle – that of Americans I mean – is somewhat complex. But note: John Adams was the man who decided upon our separation from the Old World, Europe. He imagined, for example, that there scarcely existed between us a degree of kinship. Afterward, Tom Paine noted that the war was not so much a war of separation but rather one for liberty and the inspiration of the French Revolution. . . . But our world did not revolt struggling for equality; scarcely anything was done in equality’s name. The great realization, the real consequence of the revolution was the separation, and I should be greatly troubled if we remained separate from Europe  – the Old World  – without demonstrating some originality to the world.5

To his credit, and the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding, Frost insisted that, truth be told, “scarcely anything was done in equality’s name” and that “everything disappeared” (as he later remarks, wonderfully) with Tom Paine, whom Theodore Roosevelt called a “flthy little atheist.” That Frost read “The Gift Outright”  – an American poem about which there 2 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.001

Introduction

can be no consensus – at the inauguration of JFK is oddly perfect. Kennedy would lead us into a “New Frontier” and preside over “Camelot,” popular terms of art so diverse in implication (New World, Old World) as to be comically incompatible. But America has never been compatible with itself; just ask Young Goodman Brown or the conspiracy theorists who are his heirs. Whatever the case, one circumstance distinguishing America from England – it would be hard to overstate its importance – is this: our “colonized” population was internal to the nation:  slaves.6 Once slavery was abolished, neo-slavery and Jim Crow replaced it; after those went came the mass incarceration of people of color.7 “Plain it is to us” – writes DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in phrases that still ring true, mutatis mutandis – that what the world seeks through desert and wild we have within our threshold, – a stalwart laboring force, suited to the semi-tropics; if, deaf to the voice of the Zeitgeist, we refuse to use and develop these men, we risk poverty and loss. If, on the other hand, seized by the brutal afterthought, we debauch the race thus caught in our talons, selfshly sucking their blood and brains in the future as in the past, what shall save us from national decadence?8

Here  – even as in The Columbiad, in Emerson’s “The American Scholar” (1837) and “The Poet” (1841), and in Whitman’s preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass – is a call to make the New World genuinely new. Crises to do with slavery and its aftermath track our literary history closely, moving it away from England’s. Out of the Missouri Compromise of 1818–1820, in the deliberations for which Jefferson purported to hear “the [death] knell of the republic,” came Bryant’s “The Ages” (1821).9 There the United States fgures as the consummation of historical operations begun in ancient Greece, relayed via Rome to Europe and England, and then, under the westering star of empire, to America. “Here the free spirit of mankind at length / Throws its last fetters off.” “Who shall place / A limit to the giant’s unchain’d strength,” Bryant asks, “Or curb his swiftness in the forward race?” “Europe is prey to sterner fates, / And writhes in shackles.” “But thou, my country,” says Bryant in apostrophe to the Era of Good Feelings, “shalt never fall . . . seas and stormy air / Are the wide barrier of thy borders, where / Among thy gallant sons that guard thee well, / Thou laugh’st at enemies.” Lincoln, of course, knew better, and wrote the two best prose poems of the nineteenth century, both of them elegies:  the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. He watched as the nation endured the Nullifcation Crisis of 1832–1833, Nat Turner’s insurrection (1832), and the 1837 murder of abolitionist and journalist Elijah Lovejoy by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois (they tossed his printing press in the Mississippi). And Lincoln said, 3 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.001

Mark Richardson

before the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfeld (in 1838): “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and fnisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” We must ourselves be its author and fnisher: Whitman took that in the optative mood, switching out the antecedent to the pronoun (If creation be our lot . . .). The Mexican War, and the 1850 Compromise it occasioned, gave us James Russell Lowell’s best poetry (in The Bigelow Papers); Whitfeld’s “America”; Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”; Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; Melville’s Moby-Dick; Whittier’s “Ichabod!” and Emerson’s “Ode, Addressed to William Ellery Channing.” Publication of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) coincided with Bleeding Kansas (a guerilla war sparked by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854). Melville’s The Confdence Man appeared on April Fool’s Day, three weeks after the delivery of the Dred Scott decision by the Taney court in 1857. John Brown’s work in Kansas in 1856, and at Harpers Ferry in 1859, gave rise to hundreds of poems. Henry Howard Brownell got it exactly wrong in “The Battle of Charlestown”:  “ ‘Sic Semper’ – the drop comes down – / And (woe to the rogues that doubt it!) / There’s an end of old John Brown!” Melville got it exactly right in “The Portent”: “The cut is on the crown / (Lo, John Brown), / And the stab shall heal no more.” What Brown portended (1861–1865) gave us more than can be rightly canvassed, the two great peaks of which, in poetry, are Whitman’s Drum-Taps (1865) and Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) – though I would note here that the better part of Dickinson’s poems date from the war years, during which she wrote at a pace unmatched in our fevered history. Enough minor poetry occasioned by the war exists to fll 150 two-column, closely printed pages in Burton Stevenson’s 1908 anthology, Poems of American History (and Stevenson is highly selective). And then there are the sorrow songs of the slaves themselves, and after those, the blues, which have gotten into our poetry (and into everyone’s music). The Great Migration – begun in 1910 in response to the reinstitution of white supremacy in the South, and to the lynching terror – gave us the New Negro Renaissance, though DuBois, again, deserves credit for having made The Crisis what it was when Langston Hughes published “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in its pages in 1921: the frst national magazine edited by black folk, with 100,000 subscribers in 1918, eight years after the NAACP launched it. American poetry and American literature are inconceivable outside this history. But again, we have to do with the continuity of discontinuities: broken lives; a fractured union never really made whole; 750,000 dead, between 1861 and 1865;10 and tens of thousands murdered (almost all of them black) during the Reconstruction and after its collapse. Poets picked up the pieces as best they could, giving us, from time to time, our democratic vistas. 4 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.001

Introduction

As for the New South, H. L. Mencken pegged it in “The Sahara of the Bozart” (1920): “Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity.” Mencken smoked out, if he did not dwell upon, the reason:  “Georgia is at once the home . . . of the Methodist parson turned Savonarola and of the lynching bee,” he writes. “The Leo Frank affair was no isolated phenomenon. It ftted into its frame very snugly.”11 Frank, a Jewish-American factory superintendent, was lynched outside Atlanta on August 17, 1915. Postcard photographs of the hanging (recall Bob Dylan’s lines in “Desolation Row”) were printed and sold. Celebrants arrived from the capital of the New South, snatching at Frank’s garments for souvenirs. Such spectacles were weekly affairs at the South. But “The Sahara of the Bozart,” by Richard Wright’s own account, launched a career that gave us Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), Native Son (1940), Black Boy (1945), a fair amount of political poetry (in the 1930s), and, wouldn’t you know it, hundreds of haiku. Native Son gave us Gwendolyn Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville (1945), a counterpart in poetry to Wright’s portrait of black Chicago, a city that, as Steven Tracy points out in Chapter  20, was very much a part of the New Negro Renaissance.12 The white-controlled South yielded itself to terrorism, chicanery, lies, and “plantation myths.” Honest accounting was a dead letter in public hearing; with it went a great deal of honest poetry. The oppression was internalized, made a matter of “conscience,” as any close reader of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – that troubled document of the post-Reconstruction years – knows. It was the old American problem. John Jay Chapman diagnosed it in his biography of William Lloyd Garrison: In order to bind the Colonies into a more lasting union, a certain suppression of truth, a certain trampling upon instinct had been resorted to in the Constitution. All the parties to that instrument thoroughly understood the iniquity of slavery and deplored it. All the parties were ashamed of slavery and yet felt obliged to perpetuate it. They wrapped up a twenty years’ protection of the African slave trade in a colorless phrase. . . . Our fathers did not dare to name it.13

An incapacity rightly to see America, and so rightly to speak and write of it, and so rightly to think of it, was part of the American enterprise, when the Constitution was framed and signed, and when the settlement of the disputed election of 1876 brought Federal troops out of Southern cities, leaving the freedmen to the tender mercies of the Democratic Party and its terrorist constabulary.14 On March 29, 1900, Benjamin Tillman, of South Carolina, stood in the Senate Chamber to speak. The “race question,” he said, has “been the cause 5 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.001

Mark Richardson

of more sorrow, more misery, more loss of life . . . than any and all questions which have confronted the American people from the foundation of the Government to the present day. Out of it grew the war, and after the war came the results of the war, and those results are with us now. The South has this question always with it. It cannot get rid of it. It is there. It is,” he affrmed, “like Banquo’s ghost, and will not down.” Reading this, DuBois might have said: Give the old boy enough rope and he will lynch even himself. Here is an example of a man unaware of what his words imply and incapable of rightly “hearing” them. This is dramatic irony of a high order. Or shall we imagine a Tillman somehow aware that his allusion to Macbeth constitutes the inadvertent confession of a ruthless politician – a politician who, in 1876, our centennial year, abetted the murder of another South Carolina politician, Simon Coker, in order to get his start? A shrewder evocation of the same unquiet banquet in Macbeth comes in The Souls of Black Folk (another of our great prose poems), three years after Tillman strutted his hour upon the stage. “And yet,” DuBois says, thinking of Banquo’s apparition, and quoting Macbeth’s horrible importunity, “And yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed place at the Nation’s feast. In vain do we cry out to this our vastest social problem:  ‘Take any shape but that, and my frm nerves / Shall never tremble!’ The Nation has not yet found peace in its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land” (6). That Tillman and DuBois should both reimagine America as Macbeth’s bloody Scotland is a telling irony, which the weird sisters might well have arranged. One wonders what novelist (and poet) William Dean Howells could possibly have had in mind when he said, in 1886, ten years after the collapse of the Reconstruction, that “the more smiling aspects of life” are “the more American,” that “the large, cheerful average of health and success and happy life” is “peculiarly American,” and that the human race, in America, “has enjoyed conditions in which most of the ills that have darkened its annals might be averted by honest work and unselfsh behavior.”15 A “certain suppression of truth” indeed. Honest work and unselfsh behavior hadn’t gotten the freedmen anywhere. Lynchings rolled on by the day. Howells’s ability to ignore this fact is a characteristic American talent; in it he is perfectly sincere. Out of all this, Paul Laurence Dunbar composed the most exemplary lyric poem to emerge in the late nineteenth century, “We Wear the Mask,” collected in Lyrics of Lowly Life (New York, 1896)  with a preface (of course!) by a smiling Howells:  “We wear the mask that grins and lies, / It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,  – / This debt we pay to human guile . . .”16 America is hard to see (as Frost once said):  part of it hides in plain sight; the rest is compelled to hide 6 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.001

Introduction

its face. In his preface, Howells assures the reader, frst, that Dunbar is wholly African in descent, without “admixture of white blood,” and that his achievement in poetry without white blood is evidence of “the essential unity of the human race.” But the concession comes with a codicil, altogether of its day (the Plessy v. Ferguson decision was handed down in 1896):  the essential unity of the races notwithstanding, “a precious difference of temperament” exists “between [them] which it would be a great pity ever to lose, and . . . this is best preserved and most charmingly suggested by Mr. Dunbar in those pieces of his where he studies the moods and traits of his race in its own accent of our English” – that is, in the dialect poetry, which compasses “the range of the race,” as Howells phrases it, not in the poetry written in standard English. Could there be a fner literary-critical counterpart to the “separate but equal” doctrine established by Plessy? So much the better, as Howells later remarks, that Dunbar has a “fnely ironical perception of the negro’s limitations, with a tenderness for them which I  think so very rare as to be almost quite new.”17 To which the book makes answer unheard: “With torn and bleeding hearts we smile / And mouth with myriad subtleties” (167). Another force hampered American poetry in the late nineteenth century. Over the Gilded Age, over the Genteel Era, presided Anthony Comstock and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. To understand the American modernists, we should consider the climate for the arts in America in the period between 1877 and 1920. Comstock did as much as anyone to make that climate what it was. He and his agents instigated some 3,646 prosecutions against authors, editors and publishers, which led to 2,682 convictions and the destruction of some ffty tons of books. The Comstocks created an atmosphere in which literary editors took few risks. “As a practical editor,” Mencken writes in “Puritanism as a Literary Force” (1917), I fnd that the Comstocks, near and far, are oftener in my mind’s eye than my actual patrons. The thing I always have to decide about a manuscript offered for publication, before I give any thought to its artistic merit and suitability, is . . . whether some roving Methodist preacher, self-commissioned to keep watch on letters, will read indecency into it. Not a week passes that I do not decline some sound and honest piece of work for no other reason.

He continues in a passage that suggests much about our literary expatriatism: “I have a long list of such things by American authors, well-devised, well-imagined, well-executed, respectable as human documents and as works of art – but never to be printed in mine or any other American magazine. . . . All of these pieces would go into type at once on the Continent.” A remarkable concession from the most intrepid American editor of the period.18 7 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.001

Mark Richardson

South and North a certain muzzling set in, its operations both juridical and psychological. The period spanning 1876–1912 was a bland one for American poetry. Exceptional fgures include Dunbar, who worked as through the straits. Stephen Crane published, in the late 1890s, two short books of poetry, The Black Riders and War is Kind; he was innovative, but the result was thin and inconsequential. The most enduring poet to start his career during the Genteel Era was the owlishly dark Robinson. For that epoch the following anthology, well-described by Louis Untermeyer, was a kind of summa, its editor a byword for the practices that thwarted the emergence of a genuinely modern American poetry. Untermeyer writes in The New Era in American Poetry (1917): Turn to Edmund Clarence Stedman’s An American Anthology (1900) – a stupendous tome of almost nine hundred pages  – and see what Stedman considered the fne fower of American poetry. In this gargantuan collection of mediocrity and moralizing, there are perhaps sixty pages of genuine poetry and no more than ten pages of what might be considered genuine American poetry. . . . And all this as recently as 1901!19

Frost was twenty-seven in 1901, as was Gertrude Stein. Pound was sixteen, Stevens twenty-two, Eliot thirteen, Hart Crane two, Robinson thirty-two, William Carlos Williams eighteen, and Marianne Moore fourteen. Such was the literary world they inherited. What they and their successors did with it is history. N OT E S 1 I haven’t pages enough in the present volume to take good measure of Native American poetry once it became a part of American literature. But I prepared this companion aware that a counterpart to it has long been available:  The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature, ed. Joy Porter and Kenneth Roemer (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2005). See Norma C.  Wilson’s essay therein, “America’s Indigenous Poetry” (145–160), a fne introduction I  wish I  might have printed here. See also Craig Womack, Red on Red:  Native American Literary Separatism (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 2 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (Rochester: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855): 445. 3 Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, anniversary edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012): xii. 4 Barlow, The Columbiad (Philadelphia, 1807): xiii–xix. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 5 The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Mark Richardson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007): 362. 6 English subjugation of Ireland presents rather a different case. 8 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.001

Introduction 7 See Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name:  The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York:  Anchor, 2009), and Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010). 8 Souls of Black Folk (Chicago:  A.  C. McClurg, 1903):  90. Hereafter, in this Introduction, cited parenthetically. 9 Jefferson made his often-quoted remark in an April 22, 1820, letter to John Holmes. 10 See J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57.4 (December 2011). 11 The essay was collected frst in Mencken, Prejudices:  Second Series (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1920): 136–154. 12 Wright reviewed A Street in Bronzeville for Harper and Brothers (his publisher) and recommended that they issue it. 13 Chapman, William Lloyd Garrison (New  York:  Moffat, Yard, and Company, 1913): 14–15. 14 See also Michael Gilmore, The War on Words: Slavery, Race and Free Speech in American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Remarkably, Gilmore fails even to mention Chapman, notwithstanding that he anticipated arguments made in The War on Words by a century. 15 Howells, “Dostoyevsky and the More Smiling Aspects of Life,” Harper’s 73 (1886): 641–642. 16 The poem had frst appeared in Dunbar’s 1895 volume, Majors and Minors (Toledo, OH: Hadley and Hadley). 17 Lyrics of Lowly Life (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1896): xiv, xvii–xviii. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 18 Mencken, A Book of Prefaces (New  York:  Alfred Knopf, 1917):  277. For more about these matters, in a broader, transatlantic context, see Rachel Potter, Obscene Modernism:  Literary Censorship & Experiment, 1900–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 19 The New Era in American Poetry (New York: Henry Holt, 1919): 9.

9 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.001

1 C H A R L OT T E   GOR DO N

“The First Shall Be Last”: Apology and Redemption in the Work of the First New England Poets, Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor “Crude,” “barbarous,” and “pedestrian”  – these are some of the terms used to describe the work of Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) and Edward Taylor (1642–1729). But unfattering though these are, neither Bradstreet, a highly educated member of one of the most prominent Puritan families of Massachusetts Bay, nor Taylor, a minister in a remote frontier town, would have taken offense. They, too, criticized their work. “Faltering,” said Bradstreet. “Stupid,” said Taylor. Although known today as America’s earliest poets, Bradstreet and Taylor did not think of themselves as Americans. They saw themselves as Puritans, nonconforming dissidents, members of the most radical branch of the English Reformation who regarded the Church of England as a corrupt, damnable institution. And like most seventeenth-century English immigrants to America, they regarded themselves as English, or at best “New English.” Nor did they see themselves as poets, since, in the seventeenth century, writing poetry was considered an avocation, more a hobby than a career. The eighteen-year-old Bradstreet sailed to America in 1630 on the Arbella, the fagship of the great Puritan migration. Although she had not wanted to come to America, she soon became persuaded of the righteousness of the New England cause and wrote on behalf of the colony, producing The Tenth Muse (1650), the frst published book of poems by a New England author. Taylor did not arrive in the New World until 1668, four years before Bradstreet died. Unlike Bradstreet’s work, which he admired – The Tenth Muse was the only book of poetry in his library – Taylor’s work was unpublished in his lifetime, and he requested that it not be published after he died. His grandson, Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, deposited Taylor’s seven-thousand-page quarto manuscript in the college library where it was lost until 1936. The frst edition of his poems appeared in 1939, some 250 years after he frst set pen to paper. Bradstreet and Taylor shared a commitment to the religious, political, and social movement that propelled them out of England. Some scholars, 10 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.002

Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor

infuenced by Hawthorne’s hostile depiction of Puritans in The Scarlet Letter and by modernist prejudices against didactic poetry, have criticized the religiosity of their work. But Puritanism provided both poets with inspiration, purpose and a complicated aesthetics that would have a profound infuence on future American writers. In 1929, the modernist Conrad Aiken excised many poems by more famous poets (most notably Emerson, Whittier, and Longfellow) to include Bradstreet in his American poetry anthology.1 Ever since, her work has been prominent in anthologies. Taylor’s work, although more arcane than Bradstreet’s, has been hailed as the most signifcant literary fnd of the twentieth century. Both poets believed their efforts were fawed by original sin, but they strove for excellence to please God and shared Milton’s impulse to justify God’s ways to humankind; no topic was too large or ambitious. Bradstreet wrote a history of the ancient world and gave voice to the frst statement of New English identity; Taylor adapted the intricate wit and stylistic conventions of English metaphysical poetry to the stringent requirements of Massachusetts Puritanism. Bradstreet struggled to break with English tradition to carve out a New English Puritan voice, asserting her identity as a woman writer while laying the foundation for future American poets with her emphasis on simplicity, authenticity, and the vernacular. Taylor, on the other hand, never fully departed from the English metaphysical tradition, devoting himself instead to the minute examination of his soul and the celebration of the divine, creating a body of work that is notable for what William Scheick has called its “unqualifed moral intensity.”2 Most importantly, however, both poets submitted their hearts to ruthless self-examination, testing and questioning their desires in accordance with the strictures of their faith. The result is an arresting counterpoint in their work: aspiration alternates with humility, artistic striving turns to spiritual despair, creative exhilaration gives way to Christian piety. Anne Bradstreet Later in life, Anne Bradstreet recalled that when she saw “the new world and new manners . . . my heart rose,” which in seventeenth-century parlance meant she felt nauseated.3 However, as a daughter and a wife, she was bound by the wishes of her father, Thomas Dudley, and her husband, Simon Bradstreet, both leaders of the Puritan exodus. The Bradstreets arrived in Salem, settled in Newtown (now Cambridge), moved to Ipswich a few years later, and then helped found Andover in 1643. Bradstreet raised eight children to healthy adulthood, ensured the family was clothed and fed, nursed the ill with medicinal plants she grew, and oversaw all business transactions 11 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.002

Charlotte Gordon

in the frequent absence of her husband. She also produced more than seven thousand lines of imaginative, witty, and innovative poetry. By the end of her writing life, she had largely eschewed the learned allusions, poetic embellishments, and fanciful imagery of the English Renaissance, developing a “plaine” poetics that expressed her allegiance to the Puritan mission of Massachusetts Bay. Bradstreet’s father had taken the unusual step of providing his daughter with an education, perhaps in part because he recognized her prodigious talents, but also because he believed her literary efforts would refect well on the Dudley family. By encouraging Bradstreet to set pen to paper, Dudley cast aside contemporary prejudices. Most people believed that women’s minds were too weak to read, let alone write, poetry. Bradstreet had few female role models and set herself the task of adapting English forms and themes to accommodate her identity as a woman, making her as much a literary pioneer as an actual pioneer. Her central diffculty was claiming legitimacy as an author. How could a dissenting female colonial dare to write poetry? How could she join the tradition of Spenser and Sidney? Bradstreet’s frst three formal poems  – elegies to Sir Philip Sidney, to the sixteenth-century Reformed poet Guillaume Du Bartas, and to Queen Elizabeth – confront this problem of inheritance with a double-voiced strategy of self-assertion and self-deprecation. Despite the controversy she knew might erupt if she revealed her identity as a female writer, Bradstreet declares that she is a woman but defects criticism by apologizing for her “weakness.” In the elegies to Sidney and Du Bartas, she complains that her muse is inadequate, and she ends the poem to Sidney with the nine muses of classical fame driving her off Mount Parnassus because she is a woman. This appears to be a confession of inadequacy, but Bradstreet implies that she has found a better guide than the pagan goddesses – the Christian God. In her elegy to Du Bartas, she is again apologetic about her female frailty but expresses her ambition to be considered the next truly Christian poet. Signifcantly, Bradstreet suggests that the alterity of the female poet entails no defciency. Her self-deprecation simultaneously marks her identity and expresses her estrangement. She may be in a troubled relation to the Muses, but this clarifes her status as a Reformed poet and bears fruit in her poetics, as it causes her to make a self-conscious departure from generic convention. She interrupts her narrative to apologize, and, though Ann Stanford reads these disruptions as “digressions” that mar the poem, they are perhaps better seen as a strategic adaptation of a genre previously reserved for men.4 Each time Bradstreet calls attention to her “weakness” she also signals her struggle with prohibitions concerning poetry by women. 12 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.002

Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor

The elegy to Elizabeth develops these ideas more explicitly; the queen provides the poet with hope not simply of Fame but also of redemption as a woman writer. Bradstreet dispenses with Muses altogether in this poem and in fact would never “use” a Muse again. This dismissal implicitly critiques the Renaissance convention that women should be inspirers, not creators, of poetry. For the frst time, Bradstreet claims the right to compose poetry, citing the queen as evidence of a woman’s ability to achieve greatness, and counters the arguments of a critical male audience: Now say have women worth? Or have they none? Or had they some but with our Queen is’t gone? Nay masculines, you have thus taxed us long But she though dead, will vindicate our wrong. (212)

Bradstreet continues to struggle with the problem of being a writing woman in The Quaternions – four long poems, each made up of four shorter poems – ostensibly inspired (as was Milton) by Du Bartas’s account of Creation in the Divine Weekes and Workes (1605; English edition, 1621). However, Bradstreet’s work differs sharply from her predecessor’s. In the frst two quaternions, “The Four Elements” and “The Four Humours” (1641–1643), Bradstreet personifes the elements and humors – a dramatic departure from Du Bartas’s dry retelling of the story – creating two sets of quarreling sisters who faunt their rhetorical skills in a battle for “preeminence.” The sophistication and encyclopedic knowledge of Bradstreet’s sisters demonstrate not their skills only but the poet’s also. Bradstreet depicts the humors as daughters of the elements, devising a matriarchal inheritance to counter the male literary tradition. At the end of each quaternion, after they argue their points, the sisters graciously accept their places in the universe. In an era when misogynistic critics held that women’s words could “fret like a gangrene and spread like a leprosie, and infect far and near,” Bradstreet’s women speakers use their intellects to solve philosophical questions and end strife.5 In the fnal two quaternions, “The Four Ages of Man” and “The Four Seasons” (1643), Bradstreet’s growing allegiance to Puritanism becomes apparent through a stylistic change. In “Childhood,” a “weary” mother sings “By By” to her son (149–151). Bradstreet’s turn to the vernacular is a new legitimating tactic. And unlike with the sisters in the preceding quaternions, the legitimacy of this female speaker stems from her duty to her child. By linking her obligations as a mother to her obligations as a writer and community leader, she claims the right to speak. In a later poem, “In Reference to Her Children,” Bradstreet declares that she uses poetry to teach her family right from wrong. Like the weary mother in “Childhood,” she “sings” for their sake, not her own. 13 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.002

Charlotte Gordon

At frst glance she appears to take back her claims on behalf of women in her “Prologue” to “The Four Monarchies,” an incomplete poem in heroic couplets that tells the history of ancient Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome. But Bradstreet uses the same strategy of self-deprecation and self-assertion as in the elegies, once again marking her presence as a female writer by disrupting convention. At frst, the poem sounds like a traditional epic: To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings, Of cities founded, commonwealths begun, For my mean pen are too superior things . . . (100)

By allowing the reader to think the poem will concern wars, captains, and kings, and then overturning this expectation by speaking of her “mean pen,” Bradstreet performs an act of what Luce Irigary calls mimicry, simultaneously expressing her debt to Virgil and her differences from him.6 She qualifes her confession of inadequacy by revealing her command of the opening of The Aeneid (“I sing of arms and a man”) and proceeding to write a poem that is exclusively about wars, cities, and kings (and also queens). In the ffth stanza, Bradstreet acknowledges the controversy surrounding women writers, saying, “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue / Who says my hand a needle better fts; / A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong, / If what I do prove well, it won’t advance; / They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance” (101). But such “carping” critics are poor readers, she implies. Clearly, she has not “stol’n” her words; just as clearly they are skillfully written. Bradstreet ends the poem by demonstrating that the apparent lowliness of the poem’s speaker is actually an expression of her unasserted virtue. She rejects the traditional tribute of a laurel wreath (bays) worn by male poets and asks instead for a “simple” wreath of “thyme” (102). This rejection of laurels is not what it appears: thyme can also be heard as “time,” suggesting that Bradstreet aims at eternality, surely as lofty an aim as earthly fame. In “A Dialogue between Old England and New” (330–343), Bradstreet returns to the structure of quarreling women, this time inventing a debate between an ailing mother (Old England) and her concerned daughter (New England). New England’s stanzas are short, urgent, and to the point. Old England, on the other hand, uses elaborate imagery and allusions to try to hide her “sins.” At the end of the poem, New England urges her mother to use “plaine” language, but Old England cannot but defend herself (337). Finally, New England announces that Old England’s only hope is to be like New England and learn to “tell another tale” (343). Bradstreet’s emphasis on New England’s distinctive language and her depiction of New England as a kind of messianic prophet gives New England an identity fundamentally 14 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.002

Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor

linked to a religious and political, if not yet national, entity. New England’s focus on salvation and God’s judgment allows Bradstreet to reveal the soteriological and eschatological agenda of New World Puritans. Indeed, Bradstreet is the frst poet to grant New England a justifying voice – a female voice – employing Puritan rhetoric to explain the New England errand to the Old World and ultimately to future generations of Puritans and their republican descendants. Having pronounced New England’s mission, Bradstreet’s quest to fnd cultural authority as a woman writer merges with her Reformed identity. The female poet can be ascendant because of the Christian tenet that the last shall be frst; the new, the young, the colonial, and the woman will head up the heavenly line. For Bradstreet, salvation lies in a theological principle with signifcant literary ramifcations: humility, the humility that is embedded in plain, undecorated speech. The poetry of the 1650s and 1660s includes some of her best-known work: the poems to her husband, the lament for the burning of her house, and the elegies for her grandchildren. Here, Bradstreet no longer presents herself as an unworthy inheritor of the Renaissance. Instead, she adopts the “plaine” style, expressing her deepened allegiance to Puritanism by returning to the singing mother of the third quaternion, painting herself as a teacher who seeks to guide her loved ones. Most modern readers assume that Bradstreet’s later work is more “personal.” But although Bradstreet enjoyed a passionate relationship with her husband, and deeply loved her children and grandchildren, she imbued marriage and family with a public signifcance most moderns overlook. In seventeenth-century New England, as Mary Beth Norton points out, the family was the primary building block of the community and so was considered a public institution.7 This expanded notion of the public arena and the diminution of the idea of the private realm meant that women’s traditional tasks were weighted with a civic and theological meaning. Mothers like Bradstreet were the primary religious educators of their children, an urgent mission: they were responsible for the future of the colony. Accordingly, Bradstreet’s “personal” lyrics refect her efforts to build a base of loyal Puritans in Massachusetts Bay. Casting her readers as her children, Bradstreet gained authority as a writer by enacting the role of a Puritan mother, at last fnding the literary legitimacy she had yearned for as a younger writer. Bradstreet makes an explicit link between the roles of mother and poet in “An Author to Her Book,” where she poses as a single mother whose “bastard” child is her volume of poetry (389–390). Other seventeenth-century writers spoke of their books as children, but Bradstreet’s version is remarkable for the boldness of her self-representation as a woman author. On 15 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.002

Charlotte Gordon

one level the speaker’s lack of a husband seems shameful, but Bradstreet’s double-voiced strategy of assertion and apology allows for a second implication: the female poet needs no man to “give birth” to poems. Bradstreet develops this theme by employing what Rosemond Tuve terms “the metaphor of style as garment”8: she can only dress her “child” in “homespun cloth,” a claim reminiscent of “New England’s” insistence on the “plaine” style. She uses meter and diction to mimic her deprecations (“I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet, / Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet”), apologizing for her lack of skills even as she displays those skills. Finally, in one of her most famous self-deprecatory passages, she declares that she had no intention of publishing her book; it was “stol’n” from her – a trope commonly used by male authors, but here also an allusion to the critics in “The Prologue.” Unfortunately, readers have taken this literally, as if Bradstreet’s work really was stolen from her. But this underestimates the complexity of Bradstreet’s strategies of self-representation. In fact, Bradstreet was well aware that her brother-in-law, John Woodbridge, took her manuscript with him to England in 1649. She also knew he would circulate her poems among his friends and colleagues, which was considered “publishing,” since the printing of a book and the circulation of a manuscript were both intended to “make public” one’s work. Bradstreet also recognized that her father and other leaders thought a devout woman would be a good spokesperson for the colony. The existence of a mere female who could create virtuosic and theologically correct poetry while living in New England contradicted critics who believed that the American wilderness induced savagery. Consequently, when The Tenth Muse was published in 1650, it served not only to elevate Bradstreet (the book sold well on both sides of the Atlantic); it also became part of the polemical debate on the Reformed experiment in New England. Bradstreet demonstrated that New Englanders could participate in one of the most elite activities of English culture: the writing of poetry. At the same time she articulated a New English vision of righteous identity. Bradstreet’s fnal poems wrestle with Puritan doctrine. In the elegies to her grandchildren, who died tragically young, she concentrates on the theme that “all things” must “Fade,” using colloquial expressions as evidence of her humility and her reformed status (404–406). Her religious life was not always smooth, as these poems indicate. She recorded her uncertainties in a prose autobiography, recounting her bouts of atheism and her interest in Catholicism. Her long poem, “Contemplations,” depicts the diffculties of faith while also expressing her commitment to the New England Puritan mission. Bradstreet invented an original structure  – thirty-three stanzas with seven lines each  – to reinforce the 16 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.002

Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor

redemptive nature of reading and writing poetry. Seven represents the union of the world and spirit, and thirty-three is Jesus’s age at the crucifxion. The poet strolls through a beautiful natural landscape and is tempted to forget God. She turns to the Bible, retelling the story of the fall for ten stanzas, and when she returns to her contemplation of nature, her Scriptural immersion protects her from losing herself; she can now remember God while dwelling in the world. Bradstreet’s last poem, “As Weary Pilgrim,” takes the theme of “Contemplations” and renders it entirely in the “plaine” style; the poem is a short, biblically inspired rendition of the pilgrimage of faith. Just as the “weary” mother of “Childhood” sings for her child, the “weary” pilgrim tells the story of her spiritual travail for her reader/children (321). The poet yearns for her struggles to end in the arms of Christ, but she also wants to leave behind a map of her journey for others to follow. Bradstreet spent the years before her death revising her work for a new edition, published posthumously in 1678. This volume included her fnal poems, refecting her mature commitment to New England through her themes and her use of the “plaine” style. In an interesting gesture of self-awareness, she decided against the title The Tenth Muse, entitling the work Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning. At this point in her life it must have seemed safe to acknowledge the truth:  she was not a woman who inspired poetry but one who wrote it. For more than two hundred years, she remained popular with readers and was regularly included in anthologies of colonial poetry. Unfortunately, though, Bradstreet’s contributions to the origins of American literature and American identity have been overlooked by critics who, following the lead of earlier scholars such as the famous Perry Miller and Samuel Eliot Morison, have argued that her poems show little evidence of her life in New England, let alone a new poetics. However, the New World’s infuence on Bradstreet was as much theological as practical, as much fgurative as literal. The evidence for New England’s impact on Bradstreet’s work comes not from her use of “American” fora and fauna, or lack thereof, as Miller and Morison claimed, but from the remarkable change in her poetics that occurred over the course of her lifetime, a change that matched her deepening New World and Puritan allegiances.9 Edward Taylor If Bradstreet wrote for those who came after, Edward Taylor focused on the past, looking to Bradstreet and the frst colonists who seemed more heroic, more “pure,” and more truly religious than his own generation. He saw his 17 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.002

Charlotte Gordon

mission as one of conservation, preserving Puritan discipline and practice in a colony that was becoming lax and diverse. Born in Leicestershire in 1642 or 1643 in the midst of the English Civil War, Taylor came of age under the Puritan regime of Oliver Cromwell. He received a rigorous education in biblical languages and theology. However, at age eighteen, the Restoration disrupted his education. A  strict nonconformist, Taylor refused to swear the oaths required under the Act of Uniformity (1662), severely curtailing his job prospects and educational options. Believing it his duty to defend Puritanism against the forces of evil, Taylor began his writing life by composing diatribes against Anglicans and Catholics. At age twenty-six, he immigrated to Boston and enrolled in Harvard College. Upon graduation three years later, he accepted a position as minister of the Congregational Church in the town of Westfeld, Massachusetts, a position he held for the next ffty-six years. A tiny farming village, Westfeld was on the edge of the wilderness and suffered frequent Indian incursions. The church was as much a fortress as a place of worship, with fortifed walls and a watchtower for keeping guard, reinforcing Taylor’s belief that the world was a contest between God’s chosen people and the devil. He vented his rage in his Metrical History of Christianity, twenty-one thousand lines of anti-Catholic diatribe, which modern critics have dismissed as “dull” and “bigoted.” In 1675, King Philip’s War erupted – a three-year confict between the colonists and Native Americans. Taylor, as Westfeld’s leading citizen, became a sort of general, organizing the villagers against Indian attacks. Westfeld survived, but twelve of the region’s towns were razed. To Taylor and other Puritans, this was a time of soul searching. Had the colonists lost God’s blessing? Taylor believed God was punishing them for falling short of the high standards set by the frst generation; in public writings and sermons, he urged New Englanders to adhere to the tenets of their forebears. Everywhere he looked, he saw opponents to the strict discipline he thought essential for the colony’s survival. His near neighbor, Samuel Stoddard, the pastor of the church in Northampton, endorsed “The Halfway Covenant,” an agreement that allowed the children of original church members to join their parents’ church without undergoing a test of faith. The only provision was that they not participate in Communion until they testifed to their conversion. To Taylor, this was a slipshod compromise; no one should be allowed to join a church without the direct experience of God’s grace. Furthermore, he disagreed with the principle of using Communion as a test of conversion, or worse, an initiation rite for membership. He agreed that full church members alone should take Communion but thought even they were rarely 18 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.002

Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor

adequately prepared. For Taylor, the Last Supper was no empty ritual; it signifed union with the Holy Spirit, a “wedding supper.” He warned members of his church not to take Communion unless they had spent hours in quiet refection, praying for forgiveness:  “Not to prepare is a Contempt of the Invitation,” he declared. “It is to abide in a Sordid, and flthy, wicked, and Sinfull State.”10 Ultimately, however, preparation was a deeply personal business, and so in the privacy of his study, Taylor turned inward, writing two series of more than two hundred poems, which, fttingly, he called Preparatory Meditations. These spiritual exercises are written in six-line stanzas of iambic pentameter, a form he took from “The Church-porch,” the introductory poem to George Herbert’s The Temple. Unlike Bradstreet, Taylor did not need to search for new forms to accommodate his identity since he was not a woman writer. Instead, he relied on literary tradition and biblical poetry. Donald Stanford, editor of the frst collection of Taylor’s poems, describes the poet as the “last important representative of the metaphysical school of poetry founded by John Donne” (xxiv). Wilson Brissett suggests that Taylor’s “highest aesthetic aspiration at times seemed to be not the forging of a new style or mode of expression but the working back towards the existing poetic mode of the Hebrew psalms.”11 Over the next forty-three years, Taylor composed meditations investigating his relationship to God. Jeffrey Hammond explains that the Meditations are “vehicles for Taylor’s private exploration of his own struggles as an earthly pilgrim.”12 The poet exalts in God’s glory, fears God’s power, despairs over his own sins, and confesses his lapses in faith. The result is an astonishing array of refections, a complex portrait of one man’s mind and soul. Like Bradstreet, Taylor laments his limitations as a writer: “How shall I praise thee then? My blottings Jar / And wrack my Rhymes to pieces in Thy praise” (21). He depicts himself as “Unclean, Unclean” and as a “Lump of Loathsomeness” (129). Like Bradstreet, he sees these faws as a refection of his own sinful condition but does not link them to his gender, though he must thread his way through the intricacies of imagining Christ as his Bridegroom, which, in turn, renders him, a “Bride” (39). Taylor always fnds consolation in Christ, but it does not erase his suffering. In Meditation 1: 34, which Taylor composed in 1685 after the death of his wife of ffteen years, Elizabeth, he describes a corpse “with White bare-butter Teeth, bare staring bones/ With Empty Eyeholes” (55). He ends the poem by declaring that Death is “a Spur to Duty” and “A Golden doore to Glory,” but the horror of the earlier descriptions remains vivid, making clear that his victory over loss is pyrrhic (55). His lamentation for the death 19 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.002

Charlotte Gordon

of his little son James is sharp and bitter, and although he turns to theology for comfort, he squarely confronts his pain: under thy Rod, my God, thy smarting Rod That hath off broke my James, that Primrose, Why? Is it for my sin? Or Trial? ... Yet let the Rose of Sharon spring up cleare, Out of my James his ashes unto mee, In radient sweet and shining Beames to cheer My sorrowfull Soule, and light my way to thee. (150)

Taylor’s preoccupation with doctrine distinguishes him from Bradstreet. But like Bradstreet, he uses imagery and language from his own life, sometimes to strange effect. When he mourns his inability to smell “the sweetness most sweet” of the Lord, he asks if he has been “denos’de” (7). God’s grace is like a draught of beer. Christ’s incarnation is “the burning sun” “buttoned up in a Tobacco box” (125). Some consider these conceits as aesthetic lapses, but Brissett suggests that Taylor’s “conjuncture of extremes” originates in his wonder at the paradox of the “incarnational mixture of God and man.” Certainly, the poet’s analogies bring theological abstractions to life. God’s word is “White bread . . . / Moulded up by God’s hand and baked tite / In Justice’s hot oven” (255). As with Bradstreet, Taylor’s civic and theological duties inform and inspire even his most personal poetry. He never loses sight of his public role, praying for God’s grace to “wash” him clean that he may “hold Church fellowship with Saints most cleare” (130). Ultimately, the purpose of his Meditations is not to retreat further from the world but to join his brethren in praise of God. Taylor remarried in 1692, the year of the Salem Witch Trials, an outbreak of mass hysteria some historians see as a delayed response to the trauma of King Philip’s War. Taylor did not participate in the trials, but he, too, was gripped by what he saw as a battle between God and Satan for our souls. He made this the theme of his second set of poems, God’s Determinations Touching His Elect. Unlike Michael Wigglesworth’s 1662 best seller, The Day of Doom, which spotlights the damned, Taylor’s poems focus on God’s chosen ones. Going beyond the scope of Meditations, he depicts a debate between Justice and Mercy. The Saint teaches Puritan doctrine to the bewildered soul. The poet celebrates Christ’s mercy, an optimistic viewpoint all the more compelling for the struggle that has taken place: He’s both our Bridge and Raile. Although we fall and Fall and Fall and Fall 20 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.002

Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor and Satan fall on us as fast. He purgeth us and doth us call. Our trust on him to cast. (296)

Norman Grabo considers God’s Determinations a study of “the soul’s exertion to accept the fact that it has been chosen.” Barbara Lewalski calls the work “a morality play.” In fact, God’s Determinations is both the exploration of one soul’s pilgrimage and an allegorical examination of the fate awaiting God’s saints.13 Taylor also wrote occasional poems that derive theological meaning from daily affairs. In “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly,” he depicts Satan as a spider who ensnares a sinner (the fy), avoiding one of God’s chosen (represented by a wasp). In two poems called “Huswifery,” Taylor describes himself as a spinning wheel and a loom, using the sort of domestic imagery Bradstreet frequently employed, and expressing his desire to be God’s instrument.

Conclusion Taylor’s preoccupation with the state of his soul, church fellowship, and theological doctrine represent his self-appointed mission to maintain righteous Puritan worship on the harsh frontier of the American wilderness. Neither he nor Bradstreet was concerned with “originality” – a word with close associations to sin (original sin) in the seventeenth century. Rather, as Sally Promey explains, the Puritans regarded innovation with suspicion, prizing “reiteration” and the imitation of worthy sources such as Scripture.14 Bradstreet saw her “homespun” style as a purifcation of excessive ornamentation, not as an invention. Taylor celebrates God’s glory not by creating a new poetics but by writing poetry that examines his relationship to God and explores the complicated ramifcations of Puritan doctrine in minute, almost obsessive, detail. Both poets share a reverence for the humble – a spinning wheel, a lullaby, a crying child. But to write with an eye toward humility is also to write with an eye toward redemption. For Taylor, New England is not extraordinary per se; the church, not the land, holds redemptive promise, in a communion of fellow saints. For Bradstreet, the New World is the prelude to union with Christ, the last stop before heaven, the site on earth closest to God – a sanctifcation that predates Romantic celebrations of America by more than two hundred years. By imbuing New England with the promise of salvation, she anticipates future New World poets who would also lay claim to America’s transformative powers. New England can save Old England, says Bradstreet. America will save the world, says Whitman. 21 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.002

Charlotte Gordon NOT E S 1 American Poetry, 1671–1928: A Comprehensive Anthology (New York: Modern Library, 1929). 2 See Scheick’s The Will and the Word:  The Poetry of Edward Taylor (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1974): 161. 3 See Bradstreet’s memoirs, as quoted in Jeannine Hensley, ed., The Works of Anne Bradstreet (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1967; reissued in 2010): ix. All quotations from Bradstreet’s writings are drawn from this edition. Subsequent references to the book are given parenthetically by page number. 4 See Stanford, Anne Bradstreet: The Worldly Pilgrim (New York: Burt Franklin, 1974): 10. 5 The phrase is taken from John Cotton’s 1638 interrogation of the antinomian Anne Hutchinson: “And so your opinions fret like a gangrene and spread like a leprosy, and infect far and near and will eat out the very bowels of religion, and has so infected the churches that God knows when they will be cured.” See Bruce C. Daniels, New England Nation:  The Country the Puritans Built (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 72. 6 See Irigary, “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine,” collected in This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1985): 68–85. 7 See Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Knopf, 1996). 8 See Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery:  Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947): 61. 9 See Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1956): 9–10; and Morison, “Mistress Anne Bradstreet,” in Critical Essays on Anne Bradstreet, eds. Pattie Cowell and Ann Stanford (Boston:  Hall & Company, 1983): 43–55. 10 Donald Stanford, ed., The Poems of Edward Taylor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960; reprinted in 1989): xxix. Subsequent citations of this edition are given parenthetically by page number. 11 See Brissett, “Edward Taylor’s Public Devotions,” Early American Literature 44.3 (2009): 457–487. 12 See Hammond, Sinful Self, Saintly Self:  The Puritan Experience of Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993): 164. 13 See Grabo, Edward Taylor (Boston: Twayne, 1988): 27; and Lewalksi, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1979): 391. 14 See Promey, “Seeing the Self ‘In Frame’: Early New England Material Practice and Puritan Piety,” Material Religion 1.1 (2005): 10–47. F U RT H E R R E A DI NG Craig, Raymond, “The ‘Peculiar Elegance’ of Edward Taylor’s Poetics,” in The Tayloring Shop, ed. Michael Schuldiner (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997): 68–101. Davis, Thomas M., Edward Taylor vs. Solomon Stoddard: The Nature of the Lord’s Supper (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). 22 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.002

Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor Eberwein, Jane, “ ‘No Rhet’ric We Expect’:  Argumentation in Bradstreet’s ‘The Prologue,’ ” in Critical Essays on Anne Bradstreet, eds. Pattie Cowell and Ann Stanford (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983). Gordon, Charlotte, Mistress Bradstreet:  The Untold Life of America’s First Poet (New York: Little, Brown, 2005). Johnson, Barbara. A World of Difference (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). Kamensky, Jane, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Patterson, Daniel, ed., Edward Taylor’s Gods Determinations and Preparatory Meditations: A Critical Edition (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2003). Round, Philip, By Nature and by Custom Cursed: Transatlantic Civil Discourse and New England Cultural Production, 1620–1660 (Hanover:  University Press of New England, 1999). Rowe, Karen E., Saint and Singer:  Edward Taylor’s Typology and the Poetics of Meditation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Schweitzer, Ivy, “Anne Bradstreet Wrestles with the Renaissance,” Early American Literature 23 (1988): 291–312. Sweet, Timothy, “Gender, Genre, and Subjectivity in Anne Bradstreet’s Early Elegies,” Early American Literature 23 (1988): 152–174. Trent, William, and Benjamin Wells, eds., Colonial Prose and Poetry, Vol. 1 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, 1903). Ulrich, Laurel, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York: Knopf, 1982).

23 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.002

2 CA R L A W I L L A R D

Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley began the African American literary tradition with the 1773 publication of her Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral.1 The book was met with celebration and scorn on both sides of the Atlantic, in large part because Wheatley sounded the great paradox of an enslaved “Afric” who was also a genius and thus a challenge to enlightenment notions concerning race and slavery. She had already caused quite a stir in Christian circles by the time Poems went to the London printer, particularly for her 1770 elegy honoring the Reverend George Whitfeld, an English evangelist quite popular in the colonies. If her master’s account was accurate, Wheatley was a child prodigy who could read even the most diffcult Biblical passages and flled audiences “with amazement” at nine years old, a mere ffteen months after she turned up for sale near the ship that carried her from West Africa to Boston in 1761. Her reputation grew when her poems began to appear a few years later in New England newspapers, pamphlets and broadsides, treating all manner of subjects found in the popular “occasional” poetry of the period: deaths, hurricanes, milestones in Parliament, the wonders of science, the Christian mainstays of moral comportment and, increasingly, American political freedom. Wheatley composed in the tradition of the lyric epistle, framing the symbolic landscapes of her poetry as conversations between her poems’ speakers and a host of internal audiences, both historical and divine. Perhaps her own experience of the Middle Passage informed her early interest in the Virgilian and Homeric themes of tempestuous seas, where destructive gods assume a form very like enraged men. A 1766 New England hurricane provided the occasion of her frst publication, “On Messrs. Hussy and Coffn,” but the drama of the poem resides not in the narration of actual details of the storm, which the young poet overheard as she served at table, but rather in the address – the prophetic rhetorical stance – of the speaker: 24 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.003

Phillis Wheatley Did haughty Eolus with Contempt look down With Aspect windy, and a study’d Frown? Regard them not; – the Great Supreme, the Wise, Intends for something hidden from our Eyes. (116)

Wheatley erects her speaker as a visionary in the midst of the storm with the power to perceive an angry Eolus undone by the gentler, and Christian, “Great Supreme.” The commanding voice is striking in a girl of twelve or thirteen, particularly as the speaker advises the men at sea to disregard powerful forces and to trust her perception of divine providence. Another early poem suggests that the poet began her career by taking as intimate company divine fgures who imparted their knowledge, and also their authority, to her poems’ speakers. Her 1766 poem “On Virtue” – composed in measured blank verse, carefully mingling end-stopped and enjambed lines – unfolds as an intimate conversation with a fgure of moral perfection that exists beyond human understanding but that may be called to the aid of the troubled soul: O Thou bright jewel in my aim I strive To comprehend thee. Thine own words declare Wisdom is higher than a fool can reach. I cease to wonder, and no more attempt Thine height t’explore, or fathom thy profound. But, O my soul, sink not into despair, Virtue is near thee, and with gentle hand Would now embrace thee, hovers o’er thine head. Fain would the heaven-born soul with her converse, Then seek, then court her for her promised bliss. (51)

Although she cannot “fathom” Virtue’s “profound” – Wheatley seems aware of the latter word’s etymology – the speaker does comfort her “soul” and later seeks Virtue as would a budding woman struggling with a matter playing on many a youthful mind. In the second part of the poem, the speaker again makes her appeal: “Auspicious queen, thine heav’nly pinions spread, / And lead celestial Chastity along.” As if in echo to Tertullian’s “An Exhortation to Chastity” – reprinted as a pamphlet in the same year2 – Wheatley implores Virtue to save her from the temptations of youth, “Attend me, Virtue, thro my youthful years!”, and to stay her determination: “O leave me not to the false joys of time! / But guide my steps to endless life and bliss.” “Teach me a better strain, a nobler lay,” the poet pleads, in concluding the twenty-one line colloquy, “O Thou, enthron’d with Cherubs in the realms of day!” (51). Both early poems display a robust engagement with the eighteenth-century idea that poets were enlightened persons who could mediate divine knowledge because they had access to the teachings of divine fgures. That idea 25 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.003

Carla Willard

derived, in neoclassical poems, from a heroic strain in classical poetry, particularly from the device of invocation whereby poets trumpeted their affliation with divinities (“Hail!”) or summoned inspiration by calling on the Muses, often with direct reference to the poet’s identity, as here, in Wheatley’s 1771 poem “On Recollection”: “. . . Inspire ye scared nine / Your ven’trous Afric in her great design.” Such invocations traced their lineage back to Homer, whom Wheatley read and admired, perhaps in Pope’s translation, and also to Virgil, whom the poet calls “Great Maro” in her celebration of patrons in “To Maecenas” (50). Wheatley, however, gave the ancient convention a signature stamp in virtually all of her poems: she typically extends brief salutations into longer engagements with the divinities she invokes. Taken together, the many speakers we encounter in Poems create and sustain an exclamatory and resonant heroic voice as, line by line, they call upon and herald fgures central to enlightenment thought concerning religion, aesthetics and science. Invocation mounts to panegyric in “On Imagination,” where questions are swept up in rhetorical fights of encomium: “Imagination! Who can sing thy force? / Or who describe the swiftness of thy course? / Soaring through air to fnd the bright abode, / Th’ empyreal palace of the thund’ring God” (78). In “On Recollection,” invocative address targets a divine fgure who also becomes the poet’s muse, allowing the poet to fuse and lengthen appeals for both inspiration and remembered pasts: “Mneme, immortal pow’r, I trace thy spring: / Assist my strains, while I  thy glories sing” (76). Extended invocation resounds as a stylistic feature of Wheatley’s verse, and as her speakers invoked, they also followed divine company, ascending mountains, soaring to the skies, and thus mounting in verse an omniscient, panoramic parapet from which they might marvel at both terrestrial and celestial wonders of art, nature and science – always with a Christian eye on the great creator whom Wheatley calls “monarch” in “Thoughts on the Works of Providence”: ARISE, my soul, on wings enraptur’d, rise To praise the monarch of the earth and skies, Whose goodness and benefcence appear As round its centre moves the rolling year, Or when the morning glows with rosy charms Or the sun slumbers in the ocean’s arms: Of light divine be a rich portion lent, To guide my soul, and favour my intent. Celestial muse, my arduous fight sustain, And raise my mind to a seraphic strain! (67)

The poet’s exhortations to her “soul” and to the “celestial muse” are set within conventional versifcation, of course. Wheatley’s ear for the rhyme 26 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.003

Phillis Wheatley

and cadence of iambic pentameter approximated the Augustan heroic couplet with such fdelity that her style has often been relegated to the heap of imitative verse. Such dismissals of the poetry, however, ignore the sustained voice Wheatley achieves, and nowhere is that voice more evident as a stylistic innovation than in her elegies. Over the decade following the 1763 outbreak of smallpox in Boston, elegies became frequent features of print media, and they garnered great popularity as a genre with the mid-century publication and circulation of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” Almost half of the thirty-nine pieces gathered in Poems are elegies, but not one embraces Gray’s heroic stanza, meditational lament, bucolic setting or somber prosody. Instead, Wheatley’s elegiac speakers mount the rhetorical stage trumpeting proclamations like a great warrior who admonishes Death for his dominion (“Grim Monarch!”), affronts Death’s rapacious appetite (“Enough thou never yet wast known to say / Though millions die, the vassals of thy sway”) or disparages Death’s heartless intractability: “Nor youth, nor science, nor the ties of love, / Nor aught on Earth thy finty heart can move” (59). This elegiac mode transforms Death such that speakers lord over Death’s dark symbolism before they ascend, again and again, “From dark abodes to fair ethereal light” (57). More often than not, Wheatley’s elegiac speakers quickly move heavenward and hover among the Christian pageant attending heaven’s gate, where they offer salving promise to the bereaved. One speaker calls on her muse for inspiration to follow the departed and mediate this heavenly promise: “O could my muse thy seat on high behold, / How deckt with laurel, how enrich’d with gold!” (58). Another calls on mourners to look beyond grief to embrace the enraptured spirit of those departed: “With tow’ring hopes, and growing grace arise, / And seek beatitude beyond the skies” (89). Still another brings us close enough to heaven to hear the angels speak to parents wracked with grief over the loss of their infant: “ ‘In heav’ns high palaces your babe appears: / Prepare to meet him, and dismiss your tears’ ” (94). The central impulse here is much closer to Milton, and the consoling act of the elegiac epistle, than to Gray and the “graveyard school.” Unlike Milton in Lycidas, however, Wheatley uses Death as a rhetorical threshold more briefy framed than not, through which she places her speakers and audiences within earshot of the departed and the divine. Phillis Wheatley had few peers that measured the amplitude of her voice, and fewer that held with her long notes of encomium. Praise was what she did best, and it was praise that, for generations to come, would mire her reception in conficting opinions. The praise of royalty 27 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.003

Carla Willard

and royalists in her 1773 book probably spurred Thomas Jefferson to deride her for mistaking dunces for heroes, even as, quite to the contrary, George Washington hailed her “encomium and panegyric” as a “style and manner exhibit[ing] a striking proof of your great poetical Talents.”3 The poet chose to honor in verse some of the most powerful public fgures on both sides of the Revolution, drawing portraits of George Whitfeld, George III, George Washington, and the Earl of Dartmouth with such grandeur that critics for generations would condemn her poems as pawns to a slave-holding society. However, as her celebrated elegy to Whitfeld makes clear, Wheatley praised public fgures who in her poems spoke and acted in line with antislavery heroism. Her George Whitefeld promised to Africans in the elegy something he never promised to Africans in life – that they could become “sons and kings and priests to God.” Her heroes understood the connection between religious and political liberty and moved in a realm where “great” men extended freedom’s mission even to “the meanest peasants” (“To The King’s Most Excellent Majesty. 1768” [53]) or listened to appeals for a more expansive freedom and could “Hear every tongue thy guardian aid implore” (“To His Excellency General Washington,” my emphasis [167]). In short, Wheatley’s heroes formed an ideal antislavery audience who lent compassionate ears to her speakers’ bid for “Freedom,” as in her poem “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for North-America, &c.”: Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song, Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung, Whence fow these wishes for the common good, By feeling hearts alone best understood, I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat: What pangs excruciating must molest, What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast? Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d: Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway? (83)

Perhaps the poet did remember her father and the shattering blow of enslavement when frst it fell. More certain is that Wheatley brought out, in her poems, characters poised to enlist antislavery sympathy from very real auditors such as Dartmouth, who might better relate to the terms of a 28 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.003

Phillis Wheatley

father’s suffering. Whatever the case, Wheatley made ideal heroes out of people whose actions in life were far from ideal. She praised both royalist and patriot until just before the outbreak of the Revolution, making a defnitive turn of political affliation with her 1775 epistle to George Washington. This late embrace of the Patriot cause could suggest that the poet long resisted lending her support to a revolution that made little connection between the institution of slavery and all the rhetoric concerning the “slavery” white colonists endured under British rule. She had been among those Boston servants who heard the cries of freedom ring from pulpit and square and who knew that even the most engaged white citizen on both sides of the struggle returned home and took tea prepared and poured by slaves. She treated the paradox with biting irony in a letter to Sansom Occum: “How well the cry for Liberty, and the reverse disposition of the oppressive power over others agree, I humbly think it does not take the penetration of a Philosopher to determine.”4 In the public venue of her verse, however, Wheatley never relinquished the exclamatory praise of heroes who, as she represented them, were sympathetic to her appeals. She wrote poem after poem on religious and political freedoms, knowing full well how diffcult were the causes of justice and emancipation when even the most eloquent “Afric”  – a poet shielded from the drudgery of hard work, given permission to leave her light chores when inspiration hit, pampered and perhaps even loved by her Mistress, Susanna Wheatley – was not freed. As much as her speakers sounded loud the “sorrows” of slavery and the “glory” of freedom in the years leading up to the publication of her book, Wheatley remained a slave until 1773 when the poet shrewdly used her British friends to push the hand of the Wheatley family toward guaranteeing her manumission.5 She lived several more years in the Wheatley household before beginning a life with John Peters, a self-educated freeman and businessman with a reputation for being less than pleasant with white Bostonians. Perhaps the poet found in her future husband a like-minded conversant on the peculiar “freedom” that took the colonies by storm while slave ships still traffcked in African men, women and children, bearing them in shackles to American shores. From 1776 until her death in 1784, Wheatley would continue to write elegiac and heroic epistles that touched on the subjects of a truly expansive “Liberty” and emancipation. Sadly, scholars have not found the poems listed in proposals for a second book; nor have they found any evidence suggesting that members of the old Wheatley circle came to her aid, as her health worsened, and as she traded the comforts of the wealthy Wheatley household for an impoverished independence with Peters, during the severe depression that followed the Revolution. 29 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.003

Carla Willard

Wheatley’s life ended in hardship. She saw two of her three children die and would herself die holding the third who quickly followed the poet to her grave. One of Wheatley’s last poems is an elegy dedicated to her own passing, written least six months before her death on December 5, 1784. Here, we fnd an anomaly: there is no heralding speaker and no sustained invocative conversation. Instead, the poem grounds the speaker in a pastoral landscape and uses for the frst time the stanza of Gray, keeping time to a similarly somber prosody: FAREWELL! Ye friendly bowérs, ye streams adieu, I leave with sorrow each sequesteréd seat: The lawns, where oft I swept the morning dew, The groves, from noon-tide rays a kind retreat. Yon wood-crownéd hill, whose far projecting shade, Inverted trembles in the limpid lake: Where wrapt in thought I pensively have strayéd, For crowds and noise, reluctant, I forsake. (177)

This elegy is one of the most bucolic of Wheatley’s poems, and its claim on a favored rural setting, away from “crowds and noise,” recalls an epoch when the pastoral, rural idyll assumed an air of impending loss, anticipating the poetry of the early nineteenth century. The poem suggests a sensibility that had long desired a “sequestered seat,” even if the poet only imagined such a retreat by reading other poets and writers, such as Addison in his dialogues on the pastoral with Cynthio to whom the poet alludes in the elegy. Though flled with the artifce of an idyllic landscape, this is also a poem written by a realist who knew her time was coming to an end, who wrote about her departure with some sadness but who took a signature turn toward “Hope” as the poem closed: But come, sweet Hope, from thy divine retreat, Come to my breast, and chase my cares away, Bring calm Content to gild my gloomy seat, And cheer my bosom with her heavenly ray.

Wheatley ceases her lament in the last stanza, returning to a theme that had always preoccupied her, and that fairly clamored for attention in most of her verse: poetry, and poetic fgures, could work miracles on earth. Hers was an exceptional conversation that ended with an exceptional Hope that divine ideals might salve and solve everyday hardships, even at death’s door. It would no doubt please her that her Hope outlived her and that future generations continue to explore the spiritual and political vision that few of her contemporaries embraced. 30 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.003

Phillis Wheatley N OT E S 1 Although Jupitor Hammon published poetry before 1773, Wheatley was the frst to publish a book. Quotations from Wheatley’s poetry are drawn from Julian Mason, ed., The Poems of Phillis Wheatley (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989), and cited parenthetically by page number. 2 Tertullian’s “Exhortation” begins (in Sydney Thelwall’s 1870 translation): “Although, in cases of this kind, each individual ought to hold colloquy with his own faith, and consult its strength; still, inasmuch as, in this (particular) species (of trial), the necessity of the fesh (which generally is faith’s antagonist at the bar of the same inner consciousness, to which I have alluded) sets cogitation astir, faith has need of counsel from without, as an advocate, as it were, to oppose the necessities of the fesh: which necessity, indeed, may very easily be circumscribed, if the will rather than the indulgence of God be considered.” 3 See Washington’s letter to Phillis Wheatley, February 28, 1776, in Mason, note 38, 165. 4 Mason, 204. Letter dated February 11, 1774. 5 Vincent Carretta makes a compelling argument for the shrewd manner in which Wheatley secured her manumission from the Wheatley family. The poet’s 1773 journey to England came nearly a year after the Somerset ruling, in which a slave, once on English soil, could not be compelled to leave the country and returned to slavery. Carretta speculates that the poet forced the Wheatleys’ son, Nathanial – who had traveled with Phillis to England and was engaged there on business when Poems appeared  – to swear before his business associates that he would liberate the poet on his return to the colonies. Wheatley further insured she would keep whatever “property” was hers, once back in America, by having manumission papers drawn up and by sending a copy to Israel Mauduit, Esq., a Fellow of the Royal Society. See Carretta, Phillis Wheatley:  Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011): 136–138.

F U RT H E R R E A DI N G Carretta, Vincent, Phillis Wheatley:  Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New  York:  Basic Civitas Books, 2003). Mason, Julian, The Poems of Phillis Wheatley (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1989). Shields, John, ed., New Essays on Phillis Wheatley (Knoxville:  University of Tennessee Press, 2011). Phillis Wheatley and the Romantics (Knoxville:  University of Tennessee Press, 2010). Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation:  Backgrounds and Contexts (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008). 31 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.003

3 K E R RY   L A RS ON

The Historical Epic, Women’s Poetry, and Early American Verse

Much has been written on the connection between prose fction and history during the early decades of the nineteenth century in the United States. Novelists such as James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, Robert Montgomery Bird, William Gilmore Simms, and Catherine Maria Sedgwick, in depicting various moments from the nation’s past, rode the wave of enthusiasm that had been set in motion by Walter Scott’s immensely popular Waverley novels. More than a vogue, the historical romance conferred upon the novel a new respectability by offering an alternative to gothic sensationalism, seduction narratives, and picaresque satire. It imbued the genre with a moral purpose and seriousness (all citizens need to know their history) that allayed doubts about the folly and frivolity of novel-reading; its distance from the present also supplied the requisite set of romantic and poetic associations that answered concerns about the allegedly banal or insipid character of everyday life in antebellum America. Indeed, the novel’s transformative encounter with history transformed, in turn, the writing of history itself, as a number of scholars have shown. Less well known, on the other hand, is the equally prominent role played by history in the poetry of the period. No doubt part of the reason for this comes down to a difference in genre. What was a relative novelty to American fction in the 1820s had been a settled convention in poetry. One prominent precedent may be found in the so-called prospect poem, whose popularity in the United States reached its height in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. A blend of epic and georgic styles, the prospect poem typically features a speaker on a promontory overlooking a landscape who, ranging backwards through history to witness a procession of civilizations passing in review before him or her, beholds the rising glory of a new republican empire. History as it appears here is part of a self-consciously visionary exercise tightly bound to concepts of empire and heavily dependent on Enlightenment notions of progress. Instead of serving to legitimate a genre of dubious or uncertain repute, it is a warrant of poetry’s high destiny, 32 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.004

Women’s Poetry and Early American Verse

its link to inspiration and prophecy. It is sometimes said that the prototype for the prospect poem goes back to the last two books of Paradise Lost (1674), where the archangel Michael unfolds a vision of humankind’s future history to an astonished Adam, though it is possible to fnd earlier poems such as Denham’s Cooper Hill (1642), a local, topographical poem, already embracing broader political topics (trade, colonization, and religious confict). In any event, the British landscape poem of the frst half of the eighteenth century, with its combination of georgic nationalism and ecstatic prophecy such as we see on display in the celebrated conclusion to Pope’s “Windsor Forest” (1713), was readily transposed to American locales, especially during and directly after the Revolutionary War, when visions of “an empire of liberty,” as Jefferson called it, were virtually irresistible. Prominent examples include John Trumbull’s “Prospect of the Future Glory of America” (1770), Henry Hugh Brackenridge’s and Philip Freneau’s “The Rising Glory of America” (1771), Phillis Wheatley’s “Liberty and Peace” (1784), Joel Barlow’s “Vision of Columbus” (1787), Sarah Wentworth Morton’s Beacon Hill (1797), and Timothy Dwight’s “Greenfeld Hill” (1794). The timing of these texts is as important as their subject matter. Suvir Kaul has shown that, in Great Britain, the prospect poem had more or less run its course toward the end of century, repurposed to serve other causes such as antislavery, or turned in on itself to question excess and decline within the empire.1 To this we may add the revival of Romance so evident in British poetry from Gray to Wordsworth, whose fascination with the demonic, local superstition, or folkloric myth loosened the privileged bond between empire and history by narrowing the scale of historical interest to a charmed but bounded site. No revival of comparable proportions seems to have occurred in eighteenth-century American poetry, where a neoclassical or Augustan decorum continued to predominate.2 This along with the more extended vogue of the prospect poem helps explain why key precepts from Enlightenment historiography should be so prominently and programmatically placed on display in poems by Freneau, Dwight, and others, not just the old idea of the westward course of genius but also the assumption that there is an overriding, secular purpose to the course of history, that this purpose may be described in terms of a progressive refnement of manners or sociability, and that empire is the privileged metric for conceptualizing historical time. Such themes underpin Barlow’s mammoth The Columbiad (1807), a book-length production in heroic couplets that is essentially a series of prospect poems strung together. Here again the timeframe is striking, for in the same year that Barlow published his epic, Wordsworth brought out the expanded edition of Poems, in Two Volumes. 33 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.004

Kerry Larson

The immediately succeeding generation of poets born near the turn of the century whose publications fall between 1815 and 1840 therefore encountered a rather peculiar inheritance: a tradition of visionary, aggressively nationalistic verse set within the framework of imperial history that was already becoming obsolete as it appeared. Obviously other infuences helped shape the interests of authors such as Lydia Sigourney (b. 1791), William Cullen Bryant (b. 1794), and Maria Brooks (b. 1794), but the ongoing appeal in their work of a certain brand of philosophical history that so beguiled their predecessors is nevertheless striking. Equally striking is the extent to which women’s poetry of the period more generally is drawn both to history and the historical epic in ways that ask us to reconsider the caricature of the poetess haunted by domestic sorrow or private grief. I shall be primarily interested in the epic and its role as the privileged link between the poetical and the historical. Like many other poets, the ones considered here consciously strive to modify or dramatically alter inherited forms they fnd constraining even as they necessarily work within them. Their situation is further complicated by the fact that, even as the epic remains the summit of poetic legitimacy, it also retains a specifc interpretation of history that was becoming progressively less credible. Because poetry’s investment in history at this time was importantly bound up with a variety of generic challenges and opportunities, genre shall form the leading point of reference in the readings that follow. When Lydia Sigourney published her frst volume of poetry, Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse (1815), the North American Review included in its pages a notice that, while favorable, did venture one suggestion. It urged the author to set her sights on “some more considerable undertaking” for her next project and pointed to the legends of Indian history as a resource that might surpass in their richness even Scott’s recent explorations of the Scottish Highlands.3 Within two years Sigourney had composed the frst two cantos of an epic that would eventually exceed four thousand lines and be issued under the title Traits of the Aborigines of America (1822). Its approach is doubly historical: it relates incidents and information concerning native peoples from Greenland to South America dating back to their distant origins, and it interpolates a wealth of classical allusions and Biblical parallels meant to illustrate certain aspects of Indian life, as when the heroism of a dying warrior is described in terms of “stern Regulus” (1. 60–62) of Carthage, or when “the treasur’d pathos” of the “Untutor’d Red Man” is compared favorably to the accomplished eloquence of ancient Greece and Rome (3. 529–548).4 This sort of cross-referencing between a native and world historical framework is supplemented by the use of various devices familiar to the epic, as when the better part of canto 2 is spent following the 34 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.004

Women’s Poetry and Early American Verse

itinerary of Captain John Smith, the New World’s counterpart to Odysseus or Aeneas, as he wanders from continent to continent before landing at Jamestown, or when the muse is invoked in the beginning of canto 3. The erudition displayed throughout the course of the poem extends, moreover, to lengthy notes, which not only cite historians such as Rollin or Robertson and ethnographers such as Heckewelder and Schoolcraft but also contain short essays on everything from the fora and fauna of the North American continent to Welsh bards of the sixth century and “the Ice Palace, erected in the year 1740, by Empress Anne, of Russia.”5 Sigourney’s “more considerable undertaking” is nothing if not ambitious. From the standpoint of American literary history, its most original feature consists in its attempt to break the bond between the historical epic and empire. Although the term would not yet have been available to the poet, her true subject is imperialism, a theme that presides over nearly every encounter involving the aborigines and their European colonizers and so provides this sprawling, encyclopedic poem with some measure of coherence. The privileging of empire as an organizing principle for interpreting the past is here abandoned; if the Aztecs and Inca are of interest to a predecessor such as Barlow a mere ffteen years earlier because they exemplify the barbaric stage of civilization, Sigourney is primarily interested in the barbarity of men such as Cortes and Pizarro. (The contrast is even more striking in the case of Columbus, who for Barlow is the prototype of the epic hero but for Sigourney is just another imperialist.) Rather than framing historical time in terms of a story that takes us “from absolute barbarism [to] modern refnement,”6 as Dwight puts it in his prefatory description to The Conquest of Canaan (1785), Sigourney keeps telling the same story, one that fnds savagery in the civilized and true refnement in the “savage.” Beneath the swirl of activity and the dazzling array of historical allusions, her portrait of the native is static, to say the least; invariably cast as “The White Man’s Friend” betrayed by white treachery, he belongs to “a blinded race / Frantic with injuries” (3. 444–445). No sooner does Columbus land on the shores of the New World, for example, than he is welcomed by “a poor Lucayan” whose disarming innocence only serves to make the explorer’s subsequent crimes more damning. See ye these verdant vales, And spicy forests, where we careless live In simple plenty? From far distant lands A differing and superior race you come, With mighty weapons, and a warlike force To us resistless. We have not the heart To harm the stranger, or to see your blood 35 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.004

Kerry Larson Staining our arrows. Yet if men you are, Like us, subject to death; if ye believe As we have heard, that after this short life Another comes, unending, where all deeds Receive their due reward, we need not fear To trust your mercy, for you cannot seek To wound the innocent. (1. 361–673)

As scenes like this are repeated, a basic irony is hard to miss. Just as the natives are Christian in all but name, the European invaders are Christian in name only. In spite of the inordinate amount of learning poured into the poem, Sigourney is essentially indifferent to the traits of her aborigines and even more to the possibility that such traits may exhibit considerable variation across tribes and regions. Hers is a sentimental politics, rooted in a Christian universalism that can often make it seem as though Sigourney were endeavoring to do for the Indian what Harriet Beecher Stowe would later do for the slave in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Traits of the Aborigines has been described by Nina Baym as “a poem of social protest in the guise of a historical epic,” a useful observation but one that raises the question of why Sigourney would decide to convey her anti-imperialist message through a genre conventionally associated with nation-building and national destiny.7 Precedents do exist for using the epic at cross-purposes, as in Laetitia Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred And Eleven, which is not a mock epic but which does enlist epic conventions to deliver a withering portrait of Britain’s commercial decadence and moral decline.8 Is there a parallel sense in which the generic commitments of the form work with rather than against Sigourney’s declared political sympathies? The poet herself indicates that “the returning Muse . . . steers / ‘Tween Truth’s fair region, and the varying clouds / Of wild Romance” (3. 10–13), suggesting that if pure didacticism is not primarily her intent, neither is pure diversion. Because she has no interest in macro-narratives of historical progress, Sigourney bypasses the opportunities Scott and others so deftly exploited by casting such narratives in an ambivalent light.9 Crucial to that ambivalence is the implication that in mourning the passing of an older, more primitive order, in all its valor and gallantry, we are really savoring the bittersweet cost of progress itself, which, regrettably but inevitably, ushers the native off the stage. But in the same way that Sigourney refuses to celebrate Columbus as an agent of advancing civilization, her epic also refrains from making his victims the objects of a pleasurable melancholy. It’s not just that the lofty rhetorical style, with its use of stately personifcations, periphrasis, extended similes, and other epic mannerisms, creates an inhospitable environment for romance;10 Sigourney’s moral absolutism subordinates elegiac regret to 36 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.004

Women’s Poetry and Early American Verse

raw indignation. At their melodramatic best, her characterizations do their utmost to oppose the pastoral, utterly defenseless innocence of the Indians against the irrational fury of their invaders: What piercing shrieks of woe, Break from those bounds, where clust’ring foliage shades The Chenaw villages. A moment since, And all was peace. Those simple, lovely cells, And cultivated gardens, seem’d the abode Of rural happiness. Now, the green turf Where spring was strewing her pure blossoms, reeks With living crimson. On the furrow’d feld, Which his own hands were planting, sudden falls The un’armed father. His young children shriek Around their dwelling, and th’ unconscious babes Cling to their captive mothers. Angry bands Urge wide the work of death. Tir’d day declines Yet still their hands unshrinking, clench the sword, Reeking in gore. (3. 866–879)

In its visual sweep, impersonality, and classicizing gestures, the epic style serves to distance us from the pathos so integral to the historical romance and its investment in the vanishing primitive. In contrast to the fgures haunted by “a melancholy presentiment of the destruction of their own race”11 that we fnd in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824), Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1827), or Bird’s Calavar (1834), Sigourney’s exemplary victims exhibit an utter lack of foresight of what history has in store for them. The result downplays the opportunities for identifcation and disavowal between the victims and victors of history that the historical novel so skillfully exploits. The entire machinery of ambivalence central to the romance format turns out to be not just beside the point for Sigourney but also counter to the poem’s spirit of intervention and exposure. Her use of the epic, in the meantime, is presumably intended to make up for the absence of tragedy in conferring upon her subjects the necessary dignity and heroism that other, lesser forms of verse could not hope to provide. Still, useful as these considerations may be, they cannot fnally overcome the impression that there remains an important gap between the urgency of the poem’s politics and its idiom. A  note to the passage quoted above explains that the massacre described occurred in the spring of 1818 at the hands of troops led by Gen. Jackson, but what’s interesting here is the disparity between this information and the abstract, formulaic cast of the imagery, which seems more suitable for the burning towers of Troy than the palisades of Tennessee. Here we might think back on the reviewer of Sigourney’s frst 37 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.004

Kerry Larson

volume, who clings to the assumption that the epic poem is the surest way of vindicating national honor when it comes to literary distinction even as he turns to a novel by Walter Scott when it comes to suggesting suitable topics. This kind of mixed message would seem to confrm Lukacs’s insight that the historical novel as popularized by Scott was by this point in time “renewing the old laws of the epic poetry in [an] original way.”12 Needless to say, the social demand for a prophetic nationalism scaled to epic proportions in the manner of the prospect poem, set against the novel’s revivifcation of precisely this genre, leaves a poet of Sigourney’s time and place in a peculiar position. A curious combination of the outdated and the innovative, Traits of the Aborigines retains the high prophetic strain of the epic but in order to sing of America’s rising shame, not glory. It ends by invoking the spirit of Washington, apostrophizing then-President James Monroe, and imploring the rest of the country to come to the aid of “thy brother, perishing within thy gates” (5. 593) and unfurl “the banner of thy wisdom, till their minds, / Freed from debasing fetters, twine the arts / Of civilization, with the hopes sublime / Of pure Christianity” (5. 574–577). This is not to say that Traits of Aborigines amounts to nothing more than a dead end. For all its defciencies, Sigourney’s text does strike out in a new direction, as I have hinted. Where the only kind of progress worth caring about is the conversion of souls, the wonders of a vaguely providential, immanent, and irresistible necessity working its way through recorded history become much less enchanting. If Sigourney considers the Indian a member of an “inferior” race (which she of course does), that is because the Indian is not (yet) a Christian and not because the Indian belongs to an earlier stage of development in the course of humankind’s growth. The sense of history as a sublime spectacle, pageant, or procession of past civilizations viewed from a commanding distance and shaped by a continuously developing storyline gives way to a different emphasis. “She, o’er the vast Atlantic surges rides,” Mercy Otis Warren had exclaimed almost ffty years before, swayed by precisely this sense of wonder as she welcomes long-suffering Freedom at last to “Columbia’s distant, fertile plains, / Where liberty, a happy goddess, reigns” (“A Political Reverie,” 1774). In Sigourney, the required task of projecting history’s grandeur and epic scope is still felt, but it is assumed by the notes that come at the end of the poem as much as by the poem itself. History becomes more a matter of vignettes, anecdotes, and selected incidents to be clarifed by the annotations, the miscellaneous character of which cannot help but disrupt narrative continuity. From this standpoint, Sigourney’s version of world or universal history differs not just from predecessors such as Warren but from contemporaries such as the extremely popular historian George Bancroft or the infuential educator 38 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.004

Women’s Poetry and Early American Verse

Emma Willard, whose millennial republicanism does very much keep alive a sense of historical sublimity as the outcome of a particular, overarching narrative. Poetry’s need to foreshorten or encapsulate such narratives becomes still more pronounced in volumes published by Sigourney after Traits. There we are likely to come across titles such as “Napoleon at Helena,” “The Martyr of Scio,” “Lady Jane Grey,” “Paul at Athens,” “The Power of Friendship: The Ancient Legend of Franconia,” and “Zama.” In her autobiography the poet recollects her early years as a teacher sharing with her pupils the delights of tracing “the progress of ancient times [and] fall of buried empires,” but these short poems telescope “the broad annals of History” by capturing the world historical subject in what is best described as a “teachable moment,” when the proud are brought low or the lowly lifted up.13 Elsewhere a historical crisis of some kind serves as the backdrop for commemorating forgotten acts of heroism, as when a minister defes the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and is tortured to death (“The Huguenot Pastor”), while in other cases the choice of topic calls to mind, in its apparent arbitrariness, a schoolroom exercise (e.g., “The Rival Kings of Mohegan, Contrasted with the Rival Brothers of Persia”). The sense of exhibitionism implied in these shows of learning has not escaped Sigourney’s commentators, who have pointed to the central role of pedagogy in both her life and her self-conception as a poet or to the infuence of republican motherhood and its expectation that mothers raise their children with the manners and virtues suitable to a democratic republic. Later in her career, Sigourney tried her hand at historical topics whose size splits the difference between the epic and the anecdote; her poem on Count Zinzendorff, founder of a radical Moravian sect intent on converting Native Americans in the early eighteenth century and published in 1836, continues the sentimental activism of Traits while paring its length down to just under six hundred lines of blank verse. Five years later Sigourney issued another mid-sized poem on Pocahontas. In their protest over the loss of a homeland as well as their patent mythologizing, both texts look forward to Longfellow’s blockbuster, Evangeline (1847), published a few year later. These last few examples would seem to justify the tendency among scholars to associate the historical with the public or political, a correlation that almost by default leaves the poetical to address private or subjective concerns. As we have seen, however, this oversimplifes the options faced by poets coming of age during the early nineteenth century. The persistence of the epic as a model for literary distinction in the United States depersonalizes voice even as it commits the poet to a grand theory of history that cannot be entirely renounced even if it can’t be simply credited. The brilliance 39 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.004

Kerry Larson

of the historical romance a la Scott, I’ve suggested, is to turn this predicament to its own advantage by capitalizing on the experience of ambivalence, so that the displacement of the pre-modern by the modern is the occasion not for acclaim or approval (as it would be for, say, philosophes such as Voltaire or Hume) but rather for regret and melancholy. But, whatever else it may accommodate, the epic cannot accommodate ambivalence. Hence the enduring awkwardness of a poet such as Bryant when drawn to subjects in the world historical vein, as in “The Prairies,” “The Fountain,” “The Conjunction of Jupiter and Venus,” “The Ages,” or “The Night Journey of a River,” each of which span centuries but end in the present on a openly quizzical, often baffed note. In his best-known poem, “Thanatopsis,” the grand panorama of the prospect poem has left Freneau’s Ohio River valley and Barlow’s Rocky Mountains to preside over a graveyard that encompasses the entire continent. As is so often the case in Sigourney, the sonorous, orotund style of heightened dignity gives us the odd impression that we’re being addressed by someone intent on sounding like a poet, as opposed to just being one: Yet not to thy eternal resting place Shalt thou retire alone, – nor couldst thou wish Couch more magnifcent. Thou shalt lie down With patriarchs of the infant world – with kings, The powerful of the earth – the wise, the good, Fair forms and hoary seers of ages past, All in one mighty sepulcher. . . . The golden sun, The planets, all the infnite host of heaven, Are shining on the sad abodes of death, Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread Thy globe are but a handful to the tribes That slumber in its bosom. – Take the wings Of morning, traverse Barca’s desert sands, Or lose thyself in the continuous woods Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound, Save his own dashings – yet – the dead are there: And millions in those solitudes, since frst The fight of years began.14

A superannuated, seemingly posthumous voice (set at a cosmic remove) gestures at the props of imperial imagination (kings, patriarchs, seers of ages past) and vaguely echoes some of its favorite themes (the founding of a new collectivity, the extent of its domain, the movement from the Far East [“Barca’s desert sands”] to the Far West [the Oregon River]). It impersonates 40 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.004

Women’s Poetry and Early American Verse

the pomp and ceremony of the epic manner while infusing it with a brooding, consolatory tone. We vaguely sense that the poem, populating an otherwise empty landscape with a phantom empire of the dead, has somehow to do with “the progress of ancient time [and] the fall of buried empires,” even if there are no ancient civilizations to speak of and no buried empires to name. An impassive witness to “the still lapse of ages,” nature preserves an ancientness also made to seem timeless. It’s as though Bryant were intent on representing history as primarily a kind of mood, one before which the shaping powers of agency are distant to the point of irrelevance. A fuller treatment of “Thanatopsis” would consider the self-consciously Wordsworthian opening (a late addition on Bryant’s part), its debt to British graveyard verse, and its apparent indifference to a Christian afterlife. But for present purposes, it is enough to see why valorizing the historical strictly in terms of the political, itself something of an occupational hazard for critics who study non-canonical authors, can hinder as much as help. This is especially true in a period where the historical was increasingly identifed with the exotic, the esoteric, or the foreign; Bryant’s interest in getting us to identify with a spirit of pastness independent of anyone’s actual past is symptomatic. It’s not immediately clear, for example, why a long poem about a sultan who constructs a luxurious bower in order to woo a beautiful but unmoved maiden should be considered historical, but that is the way Lucretia Davidson’s “Amir Khan” (1829) presents itself in supplementing its octosyllabic couplets with footnotes, which refer the reader to Middleton’s Geography and other texts familiar to enthusiasts of world history. Another volume published around the same time titled Guido, A  Tale; Sketches from History and Other Tales (1828), by “Ianthe” (Emma Embury), offers a version of the same practice by way of headnotes. Further collections (e.g., Edgar Allan Poe’s Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Other Poems, published in 1829) attest to the ongoing craze over “Oriental” settings at this time, though specimens of the versifed Oriental tale accompanied by annotations go back to Robert Southey’s epics, Thalala the Destroyer (1801) and Curse of Kehama (1810). For the American muse, long schooled in the assumption that to travel west was to dial back history to its beginnings, going east curiously meant the same thing, only now overlaid with an aura of antiquity, not unlike Bryant’s “patriarchs of the infant world.” Easily the most energetic and inventive example of the so-called Oriental epic during this period is Maria Brooks’s Zophiel; or, The Bride of Seven, an epic in six cantos based on an incident in the apocryphal Book of Tobit. The narrative concerns the fortunes of the Jewish maiden Egla and the deadly fate that befalls her several suitors, each dispatched by Zophiel, initially presented as a malevolent demon with erotic designs on the helpless Egla but 41 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.004

Kerry Larson

over time converted to a good angel by her resplendent virtue. As the motif of the repeated trial and theme of endangered innocence suggest, the plot follows the conventions of a quest romance. Brooks accordingly dispenses with the blank verse of contemporaries such as Bryant and Sigourney and uses the heroic quatrain, with an elegant alexandrine to cap off the fourth line from time to time, and writes in a lush, provocatively sensual style suggestive of Keats. Gone are the didactic proprieties of Republican motherhood; gone, too, is the sentimental focus on the fate of victims. Though the story comes from the Bible, its author goes to great lengths to tell us that her portrayal of the main protagonist, Zophiel, an intermediate fgure straddling the human and the divine, has multiple precedents in Judaic, Classical, and Persian mythologies. The dramatic interest is divided between the spiritual anguish of Brooks’s fallen angel, torn between good and evil, and Egla’s mounting despair over accusations that she is responsible for murders that are in fact committed by her tormented but unseen protector, Zophiel. In her valuable discussion of the poem, Barbara Packer emphasizes the extent to which Zophiel rewrites Paradise Lost, with the result that Milton’s epic is handed down to us as it might have been written by “Eve and Belial, rather than by Milton, Adam, and God.” She goes on to contrast “the richness of the sensuous particulars [within the poem] and the sober authority of her learned footnotes,” though it’s fair to add that the same daring and assurance Packer admires in the poem animates the footnotes.15 Like the annotations in Sigourney’s text, those in Brooks’s are striking for their range, depth, and sheer bulk; references to Tertullian, Josephus, Hesiod, Hafz, Voltaire, Fontenelle, Chateaubriand, Robertson, Brucker, Hartman, and so forth, sometimes set beside extended quotations in Latin and French, display, in their headlong enthusiasm, a pride and pleasure in a cosmopolitan intellectuality that goes well beyond the need to establish an historical context or authenticate sources. Originally Brooks had followed Southey in making the annotations genuine footnotes; but dividing the page between a few lines of verse and a block of prose beneath was evidently too distracting for later editors, who moved the notes to the end of the volume.16 Reading the text as originally formatted by Brooks does create an almost irresistible impression of (poetical) surface and (prose) depth that, ideally no less than literally, coexist on the same page. Here again, though, one cannot resist the further impression that the notes collectively serve to impart a breadth and visionary sweep to the historical canvas that the poem is no longer conceived to provide on its own. It’s all the more interesting that Brooks should frame her ambitions in the way she does at the outset of the poem. Its frst words call upon the “Shade of Columbus” to bless her endeavor as they imagine the poet standing at 42 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.004

Women’s Poetry and Early American Verse

or near his grave (“here thy relics rest”) and feeling “the selfsame breeze that passes o’er thy breast / Salutes me as with panting heart I sing.” One critic is no doubt right to observe that this opening places her song “within a particularly Caribbean light” of New World geopolitics, thereby alerting us not only to the curiously tropical-seeming landscapes in what should be Babylon and its vicinity but also to the suggestive prominence given the themes of captivity and bondage by a writer who resided in Cuba while writing much of the poem on her coffee plantation and who was known by the pen name Maria del Occidente.17 More immediately, though, Brooks’s invocation serves to insert her work into a long line of American poems where hailing Columbus had become a virtually ritualized act of signaling. Brooks honors the conventional association between the epic and the discovery of the New World even as she surrounds it with a proto-Romantic language of inspiration. As if to sharpen the contrast, she follows her frst invocation with a second, this one to another legendary explorer (the titular hero of still another epic tale by Robert Southey) who was alleged to have founded a colony west of the Mississippi River more than three hundred years before Columbus and whose Welsh ancestry provides a further point of genealogical authority. Madoc! My ancient fathers’ bones repose Where their bold harps thy country’s bards inwreathed; And this warm blood once coursed the veins of those Who fourished where thy frst faint sigh was breathed.

From the graves of the fathers Brooks proceeds directly to the birthplace of Eve, summoning, in the fourth quatrain, “Spirits who hovered o’er Euphrates’ stream” to attend to “my trembling Muse.” In multiplying both geographical sites (the Americas, Britain, Islam) and the literary traditions they suggest (nationalist, Romantic, Biblical), the poet’s triple invocation pays respect to epic convention while overloading its circuits. The effect is to diffuse the burden of generic expectation by imagining a multitude of overlapping but distinct paths to take without necessarily committing to any one of them. The poet’s flial piety to her forefathers and foremother, as conventional as it is genuine, cannot be centered but remains, like her heroine, unattached. Columbus, Madoc, and Eve are never mentioned again. Like Sigourney and Bryant, Brooks was born too late to regard the epic and its offshoots as a wholly unproblematic way of linking poetry to history, but, like them as well, she was born too early to imagine a substitute with comparable prestige and authority. Only a generation later, in a text like “Song of Myself,” do we begin to see the epic form treated openly as an object of experimentation and parody. And yet who is to say that 43 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.004

Kerry Larson

Sigourney’s activism and turn from Enlightened historiography or Brooks’s skill in simultaneously following and relaxing epic conventions did not have their own role to play in the development of what Roy Harvey Pearce once called “that strange, amorphous, anomalous, self-contradictory thing, the American epic”?18 Pearce of course had no use for any of the poets discussed in this essay, an exclusion that later scholars have sought to correct by mapping other traditions not covered in his sense of what constituted “the continuity of American poetry.” Still, Pearce’s general sense of the epic as an obsolescent form that paradoxically sparked innovation need not be, in itself, exclusionary. As scholars continue to contemplate an interval of time that has remained something of a blank page in the literary history of American poetry, we may wish to think of the poets of this era as not simply marginalized by our national narratives but instrumental in both complicating and advancing them. N OT E S 1 Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire:  English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). As he explains on the frst page of his study, Kaul takes James Thomson’s “Rule, Britannia” as, conceptually and rhetorically, the paradigmatic expression of the poem of empire as he understands it. Thomson’s ode was frst published in 1740. 2 On this point see also McWilliams, “Poetry of the Early Republic” (153), and Barbara Packer, “American Verse Traditions, 1800–55,” The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 4, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2004): 13–14. 3 “Miss Huntley’s Poetry,” North American Review 1 (1815): 111–121 (the passage here quoted appears on the frst page of the review). 4 Traits of the Aborigines of America: A Poem (Cambridge, MA: The University Press, 1822). Subsequent references, cited in parenthesis, identify the number of the canto followed by the line number. 5 The annotations are separately paginated in the edition I am using. The quote occurs on page 17 of this section. Sigourney’s biographer credits the poet’s husband, Charles Sigourney, with the suggestion of appending the notes to the poem, though he does not cite a source for this information (George S. Haight, Mrs. Sigourney:  The Sweet Singer of Hartford [New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1930]: 25). 6 The Major Poems of Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), eds. William J. McTaggart and William K.  Bottorf (Gainesville:  Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints, 1969): 17. 7 Nina Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995): 82. 8 For further discussion, see Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire (120–131). 9 There are two references to Scott in Traits, the frst in his role as the author of Marmion, a historical closet drama published in 1808 (see Traits, canto 3, 44 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.004

Women’s Poetry and Early American Verse

10

11 12

13 14 15 16

17

18

line 13) and the second in his role as the anonymous author of “the celebrated Scottish novels” (3. 112–119). This is not to say that there are no elements of the romance. One exception may be found in the interpolated story of Oolaita, an Indian fable of thwarted love drawn from Schoolcraft (3. 551–665). But I have something more particular in mind when speaking of the historical romance as popularized by Scott, and it is this model, I argue, that Sigourney rejects. Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok and Other Writings, ed. Carolyn Karcher (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986): 31. Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1983):  47. The Historical Novel was originally published in 1937. Lydia Sigourney, Letters of Life (New York: D. Appleton, 1866): 203. Poems of William Cullen Bryant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914): 12. Barbara Packer, “American Verse Traditions, 1800–50”: 67. Zadel Barnes Gustafson issued an edition of the poem in 1879 that converted the footnotes into endnotes. In her collection, American Female Poets (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1849), Caroline May offers her opinion that “the Notes to this poem are full of curious information, and more interesting than the poem itself” (58). Brooks’s son once described his mother as “a hard student and woman of much research [who was] very particular to obtain her authority from the original” (Zophiel; or, The Bride of Seven, ed. Zadel Barnes Gustafson [Boston: A. D. Shepard, 1879]: xii–xiii). Kirsten Silva Gruez, Ambassadors of Culture:  The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2002):  64. See also Gruez, “The Cafetal of Maria del Occidente and the Anglo-American Race for Cuba,” in Traffc in Poems:  Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange, ed. Meredith McGill (New Brunswick:  Rutgers University Press, 2008): 37–62. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1961): 61. F U RT H E R R E A DI N G

Baym, Nina, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995). Bell, Michael Davitt, The Development of American Romance:  The Sacrifce of Relation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Cheng, Eileen, The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth: Nationalism and Impartiality in American Historical Writing, 1784–1860 (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 2008). Davidson, Cathy N., Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Dekker, George, The American Historical Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Kaul, Suvir, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire:  English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Levin, David, History as Romantic Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959). 45 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.004

Kerry Larson Loeffehoez, Mary, From School to Salon:  Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004): 32–64. McWilliams, John, “Poetry of the Early Republic,” in Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1988). Orians, G. Harrison, “The Romance Ferment After Waverley,” American Literature 3 (1932): 408–431. Phillips, Mark Salber, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

46 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.004

4 C H R I S TO P H I R M S C H ER

The Fire This Time: Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier

In the afternoon of March 11, 1873, at 2:47 PM, Charles Sumner, one of the most radical minds of any period in American history, died, in great pain, in his house on Lafayette Square in Washington, DC. He was only sixty-three years old. The last thoughts of the dying senator were about his civil rights bill. “Don’t let the bill fail,” he is said to have told Frederick Douglass, who was among those who had assembled at Sumner’s bedside.1 Back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sumner’s closest friend, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), who had loved Sumner like no other man in his life, was too bereft for words. Hunkering down by his freside, he wrote to George Washington Greene: “I thought I was prepared by his frequent attacks for this fnal one. But I was not. . . . I cannot write more.”2 Longfellow did recover enough to compose a sonnet in memory of his best friend. In “Three Friends of Mine” (1875), a series of Petrarchan sonnets dedicated to the three friends he had lost – the classicist Cornelius Felton (d. 1862), the scientist Louis Agassiz (d. 1873), and then fnally Sumner – he offered a personal account of his friend’s death, his own grief, no longer hidden behind the impersonal “we”: River, that stealest with such silent pace Around the City of the Dead, where lies A friend who bore thy name, and whom these eyes Shall see no more in his accustomed place, Linger and fold him in thy soft embrace And say good night, for now the western skies Are red with sunset, and gray mists arise Like damps that gather on a dead man’s face. Good night! good night! as we so oft have said Beneath this roof at midnight in the days That are no more, and shall no more return. Thou hast but taken thy lamp and gone to bed; I stay a little longer, as one stays To cover up the embers that still burn.3 47 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.005

Christoph Irmscher

Somewhat unexpectedly, this freside poem begins with the poet’s view turned toward the outdoors. It is addressed not to his dead friend but to the Charles River outside the poet’s house as it winds its way around Mount Auburn Cemetery (“the City of the Dead”), where Sumner lies buried. The poet is present only synecdochically, through his eyes, but eyes that can no longer see, since his friend is dead. In the outrageous fantasy the sonnet offers, the river takes the poet’s place and embraces his friend and – because Longfellow himself no longer can – says goodnight to Sumner, rocking him to sleep. But the inconvenient reminder in line 8, just before the poem’s turning point or volta, that Sumner is indeed dead interrupts this fantasy. Just as Sumner is never mentioned by name, his dead body (or, rather, what we assume to be his dead body) is introduced into the poem only via a simile: the evening mists settling over the Charles River are like the damps gathering on a dead man’s forehead. The simile points us to a larger likeness, if only in name: that between the river Charles and the dead man Charles. Longfellow never actually pronounces the name, but precisely because he doesn’t, it becomes the hidden theme of the poem, the unsung refrain around which it is built. The poet, who would usually address his friend as “Sumner,” cannot – not even now – say “Charles,” and yet, lamenting his friend’s death, he says it over and over again. The sestet picks up what the octave left unfnished. As the poet himself tries to say “good night” again, as he had done so often before, he moves the scene indoors, into his parlor or study, in front of the freplace. And now the fantasy works, sort of: although the poet fnds himself alone in front of the freplace and although he knows that the days when Sumner came to visit will no more return, it is easy for him to pretend that he has been given one more chance, that his dead friend has just gone upstairs to sleep, while he stays behind to tend to the embers of the fre that, yes, “still” burns.4 *** The freside holds a distinguished place in the dictionary of literary critical insults. And, on the surface at least, Longfellow’s Sumner poem confrms all the accusations wielded by literary critics against the “freside poets,” a group united even more by the scholarly disdain they have experienced than by any deeper similarities in temperament or poetic practice. To be sitting by the freside, one’s own or that of a friend, meant shunning the world outside for escapist bliss and the false pleasures of domesticity.5 Fireside poetry puts men where they don’t belong:  inside the home, the woman’s realm.6 Regarded as “simple-minded chaps” – to modify a term of abuse applied to Longfellow by Perry Miller7 – and as the “worst offenders” in a registry of literary sins (F. O. Matthiessen8), poets such as Longfellow, Oliver Wendell 48 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.005

The Fireside Poets

Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894), James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), and John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) have been accused of all imaginable literary transgressions, from sentimentality and inauthenticity to crude didacticism or lack of genuine poetic talent. With its “constipated sweetness” (as Walt Whitman once said),9 freside poetry bears the odium of having been produced by stuck-up, conservative white men, the purveyors of unacceptably predictable solutions for problems that aren’t any or have become too complex to be resolved in the space of a sonnet or ballad. At a recent Longfellow symposium, the distinguished poet and translator David Ferry complained that the conclusions of Longfellow’s poems were “unearned,” by which he meant that the moral or the advice that comes at the end of the typical Longfellow poem (“Learn to labor and to wait”; “Know how sublime a thing it is / To suffer and be strong”; “There are no birds in last year’s nest”; “Some days must be dark and dreary”) appears tacked on to a poem that hasn’t performed enough work to warrant it.10 And yet, Longfellow’s poetry has, over the last decade or so, experienced a critical revival of sorts. The same cannot be said for Holmes, Whittier, or Lowell, who still languish in the bottom drawers of literary history.11 The Firesiders were products of their time, of their education, race, gender, and class, and then some. But so were other, more safely canonized writers such as Hawthorne and Melville. Certainly, any attempt to resurrect Longfellow and his friends – and with them the readers who devoured their works – cannot simply brush such biases aside. But, as Daniel Aaron pointed out some time ago, the canon of American literature isn’t “all that rich and various” that it can do without their presence.12 Longfellow’s Sumner sonnet is a case in point. Far from following the standard narrative of the elegy, it treats death as if it were merely a temporary inconvenience. Longfellow uses the fction of the freside to capture the deep, persistent emotional bond between two men, representing their friendship as if they were lovers or a married couple. The freside in Longfellow’s parlor comes to stand for both intimacy and its devastating loss. It is the place where the private becomes public and vice versa, the place where the inside and the outside collide. It both affrms the ties that hold society together and points to the hole that (even physically) opens up right in the middle of it:  the absence that Longfellow both acknowledges and denies, sometimes within the space of a few lines. *** Longfellow’s “freside” poetics – paradoxical, allusive, self-canceling, always cognizant of the needs and problems in the world outside the poem – took shape in the “Dedication” to The Seaside and the Fireside (1849), where 49 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.005

Christoph Irmscher

Longfellow casts himself in the role of a patient listener to the stories told by others, a “not unwelcome” guest in the homes of the people, the grateful transcriber of their conversations (the double negations indicate his own purposely diminished sense of authorship). The volume was divided into two parts, “By the Seaside” and “By the Fireside.” At the juncture between the two parts, Longfellow placed “The Fire of Driftwood,” which uses both settings. Longfellow’s poem this time starts indoors, with an image that would have been familiar to any reader at the time:  a group of friends has assembled in a leaky old farmhouse near Marblehead, Massachusetts.13 Longfellow visited Devereux Farm, the house that inspired the poem in 1846, but the scene he creates is an imagined one, and he needed the setting to be as austere, as stark as possible. The decaying, dilapidated, “brown” town of Marblehead casts its depressing spell on the mood inside, where the conversation has turned to the nature of life itself or, more precisely, to those moments when friends recognize that they must go their separate ways: We spake of many a vanished scene, Of what we once had thought and said, Of what had been, and might have been, And who was changed, and who was dead; And all that flls the hearts of friends, When frst they feel, with secret pain, Their lives thenceforth have separate ends, And never can be one again; The frst slight swerving of the heart, That words are powerless to express, And leave it still unsaid in part, Or say it in too great excess.

Note that Longfellow, seven stanzas into the poem, hasn’t even mentioned the fre or driftwood of the poem’s title. In simple quatrains, relying on straightforward rhymes, Longfellow points to the discrepancy between the experience he relates (the unpredictability of life that ends some lives and lets others go on; the barely noticeable turning away of friends from each other) and the poetic expression of that experience. No language can ever really articulate the full extent of the experience of loneliness, and yet that is precisely the specter that hovers behind the group, as does, too, the possibility of death, especially in the next stanza, which compares the friends’ disembodied voices to leaves – the “leaves” or pages of a book (an album full of images of the past?) that are being turned as well as the leaves of autumn rustling in the darkness. 50 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.005

The Fireside Poets The very tones in which we spake Had something strange, I could but mark; The leaves of memory seemed to make A mournful rustling in the dark.

Since the poem, too, never quite states what it wants to state, its theme and mode become one and the same. When Longfellow, in the next stanza, names the metaphor he has been gesturing toward – and it is one of the oldest in our shared cultural history, that of life as a voyage and of life’s failure as shipwreck – his poem immediately cedes authority to the fre blazing in the room. The fact that the fre is made from the wreckage of actual ships that foundered on the ocean outside seems to anchor it in real life again, a world of tragedy and real death beyond the walls of the dilapidated farmhouse where the friends sit and feel sorry for themselves: Oft died the words upon our lips, As suddenly, from out the fre Built of the wreck of stranded ships, The fames would leap and then expire. And, as their splendor fashed and failed, We thought of wrecks upon the main, Of ships dismasted, that were hailed And sent no answer back again.

Ironically, now that the friends’ voices fade into silence, Longfellow’s lines conspire to make all sorts of noise: the windows rattle, the ocean roars, the winds blast, and the fames bicker. The fre has opened the farmhouse and the circle of the nostalgic friends to the outside world, externalizing the poem, literalizing its metaphors, in ways that the speaker comes to regret. Symbolic wreckage collides with the fragments of real death, with the driftwood metonymically representing the sailors that never came back. As Hans Blumenberg, in his meditation on the shipwreck as a metaphor, pointed out, the harbor is not an alternative to shipwreck; rather, it is the place where we, helpless spectators of the disasters around us, abandon the pleasures of life.14 And so Longfellow’s last two stanzas hurriedly internalize the fre again, rebranding it as a metaphor for the thoughts in our brain. As the fre fzzles out, so do our memories, which thus become comparable to the ships that don’t return. But just as a fre fickers up again before it dies, Longfellow casts doubt on the ability of that fnal image to express what ultimately cannot be said. The two things  – the fre outside and the fre within, the actual fames and the burning heart – are “too much akin”: a matter of poetic convenience rather than truth-speaking. 51 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.005

Christoph Irmscher O fames that glowed! O hearts that yearned! They were indeed too much akin, The drift-wood fre without that burned, The thoughts that burned and glowed within.

Longfellow’s poem constantly negotiates between the inside (the farmhouse and the minds of the friends) and the outside (the ships on the ocean, the town of Marblehead or any town where people live and die) with the freside serving as the nexus between the worlds. The meanderings of this highly self-conscious meditation should once and for all dispel the notion that Longfellow’s conclusions are unearned, easily obtained. For Longfellow, poetic speech always exists on the verge of expiration. His poetry is not carried by the conviction that it will outlive marble monuments and princes, and in the self-consuming quality of fre he fnds an analogue for his own artistic production. The freplace is where we sit and wait, where we tell stories and write and just generally hold on, though we also know that we can’t and won’t. *** In Whitman and Celebrity, David Haven Blake offers an astute comparison between Longfellow the pacifc praiser of comfy domesticity and Walt Whitman of Mannahatta, the hirsute poet of the outdoors and promoter of “performative personality.” Pointing out that the word “freside does not occur in Whitman’s collected works,” Blake emphasizes the transformative, reciprocal relationship Whitman wanted to establish between himself and his anonymous readers. By contrast, Longfellow preferred to represent himself as speaking to those who already agreed with him.15 Leaving aside the fact that Blake replicates a distinction Whitman himself actively promoted – in one of his conversations with Traubel, he characterized even Thoreau as a freside poet of sorts, a creature of the library rather than the woods16 – this reading also supports a diminished view of a poet his contemporaries viewed as rather political. It is worth remembering that Longfellow was the frst major white American poet to devote an entire cycle of poems to the noxious effects of slavery, while Whitman eliminated the most radical statement on race he ever made – when, in “The Sleepers,” he impersonated a black slave threatening death to his white master – from the second and all subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass. The political message Longfellow’s poetry conveys comes fltered through the lens of the past and the lessons we still have to learn from it. One of Longfellow’s most popular poems, Evangeline:  A  Tale of Acadie (1847), about the displacement of the ethnic minority of the Acadians by the powers of colonialism, also contains a description of a freside setting. Granted, that 52 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.005

The Fireside Poets

freplace, anticipating the trouble that is to come, appears to be somewhat different from the cozy freside of an affuent Harvard professor: In-doors, warm by the wide-mouthed freplace, idly the farmer Sat in his elbow-chair, and watched how the fames and the smoke-wreaths Struggled together like foes in a burning city. Behind him, Nodding and mocking along the wall, with gestures fantastic, Darted his own huge shadow, and vanished away into darkness. Faces, clumsily carved in oak, on the back of his arm-chair Laughed in the fickering light, and the pewter plates on the dresser Caught and refected the fame, as shields of armies the sunshine.17

Longfellow renders the “wide-mouthed” freplace, an image of oral engulfment, as a source of both pleasure (enhanced by the m and n sounds) and destruction (the s and sh sounds). The battle of the fames in the freplace, watched by the idle Benedict Bellefontaine, spills over into his domestic realm, where emblems of domestic comfort – the wall behind him, the carvings on his chair, and the plates  – refect the fre, joining in the fantastic dance of light and shadow. While Benedict remains passive, the fre animates everything: Even the farmer himself – or rather his shadow – begins to dance in the fickering light. Evangeline is a poem about the destruction and diffcult, partial rebirth, from the ashes of their lives, of an entire people who, traumatically deprived of their ancestral homes, “despairing, heart-broken, / Asked of the earth but a grave, and no longer a friend nor a freside.”18 Not coincidentally, the annihilation of the village Grand-Pré appears as a fre gone out of control, settling down, like a blood-red, many-limbed harvest moon, over the houses of the Acadians, embracing them in lethal folds of smoke and fames. The burning of Grand-Pré comes at the beginning of a harrowing journey that takes Longfellow’s protagonist all across the territory of the future United States, down to Louisiana and deep into the western prairies, all in search of her lover Gabriel, separated from her during the expulsion. As the Acadians fan out in search of a new home, puny campfres replace indoor freplaces. It is over one such fre that the one true moment of intercultural understanding in the poem takes place. At the foot of the Ozarks, Evangeline encounters a Shawnee woman with an eerily similar life story: “Once, as they sat by their evening fre, there silently entered / Into their little camp an Indian woman, whose features / Wore deep traces of sorrow, and patience as great as her sorrow.” The Shawnee’s experience, shared by the “quivering fre-light,” resonates with Evangeline’s own, in a way that has few analogues in nineteenth-century American writing.19 This exchange of tales models the virtual one with which the poem ends when Longfellow asks us to contemplate the graves of Evangeline and Gabriel, who, fnally 53 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.005

Christoph Irmscher

united in death, lie forgotten in a Catholic graveyard right in the middle of Protestant Philadelphia. Longfellow’s freside was a capacious place – a place where a radical senator, Shawnee, and Acadian, Catholic, and Protestant alike could be found. Fire builds community and destroys it; it is up to the poet to harness it. *** In 1847, the year Evangeline was published by Ticknor and Fields, Congress passed the U.S. Passenger Act, establishing standards to be followed by ships carrying passengers to the United States and imposing penalties for captains not ensuring these standards. Putting a limit on how many could travel, the Act also increased fares. Ballooning numbers of immigrants had put pressure on a nation that was still in search of a narrative that would defne it. It makes sense, then, that Longfellow’s story of displacement and disorientation, featuring a non-English-speaking, non-Protestant protagonist, would have found a wide readership among disconcerted Americans. One of Longfellow’s illustrators chose to represent the Acadians in chains, an image that spoke to those who shudderingly remembered the Trail of Tears as well as to African-American readers, with whom Longfellow was a great favorite, a champion of liberty. The literary elite remained reserved. Even Longfellow’s friend, fellow poet James Russell Lowell and the most cerebral member of the group, was not overfond of Longfellow’s hexameters (they had, he felt, the same relationship to ancient Greek meter as Johann Strauss did to Ludwig van Beethoven), but he consoled himself by noting he had learned at least one lesson from his Harvard predecessor – that “elegance also is force.”20 In his own elegant “A Winter-Evening Hymn to My Fire” (1854), Lowell self-consciously invokes Zoroaster, the magician-astrologer-god, to aid him in praising his fre, in marked departure from Christian worship: Beauty on my hearth-stone blazing! To-night the triple Zoroaster Shall my prophet be and master: To-night will I pure Magian be, Hymns to thy sole honor raising, While thou leapest fast and faster, Wild with self-delighted glee, Or sink’st low and glowest faintly As an aureole still and saintly, Keeping cadence to my praising Thee! still thee! and only thee!21

The second stanza switches mythologies and tells the story of fre’s enslavement by the wily Prometheus, who, after promising “endless ease” to the fre, 54 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.005

The Fireside Poets

that “elfsh daughter of Apollo,” turned it into a “drudge to boil the pot.” Lowell’s poem goes on to maintain that fre can be enslaved but not tamed. Plotting insurrection while “thy wittol masters” sleep (the archaic adjective means “cuckolded” or “deceived”), the fre will ravage the structures that have been made to contain it. Our only hope: putting it in the right hands, turning the fre into a friend, admitting it to our houses, thus honoring its ancestral rights, will turn Cinderella into a princess again. It is around such a fre that Lowell and his guests will sit and abandon themselves to the pleasures of smoking, paying tribute to “Nicotia, dearer to the Muse / Than all the grape’s bewildering juice.” Lowell goes on to offer a clever description of the effects of smoking tobacco on people’s minds: lost in the currents of “unguided talk,” submerged in “smooth, dark pools of deeper thought,” they feel free to be who they want to be.22 Lowell’s speaker recognizes that his fre does not allow him to ascend to the heights of divine insight: “Thou holdest not the master key / With which thy Sire sets free the mystic gates / Of Past and Future:  not for common fates / Do they wide open fing.” There is, perhaps, a faint echo of Emerson’s “Merlin I” (1847) in those lines, of the transcendentalist encouragement to let the poet’s verse soar unencumbered by meter and other poetic conventions to the heights of prophetic revelation, to the region where “God’s will sallies free” and the doors of heaven open to secrets that “no sword of angels” can reveal.23 But Lowell knows that he is no Emersonian bard. As expected, his fre burns down: “Thou sinkest, and my fancy sinks with thee.”24 Were the guests around fre ever real? The speaker is left alone with his pain, haunted by ghosts, dwelling on the shadows of the past. But the familiarity of the fnal gesture – the poem as a “recherche du temps perdu” and the freplace as the site of helpless nostalgia – cannot obliterate Lowell’s provocative riff on the disastrous consequences of “enslaving” the fre. In 1854, Lowell’s contemporaries would have read the poem not just as an idle “revery” but also as a comment on slavery: free the drudges and admit them into our households, and we will fnd ourselves surrounded by royalty. *** Fireside poetry is rooted in the conviction that, at the end of the day, it is not poetry that matters but life. The wittiest of the Firesiders, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in his other life the Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard, regarded his poems as toys and in a birthday tribute dedicated to his friend John Greenleaf Whittier jokingly compared himself to Scheherazade, but one not cowed by the fear of death; his personal nightmare was to show up at a banquet without a poem in hand.25 55 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.005

Christoph Irmscher

Not surprisingly, Holmes, who regarded life as a gift and not as a problem to be solved, was dismissive of the poetry of the Transcendentalists, where, as he unkindly phrased it, “[S]elf-inspection sucks its little thumb.”26 In “At My Fireside,” Holmes’s reworking of Longfellow’s “Fire of Drift-Wood,” written when he was almost eighty, Holmes contemplates the imminent end of his life (and the demise of his poetic inspiration, too) but does not fnd in it a cause for general despair. Even as he watches what is left of his life fade as the fre before him glimmers out and the sun sets on the windows of the past, someone somewhere else takes pleasure in a new dawn, and Holmes is glad to participate, even if only vicariously, in someone else’s joy. ALONE, beneath the darkened sky, With saddened heart and unstrung lyre, I heap the spoils of years gone by, And leave them with a long-drawn sigh, Like drift-wood brands that glimmering lie, Before the ashes hide the fre. Let not these slow declining days The rosy light of dawn outlast; Still round my lonely hearth it plays, And gilds the east with borrowed rays, While memory’s mirrored sunset blaze Flames on the windows of the past.27

Holmes’s friend John Greenleaf Whittier, too, faced the extinction of his life and poetry with equanimity. But, then, among all his contemporaries, he probably had the least reason to be ashamed of the choices he made. An ardent opponent of slavery, Whittier toured the North to speak on behalf of abolitionism, often braving the fury of a mob. A co-founder of the Anti-slavery Society and coeditor of the National Era, he convinced Charles Sumner to run on his Liberty Party’s ticket for the Senate. Nevertheless, cozy freplaces are ubiquitous in Whittier’s poetry. His best-selling poem Snow-bound (1866), a nostalgic memory of a time, decades ago, when his own family and assorted friends spent a few days hunkered down inside the farm during a massive snowstorm, contained a description of a freplace that became iconic and turned the Whittier family farm into a tourist destination. But an infnitely more moving freside narrative appears in Whittier’s late poem “Burning Drift-Wood” (1890).28 The eighty-three-year-old Whittier, generally the least deliberately literary among the Firesiders, begins his reminiscence by systematically stripping away layer after layer of poetic cliché. With every piece of drift-wood he burns, Whittier, speaking unabashedly 56 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.005

The Fireside Poets

in propria persona, returns to the unfulflled dreams of his youth and to the life-as-voyage metaphor in Longfellow’s earlier poem, but with a twist. The wreckage of his life, by conventional terms, happened before his ship ever set sail. He never glimpsed the fabled Fortunate Isles of Greek mythology, home of the thrice reincarnate; never saw Arcadia; never passed by the island where the Sirens lived; never even came close to Prester John’s mythic kingdom; never visited Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure dome. The point of Whittier’s list is, of course, the unreality of all those places, the object of humankind’s pipe dreams. Whittier’s ships didn’t reach what some would call the “haven of Content.” His fabulous places are ciphers, exaggerated into the realm of fantasy, for things he in fact, as his readers knew too, did not achieve: family, offspring, wealth. Instead, Whittier learned to let himself be guided by Love and Duty, facing reality as it was and old age as it is: What matter that it is not May, That birds have fown, and trees are bare, That darker grows the shortening day, And colder blows the wintry air! The wrecks of passion and desire, The castles I no more rebuild, May ftly feed my drift-wood fre, And warm the hands that age has chilled.

As he is feeding his dreams to the fre  – one recurrent conceit in freside poetry is the book that ends up in the freplace  – his real achievements emerge. The ritualistic “holocaust” of poetic folly allows him to reaffrm what is really important in life. (Such optimism handily distinguishes Whittier from his New England contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, in his story “Earth’s Holocaust” [1844], also imagined a burning of books, a literal one, only to anticipate at the end, under the guidance of the devil himself, an immediate rebirth of old follies and sinister desires, for such is human nature). In Whittier’s old age, the real “wonders of the world,” facilitated by technological advancements, come to him, right to his doorstep in Amesbury, Massachusetts. The world has changed, but for the better, especially because among those wonders is one that Whittier himself helped bring about and that he evokes in some of the most moving lines in nineteenth-century poetry: Far more than all I dared to dream, Unsought before my door I see; On wings of fre and steeds of steam The world’s great wonders come to me, 57 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.005

Christoph Irmscher And holier signs, unmarked before, Of Love to seek and Power to save, – The righting of the wronged and poor, The man evolving from the slave; And life, no longer chance or fate, Safe in the gracious Fatherhood. I fold o’er-wearied hands and wait, In full assurance of the good.

With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Whittier’s fght to end slavery had reached its goal. His notion that the “man” needs to “evolve” from the slave sounds unpleasantly Lamarckian, a reminder of the blind spots in his racial politics, but it doesn’t distract from the powerful acknowledgment in this poem that for Whittier the sum of his life consists in what he was able to do for others. And yet, as a devout Quaker, Whittier attributes his success – the righting of the wrong – not to his own efforts but to God. The image he leaves us with is of the old poet sitting in front of his cold freplace, not alone but secure in the imagined company of Faith, Hope, and Charity, calmly awaiting death, anticipating his arrival at the only paradise of which he knows, the Isles of Peace, where no one needs any fre at all. N OT E S 1 David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner (New York: DaCapo, 1996): 586. 2 Longfellow to George Washington Greene, March 11, 1874, The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Andrew Hilen, vol. V:  1866–1874 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1982): 727. 3 Longfellow, “Three Friends of Mine,” The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston: Houghton Miffin and Co., 1895): 315. 4 Charles C. Calhoun, in Longfellow:  A  Rediscovered Life (Boston:  Beacon, 2004), points out that “we lack the vocabulary” to defne a romantic yet likely non-sexual attachment of the kind Sumner and Longfellow enjoyed (135–136). 5 Newton Arvin, in Longfellow:  His Life and Work (Boston:  Atlantic Monthly Press, 1963), claims that, unlike Hawthorne, Longfellow was incapable of understanding the destructive powers of fre (189–190). 6 See Kirsten Silva Gruesz, “Feeling for the Fireside:  Longfellow, Lynch, and the Topography of Poetic Power,” Sentimental Men:  Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, eds. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999): 43–63. 7 See “Longfellow’s 150th Anniversary Today Is Marked by Exhibitions,” The Harvard Crimson (February 27, 1957). 8 See Matthiessen’s introduction to The Oxford Book of American Verse., ed. F. O. Matthiessen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950): xviii. 58 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.005

The Fireside Poets 9 See “Walt Whitman in St. Louis. Literature, Politics, and the Prairie States. Two Manuscript Notes and Printed Newspaper Clipping, with Holograph Additions by Whitman,” The Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana, Manuscripts PS 3222. W62 1879. 10 David Ferry, remarks on the occasion of the Eighth Annual Longfellow Forum, “The Poet in American Culture,” November 10, 2007, organized by the Maine Historical Society, University of Southern Maine. The lines are from Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life,” “The Light of Stars,” “It Is Not Always May,” and “The Rainy Day” (Longfellow, Poetical Works, 3, 4, 16). 11 See Calhoun; Christoph Irmscher, Longfellow Redux (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2006); Irmscher, Private Poet, Public Man:  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009); Irmscher and Robert Arbour, eds., Reconsidering Longfellow (Madison:  Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014). The last important study of Holmes is Peter Gibian, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For the best recent treatment of Whittier, see Angela Sorby’s Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917 (Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005). Martin Griffn, in Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865–1900 (Amherst:  University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), devotes a chapter to Lowell’s “Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, July 21, 1865.” 12 Daniel Aaron, “The Legacy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” Maine Historical Society Quarterly 27.4 (1986): 65. 13 Longfellow, Poetical Works: 106–107. 14 Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator:  Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997): 35. 15 David Haven Blake, Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006): 94–95. 16 Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, vol. 1 (Boston:  Small, Maynard, 1906): 231. 17 Longfellow, Poetical Works: 75. 18 Longfellow, Poetical Works: 84. 19 Longellow, Poetical Works: 93. 20 James Russell Lowell, “A Fable for Critics” (1848), The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell, Cabinet edition (Boston:  Houghton, Miffin, and Co., 1903): 184. 21 Lowell, Poetical Works: 428. 22 Lowell, Poetical Works: 430. 23 Emerson, “Merlin I,” in Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations, eds. Harold Bloom and Paul Kane (New York: Library of America, 1994): 92. 24 Lowell, Poetical Works: 431. 25 “For Whittier’s Seventieth Birthday” (1877); The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston: Houghton, Miffin, and Co., 1903): 330. 26 Holmes, “An After-Dinner Poem” (1843); Poetical Works: 68. 27 Holmes, “At My Fireside” (1888); Poetical Works: 352. 28 The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: Houghton, Miffin, and Co., 1904): 581–582. 59 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.005

Christoph Irmscher F U RT H E R R E A DI NG Aaron, Daniel, “The Legacy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” Maine Historical Society Quarterly 27.4 (Spring 1988): 42–66. Calhoun, Charles C., Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (Boston: Beacon, 2004). Duberman, Martin, James Russell Lowell (Boston: Beacon, 1966). Gibian, Peter, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Gioia, Dana, “Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism,” The Columbia History of American Poetry, ed. Jay Parini (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1993): 64–96. Griffn, Martin, Ashes of the Mind:  War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865–1900 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). Irmscher, Christoph, Longfellow Redux ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006; 2nd ed., 2008). Private Poet, Public Man:  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). “Longfellow’s Sentimentality,” Soundings 93.3/4 (Fall/Winter 2010): 249–280. “Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature, ed. Jackson Bryer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Irmscher, Christoph, and Robert Arbour, eds., Reconsidering Longfellow (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014). Sorby, Angela, Schoolroom Poets:  Childhood, Performance and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917 (Lebanon:  University of New Hampshire Press, 2005).

60 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.005

5 M A R K   S C OT T

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson published 166 poems between 1829 and 1882, the year of his death, most of them in three collections of verse:  Poems (1847), May-Day and Other Pieces (1867), and Selected Poems (1876).1 He began writing poetry in 1812, when he was nine.2 His frst memorable poem, “Hymn, Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument” (“Concord Hymn”), published in 1837, begins: By the rude bridge that arched the food, Their fag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood And fred the shot heard round the world. (CW 9: 307)

But “Concord Hymn” is not characteristic of Emerson’s poetry. “Unity” is. The 1844 motto for his essay on “The Over-Soul,” “Unity” treats Emerson’s prepossessing theme: Space is ample, east and west, But two cannot go abreast, Cannot travel in it two: Yonder masterful cuckoo Crowds every egg out of the nest, Quick or dead, except its own. (ECPT 204–205)

The argument of Emerson’s poetry is “to . . . banish the Not Me & supply the Me,” “to abolish difference & restore Unity.”3 The only unity in his heterogenous collection of poems is Waldo Emerson’s desire to make all things be of his mind. This is the “necessary and autobiographic basis” of his verse. “Talent amuses,” he says in “Poetry and Imagination,” “but if your verse has not a necessary and autobiographic basis, though under whatever gay poetic veils, it shall not waste my time.” The next paragraph reads: For poetry is faith. To the poet the world is virgin soil; all is practicable; the men are ready for virtue; it is always time to do right. He is a true re-commencer, or 61 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.006

Mark Scott Adam in the garden again. He affrms the applicability of the ideal law to this moment and the present knot of affairs.4

As he works on the manuscript of Poems in 1845, Emerson thinks that most poets fail to execute “the offce of poetry.” They, along with most readers, resort to literature “as consolation, not as decalogue.” Literature is thereby “defamed & disgraced” (JMN 9:  162). Emerson means to execute “the offce of poetry”; he will command, and his commandments are anything but consoling. He apprises us of our vice and our wrongdoing. He throws his “bible” at us. “I said to [William Cullen] Bryant,” Emerson writes in his journal in 1838, I think no man could be better occupied than in making up his own bible . . . I think the true poetry which mankind craves is that Moral Poem of which Jesus chanted to the ages stanzas so celestial, yet only stanzas.5

Emerson craved “that Moral Poem.” His stanzas say that what mankind craves is a nation of Emersons.6 In most of his poems, Emerson is “the heart of all the scene,” as he says in “Woodnotes I” (W 9: 47). He is “the pine-tree” whose “runes” the “universe” “understands” (W 9: 53). He is awaited by the Sphinx in “The Sphinx.” He is “the bard and sage” Mount Monadnoc awaits in “Monadnoc.” He is Brahma in “Brahma.” He is Nature in “Song of Nature,” where “Nature” says that Jesus, Shakespeare, Moses, and Plato fell “short” of being “the man-child,” “The summit” of creation, but that “The sunburnt world a man shall breed.” That man, of course, is Emerson. The credal and doctrinal tone of Emerson’s poetry is the personal thing about it. Where he doesn’t ignore other doctrines and creeds, he scorns and demotes them, as in “Blight” and “Xenophanes,” before disposing of them and professing his own. His poems are bouts of what Ellery Channing, who knew Emerson well and often went on walks with him, called “the Emerson cholic”: “Emerson was never in the least contented . . . ‘When shall I be perfect? when shall I be moral? . . . when will the really good rhyme get written?’ ”7 Why, then, on frst reading them, do Emerson’s poems not sound cholicky and unsatisfed? Because he was careful to write his verse as “esoterically” as he could. “All writings must be in a degree exoteric,” he says in “Poetry and Imagination,” “written to a human should or would, instead of to the fatal is: this holds even of the bravest and sincerest writers” (W 8:  30–31). In his prose, this “bravest and sincerest” writer, whose 1,500-lecture career amounted to reading his journal in public biweekly for forty years, felt constrained to use “the weak would” of “the moderns” now and then, for the beneft of his humbler auditory (W 12:  88). Not so in his poetry. “What the people think” is almost entirely omitted from 62 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.006

Ralph Waldo Emerson

his verse. In his verse, Emerson advances “the strong should” of “the old Greek,” even when – especially when – he writes it in the indicative mood (W 12: 88). Whatever his grammatical mood, Emerson speaks in his poems “as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he” (W 2: 51). He talks this way in his prose too, but there he gives his doubts and dissatisfactions, and his antagonists, their say. Still, in prose or in verse, in the imperative or the indicative mood, Emerson is teaching the same doctrine, “the doctrine of poetry.” This doctrine, which he is careful not to call his, “reverses the common sense, for it is the doctrine that the soul generates matter.”8 “What I must do is all that concerns me,” he writes in his 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness . . . the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. (W 2: 53–54)

“Sursum Corda” is a verse rendition of “Self-Reliance.” A soliloquy, it begins in the imperative mood, as at least 87 of the 450 “scraps of verse” Emerson left behind do (ECPT 625–637; W 9: 506). He will not write “our American literature and spiritual history” in “the optative mood” (W 1:  342). Two of the poem’s eight sentences are indicatives, two are closed questions, and four are imperatives: Seek not the spirit, if it hide Inexorable to thy zeal: Baby, do not whine and chide: Art thou not also real? Why shouldst thou stoop to poor excuse? Turn on the accuser roundly; say, “Here am I, here will I abide Forever to myself soothfast; Go thou, sweet Heaven, or at thy pleasure stay!” Already Heaven with thee its lot has cast, For only it can absolutely deal. (ECPT 69)

“Sursum corda,” the Catholic priest says, “Up, hearts.” Even that is “poor excuse.” Emerson will not be commanded from without. The spirit deals itself: “The wind bloweth where it listeth” (John 3:8). “Turn on the accuser,” Emerson says. Who or what is “the accuser”? In his journal, Emerson calls “conscience” “the stern accuser” (EHJ 47); in Poems, in “The Park,” “conscience” is “the god” seated on Emerson’s neck, the god whose “eyes his eyeballs meet” in the glass (ECPT 67). To himself, then, Emerson says: “ ‘Here am I, here I will abide / Forever to myself soothfast.” Emerson, heaven, and 63 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.006

Mark Scott

the spirit are co-dependent, and co-independent of other lots and laws. In “Sursum Corda,” the kingdom of heaven is scandalously within. It is accomplished. Heaven is “Already” satisfed with Emerson, even if he isn’t satisfed with himself. There are, I think, only two audacious and authentic sustained passages in Emerson’s verse: there is Monadnoc’s story about “the spruce clerk” who climbed up its side one day, in which Emerson lays bare his disgust at “the inconceivable levity of human beings” (W 7: 91), and there is Emerson’s portrayal of himself as Cupid, who is nothing but eyes, in “Initial, Daemonic, and Celestial Love.” I can only touch on the latter here.9 “Leave his weeds and heed his eyes,” says the narrator of “Initial, Daemonic, and Celestial Love,” “All the rest he can disguise” (W 9: 104). The next ninety-six lines (of which I quote only twenty-fve below) are the most disinterested, and perhaps the only amoral, lines in Emerson’s poetry. In blazoning Cupid, Emerson seems to tell all his thought and to comprehend it too: In the pit of his eye’s a spark Would bring back day if it were dark; And, if I tell you all my thought, Though I comprehend it not, In those unfathomable orbs Every function he absorbs. He doth eat, and drink, and fsh, and shoot, And write, and reason, and compute, And ride, and run, and have, and hold, And whine, and fatter, and regret, And kiss, and couple, and beget, By those roving eyeballs bold. Undaunted are their courages, Right Cossacks in their forages; Fleeter they than any creature, – They are his steeds, and not his feature; Inquisitive, and ferce, and fasting, Restless, predatory, hasting; And they pounce on other eyes As lions on their prey; And round their circles is writ, Plainer than the day, Underneath, within, above, – Love – love – love – love. He lives in his eyes (W 9: 104–105) 64 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.006

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the mask of Cupid, as in the mask of “Fate” (the poem), Emerson mounts his bully pulpit: Broad are his shoulders and strong; And his eye is scornful, Threatening, and young (W 9: 32)

“Young” is Emerson’s favorite epithet. Cupid is young, “a poet” in “The Sphinx” is young, “Uriel” is young, “and we are never old” (“The World-Soul”). By young, Emerson almost always means archaic, primeval (“Adam in the garden again”), and wise. Cupid, Uriel, Fate, Monadnoc, and the pine-tree in “Woodnotes” are as wise as Solomon and as original as “the solar course,” from which Emerson wants his “sentiment divine” to come “shrilling” at us in “Uriel’s voice of cherub scorn” (W 9: 15). But Emerson needs no persons or gods to tell us what we need to know. His “minstrel” is “The Harp,” the wind-harp, the Aeolian harp. Emerson left no clearer statement than this of his arrested development as a man and as a poet. As in “Initial, Daemonic, and Celestial Love,” so in “The Harp”:  the rule of Emerson’s esoteric poetry seems to be, No children allowed, Only children allowed:10 my minstrel knows and tells The counsel of the gods, Knows of Holy Book the spells, Knows the law of Night and Day, And the heart of girl and boy, The tragic and the gay, And what is writ on Table Round Of Arthur and his peers; What sea and land discoursing say In sidereal years. He renders all his lore In numbers wild as dreams, Modulating all extremes, – What the spangled meadow saith To the children who have faith; Only to children children sing, Only to youth will spring be spring. (W 9: 237–238)

“Knows” is Emerson’s keyword from the 1820s on, and its object is “one.” “Only” repeats the “one” of “Xenophanes” and “the Same” of “Blight,” as if an adverb could realize the purity, or puerity, that Emerson craves. “Modulating all extremes,” following hard on “numbers wild as dreams,” captures Emerson in his constitutional struggle to be both the gentleman 65 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.006

Mark Scott

in society and “The wild-eyed boy, who in the woods / Chants his hymn to hills and foods” (“Woodnotes II,” W 9: 49). Only know this: Emerson bars any evidence that might support “the popular faith” or impeach “the ideal theory” he announced in Nature (1836): “The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind” (W 1: 59). What is it like to read such advantaged poems? In 1883, Joel Benton described his experience:  “Emerson pours forth at times broken, irregular verses; deals in abrupt transitions of thought; employs occasionally astonishing rhymes; and leaves to the reader some discretion and part in weaving together the continuity of his ideas.” Benton puts the best spin he can on previous criticism of Emerson’s poetry,11 but he (and it) omits to say that Emerson also writes solid, regular verses; carries sentences ably over many lines; deals in prosaic transitions; rhymes unnoticeably; and tells the reader exactly what to think. Emerson’s habits are marked. He is loyal to words and pairs that please him, such as gods and periods. He rhymes world and furled in two poems and woods and solitudes in four. And he relies on dependent clauses for mounting “a certain longanimity to make that confdence & stability which can meet the demands others make on us” (JMN 7: 327).12 In “To Rhea,” for example, Emerson counters the demands of others with an order that both he and they are unlikely to execute: If with love thy heart has burned; If thy love is unreturned; Hide thy grief within thy breast, Though it tear thee unexpressed. (ECPT 12)

In “Give All to Love,” a grammatic and thematic reprisal of “To Rhea,” the command “Heartily know” could not be more anticlimactic and detached. It is thoroughly longanimous: Though thou loved her as thyself, As a self of purer clay, Though her parting dims the day, Stealing grace from all alive; Heartily know, When half-gods go, The gods arrive. (ECPT 73)

In “The Problem,” Emerson tells how it was with Michelangelo: Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew, – The conscious stone to beauty grew. (ECPT 10–11) 66 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.006

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It did not. Nor have Emerson’s poems grown beautiful. He knew they were “cripples for life” when he fnished the manuscript of Poems,13 but he published them anyway, in favor of another knowing. “I know,” he writes in 1844, “against all appearances, that there is a remedy to every wrong, & that every wall is a gate” (JMN 10: 390).14 Emerson’s poems are littered with such unconditional and unqualifed assertions. He consistently states as fact, with himself alone as warrant, whatever wish or belief runs counter to “the popular faith.” Writing to Margaret Fuller in 1842, he says that his wife, Lidian, sometimes taxes me at home with an egotism more virulent than any against which I rail. Perhaps she is right . . . I must unfold my own thought. Each must build up his own world, though he unbuilt all other men’s, for his materials. So rabid does egotism, when contradicted, run. (L 3: 20)

Like “The old men” in “Blight,” Emerson’s poems are “unitarians of the united world.” Wherever his “clear eye-beams” fall, he sees “the footsteps of the SAME” (ECPT 111–112). He sees the end of difference. Attacking his poems on the downbeat, on verbs without subjects, nouns without articles, adjectives without nouns, Emerson shifts meter, rhyme scheme, tense, and person at will, as in “The Sphinx,” “Days,” “Concord Hymn,” “Give All to Love,” and “Sea-Shore.” He uses this abruption to “front”15 what provokes him:  “the common sense,” “the popular code,” “what the people think.”16 To end the difference between him and the manifolds that “Deceive us” (“Blight”), he omits as much ordinary talk and action from his verse as he can. He supplies nearly pure animation, or personifcation, the master trope of his poetry. In personifcation, Emerson says, every abstract idea, every element, every agent in nature or in thought, is strongly presented as a god . . . so that the universe is flled with august & exciting images. It is imaginative & not anatomical. It is stimulating. (JMN 9: 150)

Seldom documentary or narrative in his presentation, Emerson stims to the marvelous comics and godly cartoons he draws, unfazed by even his own utterances. “Man’s spirit must dive,” he keeps saying  – but up, not down, “drawn” by “the heavens” in “The Sphinx” and by love in “Give All to Love”: High and more high It dives into noon, With wing unspent, Untold intent; But it is a god, Knows its own path, And the outlets of the sky. (W 9: 91) 67 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.006

Mark Scott

The ending of “Each and All,” overwritten by two sententious lines, shows the discipline it requires to be an Emerson. It has ten of the most satisfying lines in his poetry: Then I said, “I covet truth; Beauty is unripe childhood’s cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth:” – As I spoke, beneath my feet The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath, Running over the club-moss burrs; I inhaled the violet’s breath; Around me stood the oaks and frs; Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground; Over me soared the eternal sky, Full of light and of deity; Again I saw, again I heard, The rolling river, the morning bird; – Beauty through my senses stole; I yielded myself to the perfect whole. (ECPT 9–10)

Only in eight lines of “The Harp” does Emerson as credibly place himself somewhere, doing something: When pacing through the oaks he heard Sharp queries of the sentry-bird, The heavy grouse’s sudden whir, The rattle of the kingfsher; Saw bonfres of the harlot fies In the lowland, when day dies; Or marked, benighted and forlorn, The frst far signal-fre of morn. (W 9: 240)

But “Each and All” is not Rossetti’s “The Woodspurge,” or Frost’s “The Vantage Point,” or Stevens’s “On the Road Home,” which begins It was when I said, “There is no such thing as the truth,” That the grapes seemed fatter. The fox ran out of his hole.17

But the idea is the same: decisive utterance is “causal.”18 Emerson’s difference from Stevens is that Emerson, in “abandonment or ecstasy of will or intellect”19 to his doctrine, must say, “Beauty is unripe childhood’s cheat.” “The ideal theory” has already indemnifed him for slandering beauty and lying to himself. Beauty fattens all around him when he speaks his creed, because now things appear as they truly are, “Full of light and of deity.” “I 68 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.006

Ralph Waldo Emerson

covet truth” is verifed. Now that river and bird are disposed of, subordinated “to the mind,” Emerson consents to “yield” to his costly “virtue” (W 1: 60). On these accounting principles, if not by the sonnet pattern he has balked at four times in ffty-one lines, Emerson dutifully tags the end of “Each and All” with a pompous couplet. In “The World-Soul,” the frst four lines score; the second four are what used to be called cant. Emerson and “the World-Soul” falsely confess to “despoiling the unborn.” Emerson can only “individualize”20 the voice that silences others, “the voice that speaketh clear”: The politics are base; The letters do not cheer; And ’tis far in the deeps of history, The voice that speaketh clear. Trade and the streets ensnare us, Our bodies are weak and worn; We plot and corrupt each other, And we despoil the unborn. (ECPT 17)

In the twelfth stanza, Emerson impersonates his friend Thomas Carlyle, he of “Might makes Right”21: He kills the cripple and the sick, And straight begins again. For gods delight in gods, And thrust the weak aside; To him who scorns their charities, Their arms fy open wide. (ECPT 19)

Having infused the republic with his world-soul, Emerson tacks on a precious ending – an old fragment he now sees how to repurpose22: Spring still makes spring in the mind        When sixty years are told; Love wakes anew this throbbing heart,        And we are never old; Over the winter glaciers        I see the summer glow, And through the wild-piled snow-drift         The warm rosebuds below. (ECPT 20)

Despite denying the premise of “the doctrine of poetry” in its frst line, this stanza still glowed for Emerson when he turned sixty-nine (J 10: 384n.). There is little relief from dictatorship in Emerson’s poetry. The rarest tone in his verse is the tone that neither disciplines nor sentences. He sounds it in some of the “rhythmical scraps” he left unpublished (W 9: 404): 69 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.006

Mark Scott I sat upon the ground I leaned against an ancient pine The pleasant breeze Shook the forest tops like waves of ocean I felt of the trunk the gentle motion (ECPT 364) In May the caterpillar weaves His shining tent in appletrees (PN 368) Music stoops To the parrot on his perch To the spider on his string (PN 370)

No imperatives, no doctrine, no inversion, no bardic manners:  Emerson could have written, and printed, more verses like these, but instead he wrote poetry as if he alone had things to say, need to say them, right to say them, and words to say them with – as if there were nothing else to say. “I admire answers to which no answer can be made,” he says in his journal.23 By his esoteric faith, out of his contradicted egotism, and in the King James terminations of his verbs, Emerson writes from a motive superior to the highest motive in the highest record known: If the Law should thee forget, More enamoured serve it yet: Though it hate thee, – suffer long, – Put the Spirit in the wrong, – That were a deed to sing in Eden (ECPT 373)

His verse is that ambivalent deed. In the second motto for his “History” essay in 1841, Emerson, as “History,” or as “the Soul” named in the frst motto, claims his ownership of the cosmos. It is a remarkably even expression of his “desire to . . . banish the Not Me & supply the Me”: I am owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year, Of Caesar’s hand, and Plato’s brain, Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakspeare’s strain. (ECPT 235–236)

Emperor, philosopher, savior, poet: a year earlier, in the Dial, in “Woodnotes I,” Emerson had elected Caesar as his poet-avatar. I don’t suppose any other poet has so emplaced him: When the pine tosses its cones To the song of its waterfall tones, Who speeds to the woodland walks? To birds and trees who talks? Caesar of his leafy Rome, There the poet is at home. (ECPT 35) 70 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.006

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Would a reader of that in 1840 or 2015 say that Emerson had a sense of humor? “Woodnotes I” sounds like parody. Emerson’s couplets are more like John Skelton’s and Samuel Butler’s than like Pope’s. One reason for that is his shorter line; another may be his “perfect conviction” in “the substantial truth of the doctrines” he preaches.24 “Woodnotes I” and “Woodnotes II,” like Nature, rest on two of Emerson’s facts: that “few adult persons can see nature” and that “all sensible men have a hankering to play Providence” (E 10; JMN 9: 379). Emerson can see nature, and he is a sensible man. In the last section of “Woodnotes I,” “Caesar of his leafy Rome” is             the heart of all the scene; On him the sun looked more serene (ECPT 38)

Not “On me the sun looked more serene”: Emerson has translated I, my, mine, and me by “the,” “he,” “his,” “him,” and “it” as unobtrusively as Virgil translates “dico” by “cano” in the frst line of the Aeneid, so that the man telling of arms and the man can be the poet singing of them. Lover of all things alive, Wonderer at all he meets, Wonderer chiefy at himself, Who can tell him what he is? Or how meet in human elf Coming and past eternities? (W 9: 44)

Take that metaleptic evasion from Emerson, and his rabid egotism flls the page. Put “I” for “he,” and he almost emulates Whitman: Wonderer at all I meet, wonderer chiefy at myself, Who can tell me what I am?

This is better than Emerson’s original in one sense and as bad in another, and I’ve only made it vulgarly self-reliant (JMN 10: 25). Had Emerson not lexically disappeared himself from most his verse (only three of sixty-seven Selected Poems begin with his “I”), Whitman might not have seemed as unprecedented. But given Emerson’s 200-year patrimony in divinity, his early occupations as teacher and minister, his enthusiasm for “law & prophets,” his delight in eloquence, and his reverence for the “genius and offce” of Milton,25 Emerson’s hortatory and didactic versifying is his habitual verbal behavior (ECPT 555). Popular wisdom accurately called him “the Concord Sage,” not “the Concord Poet.” “It is a delicate matter,” Emerson told himself in 1840, “this offering to stand deputy for the human race, & writing all one’s secret history colossally out as philosophy. Very agreeable is it in those who succeed: tedious in all others” (JMN 7:  387).26 Emerson deputes for us in “Alphonso of 71 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.006

Mark Scott

Castile.” As “a king” who “can feel” for “kings,” he addresses his only peers, “the gods”: Earth, crowded, cries, “Too many men!” My counsel is, kill nine in ten, And bestow the shares of all On the remnant decimal. (ECPT 20, 22)

“Alphonso of Castile” is high-spirited satire of utopian reformers; Emerson was not humorless. But it is also cousin to his imperative deliveries of counsels of perfection in “The World-Soul,” “Monadnoc,” and “Earth-Song” (ECPT 28–29) – and in the opening of his essay on “Fate,” where, backed by “the Hindoo,” “our Calvinists,” and “the Greek Tragedy,” Emerson proves that he, like “Nature,” “is no sentimentalist” (E 945–946). These nineteen sentences of “Fate” are better than most of the verse Emerson wrote. They alone justify the almost exclusive attention given to his prose by his staunchest advocates and critics in the last 150 years.27 But Emerson in the 1860 prose of “Fate” is no different from Emerson in the 1847 poetry of “Berrying.” A casual “Sursum Corda,” “Berrying” riddles at whim with the Calvinist doctrine of election: “May be true what I had heard, – Earth’s a howling wilderness, Truculent with fraud and force,” Said I, strolling through the pastures, And along the river-side. Caught among the blackberry vines, Feeding on the Ethiops sweet, Pleasant fancies overtook me. I said, “What infuence me preferred, Elect, to dreams thus beautiful?” The vines replied, “And didst thou deem No wisdom from our berries went?” (W 9: 41)

Here, the two interrogatives assume and affrm, rather than question, Emerson’s certainty that he is a locus of infuence, preference, election. The “what” is immaterial to him: he is squared away, as the Marines say. The vine of his salvation is “wisdom,” not Jesus (John 15:1). His tone is as relaxed as his syntax is fastidious, and the insouciance of “May be true” is a feat. The poem’s last word, which he gives to the blackberry vines, approves the presumption of its knower: “ ‘And didst thou deem / No wisdom from our berries went?’ ” Hardly. The blessed son of heaven is not going to prove a micher because he eats blackberries. Nor will he give reasons to any man, not on compulsion, not even if reasons were as plentiful as blackberries. 72 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.006

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson caught the attitude of “Berrying” in a journal entry of 1846: “A pilgrim wandering in search of a man. This too will plainly be a looking-glass business. Like to like, or, as I wrote in New York, – I met no gods, – I harbored none” (JMN 9, 206; PN 65–66).28 Emerson meets only gods in his verse because he harbors only gods in his thinking. He knew another way to write verse, just as he knew another way to meet people, but he wanted an absolute register. His verse is a defance, a dare, as “Give All to Love” is. He harries and badgers us, his hostile witnesses. He will hear none of our testimony, but “gives,” for us, his “sentiment divine / Against the being of a line” (“Uriel”). He is sure that we would give the same testimony if we were “in the same truth with” him (E 273). But we are not. There is no “You come too” in Emerson’s poetry, as there is, occasionally, in Frost’s. Nor does Emerson think in his poems, as Wallace Stevens does in his. Emerson has done his thinking; now he digests the statutes: I know, I see, I say. He runs his PowerPoint slides, at speed. “Every thing is convertible into every other. This is like that. The staff in my hand is the radius vector of the sun. The chemistry of this is the chemistry of that.”29 (LL 1: 301). “Woodnotes II” ends with one of his best presentations. The subject, as always, is Emerson, and the patter is the more personal for being in the third person. It is almost a Cole Porter lyric: He is the essence that inquires. He is the axis of the star; He is the sparkle of the spar; He is the heart of every creature; He is the meaning of each feature; And his mind is the sky. Than all it holds more deep, more high. (ECPT 49)

Here, clearly, “the doctrine of poetry” is reversing “the common sense,” and we can see what Emerson meant, in his 1841 essay on “Walter Savage Landor,” when he wrote: “Literature is the attempt of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition” (CW 10: 142). The primal eldest wrong of Emerson’s condition was that he had been born here. In 1824, when he was twenty-one, he set himself against the “proud world” in “Good-Bye” – or, with a pride as massive, he “equalized” himself with it (J 2: 138): Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home: Thou art not my friend, and I’m not thine. (ECPT 30)

Balance is kept in that second line. “Balances are kept,” he declares in “Fate”: that sentence, in its agentless, passive, warrantless certainty, is the ideal Emerson utterance (W 6: 37). Ideal, in that the man who writes it, the 73 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.006

Mark Scott

“biographical Ego” at his round desk in Concord, on May Day 1838, was actually a “tender,” expressive, impressible “sufferer,” who was once again getting his revenge for being that: The advantage of the Napoleon temperament, impassive, unimpressible by others, is a signal convenience over this tender one which every aunt & schoolgirl can daunt & tether. This weakness be sure is merely cutaneous, & the sufferer gets his revenge by the sharpened observation that belongs to such sympathetic fbre. As even in college I was already content to be “screwed” in the recitation room, if, on my return, I could accurately paint the fact in my youthful Journal. (EHJ 186)

Fortunately, writing is the weakest form of revenge. But at least it is that. N OT E S 1 In The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. IX: Poems: A Variorum Edition, eds. Albert J von Frank and Thomas Wortham (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011):  7:  111. Cited hereafter as CW 9. 2 Ralph Waldo Emerson: Collected Poems and Translations, eds. Harold Bloom and Paul Kane (New  York:  Library of America, 1994):  553. Cited hereafter as ECPT. 3 The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols., eds. William Gillman, Ralph H. Orth, et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982): 2: 373. Cited hereafter as JMN. 4 The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12  vols., ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston and New York: Houghton Miffin, 1903–1904): 8: 31. Cited hereafter as W. 5 The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols., eds. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (Boston and New  York:  Houghton Miffin, 1910–1914): 4: 425. Cited hereafter as J. 6 “[Milton] sought absolute truth, not accommodating truth. His opinions on all subjects are formed for man as he ought to be, for a nation of Miltons,” Emerson writes in his 1838 essay, “Milton” (W 12: 272). 7 William Ellery Channing, Thoreau:  The Poet-Naturalist (Boston:  Roberts Brothers, 1873): 129. 8 The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843–1871, 2 vols., eds. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001): 1: 304, 297. Cited hereafter as LL. 9 “Monadnoc,” lines 319–357 (W 9:  71–72). This is the best long passage in Emerson’s verse. 10 Published in Selected Poems in 1876, “The Harp,” save for a few added lines, is only a reprinted section of “May-Day,” Emerson’s longest poem, published in 1867. 11 Joel Benton, Emerson as Poet (New  York:  M. F.  Mansfeld, 1883):  54–55. Matthew Arnold delivered an address on Emerson in October 1883, and Benton responds to it in his book. Arnold’s lecture is reprinted in David LaRocca, 74 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.006

Ralph Waldo Emerson

12 13

14

15

16

17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26

27

Estimating Emerson:  An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013): 198–211. Cited hereafter as ESTE. “Longanimity” is a word Emerson took from Bacon. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. G. W. Kitchin (London: J. M. Dent, 1973): 169. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols., eds. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939–1995): 3: 356. Cited hereafter as L. Emerson asks the rhetorical question “and what limit is there to hope?” in a letter to his former congregation at Boston’s Second Church in 1832. The letter is printed in James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Miffin, 1895): 2: 686. Cited hereafter as Cabot. The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 3 vols., eds. Ralph H. Orth, et al. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1990–1994): 1: 49. Cited hereafter as TN. The other two phrases are in “Self-Reliance,” for which see W 2: 74, 53. I will also cite Emerson’s prose parenthetically as E, for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983). Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1990): 164. Emerson uses this word on several occasions. I refer here to its use in the manuscript poem beginning “Thus the high Muse treated me,” W 9: 324. It may also be found in The Poetry Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. Ralph H. Orth, Albert J. von Frank, Linda Allardt, and David W. Hill (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986): 587. Hereafter cited PN. The phrase is in English Traits, Ch. 18, “Results,” W 5: 303. From the essay “History”: “all public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized” (E 246). Emerson turns Carlyle’s maxim around in his late poem “Boston,” as if saying “right is might” made a better case. It does not, as J. M. Robertson points out in Modern Humanists (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1891): 19. PN 973. Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA, and London:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982): 447. Cited hereafter as EHJ. Cabot 2: 690. In Emerson’s 1838 essay on “Milton.” The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume X:  Uncollected Prose Writings, eds. Ronald A.  Bosco and Joel Myerson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013): 93. Cited hereafter as CW 10. Emerson’s offering was not very agreeable to Herman Melville, who wrote: “I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping faw. It was, the insinuation, that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.” Quoted in Emerson: A Modern Anthology, eds. Alfred Kazin and Daniel Aaron (Boston:  Houghton Miffin, 1958): 377–378. See the useful and fashionable anthology edited by David LaRocca, Estimating Emerson:  An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell (New  York:  Bloomsbury, 2013). From Carlyle to Cavell, Emerson’s verse is 75

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.006

Mark Scott treated, if it is, in dutiful digressions from the analysis of his prose. Cited hereafter as ESTE. 28 Emerson refers to a verse he wrote in 1842. See ECPT 374–375. 29 LL 1: 301.

F U RT H E R R E A DI N G Benton, Joel, Emerson as a Poet (New York: M. F. Mansfeld, 1883). Bowen, Francis, “Nine New Poets,” North American Review 64 (April 1847): 402–434. Chapman, John Jay, Emerson and Other Essays (New York: Scribners, 1898). Fiedler, Leslie A., “The Unbroken Tradition,” Waiting for the End (New York: Delta, 1964): 194–215. Firkins, O. W., Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1915). Kernahan, Coulson, “The Poet who was not a Poet,” Wise Men and a Fool (New York: Brentano’s, 1901): 225–264. LaRocca, David, ed., Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). Mott, Wesley T., ed., Ralph Waldo Emerson in Context (Cambridge,  Cambridge University Press, 2014). Santayana, George, “Emerson the Poet,” in Santayana on America, ed. Richard Colton Lyon (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968): 268–283. Thomas, Joseph M., “Poverty and Power:  Revisiting Emerson’s Poetics,” in Emerson Bicentennial Essays, eds. Conrad Wright and Joel Myerson (Charlottesville:  University Press of Virginia/Massachusetts Historical Society, 2006): 213–246. von Frank, Albert J., “Historical Introduction,” The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, volume IX: Poems: A Variorum Edition (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011): xxv–cii. Waggoner, Hyatt H., Emerson as Poet (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1974).

76 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.006

6 K E V I N J.   H AY E S

Edgar Allan Poe

Although Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) wrote some of the best-loved poems in American literature, his poetic career took some strange turns. It started conventionally enough. Reading Byron as a boy inspired him to write poetry. By the end of his teens, he had published his frst collection of verse. Two more collections quickly followed. When fnancial circumstances forced him to make a living with his pen, he turned from verse to fction and reviewing, both of which he mastered. During the last fve years of his life, he returned to poetry to create some of his most memorable works. Complicating his career further are the circumstances of his birth and upbringing. Born in Boston, Poe was abandoned by his father (the actor David Poe) in 1810. When his mother, Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, died a year later, the boy was taken in hand by a wealthy Virginia merchant, John Allan, who lived in Richmond, Virginia, where, now called Edgar Allan Poe, the poet, though never legally adopted, began his life anew. The young boy traveled with the Allan family to Scotland and England, where he received some measure of formal education, before returning with his foster family to Richmond in 1820. Allan’s wealth grew by inheritance when his uncle died in 1825, a year before Poe entered the then-newly opened University of Virginia. He left after a year, at odds with his foster father, and sought to make a living in his native Boston. Poe’s frst book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was issued in Boston in an edition of perhaps ffty copies.1 Signed not “Edgar Allan Poe” but “By a Bostonian,” the book is built around its four-hundred-line title poem, “Tamerlane.” The poem’s eponymous hero bears little resemblance to the fourteenth-century ruler of Samarkand, however. Incongruously offering his personal story to a Catholic priest, Tamerlane explains how he recognized his genius for leadership but fell in love, and how he left his lover in order to pursue conquest – all the while fully intending to return and make her his queen. After conquering much of the world, he came home to fnd her dead; the price he paid for his empire was a broken heart. Reduced to plot 77 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.007

Kevin J. Hayes

summary, “Tamerlane” seems hackneyed. What makes it memorable is the nostalgia for lost youth that Tamerlane articulates: ’Tis thus when the lovely summer sun Of our boyhood, his course hath run: For all we live to know – is known; And all we seek to keep – hath fown.2

In childhood our imaginations are alive. As adults we enter a more “rational” world. We gain knowledge yet lose our sense of wonder. This clash between the rational and the imaginative, and the feelings of melancholy it provokes, would pervade Poe’s subsequent writings. Tamerlane and Other Poems ends with “The Lake.” Expressing a similar sense of nostalgia, the speaker recalls a remote place he visited in his youth. The wilderness setting would seem to align this work with numerous other nature poems in American literature. Whereas the poetry of William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman appreciates nature as a source of beauty and inspiration – or as the “symbol of spirit,” as Emerson famously put it in Nature (1836) – “The Lake” creates a sense of ominous terror.3 After depicting the lake in daylight, the speaker describes how it changed once night cast a pall over it: And the wind would pass me by In its stilly melody, My infant spirit would awake To the terror of the lone lake. (lines 9–12)

The speaker attempts to defne that terror, which was not fright, “But a tremulous delight, / And a feeling undefn’d, / Springing from a darken’d mind” (lines 14–16). By its end, “The Lake” shifts its point of view from frst to third person. Provocatively, the speaker’s youthful self becomes someone else, someone “Whose wild’ring thought could even make / An Eden of that dim lake” (lines 20–21). Even as it forms a ftting conclusion to Tamerlane and Other Poems, “The Lake” looks forward to Poe’s subsequent work. As Richard Wilbur has observed, “This lake anticipates all the gulfs, tarns and whirlpools through which Poe’s dreaming heroes plunge into eternity.”4 As I’ve indicated, Poe published Tamerlane and Other Poems in Boston, then the literary center of America, but it attracted little attention. Desperate, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, which offered an outlet for his ambitions – at least until he reached the highest enlisted rank, Sergeant Major for Artillery, when he grew restless. To advance his career and move beyond the enlisted ranks, Poe sought an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he could complete the college education his foster father John 78 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.007

Edgar Allan Poe

Allan had denied him at the University of Virginia. As an offcer, Poe would also have an opportunity to attain military glory. What’s more, he looked ahead to his eventual retirement from the service. Assuming he would be heir to Allan’s considerable fortune, the Boston-born Poe imagined himself as a paragon of Southern gentility, the kind of man who goes by the title “Colonel,” writes poetry, ages gracefully, and enjoys the fner things in life. Once discharged, Poe moved to Baltimore, where he published Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Other Poems (1829), a work that reveals his organic concept of a “collection.” Tamerlane and Other Poems had represented his accomplishments as a poet down through 1827. The new volume refected the current state of his poetry. It presents what he had written in the past and what he had written most recently. It shows where he is and where he had been. “Al Aaraaf” presents an ideal world inhabited by angels and enlightened human souls who mediate between heaven and the rest of the universe, conveying an awareness of beauty to others and bringing them closer to God. A deliberately diffcult poem, “Al Aaraaf” is not entirely successful. Its encyclopedic nature refects the circumstances of its composition. Before writing “Al Aaraaf,” Poe began keeping a commonplace book, which he mined for the poem. The process gives the work a miscellaneous quality. Regardless of its somewhat disjointed nature, the poem’s conception of an ideal world where an aesthetic philosophy triumphs over base concerns is magnifcent. “Tamerlane” follows “Al Aaraaf,” and several shorter poems – some new, others revised from the earlier volume – end the collection. “The Lake – to – ,” for example, is a revision of “The Lake.” Poe’s textual changes show his increasing mastery of language and his shift toward vivid, concrete imagery. The wind now looks and sounds more sinister, more foreboding: “And the black wind murmur’d by / In a dirge of melody” (lines 9–10). The feeling Poe described earlier as “undefn’d, / Springing from a darken’d mind” he made more specifc. Now it is a “feeling not the jewell’d mine / Should ever bribe me to defne / Nor Love – altho’ the Love be thine” (lines 15–17). The revision emphasizes the irrational delight of a terrifying experience. If the speaker would consider the experience further, he could describe it rationally, but this he refuses to do. For neither love nor money will he destroy his imagination by rationalizing it. Poe’s careful revisions were lost on contemporary readers. He gave away some copies of the book but sold few.5 Once at West Point, in 1830, Poe endeared himself to fellow cadets by writing satirical verse about their instructors. When he proposed a published collection of poems, the cadets readily subscribed. After his dismissal from West Point  – the poet deliberately maneuvered himself into being charged with disobedience – he went to New York to oversee the volume’s 79 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.007

Kevin J. Hayes

publication. Poems: Second Edition (1831) adds a further nuance to Poe’s concept of a collection. Far from offering the totality of an author’s output, it presents only those works he selects to represent himself to readers. Poe was happy to appear as a satirical poet among cadets. But to the larger reading public he wanted to be seen as an author of serious, important verse. He clearly distinguished between those poems written as social capital and those written to last.6 Designating the 1831 collection the second edition of Poems, Poe reinforced its seemingly organic quality, implying that his collected verse was something that gradually developed over time. Walt Whitman would adopt a similar procedure as he published ever-longer (and amended) versions of Leaves of Grass. Technically, the 1831 Poems was the third edition of Poe’s verse. His designation of the book as the “second edition” was a marketing ploy. Calling Poems the “third edition” might have seemed presumptuous: the phrase “second edition,” struck the right note. Poems: Second Edition opens with “Letter to Mr – ” (signed “West Point, 1831”), in which Poe frst outlines his aesthetic theory. A seminal document in the critical history of American verse, this manifesto (also known simply as “Letter to B – ”) dares to challenge the didactic function of verse: A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object an indefnite instead of a defnite pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance presenting perceptible images with defnite, poetry with indefnite, sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefnite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very defnitiveness.7

The collection includes some fne new lyric poems, which exemplify the claims here made: “To Helen,” “Irene,” “Israfel,” and “The City in the Sea.” Poe omitted some minor works from the previous collections, and in the “Letter” he explains why: Believing only a portion of my former volume to be worthy a second edition – that small portion I  thought it as well to include in the present book as to republish by itself. I have, therefore, herein combined Al Aaraaf and Tamerlane with other Poems hitherto unprinted. Nor have I hesitated to insert from the “Minor Poems,” now omitted, whole lines, and even passages, to the end that being placed in a fairer light, and the trash shaken from them in which they were imbedded, they may have some chance of being seen by posterity.8

“The Lake,” for instance, disappears as a separate poem but reappears embedded in “Tamerlane.” In short, preparing Poems for publication, Poe 80 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.007

Edgar Allan Poe

saw his work as a matter of consolidation, taking the best lines from his minor poems and integrating them within his lengthier works. Of the new poems, “To Helen” is arguably the fnest, but the 1831 version differs from the one that readers have come to know and love. The speaker explains that Helen has brought him home “To the beauty of fair Greece, / And the grandeur of old Rome.” Poe revised and republished “To Helen” several times. In 1843, these lines reached their fnal form: Helen brings the speaker home “To the glory that was Greece, / And the grandeur that was Rome” (lines 9–10). The changes demonstrate Poe’s meticulous craftsmanship, his willingness to revise and refne his verse until he arrived at what he regarded as the best combination of word and sound. Poe turned to fction the year Poems: Second Edition appeared. Though he longed for recognition as a poet, personal poverty and the demands of the literary marketplace forced him to try his hand at writing short stories. In the early 1830s, several magazines sponsored literary contests. Those that offered premiums for different genres of literature typically valued fction more than verse. To make a living as a writer, Poe perforce started writing prose. He did so with extraordinary results. He revolutionized the genre of the tale by bringing a poet’s sensibility to the writing of prose. The aesthetic principles that informed his poems he now applied to his short stories. In chapter one of the Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge reports that, at Christ’s Hospital School, his “sensible” if “severe” headmaster had shown him how, “in the truly great poets,” there is “a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word.”9 Poe applied this dictate to fction as well as to poetry, as, for the next decade and a half, tales dominated his imaginative writings, and as his verse took a back seat. And yet some of his best poems occur within his short stories. “To One in Paradise” appears in “The Visionary,” a romantic tale in which two lovers make a suicide pact in order to unite their souls in a greater love after death. Though inspired by an episode from Thomas Moore’s biography of Lord Byron, “To One in Paradise” echoes Percy Bysshe Shelley in terms of imagery and diction.10 The title character of “Ligeia” writes “The Conqueror Worm.” And “The Haunted Palace,” which forms part of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” presents a microcosm of the story. Sung by Roderick Usher, “The Haunted Palace” offers a metaphor of the mind, indicating Usher’s awareness that he is going mad. “The Conqueror Worm” is one of Poe’s most disturbing poems. The attitude toward death it articulates is bleak. Not only does it deny any sort of Christian life-after-death, but it also prevents death from liberating us during our lives.11 When “Ligeia” appeared in 1838, “The Conqueror Worm” was not part of the story. Poe had not even written the poem yet. He did not fnish it until 1843, when he published the poem as a stand-alone work in 81 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.007

Kevin J. Hayes

Graham’s Magazine. Not until 1845 did he make it part of “Ligeia,” when he reprinted the tale in The New  York World. The poem  – an appalling memento mori, built on the familiar metaphor of life as a play and the world as its stage  – brings vividly into view what William Empson once called, speaking of the Elizabethan imagination, “the miraculous corpse worm.”12 Some maintain that the poem doesn’t suit the short story. Earlier versions of the tale, those without the poem, depict Ligeia as more strong-willed and self-assured than she seems in later versions. Introducing the poem as her composition – “At high noon of the night in which she departed, beckoning me, peremptorily, to her side,” says the narrator, Ligeia “bade me repeat certain verses composed by herself not many days before” – Poe recasts his heroine, this time into a state of doubt: Lo! ’t is a gala night    Within the lonesome latter years! An angel throng, bewinged, bedight     In veils, and drowned in tears, Sit in a theatre, to see    A play of hopes and fears, While the orchestra breathes ftfully    The music of the spheres. . . . But see, amid the mimic rout,    A crawling shape intrude! A blood-red thing that writhes from out    The scenic solitude! It writhes! – it writhes! – with mortal pangs    The mimes become its food, And seraphs sob at vermin fangs    In human gore imbued. Out – out are the lights – out all!    And, over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall,    Comes down with the rush of a storm, While the angels, all pallid and wan,    Uprising, unveiling, affrm That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”    And its hero, the Conqueror Worm. “O God!” half shrieked Ligeia, leaping to her feet and extending her arms aloft with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of these lines – “O God! O Divine Father! – shall these things be undeviatingly so? – shall this Conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in Thee? Who  – who 82 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.007

Edgar Allan Poe knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor? Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.”

The poem’s gruesome depiction of its all-conquering “worm” undermines the confdence she has in her ability to overcome death by an exertion of the will. Even if the poem does not ideally suit the tale, the presence of “The Conqueror Worm” in “Ligeia” indicates how important fction had become for Poe. Much as he embedded “The Lake” within “Tamerlane” in 1831 as an attempt to rescue that poem from obscurity, he placed “The Conqueror Worm” in “Ligeia” to give it “some chance of being seen by posterity.” Poe understood that “Ligeia,” which he considered his best story, had a lasting power that could help preserve and perpetuate the poem. From the early 1830s to the mid 1840s, short fction remained Poe’s preferred form of literary expression, but he made a triumphant return to verse with the publication of “The Raven” in January 1845. Its striking trochaic octameter lines (save for the trochaic tetrameter of the changeable refrain), its pronounced use of repetition and internal rhyme – which latter aspects of the poem Padraic Colum attributed to the infuence of Irish poet James Mangan13 – all but ensured that “The Raven” would capture the popular imagination. It was reprinted in numerous magazines and newspapers nationwide, memorized by countless readers, and parodied by many wits, wags, and poetasters. “The Raven” also caught the attention of Evert Duyckinck, who edited the prestigious Library of American Books for Wiley and Putnam. Duyckinck soon asked Poe to contribute a collection of verse to the series. The Raven and Other Poems appeared that September. This volume includes most of the poems from Poe’s earlier collections as well as those few he had written since. It further contributed to the popularity of “The Raven” and continued to fuel Poe’s literary reputation. Some people even started calling him “Raven.”14 The poem also prompted Poe to write “The Philosophy of Composition,” an essay in which he detailed his creative process, using “The Raven” as his example. This essay contains Poe’s famous pronouncement that the death of a beautiful woman is “the most poetical topic in the world” and that “the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”15 In this essay he even established an ideal length for a successful poem: about one hundred lines. This length-requirement essentially deems both “Tamerlane” and “Al Aaraaf” unsuccessful. If a poem be too long, Poe now contended, it cannot hold the reader’s complete attention. While the length Poe stipulated excludes some of the great poems in the Western literary tradition, it 83 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.007

Kevin J. Hayes

was not unprecedented. As Owen Aldridge has observed, Poe’s aesthetic of length aligns his poetry with much Oriental verse.16 “Ulalume” (1847) follows “The Raven” in terms of both its subject and its narrative voice – a bereaved lover relating the death of a beautiful woman – but it differs in other respects. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe says he frst intended to set “The Raven” outdoors but concluded that “a close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident: it has the force of a frame to a picture.”17 With “Ulalume,” Poe challenged himself to write a poem set in forest and feld, achieving a circumscription of space through the use of an overarching canopy of tree branches. “Ulalume” implies that “The Philosophy of Composition” must be read as both a statement of poetic principles and an author’s challenge to surpass his own personal standards.18 “Ulalume” takes place exactly one year after its speaker has buried his lover. Poe portrays the speaker’s soul as something external to him, a winged companion, aptly named Psyche (whose Greek root means “soul” or “spirit”). The bifurcation of the narrator’s body and soul indicates how grief has fractured his mental and physical state. The action of the poem takes place on Halloween, when spirits of the dead are free to roam the earth, reinforcing the contrast between matter and spirit. Only with the appearance of a rising crescent, which has been alternately interpreted as the moon or Venus, does he become cognizant of something external to him. Interpreting this heavenly body as Astarte, the Phoenician goddess of fertility, he indicates that his understanding of the external world is still highly subjective. Over the next three stanzas, he argues with Psyche about whether or not they should approach Astarte, he taking the affrmative and she the negative. A cross between a political debate and a lover’s quarrel, the argument continues the external/internal dichotomy as it juxtaposes public and private modes of discourse.19 It ends with the speaker of the poem prevailing over Psyche. The two proceed to fnd themselves at the tomb of Ulalume. Only then do they realize together where they are and what night it is. “Ulalume” may be the greatest Halloween poem ever written. “Annabel Lee,” which also takes for its subject the death of a beautiful woman, forms a triptych with “The Raven” and “Ulalume.” Each represents a different phase of grief. As “The Raven” ends, the bird’s shadow eclipses the soul of the bereaved narrator, which seems as if forever obscured. In “Ulalume,” the bereaved lover has had one year to reconcile himself to the death of his lover. The time is inadequate, but the action of the poem, a physical journey through the natural world, suggests the process of grief is progressing. “Annabel Lee” takes place many years after the bereaved narrator has lost his lover. Though he thinks of her every night, he has achieved 84 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.007

Edgar Allan Poe

some peace. He realizes that death cannot end their love. Whereas dark imagery dominates the fnal stanza of “The Raven,” light imagery prevails in the fnal stanza of “Annabel Lee”: For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee . . .

Edgar Allan Poe’s contribution to the history of American poetry goes beyond the verse he wrote. He was also an excellent literary critic. In addition to “The Letter to B – ” and “The Philosophy of Composition,” he wrote several long and insightful reviews of contemporary poets: Bryant, Joseph Rodman Drake, Fitz-Greene Halleck, and Longfellow (among others). Poe could be petty, as he is in some of his discussions of Longfellow, but, at his best, his criticism is perceptive and inspiring. His “Drake-Halleck Review,” for example, transcends the trivialities of the poets under review to become an eloquent statement on the purpose of poetry. Late in life Poe wrote two major theoretical essays, “The Rationale of Verse” (1848) and “The Poetic Principle,” published posthumously in 1850. Together these two essays summarize Poe’s thoughts about what makes a good poem. It was the Roman poet Horace who originally said that the purpose of poetry is to delight and instruct. Once established, this literary paradigm held sway in Western culture for nearly two thousand years – that is, until Edgar Allan Poe came along. Early on, in his “Letter to B – ,” Poe emphasized that poetry must delight but need not instruct. Later in the nineteenth century, this concept would become formalized in the doctrine of “art for art’s sake.” In his critical writings, Poe does not use this exact phrase. But in an 1844 critical review, and again in “The Poetic Principle,” he speaks instead of a “poem written solely for the poem’s sake.”20 To create a sense of poetic delight for his readers, Poe used as many poetic devices as he could – alliteration, cadence, fgurative language, meter, repetition, rhyme. He sought to immerse his readers in a world of sound and image, meaning and melancholy, to give them an aesthetic experience that would last a lifetime. N OT E S 1 The exact number is unknown. 2 Edgar Allan Poe, The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 3 vols., ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA:  Belknap Press, 1969–1978):  I:  39 (lines 384–387). All subsequent quotations of Poe’s verse are from this edition and are cited parenthetically by line number. 3 Daniel Hoffman, “Edgar Allan Poe,” in Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Eric L. Haralson (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998): 342. 85 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.007

Kevin J. Hayes 4 Richard Wilbur, “Edgar Allan Poe,” in Major Writers of America, ed. Perry Miller (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962): 383. 5 Kevin J. Hayes, Edgar Allan Poe (London: Reaktion, 2009): 49. 6 Kevin J. Hayes, Poe and the Printed Word (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2000): 24–25. 7 Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984): 11. 8 Poe, Collected Works: I: 156. 9 Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907): 4. 10 Wilbur, “Edgar Allan Poe”: 389. 11 Max O. Hallman, “Edwards and Heidegger on the Signifcance of Death,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 16 (1985): 305. 12 Empson, 7 Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1966): 26. 13 Padraic Colum, “Introduction” to Anthology of Irish Verse, ed. Padraic Colum (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922): 9. 14 Kevin J. Hayes, “A. J.  Duganne and E.  A. Poe,” Edgar Allan Poe Review 1 (2000): 80–81. 15 Poe, Essays: 19. 16 A. Owen Aldridge, The Reemergence of World Literature: A Study of Asia and the West (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986): 79. 17 Poe, Essays: 21. 18 Kevin J. Hayes, “Putting ‘Ulalume’ in Its Place,” in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 198. 19 Hayes, “Putting ‘Ulalume’ in Its Place”: 201. 20 Poe, Essays: 76, 295. F U RT H E R R E A DI NG Carlson, Eric W., ed., The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism since 1829 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966). Fisher, Benjamin Franklin, The Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Hayes, Kevin J., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). ed., Edgar Allan Poe in Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Poe and the Printed Word (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Edgar Allan Poe (London: Reaktion, 2009). Hoffman, Daniel, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Garden City: Doubleday, 1972). Parks, Edd Winfeld, Edgar Allan Poe as Literary Critic (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 1964). Thomas, Dwight, and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987). Walker, I. M., ed., Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge & K. Paul, 1986). Zimmerman, Brett, Edgar Allan Poe: Rhetoric and Style (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2005). 86 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.007

7 DAV I D S . R E Y NOL DS

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) changed the course of poetry. Generally recognized as the father of free verse, he liberated poetry from rhyme and meter, opening it up to the fexible rhythms of feeling and voice. Championing himself as the “bard” of American democracy, he represented in his writings the total range of experience. He was the frst poet to treat sex candidly and to explore same-sex love with subtlety. Among the other distinctive features of his poetry were his all-embracing persona, his imaginative vocabulary, and his sweeping catalogs, which juxtaposed crisp vignettes of people, places, and things. Few writers illuminate the miraculous nature of everyday life as powerfully as Whitman did. Whitman once said, “I stand for the sunny point of view  – stand for the joyful conclusions.”1 “Cheer!” he declared. “Is there anything better in this world anywhere than cheer – just cheer? Any religion better? – Any art? Just cheer!”2 Although his verse encompassed the dark features of experience – death, insanity, loneliness, and spiritual torment – it ultimately affrmed the delight and sanctity of life. Whitman had a messianic vision of himself as the quintessential democratic poet who could help cure the many ills of his materialistic, politically fractured society. Having absorbed America, he expected America to absorb him and to be mended in the process. He constantly brought attention to the historical origins of his writing. “In estimating my volumes,” he wrote, “the world’s current times, and deeds, and their spirit, must frst be profoundly estimated.”3 The poet fails, he stressed, “if he does not food himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides . . . if he be not himself the age transfgured.”4 Whitman’s writings were indeed “the age transfgured,” refecting virtually all aspects of nineteenth-century life. His personal background prepared him to be a uniquely democratic observer of his nation. Born near Huntington, Long Island, in 1819, he was the second of Walter and Louisa Whitman’s eight children (Walter and Louisa were both descendants of Long 87 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.008

David S. Reynolds

Island farmers). At three, Walt was taken to live in Brooklyn, a fast-growing town where he would live for several decades. After attending a district school there, Walt entered the workforce at age eleven to help support his fnancially pinched family. He worked successively as a lawyer’s assistant and a newspaper apprentice before becoming a roving teacher in one-room schoolhouses throughout Long Island. He returned to Brooklyn in the early 1840s and ferried constantly across the East River to New York. He worked as a journalist and sometime editor of various Brooklyn and New  York newspapers and in 1848 went south for a three-month stint writing for the New Orleans Daily Crescent. In his journalism he tested out most popular literary genres:  he wrote temperance fction, patriotic legends of the American Revolution, blood-curdling sensational tales and poems, religious and sentimental verse, and essays treating many aspects of American life. These early writings are not individually distinguished, but, taken together, they show him experimenting with a variety of themes he would later incorporate into his poetry. The early 1850s witnessed Whitman’s transformation from a derivative, conventional writer into a marvelously innovative poet. This change can be attributed in part to the infuence of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Whitman once recalled having carried in his lunch pail a volume of the philosopher’s essays. He paid homage to Emerson’s infuence when he told the author John Townsend Trowbridge, “I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.”5 The frst edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) is Emersonian in a number of ways. Emerson’s insistence on self-reliance and nonconformity is refected in Whitman’s cocksure persona, whose frst words are, “I celebrate myself.”6 Emerson’s belief in the miraculous beauty of even the most ordinary features of the natural world is echoed in Whitman’s paeans to grass spears, a mouse, a morning glory, to name some of the everyday wonders he mentions. Whitman’s free-fowing, proselike lines answered Emerson’s demand for relaxed, organic poetry. Whitman also fts Emerson’s description of the thoroughly democratic poet, as he surveys American life in its dazzling diversity. Small wonder that Emerson hailed Leaves of Grass as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed,” possessing “the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.”7 But Emerson is actually a small part of what lies behind Leaves of Grass, which Whitman expected to be a force for healing and reconciliation in a nation beset by what he saw as presidential incompetency, political corruption, and alarming sectional tensions. Whitman’s poetry emerged just when the nation was on the verge of unraveling due to the quarrel over slavery that led to the Civil War. The Long Island-born Whitman, formerly a political 88 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.008

Walt Whitman

journalist who had edited Brooklyn’s leading Democratic newspaper and had written conventional poetry and fction, was startled out of his complacency by the specter of impending disunion. By the early 1850s, no longer a party loyalist, he had come to believe that the nation was threatened on all sides by venality and moral fabbiness. Of President Franklin Pierce, the soft-spined chief executive who leaned to the South, Whitman wrote, “The President eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it, and tries to force it on The States.”8 Horrifed by escalating tensions between the North and the South in the wake of the infamous Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and the proslavery Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, he wrote, “We need satisifers, joiners, lovers. These heated, torn, distracted ages are to be compacted and made whole.”9 The nation’s merits and demerits, as he called them, must be transformed in the crucible of poetry. For Whitman, the times demanded a poet who could survey the entire cultural landscape and give expression to the full range of voices and images America had to offer. Among these cultural voices were strident ones of anger and protest. For a decade before the frst edition of Leaves of Grass appeared, reformers of various stripes had been agitating for radical social change. Whitman thought that he himself, above all, was the one chosen to agitate the country. He declared, “I think agitation is the most important factor of all – the most deeply important. To stir, to question, to suspect, to examine, to denounce!”10 Key lines in his poems echo this zestful tone. “Let others praise eminent men and hold up peace,” he writes. “I hold up agitation and confict.”11 Agitation for Whitman, however, didn’t mean joining a radical reform group intent on revolutionizing the social order. On the contrary, he viewed reformers as potentially dangerous disrupters of society. During the slavery crisis, he criticized radical Abolitionists and proslavery Southern fre-eaters, both of whom were calling for the immediate separation of the North and the South. Although he believed in the social advancement of women and befriended several women reformers, he took no part in the many women’s rights conventions that succeeded the historic one in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Likewise, even though his liberated attitude toward sex had much in common with that of the free-love advocates of his day, he had little tolerance for the free-love movement. Although he featured working-class types in his poetry, he did not accept working-class radical movements such as Fourierist socialism or, later on, communism and anarchism. When his leftist friend Horace Traubel hounded him on his political stance, he advised, “Be radical, be radical, be radical – be not too damned radical.”12 While advocating agitation, therefore, Whitman took care to avoid what he saw as extremism. After all, how could Whitman, devoted to the Union, 89 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.008

David S. Reynolds

identify with an abolitionist such as William Lloyd Garrison, who, in disgust over slavery, burned the Constitution in public and thundered, “Accursed be the AMERICAN UNION, as a stupendous republican imposture!”13 Or how could Whitman, an ardent advocate of the institution of marriage, go along with the free-lovers, who wanted to abolish conventional marriage because they regarded it as legalized prostitution? For all his adventurousness, he had an impulse to avoid extremes and steer a political middle course. It was perhaps for this reason that he shied away from homosexual activists, especially the British writer John Addington Symonds, who pressed him to make a clear declaration of his homosexuality. In the early 1870s, Symonds began barraging Whitman with questions on the matter. Whitman later recalled that these questions aroused in him, as he put it, a “violently reactionary response, strong and brutal for no, no, no.”14 When in 1890 Symonds asked directly whether the “Calamus” poems portrayed what was then called “sexual inversion,” Whitman angrily insisted that such “morbid inferences” were “damnable” and “disavow’d by me.”15 It could be, as some have claimed, that Whitman was simply lying. Most likely, though, his denial to Symonds was part of his lifelong impulse to defuse any controversial topic that could prove deleterious to his personal or social peace. He witnessed enough disruption among his family members – his father’s fnancial struggles, the pathetic retardation of his brother Eddy, the psychotic episodes of his sister Hannah, and the confrmed insanity of his brother Jesse, whom Walt had to commit to the Brooklyn Lunatic Asylum – to make him want, at all costs, to avoid further disorder in his private life. That’s why when he was in the throes of his stormy relationship with the Washington streetcar conductor Peter Doyle he warned himself to “Depress . . . this diseased, feverish, disproportionate adhesiveness” and cultivate “a superb calm character.”16 Hence also his idealized self-portrait in the 1855 preface as a poet who was “the equable man” who kept all things in balance.17 Whether he achieved such a balance in his private life may never be known to a certainty, but publicly he struck a balance even in his most apparently daring poetry about same-sex love. Although his homoerotic poems aroused the suspicions of individual activists, most of them European intellectuals like Symonds, from a more general, public standpoint Whitman usually succeeded in avoiding controversy in his poetic expressions of male desire. He lived in an America before the sexual categories “homo-,” “hetero-,” or “bi-” were even known. During Whitman’s life, deep affection between people of the same sex was unself-conscious, widespread, socially acceptable, and not associated with a sexual “type.” It often involved physical, though not typically genital, contact. The 90 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.008

Walt Whitman

words “comrade,” “lover,” and “friend” were regularly used interchangeably, as they are in Whitman’s poems. In that era, his poems of heterosexual passion – not only the overt “Children of Adam” poems but also even tame ones such as “The Dalliance of the Eagles” – were branded as obscene in conventional circles, while the ones dealing with comradeship and male love were not. When Leaves of Grass was banned in Boston in 1881, it was the hetero-erotic “Children of Adam” poems that were specifcally targeted by the moral police, not the “Calamus” ones, which today seem clearly homoerotic but which then were close enough to the cultural mainstream to avoid raising eyebrows. It is signifcant that Whitman’s poetic balancing act began in 1847, the year President James K.  Polk intensifed the war against Mexico in an effort to take over hundreds of millions of acres of land in what is now the American West. For antislavery Northerners such as Whitman, the Mexican War was part of an infamous plot by the South to claim new land for slavery. Whitman, a free soiler who had editorially opposed the extension of slavery in the Eagle, was prepared neither to go to jail for his beliefs nor to demand immediate disunion, as the Garrisonians were doing. Instead, his frst instinct was to write poetry in which the two sides of the slavery divide were held in friendly equilibrium. In his notebook he scribbled the frst known lines of the kind of free-fowing, prose-like verse that would become his stylistic signature: I am the poet of slaves, and of the masters of slaves [. . .] The I go with the slaves of the earth are mine and The equally with the masters are equally [illegible] And I will stand between the masters and the slaves, And I Entering into both, and so that both shall understand me alike.18

Whitman here invents a poetic “I” who can comfortably mediate between the political antagonists whose opposing claims threatened to divide the nation. He announced himself simultaneously as the poet of “slaves” and of “the masters of slaves,” one who was prepared to “go with” both “equally.” He was able through poetry to “stand between” and “enter into” both. Emerging directly out of the slavery crisis, Whitman’s poetic persona was constructed as an absorptive device that could imaginatively defuse acrimonious sectional quarrels, just as in his private life Whitman cultivated a “superb calm character” to meliorate his personal upheavals. 91 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.008

David S. Reynolds

When, in the early 1850s, his alarm over rising national tensions intensifed, the absorptive, equalizing power of his “I” grew exponentially. For him, the poet was no marginal artist distanced from the social events of the day but rather a vital social agent necessary for national healing and reconciliation. Indeed, he had visions of changing the world through inspired poetry whose pulsating rhythms, as scholars have shown, owed much to the King James version of the Bible. “Of all nations,” he wrote in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, the United States “most need poets.”19 Since political leaders were failing miserably to hold the nation together, poets alone held the key to social cohesion. “The Presidents,” he announced, “shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.” The poet, he explained, “is the arbiter of the diverse and he is the key. He is the equalizer of his age and land . . . he supplies what wants supplying and checks what wants checking.” What he supplied in Leaves of Grass was a profoundly democratic vision whereby all barriers – sectional, racial, religious, spatial, and sexual – were challenged in unprecedented ways. Theoretically, American democracy had itself abolished social barriers. By the 1850s, however, it was painfully clear that such barriers were on the verge of separating the nation. Whitman’s poetic persona, in contrast, affrmed complete equality. At a time when the North and the South were at each other’s throats, Whitman’s “I” proclaimed himself “A southerner soon as a northerner, / . . . At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine or the Texan ranch.”20 In an era when racial confict was exacerbated by the slavery debate and by surging immigration, he painted sympathetic portraits of Native Americans, recently arrived Europeans, and African Americans – even to the extent of identifying himself with a fugitive slave pursued by hounds and federal marshalls. During a period when class divisions were prompting American socialists to establish scores of classless communities throughout the country, he forged a poetic utopia in which the rich and the poor, the powerful and the marginal, coexisted in diversifed harmony. This thoroughly democratic “I” was, in the words of “Song of Myself,” Of every hue and trade and rank, of every caste and religion, Not merely of the New World but of Africa Europe of Asia . . . a wandering           savage, A farmer, mechanic, or artist . . . a gentleman, sailor, lover or quaker, A prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer physician or priest.

In his attempt to create all-unifying poetry, he drew from nearly every arena of cultural life. From Manhattan street life, he borrowed much from the real-life fgure of the “b’hoy,” street slang for “boy.” Whitman famously 92 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.008

Walt Whitman

described himself in a poem as “one of the roughs” and boasted that he was “Disorderly feshy and sensual . . . eating drinking and breeding.” In reality, he was few of these things: he was no breeder, for he almost certainly had no children; he was only a convivial drinker; and he was turbulent only on those rare occasions when his temper got the best of his generally calm demeanor. But the zestful characteristics he brags about in the poem were characteristic of the b’hoy, who was typically a butcher or other worker who spent afternoons running to fres, going on target excursions, or promenading on the Bowery with his g’hal. Whitman saw the b’hoy as a wonderfully fresh American type. In his notebook he praised “the splendid and rugged characters that are forming among these states, or have already formed, – in the cities, the fremen of Mannahatta, and the target excursionist, and Bowery Boy.”21 One of his goals as a poet was to capture the vitality and defance of the b’hoy. As he writes in “Song of Myself”: The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power, but in his own right, Wicked, rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear, Fond of his sweetheart, relishing well his steak, Unrequited love or a slight cutting him worse than a wound cuts, First-rate to ride, to fght, to hit the bull’s eye, to sail a skiff, to sing a song or play on the banjo, Preferring scars and the beard and faces pitted with smallpox over all latherers and those that keep out of the sun.22

Whitman’s whole persona in Leaves of Grass – wicked rather than conventionally virtuous, free, smart, prone to slang and vigorous outbursts  – refects the b’hoy culture. One early reviewer noted that his poems refected “the extravagance, coarseness, and general ‘loudness’ of the Bowery boys.”23 Another reviewer referred to him simply as “Walt Whitman the b’hoy poet,” and a third as “the ‘Bowery Bhoy’ in literature.”24 While integrating the idioms of common people, Whitman also absorbed images from popular performances they loved. If his poetry has an unprecedented intimacy, as though the poet were reaching right through the page, it was partly because, as a cultural ventriloquist, he was poetically enacting the kind of performances that he witnessed among American actors, singers, and orators. During this time what was called the American style of acting evolved. This style featured intense emotionalism and, above all, a dissolving of the boundary between the performer and the audience. Few crossed this boundary so notably as Junius Brutus Booth, Whitman’s favorite actor and the leading tragedian in antebellum America. Booth’s genius, Whitman said, “was to me one of the grandest revelations of my life, a 93 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.008

David S. Reynolds

lesson of artistic expression. He had much to do with shaping me in those early years.”25 So utter was Booth’s absorption in a role that he challenged the very boundaries between life and art. He could become so carried away as Othello trying to suffocate Desdemona with a pillow that he had to be pulled away by other actors for fear he would actually kill her. As the sword-wielding Richard he sometimes inficted real wounds and many times pursued the terrifed Richmond of the evening clear out of the theater onto the streets, where he had to be disarmed. As Whitman explained, “When he was in a passion, his face, neck, hands, would be suffused, his eye would be frightful  – his whole mien enough to scare audience, actors.”26 But these were the performances the American public loved, and for Whitman they were symbols of cultural togetherness. Whitman himself was a kind of spontaneous actor, spouting passages from Shakespeare on ferryboats or in New York omnibuses. For him, acting provided not just a link to the public but also a metaphor for fexible role-playing in his poetry. He pauses in a poem to boast of his role-playing ability: “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels . . . I myself become the wounded person.”27 In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” he says he has “Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress, / The same old role.”28 He drew other symbols of cultural togetherness from oratory and music. The period between Patrick Henry and Abraham Lincoln has been rightly called the Golden Age of Oratory, when orators strode the lecture platform with an air of greatness later lost. Given the high visibility of orators on the American scene, it is understandable that Whitman linked his poetry with oratory. As he said to a friend, “When I  was much younger  – even back before the Brooklyn days – I was to be an orator – to go about the country spouting my pieces, proclaiming my faith.”29 Even in the 1850s, after his best poetry was written, he said his main goal was to be “a public Speaker, teacher, or lecturer,” trying “always to hold the ear of the people.”30 Although he was not vocally equipped to become a lecturer, he reproduced oratorical rhythms and infections in his poetry. The big innovation among orators of his day was a spontaneous, impromptu style featuring rhythmic cadences, personal addresses to a “you,” and constant interaction with often rambunctious audiences. Whitman witnessed this participatory style in performances of the temperance speaker John Gough, the Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher, the Whig politician Daniel Webster, and the feminists Abby Kelley and Lucretia Mott. For him, writing was closely allied to speaking. He would write down impressions in what he called “the gush, the food, the throb of the moment,” and then, as he put it, “I like to read them in a palpable voice: I try my poems that way – always have: read them aloud to myself.”31 Writing oratorical poetry was a culturally accepted mode of 94 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.008

Walt Whitman

making contact with the American public. If the performers and speakers he admired challenged the boundaries between themselves and their hearers, he tried to demolish such boundaries altogether. He coaxed, seduced, and embraced the reader. At moments he pretended he was an all-powerful orator, with total control over America: O the orators’ joys! To infate the chest, to roll the thunder of the voice out from the ribs and throat, To make people rage, weep, hate, desire, with yourself, To lead America – to quell America with a great tongue.32

In music, his interest similarly gravitated to performers who had vital connections with the popular audience. The Hutchinsons, the most popular family singing group of the day, marked the epitome of American singing for the poet who above all saw himself as the American singer. In a newspaper he wrote of the Hutchinsons, “Simple, fresh, and beautiful, we hope no spirit of imitation will ever induce them to graft any ‘foreign airs’ upon their ‘native graces.’ We want this sort of starting point from which to mould something new and true in American music.”33 His poetry in several ways imitated their singing. He loved what he called their “elegant simplicity in manner,” and he told himself to maintain in his poems “A perfectly transparent, plate-glassy style, artless.”34 They sang about common American experience and ordinary individuals – as he said, “they [were] democrats” of song, just as he wished to be the bard of democracy.35 They were the frst public fgures to literally “sing themselves.” In their signature song, “The Old Granite State,” well known to Whitman, they included all thirteen names of the members of their extended family. They made singing oneself a commonplace in the public arena. Whitman may have wanted to strike a responsive chord when he wrote, “I sing myself,” and when he brought his name into his poetry: “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos.”36 His populist leanings controlled even his response to that relatively elite form of music, the Italian opera. “But for the opera I could not have written Leaves of Grass,” he said.37 The opera star he singled out for special praise, the Italian contralto Marietta Alboni, was unique for him since she straddled elite and popular audiences. She was not only a superb performer but also a musical bridge between the social classes. “All persons appreciated Alboni,” Whitman declared, “the common crowd as well as the connoisseurs; for her the New York theaters were packed full of New York young men, mechanics, ‘roughs,’ etc., entirely oblivious of all except Alboni.”38 Whitman heard every one of her Manhattan concerts during her 1852 tour, and he tried to reproduce the feeling she inspired in several poetic lines: “I hear the trained soprano (what work with hers is this?) / She wrenches such ardors from me 95 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.008

David S. Reynolds

I did not know I possess’d them.”39 Alboni was the only singer ever mentioned by name in his poetry: “The teeming lady comes, / The lustrous orb, Venus contralto, the blooming mother, / sister of the loftiest gods, Alboni’s self I hear.” Whitman’s search for culturally unifying images sent him also to science, pseudoscience, and the visual arts. From the pseudoscience of animal magnetism he borrowed the vocabulary of electricity. A  popular animal magnetist such as John Bovee Dods could write that “electricity, as a universal agent, pervades the entire atmosphere,” controlling the body and nature and linking people to God. Whitman put a poetic spin on the idea: “I sing the body electric, / The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, / They will not let go of me till I respond to them, / And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.”40 From another pseudoscience, spiritualism, he derived a kind of mysticism, affliating him with the spiritual world and liberating him from conventional restraints of time and space. He included the spiritualist as among “the lawgivers” of poets and often used spiritualist images, as in these lines: “O! mediums! O to teach! O to convey the invisible faith!” or “Something unproved! something in a trance!”41 If spiritualism led him toward the heavens, photography and genre painting led him in a different direction: toward the accurate depiction of everyday reality. “In these Leaves [of Grass],” he declared, “every thing is literally photographed. Nothing is poeticized.”42 His radically egalitarian poetics, by which common people and events are pictured without embellishment, as in his seemingly endless catalogs, was reinforced also by the genre painting of the day, especially that of his fellow Long Islander William Sidney Mount. Just as Mount liked to capture workers in moments of recreation or ease, so Whitman chants of lazily contemplating the grass or of common workers singing songs. Just as Mount represented the activity and movement of common life, so Whitman captured varied subjects in the midst of everyday activities, relying heavily on active verbs or participles. When one commentator described Whitman’s poetic catalogs as “one line genre word paintings,” he doubtless had in mind the kind of lively, quotidian vignettes Mount popularized.43 Given their shared interests in the ordinary, it is understandable that when Mount wrote down in his notebook his plans for possible paintings he produced passages comparable in spirit to Whitman’s catalogs. Here is Mount: Two lovers walking out, Walking out after marriage, one after the other, after the manner of Judse and Sam [. . .] A Clergyman looking for a sermon at the bottom of his barrel. 96 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.008

Walt Whitman A Negro fddling on the crossroads on Sunday [. . .] Lovers economical eating ice cream out of one glass, aint you glad you have come. Only one shilling – the waiter grinning behind.44

Here is Whitman in a similar spirit: The one-year wife is recovering and happy having a week ago borne her frst child, The clean-hair’d Yankee girl works with her sewing machine or in the factory or mill, The paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer, the reporter’s lead fies swiftly over the notebook, the sign-painter is lettering with blue and gold.45

Whitman’s identifcation with his culture extended to the most apparently private area, sex. Many take Whitman as a sexual rebel whose poetry stood in opposition to an absurdly proper Victorian America. True, there was an ice cap of conventionality Whitman was trying to pierce. But there was a seamy underside to Whitman’s America. There was a thriving pornography trade that distressed him. In hundreds of pamphlet novels, which are today stashed in the depths of rare book rooms, popular writers such as George Thompson and Henri Foster dealt with all varieties of sex: incest, sadomasochism, child sex, and mass orgies. In this fction, sex was unconnected with love; violence, entrapment, and manipulation governed it. Whitman feared that such popular literature was contributing to what he regarded as America’s alarming moral decline. Shortly after Leaves of Grass frst appeared in 1855, he was walking around with a friend in Manhattan when he spotted a teenager selling pornographic books. “That’s a New York reptile,” he snarled. “There’s poison around his fangs, I think.”46 He once wrote in his notebook: “In the pleantiful [sic] feast of romance presented to us, all the novels, all the poems really dish up only one . . . plot, namely, a sickly, scrofulous, crude, amorousness.”47 This love plot, Whitman believed, was at the very root of the problem of popular culture, for it was full of unhealthy distortions. In a newspaper article he wrote: “Who will underrate the infuence of a loose popular literature in debauching the popular mind?”48 In opposition to this sensational popular literature, he wanted to treat sex as natural and genuine, free of hypocrisy and gamesmanship. To counteract what he saw as the corruptions and inhumanity of the love plot, Whitman borrowed sanitizing images from modern sciences, particularly physiology and phrenology. The 1840s and 1850s produced several books on human physiology that lent a new candor to the exploration of human sexuality. As editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle Whitman 97 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.008

David S. Reynolds

approvingly reviewed several physiological books, and in his poetry he tried to supplant what he saw as the grotesque distortions of the love plot with the frank freedoms of physiology. In the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass he denounced literature “which distorts honest shapes” and wrote: “Exaggerations will be revenged in human physiology.”49 The frst full passage on sex in “Song of Myself” shows him taking care to place his persona in the candid realm of physiology, distant from what he considered the nasty arena of sensational sex: Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man         hearty and clean, Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be          less familiar than the rest.50

His exploration of sexual organs and functions is always guided by his impulse to remove sex from the lurid indirections of the popular love plot. When in his poetry he sings praise to the naturalness of copulation, to jetting sperm or cohering wombs, or when he lovingly records the private parts of men and women, he displays his prevailing interest in ushering sex from the coarsely sensational to the honestly physiological. “Of physiology from top to toe I sing,” he wrote in the 1867 edition of Leaves.51 Of equal use to Whitman in combating the luridness of popular sensational fction was phrenology, the pseudoscience that attributed human impulses to distinct organs of the brain. Leading phrenological theorists, such as Whitman’s friends Orson and Lorenzo Fowler (whose publishing house distributed the frst edition of Leaves of Grass and published the second edition), had underscored the naturalness of sexuality when they had argued that the two most powerful brain organs were amativeness (sexual love between men and women) and adhesiveness (comradely affection between people of the same sex). For Whitman phrenology provided another means of dealing with sex with combined openness and tact. He wrote confdently: “I know that amativeness is just as divine as spirituality – and this which I  know I  put freely in my poems.”52 Elsewhere he wrote that the underlying qualities of his poetry were “a powerful sense of physical perfection, strength and beauty, with great amativeness, adhesiveness.” He justifed his most openly sexual poetry sequences, “Children of Adam” and “Calamus,” by specifying that the former was designed to illustrate “amativeness,” or heterosexual love, and that the latter focused on “adhesiveness,” or comradely fellowship.53 Since one of Whitman’s overriding goals was to absorb the shocking images of popular culture the better to purify them, he repeatedly used 98 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.008

Walt Whitman

what might be termed “cleansing rhetoric”  – that is, the yoking together of refreshing images of nature and of sex. Throughout his poetry Whitman adopts sexual images common in sensational literature and converts them into lovely metaphors for his aesthetic enjoyment of nature, as in lines such as “Press close barebosomed night!,” or “voluptuous coolbreathed earth,” or “the clasping and sweet-fesh’d day,” or “The souse of my lover the sea, as I lie willing and naked.”54 Into the vacuum created by the social and political crises rushed Whitman’s gargantuan poetic “I,” gathering images from every facet of American life in a hopeful gesture of unity. Faced by what he considered the disunity and fragmentation of American society, Whitman offered his 1855 poems as a gesture of healing and togetherness. When he had his thin, elegantly bound quarto of poems published in 1855, he hoped that it would be widely read as a model of cultural cohesion, beauty, and uplift  – “the new Bible,” he once called it.55 With wishful bravado, he concluded his 1855 preface, “The proof of the poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”56 Such absorption, however, was long in coming. Leaves of Grass, which had attempted to abolish all narrowness of vision, immediately became subject to narrow interpretations. A number of critics fxed on its sexual images, giving rise to a long debate between those who branded Whitman as obscene and those who insisted that he treated sex candidly and purely. Leading the defense was the fery reformer William Douglas O’Connor, who brilliantly nicknamed Whitman “the Good Gray Poet,” a sobriquet that did much to defuse opponents and emphasize the poet’s benign, avuncular qualities. But the “Good Gray” image itself proved confning, as Whitman increasingly turned away from daringly experimental themes toward more conventional ones. He thought the Civil War  – which he witnessed frsthand as a volunteer war nurse in Washington, D.C., hospitals  – accomplished for the nation what he had hoped his poetry would: it swept away many social ills and brought to power Abraham Lincoln, the homespun “captain” who possessed many of the egalitarian qualities Whitman had formerly assigned to his poetic “I.” In Lincoln’s life and especially in his tragic death, Whitman thought, America had been rescued, because it at last had a martyr the whole country could worship without shame. Lincoln was fgured as the sunken western star – its beauty intertwined with that of lilacs and a bird’s song – in Whitman’s evocative poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” which Swinburne called “the sweetest and most sonorous dirge ever chanted in the church of the world.”57 Whitman devoted much of the last three decades of his life to eulogizing Lincoln and the war, 99 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.008

David S. Reynolds

repeatedly giving his lecture “The Death of Abraham Lincoln” and reading his uncharacteristically jingly poem “O Captain! My Captain” before reverent audiences. After the war, confused by the complex social realities of Reconstruction, Whitman retreated to a moderate stance on issues such as race and class. Radical activists  – free-lovers, feminists, communists, and religious iconoclasts – continued to fock to him, deploying progressive passages from his early poems to promote their individual causes. But he maintained a genial distance, insisting that his work could be understood only in its relation to the totality of American culture. In the postwar decades, Whitman had a series of strokes that fnally left him an invalid, but his fame grew steadily. Perceptive readers such as Emerson, Swinburne, Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, and others recognized the power of his verse. Despite this growing appreciation of his poetry, however, Whitman thought considerable time would pass before his poems were understood or accepted in the way he envisaged. In “Long, Long Hence,” he said his poems would “reach fruition” only “After a long, long course, hundreds of years, denials.”58 But it would not be hundreds of years before his songs reached fruition. In the century since his death he has touched a wide array of readers. The fact that Whitman in his own time appealed to both capitalists and socialists, to both religious types and materialists, foreshadowed the even richer multiplicity of interpretation that has greeted him since his death. No writer is regarded as more indisputably American than he, yet no writer has reverberated on the international scene to the extent that he has. His liberation of the poetic line from formal rhythm and rhyme was a landmark event with which all poets since have had to come to terms. His equally bold erotic themes have provided a fertile feld of interpretation and have led to candid discussions of sex in the wider culture. The radically egalitarian nature of his poems, especially those he wrote in his rebellious phase in the 1850s, has inspired progressives of all stripes. His boundless love and all-inclusive language, refected in his extraordinary intimacy with his contemporary culture, makes his writing attractive and exciting for practically all readers. At his best, Whitman was the quintessential democratic poet, gathering images from many cultural arenas and transforming them through his powerful personality into art. By fully absorbing his time, he became a writer for all times. N OT E S 1 Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (hereafter abbreviated as WWC), vol. 2 (1907; rpt., New York: Rowman and Littlefeld, 1961): 430. 100 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.008

Walt Whitman 2 WWC, 1 (1905; rpt., New York: Rowman and Littlefeld, 1961): 167. 3 Whitman, Prose Works, 1892 (hereafter abbreviated as PW), ed. Floyd Stovall, vol. 2 (New York: New York University Press, 1964): 473. 4 Whitman, PW, ed. F. Stovall, 2: 454. 5 John Townsend Trowbridge, “Reminiscences of Walt Whitman,” Atlantic Monthly, 89 (February 1902): 166. 6 Whitman, Leaves of Grass. 150th Anniversary Edition (hereafter abbreviated as LG 150th), ed. David S. Reynolds (1855; rpt., New York: Oxford University Press, 2005): 1. 7 Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (hereafter abbreviated as WCP) (New York: Library of America, 1982): 1326. 8 WCP: 1310. 9 Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (hereafter abbreviated as NUPM), ed. Edward F. Grier (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1: 196. 10 Horace Traubel, WWC, 5 (Carbondale:  Southern Illinois University Press, 1964): 529. 11 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Comprehensive Reader’s Edition (hereafter abbreviated as LGC), edited by Harold Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New  York: New York University Press, 1965): 237. 12 Traubel, WWC, 1: 223. 13 Selections from the Writings and Speeches of William Lloyd Garrison (New York: Negro University Press, 1968): 119. 14 Traubel, WWC, 1: 77. 15 Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, vol. 5 (New York: New York University Press): 71. 16 Whitman, NUPM, 2: 890. 17 LG 150th: v. 18 The manuscript drafts, along with other writings by Whitman, appear on The Walt Whitman Archive, created by Kenneth M.  Price and Ed Folsom:  http:// www.whitmanarchive.org/. 19 LG 150th: v. The next two quotations in this paragraph are from the same page. 20 LG 150th: 11. The block quotation after this paragraph is on page 12, the frst quotation in the next on 17. 21 Whitman, Daybooks and Notebooks, ed. William White (New York: New York University Press, 1978), vol. 3: 736. 22 LG 150th: 41. 23 [A. S. Hill], North American Review, vol. 104 (January 1867): 302. 24 New York Daily News (February 27, 1856), and New York Examiner (January 19, 1882). 25 Whitman, PW, 2: 597. 26 Horace Traubel, WWC, 7 (Carbondale:  Southern Illinois University Press, 1992): 295. 27 LG 150th: 27. 28 Whitman, LGC: 163. 29 Traubel, WWC, 1: 5. 30 Whitman, Correspondence, 1: 45. 101 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.008

David S. Reynolds 31 Traubel, WWC, 2:  26–27; WWC, 3 (1912; rpt., New  York:  Rowman and Littlefeld, 1961): 575. 32 Whitman, LGC: 181. 33 Brooklyn Star (November 5, 1845). 34 The Gathering of the Forces, eds. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black (New  York:  G.  P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920):  346–347, and Whitman, Notes and Fragments, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (1899; rpt., Ontario: A. Talbot and Co., n.d.): 70. 35 Brooklyn Daily Eagle (March 13, 1847). 36 WCP: 188; LG 150th: 17. 37 Trowbridge, “Reminiscences of Walt Whitman”: 166. 38 Faint Clews & Indirections:  Manuscripts of Walt Whitman and His Family, eds. Clarence Gohdes and Rollo G. Silver (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1949): 19. 39 LGC: 56. The quotation in the next sentence: 407. 40 J. B. Dods, The Philosophy of Electrical Physiology (New  York:  Fowlers & Wells, 1850): 61; and LGC: 93. 41 WCP: 15; LGC: 602 and 179. 42 Whitman, NUPM, 4: 1524. 43 John Burroughs, Walt Whitman: A Study (1896; rpt., New York:  AMS Press, 1969): 143. 44 Alfred Frankentsein, William Sidney Mount (New  York:  Harry N.  Abrams, 1975): 130. 45 LGC: 42–43. 46 Whitman, New  York Dissected, eds. Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari (New York: Rufus Rockwell Wilson, 1936): 127. 47 Whitman, NUPM, 4: 1604. 48 Whitman, I Sit and Look Out: Editorials from the Brooklyn Daily Times, eds. Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwatrz (New York: AMS Press, 1966): 113. 49 Whitman, WCP: 19. 50 LG 150th: 2. 51 Whitman, LGC: 1. 52 Whitman, Notes and Fragments: 40. The quotation in the next sentence: 66. 53 Whitman, NUPM, 1: 413. 54 LG 150th: 15. 55 Whitman, NUPM, 1: 353. 56 LG 150th: xvi. 57 Milton Hindus, Walt Whitman:  The Critical Heritage (London:  Routledge, 1997): 9. 58 Whitman, LGC: 544. F U RT H E R R E A DI NG Hindus, Milton, Walt Whitman: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1997). Kaplan, Justin, Walt Whitman: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980). Loving, Jerome, Walt Whitman:  The Song of Himself (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1999). 102 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.008

Walt Whitman Martin, Justin, Rebel Souls:  Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians (New York: Da Capo Press, 2014). Matthiessen, F. O., American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). Reynolds, David S., Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1989). Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Vintage, 1996).

103 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.008

8 RO B E RT   FAGGE N

Melville the Poet

Melville’s poetry presents a number of challenges to the contemporary reader. Highly compressed and often metrically unpredictable, his verse in many respects anticipates modernist tendencies more than those found in genteel nineteenth-century American or Victorian work. He has much more in common with the metrical and vocal eccentricities of Browning than with Tennyson, his chiseled edges closer to Hardy than to Kipling. Melville’s large poetic oeuvre varies from short, epigrammatic lyrics to the book-length narrative Clarel. We may, indeed, wonder why he shifted from writing novels – great ones, despite their marketplace failure – to writing poetry. As in most of Melville’s writing, he cultivated ambiguity, undermined moral fable and allegory, and pushed received forms to new boundaries. While Melville’s poetry is neither completely successful nor predictable, it is often powerful and almost always interesting. Starting in the late 1850s, Melville worked hard at the craft of verse while reading widely and deeply in a range of poets – from Dante and Wordsworth to Emerson, Byron, and Arnold.1 Despite this interest and effort, Melville kept this work a secret, as though it would be an embarrassment for such activity from a professional writer to become known even to his family. When Melville started writing Clarel in the 1870s, his wife, Elizabeth, wrote to her stepmother of her husband’s renewed effort in poetry, fearful because of “how such things spread.”2 The disciplined sense of form in poetry, as opposed to the rhapsodic, operatic qualities of his own prose, appealed to him. In Timoleon (1891), his last published book of poems,3 Melville included a short, epigrammatic work titled “Greek Architecture,” something of his own ars poetica: Not magnitude, not lavishness, But Form – the Site; Not innovating wilfulness, But reverence for the archetype.4 104 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.009

Melville the Poet

In this laconic poem, not quite a sentence, Melville uses variation within strict form to point to an ideal. Here as elsewhere his work often shows nostalgia for a sense of order and meaning that has, with time, inevitably become fragmented, splintered, lost. At other times, Melville looks forward to letting go of the past and its often-terrible precedents. Melville’s short fction at its best verges on the cryptic and evokes powerful silences; he found poetry an even more apt way to talk about or around matters of great, if not unmentionable, sensitivity. In the same book, he gives us the poem “Fragments from a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century,” a curious title, in part because we wonder how the author, who invented the fragments, knew anything about the whole. It is as though we have come upon an obscure conversation, and a rather dark one, about the possibility of moral action in our world: *** Found a family, build a state, The pledged event is still the same: Matter in the end will never abate His ancient brutal claim.

*** Indolence is heaven’s ally here, And energy the child of hell: The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear But brims the poisoned well. (284)

Both quatrains tend toward the aphoristic and cryptic, features underscored by the compressed syntax. The present can be viewed only through the lens of the past – ruined architectures, doomed, like everything, to loss and disintegration. These epigrammatic poems have the quality of undoing assumptions and pointing toward silence. In this respect, Melville is aligned with English metaphysical poetry even as he forges his own blend of didactic and narrative verse. Melville’s most powerful book of verse was also his frst:  Battle Pieces, and Aspects of the War (1866).5 “Pieces” suggests fragments of a whole that cannot be seen, which is why they can only represent “aspects”: pictures of one kind or another, fragments or shrapnel of one kind or another, weapons of one kind or another, musical compositions of one kind or another. Published soon after the war, it was also  – next to White Jacket (1850) – one of Melville’s most overtly political works. Melville came from a family of conservative Democrats.6 He often seemed distant and sometimes indifferent to partisan politics, but he was troubled by the radical, 105 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.009

Robert Faggen

abolitionist frenzy of the New  York Republicans. Melville appears less attracted to revolution than to gradual resolution of problems, even ones as deep and troubling as slavery. A reader of Benito Cereno may be perplexed by its ambivalent characterization of Babo and the bloodiness of the slave rebellion. Nothing would indicate that Melville supported or advocated slavery. But his extremely skeptical attitude toward human nature, and his ever-increasing recognition of evil as a pervasive and real presence, made him politically cautious. In a prose afterword to Battle Pieces, called the “Supplement,” Melville argues that the North should not enforce a vindictive peace on the South. In fact, reviewers of the book tended to focus more on the “Supplement” than on the poetry. Northern whites, says Melville, were “bound to be Christians toward [their] fellow-whites as well as philanthropists toward the blacks.” He goes on to suggest that justice “may well be left to the graduated care of future legislation and of Heaven.” Melville was not alone, and not unwise, in this view, but his moderate position was dangerous in the volatile, vindictive post-bellum political climate. Melville often spoke, as had the Puritans, of national mission and destiny in Biblical and moral terms. In one of the most polemical and somewhat jingoistic moments in White Jacket: or, the World in a Man of War, Melville links the nation – as did the Puritans and the Enlightenment founders – to the story of the formation and liberation of the Israelites in Exodus. This attends his argument – in a chapter titled “The Evil Effects of Flogging” – for the elimination of what he considered the evil of corporal punishment, and it shows, to some degree, his faith in the mission of American democracy and in progress: Escaped from the house of bondage, Israel of old did not follow after the ways of the Egyptians. To her was given an express dispensation; to her were given new ways under the sun. And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people – the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. . . . We are the pioneers, the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours. . . . And let us always remember that with ourselves, almost for the frst time in the history of earth, national selfshess is unbounded philanthropy; for we cannot do a good to America but we give alms to the world.7

Melville’s moralizing about fogging in 1850, which very well may have been intended to indict the practices of slaveholders as well as the U.S. Navy, might not have held up as well sixteen years later, after the Civil War, when a mood of retribution toward the South was strong. His attitude toward the war as conveyed in the poems was probably confusing to the 470 people 106 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.009

Melville the Poet

who bought and may have read the volume (Whitman’s Drum Taps also sold as poorly as Melville’s book). The book failed to make sense to a wider audience of Americans until a selection was published in 1971: On the Slain Collegians,8 titled after a poem in Battle Pieces. The extraordinary unpopularity of the Vietnam War no doubt made the ambivalence in Melville’s poems interesting and poignant to twentieth-century readers. If the expectation of nineteenth-century readers and some twentieth-century readers would be to fnd Melville unapologetically for the war, engaged in a strong condemnation of slavery, or in a bitter condemnation of the South, then his poetry might seem shockingly unpatriotic. Over time, however, interest in Melville’s poetry of the Civil War has increased precisely because of its ambivalence and detachment. Politics and ideology aside, Melville presented a poetry and an aesthetic that seemed harsh, diffcult, and downright unpoetic to his contemporaries. One critic of Melville’s time called attention to his “grotesque metaphors and strained similes . . . and strange phrases to express the most simple ideas.” But these are precisely the qualities that have given the poetry lasting power. Add to that Melville’s inclusion of multiple perspectives and voices, and we can see what makes his poetry so unusual and powerful. Conciliatory and politic as “the Supplement” may be, the poems often convey poignant and irreverent perspectives not found, for example, in James Russell Lowell’s 1865 “Commemoration Ode” or in the poetry of Buchanan Read or of Henry Howard Brownell, a solider-poet and author of War Lyrics and Other Poems (1866). Oliver Wendell Holmes dubbed Brownell “our battle laureate.” But the passion of Brownell’s verse and the authenticity of his experience, such as can be found in “The Bay Battle,” do little to make it either interesting or memorable (compare Melville’s “The Battle of the Bay”). War’s awful machinery required for Melville something other than the smooth glories and sops to truth found in the poetry of many of his contemporaries. Some sneered at Melville for writing as a noncombatant, but the charge is inane and also, partly, unfair. Should we discount Stephen Crane because he did not fght in the Civil War? The narrative poem “The Scout toward Aldie” was based on Melville’s experience with a military expedition. The poems are often elegiac and detached – poetry about the aftermath of battle and war – and rarely suggest the making of art out of combat experience. Melville inaugurated the volume with one of his ambiguous dedications. An epitaph itself, as is only ftting, the dedication memorializes the men who died “for the maintenance of the union” and “fell devotedly under the fag of their fathers.” Melville seems to underscore an Abrahamic sacrifce, a blind willingness to kill and be killed, for a fervent patriotism. But “devotedly” 107 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.009

Robert Faggen

sounds chillingly ironic; the dedication has the icy feeling of Wilfred Owen’s appropriation of the Horatian aphorism dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (it is sweet and ftting to die for one’s country). Melville had leant a similar doubleness to the dedication of The Confdence Man: “To the Victims of Auto da Fe.” That simple phrase could refer either to the actual historical victims of the Inquisition, with whom Melville seems to have had much sympathy, as well as to any “victims of ‘acts of faith,’ ” which is more in keeping with the novel’s central theme: deception. Melville’s thoughts about faith are indeed complex and conficting, and Battle Pieces is the frst of his books of poems to explore the challenge of faith posed by the Civil War, just as Clarel would take on the problem of faith for the entire nineteenth century. The American Civil War was often framed in theological and apocalyptic terms by the radical Republicans and abolitionists. God and Christianity were, of course, used to justify the actions of both sides. Among the most famous Civil War poems is the one by Julia Ward Howe that, set to the music of “John Brown’s Body,” became “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The frst two lines are apocalyptic about divine presence, referring directly to Revelations: “Mine eyes have seen the glory / Of the coming of the Lord / He is trampling out the vintage / Where the grapes of wrath are stored.” One of its most poignant verses draws the analogy between the martyrdom of Christ and the martyrdom of soldiers in a righteous cause: In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea With a glory in his bosom That transfgures you and me As he died to make men holy Let us die to make men free While God is marching on

Melville’s Civil War poetry repeatedly questions, if not undermines, the ease, pleasure, and power with which religion was drawn into the framing and justifcation of war and sacrifce, particularly by radical Northern Republicans and abolitionists. Melville’s elegiac and questioning verses moved against sacred truths and moral certainties. Melville did not see in the war “the coming of The Lord,” though, invoking Exodus, he was willing to see divinity working mysteriously, perhaps awfully, in human events: “The Lord is a man of war!” the speaker exclaims in “The Battle for the Mississippi,” but the point is qualifed in the next two lines: “So the strong wing to the muse is given / In victory’s roar.” That “roar,” brilliantly rhymed with “war,” brings with it the human propensity to invoke God and divine analogies in the heat of momentary optimism and enthusiasm. 108 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.009

Melville the Poet

The book opens with a kind of exordium of four mysterious and complex poems – “The Portent,” “Misgivings,” “The Confict of Convictions,” and “Apathy and Enthusiasm” – that set up the ambiguity and contradictions Melville had always cultivated in his fction and sustained in Battle Pieces. “The Portent” is a masterful poem about John Brown that avoids portraying him either as an evil perpetrator of terror or as a saintly martyr for the cause of abolition. The opening line eerily invokes the image of Brown in death: Hanging from the beam, Slowly swaying (such the law), Gaunt the shadow on your green, Shenandoah! (5)

The parenthetic phrase “such the law,” oddly rhymed with Shenandoah, refers not only to the fact and the irony that Brown’s righteousness, in the eyes of the law, amounted to murder punishable by death; “the law” also refers to the “swaying” itself, as though nature’s laws also governed the entire process of his rebellion and its consequences. The poem is addressed to Shenandoah, the green valley in Virginia; Brown cast his dark shadow upon Harper’s Ferry and the pastoral American world. No doubt Melville also had the popular folk song “Oh, Shenandoah” in mind. Here there can be no nostalgia and perhaps no faith in martyrdom because “the stabs shall heal no more.” Perhaps the most striking aspect of the poem is the way the phrasing evades agency:  Brown is “hanging,” but there is no mention of who hanged him. “The streaming beard is shown / (Weird John Brown), / The meteor of the war.” But it is left uncertain who is responsible for this showing. As a metaphor for Brown, “the meteor” is a sign but also a natural phenomenon without certain cause and of uncertain meaning. It also recurs, as Melville suggests in another poem, periodically. Brown remains “weird,” a perplexing, demiurgic force. Melville avoids the moralizing so common in discourse about Brown. “The Portent,” not listed in the table of contents, is followed by three poems that explore deeply Melville’s almost conservative ambivalence about the war. “Misgivings” is an odd sonnet of two seven-line stanzas that continues a detached but still grave apprehension. Again, the coming war is made analogous to a potentially devastating natural phenomenon, a great storm that a mighty ship of state may fear. Melville no doubt had in mind Longfellow’s “The Republic,” in which the state is a great ship built by a divine hand: Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O UNION, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, 109 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.009

Robert Faggen With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate! We know what Master laid thy keel, What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel, Who made each mast, and sail, and rope, What anvils rang, what hammers beat, In what a forge and what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!

In “Misgivings,” the ocean storm threatens the land, “the hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.” What is the cause of this apocalyptic food? Why is “Nature’s dark side” heeded now? The speaker of Melville’s poem does not provide an unambiguous answer, and he seems detached as he contemplates severe moral contradictions: I muse upon my country’s ills – The tempest bursting from the waste of Time On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime. (7)

The war emerges mysteriously, “bursting from the waste of Time.” Melville looks at the Civil War with a grand sense of temporal detachment. The war may be no more than waste in time rather than the culmination of historical process or progress. Melville could regard the United States and the great experiment in democracy as “the world’s fairest hope” while also regarding both slavery and, perhaps more important to Melville, the fratricide of war as “man’s foulest crime,” a repetition or recurrence of the crime of Cain that begins the conficts of history. But in “The Confict of Convictions” it is by no means obvious what the convictions are. Melville makes ambiguous references to slavery, which he may view as a universal human condition (“Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that,” Ishmael asks provocatively in the frst pages of Moby-Dick), and he leaves open-ended which factions represent good and which evil. The seven metrically irregular stanzas interspersed with stark, parenthetical choruses form something like a dialogue about faith and doubt, action and inaction, and – perhaps most striking – time past and time future. Critics of the poem have noted its Miltonic and Biblical imagery and its allusions (particularly to warfare between God, with archangels Raphael and Michael, and Satan). This should be unsurprising both because it underscores the warfare between Satan and God at the heart of Christianity and because Milton’s epic poetry was haunted by his own experience of civil war. Melville may be putting the war in a cosmic and theological context. Melville also pokes fun at theodicies attempting to justify the war and its destruction. 110 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.009

Melville the Poet

For those who see in the war an enactment of the end of days, and God’s truth marching through the sacrifce of martyrs, Melville offers a vision of the persistence of the old and the ancient: Satan’s old age is strong and hale, A disciplined captain, gray in skill, And Raphael a white enthusiast still; Dashed aims, at which Christ’s martyrs pale, Shall Mammon’s slaves fulfll? (8)

Miltonic mythology aside, the language tempts us into associating Satan with the South, “gray in skill.” But that is countered by the characterization of Raphael. He is ineffectual, “a white enthusiast,” and if somehow symbolic of the North, still far less than passionate or effectual as regards racial equality. The whole nation may be “Mammon’s slaves.” “Man’s latter fall” suggests not only the war but also the persistence of what Melville later called in Billy Budd “a depravity according to nature” – something far less theologically categorizable than “original sin” – in all those who for their convictions would participate in bloodshed and fratricide in the name of justice or nation. (The conceit of “The Maldive Shark,” a later poem from John Marr, suggests a larger, banal evil in the shark that protects the unwitting pilot fsh.) The next stanza is a parenthetical interjection entertaining thoughts of undoing the instruments of war altogether, leaving the fnal war between good and evil something for “aeons” hence: (Dismantle the fort, Cut down the feet – Battle no more shall be! While the feld for fght in aeons to come Congeal beneath the sea.) (9)

Melville envisions the war, partly, as a manifestation of God, and partly as God manifested in Nature. Nature’s scheme, whatever it may be, works over vast periods of time and may be indifferent to human purposes. When he invokes “The Ancient of Days,” from the Hebrew apocalyptic prophet Daniel (7:9), that white-bearded God is, oddly, “forever young” and doesn’t yield easily to the improvements or progress that might produce the reign of Christ on earth: The Ancient of Days forever is young, Forever the scheme of Nature thrives; I know a wind in purpose strong – It spins against the way it drives.

The enigmatic lines about the wind evoke the prophet Hosea’s injunction against an idolatrous Israel:  it “sows the wind and reaps the whirlwind.” 111 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.009

Robert Faggen

The strong convictions of each side in the war, both idolatrous, are likely to reap a destructive wind driving against its intentions and purposes. Nature, as Melville had both heard and witnessed in earthquakes, can destroy cities, if not nations, leaving chasms that will take centuries on which to build any future hope of utopia: What if the gulfs their slimed foundations bare? So deep must the stones be hurled Whereon the throes of ages rear The fnal empire and the happier world. (10)

Melville would eventually write a poem titled “The New Ancient of Days,” which he never published, that mockingly celebrates the fnding of a fossil skeleton so old that its existence – along with Darwin’s vision unleashed in 1859, just before the outbreak of the war – undermines the validity of the Biblical timeline and man’s importance within it.9 In the Pauline view of history – particularly in Romans – all of the past is simply waste before the perfection of the future. Yet this seemed to Melville a desecration of the past. Melville feared the apocalyptic fascination with progress would lead to the ruin and loss of a valuable foundational past: (The poor old Past, The Future’s slave, She drudged though pain and crime To bring about the blissful Prime, Then – perished. There’s a grave!) (10)

Melville presents a vision of the new Iron Dome that was being built on the nation’s capitol – a fgure of the state that appears also in “The Scout Toward Aldie” and “Lee in the Capitol” in Battle Pieces – as a potentially idolatrous consolidation of power, power not divine but “unanointed”: Power unanointed may come – Dominion (unsought by the free) And the Iron Dome, Stronger for stress and strain, Fling her huge shadow across the main; But the Founders’ dream shall fee. (10)

Both sides in the war, as Lincoln said in his second inaugural address, prayed to the same God. But Melville’s God “KEEPS THE MIDDLE WAY. / NONE WAS BY / WHEN HE SPREAD THE SKY; WISDOM IS VAIN, AND PROPHESY.” This is Job’s God speaking out of the whirlwind to man asking for answers and, instead, providing no answer except an inhuman vision that belittles human power and comprehension. 112 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.009

Melville the Poet

“The Confict of Convictions” was dated 1860–1861 (referring to a span of great tension). But many of the poems and, according to Melville’s brief preface, the entire book were inspired by the fall of Richmond and the end of the war. The poems gathered in the book engage various battles and events dating from the course of the entire war. But one senses throughout ambivalence about the cruelty inficted and experienced by both sides. Melville’s overall rhetorical purpose seems to have been to caution the North against becoming too cruel and arrogant in its victory, to the point of crushing and punishing the South beyond any hope of a dignifed re-entry into the Union. If the Iron Dome would be one form of idolatry, the machinery by which the war was fought became yet another form. One of the most memorable poems in the book, “A Utilitarian’s View of the Monitor’s Fight,” strips war of any sense of nostalgia or of glory. The USS Monitor becomes an emblem of an emerging mechanized warfare. The beauty of weapons should seduce no one. Rather than focus on the Monitor’s most famous battle with the CSS Virginia (formerly the USS Merrimack), the poem focuses on the ironclad steamship itself, which looked more like a submarine with a large rotating gun turret, as an emblem of the inhuman machinery of war. Function trumps beauty, and effectiveness, glory. The aspect of the Monitor  – particularly compared with the old warship Temeraire – was, if not ugly, representative of a kind of barbarity appropriately representative of the Civil War and providing inspiration for an aesthetic of the poetry of war: Plain be the phrase, yet apt the verse, More ponderous than nimble; For since grimed War here laid aside His Orient pomp, ’twould ill beft Overmuch to ply The rhyme’s barbaric cymbal. (44)

Melville strangely seems to echo Milton’s argument in his prefatory note to Paradise Lost that rhyme itself is but a convention and perhaps ill-suited to serious subject matter. Of course, Melville’s war poems are not blank verse and do rhyme; there may indeed be something ill-beftting, if not indecorous for this war and the nature of war in general, to craft verse too nimble or elegant. Melville’s inventive verse forms, irregularities in meter, often blunt and surprising diction, and surprising rhymes may be the apt barbaric symbols for war, especially one that rings with “the clangor of the blacksmith’s fray.” More important, “War yet shall be, but warriors / Are now but operatives . . .” In this war, human life becomes an instrument in the war machine. 113 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.009

Robert Faggen

The book also invokes multiple perspectives. Striking examples of this are the poem “Donelson,” the two poems about Stonewall Jackson, and the two poems about Sherman’s march: “The March to the Sea,” and “The Frenzy in the Wake.” For “The March to the Sea,” for example, Melville invents a peculiar stanzaic form of twelve lines. The stanzas seem to fow with the rhythm of a march, cascading downward, but one soon realizes that they are formed in the shape of Georgia. The visual or concrete poetry tends to turn the state and the march into an icon or verbal monument. But the refrain in the fnal two lines  – particularly the phrase “glorious glad marching” – throws a sardonic light on what was unquestionably horrifc destruction: The foragers through calm lands Swept in tempest gay, And they breathed the air of balm-lands Where rolled savannas lay, And they helped themselves from farm-lands – As who should say them nay? The regiments uproarious Laughed in Plenty’s glee; And they march till their broad laughter Met the laughter of the sea: It was glorious glad marching, That marching to the sea. (96)

The relentless repetition of this kind of rhyme and odd trochaic meter suggest the way the march itself has its own mindless energy. The form leaves room and in fact gives more poignancy to the question the speaker asks in the fnal stanza, raising doubts about “necessity” as a justifcation for such terror: “Was it Treason’s retribution – / Necessity the plea? / They will long remember Sherman / And his streaming columns free –.” Melville builds the poem until it breaks at this fnal question about the necessity of retribution. “The Frenzy of the Wake” follows “The March to the Sea.” It is a passionate, agonizing lyric in the voice of a Confederate soldier. The speaker’s rhetoric echoes some signifcant passages in Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, as he contemplates the possibility of revenge. His reference to Jael in the second stanza is striking for two reasons: Jael was the non-Hebrew heroine of Judges who slew the Philistine general Sisera by striking him with a stake through the temple. Though outside the elect nation, Jael nevertheless becomes a national hero. Melville allows his speaker to be an outsider even as he entertains a vision of righteous revenge: 114 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.009

Melville the Poet Shall Time, avenging every woe, To us that jot allot Which Israel thrilled when Sisera’s brow Showed gaunt and showed the clot? Curse on their foreheads, cheeks, and eyes – The Northern faces – true To the fag we hate, the fag whose star Like planets strike us through.

This analogy to Jael’s murder of Sisera points to a kind of twist in Melville’s sense of sympathy and allegiance. It was precisely the analogy to Jael uttered by Delila to Samson in Samson Agonistes that provoked an insightful response by Melville in the margins of his edition of Milton. Delila taunts the tricked and imprisoned Samson, proclaiming that she will be “not less renown’d than in Mount Ephraim, / Jael, who with inhospitable guile / Smote Sisera sleeping through the temples nail’d.” Delila, another non-Israelite, invokes Jael as a hero, this time against one of Israel’s great sons. Melville, feeling the poignancy of this, wrote in the margin: “There is a basis for the doubt expressed by A. Marvell in his lines to Milton on the publication of P. Lost. There was a twist in Milton. From its place the above marked has an interesting significance.” Melville refers, of course, to Andrew Marvell’s prefatory poem to Paradise Lost: “the argument / Held me awhile misdoubting his intent, / That he would ruine (for I saw him strong) the sacred Truths to Fable and old song.” Melville had also marked that passage in his edition of Milton and wrote (as if conversing with Marvell over brandy): “It is still misdoubted by some. First impressions are generally true, too, Andrew.” Melville saw in Milton something present in his own poem: a deep ambivalence about national authority and power and a willingness to give strong voice to those unjustly suffering and to underdogs. It is the side of Melville so sympathetic to Captain Ahab. Rather than announce God’s truth, Melville leaves it to silence or to a whisper. “Shiloh,” a single-sentence masterpiece, is framed by the eerie perspective of swallows “skimming lightly, wheeling still” over the battlefeld strewn with the bodies of Northern and Southern soldiers, “dying foemen mingled there – / Foemen at morn but friends at eve – / Fame or country least their care: (What like a bullet can undeceive!) . . . ” (46). The hushed sounds of the place name echo through the poem, a town named after the ancient Hebrew location of the Tent of Meeting and the Ark of the Covenant that was all but erased from memory when the Israelites carried the Ark of the Covenant into battle. The parenthetical phrase, a quiet exclamation, sardonically defates in tone and sense the glory or political allegiance that had motivated the young men to kill. A bullet becomes the agency of an elusive wisdom. 115 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.009

Robert Faggen

Battle Pieces sold just over 470 copies and received mediocre reviews. This hardly deterred Melville from continuing to write and publish poetry. The books of poems that followed include the nearly six-hundred-page Clarel:  A  Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), John Marr and Other Sailors (1888), and Timoleon (1891). Billy Budd, Melville’s fnal novel, began as the broadside poem with which it concludes: “Billy in the Darbies.” Clarel is a profound exploration of faith in a multi-vocal narrative and journey to the holy land. On one level it plays with the proliferation of late nineteenth-century Protestant Holy Land pilgrimage narratives, many of which fueled millennialist fantasies and Holy Land mania.10 These narratives were also inspired by the old Protestant idea of America as the New Israel, destined to be God’s work on earth. Given how Battle Pieces often eviscerated that kind of ideology, it is not surprising that Clarel embodies some of Melville’s darkest meditations on faith in a wilderness of hopeless ruins and sand. Populated by complex and enigmatic characters, Melville gives us, in addition to Clarel the young seeker, Ungar, an ex-Confederate (part Indian and also Catholic), and Mortmain, a Swede who had seen the outer limits of human evil in the revolutions of 1848 and so becomes an apocalyptic prophet of darkness. Clarel embodies what Hawthorne called Melville’s “wandering to and fro over the deserts of faith”; this is not surprising in terms of Melville’s temperament and experience. But he also responds in the poem to the confict of science and faith that became a dominant feature of the spiritual and intellectual landscape of the late nineteenth century. Playing with the fgure of petrifcation, the narrator asks of faith in language that prefgures Yeats’s “The Second Coming”: But in her Protestant repose Snores faith toward her mortal close? Nay, like a sachem petrifed, Encaved found in the mountain-side, Perfect in feature, true in limb, Life’s full similitude in him, Yet all mere stone – is faith dead now, A petrifcation? Grant it so, Then what’s in store? what shapeless birth? Reveal the doom reserved for earth? How far may seas retiring go?11

Deeply skeptical, Melville in Clarel, and in his later poetry, reveals himself to be a constant seeker, making his art the site of remarkable adventure in language and thought. 116 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.009

Melville the Poet NOT E S 1 For the most thorough account of Melville career as a poet, see Hershel Parker’s Melville: The Making of the Poet (Evanston:  Northwestern University Press, 2008). 2 The Melville Log, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Gordian Press, 1969): 709. 3 Melville’s last collection of poems was actually Weeds and Wildings Chiefy: With a Rose or Two (1924). It remained unpublished at his death on September 28, 1891. 4 Herman Melville, Published Poems, Battle-Pieces, John Marr, Timoleon, vol. 11, The Writings of Herman Melville, Northwestern-Newberry Edition, eds. Robert C. Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall Reising, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press): 305. All further quotations of the poems are from this edition. 5 The Battle Pieces of Herman Melville, ed. with introduction and notes by Hennig Cohen (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1963), is uncommonly sound. 6 For Melville’s personal experience of the Civil War, see Stanton Garner’s The Civil War World of Herman Melville (Lawrence:  University Press of Kansas, 1993). 7 Melville, White-Jacket, ed. G. Thomas Tanselle (New York: Library of America, 1983): 506. 8 Melville, On the Slain Collegians, with illustrations by Antonio Frasconi (New York: Noonday Press, 1971). 9 See Karen Lenz Madison and R. D. Madison’s “Darwin’s Year and Melville’s ‘New Ancient of Days,’ ” in America’s Year Darwin: Darwinian Theory and U.S. Literary Culture, eds. Tina Gianquitto and Lydia Fisher (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 2014): 86–103. R. D. Madison also provides a precise transcription of the poem. 10 See Hilton Obenzinger’s American Palestine (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1999) and Stephanie Stidham Rogers’s Inventing the Holy Land: American Protestant Pilgrimage to Palestine, 1865–1941 (New  York:  Lexington Books, 2011). 11 Clarel, A  Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, eds. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougal, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1991): 292.

F U RT H E R R E A DI NG Aaron, Daniel, The Unwritten War:  American Writers and the Civil War (Madison: University Wisconsin Press, 1973). Cohen, Henig, ed., The Battle-Pieces of Herman Melville (New  York:  Thomas Yoseloff, 1964). Cox, Richard H. and Paul Dowling, “Herman Melville’s Civil War:  Lincolnian Prudence in Poetry,” Political Science Reviewer 29 (2000): 192–295. Dillingham, William B., Melville and His Circle: The Last Years (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). Garner, Stanton, The Civil War World of Herman Melville (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993). 117 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.009

Robert Faggen Grey, Robin and Douglas Robillard, in consultation with Hershel Parker, “Melville’s Milton:  A  Transcription of Melville’s Marginalia in His Copy of The Poetical Works of John Milton,” Leviathan 4 (March and October 2002): 117–204. Melville, Herman, Clarel, A Poem and a Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, eds. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougal, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago:  Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1991). Milder, Robert, ed., Critical Essays on Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1989). Parker, Hershel, Melville:  The Making of the Poet. (Evanston:  Northwestern University Press, 2008). Philbrick, Nathaniel, “Hawthorne, Maria Mitchell, and Melville’s ‘After the Pleasure Party,’” ESQ 37 (1991): 291–308. Shurr, William B, The Mystery of Iniquity:  Melville as Poet, 1857–1891 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1972). Spengemann, William C., “Melville the Poet,” American Literary History 11.4 (Winter 1999): 569–609. Stein, William B., The Poetry of Herman Melville’s Late Years:  Time, Myth, and Religion. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970). Vendler, Helen, “Melville and the Lyric of History,” Southern Review 35.3 (Summer 1999): 579–594. Warren, Robert Penn, “Melville the Poet,” Kenyon Review 8 (1946): 208–223. Warren, Rosanna, “Dark Knowledge:  Melville’s Poems of the Civil War,” Raritan 19.1 (Summer 1999): 100–121.

118 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.009

9 M A RT H A NE L L   S M I TH

Forever Young: Rereading Emily Dickinson in the Twenty-First Century

Walt Whitman was near the end of his life and preparing the “deathbed edition” of Leaves of Grass when Poems by Emily Dickinson was published in 1890, and the writer Emily Dickinson, dead four years, became an author. At this time, her poetry moved from manuscript pages circulated in parlors, bedrooms, dining rooms, and kitchen tables to beautiful (but plain) clothbound volumes circulated well beyond her kith and kin. During her lifetime, while Whitman was printing volumes of Leaves of Grass adorned frst with his image and then also with the authorial imprimatur “Walt Whitman,” Dickinson had been publishing herself coterie-style by distributing her poems through her letters and through her own voice and that of her correspondents as her poems were read aloud. Ten, perhaps more, of her poems were printed in newspapers, and “Success is counted sweetest” (FP 112), printed in 1864 during the Civil War in the Brooklyn Daily Union, was also printed in Roberts Brothers No Name Series in 1876 in A Masque of Poets, edited by prominent writer Helen Hunt Jackson.1 As were those printings, each of the others contemporary to Dickinson were marked authorially as “anonymous.” Since printed volumes “of Emily Dickinson” became available, reader upon reader has voiced a desire to know, even to speak with, this dead woman writer, whoever she was. Elegant simplicity characterized each of the early editions and their various printings and the more than nineteen thousand Poems by Emily Dickinson that sold on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1890s and introduced her to the world, as well as those volumes printed between 1914 and 1945 that kept alive and bolstered Dickinson’s reputation. Widely reviewed transatlantically, such distribution was a considerable remove from Dickinson’s own circulation of her poems, and that by her immediate readers to local audiences – her sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson, introduced the initial printed volume’s coeditor Mabel Loomis Todd to Dickinson’s poetry by reading to her in the parlor of the Evergreens: “. . . went in the afternoon to Mrs. [Susan] Dickinson’s. She read me some strange poems by Emily Dickinson. They are 119 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.010

Martha Nell Smith

full of power.”2 A March 26, 1904, letter from Louise Norcross, Dickinson’s beloved cousin, to the editors of Boston’s Woman Journal makes clear that Dickinson’s literary work was no secret and provides a rare portrait of the woman poet at work, writing and reading aloud amid the duties of housekeeping: “Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her most wonderful sentences on slips of paper held against the kitchen wall while she was hovering over culinary formations. And I  know Emily Dickinson wrote most emphatic things in the pantry, so cool and quiet, while she skimmed the milk; because I sat on the footstool behind the door, in delight, as she read them to me. The blinds were closed, but through the green slats she saw all those fascinating ups and downs going on outside that she wrote about.”3 Those scenes of localized reading, of being perused and proclaimed aloud in domestic spaces in Amherst parlors, are also a very long way from the twenty-frst century and more than a century of reading Emily Dickinson’s poems in posthumously produced volumes, including two variorums, Thomas H.  Johnson’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson, which for the frst time collected all of her known poems into a single edition in 1955, and R.  W. Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1998, which updated the work of Johnson, subtracting some poems and adding others so that Franklin’s count is 14 poems more than Johnson’s 1775.4 Dickinson’s poems are now also widely read on computer screens, in pocket-size cheap paperback volumes, on PDAs, and in specially curated volumes to highlight particular correspondences, themes, or other aspects of her writing. As is Whitman, Dickinson is not only one of the most distinguished poetic voices in American letters, but she is also an icon in popular as well as literary, art, music, and even cinematic and televisual cultures, and is as often as not an icon for uniqueness, for the unusual, for the unexpected. Her well-known teenaged image festooned an 8¢ U.S. postage stamp, the 1976 drama The Belle of Amherst is performed now more than ever, and rock-and-roll bands croon “My Life had stood a / Loaded Gun” (FP 764)  with feminist rage and resolution, a contrast to the late sixties Simon and Garfunkel rendition describing a conventionally ensconced young woman who “reads her Emily Dickinson” while her agonizing young bard (sure to break her heart) “reads his Robert Frost.”5 Likewise, scholarly speculations and squabbles over whether Emily Dickinson was an epileptic or had an abortion or was erotically lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, or asexual are all quite some distance from Emily Dickinson the writer and her cultural and social environs. For more than a hundred years, the question that has captivated those parlor and kitchen audiences, as well as audiences of the scholarly and general reader editions in print and, for the last two decades, digital form, is the one readers always ask, whether conscious of the query or not, of every Emily 120 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.010

Dickinson in the Twenty-First Century

Dickinson text: “What is it like to read this?” What is it like to read writings initially reviewed as “startling,” “striking,” “remarkable,” “uncommon,” “eery,” “enigmatical,” and “suggestiferous” and still characterized that way today?6 That question – “What is it like to read this?” – is the question that guides this essay, which provides an overview of how writings of, by, and about Dickinson have been read since her lifetime and through the eras of different published presentations, and focuses on twenty-frst century digital Dickinsons, pondering what is it like to read Dickinson’s manuscript surrogates on screen. Such a question also extends to reading the poet herself. Who was this woman who left nearly two thousand poems behind to be discovered posthumously among her belongings and to be excavated from her surviving correspondences? Who was this woman who declared in a poem, “This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me” (FP 519),7 a statement that many audiences have taken to be about her work and its relation to the world? Audiences were curious about the writer’s life and character from the beginning, and presumptions about her biography and her personality have in turn infuenced the editing and reading of her work. Though Dickinson circulated at least a third and probably far more of her poems by enclosing them with, embedding them in, or sending them as letters, and so, according to her own rigorous terms, published herself by doing so, she “did not,” as she told prominent author and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “print” (JL 316).8 Dickinson had corresponded with Higginson for nearly a quarter of a century; he was a logical person to turn to when her sister Lavinia sought editors to get the posthumously discovered trove of Emily’s manuscript poems into print. The frst volume of Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd was published in 1890, a second in 1891, and a third, edited only by Todd, in 1896. While they were preparing the second volume for publication, Higginson wrote, “One poem only I dread a little to print – that wonderful ‘Wild Nights,’ – lest the malignant read into it more than that virgin recluse ever dreamed of putting there.”9 This notion of the never-married Emily Dickinson as virginal and reclusive has been the most popular story about her life, but it is at best a partial truth. While she certainly became more and more selective about the company she kept, Dickinson was much more sociable than usual descriptions would have us believe. One of her friends described how as a woman in her late twenties and early thirties Dickinson frequently entertained guests at her brother and sister-in-law’s house, the Evergreens, “at the piano playing weird & beautiful melodies, all from her own inspiration.” Another of her contemporaries who attended a reception at the Homestead (her home) did not complain that the thirtyish Dickinson 121 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.010

Martha Nell Smith

was withdrawn and hiding in her room but that she was “so surrounded by people that I had no chance to talk with her, and she asked me to call on her the next morning” (YH 1: 366–367; 2: 115). Though a reader might not guess as much from the most well-known picture of the poet at sixteen or seventeen, while still a teenager, Dickinson herself mused, “I have lately come to the conclusion that I  am Eve, alias Mrs. Adam. You know there is no account of her death in the Bible, and why am not I Eve?” (JL 9). Indeed, she might well be called a literary Eve, a frst woman as it were who was introducing critical inquiry into what it means to be a poet, because she “published” herself epistolarily with design and clear ambition, reaching out to a key man of letters in Higginson. This description of her work as a poet is the one to which Dickinson herself, who rigorously distinguished between the terms “publish” and “print,” points if readers attempt, as twentieth-century poet Adrienne Rich suggests, to discover Dickinson on “her own premises” and in her own words.10 Though readers have long pondered why she did not publish more poems via conventional methods during her lifetime, after more than a century of critical refections upon her work, and upon her audiences, immediate and posthumous, Dickinson’s methods of binding about a thousand of her poems into forty manuscript books and distributing several hundred of them in letters are by the early twenty-frst century widely recognized as her particular forms of self-publication.11 Through digital surrogates also visible now are poems on envelopes. On shopping paper. Decorated with stamps. With clippings from the household copy of Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop and other books and magazines Dickinson used in what Ellen Gruber Garvey has called “writing with scissors.”12 Saucily written around three edges of a letter. Saucily written to look conventional. Saucily written to appear as “not poetry.”13 On linen gilt-edged stationery, stained with coffee, with wine, with tears, with blood. On paper folded many times, so much so that, more than a century later, the creases threaten to part. Folded many times because read so many times, read to be tucked away, treasured, brought out, read again, as Susan Dickinson read to many visitors, friends, and family. On paper bearing traces of glue, signs of having been pasted into a scrapbook to be read, reread, shown to visitors in the Evergreens and other parlors. On paper sporting pinholes, signs of having been pinned into a scrapbook, or on the side of a sewing basket, or bound with string together with other poems in her famous handmade books. For most of Dickinson’s lives as An Author, spatters of blood, sweat, tears, and the detritus of drawing room circulation (traces left by fngers soiled with food and drink and/or glue for item placement in commonplace 122 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.010

Dickinson in the Twenty-First Century

books) have been sealed away from view. Her poems have been “professionalized,” removed far, far from the conditions in which she placed them and the conditions in which they were circulated widely enough so that “all the literary men” were “after her to have her writings published” (YH 2: 361). Twenty-frst-century technologies are even farther away than books from those nineteenth-century rooms and hands, but they nevertheless enable many more opportunities to examine images of physical traces of nineteenth-century handlings of Emily Dickinson’s poems, letter-poems, and letters, and to much larger and more diverse constituencies of readers than was possible when views of her manuscripts were limited to a very few scholars given special access to Harvard, Amherst, and other special collections archives requiring special permission for access. So the valences of the question, “What is it like to read this?” (meaning making those handcrafted writings into texts more easily intelligible to poetry’s audiences through mass and uniformly produced print translations), are multiple. In the twenty-frst century, digital surrogates gathered by the archives of editorial, critical, and curatorial attentions into the exhibitions, articles, critical and creative responses to her work in the Dickinson Electronic Archives; Radical Scatters:  Emily Dickinson’s Late Fragments and Related Texts, 1870–1886; Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences: A Born-Digital Inquiry; Boston Public Library’s Emily Dickinson’s Papers; Amherst College’s Emily Dickinson Collection; and Emily Dickinson Archive enable us to reimagine “How to read a nineteenth-century poem” or rather what can be learned about poetry and its histories by trying to imagine how Emily Dickinson’s poems were read during her lifetime.14 The postal, hand, and voice-to-ear circulations of her coterie publication are diffcult to imagine from the printed page. These new publications in digital media make possible the showing as well as the telling of the biographies of her writings’ lives in nineteenth-century parlors as they were read and reread, silently and aloud, privately and in the publics of the sociocultural exchanges of domestic and literary cultural spaces.15 Refocusing twenty-frst-century readers’ attentions in such ways highlights the conversations about reading that, for many of Dickinson’s contemporaries (the literate soaking up magazines, journals, newspapers, poetry volumes, novels), infused everyday life. Read anachronistically for most of their lives in the world of print and digital publication, as if they had been imagined as belonging on and prepared for the elegant nineteenth-century letterpress page, the writings many know so well by their variorum numbers can now more easily be resituated into a critical narrative that, self-consciously anachronistic, suggests new and generative ways of reading and taking pleasure in nineteenth-century poems and in the abundant, lively joys, sorrows, fears, and hopes with which they were engaged. 123 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.010

Martha Nell Smith

After all, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, poetry was not this serious and devoted to writing woman’s paid profession but was, as Susan wrote to editor Curtis Hidden Page, “sermon . . . hope . . . solace . . . life.”16 Dickinson’s poem about reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “I think I was enchanted” (FP 627),17 stresses the affective, the transformative, the powers of poetry to magnify and deepen one’s experience of familiar spaces and ordinary creatures. This power is that of the art of poetry in all its messy, physical, erotic affect bound to make one spill one’s wine, one’s coffee, or because of its effects otherwise lose one’s composure. Bound to make one read aloud, with power, with affectation, full throated, from the belly, poetry is physical, electric. To understand what it is like to read Dickinson in the twenty-frst century, thinking briefy about stages of reading Dickinson over the past century, stages that track literary critical and more general cultural trends, provides insight into not only her poems but also the contexts in which they have been received and the contexts created for subsequent readers. In each and all of those stages, Dickinson’s writings, however received and however translated, are rife with immensely valuable “moments of edginess” for reading and renewal that offer “a sense of possibility larger than any we could” otherwise “entertain.”18 The initial posthumous stage might be called simultaneously sentimental/ avant-garde. Indeed, recognizing the poem’s extraordinary erotic expression, Higginson worried about publishing “Wild Nights” and remarked the idealized, sentimentalized cultural composite image of the virgin recluse poetess, attaching that to Dickinson herself as a reason for his anxiety. When his coeditor Todd published “A solemn thing – it was / I said – ” (FP 307),19 she edited out the last two stanzas ending with a female speaker emphatically declaring “And I sneered – softly – ‘Small’!” By doing that, Todd could normalize Dickinson’s poem questioning the value of marriage into “Wedded,” a poem in which the speaker is pining for matrimony. During the next general modernist/New Englandly20 stage of reading when nine editions of her work were produced from 1914 to 1945, editors were a bit more bold but still clearly felt that Dickinson’s unusual expressions needed to be explained. In 1929, niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi published “It always felt to me – a / wrong / To that Old Moses – done – ” (FP 512), a near-blasphemous poem questioning God’s sense of justice.21 In fact, Dickinson’s speaker depicts God as a “Boy” who “deal[s] with / lesser Boy  – ” when she characterizes his refusal to let Moses enter the Promised Land because in a ft of temper he had struck, rather than simply spoken to, a rock in order to have water brought forth for the thirsty, whining, petulant, ungrateful Israelites whom he had led out of slavery. Though the poem clearly situates God as a bully, 124 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.010

Dickinson in the Twenty-First Century

Bianchi and Alfred Hampson, her coeditor, felt Dickinson’s clear-eyed sense of fairness and portrayal of God as a character lacking that compassion had to be explained, and claimed that “she is not really calling her Creator a bully, she is only ‘Emily outraged’ again, as when we ran to her with our childish tales of injustice.”22 The next general stage of reading Dickinson might be called new critical/ psychological and runs from the mid-1950s to the 1970s. The frst variorum of Dickinson’s poems appears in 1955, and they are numbered and ordered more or less chronologically, lending a scientifc, objective aura to that production. Numbering the poems as if they are specimens for study certainly suits New Criticism, the formalist movement claiming self-referentiality for what were viewed as self-contained aesthetic objects. Poems, especially the shorter poems and lyrics of Dickinson, were perfect for that school of thought. Her captures of intense psychological moments, of bits of consciousness so diffcult to grasp that they are beyond almost anyone’s expression, as well as her mysterious, not well understood life were likewise perfect for the psychoanalytic literary theory enjoying so much attention from the mid-century until well into the 1970s. When literary criticism entered a stage of strong feminist critical inquiry, Dickinson criticism also entered a stage from the 1970s to 1990s that might be called feminist/psychological/ sociological. During this time her circumstance as a woman poet, both personal and as in terms of social status, generated much criticism and biography, and both her sexuality and her courage were more readily recognized. Because of the fresh felds of inquiry enabled by these critical movements, a volume such as Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson found both a welcoming publisher and audience by the end of the 1990s.23 Just at the time a queerer Dickinson was more readily entertained, use of the World Wide Web for educational and research purposes became more and more widespread, and an era of reading we might call writerly/postmodernist was ushered in, an era in which critical reading still thrives. In fact, although each of the previously mentioned stages of reading Dickinson emerged as literary and critical evolutions made them more possible, none of them is temporally bound, and all of them still inform and sometimes focus contemporary editorial productions and interpretations. Writerly/ postmodernist reading Dickinson also creates suitable environs for reading her manuscript surrogates. In what follows, the digital Dickinsons featuring manuscript views are briefy examined and analytically described the better to enable readers to use them critically. These descriptions are designed, then, as companions to those digital resources. The Walt Whitman Archive24 is clearly the main, primary scholarly digital archive devoted to his work, but 125 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.010

Martha Nell Smith

there are multiple scholarly digital projects under way on Emily Dickinson contributing to a Dickinson “Commons” online. For a poet who has inspired such diverse and contesting responses and who championed “dwell[ing] in Possibility,” this is undoubtedly a good thing. Dickinson is, after all, a subject (and curator) of our deep gossip, and of our archives – archives of documents and artifacts in the special collections of prestigious libraries, and in the Dickinson houses known as the Emily Dickinson Museum, and the archives of our individual and collective critical and theoretical attentions. Though Dickinson is more dispersed digitally than is Whitman, the media offer opportunities for instantaneous connections and linking that are not readily available bibliographically. In the digital world, a single, monolithic resource structured like a variorum is simply not necessary in order to optimize access and use. The oldest of the digital Dickinsons is the Dickinson Electronic Archives (DEA), which began in 1994. Its earliest conception was heavily infuenced by all of the excitements of widespread use of PCs and the multi-faceted, extratextual connections made possible by the World Wide Web. Images and sound fles could now be exchanged as well as typed text. Much more, both in quantity and diversity of type, information could be put into a single resource and linked across resources. Those facts alone contrasted with bound publications such as The Book in exciting, most promising ways. Since no major holder of Dickinson manuscripts was talking about digitizing their holdings in 1994 nor for the next decade, the DEA’s earliest goal was to bring every known manuscript in Dickinson’s hand together in one online resource. An illusion of comprehensivity infused the dreams of that early project, but through use as a creative and critical collaboratory and through deeper understandings of limits concerning entirety, as well as because of restrictive copyright asserted by Harvard University Press, the DEA’s designs and ambitions evolved, spinning off the digital scholarly edition Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences: A Born-Digital Inquiry in 2008 and the exhibition-oriented DEA2 in 2012. Because the DEA emerged well before the widespread use of digital resources, one of its frst goals was to teach readers what might be done with these new tools. So the earliest forms of publication in the DEA were three digital articles  – “Emily Dickinson Writing a Poem,” which showed readers that Dickinson in fact collaborated and did not write in total isolation; “Dickinson, Cartoonist,” which showed readers that the poet was far from morbid and totally obsessed with death but in fact had a jaunty and bawdy sense of humor; and “The Letter-Poem, a Dickinson Genre.” The latter project did not claim that Dickinson is the only poet to mingle poetry and prose, but in showing that she did so it also made clear that her poems are not the little lyrics engulfed by white space 126 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.010

Dickinson in the Twenty-First Century

that print editions make them appear but are in fact expressions that fll up the page with confdence and verve.25 As the DEA’s editors were working on markup of Dickinson’s manuscript oeuvre, the DEA collaborated with The Walt Whitman Archive to develop new media pedagogical strategies in The Classroom Electric: Dickinson, Whitman, and American Culture and also produced Titanic Operas: A Poet’s Corner of Contemporary Women Poets Responding to Dickinson’s Legacy where users can listen to Gwendolyn Brooks, Amy Clampitt, Toi Derricotte, Sandra Gilbert, Marilyn Hacker, Carolyn Kizer, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Joyce Carol Oates, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Alicia Ostriker, Katha Pollitt, Adrienne Rich, and Ruth Stone read her poems and their own in tribute to Dickinson, and read other poets’ written responses to her.26 Because the DEA was proceeding through Dickinson’s publication according to her own system – in other words, correspondent by correspondent – and because her own work focused on Dickinson’s scraps and fragments, DEA coeditor Marta L. Werner produced Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson’s Late Fragments and Related Texts, 1875–1886 from 1999 to the present. As did I, Werner began her deep markup of manuscripts in SGML, but now, as is Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences, Radical Scatters is marked up with TEI-conformant XML. Radical Scatters focuses on drafts and fragments written in the last decade of Dickinson’s life and closely examines her compositional processes. Readers can easily access individual manuscript images as well as constellations of images and can search for material features of the documents as well as for words that are on their pages. An invaluable, dynamic lens examining the poet’s compositional strategies, Radical Scatters also shows just how limiting senses of Dickinson’s writing that rigidly separate prose from poetry can be. Originally site-licensed at the University of Michigan Press, Radical Scatters is now, as is the DEA, completely open access. Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences (EDC) is a Rotunda New Digital Scholarship publication of the University of Virginia Press. This XML-based archive brings together selected poems, letters, and letter-poems from Dickinson’s correspondence with her sister-in-law and primary confdante, Susan Dickinson, and in the EDC each text is presented with a high-quality digitized scan of the holograph manuscript. These images have zoom functionality for examination of any documentary minutiae as well as a special light-box feature that allows users to view and compare constellations of related documents (all a user needs to do is click on “View constellation of document images” in the left sidebar and a new window opens enabling this functionality). Users may search by date, genre, manuscript features, and full text. Also, the table of contents is dynamic and can be organized 127 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.010

Martha Nell Smith

by frst line of the manuscript, by constellation (different versions of poems or other associated text organized together), by archive in which the document is housed, or by the Franklin, Johnson, or Open Me Carefully editions. Dating from the 1850s to the end of Dickinson’s life, the work collected here shows all the characteristics of the poet’s developing and mature art. Also, for every document, the user may examine, copy, and use the XML markup scheme. Though Harvard University Press has required that the University of Virginia Press site license this resource, this digital scholarly edition is in every other way completely open access.27 The Boston Public Library’s (BPL) Emily Dickinson’s Papers is a Flickr site featuring images of the letters and poems Dickinson sent to Higginson. It provides the BPL’s accession and cataloging information as well as the citation information for those letters’ and poems’ appearances in Harvard University Press editions. Though the BPL resource itself is completely open access and provides opportunities for users to make their own notes about the documents, a stern note at the bottom of every image directs users to contact Harvard University Press for “permission to quote from published editions of Dickinson’s work that are still in copyright (such as the Johnson and Franklin editions of the poems).” That is, of course, proper, but what is not so clear and necessarily justifed is the subsequent “and for all commercial uses of Dickinson texts in this image set.” The image set is of documents that are in the public domain, and if a user is quoting from those and not from published editions, there should be no copyright and permissions issue. The Amherst College Digital Collection (ACDC) Emily Dickinson Collection makes that absolutely clear at the bottom of each image that it features:  “Amherst College provides this item to support research and scholarship. Amherst College can neither grant nor deny permission to publish or quote from materials in its collections. Neither titles nor facts can be copyrighted; therefore, permission is not required to cite a collection as a source or to use facts from it.” ACDC’s Emily Dickinson Collection likewise lays all of its holdings out according to what a researcher will fnd when calling up folders with Dickinson documents within them.28 So when a user accesses the page to browse the collection, image after image of manuscript is seen, and a user clicks on that thumbnail to be taken to the contents of the folder. The manuscripts are featured on a clean, white background so they are friendly to sight-challenged users, and users can browse images of manuscripts by words, lines, or catalog number; zoom into the manuscripts; download images of them; reuse the images in other digital resources; and quote from them freely. The site is truly open access, and though information is given for the reader’s convenience about the Johnson and Franklin editions, there is no note mandating quoting from those resources, and 128 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.010

Dickinson in the Twenty-First Century

searching will take you to the manuscript containing the words for which you searched. By contrast, the Harvard University Press and Houghton Library Emily Dickinson Archive (EDA), for which I serve on the Advisory Board, is open access in that it provides digital surrogate images for nearly all of Dickinson’s known poems,29 providing readers with images of manuscripts held in multiple libraries and archives, an array of transcriptions of Dickinson’s poems tied to print editions, and digital tools intended to foster exploration and scholarship. Users of the site can browse images of manuscripts by a frst line if it is included in Franklin’s variorum as a poem, by the date he gives, and/or by recipient named in his edition. Users can turn the pages of and zoom into the manuscripts; search the full text of six editions of Dickinson’s poems (but not of the manuscripts); browse Emily Dickinson’s Lexicon, a resource indexing Dickinson’s word choices along with their contemporary defnitions; and create an account to make notes on images, privately save transcriptions of poems, and create new editions of her poetry for private, personal use only. A splendid resource in many ways, the EDA features no editorial innovation and little innovation as a digital archive. The EDA’s orders are not dictated by the manuscripts, as is Amherst College’s and those of the DEA, Radical Scatters, and the EDC, but are structured according to Franklin’s variorum. Rather than being produced with the manuscript as copy text, the EDA is produced with the Franklin variorum version as copy text. The EDA is therefore static, rather than dynamic, caught as it is in the frozen social relations of the variorum edition.30 If one searches by the frst line of the manuscript letter-poem to Susan Dickinson “Morning / might come” found in “A Letter-Poem, A Dickinson Genre,” and in Open Me Carefully, search results are “0.”31 However, if one searches the EDA for “Show me Eternity,” the search yields “3,” though two of the search results have nothing to do with the letter-poem to Susan; only the top search result does. “Show me Eternity” takes one to the document because those are the lines Franklin has marked as the beginning of a poem. So EDA users might search for the frst line of a Dickinson manuscript and have “0” results, though the manuscript in question is in fact in the EDA. Also, if one searches for a poem enclosed in a letter, the search leads to the part of the letter containing the Franklin-identifed poem. Searching for “ ‘Speech’ – is a prank / of Parliament – ” (FP 193) leads one not to the frst line of the Dickinson manuscript in which it appears but to the third page of the letter in which it is featured about one-third of the way down the page. The frst line of the manuscript on which it appears is “Dear Mr Bowles,” for which one gets “0” results when searching. By contrast, Searching ACDC’s Emily Dickinson’s 129 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.010

Martha Nell Smith

Collection takes one to the entire manuscript and to an image that begins with the letter’s frst page.32 The EDA is a prominent digital resource that serves as an illustrated companion to Franklin’s variorum, not a full open access archive of the poet’s manuscripts. These new digital resources offer multiple ways of accessing high-quality digital surrogates of her scribal materials. Readers should remember that even in these media, we are no closer to the writer herself, however enticing and revealing their color display on our computer screens. Also, users should work to examine what is presented and how in each of these resources, and should demand that every resource make clear the dictates of its searchability. Whatever their limitations, each of these digital resources offers access to vital elements of Dickinson’s writing that cannot be revealed or as clearly presented in a book and in doing so provides new opportunities for scholarship, critical understanding, and reading pleasure. So in the twenty-frst century, “What is it like to read Emily Dickinson?” By now, even casual readers of Emily Dickinson are aware not only of the legends of the poet writing out of supposed brokenheartedness, and about her being morbid, but also that many of her poems (try, for example, “Because I could not stop for death”) can be sung to “The Yellow Rose of Texas” since her writings import ballad and hymnal schemes of rhythm and rhyme. In the world of print, the author “Emily Dickinson” has to varying degrees put the writer Emily Dickinson under erasure, frst by printing poems in newspapers and journals written by “anon” and then through editorial cropping, rearrangements, and textual choreographies that persist to this day. As we continue to remember that we cannot really go back to a time when Emily Dickinson’s writings were not literature, to our questions we should add, “Do we know what we are reading when we read Emily Dickinson’s writings?” Arguing persuasively that richly diverse poetic writings – epitaphs, elegies, anagrams, meditations, epics, satires, dialogues in verse, pedagogical exercises, protest songs, ballads, odes, and commemorative recitations – have all been “lyricized” by post-nineteenth-century reading practices, collapsed into one genre that occludes our apprehensions of reading practices of the past and their import, Virginia Jackson has relentlessly asked, “Did Emily Dickinson write poems?”33 By the twenty-frst century, we cannot help but come to Dickinson with frm expectations of what we will fnd, expectations generated by our own interpretations and more than a century’s worth of criticism featured in semantic prosthetic devices that help us think – books, articles, editions, and critical and editorial work online. What makes reading Emily Dickinson so fetching, and to a wide range of audiences, has of course in part been her somewhat notorious fame for solitude contrasted with her fame for, in the practice of 130 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.010

Dickinson in the Twenty-First Century

her writing, having a genius for intimacy. As those avid readers Susan and Emily Dickinson watched the lamps that ficker while poets write and read, across the meadow, creating an intimacy across space, so the written record that Dickinson left creates intimacy with her readers across space and time, whatever the medium, whatever the edition by and through which she is enjoyed. The poematic thrives in her work, however presented, and one of the great joys and advantages of the twenty-frst century and multiple machines (from The Book to various digital devices) by which readers can peruse Dickinson’s writings is that the poematic is alive in every media translation of Dickinson’s writings. Ethically crucial for us as well is that we should employ the technology of self-consciousness to delve more deeply into questions that should be asked of and by any edition and every reader: Who made the texts on the screen or page before you and for what purposes? Who has handled Dickinson’s “letter to the World” and her transmission of poems in letters to her contemporaries in order to put her words before you? Triangular intertextualities – or the dynamic infuences of biography, reception, and textual reproduction upon one another – inform all editorial practices; indeed, they inform all critical positions and positionings. Will you, as every editor, critic, and biographer has already done, join in producing and reproducing, over and over again, Dickinson’s “letter to the World”? Will you, in other words, read, really read, Emily Dickinson? As Thornton Wilder said: Yet genius on wings can confound any of our own theoretical objections. Emily Dickinson wrote: ’Tis glory’s overtakelessness That makes our running poor.

Emily Dickinson, in addition to forging our American language for us, enjoyed many a witches’ Sabbath with the language, on her own.34 N OT E S 1 “FP” refers to R. W. Franklin, ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1998) and gives the number Franklin assigned the Dickinson poem. This essay quotes directly from her manuscripts and gives the HUP edition number for the reader’s convenience. Digital surrogates of the manuscripts for this poem can be found in Emily Dickinson Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and Houghton Library, 2013; http:// www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/237040), cited hereafter as EDA, and in Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences:  A  Born-Digital Textual Inquiry, eds. Martha Nell Smith and Lara Vetter (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008; http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/edc/display.xqy?doc=/edc/DEAms EDCSHDhb189.1b.xml), cited hereafter as EDC. The digital resources also give printing histories. 131 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.010

Martha Nell Smith 2 Mabel Loomis Todd’s diary, February 8, 1882; quoted in Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1960) 2: 361. Throughout the rest of this essay, Years and Hours is cited as YH with the volume and page number. 3 Gary Scharnhorst, “A Glimpse of Dickinson at Work,” American Literature 57 (October 1985):  192. An indispensable addition to Scharnhorst’s note is Melissa White, “Letter to the Light:  Discoveries in Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence,” The Emily Dickinson Journal 16.1 (2007):  1–26. White chronicles some of Dickinson’s “semi-private” circulation of her manuscripts to her Norcross cousins, underscoring that Dickinson’s writing was not something she hid. 4 Johnson’s variorum is also The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955). 5 See The Lemonheads, “3-9-4,” Hate Your Friends (Taang! Records, 1987) and Simon and Garfunkel, “The Dangling Conversation,” Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme (Columbia Records, 1966). 6 See Klaus Lubbers, Emily Dickinson:  A  Critical Revolution (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 1968); Willis J. Buckingham, Emily Dickinson’s Reception in the 1890s: A Documentary History (Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989); Joel Myerson, Emily Dickinson: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh and London:  University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984). 7 EDA (http://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/235789). 8 The parenthetical citation is to Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward, eds., The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1958) and puts the number given to the letter in that edition after “JL.” This letter can be found in full in EDC (http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/edc/display.xqy?doc=/edc/ DEAmsEDCTWHbpl23.1b.xml). Also, as much as 80  percent of Dickinson’s correspondences have likely been lost. So it is reasonable to assume that she sent far more than one-third of her poems out in letters. 9 Quoted by Millicent Todd Bingham, Ancestors’ Brocades: The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945): 127. 10 Adrienne Rich, “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,” Parnassus 5.1 (1976) and in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence:  Selected Prose 1966–1978 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979): 157–183. 11 For a much more extended analysis of Dickinson’s distinguishing between the terms “publish” and “print” and the ramifcations of her redefning publication itself, see my Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992). In 1992, that Dickinson was publishing herself was not nearly as accepted as it is now. 12 Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writings with Scissors:  American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 13 Sandra M. Gilbert, “American Sexual Poetics of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson,” Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986): 128. 14 The digital resources are given chronologically (in the order in which they were produced):  Dickinson Electronic Archives (1994 to the present; 132 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.010

Dickinson in the Twenty-First Century

15

16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23

24 25

26

http://emilydickinson.org), Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson’s Late Fragments and Related Texts, 1870–1886 (1999 to the present; http://radicalscatters.unl .edu), Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences:  A  Born-Digital Inquiry (2008 to the present; http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/edc), Boston Public Library’s Emily Dickinson Papers (2009 to the present; https://www.fickr.com/photos/ boston_public_library/sets/72157604466722178/), Amherst College’s Emily Dickinson Collection (2012 to the present; https://acdc.amherst.edu/collection/ ed), and Emily Dickinson Archive (2013 to the present; http://edickinson.org). Both Radical Scatters and Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences are scholarly editions. Besides these six resources, there are important digital archives offered by the Emily Dickinson Museum (https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/) and also by the Hougton Library (http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/ collections/modern/dickinson.cfm). Amherst College is adding to its Emily Dickinson Collection all of the time (transcripts and notes by editors and more), and the John Hay Library at Brown University has a substantial collection donated by the heirs of Dickinson’s niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi (1991 to the present; http://library.brown.edu/collatoz/info.php?id=33); some material from that resource is included online in the Dickinson Electronic Archives, and more will be added. There are several strong studies of Dickinson’s circulations in literary cultures in the nineteenth century and even her compositional processes. Please see “Further Reading.” February 17th, early 1900s; q.  in Writings by Susan Dickinson, eds. Smith, Vetter, and Laura Lauth (http://archive.emilydickinson.org/susan/chp1.html). EDA (http://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/235919). Richard Poirier, “Writing Off the Self,” The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Refections (New York: Random House, 1987): 183. EDA (http://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/235559). I borrow “New Englandly” from Dickinson. See FP 256, or “The Robin’s my Criterion / for Tune  –” at http://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_ sets/235480. EDA (http://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/235792). Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson, eds., Further Poems of Emily Dickinson:  Withheld from Publication by Her Sister Lavinia (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1929): viii. Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, eds., Open Me Carefully:  Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Ashfeld, MA:  Paris Press, 1998). See “Further Reading” for numerous works situating Dickinson’s writing more historically and sociologically. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, eds., The Walt Whitman Archive (mid-1990s to the present; http://www.whitmanarchive.org/). “Emily Dickinson Writing a Poem” (http://emilydickinson.org/safe/index.html); “Dickinson, Cartoonist” (http://emilydickinson.org/cartoon/index.html); “The Letter-Poem, a Dickinson Genre” (http://emilydickinson.org/cartoon/index .html). Kenneth M. Price and Martha Nell Smith, eds., The Classroom Electric (http:// www.classroomelectric.org/); Smith, with Laura Elyn Lauth, eds., Titanic Operas (http://www.emilydickinson.org/titanic-operas/folio-one/). 133

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.010

Martha Nell Smith 27 EDC (http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/edc; user id: edc, password: d1Ck!nN [those are numerals after the “d” and “$”]). 28 ACDC Emily Dickinson Collection (https://acdc.amherst.edu/browse/collection/ ed). 29 The EDA Advisory Board is described near the bottom of the “Partners and Credits” page (http://www.edickinson.org/team). Also listed on that page are contributing institutions, the technical team, the Harvard UP team, and the Harvard Library team. This description is part of the Manuscript Markup Workshop Marta Werner and I led in October 2014 at Case Western University for DEA team members who are proceeding with TEI-conformant XML markup of Dickinson’s documents, a project endorsed by Leslie Morris of the Houghton Library, who led the EDA project. The Emily Dickinson Lexicon, curated by Cynthia Hallen, is also a partner (http://edl.byu.edu/). 30 I talk about the problems with searchability in the bibliographically oriented EDA in “Frozen Social Relations and Time for a Thaw: Visibility, Exclusions, and Considerations for Postcolonial Digital Archives,” Journal of Victorian Culture 19.3 (Fall 2014): 403–410. “Frozen social relations” is a term that feminist theorist Donna Haraway and Katie King have used. 31 In the DEA’s “A Letter-Poem,” “Morning / might come” is featured as a blending of poetry and prose (http://archive.emilydickinson.org/letter/hb90.htm), as it is in Open Me Carefully (246 – the number refers to that given by Hart and Smith for each document within OMC). 32 In the EDA, “Dear Mr Bowles – . . . ‘Speech’ is a prank” can only be found by clicking on the arrows at the bottom of the manuscript image (JL 252; http:// www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/239066). ACDC Emily Dickinson’s Collection (https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:4834). 33 Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery:  A  Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 34 Thornton Wilder, “Toward an American Language,” American Characteristics and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1979): 29. F U RT H E R R E A DI N G Crumbley, Paul and Eleanor Elson Heginbotham, eds., Dickinson’s Fascicles: A Spectrum of Possibilities (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2014). Dickinson Electronic Archives. http://www.emilydickinson.org/bibliography. This resource is continually updated. Eberwein, Jane and Cynthia MacKenzie, eds., Reading Emily Dickinson’s Letters: Critical Essays (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). Howe, Susan, My Emily Dickinson (rpt. New  York:  New Directions, 2007 [orig. 1985]). Jackson, Virginia, Dickinson’s Misery (Princeton and Oxfordshire:  Princeton University Press, 2005). Miller, Cristanne, Reading in Time:  Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). Richards, Eliza and Alexandra Socarides, eds., “Networking Dickinson,” Special Issue Emily Dickinson Journal 23.1 (2014). 134 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.010

Dickinson in the Twenty-First Century Richards, Eliza, ed., Emily Dickinson in Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Socarides, Alexandra, Dickinson Unbound:  Paper, Process, Poetics (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Werner, Marta, Open Folios:  Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). “Ravished Slates: Re-visioning the Lord Letters,” Dickinson Electronic Archives 2, http://www.emilydickinson.org/ravished-slates-re-visioning-the-lord-letters, accessed February 2013 to the present.

135 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.010

10 JOA N N E B R A XTO N A N D L AU R I   R A MEY

Paul Laurence Dunbar

A contemporary of W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington – who called him the “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race” – the author of six volumes of poetry, as well as novels, librettos, songs, and essays in a tragically short life (1872–1906), Paul Laurence Dunbar was America’s frst prominent black man of letters. He found wide appeal with black and white audiences, writing in both dialect and standard English. His work in dialect was perhaps the most controversial; some critics misread it because white authors had so often used dialect to caricature and demean the black experience and persons of African descent. But such critics overlooked Dunbar’s tragic-comic aesthetic of resistance, his use of irony, and his negotiation of “the mask” to explore and confront racism in the spaces between black and white cultural paradigms. Dunbar also used African American spirituals and other materials from the oral tradition – then viewed by some as objects of disdain or vestiges of plantation culture – to form an authentic poetic diction. This complex voice of duality became, for the generations that followed him, the basis for a new black aesthetic that would negotiate diffcult and often externally imposed boundaries and limitations. For instance, Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask” exemplifes black aesthetic resistance to white cultural ideals and a self-defning voice for the modern African American experience. Dunbar transcended the stereotypical plantation tradition and anticipated the aesthetic developments of African American Modernism. From James Weldon Johnson to Countee Cullen to Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, African American poets from the start of the twentieth century and after engaged with and responded to Dunbar. In God’s Trombones and The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), Johnson sought a revision of Dunbar’s aesthetic by “trying to break away from, not Negro dialect itself, but the limitation on Negro dialect imposed by the fxing effects of long convention.”1 Nevertheless, Dunbar remained, for many, the poet laureate of his race and at times as well as an infuential and innovative voice within the larger American literary canon. 136 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.011

Paul Laurence Dunbar

In the “the old tunes,” Dunbar found and deftly reshaped authentic cultural materials that had been burlesqued to portray African Americans and their culture negatively. Jazz later formed Langston Hughes’s aesthetic in a similar way:  he  – among other writers in multiple genres  – followed Dunbar’s example in recuperating and recreating African American cultural artifacts. When Hughes wrote, “Most of my poems are racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I know,” it might just as easily have been Dunbar speaking. Because of what Dunbar had done earlier, these “younger Negro artists” could express their “individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.”2 Dunbar performed the extraordinary act, for a black poet of his time, of writing some poems in conventional poetic diction and forms, and others in folk-rooted forms. “Authenticity” has been one of the consistent critical barometers applied to African American poetry as far back as the spirituals and work songs. The criterion of authenticity has been a double-edged sword. Deeming only certain African American poetry “authentic” valorizes a limited array of themes and styles. Poetry criticized for being “inauthentic” has been dismissed as mimicking mainstream white conventions. Versatility in black poetry has been regarded with suspicion, owing to concerns that the poet’s “true” emotions and identity are not being fully revealed. Commentary of this nature undermines Dunbar’s critical and original contributions to a transformative and still changing aesthetic rooted in the nature of embodied black experience. As DuBois predicted, the problem of the twentieth century proved to be the problem of the color line, while the critical issue of modern and postmodern poetry has been the identity of the lyric subject. For poets such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, defning and normative features of Modernist poetry included animation of diverse speaking subjects, poetic registers and dictions, and stylistic experimentation. For audiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Dunbar’s perceived dual body of poems created a conundrum as to which was his “real” poetry and whether he should be taken as seriously as poets who used an “authentic” voice and style consistently. A  black poetics was not formulated until later and might have been necessary to enable a proper appreciation of Dunbar’s writing in its unity. He exemplifed the problem of “double-consciousness” identifed by DuBois.3 In fact, “We Wear the Mask” is a poetic evocation of this very condition: “Why should the world be over-wise, / In counting all our tears and sighs? / Nay, let them only see us, while / We wear the mask.”4 As has been noted, Dunbar’s example also anticipates Hughes’s landmark 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” which argues for an aesthetic rooted in African American identity, individualism, and the lives of ordinary 137 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.011

Joanne Braxton and Lauri Ramey

people. Following Dunbar, vernacular poetry gained respectability, power, and agency in African American poetry; now it could be used artfully to evoke the variety of black life and expression instead of to parody it. Again, this marks Dunbar’s contribution to an emerging Modernist black aesthetic. Using an American vernacular that was equal parts contrivance and mimesis, Dunbar might well be enshrined, in the canon, as an innovator on a par with Whitman and Dickinson. In many ways, Dunbar was frst, preceding even Eliot and Pound, in his treatment of the world as an affair of masks. Dunbar’s most renowned poems now routinely appear in major anthologies of American, African American, and English language literature. Anthologies of African American and African diasporic verse typically contain large, diverse selections from his work, including such poems as “We Wear the Mask,” “Sympathy,” “An Ante-bellum Sermon,” “When Malindy Sings,” “A Negro Love Song,” “The Poet,” “Frederick Douglass,” and “The Colored Soldiers.” But despite Dunbar’s dozens of classic, astonishing poems, and his inescapable practical and symbolic presence in American and African American literature, he remains a perplexing poet whose precise artistic accomplishments have yet to be fully articulated. When the 1972 centennial of Dunbar’s birth came and passed, many academics still failed to give Dunbar his due. Indeed, signifcantly, Houston Baker felt that Booker T. Washington was more representative of the advent of Modernism than Dunbar. Nikki Giovanni said, in tribute to Dunbar, “We overlook so many of the people who have done so much.” Signifcantly, the poem she read on this occasion, “Like a Ripple on a Pond,” was originally written for Margaret Danner, another among so many fgures in African American poetry who have been overlooked. Dunbar’s work withstands the criticism faced by most black writers who attempt to portray authentic black folk speech because Dunbar, in poems such as “An Ante-bellum Sermon,” inverted these stereotypes, bringing into view the practical uses of the “mask” together with a bi-vocality we might date, in African American literature, to Phillis Wheatley’s “Twas Mercy That Brought Me From My Pagan Land.” Both poets have been misread and, at times, underappreciated; a hostile literary establishment simply overlooked the doublevoiced use of irony in these works. The aesthetic was there, along with a “principle of indirection” that sustained a strategic social ethic, which itself undergirded a physical and cultural landscape rife with practical experiences of moral injury, not only in the world of publishing, but in everyday life. Darwin Turner described Dunbar as a “rejected symbol.”5 Even the accolades Dunbar received proved a mixed blessing, as audiences alternately admired and ignored aspects of his work. He wrote to James Weldon Johnson, “I’ve got to write dialect poetry; it’s the only way I can get them 138 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.011

Paul Laurence Dunbar

to listen to me.” In her introduction to Dunbar’s poetry in Countee Cullen’s classic anthology of black poetry, Caroling Dusk (1927), Alice Dunbar Nelson discussed “the famous criticism of Majors and Minors by William Dean Howells” and its lasting impact (Howells had praised the vernacular poetry, ranged, in the book, under the heading “Humor and Dialect,” but had largely dismissed the rest). According to Dunbar Nelson, it was not Dunbar’s goal to concentrate mainly on the dialect poetry for which he became best known; most of his poetry was in standard English. Nelson alluded to Dunbar’s “The Poet,” using its closing line as a self-referential epitaph: she called it the “tragedy of his life” that “the world ‘turned to praise the jingle in a broken tongue.’ ”6 Dunbar’s poems sometime refer to “spirituals” or “the old tunes” euphemistically, both directly and indirectly. In “Long Ago,” we read “I done fu’got each ol’-time hymn / We ust to sing in meetin’ ” (193), lines immediately – and ironically  – followed by the association of the forgotten hymns with prayers learned from a preacher in those same meetings. In this context, the phrase “ol’-time hymn” may or may not refer to slave spirituals and work songs now forgotten. So, we might take this erasure as a reference to traditional white hymns sung in church services many attended under the supervision of white masters overseeing black religious expression as a hedge against potential rebellion. “Ol’-time hymns” also could refer to the secret meetings held by the slaves themselves – either their own (generally forbidden) worship services or the ring shouts that typically followed, where the self-determined poetry of the spirituals was sung. These powerfully haunting songs were often subversive, characterized by an aesthetic of secrecy. In short, a phrase one reader might regard as sentimentalizing plantation culture may instead constitute a powerfully subtle and ironic statement of the loss, in the present, of the subversive duality of the voice of the oppressed reaching for transcendence; this would explain why the poem itself adopts the technique of doublevoicing for two audiences. So we are left with at least two possible readings of Dunbar’s phrase, a phrase weighty and symbolic enough to serve as a virtual objective correlative for his own poetry, and for early African American poetry in general : “ol’-time hymns” could refer either to accepted white verse (church hymns), lined out by white exemplars and “properly” repeated, or to self-determined poetry forged by black exemplars, to different effect and use. In either case, the presence of these songs in Dunbar’s poem is ghostly and evokes an era wherein blacks sometimes purchased authentic self-knowledge at a high price and therefore wisely learned to conceal it. But this ephemeral presence has an inspirational function. In stanza two of “Long Ago,” which introduces a refrain, a new and different “song” is 139 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.011

Joanne Braxton and Lauri Ramey

created in the speaker’s self-refexive invocation:  “An’ sing a song fu’ de day dat died” (193). The refrain, thrice repeated, assumes an antiphonal function. In a formal and thematic allusion to the call-and-response structure of spirituals, the song of long ago continues to respond to the call of the present. In stanza three, the poet continues to drive home the point that some memories are lost and others retained: “Hit’s fu’ somet’ings I ust to know / I set to-night a-honin.’ ” The past is gone and, with it, memory. The poem is a ghostly, palimpsestic call-and-response duet between two songs (and singers/poets), and two eras, directly echoing two central operational features of the spirituals’ unique voice and imagery: metonymic voices that speak for individual and community and the speakers’ ability to transcend time and space based on the non-Cartesian perspective of African religion and philosophy. The new song created in the present for “De day of long ergo” is not the same as the song actually sung during a past now dead. The song of long ago is mentioned once in the frst stanza and has been forgotten as the time of the poem moves on. The “new” song cannot be the same as the forgotten song – which is mentioned only in stanza one – but has been inspired by it. While the old song remains an echo in a refrain that recurs and recurs, the new song born of the forgotten song grows ever louder. It may be a refrain in which a contemporary song  – a song created indisputably of African American agency  – was inspired by, but is not the same as, the “ol’-time hymn” of a past that has been “forgotten.” The past cannot literally or metaphorically be left behind, but neither can it be fully represented or embodied. This view of black song supports the preponderance of critical writing on Dunbar’s poetry, which sees the major issue as the split between his vernacular and formal verse. The songs of the enslaved have been thought either to refect the vernacular tradition or to serve as a symbol of its rejection. Condemnation for not being authentic enough results in categorization not typically applied to poetry disconnected from racial signifers. Consider the parallel role of students and faculty at Hampton Institute (now University) who worked with Dunbar to produce such volumes as Candle Lightin’ Time (Dodd Mead, 1901), a book illustrated with fne photographs taken by the Hampton Institute Camera Club and featuring decorative engravings by Margaret Armstrong. The book brought new readers to Dunbar’s work; and other volumes like it, produced by Dunbar in collaboration with the Camera Club, freshly arranged and introduced spirituals to the larger public. There is a clear lineage building on a common source that provides us with the critical ability to establish an African American poetic canon with shared resources and reference points, including music, rhythm, doublevoicing, consciousness of two audiences, irony, hyperbole, and other 140 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.011

Paul Laurence Dunbar

conventional fgures. Though a poem such as an “An Ante-bellum Sermon” refers directly to spirituals as both subject and method, Dunbar uses their structures and operations in hidden ways, too (which is precisely how the spirituals themselves operate). In other poems the presence of the spirituals is much less obvious, but that presence explains the impact of Dunbar’s poetry astonishingly well. These processes show how Dunbar relies on foundational sources in African American poetry to create his own African American poetry – not solely on African American “vernacular culture,” in other words, which is a highly signifcant distinction. He does not, that is, exclusively use “vernacular language” as style or device; he employs it as an artistic model. The frst recordings by the Fisk Jubilee Singers (1909–1911) aimed to preserve the authentic style and lyrics of songs as sung by previously enslaved persons at the time the Jubilee Singers frst were formed in 1871. Notably, some of the earliest Fisk recordings now available include four recitations, by Rev. J. A. Myers, of Dunbar’s poems. The poems chosen all refer to the tradition of African American music: “Banjo Song,” “When Malindy Sings,” “The Ol’ Tunes” (from Lyrics of Lowly Life, 1896) and “In the Morning” (from Lyrics of Love and Laughter, 1903). According to Duck Baker’s liner notes for Volume 3 of the series in question (1924–1940), “[Rev. Myers’s] declamations of Paul Laurence Dunbar poems . . . were high points of the concerts of the Fisk singers under James Work II’s direction from 1901–1916.”7 Dunbar’s own recitations were described in reviews as performances in which he sang or declaimed his poetry. Here we can readily see Dunbar as an early precursor of spoken word and performance poetry. The age-old connection between music and poetry in the Western lyric tradition has, over the centuries, been broken, severing the oral from the textual while privileging the latter. One consequence is that the categorization and canonization of spirituals, and of poetry such as Dunbar’s, has been complicated. The connection of African American poetry and song  – which was traditional – became a barrier to appreciation and cultural acceptance because of racist (and aesthetic) preconceptions. While black audiences recognized the deeply engrained bond between poetry and music, they would have been leery of perpetuating popular stereotypes that some white audiences would have been all too happy to recognize and reinforce. Could poetry in dialect have failed to be problematic in the racially complicated cultural and linguistic context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? It is worth noting that because of his skillful redeployment of the English literary canon – notably the British and American Romantic poets, together with his treatment of the mask – Dunbar is often regarded as the founder of modern African American poetry, a touchstone for subsequent 141 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.011

Joanne Braxton and Lauri Ramey

generations of poets. Some emulated him for his bold and affectionate representation of African American culture, while others reacted against his work for a variety of reasons, including, perhaps, professional jealousy. But, regardless of these tensions, it is appropriate to view this infuential poet as a prodigious force in a tradition whose origins – including the techniques of coding, signifyin’, and doublevoicing – lie in an aesthetics of secrecy native to spirituals created by enslaved Africans and their descendants. Dunbar’s prophetic voice exemplifes black aesthetic resiliency, the self-defning voice of the modern African American experience. The publication of “We Wear the Mask” in 1895 coincided with Booker T.  Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” address and anticipated, as we have seen, DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which laid out the theory of “double-consciousness” and described the dialectic of being at once black and American. Dunbar made poetry of this dialectic and duality almost a decade before DuBois theorized it. His complex voice of duality became, for the generation that followed, the basis for a new black aesthetic. Dunbar transcended the stereotypical plantation tradition and anticipated the Harlem Renaissance. He has also been an important fgure for contemporary poets such as Nikki Giovanni, Raymond Patterson, and Etheridge Knight – participants in the 1972 Dunbar Symposium in Dayton, Ohio – and Elizabeth Alexander and Harryette Mullen, who participated in the 2006 Dunbar Symposium at Stanford University. Work inspired by Dunbar has been written by poets as diverse as Ishmael Reed (“Paul Laurence Dunbar in the Tenderloin”), Robert Hayden (“Paul Laurence Dunbar”), and C. S. Giscombe (“Dayton, O., the 50’s & 60’s”). Maya Angelou took the title of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from “Sympathy” and frequently recited Dunbar poems. Even performer Alicia Keyes has acknowledged her debt to Dunbar. The aesthetic infuence of Paul Laurence Dunbar is indeed vital and ongoing; making it visible reaffrms his continuing presence in literature, music, and other contemporary performance contexts. N OT E S 1 The Book of American Negro Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922): xl. 2 Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” published frst in The Nation on June 23, 1926. 3 See DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago:  A.C. McClurg, 1903):  “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, – a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s 142 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.011

Paul Laurence Dunbar

4

5 6

7

self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,  – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (3). The Collected Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, ed. Joanne M.  Braxton (Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press, 1993):  71. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. See Turner, Paul Laurence Dunbar:  The Rejected Symbol (New  York:  Bobbs Merrill, 1967). See Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk (New York:  Harper and Brothers, 1927):  1–2. The article by Howells to which Nelson refers appeared in Harper’s on June 27, 1897. The series was issued by Document Records; volume three appeared in 1997.

F U RT H E R R E A DI N G Blount, Marcellus, “Caged Birds: Race and Gender in the Sonnet,” in Engendering Men:  The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, eds. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden (New York and London: Routledge, 1990): 208–232. Brown, Sterling, Negro Poetry and Drama, and the Negro in American Fiction (New York: Athenaeum, 1937). Dunbar, Paul Laurence, The Collected Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, ed. Joanne M. Braxton (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993). With an extensive introduction by the editor. Gayle, Addison, Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar (New York: Doubleday, 1971). Gates, Henry Louis, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Harrell, Willie, ed., We Wear the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Politics of Representative Reality (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2010). Martin, Jay, ed., A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975). Ramey, Lauri, “Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Spirituals,” in Black Music, Black Poetry, ed. Gordon Thompson (Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate, 2014): 39–54. Revell, Peter, Paul Laurence Dunbar (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979). Turner, Darwin, Paul Laurence Dunbar:  The Rejected Symbol (New  York:  Bobbs Merrill, 1967). Wiggins, Lida Keck, The Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, introduction by William Dean Howells (Washington, DC:  Austin-Jenkins, 1907). Includes the frst detailed biography of the poet.

143 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.011

11 H E N RY   AT M OR E

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) was, after Robert Frost, the most decorated and esteemed American poet of the early twentieth century. (The Pulitzer score was four to three in Frost’s favour.) If he has worn less well, it is not because the best of him isn’t equal to the best in Frost but because the worst in Robinson is rather worse than the worst in Frost, and much more copious. Robinson was nothing if not prolifc and became more so after success removed one of the motives for circumspection. Between 1916 and his death in 1935, he published no less than eleven book-length narrative poems (to which should be added “Captain Craig,” his major project of the late 1890s) that are strenuous to read and, for all Robinson’s facility, can’t have been restful to write. “Captain Craig” (1902) and, to an extent, Lancelot (1920) aside, these works have few modern admirers, although they were all solid – in the case of Tristram (1927) spectacular – sellers. Nobody could deny that they have their moments, but the consensus is that they are not the place to make a beginning with Robinson. More acclaimed are a series of medium-length character studies, of a sometimes self-conscious knottiness, beginning with “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford” (1916) and taking in “The Three Taverns” (about St. Paul), “John Brown,” “Lazarus” (all 1920), and “Rembrandt to Rembrandt” (1921).1 What you think about these depends upon what you think about Robert Browning, because they are recognizably in that tradition (although Robinson himself claimed not to enjoy Browning). “Lazarus” is the most successful; it has longeurs but also manages to convey a bracingly arid hopelessness about the central paradoxes of the Christian faith. But Robinson’s fame mainly rests on his short lyrics, and these mainly from the early- and mid-period volumes The Children of the Night (1897), Captain Craig (1902), The Town Down the River (1910), and The Man Against the Sky (1916). The best of them approach a formal perfection almost unmatched in twentieth-century American verse; at the same time, they can often seem easier to admire than to like. A chill hangs around Robinson’s reputation, and he did not, in truth, 144 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.012

Edwin Arlington Robinson

discover many occasions in either his personal or literary engagements to dispel it. Neither did he play often enough to his real strengths, which are not what frst acquaintance with his poetry might suggest them to be. We’ll start with some good lines from one of Robinson’s better poems; they are quoted here because they contain the most famous word in Robinson. He unearthed and wrote it down in his mid-twenties while living a shiftless existence at his family home in Gardiner, Maine, keeping house with his mother, tending the family orchards and vegetable plots, and caring for his brother, Dean, who was succumbing to the opium addiction that would eventually kill him: Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time, Tiering the same dull webs of discontent, Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.2

We can ignore the poets and the kings; Robinson addressed them often, but they were not his natural constituency. “Alnage” gets the man. It means, Robinson’s biographer Scott Donaldson explains, “measurement by the ell” – specifcally, of woollen cloth.3 The frst entry in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dates from 1477, the last from 1736. It was not, then, a word in use; Robinson had to go looking for it. “Tiering” is nice as well, a lot less commonplace than it appears, and oddly proleptic: it means “to arrange and pile in tiers,” and the only instance the OED gives is from an 1888–1889 New York Produce Exchange Report about what were not the contracted duties of lightermen. Robinson would spend several years of his middle age shirking the duties of a New York customs offcial. There are few better exemplifcations of the truth that the most productive use poets can make of their time is in consulting dictionaries. “Alnage” is good because it matches, at the same time as it makes satisfactorily strange, the sentiments of the verse. Who does not suffer on occasions the tedium of life and the way it is constantly shrinking to ft the constant shrinking of the personality? (People who don’t Robinson is mostly content to leave to their better devices.) “Alnage” and “tiering” are also good because of where they can take us, scenes in which we can picture the young Robinson making his owlish rounds, sharpening the nicety of his observations, formulating his melancholy morals. The backroom of the small-town New England haberdashers or dry-goods store, where balding men engage in skillful operations made routine by long practice, and whose industry is exalted by a well-established Protestant doctrine of grace. River wharves where timber, paper, and – in the frigid districts of Maine where Robinson grew up – ice would be processed, packaged, stored, and readied for transit to great cities to the south. Fortunes to be 145 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.012

Henry Atmore

won or lost by men according to their energy, reputation, probity, and self-control: the virtues of Robinson’s father and the chronic weaknesses of his brothers. And the library, Robinson’s favourite haunt, where the words were for the poet in the puritan tradition – Robinson being one of the last of the great American puritans – to seek an exact ft between circumstance and reckoning: the calling of souls to account for the work and idleness of their days before tribunals of ultimate justifcation. “Alnage” does all this, precisely, compactly. Robinson is not always – or even, taken in bulk, often – thus, but we can see in this happily unhappy line the effect it was his signature to strive for. “Alnage” misleads a little in suggesting a habit of attention to the things that people do for a living and the places where they do them. Robinson was not prepossessed by the details of the daily grind. He moves on the whole ghostlike through the towns and landscapes of New England. The main sense in which he seems to have known them intimately was his reluctance ever to go anywhere else. He could write movingly of how the adrift crave contact with the well-moored but he preserved in his public demeanor, and as he grew older with all but his closest friends, a not inconsiderable hauteur. The political poems of the 1920s, “Demos” and “Dionysius upon Demos” (the latter venting spleen at “unethical unanimity” and “amiable automatons” [908,  913]; “We have had too much / Of the insurgent individual,” snarls nasty ol’ democracy [917]) do not betoken a general impulse towards charity. It is always, therefore, a question with him how much contact he seeks with the objects of his regard. Take “The Mill” (1920), a poem that draws upon memories of the steep and unreversed decline in the Gardiner economy during the agricultural depression of the mid-1890s (APL 115–118).4 A  miller fallen on bad times announces to his wife “There are no millers any more” and then, to prove the point, hangs himself. The wife discovers the body in a room where linger the last traces of “a warm / And mealy fragrance of the past.” She too resolves upon suicide, but not to join her husband. Rather, to escape him. “And if she thought it followed her” – it being his body and what it broadcasts of their failure – she reasons: That one way of the few there were Would hide her and would leave no mark: Black water, smooth above the weir Like starry velvet in the night, Though ruffed once, would soon appear The same as ever to the sight. (460–461)

This is a terrifc poem, but it is wrong I think to see it as being about, in any straightforward sense, the consequences of economic decline. What 146 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.012

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Robinson is after is the woman’s motive, and he is after it because it chimes with his own. The key to this is not her grief at her husband’s suicide but its affront. A double affront: to the past, for its blatant contrast to the warm, rich odors of the mill in its heyday; and to propriety, for speaking so unequivocally of his despair. Despair, if it is to be spoken of at all, must not be spoken plain. The wife elects for drowning as a mode of dispatch because she wants her body to be hidden, and her body to be hidden for it to be mute – and so preserve a mede of dignity. Robinson accords her this by his sudden descent (or ascent; it could be argued either way) into stock nocturnal imagery: the water’s surface “like starry velvet” and its momentary “ruffing” when she drops into it, the conjunction of the two suggestive of a frill-necked Elizabethan grandee gazing upon proceedings. There is powerful delicacy at work here: Robinson knows what an insult it would be to show us this woman’s corpse. But there is also distance, as it were, coolly and almost surgically maintained. Robinson’s compassion is of a sort that moves and instructs in proportion to its disavowal of touch. *** His poems live sunken in a dim, tenebrous universe ftful with rumours of hope, a “Light” that has no locatable source and is therefore diffcult or impossible enduringly to credit. Such is their repute. He drew up, Denis Donoghue said, “a list of rules for membership in a gloom club.” His “favourite color was grey”; in the best-known portrait of him (by Lilla Cabot Perry), he wears a grey suit and sports a ferrous moustache clamped to what must be a pallid upper lip.5 The one thing he was sure of was his grief (Radcliffe Squires).6 He inhabited (Ellsworth Barnard) “a chill and twilit world . . . where the dominant mood is one of bewildered suffering.”7 Barnard did much to re-establish Robinson’s reputation in the late-1960s, but sentences such as this, like the Cabot Perry painting, do not exude an atmosphere of welcome. Strait is the gate and narrow the path to Robinson, and the journey is to be undertaken only by the permanently depressed of spirit. Robinson’s people, mostly men in late middle or early old age, are eclipsed in the crabbed purlieus of their personalities by the vast embodied indifference of everything else. Failure is a kind of anti-gravity winnowing Yankeedom of its talentless, unbecoming, pusillanimous, or just plain unlucky chaff. Robinson lives with the chaff, out of fellow feeling we must suppose, although it is rare in the experience of chaff to receive a sinecure through the direct offces of Theodore Roosevelt. Such is the repute of Robinson’s people and their affront to the burnish of the Gilded Age. 147 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.012

Henry Atmore

And as with the greyness, the reputation is not unearned. Compassion, however aloof, is a virtue. The lives of the “born to be defeated” (45) are time-honored fuel for the poetic fame. Lots of poets have found twilight congenial. Robinson is chiefy to be valued, the argument runs, for the dignity and technical brilliance of his address to traditional concerns with unheralded life as it is lived on the social margins. He is very good indeed on how un-success is accommodated by the unsuccessful and how it repulses those who think they still have a race to run (even at Charmus’s risk of coming in seventh out of a feld of fve). My own view is that the reader’s time is often better spent exploring his uplands. Still, we must tarry awhile in his glooms. There are limits to Robinson’s regard for the vagrant. Women feature strongly in his poetry, but for the most part as bereavers, not the bereft. They bereave by importunacy (“John Evereldown”) and by refusal (“For a Dead Lady,” one of Robinson’s subtlest poems); by remaining alive (“The Unforgiven”) and being dead (“Luke Havergal,” “Reuben Bright”). In “Isaac and Archibald,” subject of more detailed discussion below, hints are dropped that the absence of women is a condition of male happiness. For a man who never married, he possessed an uncommon exactitude in diagnosing where marriage hurts. But this should not be taken too far. Robinson was by all accounts nervous around women and hurt by the ones he did allow himself to love (outstandingly, Emma Shepherd, wife of his estranged brother Herman), but his disappointments did not curdle into misogyny.8 “Aunt Imogen” (1902) and “The Poor Relation” (1916) are two fne evocations of spinsterhood; the wife in “Eros Turannos” sins – a point lost on some commentators – but is more sinned against, and the burden of that great poem is a proud woman’s helplessness before the sources of her woe; “The Growth of Lorraine” (1902) comments sardonically but sympathetically on the impossible demands the respectable make on female virtue. A more serious shortcoming is to do with the monochromaticity of Robinson’s feld of vision. The America in his poems is not multitudinous of creeds and colors. Very infrequently, but when it comes, jarringly, this is made explicit: “Poor strangers of another tongue / May now creep in from anywhere” is “Calverly’s” rendering of reasons no longer to habituate a New York bar (330). The infection we give “poor” makes a difference to how these lines are taken: some readers will think that Robinson leaves too much to interpretive fat. But this is a rare case: for the most part other (i.e., genuinely alien) tongues do not fgure with him. The extraordinary names he invented for his personages – John Evereldown, Luke Havergal, Cliff Klingenhagen, Miniver Cheevy, Flammonde, 148 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.012

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Bewick Finzer, Eben Flood, Shadrach O’Leary, Leffngwell, Lingard, and Clavering  – betray something of the philologist’s regard for shades of relation between the ethnicities of Northern Europe. He doesn’t use words like “Celt,” “Teuton,” “Aryan,” “Nordic,” and so on, but we can sense them lurking at times. It was said of Robinson by solid-credentialed Brahmin types, that he had tone (APL 129): one reading of his poetry is that it largely deals with people who by disposition or happenstance have come to lose it. That the line in “The Clerks,” “you that feed yourself with your descent” (90), should support two radically different construals  – descent as inheritance, pride, and descent as failure, abjection – is typical of Robinson. His ruins of men were once fne structures of settled New England blood, and one feels he would not be averse to their restoration as a general program of cultural reform. Another question is what, if anything, we are to learn from Robinson’s taxonomy of the various ways there are for middle-aged men to fail. Take loneliness:  Robinson is often described as its laureate.9 In my view he doesn’t get it quite right, although he comes close at times:  the miscues arrive, precisely, whenever he is tempted into being didactic. It is lazy and derelict to think that loneliness is unitary: lazy because of a common and too pat identifcation of loneliness with inaccessibility; derelict because it is the deadliest of consolations to the despairing to say that everyone is in the same boat. “Richard Cory” (1897), a poem once greatly admired, rests on the contention that loneliness is the common state of all mankind. Even the “imperially slim,” the eternal futterers of feminine pulses, suffer from it: And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head. (82)

A charitable reading would be that Robinson is being ironic here. How right for the townsfolk to resent Richard Cory! How irritating it is when those who walk in glory affect the weaknesses of the “always human,” as if compunction were a duty owed to all, rather than recompense to the ill-favored. Alas, this is not Robinson’s intention: he wants us to contemplate in mute sympathy Cory’s predicament and scorn the sausageless shopkeepers who envy him. A better study, because funnier, is John Evereldown, a man whose isolation stems from a compulsion towards a particular kind of sociability. “Come in by the fre, old man, and wait! / Why do you chatter out there by the gate?” The answer is: God is no friend to John Evereldown . . . I follow the women wherever they call, And that’s why I’m going to Tilbury Town. (73–74) 149 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.012

Henry Atmore

Different and better again is the saddest and most defant of Robinson’s isolates, Eben Flood, talking to himself because there is nobody else to talk to (at all), lord of street-mutterers: He raised again the jug regretfully And shook his head, and was again alone. There was not much that was ahead of him, And there was nothing in the town below – Where strangers would have shut the many doors That many friends had opened long ago. (575)

When the three specimens are arrayed thus, we see that the sophisticate is not, cannot be, lonely in the way that the superannuated skirt-chaser is lonely and that neither of them is lonely in the way that an old man whose friends have all died is lonely. The sophisticate has renown, and while I think Robinson is being lazy in “Richard Cory,” he is not so lazy as to set this at naught; the skirt-chaser has skirt, when and if he can attain it. Robinson doesn’t think either of these are prizes worth the winning, but we need not hold company with him there. And Eben Flood has memories of glories past  – some of, say, Hardy’s desolates, or Larkin’s, can’t even call upon these. To speak, then, as Robinson can be made to speak, of a cosmic loneliness, a negativity abstracted from personality and situation, is to do disservice to the force of the word “lonely.” It is rendered unspecifc to the differentials of experience and, as such, becomes simply tedious. The last indignity to offer Eben Flood would be to assimilate him to Richard Cory. Try to extract anything from Robinson  – turn his moments of insight into the lives of cuckolds, fools, over-reachers, under-reachers, hobos, street-corner Santa Clauses, drunks, the whole motley of their unlooked-for fellowship, into some more expansive motion of human sympathy – and the insights disappear. He was not Hardy: there is no utile philosophy behind his articulation of discontent. The reason why selections of his poetry run to a slim 150-pages, when his collected works, one of the famously unread books in American literature, is a 1500-page doorstopper, is that Robinson thought philosophy was called for and that he was the man to supply it. He was made unhappy, as who was not, by the “unbridled industrialism, mendacity, expansionism, and greed” of his times, “the spiritual downdraft created in the wake of Darwinism’s sweeping-away the religious verities of the past” – the metaphorical confusion that reigned and still reigns when bookish sorts try to come to grips with “science.”10 His letters of the 1890s and early 1900s betray the horrible fascination Herbert Spencer held for the savants of the Gilded Age, not so much for the imprimatur Spencer was 150 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.012

Edwin Arlington Robinson

believed to have given robber-barony, but because of the encompassment of his cosmogony – its annihilation of interstices in which might dwell, unmolested, people overwhelmed by the tides of progress.11 Robinson certainly felt himself to be overwhelmed, particularly during the years of hardship he suffered in New York following his falling out with his brother Herman; the record of his furtive, harried existence in that period is the record of a man struggling to achieve purchase upon an unfriendly social reality. In compensation, and in what seems often a conscious effort to relieve his poetry and his world view from the weight of their despondency, he turns transcendental. Few have beneftted from having the epithet “Emersonian” attached to them; Robinson is vitiated more than most.12 The unadorned quality of his best poems is mitigated by their focus, the small scale on which the strings of abstractions and bare, unpredicated nouns are applied. When he is scanning the far horizons (or, worse, the chill waste spaces of the starry night), the result is always a dismaying nullity. The best of the Emerson-inspired poems, “The Man Against the Sky” (1916), betrays awareness of the cost exacted by traffc in these zones, but Robinson appears to be helpless to do anything about it: All comes to Nought, – If there is nothing after Now, And we be nothing after Now, And we be nothing anyhow, And we know that, – why live? ‘Twere sure but weaklings’ vain distress To suffer dungeons where so many doors Will open on the cold eternal shores That look sheer down To the dark tideless foods of Nothingness Where all who know may drown. (69)

One need only to go to Dickinson or Hopkins or Hardy or even Arnold (obviously the proximate infuence here) to see how inadequate this is as an expression of existential dread in the face of a suddenly expanded and god-evacuated universe. Parodic, almost: is that a little gleam in Robinson’s steely New England eye? The unease is compounded when he struggles, in the accredited manner, through to the other side: squeezes the nothingness for its quintessence of “Light”; is vouchsafed “Visions” of uplift; catches echoes of divine laughter sweeping the universe; sees wider and deeper than his fellow men mired in the pursuit of cash. Again, Robinson could see the silliness in this (“what has . . . This nineteenth-century Nirvana-talk / To do with you and me?” he asks in “Captain Craig” [116]); again, this did not stop him from indulging it frequently. Yvor Winters was being unwontedly 151 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.012

Henry Atmore

polite when he said that, in the grip of moods like this, Robinson was guilty of “evasion of exact statement” (YW 90): It is the faith within the fear That holds us to the life we curse; – So let in ourselves revere The Self which is the Universe! Let us, the Children of the Night, Put off the cloak that hides the scar! Let us be Children of the Light And tell the ages what we are!13

Amy Lowell remarked anent Robinson’s decision to omit this from his Collected Poems (1921), “it is not so important as poetry as it is as revelation.”14 Even the quiet splendours of “Isaac and Archibald” are marred by adjurations to attend to “the light behind the stars” – the old Gnostic heresy that tangible, quantifable reality is a bubble that the seer, seeker, poet, prophet, whatever, needs to prick. A heresy that leads to a condition fatal, one would have thought, to good poetry (although it is not fatal to Robinson): an almost total indifference to the minutiae of the here and now. James Dickey speaks for many in fnding Robinson’s verse “oddly bare,” his landscapes lacking “background defnition” and feeling like “token concessions” to what poetry is popularly expected to do (61–63). Even his characters, thought William Free, are seldom “fesh and blood: they are textures of ideas.”15 Radcliffe Squires attributed this to a reluctance “to make God over in the image of language.”16 This doesn’t look quite right to me:  in some ways it was hubris, not humility, that turned Robinson into such a grey practitioner. “God’s music has no modes,” he writes in “Captain Craig,” “his language has no adjectives” (116). Evidently, a strain in Robinson’s Protestant inheritance, the strain of Bunyan as opposed to that of Milton, made him chary of metaphor coining and even close observation, if (like “passion”) they led to  – a wonderful Robinsonism  – the “soilure of the wits” (900). *** There rests the case for the prosecution:  Robinson as a poet of broken human things for whom (as he says of George Crabbe) a bookshelf’s “darkest inch” (94) will always be reserved in bedsit-land. Offering not much more than metrical sprightliness and well-varnished gloom. Some familiar favourites in the anthologies, to be settled into with a sigh when, goddamn it, why is the universe so sad? Convenient to have at hand if the class is bored with reading Frost. It goes without saying that I believe 152 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.012

Edwin Arlington Robinson

an injustice is being perpetrated here. Robinson, I  think, is a beautiful poet, not always, not often, but sometimes sustainedly, and in dimensions uniquely his own. Robinson wrote “Isaac and Archibald” at the turn of the century (it was published in 1902) as a memorial to conversations with two older men, William Thorne and Alfred Louis, who each took pleasure in pointing out the other’s decrepitude. It is a 344-line poem in loose, prosy (in a positive sense), blank verse. It has formal resemblances to “Captain Craig,” the longer work with which it was twinned on publication, a poem that also belies its length and lapses into “philosophy,” by being a surpassingly smooth read. “Captain Craig” goes over old ground – it opens with the titular personage, another geriatric (also modeled on Alfred Louis), oppressed by “a forlorn familiar consciousness / That he had failed again” (114). We know where we are with him. Isaac and Archibald, by contrast, have not failed, and the terms of what must be counted their triumph are not obvious. William James thought “Isaac and Archibald” “fully as good as anything of the kind in Wordsworth,” presumably thinking of “The Old Cumberland Beggar” and “Michael,” perhaps “The Ruined Cottage” (quoted in APL 213–214). It is a nice compliment, but not one of James’s profounder thoughts: “Isaac and Archibald” is not really like anything in Wordsworth. The poem is, for one thing, uninterested in the questions of habitation that preoccupied the latter: what it is like to be a person, at a certain stage of life, lodged in a certain kind of landscape, haunted by certain kinds of memory, and the issues raised by the poet’s presumption that his art affords a way into the mysteries of that personality. Robinson’s verse is not gnarled up, as Wordsworth’s often is, by the energy of such concerns. Yvor Winters said that “Isaac and Archibald” was “extraordinarily lovely” but “minor,” a judgment enforced by Winters’s view that Robinson wrote best when he was trying to write like Browning (YW 147). Analysis of its effects, Winters implies, would be otiose; the beauties lie all on the surface. There is truth in this, but also evasion. Read “Isaac and Archibald,” let it work its charms, and then try to specify what it is that has brought delight. The poem is as elusive as the clean air it seems to breathe in draughts. A twelve-year-old boy is invited by an old man to visit another old man who lives on an outlying farm. Isaac, the boy’s companion, confdes that he is worried about his friend: Archibald has been acting awful old of late. When they arrive Archibald says something similar about Isaac, not so much that his mental faculties are deteriorating as that he is abusing the privilege of the elderly not to worry about hurting other peoples’ feelings. (Critics have assumed that the old men’s confdences are precisely parallel, 153 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.012

Henry Atmore

but this is not the case.) They go down into Archibald’s cellar to drink some cider; the boy falls into a daze and has vague dreams about mythical heroes he has been reading about in books recently; Isaac and Archibald play cards; Archibald wins. Is there a woman around the place? We aren’t quite told, but somebody cooks supper. The boy has another dream, that Isaac and Archibald are angels. It is diffcult to know what to make of this, but it brings the poem to an end when otherwise it could just amble on more or less indefnitely. Is it that a message has been transmitted, because that is the vocation of angels, a piece of wisdom dispensed, because wisdom is what the old are whispered to have hoarded? Maybe Robinson thought this, but it is not what – is much less than – he has achieved. “Isaac and Archibald” is a landscape poem with, as customary in Robinson, no feel for landscape: there are leaves vaguely attached to trees, hills, sunlight, hackmatacks in the foreground, a “blue forest” distant (178), and that is all. It is a character study that evokes nothing of the physicality of the characters, what they look like, how they are dressed, the colors of their eyes: the one detail that sticks is that Archibald has a bad back. Much of the poem is in dialogue but – to this untrained ear, at least – no individuality is bodied forth. What all this suggests is that the poem’s merits must frst be defned negatively, as a residue of circumstance left after all the normal embellishments of poetry have evaporated away. Stillness; a kind of thrown-off inconsequentiality; its patience, as Dickey called it, the way it is in no hurry to get anywhere and in fact doesn’t. This last is a hallmark of Robinson at his best, the impression he gives of not caring greatly whether we are listening to him or not. “Here’s a thing, I knew this old man once, we’re all sad cases, but he was singular . . .” One gathers that death is in the Maine garden, but (to quote from what Robinson intended to be a defnitive statement on the operations of posterity) it is a “fnality [that] seems always to have had a way of not obtruding itself to any great extent.”17 The poem does address differentials in the semantics of “death,” as that word is experienced by the very young and the very old. These underlie the middle-aged man’s memory of his boyhood response to Isaac’s musings:            “Think of the place Where we are sitting now, and think of me – Think of old Isaac as you knew him then, When you set out with him in August once To see old Archibald.” – The words come back Almost as Isaac must have uttered them, And there comes with them a dry memory Of something in my throat that would not move. (172) 154 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.012

Edwin Arlington Robinson

But in the end Isaac and Archibald (and the boy) are only one afternoon closer to death, and even for the old folk there is promise of more afternoons to come (“Isaac was old, but not so old as that”; “The sunshine lights / A good road yet before us . . .” [177]). Death is not a destination: well, it is, but enough poems have been written treating it as such. Isaac rues “That Archibald is going, and that I  / Am staying” (172):  life on this particular August day will prove him wrong. And death is not a presence, doesn’t have the ponderousness of a presence. It is more a burr on the air, a spirit that has “laid its hand / Upon the world,” that is always being brushed against but that does not impede movement (179). “I was born,” Robinson once told a friend, “with my skin inside out”: he did not refer by this to a temperamental defciency (APL 218). The “advantage” as well as the woe of old age and of the melancholia that apes effectively its symptoms, is that old bodies are better-tuned for registering the feather touch of death’s pulsations. Vide the poem’s most celebrated passage, with the old men in front of the barrels in the cider cellar: There was a futed antique water-glass Close by, and in it, prisoned, or at rest, There was a cricket, of the brown soft sort That feeds on darkness. Isaac turned him out, And touched him with his thumb to make him jump, And then composedly pulled out the plug With such a practised hand that scarce a drop Did even touch his fngers. (175)

The cricket, the one spot of palpable color in the haze, invites reading allegorically. Dickey suggests: the insect is a more terrifying and mysterious creature – a better symbol for the context – than a maggot or dead louse would be, for it is normally a benign spirit of household or hearth. This simple way of referring to it, as though the supposition that it feeds on darkness were the most obvious and natural thing in the world to say about it, produces a haunting effect when encountered along with the gentle old farmers’ proximity to death and the boy’s budding awareness of it. (66–67)

This gets it so nearly right that the errors are instructive: frst, in thinking that the issue is how Robinson refers to the cricket, when the poet has delegated the important task of reference to Isaac; second, in treating knowledge of death as transmission along a continuum (Isaac and Archibald are close to it; the boy more distant, but aided by them, he can sight it on the horizon), when the instruments of detection are discrete and the challenge for others is how individually to read them. Isaac asks the boy (“clutching” at him with 155 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.012

Henry Atmore

his eye), “if I had ever noticed things”; the boy answers “I could not think of them,” an answer that leaves the man “injured” and “unsatisfed” (171). This is the heart of the poem: Isaac’s injury is at the thought that he is not faring as he should in the boy’s hands and that he is confronted with a species of delinquency in their being unpracticed. It is all so much subtler and more interesting than the old counseling the young that they too shall suffer and die. The boy in fact proves better than Isaac at searching Archibald for signs, through his childish fascination with Archibald’s nose, which is where the expressive power of the man seems to be concentrated:  “I saw / Just how the nostrils widened once or twice / And then grew narrow” (176); “I remarked the process of his nose / Before the words came out” (179). And while Isaac is blind to these evidences (augmenting Archibald’s grumpiness), the cellar scene demonstrates the direction of his own mastery. The beauty of the passage is not in the cricket but in Isaac’s dexterity. If we must be haunted, it should be by that old man’s thumbs. His gentleness of way with the insect, how he touches it to make it jump – an assay of the life force still extant, after what might have been a debilitating or even fatal captivity in the cider glass. How “composedly” he pulls out the plug in the barrel, and the way his “practised hand” allows “scarce a drop” of the liquid to fall, while on the cellar foor there is “late-spilled proof” that Archibald is not so adept, evidence also that Isaac might after all be correct in his estimation of his friend’s frailty. “Scarce a drop” is not the same as “no drop”: Isaac is not being superhuman in his defance of infrmity. Only the young are so much part of creation that they can manipulate it without mishap. Only angels (or the dead) are so much out of it that they can attain, bodilessly, a like perfection. The bodies of the old are half in the world and half out of it, instruments for gauging the heft of objects and conditions with which the young are too entangled to be capable of disclosing. The poem is a gentle piece of estrangement, scarcely a revelation. It fnds a way of talking about death that is unafraid but that does not seek an antidote to fear in hope or resignation. I  can’t think of another poem that does this or that derives such courtliness from the humdrum, as this of Robinson’s. *** “The Sheaves” is a late poem (published in 1925), inspired by Robinson’s holiday in England – the only time he ever left America – in the summer of 1923 (APL 380–388). It is a sonnet, and it exhibits something I fnd I have neglected in this essay, Robinson’s exceptionally adroit fashioning of medieval poetic forms to twentieth-century diction. Frost’s “The Silken Tent” is one of the few comparable achievements. “The Sheaves” contains that rare 156 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.012

Edwin Arlington Robinson

thing in Robinson, a genuinely felicitous metaphor – typical of him that he had to go to Old England to get it. Perhaps the problem with the American landscapes Robinson knew was simply their over-familiarity (we should always bear in mind how loath he was to strike west of New York). “The Sheaves” is also, as Robert Faggen remarks, a poem in which the “power of . . . light” has more to it than the usual vatic transcendentalism:18 So in a land where all days are not fair, Fair days went on till another day A thousand golden sheaves were lying there, Shining and still, but not for long to stay – As if a thousand girls with golden hair Might rise from where they slept and go away. (871)

The thousand girls rising from their sleep is an image Robinson has conjured from passing coincidences of sunlight and cloud-shadow, verbal froth that feels like it too will lift off the page and scatter in the winds. It is a willed forestalling of permanence and solidity. As such it anticipates (closely enough for me to suspect it might have prompted) the image with which Larkin, that other apostle of marriage avoidance, ended “The Whitsun Weddings,” his great English summer poem about womanhood and fecundity. Robinson in some of his manifestations is like a disembittered Larkin with elf-bells attached. “The Whitsun Weddings” concludes with a sense not of rising but falling, of gravity taking hold – as it does on even the fairest of girls – the same inexorability of “Time’s reaping” against which the protagonists of “To a Dead Lady” and “Veteran Sirens” vainly fght, with Robinson unsure of whether he should be cheering them on. “A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower / Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.” Larkin’s rain it raineth always on another man’s fowers; Robinson’s sun it shineth, but not in benediction of the poet. We are reminded, by the New Englander curmudgeon as by the Old, that diffdence while it cripples can also sometimes amaze. N OT E S 1 Yvor Winters, Edwin Arlington Robinson (New  York:  New Directions, 1946): 146–158. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as YW. 2 The Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson (New  York:  Macmillan, 1937): 90. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 3 Scott Donaldson, Edwin Arlington Robinson:  A  Poet’s Life (New  York: Columbia University Press, 2007):  114. Hereafter cited by page number as APL. 4 For a suggestion that Robinson be classed with Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, and to an extent 157 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.012

Henry Atmore

5

6

7 8

9 10

11

12

13

14 15 16 17 18

Robert Frost as a chronicler of rural New England decline, see Donald G. Sheehy, “ ‘What Became of New England’: Frost and Rural Sociology,” in Mark Richardson, ed., Robert Frost in Context (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2014): 218. Denis Donoghue, “A Poet of Continuing Relevance,” in Harold Bloom, ed., Edwin Arlington Robinson: Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1988): 31. Radcliffe Squires, “Tilbury Town Today,” in Ellsworth Barnard, ed., Edwin Arlington Robinson:  Centennial Essays (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 1969): 178. Ellsworth Barnard, “Robinson’s Critical Reputation,” in Barnard, ed., Centennial Essays: 3. For an account of the shiftings in Robinson’s relations with Emma, as traced through his poetry, see Hoyt Francere, Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York: Twayne, 1968): 57–81. James Dickey, “Edwin Arlington Robinson: The Many Truths,” in Bloom, ed., Critical Views: 63. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. Alan Shucard, “Edwin Arlington Robinson,” in Eric Haralson, ed., Encyclopedia of American Poetry:  The Nineteenth Century (Chicago:  Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998): 365. James Moore, “Herbert Spencer’s Henchmen,” in John Durant, ed., Darwinism and Divinity:  Essays on Evolution and Religious Belief (Oxford:  Blackwell, 1985): 76–100. Yvor Winters, “A Cool Master,” in Bloom, ed., Critical Views:  5–11. See also Bloom’s own more positive assessment of Emerson’s impact upon Robinson in the same volume: 1–4. The Children of the Night (New York: Charles Scribners, 1897): 12. Robinson omitted the title poem, from which these lines are drawn, when he brought the book into his collected editions. Amy Lowell, Poetry and Poets (Boston and New  York:  Houghton Miffin Company, 1930): 215. William Free, “The Strategy of ‘Flammonde’,” in Barnard, ed., Centennial Essays: 20. Radcliffe Squires, “Tilbury Town Today,” 178. Joyce Kilmer, “Edwin Arlington Robinson Defnes Poetry,” New  York Times (April 9, 1916). I thank Mark Scott for this reference. Robert Faggen, “Introduction,” in Faggen, ed., Edwin Arlington Robinson: Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 1997): xxiv. F U RT H E R R E A DI N G

Barnard, Ellsworth, ed., Edwin Arlington Robinson:  Centennial Essays (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969). Bloom, Harold, ed., Edwin Arlington Robinson: Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1988). Donaldson, Scott, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2007). 158 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.012

Edwin Arlington Robinson Francere, Hoyt, Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York: Twayne, 1968). Shucard, Alan, “Edwin Arlington Robinson,” in Eric Haralson, ed., Encyclopedia of American Poetry:  The Nineteenth Century (Chicago:  Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998). Winters, Yvor, Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York: New Directions, 1946).

159 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.012

12 M A R K R I C H A R DS O N

Robert Frost

Seven months after his frst book, A Boy’s Will, had been published in London, and six months before his second, North of Boston, would be, Robert Frost wrote his friend and former student, John Bartlett, in November 1913. “You musn’t take me too seriously if I now proceed to brag a bit about my exploits as a poet,” Frost says: There is one qualifying fact always to bear in mind: there is a kind of success called “of esteem” and it butters no parsnips. It means a success with the critical few who are supposed to know. But really to arrive where I can stand on my legs as a poet and nothing else I must get outside that circle to the general reader who buys books in their thousands. . . . I want to be a poet for all sorts and kinds. I could never make a merit of being caviare to the crowd the way my quasi-friend Pound does. I want to reach out, and would if it were a thing I could do by taking thought.1

Frost stood on his own legs as a poet for two years: 1915–1916. In February 1915 he returned to America from his two-and-a-half-year sojourn in England to fnd North of Boston issued, by Henry Holt and Company, in an American edition (bound from sheets printed by David Nutt the previous year). Holt soon issued a new, second edition of thirteen hundred copies. By the close of 1916, the book had sold some six thousand copies in America, and “all sorts and kinds” were reading it (the poet got fan mail from farmers). Frost was buttering his parsnips with regular $200 royalty payments from Holt. A book then regarded as a revolutionary part of the modernist impulse to “make it new” was anything but “caviare to the crowd.” Frost’s subtleties were not yet at odds with his desire to “reach out” to readers who “buy books in their thousands.” Soon they would be. Supplementing his income from Holt were fees ranging from $50 to $100 for the exhausting reading/lecture tours Frost embarked on from spring 1915 through the end of 1916, as he “stood on his own legs as a poet and nothing else,” though as often as not running with them to catch a train to 160 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.013

Robert Frost

Boston or New  York. He wrote his friend Edward Thomas  – the English literary critic, biographer, and poet – on August 15, 1916: I got here a year ago last March, didn’t I? I have earned by poetry alone in the year and a half about a thousand dollars – it never can happen again – and by lecturing nearly another thousand.2 It has cost us more than it used to to live – partly on account of the war and partly on account of the ill health of the youngsters. Still one feels that we ought to have something to show for all that swag; and we have: we have this farm bought and nearly paid for. Such is poetry when the right people boom it. I dont say how much longer the boom can last. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of them all the time, as Lincoln more or less put it. (LRF 474)

That last remark is prescient. But Frost isn’t bragging here. He means to show Thomas that it was possible, if diffcult, to make a living out of poetry in America. He hoped Thomas might join him in New Hampshire, where the two would conduct what Frost variously called “a summer literary camp” and “a lecture camp” (LRF 243, 322): a precursor to something like the Bread Loaf School of English and Writers’ Conference. There, they would “revolutionize the teaching of English,” literary criticism, and poetry (LRF 306). Which brings me to a second letter, this time to Louis Untermeyer, soon to be among the most infuential critics and anthologists of modern poetry in the United States. It dates from precisely the moment when Frost’s attempt to stand on his own legs as a poet was coming to an end. “Address me at Amherst next,” Frost begins, writing on New Year’s Day, 1917. He had, a few weeks earlier, signed a contract to teach English, as a full professor, at Amherst College. The year 1917, of course, would see the publication of Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations (and his essay, “Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry”); the appearance of the frst three of Pound’s Cantos – the so-called ur-Cantos  – in Poetry, and their inclusion in a second edition of Lustra.3 The year would also see the advent of Thomas’s Poems, the American edition of which Frost had helped secure, but also Thomas’s death at the Battle of Arras. An Anglo-Continental modernism – one that would court obscurity and “diffculty,” as if something to do with “modernity” required it  – was rapidly coalescing, even as the possibility for an Anglo-American modernism of the kind Frost hoped to establish in and out of New England, with Thomas for a partner, was being foreclosed, as a road not so much “not taken” as untakeable. With all this about to transpire, though he could not have known, Frost wrote to Untermeyer: You get more credit for thinking if you restate formulae or cite cases that fall in easily under formulae, but all the fun is outside saying things that 161 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.013

Mark Richardson suggest formulae that won’t formulate – that almost but don’t quite formulate. I should like to be so subtle at this game as to seem to the casual person altogether obvious. The casual person would assume that I meant nothing or else I came near enough meaning something he was familiar with to mean it for all practical purposes.4

Readers of “all sorts and kinds,” those who “buy books in their thousands”? No talk of them here. Instead we have (with a touch of derision) “casual persons” and, implicitly, uncasual ones – another sort of coterie than Pound’s but a coterie nonetheless: an elect readership within a much larger one. Frost would now write for both, fooling some of the people some of the time but all of them all of the time never. Casual readers would bring to bear on him formulae; to them Frost seemed “altogether obvious,” a consoling refuge in a literary world whose tone Eliot would set in The Waste Land (1922). The other would see the unformulaic play, the unsettling ironies, and the “subtleties” of Frost’s peculiar way of being modern, which, by the time this letter was written, had entered a third phase with the publication of Mountain Interval in late November 1916, just in time for the holiday gift-buying season (advance orders exceeded two thousand copies). Heading up that book is a poem that illustrates well Frost’s way of suggesting formulae that don’t formulate: “The Road Not Taken” – perhaps the most infamously misunderstood poem of the twentieth century. Following it is “Christmas Trees,” in which Frost frst speaks, with evident approval, of “the trial by market everything must come to,” even poetry; and in which we frst hear him assume the voice, and adopt the persona, of the rural New England sage he’d never been but to which the ear of the “casual” Christmas-gift-buying American reader was perfectly attuned. What a contrast to Pound’s opening salvo in Lustra: “I beg you, my friendly critics,” which now included Eliot, “Do not set about to procure me an audience. / I mate with my free kind upon the crags.” Pound knew “procure” belonged, at once, to the jargon of prostitution and of bribery. He certainly made “a merit of being caviare to the crowd,” even as Frost still sought one at the expense of hiding his unformulaic subtlety in plain sight. “Nothing not commercial is quite honest,” he wrote Untermeyer, but then added so as not to formulate: “You must take that as said in character. Of course I  don’t mean by that that it isn’t true” (LRF 325). What? Anyway, two roads had diverged, and Pound and Eliot were on the other, and in this case, as not in “The Road Not Taken,” the divergence made considerable difference as to how Frost himself would be “taken” over the course of the next four decades until he died, in 1963, something like an American star. 162 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.013

Robert Frost

The ironies of the poem have been often remarked. Its closing claim (“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – / I took the one less traveled by”) preposterously contradicts what’s said in stanzas two and three (where we’re told, with no uncertainty, that the two roads are “really about the same” as to traffc) (103). Is the “road not taken” of the title the road not taken by the speaker (“Oh, I kept the frst for another day!”), or the one spuriously said to be “less traveled” at the close, and therefore (again, spuriously) presumably not taken by others? The sameness of the “roads” is prospectively redescribed, right before our eyes, as “difference.” The tenses at play in the poem – the simple past in the frst three stanzas, the future progressive in the last – consort unstably. The extravagance of the last stanza is as comical as it is vague. Anyone who tells us now what he “shall be telling” us “with a sigh” “somewhere ages and ages hence” has a fne career ahead of him as a bore – the sort of bore who mischaracterizes, with tedious grandiosity, what he did in youth. But the roads Frost and Pound traveled had looked very much alike only two years earlier, in 1914 (“both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black”). Pound enlisted Frost fully into his modernizing regime, and with North of Boston Frost beat every other poet fat out, with a book utterly without precedent. Redescriptions of what “modernism” was, and became, have obscured the fact that Pound, in reviews, spoke of North of Boston almost exactly as he spoke of Joyce’s Dubliners.5 If readers mistake “The Road Not Taken” as a hymn to self-reliance – and they do – it’s as likely owing to Frost’s having gotten so subtle at the game of seeming to the casual person altogether obvious as to have courted the formulae that would obscure him from view. Why should a poet wish to do that, if not from some motive of almost rebarbative privacy? No better way to hide, we tell ourselves, than in plain sight. Frost, having sent the poem to Edward Thomas in 1915, found that not even “the only brother [he] ever had” had gotten his drift (LRF 552). “Methinks thou strikest too hard in so small a matter,” Frost begins. “A tap would have settled my poem. I wonder if it was because you were trying too much out of regard for me that you failed to see that the sigh was a mock sigh, hypocritical for the fun of the thing. I dont suppose I was ever sorry for anything I ever did except by assumption to see how it would feel. I may have been sorry for having given a certain kind of people a chance at me: I have passionately regretted exposing myself” (LRF 321). Remarkable: “I dont suppose I was ever sorry for anything I ever did except by assumption to see how it would feel.” Shall we take that any more seriously than the poem it puts off? As for self-exposure, Frost so assiduously avoided this that he wasn’t so much “a poet for all sorts and kinds” as all sorts and kinds of a poet, and 163 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.013

Mark Richardson

never a single kind, for nearly everyone. For Untermeyer: the best modern poet in the business. For his offcial biographer, Lawrence Thompson: a neurotic. For Richard Poirier:  a Jamesian pragmatist who wrote of sexuality with uncommon insight. For Sidney Cox: sincere. For Lionel Trilling, two things, serially: a “denigrator of the intellect,” but then, on second thought, “Sophoclean,” “terrifying,” and the author of “the most perfect poem of our time” (“Neither Out Far Nor In Deep”). For JFK, at whose inaugural the poet read in January 1961: “one of the granite fgures of our time in America” (whatever that means). For Joyce Carol Oates (on Twitter, no less): a “demon.” For the psychiatrist Merrill Moore: a compassionate poet of the psyche (“You really do a great deal of therapy in your role as poet,” Moore said to him in a letter, “more than you could do if you were a physician”).6 For the Nobel Prize Committee in 1950: eminently worth passing over for Bertrand Russell. But, whether “sorry for anything [he] ever did” or not, Frost would, in fact, be one traveler-poet and travel two roads, into constituencies “casual” on the one hand, and, on the other, elect and discerning. Randall Jarrell exemplifes the latter and wrote, in Poetry and the Age (New York: Knopf, 1953), what is still the best assessment of the double career of Robert Frost. On the one hand is “The Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity,” as Jarrell puts it (40). To “ordinary readers” – the “casual persons” Frost speaks of in the letter to Untermeyer – he seems “a sensible, tender, humorous poet who knows all about trees and farms and folks in New England, and still has managed to get an individualistic, fairly optimistic, thoroughly American philosophy out of what he knows” (36). The other Frost, the one who doesn’t formulate, the one unavailable to “casual readers,” the one who knows where all the fun lies, is “so far from being obvious, optimistic, orthodox” that the poems he writes, at their best, “are extraordinarily subtle and strange” (37). They “express an attitude that, at its most extreme, makes pessimism seem a hopeful evasion; they begin with a fat and terrible reproduction of the evil in the world and end by saying: It’s so; and there’s nothing you can do about it; and if there were, would you ever do it? The limits which existence approaches and falls back from,” Jarrell concludes, “have seldom been stated with such bare composure” (37). As for Frost’s relation to the “high modernists,” Jarrell points out that “the reader of Eliot or Auden usually dismisses Frost as something inconsequentially good that he knew all about long ago” (36). Here, too, are “casual persons,” the ones that read Eliot and Auden (they exist, so many are the ways of casualty). But as Jarrell as quickly says, “there is more successful organization in ‘Home-Burial’ or ‘The Witch of Coös’ – one feels like saying, in indignant exaggeration – than in the Cantos and The Bridge put together” (39). In taking, as Frost did, 164 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.013

Robert Frost

“two roads” at once utterly different and strangely alike, he got the readership he deserved, for good and ill: middlebrow stardom and (often) highbrow disdain. He would remain always, as he implied in another letter to Untermeyer, at once “intimate and baffing” (LRF 454). After reading the chapter Amy Lowell devoted to him in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917), Frost wrote her: “Doesnt the wonder grow that I have never written anything or as you say never published anything except about New England farms when you consider the jumble I am?” He then pointed out why the wonder should grow. His mother, Isabelle Moodie, emigrated from her native Scotland to America in 1856, at the age of twelve. His father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., was, he stated, of the “oldest New England stock unmixed.” He lived his frst eleven years not in New England, certainly not on a farm, but in San Francisco, the rough and tumble city where his parents settled late in 1873. After his father died of tuberculosis in 1885, the family – now including the poet’s sister, Jeanie Florence – returned to the industrial town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and there, or in its environs, Frost lived until fnishing high school. “Twenty fve years in cities, nine in villages, nine on farms,” Frost informed Lowell, and “Presbyterian, Unitarian, Swedenborgian, Nothing” (LRF 594). “Nine [years] on farms”:  the poet has in mind the interval he spent farming (and writing, and then teaching) in Derry, New Hampshire, where he and his wife, Elinor Miriam White (they married in 1895), settled in 1900, with their one-year-old daughter Lesley. The couple had three more children: Carol (1902), Irma (1903), and Marjorie (1905). The poet’s reluctance to “expose” himself had partly to do with securing the privacy and integrity of his family, which knew both uncommon grace (during the years in Derry) and uncommon grief (Robert and Elinor lost two children in infancy; and Carol and Irma  – like their aunt, Jeanie Florence Frost – would, in adulthood, fall prey to schizophrenia and depression). Doesn’t the wonder grow: a poet of “rural” New England raised (almost entirely) by a Scottish mother in large cities, or in the industrial towns that surrounded them; a teacher of psychology and education who never took a college degree; an American poet who published his frst book in London at the age of thirty-nine; a “modernist” who sold books by the tens of thousands; a writer who never dropped so much as a tag of Latin and Greek into his books but who read both languages as well as, and likely better than, either Pound or Eliot; a man who was in earnest when he said “all the fun is outside saying things that suggest formulae that won’t formulate,” and a man for whom nearly every interested reader – “stakeholders,” one almost wants to call them – would come to have a formula. So, yes, a wonder, and how persistently “intimate and baffing.” Frost had other terms for that, too. “Irony is simply a kind of guardedness,” he wrote 165 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.013

Mark Richardson

Untermeyer in March 1924. “Humor is the most engaging cowardice. With it myself I  have been able to hold some of my enemy in play far out of gunshot.”7 Bring in all sorts and kinds, but then be guarded; forbid exposure; suggest formulae that won’t formulate; hold friend and enemy alike “in play.” Frost remains at once the most widely read and the most elusive American poet of the twentieth century. The follies of “The Road Not Taken” seem out for an almost infnite run. In a review of The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume I (2014), Dan Chiasson, an able critic to be sure, called the poem “a cunning nugget of nihilism disguised as an anthem for nonconformity.”8 It has never been clear to me that Frost “disguised” anything in “The Road Not Taken” (indeed, he was startled that anyone misread it), let alone that he did it with “cunning,” which would imply an intention not merely to fool some of his readers some of the time but also to make fools of them. The poem is mischievous; one certainly wants a word to say what kind of mischief it involves. But are the alternatives really this stark? Either formulate it as “an anthem for nonconformity” or else as “a cunning nugget of nihilism”? Isn’t there a ready-enough via media? One might say to Chiasson what Frost said to Thomas in the letter collected in the book Chiasson was, in fact, reviewing:  Methinks thou strikest too hard in so small a matter. A tap would have settled [the] poem. Chiasson might have taken Frost at his word but didn’t. As for “nihilism,” leave the latter, if speak of it we must, for “Provide, Provide,” “Design,” and “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep,” at least if you happen to be Lionel Trilling in 1959, who, after years of ignoring Frost as a modernist manqué, found the poems animated by little other than the “energy with which they contemplate emptiness.” But Trilling, too, strikest too hard. The problem forever is to know how to take Robert Frost. Few have held with him for long at the point where things don’t quite formulate. Those who have may reduce to Randall Jarrell, Richard Poirier, and William Pritchard. In Poetry and the Age, Jarrell singles “An Old Man’s Winter Night” out in a short list of poems by Frost that everyone ought to know but that – at the time Jarrell was writing – relatively few people did. The poem strikes him as at once “grotesquely and subtly and mercilessly disenchanting” and also “tender.” “The limits which existence approaches and falls back from,” as Jarrell says of Frost generally, “have seldom been stated with such bare composure” as they are here. The “composure” is all, in this poem out at the “limits” of “existence.” I highlight in bold certain words for purposes that will become evident. All out-of-doors looked darkly in at him Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars, 166 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.013

Robert Frost That gathers on the pane in empty rooms. What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand. What kept him from remembering what it was That brought him to that creaking room was age. He stood with barrels round him – at a loss. And having scared the cellar under him In clomping there, he scared it once again In clomping off; – and scared the outer night, Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar Of trees and crack of branches, common things, But nothing so like beating on a box. A light he was to no one but himself Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what, A quiet light, and then not even that. He consigned to the moon, such as she was, So late-arising, to the broken moon As better than the sun in any case For such a charge, his snow upon the roof, His icicles along the wall to keep; And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted, And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept. One aged man – one man – can’t keep a house, A farm, a countryside, or if he can, It’s thus he does it of a winter night. (105–106)

The poem concerns senility and incompetence. But it’s carried off with virtuoso ease, despite its demanding Miltonic qualities. I  count eight strong enjambments (highlighted in bold) in twenty-eight lines (a ratio of 29 percent). I  speak of “Miltonic” qualities, but that’s not quite right. Note the sentence beginning “He consigned to the moon,” the most complex in the poem. Here we have a hypotactic affair, a suspended sentence drawn out over fve and a half lines, with two strong enjambments (in the lines ending “moon” and “case”). That much is “Miltonic”: the hypotaxis, the enjambments, the unfolding of a capacious sentence within the confnes of blank verse. What certainly isn’t Miltonic is the diction, with its faintly dismissive colloquialisms (“such as she was,” “in any case”). The sentence sounds rather like speech, and then again rather doesn’t; it’s both “casual” and not. The diction is demotic, and the structure unfolds in the way of things uttered extemporaneously. But there are odd touches that rise above the demotic (“broken moon,” e.g., which must mean a moon “on the wane,” as is also, of course, the old man). 167 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.013

Mark Richardson

The relation of sentence to line varies wonderfully across the whole of the poem. There are eight grammatically independent units in the poem, and these vary from some six lines in length to a single line. In a 1959 interview published in The Paris Review, Frost said: “I look on a poem as a performance. I look on the poet as man of prowess, just like an athlete. He’s a performer. And the things you can do in a poem are very various. You speak of fgures, tones of voice varying all the time. I’m always interested, you know, when I have three or four stanzas, in the way I  lay the sentences in them. I’d hate to have the sentences all lie the same in the stanzas” (CPPP 890). The rule applies as well to blank verse of the sort we fnd in “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” with its fne variations. In that variety, in that “laying” of the sentences into the lines, we feel the poet’s “prowess,” his “performance,” his self-possession  – all of them stays against what the poem describes:  a distinctly un-self-possessed old man. So long as Frost could sustain performances of this kind, so long as he could feel his own “prowess,” he had his “stay” against the “outer night” that overtakes everyone, late or soon. The poem, at frst glance, is about being unequal to the task, whatever task it is. Note how, as the poem closes, the old man’s “incompetence” – ambiguously the object of detached amusement on the one hand and of sympathy on the other – is, with something of a shock, generalized: “One aged man – one man – can’t keep a house . . .” No man – not just the “aged,” incipiently senile one described here – can “keep” a house, a farm, a countryside. Maybe the former two, the house and the farm, for a few good decades. But the third? Who ever “keeps” something like a “countryside,” the extent of which has no bounds either lexically or in the poem? Any reader of Frost can make an anthology of poems on the impossibility of “keeping” houses, families, and farms from going to seed or to hell, from “Ghost House” and “Storm Fear” in A Boy’s Will (1913); to “Home Burial” and “The Generations of Men” in North of Boston (1914); to “The Hill Wife” in Mountain Interval (1916); to “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” “The Census-Taker,” “The Kitchen Chimney,” and “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” in New Hampshire (1923); to “The Times Table” and “The Birthplace” in West-Running Brook (1928); to “Beech” in A Witness Tree (1942); to “Directive” in Steeple-Bush (1947); to “Closed for Good” in In the Clearing (1962) – and in fact to the last poem in that book, “In winter in the woods alone.” Impending disorder is always implied by any order achieved. As for “keeping” “a countryside,” I  recall what Frost says in his 1935 “Letter” to the Amherst Student: “The background is hugeness and confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos.” Against this “background” we can at best invest our prospects in what Frost calls “any small man-made fgure of order and concentration.” A poem, for 168 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.013

Robert Frost

example, for that is in fact what Frost offers up in his “Letter” as at least one way to lay hold on “utter chaos” – a poem like “An Old Man’s Winter Night.” But as we also know from “The Figure a Poem Makes” (1939), all any poem can offer is “a momentary stay against confusion.” “Nothing gold can stay,” says Frost; “these fragments I have shored against my ruins,” says Eliot in The Waste Land – and shored not only against any personal ruin we may suppose him to have in mind but against, as he gave readers reason to believe, that “vast panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”9 Frost’s rejoinder to Eliot is his “Letter”: “You will often hear it said,” as by Eliot and his acolytes, “that the age of the world we live in is particularly bad. I am impatient of such talk. We have no way of knowing that this age is one of the worst in the world’s history. Arnold claimed the honor for the age before this. Wordsworth claimed it for the last but one. I  say they claimed the honor for their ages. They claimed it rather for themselves. It is immodest of a man to think of himself as going down before the worst forces ever mobilized by God. All ages of the world are bad.” Let Eliot and company bellyache about futility and anarchy. Frost likes a background “shading off from where we stand into black and utter chaos”: “What pleasanter than that this should be so?” We are “born to” the “chaos” he speaks of, “born used to it and have practical reasons for wanting it there.” “To me,” he concludes, “any little form I assert upon it is velvet, as the saying is, and to be considered for how much more it is than nothing.” There’s an existentialist drift to this, a fact generally unrecognized. “We people are thrust forward out of the suggestions of form in the rolling clouds of nature,” and it is left to us alone to make something of ourselves and of the world we inhabit. Existence precedes essence, as the slogan goes. “An Old Man’s Winter Night” implies in its making, as against in its theme, that one possible response to “the outer night” – a night that shades off into black and utter chaos, and also into senility (an inner night)  – is to make form, the only kind of form we really can manage or “keep.” Any “keeping” done here is certainly the “keeping” of poetry – the “keeping” of this beautifully managed lyric, as I have attempted to describe “the fgure” it “makes.” Our attentions are directed alike toward the gruelly incapacities of the old man and toward the shape Frost gives the poem that describes him. Jarrell speaks of the poem, as I indicated, as at once “mercilessly disenchanting” and “tender.” The tenderness comes in the handling of the lines on the page, in the work of the poet; and in the fellow-feeling we’re compelled into when the old man’s absent-minded incompetence is generalized to implicate just about anyone. The old man may fnd himself rather mocked in the frst half of “An Old Man’s Winter Night”: he can’t recall what “brought him to that creaking room” where he stands “at a loss.” This would be the 169 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.013

Mark Richardson

“disenchanting” side of the poem. We are all bound for it: standing round in rooms at a loss as to why we’re anywhere. Frost “consigns” everything “to the moon.” Edmund Spenser would know what this means: “Proud Change (not pleas’d, in mortal things, / Beneath the Moone, to raign) / Pretends, as well of Gods, as Men, / To be the Sovereign.” In a December 1916 letter to Joseph Warren Beach, Frost writes: “If you and I and one person more are agreed that The Old Man’s Winter Night is [the best poem in Mountain Interval], that settles it. Three are a perfect strength. We don’t care a hang who prefers Dryden’s From Eavenly Armony, do we?” (LRF 508). Frost refers to the following lines from Dryden’s “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” (1687):  “From harmony, from heavenly harmony, / This universal frame began . . . The diapason closing full in man.” Pretty to think so, but  – as “An Old Man’s Winter Night” suggests  – almost certainly wrong. Even as Frost took his two roads with A Mountain Interval, and won his two readerships (which dubiously came together in Lionel Trilling), so he gives us, in “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” a poem characteristically double and dubious: demotic, only not exactly; tender, only not really; highly particular (“one aged man”), but also universal in the sentence it hands down (“one man”). Make of it what you will. So things would rest between Frost and his double constituencies, down to his own end at eighty-nine on January 29, 1963: intimate, baffing, doubtful. Enroll these in the great register of last words: “It’s a wonderful world,” Frost said, as he left the stage of the last public performance he would ever give, in late November 1962. Then after a beat: “To hell with it.”10 One aged man – one man! N OT E S 1 The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume I: 1886–1920, eds. Donald G. Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2014): 154. Hereafter LRF. 2 This total, $2,000, is, in 2015 dollars, some $46,000. 3 It’s worth bearing in mind that Harriet Monroe published the frst three “cantos” in Poetry partly on Frost’s recommendation (see LRF 542–543). 4 Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, eds. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson (New York: Library of America: 1995): 692. All quotations of Frost’s poetry and prose are from this edition and are given parenthetically, unless otherwise noted. 5 See Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (Norfolk, CT:  New Directions, 1954):  128, 267. Frost scholar Donald G. Sheehy has pointed this out a number of times. 6 See Donald G. Sheehy, “Metaphor and Mental Health in Frost,” in Richardson, ed., Robert Frost in Context (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2014): 351–366. 170 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.013

Robert Frost 7 See Untermeyer, ed., The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1963): 165–166. 8 The review appeared in The New Yorker on February 10, 2014. 9 The phrase occurs in Eliot’s 1923 essay “Ulysses, Order and Myth.” 10 The remarks are quoted in William Pritchard, Frost: a Literary Life Reconsidered (Oxford, 1984): 260. F U RT H E R R E A DI NG Brower, Reuben A., The Poetry of Robert Frost:  Constellations of Intention (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963). Faggen, Robert, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Francis, Lesley Lee, The Frost Family’s Adventure in Poetry: Sheer Morning Gladness at the Brim (Columbia:  University of Missouri Press, 1994). Authored by the poet’s granddaughter, the most thorough treatment of the so-called Derry years (1900–1910), though its scope is broader. Issued in a second, revised edition under the title Robert Frost: An Adventure in Poetry, 1900–1918 (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004). You Come Too:  My Journey with Robert Frost (Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press, 2015). Frost, Robert, Collected Poems, Prose & Plays, eds. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1995). Collected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Mark Richardson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1:  1886–1920, eds. Donald G. Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2014). The Notebooks of Robert Frost, ed. Robert Faggen (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2006). Hass, Robert Bernard, Going by Contraries:  Robert Frost’s Confict with Science (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002). Jarrell, Randall, Poetry and the Age (London: Faber and Faber, 1973). Parini, Jay, Robert Frost: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1999). Poirier, Richard, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Reissued in 1990 by Stanford University Press, with an introduction by John Hollander and a new afterword by Poirier. Pritchard, William, Frost:  A  Literary Life Reconsidered (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1984). Richardson, Mark, The Ordeal of Robert Frost:  The Poet and the Poetics (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). ed., Robert Frost in Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Sabin, Margery, “The Fate of the Frost Speaker,” in Richardson, ed., Robert Frost in Context. Sheehy, Donald, “The Poet as Neurotic:  The Offcial Biography of Robert Frost,” American Literature 58.3 (October 1986): 393–410. “(Re)Figuring Love: Robert Frost in Crisis, 1938–1942,” New England Quarterly 63.2 (June 1990): 179–231. 171 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.013

13 J OA N R E TA L L AC K

Gertrude Stein

1 Gertrude Stein may be the most radical of the American literary modernists and, I’m inclined to say, therefore among the most infuential. Infuential in the diverse and unexpected ways that those who dramatically shift the rules of the game can be. Art forms spanning literature, painting, sculpture, music, dance, theater, flm, and digital media have been affected by her poetics. At the start of the twentieth century, Gertrude Stein was part of the avant-garde scene in Paris where almost everyone she knew was busy inventing and being invented by modernism, as was Stein herself. She emerged as a transformative writer – developing compositional logics that created new space-time synergies among words, new descriptive relations between forms of life on and off the page. Her work was central in the shift from reverence for tradition (the academy) to the zest for invention (aesthetic independence) that still defnes the “cutting edge” contemporary.1 That she was a tireless booster of most things American while a lifelong expatriate in France is but one of many generative paradoxes inherent in Gertrude Stein’s character and art. Another is an enduring and poetically consequential capacity for humorous gravitas. Stein’s most productive attribute as a writer was the energetic, even joyous curiosity that kept the mind of her poesis (literally, what can be made of words) in motion. She invented methods of animating vocabularies, syntax, and grammars for word portraits and plays; radically new poetic and narrative forms; and, with creative disregard for strictures of genre, came up with a new tense she called “continuous” or “prolonged” present aerated by the delightfully queer real-life principle of the non sequitur. All this, merged into what Stein termed “descriptive immediacy,” has fascinated admirers and frustrated those (even stylistic benefciaries) who feel it’s just too diffcult to get a grip on what she was actually up to. 172 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.014

Gertrude Stein

2 Stein herself took some time to fgure out what she was up to. First she had to be the child it turns out she was. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now North Pittsburgh), February 3, 1874, she was the youngest of Milly and Daniel Stein’s fve children. Later that year her father’s business and cultural interests – including a desire to enrich his children’s education – moved the family to Europe, where Gertrude by age fve had experienced multilingual environments in Vienna and Paris. She later wrote, “Up to that time such emotions as I had had expressed themselves in German and then in French and then in Baltimore . . . emotions began to feel themselves in English.”2 In her observant family, Hebrew prayers and Yiddish enriched the mix. An aunt referred to “our little Gertie,” not quite two, as a “Schnatterer [chatterbox]” who “toddles around the whole day and repeats everything that is said or done.”3 The Stein children were constantly exposed to literature, visual arts, music, science, and the range of upper middle-class pleasures the two cities had to offer – parks, museums, food. Supplementing actively pedagogical parents was a governess and tutor in Vienna and a weekday boarding school for the girls – Bertha and Gertrude – in Paris. Back in America, the family settled in Oakland where Gertrude attended Sabbath school, and public elementary and high schools. When she was fourteen – in “an agony of adolescence”4 – Milly Stein died of cancer. Two years later Daniel died in his sleep, probably of a stroke. Gertrude, Bertha, and their brother Leo were sent to live with relatives in Baltimore. Until Milly’s illness became dire, life had been secure, intellectually stimulating, pleasurable. “All stopped after death of mother,” Gertrude wrote in a journal.5 Gertrude and Leo, “inseparable” from early childhood, bolstered each other with shared interests. Gertrude followed Leo to Harvard6 and eventually to Paris. At Harvard, her frst-year compositions refected thoughtful curiosity about people she observed around her.7 Concentrating on psychology and philosophy, she studied with philosopher-psychologist William James, who became a mentor under whose guidance she conducted experiments combining automatic writing and character analysis.8 Stein published two articles in Harvard’s Psychological Review, one cowritten with a fellow student, the other, her own – “Cultivated Motor Automatism, A Study of Character in its Relation to Attention.”9 Advised by James to pursue psychology at Johns Hopkins Medical School, Stein struggled. Her strongest interests were behavioral and characterological, aspects of psychology not yet addressed in medical curricula.10 Post-Hopkins, she would investigate character psychology by inventing an 173 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.014

Joan Retallack

experimental poetics whose multiple origins included both Hopkins and Harvard: “When I was working with William James I completely learned one thing, that science is continuously busy with the complete description of something.”11 “Complete description” became an analytic technique for transposing character traits into linguistic units. That method would drive Stein’s magnum opus, The Making of Americans. Nine years and nine hundred pages in the making, it was her quasi-scientifc laboratory for the reinvention of literary description. But frst she had to reinvent a major part of herself. 3 In 1901, having left medical school in her fnal year without a degree, Stein embarked on a reevaluation of her life plan. She traveled in Europe, spending several months at the British Museum studying the nineteenth-century novel  – a genre of introspection and refection  – before moving in with Leo at 27 rue de Fleurus. Revitalized at twenty-nine, Stein set to work on fction addressing her emotional, intellectual, sexual, moral, and imaginative perplexities. The epigraph for Q.E.D., her 1903 novella à clef, is from Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “Good shepherd, tell this youth what ’tis to love . . .” – exactly what she was trying to fgure out in a plot concerning a painful lesbian love triangle whose most developed character was Gertrude proxy, Adele. Self-aware, self-critical, with astute insights into the psychology of Helen (her love object) and Mabel (the other woman), Adele has a “mind attuned to experiment,” a preoccupation with morality, a need for explicit principles to live by, fears of intimacy, lack of confdence in her instincts. She veers between philosophically cogent refection and playful banter recalling Shakespeare’s gender switching comedy.12 Stein’s more consuming project (1903–1911) was The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress, the family being Stein’s.13 In it she shifts fctional geometries of attention away from the naturalized artifce of adjectivally ftted out characters residing in well-made paragraphs. Instead, there are the beat-by-beat rhythms of living beings. Descriptions set character traits ticking in permutative repetitions that create patterns of “resemblance” to what Stein called “bottom natures.” (“In each way of making kinds of them there is a different system of fnding the resembling.” MOA 290) Stein had noticed that everybody loves repeating being who they are, herself included: This is then now to be a little description of the loving feeling for understanding of the completed history of each one that comes to one who listens always 174 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.014

Gertrude Stein steadily to all repeating. This is the history then of the loving feeling in me of repeating, the loving feeling in me for completed understanding of the completed history of everyone as it slowly comes out in every one as patiently and steadily I hear it and see it as repeating in them. This is now a little description of this loving feeling. (MOA 292)

Demonstrating how humorously, gravely effective this method could be is Stein’s description of her father’s proxy, “David Hersland.” In life, a man who grew increasingly mercurial and obsessed with nutrition after his wife’s death (and whose own death was probably caused by overeating), his depiction is wryly ironic, slightly comic in its excessive use of “him”: Mr. Hersland had many theories in him, eating was to him a pleasure when it was going on inside him, but to him that was not the important thing for him. The important thing to him in him were ways of knowing what kind of eating was good for him, ways of having in him new ways of beginning, this was important to himself inside him. Eating was not, to himself, eating, for him, it was living, it was theorizing and believing, it was new ways of beginning. He loved to have eating going on inside him and then often, before fnishing, he would be flled up, to complete him, with impatient feeling and then he would push eating away from him. (MOA 121–122)

During the years she worked on The Making of Americans, Stein wrote other, shorter things. In 1905 she began a trilogy of novellas inspired by Flaubert’s Trois Contes, which she had studied through translating it into English. Stein’s Three Lives describes kinds of people she observed in Baltimore: two German immigrant servants – “The Good Anna” and “The Gentle Lena” – and a “negress,” Melanctha Herbert (in “Melanctha, Each One As She May”), who is by far the most complex character.14 In a thicket of stereotyping, cringe-inducing epithets, dubious rendering of dialect  – reminders of just how deaf to its own demeaning a racialized culture can be – light-skinned, smart “Melanctha” is “half made with real white blood” in contrast to her dark-skinned, irresponsible friend Rose, “raised . . . by white folks.” This brutally racist juxtaposition brings to mind a perverse kind of nature-nurture experiment that is, in a sense, played out in the story as it was being played out in obsessions with color shades and blood ratios in American society at large. But there’s another aspect of “Melanctha,” responsible when it was published in 1909 for some enthusiastic reactions by Black writers and intellectuals. One (some years later) was from novelist Richard Wright, so struck by Stein’s rendering of negro voices that he excitedly began work on a (never published) dialect novel of his own.15 Stein’s respect for Melanctha is obvious in the analysis of her nuanced psychology and multilayered relationships with parents and lovers. There are passages 175 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.014

Joan Retallack

where empathy even seems to give over to identifcation, echoing Adele in Q.E.D.: Melanctha Herbert was always losing what she had in wanting all the things she saw. Melanctha was always being left when she was not leaving others. Melanctha Herbert always loved too hard and much too often. She was always full with mystery and subtle movements and denials and vague distrusts and complicated delusions. Then Melanctha would be sudden and impulsive and unbounded in some faith, and then she would suffer and be strong in her repression. (Three Lives, 50)

The relationships in “Melanctha” are believable in their unexpected layers and shifts, engrossing and disturbing details. It remains recognized as the frst fctional account, certainly by a white author, to focus  – albeit with a flter scarred by racism – on Black characters living full lives as feeling, thinking human beings.16

4 In 1907 Gertrude Stein’s emotional life underwent a dramatic change when she fell in love with Alice Babette Toklas. By then Leo and Gertrude were immersed in modernist painting as discerning collectors and friends of Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Juan Gris, and others. Stein had sat almost daily for Picasso over several months (1905–1906) as he painted her portrait.17 They chatted across three languages (Spanish, French, English) among sketches permutating toward Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Stein was fascinated by the way Picasso worked. His series of studies – heads or bodies in similar postures with variations  – roughly resembled animation drawings for a fip book. As it happens, Picasso and Stein (along with many other artists) were quite taken by serial structures  – comic strips, the “motion studies” of Eadweard Muybridge, and cinema  – all suggesting or deriving motion from a series of still images. Repetition and variation in service of resemblance could achieve motion when time (or tempo) was added. It wasn’t long before rhythmic elements transformed Stein’s permutating descriptive sequences, becoming a moving principle in many of her poetic compositions. Picasso’s sequences of playfully sketchy bodies in motion, the circular dancers of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, along with his self-confdent, idiosyncratic work ethic, presented a beguiling counter-example to the exhaustive work demanded by the somewhat over-determined structure of The Making of Americans. Stein saw Picasso’s intensity when working but also his playfulness and his pleasure in not working. She decided to try her 176 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.014

Gertrude Stein

character descriptions – literally “making kinds of men and women” (MOA 289) – as more lightly drawn, freestanding portraits. The frst was “Ada,” a portrait of Alice Toklas composed in 1910, the year she moved into 27 rue de Fleurus. The relative brevity of “Ada” doesn’t deter Stein from an earnestly distilled Toklas family history, capped by an encomium to their domestic union: Trembling was all living, living was all loving, some one was then the other one. Certainly this one was loving this Ada then. And certainly Ada all her living then was happier in living than anyone else who ever could, who was, who is, who ever will be living.18

Stein made her frst portrait of Picasso the following year. The description of his being and working doubles as a key to the radical transformation taking place in her own being and working. Stein liked to say she was expressing in literature the same thing Picasso was doing in painting. Here her descriptions of the “thing” he was doing certainly apply to the “thing” she was increasingly doing: This one was working. This one always had been working. This one was always having something that was coming out of this one that was a solid thing, a charming thing, a lovely thing, a perplexing thing, a disconcerting thing, a simple thing, a clear thing, a complicated thing, an interesting thing, a disturbing thing, a repellent thing, a very pretty thing. . . . This one was certainly working and working was something this one was certain this one would be doing and this one was doing that thing, this one was working. This one was not one completely working. This one was not ever completely working. This one certainly was not completely working. (GSS 105–106)

In 1923, Stein composed “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” By then “completion” could mean many things but not exhaustive attempts to capture everything. The second go at Picasso is more about pattern evocation – something like taking a pulse or sampling heart rhythm with an electrocardiogram. It begins with “Picasso” in quasi-military cadence resembling (as he apparently could) a strutting Napoleon. The tempo is regulated by precisely composed repetition and variation. Try voicing it: If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it. If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.19 (GSS 190) 177 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.014

Joan Retallack

Meanwhile, back in 1912, Stein was acquiring buoyancy. Her life with Alice, her stimulating circle of friends, the relief of completing of The Making of Americans was leading to a sensual and joyous apotheosis – enacted in the poetics of Tender Buttons (1912–1913).20 5 “. . . an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.” Stein, 1913 “And he puzzled and puzzled ‘till his puzzler was sore.” Dr. Seuss, 1957

In childhood everybody loves puzzles (noun) and, if lucky, still does as an adult. The imagination that notices, invents, and puzzles (verb) is a source of joy in living; it brings us the arts, sciences, and all of cultural signifcance with the power to nudge our species beyond what we think we already know. The sole virtue of Seuss’s Grinch turns out to be its ultimately transformative persistence in puzzling. Gertrude Stein belongs in the pantheon of great puzzlers (noun charged by implicit verb). The frst epigraph above is from the opening text of Tender Buttons. “A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass” announces the linguistic mechanics of a poetics she is now calling “studies in description,”21 something resembling kinds of descriptions Picasso and Matisse and Braque are painting. If Stein’s are made of words that often seem to be independent agents  – unabashed in not sticking to the subject – that is a primary part of how “the difference is spreading.” The descriptive action of “Carafe” composes a textual geometry of attention distinct from the project of “resembling” in The Making of Americans and the portraits. There is now an additional interest in “not resembling,” in what is “not ordinary.” Words continue to signify on a semantic level, but there’s a swerve out of tightly constructed internal coherences pointing to “bottom natures.” This new “system of pointing” enacts a sweeping fgure/ground shift: whereas the earlier work homed in on characters with no indication of their physical surroundings, the three sections of Tender Buttons – OBJECTS, FOOD, ROOMS – are nothing but physical surroundings and objects in a “not ordinary” domestic infrastructure. Inhabitants are absent in the way absence can imply presence – unseen but felt. It’s as though “they” have just passed through the zone of difference into inviolable privacy:  perfect literary construction of a lesbian household for the times  – sanctum of sensual pleasures, “not unordered in not resembling.” An enormous variety of work followed Tender Buttons, though little until after World War I. Stein and Toklas were active volunteers throughout the war. Stein purchased a small Ford truck she and Alice called “Auntie” after 178 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.014

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude’s aunt Pauline “who always behaved admirably in emergencies” (AABT 172). In it they drove considerable distances delivering medical supplies for the American Fund for French Wounded. After the Germans pulled out, they did relief work for civilians in Alsace. The hiatus in Stein’s writing during the war was offset by so many important elements of her poetics having already been established. It continued to involve the creation of new grammars: rethinking how linguistic logics are put together from vocabularies and syntax to compose new geometries of attention. “This is what I  mean by immediacy of description,” Stein explained, “trying to get this present immediacy without trying to drag in anything else. I had to use present participles, new constructions of grammar. The grammar-constructions are correct, but they are changed.”22 There was also the importance of play. In fact, Stein was writing more and more texts she was calling “plays”; she had a growing interest in performance on and off the page. 6 In her lecture-essay “Composition as Explanation,” delivered at Cambridge University in 1926, Stein links the creation of “prolonged present” with another frst principle  – writing the contemporary:  “A composition of a prolonged present is a natural composition in the world as it has been these thirty years.”23 The lecture radically reconceptualizes the nature of what the temporal dimension of writing can be, positing that one can actually compose the “time of the composition” into “the time in the composition” (italics mine) not by speaking about time but through the arrangement and progression and tempi of the words. Grammar can literally create the score of a new time sense. A revolutionary idea, then and now. Stein reported that a member of the Cambridge audience called her lecture “his greatest experience since he had read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason” (AABT 235). It can indeed be startling and exciting in its diffcult but incisive articulation of the perennial relevance of every generation’s dialogue with its contemporary moment. Stein’s assertion – a core belief of modernism and postmodernism alike – that art must incorporate a poesis that makes its forms out of the experience of its time, is a large part of what changed John Cage’s life when, as a freshman in college, he encountered Stein. It has always to do with discovery rather than recounting what one already knows, exploration of the currently unintelligible rather than reiteration of the familiar. Stein puts it this way during her 1934–1935 American tour:24 Everybody is contemporary with his period . . . and the whole business of writing is the question of living in that contemporariness . . . The thing that 179 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.014

Joan Retallack is important is that nobody knows what the contemporariness is. In other words, they don’t know where they are going, but they are on their way . . . (HWW 151)

That’s what it’s like to read Composition as Explanation, particularly the frst time around. In it is perhaps the most fundamental statement of Stein’s poetics – while also being an enactment of it. More dramatically put, one enters the “system to pointing” that is introduced in the title: the explanation is embodied in the composition. There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations . . . The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen . . . It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition. (GSS 215, 218)

For Stein “the contemporary” means “the difference is spreading.” It’s clear that in composing one’s contemporary time  – that is, living and writing the acknowledgment of difference – one cannot simply recycle the language of other times but must to one degree or another invent new grammars. Stein took this seriously enough to write a grammar book. How To Write (1927–1931) addresses nouns, pronouns, sentences, paragraphs, narrative, and much more. Here’s a sample from “Sentences” showing the difference a non-cumulative paragraph can make – presentness being equally distributed from one sentence to the next. A sentence is an interval in which there is a fnally forward and back. A sentence is an interval in which if there is a diffculty they will do away with it. A sentence is a part of the way when they wish to be secure. A sentence is their politeness in asking for a cessation. And when it happens they look up. A sentence is an allowance of a confusion. There are different ways of making of, of course.25

Stein’s poetics was never far from her keen observation and delight in ordinary language usage. This paragraph is in fact a little “natural history” of the evasive and decorous use of the sentence as “interval” in polite conversation. In her words, 180 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.014

Gertrude Stein Each generation has to do with what you would call the daily life: and a writer, painter, or any sort of creative artist . . . can live only in the present of his daily life . . . Everybody lives a contemporary daily life. The writer lives it, too, and expresses it imperceptibly. (HWW 151)

7 “There are two things that are interesting history and grammar,” Stein wrote.26 To one degree or another history (or the puzzle of history) permeates her texts, her grammars. George Washington, U.  S. Grant, Wilber Wright, and Henry James are in various guises the protagonists of Four in America.27 The Mother of Us All is about Susan B. Anthony, with John Adams and Daniel Webster in cameo roles.28 Stein treats history as part of the landscape of the contemporary. If that’s true, if the history we experience and think we know is nothing other than the residue of the past as it infects the contemporary, then history is always being complicated by the living we are doing in the contemporary. It can’t be accurately depicted via the time travel contrail of historical narrative. How then to acknowledge historical contemporariness in a poetics? Stein puzzled about this in much of her work. Her second portrait of Picasso ends in emphatic present tense, “Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches” (GSS 193). In her strangely humorous and foreboding History or Messages from History (1930) Stein describes (and enacts with her poetics) the mélange of circumstances, radically different in order of magnitude, that constantly intersect in anybody’s daily life. There’s the bewildering spectrum from small-scale quotidian to large-scale history-making, creating a foreground of troubling distinctions between those with the power to make history and those who must merely endure it. That asymmetry is related to gender of course but not without fuidly unstable swerves between dichotomies and their dissolution, gravitas and humor: “The colonel has directed the soldiers to grow nasturtiums” (GSS 256). “They were outstanding in coining words without women” (GSS 264). “The lesson of history so she says is that he will do it again but will he we hope not” (GSS 267). “Mildred made and knew history. Pierre does not make but fears history. Bernard leaves and leans on history” (GSS 267–68). Actual messages from history are elusive, contradictory, non-existent as one searches for “a difference between history and description”: They will preface that. They have nieces for their vines. Vines which grow. They must be taken care of even if they fail to bear. This is not description it is not authority it is not history. The history of any opposition to happiness. There is no history in gentleness. She gently found mushrooms. She questioned 181 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.014

Joan Retallack the authority. It might have been many more there were quite enough. No history is proof against everything. Moonlight in the valley is before and after history. (GSS 263)

What seems poetically, paradoxically clear  – despite the unreliability of description  – is that history and grammar are inextricable:  The “they” embedded in the sentence, “What is history they make history,” is the grammatical “forward and back” of those who construct history even as they are constructed by their own grammars.

8 Gertrude Stein was to make history with The Autobiography of Alice B.  Toklas  – her own autobiography in a wittily ventriloquized voice of Toklas. Written in 1932, published by Harcourt Brace the following fall, it was an instant best seller followed by a six-month book tour (1934–1935). Stein appeared in twenty-two states and Washington, D.C., in a variety of venues including over a dozen colleges and universities for which she wrote numerous talks later collected in Lectures in America (Random House, 1935) and Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein with an introduction by Thornton Wilder (University of Chicago Press, 1935). On February 9, 1934, Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, a collaboration with composer Virgil Thomson, premiered in Hartford Connecticut.29 The improbable words of Four Saints – as improbable as saints themselves – are in wonderfully strange harmony with Thomson’s buoyant melodies. The performance awakened in some of its perplexed audience capacities familiar to poets – and, no doubt, saints – receptivity to what is felt before it is understood. Here’s Wallace Stevens’s account in a letter to Harriet Monroe:  “I reached Hartford in time for the opening performance of Gertrude Stein’s opera. While this is an elaborate bit of perversity in every respect: text, settings, choreography, it is most agreeable musically, so that, if one excludes aesthetic self-consciousness from one’s attitude, the opera immediately becomes a delicate and joyous work all round.”30 That the words might never be rationally understood didn’t deter its extraordinary “all-negro” cast, prepared for this moment by rigorous musical training and experience in gospel choirs. The premiere was a sensation, and when it moved to New York City it became the longest running opera in Broadway History.”31 Sixty-four years later, members of the original cast  – now in their eighties and nineties – sang passages from memory followed by comments such as “singable words didn’t have to mean, beautiful words.” The baritone Thomas Anderson recalled that the only roles open to Blacks previous to 182 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.014

Gertrude Stein

Four Saints had been in minstrelsy: it “took us off our knees and taught us to sing ‘foundationally marvelously aboundingly.’ ”32 Susan B.  Anthony in The Mother of Us All is a kind of secular saint, but Stein is too psychologically and historically astute to follow that arc toward some kind of transcendence. Women’s suffrage was Anthony’s valiant cause, and it was not yet achieved at the time of her death. In the opera, Stein makes it clear that failure had to do with the nature of men. Anthony sings this: What is man, what are men, what are they. I do not say that they haven’t kind hearts, if I fall down in a faint, they will rush to pick me up, if my house is on fre, they will rush in to put the fre out and help me, yes they have kind hearts but they are afraid, afraid, they are afraid, they are afraid. They fear women, they fear each other, they fear their neighbor, they fear other countries . . . (GSS 71)

Stein wrote this in 1945, the year Germany surrendered to the Allies. She had been thinking about the origins of war during the harrowing Nazi occupation of France, recounted in Wars I Have Seen – a memoir written while she and Alice were “hiding in plain sight” of friendly villagers near Lyon.33 Stein’s essay “The Winner Loses: A Picture of Occupied France” had appeared early on in The Atlantic Monthly (1940). Brewsie and Willie, a novella about American G.I.s (Random House, 1946), and Mrs. Reynolds, a political allegory with two dictators, clearly Hitler and Stalin fgures, were also written during the occupation.34

9 The greatest obstacle to enjoyment of Stein’s work is that it’s not performed often enough – with or without an audience. The writing poesis of her most innovative texts requires an actively collaborative reading poesis – activity of making sense and meaning. Stein composed more with her ear than her eye, but the acute observations informing her poetics were nourished by all her senses. The work is fundamentally synesthetic as language itself is synesthetic – intimately connected to the sensory spectrum of human experience in a physical world. Most of Stein lends itself to being spoken, sung, danced, read conversationally or chorally. Word patterns appearing as formidably unvaried as a Philip Glass score yield subtle and surprising permutations – like the music of Glass – when performed. Voicing creates “sound sense” that in turn stimulates semantic awareness. Movement underscores space-time relations lurking in the grammar. Take, for instance, the long trans-genre poem Patriarchal Poetry.35 Like Four Saints written in 1927, 183 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.014

Joan Retallack

Patriarchal Poetry comes alive when performed. John Cage defned silence as what we’re not noticing. Performance brings the silences of a text into audibility/visibility. Try an experiment with the following excerpts, reading frst silently, then aloud. Notice what you begin to notice, let the pleasures of puzzling begin: Let her be that is to be let her be that is to be let her be let her try. Let her be let her be let her be to be to be shy let her be to be let her be to be let her try. Not to let her to be what he said not to let her to be what he said. (580–581, 582)

And, How do you do it? Patriarchal poetry might be withstood. Patriarchal poetry at peace. Patriarchal poetry a piece. Patriarchal poetry in peace. Patriarchal poetry in pieces. Patriarchal poetry as peace to return to Patriarchal poetry at peace. Patriarchal poetry or peace to return to Patriarchal poetry or pieces of Patriarchal poetry. Very pretty very prettily very prettily very pretty very prettily. To never blame them for the mischance of eradicating this and that by then. (594)

Stanzas in Meditation (1932) is another long, notoriously “diffcult” work, full of silences that beneft from voicing. Notice the rhythmic shifts that lead from iambs to “no repose” in the opening stanza: I caught a bird which made a ball And they thought better of it. But it is all of which they taught That they were in a hurry yet In a kind of a way they meant it best That they should change in and on account But they must not stare when they manage Whatever they are occasionally liable to do It is often easy to pursue them once in a while And in a way there is no repose36

Need I say there is likely to be little if any repose in the continuing reception of Gertrude Stein’s immense oeuvre? This is not because it is in some sense impossible to read – it is always possible to read inquiringly, performatively  – but because it requires continual conversational invention on 184 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.014

Gertrude Stein

the part of a reader’s informed and intuitive poesis (a particularly rewarding form of play). This is what makes engagement with Stein’s work so exhilarating, and what leads to further development of one’s reading poesis more generally. Stein is our perennial contemporary  – as fundamentally, seductively unintelligible as any of us who live and work on the “rim of occurring.”37 That is the active domain of the artist. That is the domain of all those rising to the occasion of unprecedented times with both gravitas and humor. N OT E S 1 Stein was fundamentally “trans-generic.” I treat her poetics across all conventional genre labels in this essay. 2 Stein, Wars I Have Seen (London: Brilliance Books, 1984): 6. Hereafter WIHS. 3 Wanda M. Corn, “Family,” in Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, eds. Corn and Tirza True Latimer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011): 15. 4 In Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B.  Toklas (New  York:  Vintage Books, 1990): 75. Hereafter AABT. 5 Biographical information is from many sources, notably Stein’s AABT and WIHS; Brenda Wineapple’s Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996); the life chronology in Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, eds., Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903–1932 and 1932–1946 (New York: The Library of America, 1998); and Gertrude Stein: Selections, ed. and introduction by Joan Retallack (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2008), passim. 6 Harvard’s Annex for Women; later Radcliffe College. 7 For examples of Stein’s college writing, see “The Radcliffe Manuscripts,” in Rosalind Miller, Gertrude Stein: Form and Intelligibility (New York: Exposition Press, 1949). 8 Stein abjured the term “automatic,” which denies intentionality, to describe her own literary practices. She probably did at times engage in something like “free writing” – in today’s pedagogy, a generative, probative practice. 9 “Motor Automatism,” written with Leon M.  Solomons, appeared September 1896; “Cultivated Motor Automatism,” in May 1898. 10 For differing views on the consequences of Stein’s medical training, see Retallack’s introduction to Gertrude Stein:  Selections, and Steven Meyer, Irresistible Dictation:  Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 11 “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. with introduction by Carl Van Vechten (New York: Random House, 1946): 223. Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character – deeply problematic, widely infuential in Europe – was another major infuence. 12 Q.E.D. frst appeared posthumously in a limited edition under the title Things as They Are (Pawlet, VT:  Banyan Press, 1950), and subsequently in Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings, introduction by Leon Katz (New York: Liveright, 1983): 62. 185 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.014

Joan Retallack 13 The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (Normal and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995). Hereafter MOA. 14 Three Lives was Stein’s frst published book. Grafton Press (New York) issued it in 1909. All quotations are from New York: Dover, 1994. 15 See a longer account of Wright and “Melanctha” in “How Racist Is It,” Gertrude Stein: Selections, Introduction: 47–55. Hereafter GSS. 16 See Leon Katz’s introduction to Fernhurst, Q.E.D. where he argues that “Melanctha” was actually a rewriting of Q.E.D. in which the title character is a proxy for Stein. This reading, seen as a “blackface” exercise by Stein, has aroused some scorn. I think it may have been much more about empathetic observation. Given Stein’s daily interactions with African Americans in Baltimore, notably in her internship at Johns Hopkins, why could she not have been cognizant of the possibility of a Black woman who, like herself, could act with a “break neck courage”? Three Lives, 51. 17 Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. 18 A Stein Reader, ed. and introduction by Ulla. E. Dydo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993): 103. (Dydo) 19 You can hear Stein reading the entire poem and a number of others at Penn Sound, a website maintained by the University of Pennsylvania. 20 Published in New York in 1914 by Claire Marie press. 21 As a result of archival work done by Seth Perlow for the new City Lights edition of Tender Buttons, we now know that Stein at one point thought to give the entire book the subtitle “Studies in Description.” That phrase is familiar from its appearance in most editions only at the start of “FOOD,” the second section – between “OBJECTS” and “ROOMS” – but it clearly describes all three. 22 How Writing is Written, Volume II of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles:  Black Sparrow Press, 1974): 155. Hereafter HWW. 23 All quotes from “Composition as Explanation” in GSS, 112–124. 24 See William Rice’s chronological account of the tour in appendix I, The Letters of Gertrude Stein & Thornton Wilder, eds. Edward M. Burns and Ulla E. Dydo (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). For an extensive description of the tour and its aftermath, see Retallack’s Introduction, GSS. 25 Gertrude Stein, How to Write, preface and introduction by Patricia Meyerowitz (New York: Dover, 1975): 133. 26 “History or Messages from History,” in GSS 254–274. 27 Four in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947). 28 The Mother of Us All, in Gertrude Stein, Last Operas and Plays, introduction by Bonnie Marranca (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 29 Stein wrote the libretto in 1927. Her other major collaboration with Thomson, The Mother of Us All, premiered posthumously at Columbia University in 1947. 30 Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996): 267. 31 Four Saints quotes from Prepare for Saints: The Making of a Modern Opera, hosted by Jessaye Norman, Connecticut Public TV, 1998. 32 The phrase Anderson quotes is from Stein’s libretto. 33 Random House, 1945. 34 First published by Yale in 1952. 186 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.014

Gertrude Stein 35 Page numbers from Gertrude Stein:  Writings, 1903–1932, eds. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998). 36 Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition, eds. Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina with an introduction by Joan Retallack (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2012): 57. 37 The poet Leslie Scalapino’s beautiful phrase.

F U RT H E R R E A DI NG Corn, Wanda M. and Tirza True Latimer, Seeing Gertrude Stein:  Five Stories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Dydo, Ulla E. with William Rice, Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises: 1923–34 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003). Meyer, Steven, Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Retallack, Joan, “The Diffculties of Gertrude Stein, I & II,” in The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Watson, Steven, Prepare for Saints:  Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstream of American Modernism (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2000). Wineapple, Brenda, Sister Brother:  Gertrude and Leo Stein (New  York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996).

187 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.014

14 E L E A NOR   C O O K

Wallace Stevens

Late in life, Wallace Stevens wrote a short poem titled “The Planet on the Table,” which opens, “Ariel was glad he had written his poems.”1 Ariel, Shakespeare’s airy spirit in The Tempest, was the name Stevens had given to one of his selves when writing love letters to his future wife. (It made a contrast with his solid, large-built physical self, sometimes nicknamed the Giant.) The planet on the table is the world that he had made through his poems of “a time remembered” or “something seen that he liked.” They were “makings of his self,” his imagination, but just as much “makings of the sun,” the outside world or reality. “The Planet on the Table” is simple, straightforward, intelligent, and – to me – moving, like many of Stevens’s late short poems. It will surprise those who think of Stevens as overstuffed with gorgeous language or hard to comprehend. Here is where I  would start if I were coming fresh to Stevens. Only after absorbing some late short poems would I  return to his frst collection, Harmonium, published just before his forty-fourth birthday in 1923. This was not the way Stevens chose to present himself in Harmonium. This later simplicity was hard won. Stevens’s best-known poems still come from Harmonium, and the Stevens of Harmonium is the one people know best: the witty, sportive self, slightly self-mocking, given to strange fables and unusual perspectives, sometimes dense with implication, master of ingenious diction. He can appear to be the odd man out in modern American poetry. In the generation of Robert Frost, T.  S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, he easily sounds the youngest, though only Frost was older. He can also sound the strangest, especially to a new reader already aware of his major contemporaries. Sometimes he wanted to sound a little strange, of course (“And there I found myself more truly and more strange,” he writes in “Tea at the Palace of Hoon” [51]). His antic persona was a way of waking himself and readers, too. At about thirty-fve, Stevens had suddenly begun publishing poems of astonishing originality:  “Tea,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Sunday 188 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.015

Wallace Stevens

Morning” (all in 1915), “Domination of Black” (1916), “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (1917). Though anthologies have tamed the wildness of his titles in Harmonium  – add “Anecdote of the Jar” (1919), “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” (1918), “The Emperor of Ice Cream” (1922) – something of their strangeness remains. (He had a gift for titles, those often-ignored signposts that he could make unforgettable.) The strangeness can mask a depth of feeling:  refections on erotic love at the time of “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” (his marriage was proving diffcult), or musing on death in “The Emperor of Ice Cream” (his younger sister died in France in 1919 while nursing after World War I; a number of poems on death date to this time). There are also familiar poems that are not so strange to our ears, notably “Sunday Morning.” It bears comparison with Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” for both were published in Poetry in 1915 (“Sunday Morning” in a shorter version, and with its sections differently arranged). One intense, self-doubting, self-devouring, and claustrophobic, a twilight poem; the other concentrated, confdent, sometimes exuberant, ardently anti-sabbatarian, a poem of the sun. Such a comparison belies the force of both poems but does indicate the gulf between the two writers. “After all,” Stevens would write much later, “Eliot and I are dead opposites.”2 It is hard to choose adjectives for Stevens’s language in Harmonium, and on our choice, a lot depends. From the start, British readers found him odd, for his idiom is decidedly New World (Bonnie and Josie whooping, “Tum-ti-tum” and “tunk-a-tunk-tunk,” jack-rabbit and buzzard, etc.). It might sound precious, but R. P. Blackmur helpfully showed that it is not; it is precise. He also rightly saw in 1931 that the “important thing” about Stevens’s vocabulary consisted of “the uses to which he put those [apparently odd] words with others.” (James Merrill also found Stevens helpful for this reason: you could combine “abstract words with gaudy visual or sound effects . . . You didn’t have to be exclusively decorative or in deadly earnest.”) Randall Jarrell saw that many of Stevens’s poems are obsessed with lack, a lack he felt in turn-of-the-century America:  “delicacy, awe, order, natural magnifcence.” How many poems in Harmonium look for what is not there? As a whimsical 1915 poem, “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,” puts it, “white night-gowns” haunt the houses, not green or purple or yellow or stranger ones, and nobody will dream of exotic creatures – well, maybe “an old sailor, / Drunk and asleep in his boots” (52–53). What would business schools say about such bedtime thoughts for an insurance lawyer?3 For that is the profession Stevens fnally chose, frst working in New York, then in Hartford, Connecticut, and eventually becoming vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, specializing in surety bonds. 189 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.015

Eleanor Cook

(His salary in today’s dollars was modest compared with current lavish executive income.) The 1917 move away from New York, where he loved visiting art galleries and was one of Walter Arensberg’s circle, was hard. Stevens at frst travelled a good deal on insurance business, and some poems grew from his travels, notably a group of Florida poems. They are intensely physical poems, with Florida sometimes imagined as a woman, even a Venus of sorts, though sometimes her general messiness elicits mixed feelings. Here was a newfound part of America, with new sensations, suggesting new ways of writing. A  “Nomad Exquisite” can be surprised into new forms by a young alligator, by a green vine angering for life. In Tennessee in 1918, he decided, as he put it in a letter, that it was not possible for anything to happen there “without outside help” (208). “I placed a jar in Tennessee,” he wrote in 1919, and the poem watches that jar make things happen (60). Not actions. (“For poetry makes nothing happen,” Auden would say [my italics].)4 Rather, a whole new perspective, for part of Stevens’s sudden maturing as a poet was his refection on just how and why we see things in a certain way and consequently feel about them in a certain way. A certain verbal way, that is, though painters’ ways of seeing helped him think about this. The Harmonium poems are not only original but also much varied in kind. Stevens appeared suddenly to possess a command of technique in both metrical and free verse that awed younger, knowledgeable poets such as Hart Crane. He showed a new ability to think in poetry, hence to feel more. Behind most poems lies a richness of thought or sensation or feeling, experience already absorbed, questions already considered. He makes many a present-day poem sound thin. His tone, that most demanding of writerly tests, is usually pitch-perfect. His wit and sometimes exuberant sense of humour are his own. But his persona also knows dread and blocks and the traps of a dream world (“Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks”). Or unexpectedly, “I felt afraid” (“Domination of Black” [7]). “The Snow Man” shows one way of avoiding this: to have “a mind of winter,” where “nothing himself,” he beholds “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” (8). His subjects vary, though his lasting subject, a poetry “of the earth” (“Imagination as Value” [730]), is there from the start in its early form. Poems of the open road were popular in Stevens’s youth, but he is well past that by 1915, as he considers all our language of nature (e.g., of the maternal earth in “In the Carolinas”). He muses, too, on our language of imagination, especially as his strong idealizing imagination, his moonlight self, clashes with his ironic self or the self that revels in the sun. Stevens’s anti-clerical poems take their impetus from his desire to celebrate the natural world, not fee or suppress it, as in prevalent religious doctrine or social custom 190 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.015

Wallace Stevens

of the time, notably Christian. Better a heaven with jazz, good food, good times, even bawdiness (“A High-Toned Old Christian Woman”). “Death of a Soldier” is naturalistic, eschewing the comforts of Christian belief. The rebellion against constraint, joylessness, and conformity is consistent. Not for twenty years would Stevens examine seriously the impact of Christian tenets and biblical language on his generation. The love poems are dense though rewarding (“Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”). Other poems already mentioned are approachable in varying degrees. Is it still necessary to advise readers to relax with Stevens, to take him as he comes, to enjoy the humour? Perhaps. “Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule . . .,” “The Jack-Rabbit,” “Bantams in Pine-Woods,” and more are sheer fun, with substance concealed in their various contraries. The one long poem, “The Comedian as the Letter C,” an allegory of artistic failure, pushes the reader away, despite its entrancing title. Stevens’s judgment of Harmonium before publication was surprising: the poems were dated (“outmoded”) and feeble (“debilitated”). Part of this was anxiety, but the nub was Stevens’s desire to perfect, as he put in a 1922 letter, “an authentic and fuent speech for myself” (231). After 1923, he wrote only in a desultory way for some years. A baby arrived in 1924, he was working hard at his day job, but he also began to rethink his vocation, demanding even more of himself. A  second edition of Harmonium was published in 1931 with some extra poems, but they were a mixed lot, the best being a memorable depiction of writer’s block, “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad.” He would start again in a plainer, chastened, more open style, paradoxically rougher but more powerful. It is crucial to be aware of change and development in Stevens. The change after Harmonium is obvious, but it can be downplayed. And he goes on developing until the end of his days, rethinking and refning his principles and methods. Ahistorical generalizations about his work can do him a disservice. Two questions dominate Stevens’s writing in the thirties: frst and foremost, the place of poetry, and second, the Great Depression with its misery and political unrest. The two were related because of the pressure on writers to speak clearly about urgent social matters. Stevens had turned ffty in October 1929 within weeks of the stock market crash. His Ideas of Order appeared in 1935 (Alcestis Press), again in 1936, slightly revised (Knopf); The Man with the Blue Guitar was issued in 1937. Owl’s Clover appeared in 1936 (Alcestis) but was much abridged in The Man with the Blue Guitar and cut altogether from Stevens’s 1954 Collected Poems. (It was his Depression poem and, while historically interesting, is limited.) “Ideas of order” is a fraught subject for the 1930s. Political order? Economic order? Personal order? And what of disorder? 191 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.015

Eleanor Cook

Ideas of Order is a shorter, barer, leaner collection, saying farewell to parts of Stevens’s earlier self but also affrming his return to poetry. “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad” was stuck in the dead of winter, ghost-ridden, but the speaker of “The Sun This March” sees again a brightening sun, an end to winter: “The exceeding brightness of this winter sun / Makes me conceive how dark I have become” (108). Similarly with new life in “Meditation Celestial and Terrestrial.” “Farewell to Florida” opens the 1936 Ideas of Order and says goodbye to her, as he turns towards his own native north. The poem’s fervour betrays a passion, a passion that I think means Stevens is saying farewell to his erotic muse. He would never again write poems like “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” or “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” though mysterious female fgures and occasional erotic vibrations persist throughout his work. Other poems that say farewell to Stevens’s earlier work and tentatively envision a new direction include “Sailing after Lunch,” “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz” (referring to “mountain-minded Hoon” [100]), and especially “Autumn Refrain,” one of fve strong closing poems. The glory of the volume is the title poem, “The Idea of Order at Key West” (105–106). Its frst movement embodies aesthetic theories of the imagination in relation to nature, starting with “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” Nothing in Harmonium is this packed intellectually, yet so simple, and it lives as poetry too. Key West gives Stevens the sea, the liminal space of a coastline, a southernmost border of his country. The singer gives him a performer that he observes. Towards the end, he adds an auditor in the memorable lines: “Oh blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, / The maker’s rage to order words of the sea.” At once plainer than much of the diction and syntax of Harmonium, the closing lines are also more passionate and personal. Wordsworth’s Prelude opens: “O there is blessing in this gentle breeze . . .” and fnds within “A correspondent breeze, that gently moved . . . A tempest, a redundant energy” (1850 edition, I.1:35–37). Stevens will have nothing to do with correspondences, as he makes clear in the opening stanzas. A “blessed rage for order” sounds like an oxymoron, and rage for an artist sounds like a strange inspiration. Yet recall Stevens’s “green vine angering for life” (“Nomad Exquisite” [77]). Perhaps all the more because of his professional life, Stevens was passionately committed to his art with an almost animal force. “Force” in art was one of his most complimentary terms. It helps to read “The Idea of Order at Key West” before turning to the thirty-three part sequence, The Man with the Blue Guitar. This is Stevens’s poem of transition, a powerful answer to his dispirited and tangled cautionary tale of an artist ground down by circumstance, “The Comedian as the Letter C.” There, said Stevens in a 1935 letter, “Life [for the artist] was picking his way in a haphazard manner through a mass of irrelevancies.” In “The 192 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.015

Wallace Stevens

Idea of Order at Key West,” “life has ceased to be a matter of chance” (293). Over the winter of 1936–1937, he wrote much of The Man with the Blue Guitar, which, he said, deals with “the relation or balance between imagined things and real things.” But, he added, the poems “are not abstractions . . . Perhaps it would be better to say that what they really deal with is the painter’s problem of realization” (Letters [316]). They continue in poetry a discussion Stevens found in Cézanne’s Letters: how to realize – réaliser, in the root sense of “making real” – what the eye sees and the ear hears. For Cézanne, this was a visual problem, for Stevens, a verbal. While the poems focus on Stevens’s artistic transition, they are also grounded in the 1930s. The guitarist plays different kinds of tunes, mapping different responses to an audience and to his inner demands. “Things as they are” is a key phrase; the sun represents reality, and the moon now represents unrealistic imagination cut off from reality. The sequence is rich but often very compact, moving down to a nadir in mid-point in canto xvi (“The earth is not earth but a stone”[142]). A frst-time reader might start with the opening canto, then sample canto v (against older epic and hymn), canto x (a sardonic view of a thirties “hero”), canto xv (centred ominously on a Picasso painting). The powerful canto xix on the two lions is justifably well known; canto xxiii is funny, and canto xxv wonderfully comic. The strong ending of the last two cantos amounts in effect to a commitment by Stevens to the poetry he would write for the rest of his life. It took him another fve years to develop fully his magnifcent mature style, as seen in the 1942 Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. From then until his death in 1955, he wrote steadily as a master craftsman. Parts of a World (1942) gathers sixty-three poems written from 1937 to 1942. While the collection is mixed in quality, Stevens’s productiveness over these six years contrasts starkly with his earlier silence and demonstrates how crucial his interior struggle, and its eventual resolution, were. Parts of a World is just that, with an emphasis on parts. At a time when different all-encompassing world views were in combat (Fascism, Communism) and when the frst three of Eliot’s Four Quartets were propounding a Christian vision, Stevens resisted such systems. These poems are not symbolic or analogical parts that might imply a harmonious whole. The opening poems work against any such view, notably “Poems of Our Climate,” where despite the enticements of a perfect world, there remains “the never-resting mind” (179). In the end, “The imperfect is our paradise,” and the artist’s delight lies in “fawed words and stubborn sounds” (179). Other poems also work towards becoming “The Latest Freed Man.” But Stevens was not advocating mere randomness. The parts are often particulars that show a renewed pleasure in the world. Topics vary and tend 193 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.015

Eleanor Cook

to come in clusters of two or three poems. They include some fne ekphrastic poems (e.g., “Study of Two Pears”) and some rather mixed political poems (“Dry Loaf,” “Idiom of the Hero” “United Dames of America”) as well as poems on his art (“Of Modern Poetry,” etc.). There is far more colour, sound, taste, and smell than in Ideas of Order, a rather grey volume. “A Dish of Peaches in Russia” is simple, sensuous, and passionate. The collection is also aware of war, for though most poems were written before December 1941, Stevens kept in view the fact that much of the Western world went to war against the Axis powers in 1939. The sequence “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War” especially repays attention. Stevens had no sooner mailed the manuscript of Parts of a World to Knopf than he began writing Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction in a burst of creative energy. He gave it pride of place as the fnal poem in Transport to Summer (1947), calling it, in a 1946 letter, “the most important thing” in the book (538). Meanwhile, a small edition of the poem was issued by the Cummington Press in 1942. Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction is Stevens’s reckoning with his Christian inheritance, the inheritance he rebelled against when young. For him, faith as in the creeds of Christendom was not possible. Rather than subscribe to such beliefs dishonestly, he suggested a future alternative to the Christian story, a model that would command adherence and guide behavior. For him, all sacred writings grew from the human imagination, and a reader must imagine what follows from this. Not secularism, for Stevens did not divide the world into sacred and secular. He trusted (perhaps too sanguinely) that the human imagination would provide a future “supreme fction” as compelling as the old ones, as he explained in a letter (378). Not, he knew, the equivalent of old belief, but the next best thing. In a later refnement, he called the imagination “the next greatest power to faith” (“The Relations between Poetry and Painting,” [748]; see also part III of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”: “next to holiness . . . next to love” [398]). For him, in 1942, it was enough to write down three notes towards such a story, the titles of his three ten-part sections: “It Must Be Abstract,” “It Must Change,” “It Must Give Pleasure.” The series builds in part I  from early purging of received dogmas (cantos i–v) to a sense of fresh spiritual strength (cantos vi–x). “Abstract,” a puzzling word at frst, is far richer than in everyday use. Different contexts underlie different lines of thought and feeling, characters, tones, and more. God, or the “frst idea,” is his early focus, then “major man,” an inspiring human model who may be a clown or a vagabond (336, 344). Part II, “It Must Change,” considers ongoing metaphors and stories: angels, birdsong as earnest of a heaven (vi, a memorable canto), naked truth (vii, Ozymandias meets Nanzia Nunzio). Cantos ix and x offer fresh change of perspective. 194 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.015

Wallace Stevens

Forms of pleasure in part III rewrite religious pleasures with éclat and with increasing depth of feeling and commitment. It is as if Stevens could at last revel in a spiritual realm where he felt at home in his “magnifcent agnostic faith,” as Geoffrey Hill justly puts it.5 The poem ends with the Canon Aspirin cantos that rewrite Milton and others and with one of Stevens’s own angels. The fnal canto of plenitude, the “fat girl” canto, is wonderfully serene (351). With Transport to Summer (1947), Stevens demonstrated how fully he had reclaimed his poetic vocation. Though Harmonium has more poems, Transport to Summer is longer, chiefy because of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, as well as other series, “Chocorua to Its Neighbor,” “Esthétique du Mal,” “The Pure Good of Theory,” “Description without Place,” and “Credences of Summer.” Each series allows Stevens space for meditation on a question that engaged him, questions that follow from his clearing of the ground in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. Shorter poems bearing on the themes of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction include “Paisant Chronicle” on the subject of “major man” (written in 1945) and “The Good Man Has No Shape,” written (in 1946) against the Incarnation but strongly on behalf of the human Jesus. Some of the poems sound oddly contemporary, such as the 1946 poem “A Woman Sings a Song for a Soldier Come Home”: “The wound kills that does not bleed” (313). Or parts of the memorable, though sometimes uneven, war sequence “Esthétique du Mal” (1944). “Credences of Summer” (1946) grew out of a need for what Stevens called “a fnal accord with reality” (Letters [719]). Parts show a passionate love of this earth that belongs to Stevens’s late years (“Now in midsummer come . . . the roses are heavy with a weight / Of fragrance and the mind lays by its troubles” [322]). Part IV, a Stevens favourite, exudes the summer hay felds of his native Pennsylvania. Against Stevens’s deep sensual delight in summer plenitude, the reality of approaching death presses. Among the shorter poems, the metaphor poems are very rich, especially “The Motive for Metaphor” (1943). Its diction is not diffcult, and the motive for metaphor remains inevitably puzzling – after all, Freud, too, thought artistic ability a mystery  – but pleasurably puzzling. The syntax is wily with a lawyer’s and, much more, a poet’s subtlety. “Thinking of a Relation between the Images of Metaphors” (1946) makes a fne comparison. So do Stevens’s earlier poems on metaphor, starting with “Metaphors of a Magnifco” (1918). (“Transport” in Transport to Summer is the English equivalent of “metaphor”; in modern Greece, a bus, a metaphora, provides transport.) Stevens also writes of his art elsewhere. In “Man Carrying Thing” (1946), a simple but telling enjambment makes his point: “The poem must 195 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.015

Eleanor Cook

resist the intelligence / Almost successfully” (306). For so intelligent a writer, the assertion is fascinating. Even the good of intelligence could be a danger, something to be resisted – almost successfully, that is. Scenes from Stevens’s early life reappear with increasing frequency, as do thoughts about memory. He loved to swim when a boy, and “A Lot of People Bathing in a Stream” catches some of that physical delight and the feel of existing under water and in air or in both. Water brings other memories too: fotillas with “Shadows of friends” (“A Completely New Set of Objects” [307]). Or “The human ocean . . . Cadaverous undulations” and a memory of a forebear, “old John Zeller” (“Two Versions of the Same Poem” [309]). Seasonal poems continue. For a deep-winter January poem and a pair of memorable crows, comparable to Anthony Hecht’s “Crows in Winter,” see “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters.” Stevens reacted almost viscerally to the changing seasons. Throughout Stevens’s work, the sheer sounds of a poem can be entrancing, as they are here: “the ithy oonts and long-haired / Plomets” (“Analysis of a Theme” [305]); “Unsnack your snood, madanna, for the stars / Are shining on all the brows of Neversink”  – a seductive line and a line for seducing (“Late Hymn from the Myrrh-Mountain” [305]). Earlier sounds approximate jazz effects, delight in echoic words, and do much more, but always reject too-easy euphony. Stevens’s ability to condense and simplify theories of art, together with his sense of play, are also evident here in “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch.” The poem is laid out like a Euclidean geometrical problem, while the diction extends the historical framework (“Gothic prong and practick bright” [262]). At the end, “So-and-So” turns out to be an artist’s model: “Good-bye, / Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks” (263). It is another reminder of Stevens’s pleasure in, and gift for, inventing names. (Why is she Greek? Look back for signs of Aphrodite.) A more elaborate treatment of theories of art is offered in four quite different sections of “The Pure Good of Theory”:  “All the Preludes to Felicity,” “Description of a Platonic Person,” “Fire-Monsters in the Milky Brain,” and “Dry Birds Are Fluttering in Blue Leaves.” The poem was published in 1945, so that the man who “was a Jew from Europe or might have been” (291) is likely an exile or refugee, a reminder of the times. He is like some Jean Wahl, who was tortured by the Gestapo, escaped, and taught in the United States during the war, philosopher and critic at the Sorbonne, and admirer of Stevens as Stevens was of him. Stevens’s contemporary references are mostly like that: indirect but serious and often very telling. The Auroras of Autumn was published in 1950, only three years after Transport to Summer. Though it moves from a summer vision to an 196 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.015

Wallace Stevens

autumnal outlook, there is little sign of diminishing power. The collection is framed by the ten-part title poem and the extraordinary valedictory poem “Angels Surrounded by Paysans.” “The Auroras of Autumn” takes as its central pattern the northern lights, here symbolizing “a tragic and desolate background,” as the poet explained in a 1954 letter (852). Stevens evokes old myths as well as personal memories of his parents, memories now turned archetypal. He argues and meditates and laughs and grieves, all the while punning and dancing verbally in imitation of the dancing, unpredictable auroras. What if they should be the primal pattern for human life? The sequence, frst published in 1948, is perforce informed by consciousness of the post-war desolation endured by many, as well as by Stevens’s own aging. His meditation on whiteness (355–356) embodies such desolation, but Stevens refuses to remain there. He offers in effect two endings. The frst (part ix) asserts once more the essential “innocence” of nature. The second (part x) returns us to the exuberant Stevens, exulting in his wise rabbi fgure and in the strength of human words, “The vital, the never-failing genius, / Fulflling his meditations, great and small” (363). The collection includes the remarkable, long 1949 sequence “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” where Stevens’s purpose was “to try to get as close to the ordinary, the commonplace and the ugly as it is possible for a poet to get” – not, he added, a question of “grim reality but of plain reality”; he wanted to “purge” himself “of anything false” (Letters [636]). Throughout, he moves towards defnitions of “ordinary” and “common” that evoke wisdom literature, writing such as we fnd in Proverbs or Erasmus’s Adages, writing that distills the wisdom of the everyday. It is one of Stevens’s favourite genres. The poem meditates on an actual place, New Haven, and its thirty-one cantos move towards a working defnition of fnal reality – not the fnal reality of its founders, a New Jerusalem, nor its opposite, the anti-apocalyptic, but a new commonplace. Stevens begins by looking at the older reality (cantos I–V), moves to New Haven’s architecture (canto VII), a passionate desire for reality (VIII), a walk (XI), and then, in canto XII: “The poem is the cry of its occasion . . . not about it” (404). A poem is not about its subject any more than a cry of pain is about pain. Canto XXV, on Stevens’s personifed artistic conscience, the “hidalgo,” is moving and simple. The four powerful closing cantos include the pithy phrase “the intricate evasions of as” on the power of metaphor (425). (“Evasion,” like “illusion,” is not necessarily pejorative for Stevens. For him, the idea of God was a “benign illusion,” as he put it in a 1942 letter [402]). Canto XXIX beautifully rewrites the earthly paradise, XXX clears the sight, and XXXI rejects reality as “a solid.” Possibly it is “a shade that traverses / A dust, a force that traverses a 197 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.015

Eleanor Cook

shade” – a brain wave (417)? That would be a defnition that accords with modern physics. “Things of August” deserves more attention, like many of Stevens’s late poems. Its ten parts vary in approach and execution, but part II on the egg and part V on the rabbi are not to be missed. “August” is the literal season, where, for example, woodland birdsong falls silent (“the never-failing genius” [363]), and also by analogy the end of a life’s summer. In comparison with “The Auroras of Autumn,” “Things of August” has a daytime vision. It includes sheer enjoyment in the physical world, a sense of fun, and a sense of gratitude. In “Angel Surrounded by Paysans” (1950), the peasants, given their old French spelling, are called “countrymen” in the poem, and the scene evokes a time when angels might come calling, as on Abraham in Genesis. The countrymen simply welcome the angel at the door (we are not told who is inside and who is outside), connecting the angel with the earth. Like the angel, they grew out of a still-life painting by Tal Coat that Stevens bought, as we know from a 1949 letter (650). The angel begins by saying, “I am the angel of reality,” and then later, “I am the necessary angel of earth” (423). A year later, Stevens titled his collection of essays The Necessary Angel. So ingrained is the idea that an inspiring angel must be the angel of imagination that not all commentary accepts Stevens’s angel as the angel of reality. But he knew exactly what he was talking about. The necessary angel, he conceded, “will appear to be the angel of the imagination” for nine readers out of ten and for nine days out of ten. But, “it is the tenth day that counts,” as he puts it in a 1952 letter (753). If we want to start understanding the strength of Stevens’s late poetry “of the earth,” we might well start with this remarkable angel. The angel is “only half of a fgure of a sort”: a personifcation, a metaphor, “appareled” as in biblical or Wordsworthian apprehension, of “lightest look,” so that with “a turn / Of my shoulder . . . I am gone?” As with “turn” in “Domination of Black,” the turn of the line, of trope (etymologically “turn”), and of more, are in play. So is the simple turn of a page: it brings the end of the book, and the question “I am gone?” (423). Beyond “The Planet on the Table,” other short poems from Stevens’s last years include “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself,” centred on the earliest birdsong after winter, the lovely sound that is the frst intimation of spring to North Americans at Stevens’s latitude. Later birdsong at dawn can be loud enough to waken sleepers, but the frst robin, say, is a “chorister whose c preceded the choir” (452). A drowsy listener might not even be quite sure it is a bird rather than “a sound in his mind” (451). Stevens does not want to write about the thing, the phenomenon. He wants to embody it, to make it sound again, all soft and hard c’s. Or 198 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.015

Wallace Stevens

take “The River of Rivers in Connecticut,” a poem written against death by a man of sixty-four, the second oldest of fve children who was also the last survivor. The river is at once the Connecticut River and a timeless legendary river from antiquity, the Styx and its surroundings, the Stygia. Or see “The Plain Sense of Things.” Or the spooky “Madame La Fleurie” or the uncanny “Prologues to What Is Possible.” Or “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” the poem that James Merrill called his personal equivalent of the twenty-third psalm, “The Lord Is my Shepherd.” Or “The World as Meditation.” Or the very late “Of Mere Being,” with echoes of Yeats, for Stevens like Yeats knew how to write of aging and wrote until his last days. Stevens’s late poems take possession of the earth as his early ones did not. They show how poetry has “to do with our self-preservation; and . . . helps us to live our lives,” as he says in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” (665). Along with much of his poetry from 1942 onwards, they are the fruit of his conviction that “The belief in poetry is a magnifcent fury, or it is nothing” (Letters [446]), and that to “every faithful poet, the faithful poem is an act of conscience,” as he said in accepting the Gold Medal of the Poetry Society of America in 1951 (834). N OT E S 1 Wallace Stevens:  Collected Poetry and Prose, eds. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997): 450. Subsequent citations of this edition (from which all poetry here quoted is taken) are given parenthetically by page number. 2 The Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New  York:  Alfred Knopf, 1966): 677. Subsequent citations of this edition are given parenthetically by page number. 3 Blackmur, Form and Value in Modern Poetry (New  York:  Doubleday, 1957): 183:  Merrill, Recitative, ed. J. D. McLatchy (San Francisco:  North Point, 1986): 75; Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1953): 134. 4 Complete Works of W.  H. Auden:  Prose 1939–1948, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002): xiii. 5 Hill, The Lords of Limit:  Essays on Literature and Ideas (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1984): 16–17. F U RT H E R R E A DI N G Bates, Milton, Wallace Stevens:  A  Mythology of Self (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1985). Bloom, Harold, ed., Wallace Stevens (New York: Chelsea House, 1985). Cook, Eleanor, Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988; reprinted 2014). A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 199 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.015

Eleanor Cook Eeckhout, Bart and Edward Ragg, eds., Wallace Stevens Across the Atlantic (Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2008). Lensing, George S., Wallace Stevens and the Seasons (Baton Rouge, La: Louisiana State University Press, 2001). Maeder, Beverley, Wallace Stevens’ Experimental Language: The Lion in the Lute (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). Ragg, Edward, Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetic of Abstraction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Serio, John, ed., Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Sharpe, Tony, Wallace Stevens:  A  Literary Life (New  York:  St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Vendler, Helen, Last Looks, Last Books:  Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

200 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.015

15 I A N C OP E S TA K E

William Carlos Williams

Born in 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey, to an English father and Puerto Rican mother, as a poet Williams was a late joiner of the modernist revolution in American letters in the frst decades of the twentieth century, but he ultimately became one of its deepest explorers and proponents. Williams’s profession as a full-time pediatrician, serving both the middleand working-class environs of Rutherford and Paterson, gave him, as he stated in his autobiography, “a wonderful opportunity to witness the words being born.”1 As such his subsequent enthusiasm for the modernist desire to “make it new” became a defning strand of his work as a poet and of his own legacy. But in order to begin to achieve this, he had to rapidly overcome entrenchment in what he thought a poet should sound like. For Williams, Keats had been his “God” at medical school, and it was not until his friendship with Ezra Pound, whom he met as a fellow undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in 1902, that he was forced to confront the need to slay the models he was at that time passionately imitating.2 Williams’s frst published book of poems was a self-fnanced volume titled simply Poems that came out in 1909. Its contents illustrate perfectly all that Williams was to eradicate from his own writing over the next eight years as he began to strip his writing of archaic poetic diction and Romantic subject matter and focus instead on the world around him as he experienced it in everyday American speech. A prime example of this was the attitude Williams would later take to the writing of sonnets, the predominant form of the poems he had just published: “To me the sonnet form is thoroughly banal because it is a word in itself whose meaning is defnitely fascistic. To me it subverts most intelligences. I object to its use even here, as I always object to its use other than for doggerel.”3 In this review of Henri Ford’s poetry in 1939, his one source of criticism of the poet was the form he had used. It is not surprising therefore that Williams later asked his own publishers not to reprint his earliest volume. But it remains valuable for defning exactly what he thought had continued to hold American letters back from 201 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.016

Ian Copestake

relevance and for illustrating the steps he subsequently took to eradicate these faults from his own work. An example of the poetry contained within Poems shows many of the elements Pound despaired at, and he was busy telling anyone who would listen why such work should be rejected. Williams’s sonnet “The Uses of Poetry,” for instance, seeks to echo Keats and does so by employing archaic diction and a view of the “use” of poetry as one of escapism from painful reality: For, lest o’ersaddened by such woes as spring To rural peace from our meek onward trend, What else more ft? We’ll draw the light latch-string And close the door of sense; then satiate wend, On poesy’s transforming giant wing, To worlds afar whose fruits all anguish mend.4

The narrator seeks to detach the world of the poem from that of experience and so escape it by creating new worlds of beauty, a “use” of poetry Williams would soon distance himself from. Absent here is also the ear for contemporary modes of speech that would become a hallmark of Williams’s writing, while the poem relies upon rhythms determined by the conventional sonnet form it emulates. Pound did not hold back from his criticism of his friend’s frst volume, telling him that he had added nothing to the models he had used and that such imitations would be ignored among the contemporary poetry presses of London where Pound was establishing his vanguard. In his 1914 poem “The Wanderer: A Rococo Study,” Williams begins to take seriously the questioning initiated by Pound, and in the poem we see him illustrate the birth of his own program of turning away from the past and embracing contemporary reality. In it he states his intentions rather than, as he soon would, demonstrating and enacting or embodying them through the form and effect of his poetry on the reader. The poem focuses on an anonymous speaker who confronts the moments that lead to an awakening of his own imagination and how that becomes the object of a quest for answers to questions “she had put on to try me.”5 Envisaged as a woman and a bird and an inner part of himself, the pursuit leads to a moment of clarity as the speaker frames one such question as follows: “How shall I be a mirror to this modernity?”6 A baptism of the speaker’s newly identifed imaginative powers takes place, signifcantly, through his immersion in the waters of “the flthy Passaic,” and his role is no longer that of pursuing an idealised escape from contact with brute reality.7 Another act of suppression, besides Williams’s wish to distance himself from his frst volume, was the pragmatically unacknowledged importance 202 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.016

William Carlos Williams

of Emerson’s example to the development of his new identity as a poet. Williams’s efforts to embrace present-day experience and speech in the poetry he published from 1917 onwards, as refected in his third volume Al Que Quiere!, echo Emerson’s own call to arms eighty years previously in “The Poet” (1844), in which he states that a contemporary America of logrolling and trade and domestic politics in all its ugliness and colour is “yet unsung [. . .] and it will not wait long for metres.”8 In his 1923 prose work The Great American Novel, Williams looks back for a usable past in the American background and fnds Emerson, along with the Transcendentalists, lacking: “We can look back at that imitative phase with its erudite Holmses, Thoreaus, and Emersons. With one word we can damn it:  England.”9 Instead, Emerson’s own prodigious acolyte Whitman is the preferred exemplary fgure, helping to defne the move into the open that Williams wanted American writing to make so that it could defne its own traditions, freed from the historical weight of Europe’s cultural claims to superiority. Emerson’s own clarion call to American poets is thus couched by Williams in Whitmanian terms, as in his 1921 essay “Yours, O Youth” (the title is borrowed from Whitman’s poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers”). But despite this disguise, the Emersonian heart of his modern nativist promotion of American writing still beats: “It has been by paying naked attention frst to the thing itself that American plumbing, American shoes, American bridges, indexing systems, locomotives, printing presses, city buildings, farming implements, and a thousand other things have become notable in the world. Yet we are timid in believing that in the arts discovery and invention will take the same course.”10 Williams’s outward rejection of Emerson can be seen as serving a pragmatic end comparable to the promotion of Whitman, as his emulation of the latter’s example defned Williams’s own place within what Stephen Tapscott has described as a “native counter-tradition.”11 Whitman’s importance to Williams, like his vehement rejection of Emerson, comes at a time of insecurity in the face of the drift away from America by other moderns such as Pound and, more jarringly, T. S. Eliot. Williams subsequently explained that he felt Eliot “had rejected America and I refused to be rejected and so my reaction was violent. I realized the responsibility I must accept. I knew he would infuence all subsequent American poets and take them out of my sphere. I had envisaged a new form of poetic composition, a form for the future. It was a shock to me that he was so tremendously successful; my contemporaries focked to him – away from what I wanted.”12 The roots of the development of his own formal innovations, and their grounding in a notion of organic form and unity achieved through the imagination, are obscured by his “violent” promotion of Whitman at Emerson’s 203 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.016

Ian Copestake

expense. This has also long obscured the familial connection Williams had with an Emersonian tradition of thought, at the heart of which lay his Unitarian upbringing in Rutherford. The local variant of Rutherford Unitarianism that his mother and father so actively engaged in was shaped in its democratic and open ethos by the impact of Emerson’s own revolt against the “icehouse” of a rational nineteenth century Unitarianism that he ultimately rejected. What he desired was that every man and woman experience an intuitive relationship to God based on openness to the workings of nature, rather than on dogmatic prescriptions based on scripture. These Emersonian teachings informed the inclusive principles of the Rutherford Unitarian church that Williams’s father and mother actively helped establish in the town and that Williams attended both there (with his younger brother Ed) and, later, as a medical student in Philadelphia at the First Unitarian Church from 1902 to 1906. For Williams the truth to which he began to dedicate himself through his post-1909 poems was a disavowal of Romantic escapism and an ever more precise awareness of the language we use to frame our relationship to the worlds we most immediately inhabit. Furthermore, his writing was grounded in a sense of purpose, a conviction about the innate importance of being open to contemporary experience and of fnding the means to refresh the ways in which the ordinary could be brought into poetry and into readers’ consciousness. There is thus a sense of organic unity and purpose that fnds its expression throughout Williams’s long career in the persistent foral, tree, and root motifs that dominate his poetry. Indeed, his frst working title for his 1951 autobiography was “Root, Branch and Flower,” a title that seemed a ftting refection of his sense of the vitality at the heart of the human imagination when fed by contact with the ground beneath one’s feet, a connection his work sought to embody. One-third of the poems Williams wrote in his lifetime concerned fowers, a number that increases when the focus of poems is on natural forms such as trees. The rootedness and organicism of this subject matter is essential to an understanding of his legacy and aims, as they are emblematic of his insistence on the social value inherent in a poet or artist’s work when that work fnds beauty in the mundane, the ordinary, and the commonplace. A strong statement of this comes in his poem “To all Gentleness,” written in 1944 against the backdrop of the continuing destruction of the Second World War. The lessons of his early openness to Imagism’s focus on precise language is allied in the poem to clarity of statement, as he sets out a defence of poetry as a positive mode of perception in the midst of a world bent on destruction. A  simile leads the reader through a comparison between the beauty to be found in the seemingly unpoetic, chaotic details of mundane 204 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.016

William Carlos Williams

existence, and a fower, a leap of the imagination bridged by empathy seemingly at risk in a world torn by confict and that the speaker simply calls “gentleness”: Like a cylindrical tank fresh silvered upended on the sidewalk to advertise some plumber’s shop, a profusion of pink roses bending ragged in the rain – speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring13

Two years after this poem came the publication of the frst book of Williams’s long poem Paterson, in which, over the course of four further volumes, he would grapple with the aims and role of poetry in a world in which, as book one made clear, fower buds had been “divorced / from [their] fellows,” marking “divorce” from contact with the value of the world at our feet the unfortunate “sign of knowledge in our time” rather than “gentleness.” Through his epic work Williams continued to argue for what his shorter lyrics had aimed to exemplify, namely the need for what in the 1920s he had termed “contact,” and for the role of poetry in making such contact with the quotidian tangible and reachable. An early instance of that divorce had, however (as I’ve already hinted), come in the form of T. S. Eliot’s success and the direction his impact on modern writing seemed to be about to take. Williams sensed the potential failure, before it had even begun, of his own attempt to dig into present experience to fnd the roots of artistic expression rather than looking back in time for cultural values now perceived by writers such as Eliot as absent from the valueless wasteland of modern experience. The stated violence of his reaction to Eliot was foregrounded in his 1923 volume of prose poetry, Spring and All, a book that stands as one of Williams’s most enduring and iconoclastic works, in view of its subsequent infuence on generations of innovative poets such as Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley. It also contains many of Williams’s most commonly anthologised poems, including most famously his one sentence lyric “The Red Wheelbarrow,” as well as “To Elsie” and “At the Ballgame.” Prior to their publication as separate lyrics, these poems originally punctuated vehement and chaotic expressions in prose of Williams’s argument for poetry in the modern age and thus acted as emblematic fowers bursting from an American soil. His poems here sought to exemplify the sort of art that could stem from that soil, while his prose set out his angry resistance to the fight to Europe and its cultural heritage undertaken by Eliot and Pound. 205 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.016

Ian Copestake

In Spring and All the poet dramatizes artists’ relationships to tradition and to the expectations of readers by invoking his own preferred restating of that relationship as a cycle of destruction followed by creative renewal. Played out here is the perceived necessity of breaking free from the hold that the past has over the present. By breaking the temptation to appropriate foreign traditions of art and thought, which Williams argues were cultivated in response to their own local conditions, similarly powerful and inspiring art can be made on any soil no matter how seemingly bereft of history or culture. By “making it new” and throwing off the shackles of the past, Williams opens Spring and All with an appeal to violence, claiming that this is necessary in order that contemporary artists emulate the conditions that produced the revered cultures of the past rather than merely copying or aping what they had actually created: “The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill. The imagination is supreme.”14 The frst poem to break through the prose enacts his faith in people’s imaginative powers, which echo those of regenerative nature, as the readers’ eyes are led from the opening line’s invocation of a hidden location, “By the road to the contagious hospital,” the identity of which is delayed as we are drawn downwards by prepositions that lead us underground and past the lists of lifeless nature dominating the otherwise bleak and barren landscape. Eliot’s own modern wasteland is invoked here, his poem of that name having appeared in 1922, but Williams looks beyond it, inviting the reader to follow the poem’s tracing of a source of life deep within the soil, as “Lifeless in appearance, sluggish / dazed spring approaches –.”15 The details of the landscape sharpen as, One by one objects are defned – It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance – Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted they grip down and begin to awaken16

In the less well-known second poem of Spring and All, Williams reiterates the importance of the visual arts on his emergence as a modern poet through an ekphrastic fower poem titled “The Pot of Flowers,” based on his close friend Charles Demuth’s 1922 watercolour “Tuberoses.” The prose that immediately follows the poem sees the speaker praise such works of art or writing that display “imagination freed from the handcuffs of ‘art.’ ” The poem thus emphasises Williams’s own decisive movement away from the derivativeness of his early poetry. This second poem, like the frst, describes 206 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.016

William Carlos Williams

a downward descent of perception, as details of a painting are taken in and evoked through a fragmentary rendering of the dynamics of colour and movement that work upon the eye of reader and viewer alike to create a whole, as the vivid fower is evoked along with the darkness of the soil it has emerged from: Pink suffused with white fowers and fowers reversed take and spill the shaded fame darting it back into the lamp’s horn petals aslant darkened with mauve red where in whorls petal lays its glow upon petal round famegreen throats petals radiant with transpiercing light contending above the leaves reaching up their modest green from the pot’s rim and there, wholly dark, the pot gay with rough moss17

The layout of the poem on the page helps emphasise the fragmented nature of perception and the importance of the relationship between individual parts of experience for an appreciation of wholeness or form. The emphasis on the visual layout of a poem was thus becoming ever more important to Williams. A technique evident here, which underlines his desire to disrupt and question how sense is made, are line-breaks and pauses positioned to unsettle any easy syntactic fow, and so make the reader aware of the material of language divorced momentarily from sense. In this way Williams echoes the work of painters from the post-impressionists to the contemporary moderns he admired, such as Juan Gris, whose abstractions challenged the viewers by making them aware of the component parts of perception, thus rendering the “meaning” of a painting secondary to its status as a created object. The importance of the visual arts to Williams’s distinctive modern voice as a poet had grown since his exposure to the innovations and discussions he was able to witness and engage in at frst hand, despite his seemingly parochial commitment to a life of work and family in small town 207 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.016

Ian Copestake

Rutherford. Pound had alerted him to the colony of artists meeting locally at Grantwood, through which he met such infuential art world fgures as Man Ray. In turn he became familiar with modern work exhibited at Walter Arensberg’s studio and took trips to the 291 Gallery on Fifth Avenue in New  York, becoming friends with its creator, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Between 1905 and 1913 these galleries and the Grantwood discussions opened Williams’s eyes to the world of avant-garde experimentation in the visual arts by Americans and Europeans alike, prior to the controversial announcement of this work to a wider public through the 1913 Armory Show. The work of Marcel Duchamp impressed Williams, from his controversial painting “Nude Descending a Staircase” to his later “ready-made” sculptures. The infuence of the latter can be seen in Williams’s Spring and All, especially in a poem titled “XXV” in the volume but later known as “Rapid Transit.” Here Williams weaves the poem almost entirely from snippets of text and speech lifted from contemporary experience of a modern America city. This rush of voices evokes the chaotic bustle of a city like New York and foreshadows Williams’s acute concern with lost and found voices in his long poem Paterson. Additionally the method of laying extracts of found language alongside each other looks forward to the collage form he would apply to sequences of his epic poem, as here a range of discourses, from a critical discussion about poetry to traffc signs and advertised warnings, carry the momentum of the poem forward, detached from a controlling narrative voice or speaker. The path towards this focus on innovative poetic form had been further prepared by his volume of improvisatory writings titled Kora in Hell (1920). It featured a long prologue that confdently set out his own sense of the necessary direction for American letters at a time when, as he explained in his autobiography, “the freshness, the newness of a springtime which I had sensed among the others, a reawakening of letters, all that delight which in making a world to match the supremacies of the past could mean was being blotted out by the war.”18 The improvisations themselves consisted of a daily exercise of paragraph-long automatic writings, followed by a brief commentary, which sought to explode his own writing from ingrained habits of composition and convention and so explore new ways of cohering through spontaneous expression. As with his other subsequent volumes of iconoclastic and innovative writing, including Spring and All and his 1928 prose poetry sequence “The Descent of Winter,” Kora in Hell adopted a seasonal framework to carry its otherwise nontraditional sense of organic unity. This optimistic sense of seasonal renewal, in contrast to the sense of cultural despair Eliot was seen to be underlining, fed off Williams’s continued belief in the vital regenerative capacity of the human imagination. The genre of 208 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.016

William Carlos Williams

poetry was also deemed to be the perfect means of engaging with this potential, and due to the intimacy of its relationship to language, it was revived as a genre of vital importance in Williams’s eyes because it could help renew a reader’s relationship to the world described through it. In the 1930s this focus on the importance of precision in a poet’s relationship to language came to a head through Williams’s enthusiasm for the “Objectivist” group of poets. It revived the principle focus of Imagism by again arguing for new poetic forms that measured out the relationship between words and experience in ways that were fresh and not based on familiar conceptions of what poetry should look or sound like. It distanced itself from the idea of “free verse” by insisting on the intrinsic importance of organising principles that nevertheless were not defned by established convention. The principle members of this loose association of poets were Louis Zukofsky, with whom Williams became a strong friend, George Oppen, and Charles Reznikoff, along with other associated poets such as Basil Bunting. Briefy united by an enthusiasm for Pound’s and Gertrude Stein’s work, Williams emphasised in his autobiography the idea behind these poets’ focus on the poem as an object: “The poem being an object (like a symphony or cubist painting) it must be the purpose of the poet to make of his words a new form: to invent, that is, an object consonant with his day. This is what we wished to imply by Objectivism, an antidote, in a sense, to the bare image haphazardly presented in loose verse.”19 (A 265) Williams’s frst volume of collected poems, published in 1934, included works that exemplifed this heightened concern with innovative form and inspiration from the visual arts. Most startling among them are the radical experiments in this direction embodied in the poems “April” (which opens his “Della Primavera Trasportata al Morale” sequence) and “The Botticellian Trees.” Williams’s control over the form, sound, and visual arrangement of his poems on the page relied upon his use of techniques such as enjambment. The effect of sudden or well-placed breaks in a line’s fow disrupted conventional semantic relations between words, keeping the reader aware at all times of possible new combinations of sense and meaning and thus making reading a poem an act of construction and a creative experience in itself. A  prime example of this is “To a Poor Old Woman,” which appeared in his 1935 volume An Early Martyr and Other Poems. Here the concern with new ways of engaging a reader does not take place on a stage detached from social realities, as Williams’s collection takes snapshots of a world riven by the Great Depression. Despite that context, in this poem he fnds a way of celebrating the possibility of reconnection with that world through the fgure of a “Poor Old Woman / munching a plum on / the street.”20 Writing about the plums she holds in a bag, Williams allows the 209 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.016

Ian Copestake

line breaks of the poem alone to convey her emphatic engagement with and enjoyment of the fruit: They taste good to her They taste good to her. They taste good to her

For Williams the 1930s nearly saw the end of his own pursuit of a career in poetry due to the lack of any large audience for his work and the expense of the volumes he did ultimately bring out. The writing of fction thus seemed to offer the only viable avenue for publication, but at the end of the decade Williams’s hopes for gaining a wider audience for his poetry received a huge boost through the establishment of New Directions, a new and well-funded publishing house run by James Laughlin, who had been encouraged in this venture through his friendship with Ezra Pound. Williams was now approached and offered the chance to revive the publication of his poetry and along with it the chance to continue his work on the epic, Paterson, that had occupied his thoughts from the 1920s. The initial four books came out in 1946, 1948, 1949, and 1951, respectively, and charted a poet’s lifelong search of his local environs for a language that could survive and counter the destructive forces obstructing the growth of a culture in America. Just as Williams’s own dramatisation of his initiation as a poet of the modern world had seen him baptise himself in the waters of the “flthy Passaic,” so too was his epic situated in the least likely of settings, the “swill-hole” of Paterson, New Jersey, an industrial city riven by decline and labour disputes and with a history that had seen it envisaged as a potential capital of the United States by Alexander Hamilton, who imagined its potential manufacturing base powered by the energy of the Passaic Falls.21 For Williams the city embodied the plight of America’s continuing misdirection, its failure to realise its own potential and instead be driven by the imposition of brute will and violence against its own landscape and people, both indigenous and immigrant. Echoed here was the course of history Williams traced in In the American Grain (1925), with the focus now on the fgure of a poet called Paterson struggling to write his own epic or to fnd a “redeeming language” that was not drowned out by the noise of the Falls and his own failure to listen carefully enough to the sounds around him. The years of formal experimentation Williams had practised received their ultimate challenge as he tried to structure his epic stretching initially over four volumes but that extended beyond that initial plan into a ffth 210 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.016

William Carlos Williams

volume and ultimately saw Williams leave notes for a sixth book. The collage method gave it the form he was seeking and allowed him to lay fragments of text from historical documents to personal letters alongside each other, while recurrent motifs rather than an explicit narrative thread drove the poem. The success of the poem’s frst two books in particular, led for instance by enthusiastic reviews by Robert Lowell, saw Williams at last begin to gain belated recognition for his work. In 1950 he received the National Book Award for Poetry for both book three of Paterson and his Selected Poems. However, a stroke the following year forced him to end his medical practice, and he refected on the impact of his declining physical health on his determination to reaffrm his identity as a poet in the title poem of his 1954 volume The Desert Music. Foregrounded in many poems in this volume, and in his 1955 Journey to Love, was a change in both form and subject matter, as his increasing restriction in movement and ailing sight saw him adopt a freer fowing, descending triadic line, visually distinctive on the page, which increasingly helped him measure out his refections on his past. It also saw him argue in his writings for his own adoption of a measure that he called “the variable foot” and that he felt had enabled him to capture the distinctive American speech patterns around him. These concerns were brought together in his memorable autobiographical refection on his relationship with his wife, Flossie, from their wedding in 1912 to his reaffrmation of her importance to him, allied to his calmly refective considerations of mortality, in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” Williams’s seemingly inexhaustable energy and drive, despite a third stroke in 1958, saw him return to and evoke the impact and importance of the visual arts on his formative modern verse in his fnal 1962 volume Pictures from Breughel. After Williams’s death in 1963, he received the Pulitzer Prize for this fnal book, a form of public recognition he had sought throughout his life. His endless range of correspondence with emergent writers such as Ginsberg and Denise Levertov ensured his legacy among a new generation of poets, while his translation into Spanish of works enjoyed by his Puerto Rican mother has seen a gradual widening of international recognition for his own poetry in Latin America, through translations by Octavio Paz for instance. Williams remains a key fgure in the development of American poetry in the twentieth century across a range of subsequent movements, from the Beats to post-structuralist theories of poetics. But he also sustains his popular appeal based on the boundaries he helped push away to make commonplace experience the startling subject matter of poetry. 211 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.016

Ian Copestake NOT E S 1 William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1967): 361. 2 Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams: 53. 3 William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1969): 236. 4 William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Vol. 1, 1909–1939, eds. A Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (London: Paladin, Grafton Books, 1991): 21. 5 Williams, Collected Poems: Vol. 1: 27. 6 Williams, Collected Poems: Vol. 1: 28. 7 Williams, Collected Poems: Vol. 1: 35. 8 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. Alfred R. Ferguson et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1984), vol. 3: 21–22. 9 William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New  York:  New Directions, 1970): 211. 10 Williams, Selected Essays: 35. 11 Stephen Tapscott, American Beauty: William Carlos Williams and the Modernist Whitman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984): 91. 12 William Carlos Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet, ed. Edith Heal (Boston: Beacon, 1958): 42. 13 William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Vol. 2, 1939–1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (London:  Paladin, Grafton Books, 1991): 68. 14 Williams, Collected Poems: Vol. 1: 179. 15 Williams, Collected Poems: Vol. 1: 183. 16 Williams, Collected Poems: Vol. 1: 183. 17 Williams, Collected Poems: Vol. 1: 184. 18 Williams, Autobiography: 158. 19 Williams, Autobiography: 265. 20 Williams, Collected Poems: Vol. 2: 383. 21 William Carlos Williams, Paterson, rev. edition, ed. Christopher MacGowan (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992): 109. F U RT H E R R E A DI N G Beck, John, Writing the Radical Center:  William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics (Albany:  State University of New York Press, 2001). Breslin, James E., William Carlos Williams: An American Artist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Cohen, Milton A., Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010). Copestake, Ian D., The Ethics of William Carlos Williams’s Poetry (Rochester: Camden House, 2010). Cushman, Stephen, William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 212 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.016

William Carlos Williams Halter, Peter, The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Mariani, Paul, William Carlos Williams:  A  New World Naked (New  York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). Marsh, Alec, Money and Modernity:  Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998). Weaver, Mike, William Carlos Williams:  The American Background (New  York: Cambridge University Press, 1971).

213 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.016

16 A L E C   M A RS H

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound probably did more for American poetry in the twentieth century than anyone else did. A great poet, the inventor of the contemporary epic poem (a surprisingly fertile genre), an expert agitator, a publicist, an editor, a pedagogue, and a mover and shaker, Pound is a modernist master, with all of the baggage that equivocal title implies. If Pound was a great poet, he was also a great disgrace. His passionate involvement with Italian Fascism, dating from the mid-1930s, led to his indictment for treason in 1943. The ensuing trial found him mentally incompetent and led to his involuntary incarceration at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Insane from 1946 to 1958. Only then, when the government decided not to prosecute, was the aged poet released to the care of his wife, so both could return to Italy. Pound’s involvement with Fascism, his anti-Semitism, and his support for segregation in the 1950s have made him off limits for the more fastidious readers. But his astonishing technical virtuosity and brilliant invention permanently extended the frontiers of our language; no serious poet can afford not to read him, and none can fail to learn from him. His daunting Cantos, some eight hundred pages of poetic sounds – cacophony to theophany, ranting to chanting – defne modern poetic music. This does not mean Pound wrote better than others did but that he ranged wider. His intention throughout, he wrote in the preface to his eccentric textbook Guide to Kulchur (1937) was to COMMIT myself on as many points as possible, that means I shall make a number of statements which very few men can AFFORD to make, for the simple reason that such taking sides might jeopardize their incomes (directly) or their prestige or “position” in any one or other of the professional “worlds”. Given my freedom, I may be a fool to use it, but I would be a cad not to.”1

Pound had no job to lose, never owned any property, and made next to nothing from his voluminous writings. A freelancer for most of his life, he committed himself to a number of dubious causes out of a fery idealism, and a kind of evangelical passion, that made him a modernist prophet, 214 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.017

Ezra Pound

fascist propagandist, and staunch defender of the lost Jeffersonian Republic. Those who think of poetry as an ivory tower vocation should think again. Pound was a social activist, committed to “social and economic justice” and, surprisingly, to peace. Pound was an anti-war activist who thought globally and ecologically. For poetic activism he bears comparison with only two other American poets, the Marxist-feminist Adrienne Rich and Amiri Baraka, whose shifting black-nationalist politics are (in certain respects) as fraught and problematic as Pound’s own. Pound’s Life Pound was born in the silver mining settlement of Hailey, Idaho, on October 30, 1885, but he grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Isabel Wadsworth, his mother, was a direct descendent of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His father, Homer, worked at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia as a silver assayer. Pound entered the University of Pennsylvania at age ffteen, meeting, that year, both William Carlos Williams and, at a Halloween party, Hilda Doolittle; both became lifelong friends and major poets, partly as a result of Pound’s constant encouragement. Nonetheless, Pound left Penn after one year to enroll in Hamilton College in upstate New York, then a tiny liberal arts college of two hundred male students with an excellent faculty. By his junior year, Pound had developed his most enduring interest – Medieval and Renaissance literature – and he was beginning to translate Provencal troubadour poetry, an exercise in cutting-edge philology circa 1905. The courses Pound took in his senior year might well constitute a graduate program in comparative literature. He was reading Old French, Old Spanish, Provencal, and German, and taking seminars on The Cid and Chaucer. Add a special course in Dante, and it is easy to see why Pound pursued graduate studies back at Penn, attaining an M.A. in 1907 Pound won a fellowship to undertake research for a dissertation on Lope de Vega, travelling to Spain, Paris, and, later, London, during the summer of 1906. Though Pound’s research was fruitful, he realized that he wanted to write poetry, not philology. He returned to Philadelphia in a rebellious mood, alienated his professors, and left without a degree. Outside of class, he tried to live an arty, bohemian life, insofar as that was possible in staid Philadelphia. He affected cigarettes and began a serious relationship with Hilda Doolittle, who, infected by Ezra’s enthusiasm for the poet’s life, dropped out of Bryn Mawr – the whole adolescent story is recounted in H. D.’s roman a clef, HERmione (1927). During that time he made a book for her, Hilda’s Book, his earliest work (since republished in Collected Early Poetry). 215 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.017

Alec Marsh

He was lucky to land a job at Wabash College in Indiana beginning in the fall semester 1907, teaching French and Spanish. Like many artistic Americans then and now, he was appalled by the cultureless desolation of the Midwest. Soon enough he contrived to get himself fred (in February 1908) and took off for Europe, landing in Venice in May, where he printed 150 copies of his frst book, A Lume Spento (1908). Although he called these poems “stale cream puffs” when they were eventually republished in the 1960s, they hold up well; moody, dreamy, and “symboliste,” they include several still-anthologized dramatic monologues in the Browning manner on Provencal themes, including “Cino” and “Na Audiart.” Pound used his book to gain entrance to the London literary world, then dominated by William Butler Yeats. Within a year Pound had befriended the leading literary lights of London, not only Yeats but also Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford), editor of the English Review, and the editor of The New Age, Alfred Richard Orage. Pound would write, for Orage, hundreds of articles, reviews, and some poems over the course of the next decade. At the center of cultural activity in London, Pound saw and reviewed virtually all art shows and concerts. His literary career took off with two books of new poems published in 1909, Personae and Exultations; with a book about the troubadours, The Spirit of Romance (1910); and with two more volumes of poetry, Canzoni (1911) and Ripostes (1912). Success did not mean money. Pound lived frugally, in a single room, supported by a monthly check from his father of about twenty dollars. Pound had no vices; he did not smoke, drink, or whore. He did affect outlandish clothes because, he said, they were cheap. He courted Dorothy Shakespear, the daughter of Yeats’s sometime lover, Olivia Shakespear (through them he had met Yeats). After a long courtship, hindered by the poet’s lack of means, Pound and Dorothy married in 1914. Post-impressionist painting coincided with the arrival in London, circa 1910, of Chinese masterpieces looted from the East. These new and alien infuences had profound effects on poetry and painting. Pound was slow to catch on, but by 1913–1914 he was involved with a group of modern artists, including Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, and T. E. Hulme, a critic and philosopher. The Italian performance artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, later a great infuence on Pound’s life, came to London expounding a radically avant-garde “Futurism,” which Pound and friends at frst jeered, though in fact they were trying to do something like it themselves. On the eve of the collapse of Western civilization in the Great War, recognizably modernist movements popped up like dandelions. This was the period of Imagism in poetry, of Vorticism in the arts. Imagism, theorized by Hulme’s reading of Bergson, was an attempt to produce images by creating 216 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.017

Ezra Pound

metaphor-like structures that would release images (intuitions) in the mind of the reader. This meant short, intense lyric poems, such as those of Hilda Doolittle. Pound, foreign editor for Harriet Monroe’s new journal, Poetry (published in Chicago), scrawled the name “H. D.  Imagiste” under some of Hilda’s poems, and a movement, as well as a poet, was born. Vorticism was Lewis’s aesthetic of hard edges and diagonals, designed to fummox his countrymen; “Kill John Bull with Art” was its motto. Its vehicle, BLAST, a large-format, puce-colored item, appeared in July 1914, just weeks before the Great War began. For all of its outlandishness, it featured, besides some unfortunate poems by Pound, the opening of Ford’s The Good Soldier, Rebecca West, and, in issue two, T. S. Eliot, who was in England to work on his Harvard dissertation in philosophy. Eliot and Pound collaborated. Pound got Poetry to publish Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in June 1915; Eliot wrote his frst book on Pound, Ezra Pound: His Poetry and His Metric (1917). The Pound/Eliot relationship is perhaps the most fruitful creative friendship in English letters since Coleridge and Wordsworth. They revised each other’s work, the most notable product of which partnership was Pound’s editing of The Waste Land in 1922. Pound was ubiquitous in these years:  he reviewed Robert Frost and got James Joyce and Marianne Moore into print; he was, as I’ve noted, close to Yeats; and he knew Laurence Binyon, curator of Asian art at the British Museum, who put Pound in touch with the widow of Ernest Fenollosa. An American who taught Western philosophy in Japan, Fenollosa had made himself an expert on Asian art. Mary Fenollosa gave his notebooks on Chinese poetry and on the Noh drama to Pound, who was thereupon made her late husband’s literary executor. Fenollosa’s seminal essay, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, which Pound published, is arguably the century’s most infuential treatise on poetics. Pound’s edition of Certain Noble Plays of Japan, published by Cuala Press, had a transformative effect on Yeats, whose “Plays for Dancers” were directly infuenced by Noh. These plays, in turn, made Beckett’s drama possible. In 1915, Pound published Cathay, his versions of a number of Chinese poems, which he had found annotated, and glossed in Japanese and English, in Fenollosa’s notebooks. Lustra (1916) reveals Pound’s transformation into a modern artist. Here we fnd him changed from a poet obsessed with medieval and renaissance themes, with moods and splendors, to a writer of satirical and biting epigrams (which, as Eliot saw, recalled Martial and Catullus). His Imagist work is well represented here, as is a notable “Chinese” infuence and a palpable dissatisfaction with the cultural and social establishment. Pound regarded Cathay as a war book – many of the poems in it concern exile, the dislocations of combat in far-fung outposts, and so on – and 217 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.017

Alec Marsh

increasingly, after the military disasters of 1916 and1917, the war began to undermine Pound’s faith in the British imperium and in liberal capitalism. In 1917, Pound met Major Clifford Hugh Douglas at The New Age. Douglas’s experience running an aircraft factory during the war had persuaded him that extant commercial arrangements were both futile and unjust: increases in productivity were never matched by real increases in wages, and profts were unduly concentrated at the top. Douglas soon developed a sound critique of, and a utopic remedy for, the evils of fnance capital. Both Orage and Pound became early proselytizers of Douglas’s new economic theory of Social Credit. Pound’s poetry grew more political, and he began experimenting with longer sequences. With a major long poem already in mind, he published the “Ur-Cantos” in Poetry in 1917. In 1920, his book-length poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley made no noise until reclaimed by the British critic F. R. Leavis in the 1930s. Now it reads among the richest poems of the century, comparable to The Waste Land. The war ended in general disillusionment late in 1918. The “Carthaginian Peace” imposed thereafter, through the Treaty of Versailles (1919), was so punitive that it all but guaranteed future confict; the only real victor of the war was the United States. Though nominally winners, Great Britain, France, and Italy – to say nothing of Russia – were gravely hurt. Having published Mauberley, his “farewell to London,” and having gathered a selection “of all he wished to keep” of his lyric poetry in Umbra: The Early Poems of Ezra Pound (1920), he and Dorothy joined the frst wave of expatriates to return to Paris. Pound immediately rounded up the cream of French literature for The Dial – Eliot had got him the job of French correspondent for the magazine – and he began to write music. He soon met the wild young composer George Antheil and got involved with a new group of artists, among them Fernand Léger, Constantin Brancusi, and a young Ernest Hemingway. In 1923, he met Olga Rudge, a beautiful twenty-three-year-old violinist. Pound had been straying from his marriage for some time, but with Rudge he found a permanent partner. In 1925 she would give birth to his only child, Mary. By then, the Pounds – who would stay together – had moved to the seaside Italian resort of Rapallo, where they lived until 1945. Rapallo was a backwater, but the living was cheap. Pound was no stranger to Italy; he had done research in Italian libraries for years. Now that work suddenly began to bear fruit in The Cantos, the long poem that he would compose over the next sixty years. In 1922, Benito Mussolini – a former newspaper editor, socialist, and war hero  – had, with the blessing of the king, seized power in Italy. He suppressed the communists and set about instituting a new political religion, Fascism. Pound, like many Americans, was intrigued by the 218 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.017

Ezra Pound

energetic, charismatic politician who was determined to make Italy a world power. It was ten years, however, before Pound became a convert. In 1932, he visited the “Deccennio” exhibition celebrating the frst decade of Fascism, and there he met Marinetti, already a long-time partisan of Mussolini; Pound returned home an enthusiast. In January 1933, Pound had a meeting with Mussolini in which they discussed economic issues. Pound gave the Duce a copy of his Draft of XXX Cantos (1930) and came away enchanted. Within six weeks Pound wrote Jefferson and/ or Mussolini (1935), dedicated to the new American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the hope that FDR might follow Mussolini’s energetic example, restructuring the United States in light of Jeffersonian politics and the economic principles of Social Credit. The book is an excellent gloss on Eleven New Cantos (1934) and on The Fifth Decad of Cantos (1937). Pound then turned sharply rightward. Suddenly he became a believer in the so-called Jewish/Communist conspiracy and an anti-Semite well to the right of most Italian Fascists. Anti-Semitism aside, from now on, Pound’s political views closely tracked those of the Italian regime. From 1935 Pound became an active, unpaid English-language propagandist for the regime, writing out of personal conviction but in harmony with the needs of the state. Like a hyperactive blogger Pound began writing dozens of letters a day in his spiky “Ezratic” dialect. Always entertaining, his letters became ever more antic, cryptic, and irreverent. Senators, bankers, and FDR and his wife were all barraged by hectoring letters; so were members of the extreme right in America and Great Britain, as Pound sought to persuade the world that the Jews were plotting a second world war. Pound’s views were consistent with those of the American and British extreme right. As the thirties rolled on, and as Mussolini’s inept foreign policy and an ill-conceived oil embargo led by Great Britain drove Italy into the arms of Hitler’s Germany, Pound’s views hardened. Pound’s belief in the Jewish/Communist conspiracy never wavered, which would make him sympatico to Cold Warriors in the United States after World War II. Meanwhile, thanks to Eliot, Pound landed, in 1937, a contract to write a seventy-thousand-word book containing his account of “the sum of all human knowledge.” This became the quirky and delightful Guide to Kulchur (1938), itself an invaluable guide to The Cantos. The threat of war mobilized Pound. Between 1937 and 1939 he redacted an eighteenth-century history of China, and John Adams’s voluminous diaries, into twenty lengthy cantos that offered Confucian China and the early American republic as exemplars of just societies. In April 1939, he travelled to the United States at his own expense in a quixotic attempt to forestall the 219 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.017

Alec Marsh

coming confict. The trip was a fasco; he reached Rapallo just in time to hear that Germany had invaded Poland on September frst. As Matthew Feldman has recently shown, starting in 1935, Pound worked closely with Fascist ministries to promote, in England, a favorable view of Mussolini’s Ethiopian policy.2 Soon after the outbreak of war in Europe, Pound became a paid writer and radio presenter for the regime. Between 1940 and 1945, Pound wrote thousands of speeches, squibs, and other bits of propaganda. His radio work became problematic when Italy declared war on the United States in December 1941, but Pound never suspended his relationship with Rome radio. The danger to America, he decided, “is not that you WILL BE invaded, it is that you HAVE BEEN invaded.”3 He meant that a Jewish cabal surrounding FDR had led the United States into the war. Pound broadcast weekly on Rome radio until the collapse of the Mussolini regime in July 1943, when he was indicted for treason (in absentia) by the U.S. government. He resumed writing and broadcasting for the Reppublica Sociale Italiana – informally called the Republic of Salò – after Mussolini’s restoration to power in September 1943 as a German puppet. Pound’s late broadcasts, given under the name “Jerry’s Front,” grew increasingly desperate and sick, refecting not only the needs of his Nazi employers but also the mind of their author, who, by the time he was captured by partisans in April 1945, a few weeks before the end of the European War, was virtually starving. Pound kept at his Cantos during this trying period, writing in Italian. He published cantos 72 and 73 in Italian newspapers. Although not uninteresting as poetry, they are of a piece with his government propaganda at the time and for that reason were excluded from the published Cantos until 1986. After being released to American authorities, Pound was detained in a military prison near Pisa as he awaited a fight to the United States and a trial for treason. There, at age sixty, he was held for three weeks in a cage under foodlights until he showed such distress that he was allowed to live in a tent. By early November, when he was fown out to face trial, he had completed cantos 74–84, The Pisan Cantos, arguably the greatest work to come out of World War II and the crown jewel of his long poem. Pound was never tried for treason; he was found incompetent, with the jury persuaded by a unanimous report by four psychiatrists. He was remanded to St. Elizabeths hospital in Washington until such time as he could understand the charges against him. Never prosecuted, he remained in federal custody until April 1958. Incredibly, given the deplorable conditions and the mad company he endured there, Pound completed his translations of Confucius and of two plays by Sophocles and continued writing The Cantos, which became increasingly recondite and telegraphic as he pushed 220 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.017

Ezra Pound

his poem towards paradisiac realms while fghting a rear-guard action, as he saw it, defending the nation against subversive infuences. He admired Senator McCarthy and hated the Warren Court. After the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 – which recognized the right of the federal government (under the Fourteenth Amendment) to compel Southern states to end segregation in public schools – Pound became a frm States’ Rights proponent. Some six years earlier, in 1948, The Pisan Cantos had won the Bollingen Prize for poetry, creating a lasting controversy that did much to discredit modernism in the United States and that determines the conditions of Pound’s reception to this day. The question the Bollingen committee left all to ask was simple and clear: Can a poem that opens as an elegy for Fascism and that contains anti-Semitic views be a great work of art? The Bollingen controversy brought Pound to the attention of the American right, now regrouping as fervent anti-Communists in the new Cold War with the USSR. As the years went by, Pound made personal connections with as many prominent rightists as he did poets and students. He generated several vortices, some artistic, some political, spinning away in opposite directions: one towards Black Mountain and the Beats, the other towards the Defenders of the American Constitution, an extreme right-wing group of retired ex-military led by the Marine Lt. Gen. Pedro del Valle, and, through his disciple John Kasper, towards right-wing factions, like the Wheat In Bread Party, named by Pound, which ran segregationist candidates in Tennessee. Out of this trend came the National States Rights Party. After his release and return to Italy in 1958, Pound enjoyed only a few good years before poor health and depression reduced him to virtual silence. Tormented by the notion that his poem was “a botch” and his conspiratorial world view a mistake, Pound died in Venice in 1972. Pound’s Poetry: The Importance of Translation Excluding apprentice pieces, Pound’s poetic development can be divided into three phases. Throughout, he was steered by his constant practice of translation, which he saw as the highest form of literary criticism and a creative act in itself. The Cantos aside, Pound probably translated more poetry than he wrote. Using his translations as a guide, one can discern three phases: the early work, from A Lume Spento (1908) through Ripostes (1912), which was entwined with translations from the Romance languages (notably, an American selection of Pound’s poems was titled Provenca [1910]); a transitional period, from 1913 through 1922, when Pound re-made himself as a modernist poet and translated from the Chinese and from the Latin poetry 221 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.017

Alec Marsh

of Martial and Sextus Propertius; and a fnal period, dominated by The Cantos, which famously begins with a bravura translation of Book XI of the Odyssey. As his lifelong project, The Cantos, unfolded, Pound’s work as a poet was complemented by his translation of the whole of Confucius, including The Book of Odes (1954). By the time he collaborated on Love Poems of Ancient Egypt (1962) with his son-in-law, the Egyptologist Boris de Rachewiltz, and another disciple, Noel Stock (who became his biographer), Egyptian hieroglyphs had already entered the capacious Cantos. The presiding presence over Pound’s early poetry is Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), the pre-Raphaelite painter and poet, whose translation of Dante’s La Vita Nuova appeared as The New Life in 1861. In his introduction to the New York Review of Books edition of the work, issued in 2002, Michael Palmer stresses the “profound effect” this translation had on Pound, most especially in “the approach to translation itself.” He suggests that Rossetti’s “skilled deployment of metrical equivalents to evoke, rather than mimic, the Italian, and his unforced handling of those meters, would forever mark Pound’s Italian translations.”4 The latter included, for example, the entire corpus of Guido Cavalcanti, Dante’s contemporary, competitor, and near peer. As Pound says in his introduction to Cavalcanti:  “in the manner of these translations and of my knowledge of Tuscan poetry, Rossetti is my father and mother.”5 He used Rossetti’s translations from Dante in his scholarly work, The Spirit of Romance (1912). Pound spent years trying to translate Cavalcanti’s abstruse philosophical canzone “Donna mi Prega” and produced a scholarly edition, Cavalcanti Rime, in 1932. By then he had formulated his own philosophy of translation, based on his notion of the three principal energies to be found in poetic language:  Melopoeia, its musical properties; Phanopoeia, its power to cast images “on the visual imagination”; and Logopoeia, “the dance of intellect among words” – something far more complex and trickier than “meaning.”6 A perfect translation should approximate the energetic power of all three – an impossible but worthy ideal. For all of the energy that Pound poured into his Italian (and Provencal) translations, he is best known for “the invention of Chinese poetry for our time,” as T. S. Eliot put it in a review of Cathay (1915). The poems gathered in the book were translated from Fenollosa’s English notes on lectures in Japanese. Thus there is a complicated chain of transmission from Chinese to Japanese to English. Although Pound would eventually learn a good deal about Chinese, in 1915 he had never even heard the language spoken. He had, however, saturated himself in Chinese visual art, and somehow he managed to carry over into English the spiritual essence of the poetry (as even Chinese scholars agree). What he could 222 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.017

Ezra Pound

not translate was the melopoeia of the original poems. From his elegant free-verse versions, one would never guess that the poems rhymed in Chinese. Pound corrected this in his later translations, but, by then, Western ears had become so accustomed to how “Chinese” poetry ought to sound – unadorned, delicately cadenced free verse – that his later, more faithful rhymes sound more like doggerel than “Chinese.” The Odes, though a masterpiece of translation, never attracted other poets interested in “Asian” effects who followed Pound’s earlier path (Gary Snyder, James Wright, and Clarence Major, for example). Pound’s Early Poetry, 1908–1912 Pound’s early work is full of nineteenth-century poetry. Suffused with Rossetti, Swinburne, Browning, and Yeats, his is a symbolist aesthetic with archaic diction. As late as 1911, Pound kept the nineteenth century breathing in lines such as the following couplet from “Canzone: Of Incense”: “O censer of the thought that golden gloweth / Be bright before her when the evening falleth.”7 “The Decadence”  – probably written in Indiana, while Pound was at Wabash College  – alludes specifcally to Yeats’s The Wind Among the Reeds (1889). It speaks of the “bearers of beauty” who fall crushed, presumably under the juggernaut of an uncomprehending society: “Broken our strength, yea as crushed reeds we fall, / And the art, the art goes on” (Pound’s emphasis; CEP 44). The beleaguered artist is a constant theme. Pound thought of middle America as the sixth circle of desolation. In “The Rest” he addresses the “helpless few in my country,” the “remnant enslaved,” the American artists “broken against her / A-stray, lost in the villages / Mistrusted, spoken-against.” These artists are “lovers of beauty” – would-be aesthetes – “of the fner sense,” trapped in a Philistine environment, “Hated, shut in, mistrusted.”8 The Transition: Lustra and Poetic Sequences Lustra (which collected poems from 1913 to 1916) reveals the process by which Pound modernized himself. Doing so he encountered the same obstacles as others of his generation did, particularly D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce:  mockery, outrage, and censorship. The poems collected in Lustra began to appear in Poetry in April and November of 1913 under the title “Contemporania.” Opening the April issue, readers of Poetry confronted “Tenzone” (from the Provencal tenson signifying a challenge in verse to a rival): “Will people accept them? / (i.e. these songs)” – a rhetorical question whose answer is expected to be “No.” In fact, the reader is expected to fee, 223 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.017

Alec Marsh

“As a timorous wench from a centaur.” Pound is no longer interested in being accepted, save on his own terms. “Tenzone” closes: I mate with my free kind upon the crags; The hidden recesses Have heard the echoes of my heels, In the cool light In the darkness. (P 83)

In “The Serious Artist” Pound wrote, “Poetry is a centaur. The thinking word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties. It is precisely the diffculty of this amphibious existence that keeps down the census record of good poets” (LE 52). To speak as a centaur is to speak as a poet. His poetic feet are ringing hoof beats. To be like a centaur is to be untamable yet wise, passionate but not entirely human. K. K.  Ruthven suggests that this poem announces “a new departure.” “Tenzone” is “typical of the Lustra manner in that it uses a façade of arrogant indifference toward the reader in order to protect a statement of personal values at once vulnerable and precious.”9 “Go, my songs,” Pound writes in “Commission,” go “to the lonely and unsatisfed, / Go also to the nerve-wracked, go to the enslaved by convention / Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors” (P 89). Pound boasts that he is writing for about “four people” (P 89). The oppressors are the tyrants of convention; the oppressed are convention’s victims, women especially, but the sensitive, the different, as well; “those who have delicate lust,” those whose “desires are thwarted,” as Pound writes in “Commission.” Harriet Monroe objected to these lines, fnding them “risqué.” When the time came to publish Lustra as a book, Elkin Matthews also objected and demanded that cuts be made in the poem. Pound wanted his poem to “Bring confdence upon the algae and the tentacles of the soul” (P  89). Could the algae and tentacles be Algernon Swinburne and Alfred Lord Tennyson? Together they epitomized the Victorian manner Pound had now rejected as the “rhetorical din” of Swinburne’s music and the “luxurious riot” and “painted adjectives” of Tennyson. But they are still potent poets – or could be, if read correctly. Pound hopes that the anti-rhetorical impulse of his own work will cause people to read the Victorians differently, through their rhetoric instead of coasting along the surface of it. His readers should therefore stand up, enliven their souls, and take heart; they should “Go out and defy opinion,” just as he is doing, and “be against all sorts of mortmain” (P 90) – literally, “the dead hand” of obligations conferred on the living by the dead. 224 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.017

Ezra Pound

After Lustra Pound abandoned short lyrics and turned to writing poetic sequences – long poems, in sections, exploring a single theme. These include the “dyptich” of “Langue d’Oc” and “Moeurs Contemporaines” (1918), in which translations from Provencal are set against Pound’s attack on contemporary mores; the poems extend, as with a direct line from Lustra, a sharp satirical bite. The other two sequences are major works, “Homage to Sextus Propertius” (1918) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). Pound’s critics acted as though, in “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” the poet had somehow failed to see that the work was not a translation but (indeed) an homage to the great Roman poet. As Pound wrote in an indignant letter to the English Journal, which had panned the work, “Propertius” “presents certain emotions as vital to me in 1917, faced with the infnite and ineffable imbecility of the British Empire, as they were to Propertius some centuries earlier, when faced with the infnite and ineffable imbecility of the Roman Empire.”10 Pound insisted that all art of value is concerned with a “profounder didacticism” than the social pieties the term usually evokes: “Art can’t offer patent medicine. A failure to dissociate that from a profounder didacticism has led to the errors of the aesthete’s critique” (SL 180). The profounder didacticism moves beyond mere aesthetic considerations and far beyond the patent medicine of social niceties. It concerns nothing less than the evil, parlous state of the British Empire as it staggered towards the end of Europe’s stupidest war. This dire situation required a real purgative, not decoration. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound’s “farewell to London,” is even farther from the expected “softness” that poetry ought to provide, and its indictment of the British literary establishment even more direct. The poem is divided into two sections, the frst a sequence of thirteen poems serving as a kind of autopsy on the deceased “E. P.” and the English literary establishment that buried him. The second section, “Mauberley 1920,” is a fve-poem sequence detailing the exclusion of Mauberley, an impotent aesthete, from “the world of letters.” Pound most likely referred to this section when he called Mauberley “a mere surface . . . an attempt to compress the James novel” (SL 180). One might say that Mauberley combines two characters from Henry James, Gilbert Osmond (Portrait of a Lady) and Lambert Strether (The Ambassadors). The frst section operates under the sign of the French (Flaubert and Gautier); the second is Jamesian. The frst might be seen as the “contacts,” the second as the “life” of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. To what extent is Mauberley E.  P.  or Ezra Pound? Pound refused to help: “I’m no more Mauberley, than Eliot is Prufrock,” he remarked disingenuously in a letter (SL 180). Whatever the case, Mauberley and Prufrock alike possess ineffectual sensibilities; they are crippled, self-conscious, 225 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.017

Alec Marsh

and unable to rise to the challenge of an erotic life. Both Mauberley and Prufrock are decidedly dead selves their authors wished to cast off. The temptations of aestheticism must be purged and ridiculed for the poet to grow. Aestheticism is passive; it cripples the poetic imagination. Aesthetes appreciate beauty; they rarely wrestle with it. The result is a poetics of style devoid of substance. The aesthete is concerned primarily with treatment of the material, not content. Such poetry may be beautiful, but it remains powerless. Mere style is the empty shell of power. Intent on nothing less than saving the world, Pound set about searching for forms of power. The Cantos Pound’s epic project has been called “the most important work of Anglo-American modernism,”11 its sole competition being other works with which Pound was personally involved, Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses. Yet there is no critical consensus on The Cantos’s ultimate value. The Cantos are profound, polyglot, uneven; they are partisan, even ferocious. Like a gothic cathedral, they grew over more than sixty years and remain, like the principal medieval cathedrals, unfnished and in places rather unstable. Publishers have added new fragments to the total number of cantos since Pound’s death, and obvious mistakes – some Pound’s, some printers’ errors – blur some text, especially in the later cantos. Although The Cantos can be said to begin with the “ur-Cantos” published in Poetry in 1917, these were a false start. Evidently, Pound had no idea how to narrate his poem, or whether to make an epic hero – and if so, who? Discovering how to write his “poem including history” took about fve years and seems to have crystallized as Pound edited Eliot’s Waste Land into its fnal form in January 1922 and settled on a montage and documentary technique – simply presenting scenes, voices, and documents with a minimum of narrative integuments. No narrative and no hero, just voices and scenes; he suggested to his father that he read The Cantos as though trawling across the radio dial, with disjunctive voices coming in and fading out, cutting across one another. There was, however, a moral structure to the project, modeled on Dante’s Commedia. Pound posited a triadic structure of paradisal, purgatorial, and hellish elements, not in three distinct zones, but intermixed, as they are on earth. The paradisal elements were to be ethical, whereas the purgatorial ones would deal with human history – often imagined as the struggle of heroic intelligences against the forces of greed, the latter summed up in the term “Usura.” Usura, a much broader term that usury, encompasses all manifestations of the production of scarcity for the protection of proft. Usura is at war with the abundance 226 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.017

Ezra Pound

of nature and is, in its essence, unnatural (“contra naturam”), just as is the taking of interest on loaned money  – a form of perverse “breeding” abhorred by the ancient philosophers precisely because it was so widely practiced. As the cantos moved deeper into the century, Pound’s moral calculus attached itself to political programs; he dreamed of an agricultural utopia based on the sanity of Thomas Jefferson, the ethics of Confucius, and the improved system of representation to be found in the Fascist corporazione or guilds. At present, The Pisan Cantos are the only book of cantos likely to be read or taught as a complete book. They are, in fact, the only book of cantos still published separately. As a result, they form the most infuential part of Pound’s poem – and here we have to do especially with his infuence on other poets. The Pisan Cantos are also the most consistently lyrical cantos – early critics speak of them as “lyric poems” – and the most personal, even confessional, part of Pound’s epic. Here, Pound veers closest to Wordsworth in his intense observation of nature and to Whitman, who, in canto 82, is quoted with approval and deliberately allied with Pound himself as “exotic, still suspect.”12 “The Pisans,” I  still recall the poet Stephen Sandy saying, “are Pound’s personal intersection with history.” Composed in the military stockade at Pisa, with the poet facing trial for treason, they have an extraordinary intensity – prison literature at its fnest. There are ten Pisan Cantos, numbered 74–84, varying in length from twenty-two pages to seven. One canto, number 75, is a musical score. They are written in a variety of languages. English predominates, but Latin, Greek, Italian, German, French, and Chinese abound – “it can’t all be one language,” Pound once explained. The Pisan Cantos are founded at the intersection of the destruction of civilization, Pound’s personal trauma, and the “enormous tragedy of the dream on the peasant’s bent shoulders.” This dream of social justice, a sustainable relationship with the earth and sky, men and gods, and of world peace consistent with the teachings of Confucius, was also the tragic dream of “Europe” that he believed was incarnated in Mussolini’s Fascist experiment. In his introduction to his edition, Richard Sieburth suggests that the “myth of originary trauma, be it the violent collapse of Mussolini’s Italy or that of the poet’s own mind, is vital to an understanding of how the poem stages its theater of memory – and of forgetting.”13 Insofar as it is a theater of memory, we are asked to read the Pisan sequence as autobiography and as justifcation: a defense of the poet. These poems are at once works of contrition and self-criticism, and, sometimes, a defant elegy occasioned by the death of Italian fascism and of its charismatic leader, which for Pound represented Europe’s last best hope. 227 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.017

Alec Marsh N OT E S 1 Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions 1970): 7. 2 See Feldman, Pound’s Fascist Propaganda:  1935–1945 (London:  Palgrave Pivot, 2013). 3 Radio speech April 9, 1942, as collected in Leonard Doob, ed., Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War II (Westport: Greenwood, 1978): 86. 4 Dante Alghieri and Rossetti, trans., The New Life, with an introduction by Michael Palmer (New York: New York Review of Books, 2002): xi. 5 Pound, Translations (New York. New Directions, 1963): 20. 6 The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New  York:  New Directions, 1968):  25. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as LE. 7 Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. Michael King (New  York:  New Directions, 1976): 139. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as CEP. 8 Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, eds. Lea Baecheler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1990): 93. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as P. 9 Ruthven, A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Personae (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969): 232–233. 10 Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. D.  D. Paige (New  York:  New Directions, 1971): 231. Hereafter cited parenthetically as SL. 11 Lawrence Rainey, ed., A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in the Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997): 1. 12 The Cantos, sixth paperback printing (New York: New Directions, 1996): 540. Originally published in a number of separate books beginning with A Draft of XVI Cantos (1925) and ending with Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII (1969), the poem has been bound in a single volume as The Cantos since 1970 with no new additions since 1996, when the “lost Italian cantos” (72 and 73), which contained potentially treasonous material, were added posthumously. 13 The Pisan Cantos, ed. and annotated by Richard Sieburth (New  York:  New Directions, 2003): xiv. F U RT H E R R E A DI NG The literature by and about Pound is vast. Not for nothing do journalists speak of a “Pound industry.” Pound published widely and wrote as many as a quarter of a million letters. He knew virtually all the major literary fgures of the frst half of the twentieth century. His diffcult poetry, wide-ranging curiosity about other literatures, Confucian philosophy, and economics, together with his complicated politics, have generated numerous books and essays. New studies continue to appear as fresh archival material is published. There is not space suffcient here for a proper bibliography of Pound’s work; for that, see my Ezra Pound: A Critical Life (London: Reaktion, 2011).

1. Guidebooks to Pound’s Poetry and Prose Cookson, William, A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, rev. ed. (New  York: Persea, 2001). 228 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.017

Ezra Pound Gallup, Donald, Ezra Pound A Bibliography (Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press, 1983). Henderson, Archie, “I Cease Not to Yowl Reannotated: New Notes on the Pound/ Agresti Correspondence, 3rd ed. (Houston: 2010; privately printed). Kearns, George, Ezra Pound:  The Cantos (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 1989). Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Cantos (New Brunswick:  Rutgers University Press, 1980). Makin, Peter, Pound’s Cantos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). Ruthven, K. K., A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Personae (1926) (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1969). Sieburth, Richard, ed., The Pisan Cantos by Ezra Pound (New  York:  New Directions, 2003). Terrell, Caroll. F., A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound. Vols. I & II. ( Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984). Tryphanopoulos, Demetres P. and Stephen J. Adams, The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia (Westport: Greenwood, 2005).

2. On Pound Bacigalupo, Massimo, The Forméd Trace:  The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). Casillo, Robert, A Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988). Cheadle, Mary Patterson, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). Homberger, Eric, ed., Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge Keegan Paul, 1972). Kenner, Hugh, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1951). The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). Liebregts, Peter, Ezra Pound and Neo-Platonism (Madison:  Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004). Makin, Peter, Pound’s Cantos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Malm, Mike, Editing Economic History: Ezra Pound’s The Fifth Decad of Cantos (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). Marsh, Alec, Money & Modernity:  Pound, Williams and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998). Nadel, Ira, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 1999). Ezra Pound in Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Qian, Zhiaoming, The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). de Rachewiltz, Mary, Discretions: Ezra Pound Father & Teacher (New York:  New Directions, 1971). Rainey, Lawrence S., Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). ed., A Poem Containing History:  Textual Studies in The Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 229 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.017

Alec Marsh Redman, Tim, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 1991). Stoicheff, Peter, The Hall of Mirrors:  Drafts & Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Surette, Leon, Pound in Purgatory:  From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). Witemeyer, Hugh, The Early Poetry of Ezra Pound 1908–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

3. Biographies Carpenter, Humphrey, A Serious Character:  The Life of Ezra Pound (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1988). Heymann, C. David, Ezra Pound, The Last Rower:  A  Political Profle (New York: Viking, 1976). Marsh, Alec, Ezra Pound: A Critical Life (London: Reaktion, 2011). Moody, A. David, Ezra Pound:  Poet. Vol. I:  The Young Genius 1885–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Ezra Pound: Poet: Vol. II: The Epic Years (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2014). Stock, Noel, The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Pantheon, 1970). Tytell, John, Ezra Pound:  The Solitary Volcano (New  York:  Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1987). Wilhelm, James J., The American Roots of Ezra Pound (New York: Garland, 1985). Ezra Pound in London and Paris: 1908–1925 (College Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990). Ezra Pound:  The Tragic Years:  1925–1972 (College Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).

230 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.017

17 C E L E S T E GO O DR I DG E

Marianne Moore

“Now, to be more amiable, have you a book of verse in print? And, if not, can I get one into print for you? . . . You will never sell more than fve hundred copies, as your work demands mental attention.” – Ezra Pound to Marianne Moore, December 16, 1918.1 Marianne Moore has moved to 9th street and there have been interviews and pictures in almost every paper and magazine. Two of them have her on the same page with a picture of one of the Beatles getting married. – Howard Moss to Elizabeth Bishop, January 28, 1966.2

By the time Marianne Moore died in 1972, she had become a celebrity – America’s beloved poet in the tricorn hat and black cape who was probably better known for some of her interests and public appearances than for her artistic endeavors. For many people, Moore was the famous poet who loved sports, particularly baseball. In her foreword to A Marianne Moore Reader, she commented on her by then well-established “inordinate interest in animals and athletes”: They are subjects for art and exemplars of it, are they not? Minding their own business. Pangolins, hornbills, pitchers, catchers, do not pry or prey – or prolong the conversation; I don’t know how to account for a person who could be indifferent to miracles of dexterity, a certain feat by Don Zimmer – a Dodger at the time – making a backhand catch, of a ball coming hard from behind on the left, fast enough to take his hand off.3

In 1968 she threw out the frst baseball of the season at Yankee Stadium. Later that year she predicted for The New  York Times that the St. Louis Cardinals would win the World Series. (They did not.) Even those who had not read with care her “animal” poems  – “The Jerboa,” “The Plumet Basilisk,” “The Frigate Pelican,” “The Buffalo,” “The Pangolin” and “The Wood Weasel” – may have remembered that she 231 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.018

Celeste Goodridge

made frequent trips to the circus and the zoo. Four years after Moore died, a photograph of her taken at the Bronx Zoo in 1953 was included in a Life magazine special report titled “Remarkable American Women: 1776–1976.” The caption is typical of how Moore was perceived by the end of her life: Poet Marianne Moore was skimming nimbly from her thoughts on wine labels to grocery stores to gardening to Goethe to the pyramids, when somebody begged, “Don’t jump around so.” Moore merely paused:  “It isn’t jumping around. It’s all connected.” So it was, by her spanning genius that incorporated steeplejacks, swans, baseball, buffalo, granite and steel, silence and years, everything she encountered – even the Bronx Zoo, below – into poetry that won almost every prize there was to win. Nor was her research limited to places she could reach by subway, her favorite transportation; she espied things in hard-to-get to places, too, bringing back visions of “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”

Those who applauded Moore in this context may have forgotten, if they ever knew, that her Collected Poems, published in 1951, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and, in 1953, the Bollingen Award. It is even less likely that those who read Life also read Moore’s brilliant, diffcult, and two longest high modernist poems: “Marriage” (1923) and “An Octopus” (1924). Moore’s public persona suggested an accessibility that was at odds with her poetry and exacting prose. Moore had her portrait taken many times, often by the most famous photographers of her day:  George Platt Lynes, Cecil Beaton, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Richard Avedon. Donning her black cape and tricorn hat and holding her white gloves conspicuously in her lap, Moore embodied the appearance of decorum, distance, formality, privacy, dignity and above all a studied self-control. As several of her best critics have pointed out, her willingness to portray herself as a non-threatening spinster poet had deleterious effects on her critical reception. Moore, Taffy Martin maintains, has been treated “as a decorative oddity rather than as an active and perhaps even dangerous force.” Charles Tomlinson also notes that some of Moore’s critics have reduced her “to the status of a kind of national pet.” He also wonders “whether Marianne Moore has not suffered more from lax adulation than almost any other signifcant poet of our century.”4 At one point many of Moore’s critics have focused on her tendency to armor herself in her work and her life. Her poems make extensive use of quotations from overheard conversations, travel brochures, newspapers and her eclectic reading. Noting that Moore’s archive “makes clear the extent to which [she] wrote from a world already represented,” Bonnie Costello asserts that “she was a kleptomaniac of the mind.” Cristanne Miller notes 232 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.018

Marianne Moore

that Moore is a “judicious collector. She arranges texts or voices to assert her own.” And she maintains: “Moore’s poetic is remarkably engaging and interactive, suggesting an aesthetic of correspondence, conversation and exchange rather than mastery.”5 Writing at an earlier date, Randall Jarrell saw her poetic preoccupation with quotations and armored animals as indicative of her own need to be shielded. Alicia Ostriker and Suzanne Juhasz also perceive Moore as shielded. Ostriker asserts: “Yet would a sexual and powerful Marianne Moore have met with the respect accorded the chaste and ladylike, self-effacing spinster in the tricorn? There is no reason to think so.”6 By examining the voluminous archive Moore consciously left, critics have begun to reassess Moore’s aesthetic in terms other than those provided by her public persona. The record does reveal that she was shy, reticent and reserved; but in her letters she also emerges as deeply ambitious, confdent and outspoken, though she was equally capable of denying her ambition. These contradictory postures, like her gestures of revealing and concealing herself in her poetry, are integral to her aesthetic. Moore’s archive, housed at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, is readily available to scholars. As if certain of her place in literary history, she maintained fastidious records of her activities, reading, conversations and correspondence. In addition to the letters she received, she kept carbon copies of the letters she wrote. These documents, as well as her manuscripts and library, are invaluable for readers who wish to trace her development as a poet and prose stylist. Born on November 15, 1887, in Kirkwood, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, Marianne Craig Moore spent her formative years in her maternal grandfather’s home. Her father, John Milton Moore, suffered a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized before Moore was born; she never saw him. Mary Warner Moore took Marianne and her brother, John Warner, to live with her father, the Reverend John Riddle Warner, who was the pastor of Kirkwood Presbyterian Church. When he died in 1894, the family moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Moore entered the class of 1909 at Bryn Mawr College. Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) was in her class, though they were not friends at the time. By 1915, however, they were corresponding. An early champion of Moore, H. D. wrote a positive review of her poetry that appeared in The Egoist in 1916. This began a complicated dance between the two poets, who often reviewed each other’s work. Moore took up H. D.’s Hymen for Broom in 1923 and H. D.’s Collected Poems for The Dial in 1925. Moore was told at Bryn Mawr that she could not major in English because her writing was neither clear nor accessible. She majored instead in 233 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.018

Celeste Goodridge

“history-politics-economics” and minored in biology. The latter undoubtedly enhanced her ability to see her natural surroundings with a microscopic acumen. Her poetry abounds with precise observations: “The diffdent / little newt // with white pin-dots on black horizontal spaced- // out bands” in “The Steeple-Jack”; the cat in “Peter” whose markings resemble “shadbones regularly set about the mouth // to droop or rise in unison like porcupine-quills”; “the nine-striped chipmunk // running with unmammal-like agility along a log” in “An Octopus”; the pangolin, “Another armored animal – scale // lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity until they // form the uninterrupted central // tail row!”7 The high point of Moore’s college studies seems to have been the course she took with Georgiana Goddard King titled “Imitative Writing,” in which the focus was on seventeenth-century prose writers: Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, Lancelot Andrewes, Thomas Traherne, Richard Hooker and Richard Burton. References to these authors appear in her prose and in the notes she provided to her poems. Although Moore wrote both poetry and fction while in college, in her letters home she sought her family’s approval fnally for the poems. She published eight poems and eight stories in the Bryn Mawr magazine, Tipyn o’Bob, between 1907 and 1909 but did not attempt to write fction again until 1929. In 1933 she wrote to H. S. Latham at Macmillan that she had been working on a piece of fction since 1929 but was not sure she would ever fnish it. Indeed, Moore never published the work. During the summer of 1911, Moore and her mother traveled extensively in England and crossed the Channel to France. For Moore, the trip was enormously stimulating. Letters home to her brother refer to a lock of Shelley’s hair housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the armor they saw in England, a Whistler exhibition at the Tate Gallery, Assyrian art at the British Museum and the Louvre, and Moore’s desire to buy a Japanese print in Paris. These letters and others provide an invaluable record of the material Moore would later include in her poetry. For example, a swan she had seen at Oxford probably inspired the one she wrote about in her 1916 poem “Critics and Connoisseurs” (38). The year 1915 was Moore’s last in Carlisle, where she had been living with her mother since graduating from Bryn Mawr in 1909. It was a productive year for her. She saw her poems in print for the frst time that spring – two poems appeared in The Egoist and fve in Poetry. “To the Soul of Progress” – retitled “To Military Progress” in Observations (1924), Moore’s second volume of poetry  – typifes her best early efforts. Addressing a “you” as she did in other early poems Moore indicts military activity by setting up an equivalence between that enterprise and a torso without a head. The crows, 234 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.018

Marianne Moore

who presumably feast on that severed head, become “black minute-men // to revive again, // war // at little cost.” They are left ominously at the end of the poem: They cry for the lost Head And seek their prize Till the evening’s sky’s red. (82)

The same year Moore frst published individual poems, she also sent a manuscript to Erskine MacDonald of Malory House, which published a series of modern poets. They were not accepted. But by 1916 we fnd her corresponding with H. D. about placing a volume for her. In 1921, this became her frst collection, titled, simply, Poems. With H. D.’s support on Moore’s behalf, the volume was published by the Egoist Press and paid for by Bryher (Winifred Ellerman). Moore’s book was in good company:  under Harriet Shaw Weaver’s direction, the Egoist Press published work by H.  D., T.  S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert McAlmon and James Joyce. In 1960 Moore was asked by Donald Hall what her reaction had been to H. D. and Bryher’s having published Poems without her knowledge and why she had not pursued the task herself. Moore replied: To issue my slight product  – conspicuously tentative  – seemed to me premature . . . For the chivalry of the undertaking – issuing my verse for me in 1921, certainly in format choicer than in content – I am intensely grateful . . . Desultory occasional magazine publications seemed to me suffcient and plenty conspicuous.8

As Peggy Phelan and others have demonstrated, Moore’s self-effacing statements to Hall clearly confict with her earlier inquiries about placing the manuscript and the eager and persistent ambition she displayed in her letters. There is often a dissonance found between what Moore revealed privately and what she publicly chose to say on the subject many years later. In 1915 she also spent a week in New  York City; Moore was catapulted out of her isolation by this week-long exposure to prominent artists, photographers and authors and their work. Alfred Kreymbourg, who had accepted Moore’s poems for Others, invited her to dine with him and his wife. While there she saw photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. Later in the week she visited Steiglitz at his 291 Gallery, where she saw more of his photographs, issues of Camera Work, and the paintings he had collected by Marsden Hartley and Picasso. Steiglitz also arranged for her to meet J. B. Kerfoot, a drama critic for Life, whose work she had admired for some time. 235 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.018

Celeste Goodridge

In 1918, after spending two years in Chatham, New Jersey, where John Warner was now pastor at Ogden Memorial Church, Moore and her mother moved to Greenwich Village. The move was not surprising, given Moore’s attachment to literary and artistic circles in New York City. Around this time, in poems such as “Critics and Connoisseurs” (1916), “Picking and Choosing” (1920) and “Poetry” (1919), Moore began to carve out her responses to writing. The original version of “Poetry” is one of her early attempts to map out her own “place for the genuine” (36). (“Poetry,” which was originally twenty-nine lines, became three lines in Complete Poems, though Moore preserved the earlier version in the notes.) Using long, conversational lines and embedding quotations within them, Moore makes a plea for language and speech rhythms not usually found in poetry: “nor is it valid // to discriminate against business documents and // school-books / all these phenomena are important” (267). T.  S. Eliot might have been describing this poem when he wrote in 1923 that Moore’s poetry contains “at least three elements: a quite new rhythm, . . . a peculiar and brilliant and rather satirical use of what is not, as material, an ‘aristocratic’ language at all, but simply the curious jargon produced in America by universal university education, . . . and fnally an almost primitive simplicity of phrase” (Tomlinson 49). In the late 1910s Moore, like so many other Americans, was preoccupied with World War I. Her brother had joined the Navy Chaplains’ Corps in 1918. Perhaps, as some have speculated, Moore had Warner on her mind when she composed several of her “war poems.” “Reinforcements” (1918), which was included in Poems (1921) and Observations (1924) but deleted from subsequent collections, contains a direct reference to “military progress”: The vestibule to experience is not to Be exalted into epic grandeur. These men are going To their work with this idea, advancing like a School of fsh Through Still water – waiting to change the course or Dismiss The idea of movement till forced to . . .9

John Slatin points out that if we read “The Fish” in conjunction with “Reinforcements,” as Moore invites us to do by placing them on opposite pages in Observations, we will see both poems as a commentary on World War I.10 The men who are “advancing like a school of fsh” in 236 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.018

Marianne Moore

“Reinforcements” thus become the fsh who “Wade / through black jade” in “The Fish.” We are in a wasteland uninhabited by a human presence yet saturated with human destruction. The swimming fsh become “the turquoise sea // of bodies,” hinting at that destruction (31–32). Not long after her move to New York in 1920, Moore had her frst poems accepted by Scofeld Thayer at The Dial: “England” appeared, along with “Picking and Choosing,” in the April issue of The Dial. The celebration of America and things American in “England” would not have been wasted on those who had seen the original version of “Poetry”:                     . . . and America where there Is the little old ramshackle Victoria in the south, where cigars are smoked on the street in the      North; Where there are no proof-readers, no       Silkworms, no digressions; The wild man’s land; grassless, linkless,      Languageless country in                     Which letters are written Not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not         In shorthand, but in plain American which cats and dogs can read! (46)

In 1921, Moore took a part-time job at the Hudson Park branch of the New  York Public Library, working there until she became editor of The Dial in 1925. In 1921 Moore published “New York,” a poem that exemplifes her readiness to respond to the economic and historical conditions of her environment. In that year, as her note reminds us, “New York succeeded St. Louis as the center of the wholesale fur trade” (269). The frst part of the poem comically calls attention to the gap between “the scholastic philosophy of the wilderness” and that of “the beau with the muff”: It is a far cry from the “queen full of jewels” And the beau with the muff, From the gilt coach shaped like a perfume-bottle, To the conjunction of the Monongahela and the        Allegheny, And the scholastic philosophy of the wilderness.

This comic dissonance, and the distance it affords Moore, allows her in the remainder of the poem to offer an extended critique of the opposition between the “plunder” that “the wholesale fur trade of New York promotes” and the “ ‘accessibility to experience’ ” the city affords (54). 237 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.018

Celeste Goodridge

“Marriage” (1923) was critical of another economy – that of the institution whose name it bears. Perhaps prompted by Bryher and McAlmon’s sudden elopement in 1921, the poem moves beyond this occasion: I wonder what Adam and Eve Think of it by this time, This fre-gilt steel Alive with goldenness; How bright it shows – “of circular traditions and impostures, Committing many spoils,” Requiring all one’s criminal ingenuity To avoid! (62)

Soon after the poem begins, Moore constructs a dialogue between Adam and Eve in which they agree at Adam’s urging to be “alone together.” Later, a more contemporary couple takes over. Quotations from Bacon, Baxter, Scientifc American, the New Republic, Anthony Trollope, Hazlitt, The Tempest, Webster and Pound enable Moore to orchestrate her criticism of “eternal union” from a calculated and wry distance. William Carlos Williams’s 1925 reading of “Marriage” serves to illuminate much of Moore’s poetry up to this time, particularly the effect her mosaic of quotations can have. “A poem such as ‘Marriage,’ ” he maintains, “is an anthology of transit. It is a pleasure that can be held frm only by moving rapidly from one thing to the next. It gives the impression of a passage through” (Tomlinson 54). Williams might have been describing “An Octopus” as well. In this poem, Moore’s rapid eye takes us at a dizzying pace through a landscape where things are known through partial disclosures. Her celebration of epistemological uncertainty masterfully affrms the power of the glimpse, the half-seen and the fragment as a structure of knowledge. The very subject of “an Octopus” demands that Moore keep moving her own perspective. The glacier appears to be stationary  – “it lies ‘in grandeur and in mass’ ” – and yet is surrounded by the motion of “a sea of shifting snow-dunes” (71). Far from being stationary and predictable, this glacier of “unimagined delicacy” can kill “with the concentric crushing rigor of the python.” Even the mountain’s seemingly accessible façade becomes inseparable from the forces “which prove it a volcano” (73). Mount Ranier, despite the presence of “Paradise Park,” becomes a landmine in its potential for danger. Moore’s attentive eye deftly balances the dangers with the pleasures. During the early 1920s Moore also emerged as a perceptive critic, especially of her contemporaries. Her prose contributions to The Dial  – the 238 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.018

Marianne Moore

reviews, essays, “Briefer Mentions,” and “Comments” she wrote between 1921 and 1929, as well as her reviews of Stevens, Eliot, Pound and Williams – form a separate chapter in the history of modernism, giving us, in the process, new insights into her own aesthetic. In 1921 Moore reviewed Eliot’s The Sacred Wood for The Dial and Williams’s Kora in Hell for Contact. Praising Williams’s “compression, color, speed, accuracy, and that restraint of instinctive craftsmanship which precludes anything dowdy or labored,” Moore concludes: But one who sets out to appraise him has temerity, since he speaks derisively of the wish of certain of his friends to improve his work and, after all, the confict between the tendency to aesthetic anarchy and the necessity for self imposed discipline must take care of itself.11

In her review of The Sacred Wood Moore openly challenges Eliot when she defends Swinburne as a critic and a poet; she then mutes this at the end of the review when she uses a quotation from Swinburne to illuminate Eliot’s criticism. In 1924 Moore reviewed Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium in The Dial. Applauding Stevens’s “appetite for color,” his “precise diction and verve,” and his “positiveness, aplomb, and verbal security,” Moore also confronts his “deliberate bearishness”: One resents the temper of certain of these poems. Mr. Stevens is never inadvertently crude; one is conscious, however, of a deliberate bearishness – a shadow of acrimonious, unprovoked contumely. Despite the sweet-Clementine-willyou-be-mine nonchalance of the “Apostrophe to Vincentine,” one feels oneself to be in danger of unearthing the ogre and in “Last Looks at the Lilacs,” a pride in unserviceableness is suggested which makes it a microcosm of cannibalism. (92–95)

Moore’s willingness to censure her contemporaries has received little attention. Most considerations of her criticism stress the extent to which she always praised her subjects. Her public persona undoubtedly fueled this perception. A  case in point is her self-effacing foreword to Predilections (1955) – the only collection of her prose published during her lifetime  – in which she implies that she reviewed only those whose projects she unconditionally admired (Henry James, Pound, Eliot, Auden, Stevens and Cummings, among others). A  close look at her correspondence and The Complete Prose reveals that Moore was quite capable – particularly in her early reviews – of expressing her distaste for an author under review. In 1924 Moore received The Dial Award for Observations, her second volume of poetry. This prestigious award, which included a generous stipend of two thousand dollars, had been given to Eliot in 1922 for The Waste 239 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.018

Celeste Goodridge

Land. Before the decade was over, Cummings (1925), Williams (1926) and Pound (1927) would all be recipients. When Moore became acting editor of The Dial in 1925, the magazine was well established. In an essay for Life and Letters To-day (December 1940), she recalled some of the authors she encountered as a subscriber:  Yeats, Paul Valery, Lawrence, Ford Maddox Ford, Cummings, Williams, Stevens, Thomas Mann, Pound and H. D. She also provided a catalogue of some of the artwork that appeared in its pages: Among the pictures, as intensives on the text, were three verdure-tapestry-like wood cuts by Galanis, Rousseau’s lion among lotuses; “The Philosphers” by Stuart Davis; Adolph Dehn’s “Vienese Coffee House”; and Kuniyoshi’s curious “Heifer”  – the forehead with a star on it of separate whorled strokes like propeller-fns . . . John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, . . . Brancusi, Lachaise, . . . Picasso . . . Cocteau line drawings, and Seurat’s Circus. (358)

A close look at The Dial as it appeared when Moore was editor shows that she did not alter the character or appearance of the magazine. In fact, Moore will probably be remembered more for the prose she wrote during the years she worked there than for her editorial decisions. When The Dial folded in 1929, Moore and her mother moved from Greenwich Village to Brooklyn. They sought quieter lodgings and wanted to be near John Warner, who was assigned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Although Moore did not publish any poems between 1925 and 1932, we do well to remember that by 1925 she had published some of her fnest poems, perfected her use of syllabic and free verse, changed the shape of the poetic line, called for a new range of subject matter, and altered the way allusions and quotations had been used in poems. Her duties at The Dial may have contributed to her silence during this period. Another factor may have been that when The Dial folded, she began working on a piece of fction that we know from her correspondence with Macmillan she did not abandon until some time after 1933. By the 1930s Moore enjoyed a unique place among her contemporaries; she was a major poetic voice and an often-brilliant champion and critic of her peers’ work, and she had been editor of one of the leading journals of her time. In October of 1931, Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe at Poetry, wondering if Moore might be persuaded to take over as editor: “it shd. also be possible to get a certain amount of backing for Marianne that wd. not be available for the wild and boisterous or cerebral younger males . . .” (235). The following month he sent a similar letter to Moore, only to discover she was not interested in making the move. In 1931 Moore published her frst review of Pound’s Cantos in Poetry. Praising A Draft of XXX Cantos as “the 240 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.018

Marianne Moore

epic of the farings of a literary mind,” she did not hesitate to add her criticism to Eliot’s and Williams’s: T.S. Eliot suspects Mr. Pound’s philosophy of being antiquated. W. C. Williams fnds his “versifcation still patterned after classic metres”; and apropos of “feminolatry,” is not the view of women expressed by the Cantos older-fashioned than that of Siam and Abyssinia? (272)

In 1934 Moore met Elizabeth Bishop; they corresponded regularly for the next thirty-six years. Moore initially helped promote Bishop’s early poetry but frequently asked her to consider making revisions. Some of her suggestions were heeded, but many were not. In 1949, for example, they had a spirited exchange about Bishop’s poem “Roosters.” Moore objected to the use of the phrase “water closet” and wanted Bishop to change the title from “Roosters” to “Cocks.” Bishop remembers this incident in her memoir “Efforts of Affection”: One long poem, the most ambitious I had up to then attempted, apparently stirred both her and her mother to an immediate furry of criticism. She telephoned the day after I had mailed it to her, and said that she and her mother had sat up late rewriting it for me. . . . Their version of it arrived in the next mail . . . My version had rhymed throughout in rather strict stanzas, but Marianne and her mother’s version broke up the stanzas irregularly. Some lines rhymed and some didn’t; a few other colloquialisms besides “water closet” had been removed and a Bible reference or two corrected. I obstinately held on to my stanzas and rhymes, but I did make use of a few of the proffered new words.12

It may strike some as odd that Mrs. Moore fgured so prominently in Moore’s correspondence with Bishop. It should be remembered, however, that Marianne consulted family members, particularly her mother, on many literary matters. Bishop recalls that Mrs. Moore’s “manner toward Marianne was that of a kindly, self-controlled parent who felt she had to take a frm line, that her daughter might be given to fightiness or – an equal sin, in her eyes – mistakes in grammar” (129). Moore frequently talked with her mother about her own poems and those she was reading or reviewing. As Laurence Stapleton points out, “In Distrust of Merits” (1943) – Moore’s well-known poem about World War II – draws substantively on her mother’s responses to the war. In 1935 Faber and Faber, at Eliot’s suggestion, published Moore’s Selected Poems with an introduction by Eliot. He asserted that she “is one of those few who have done the language some service in my lifetime.” And he concluded that Moore’s poems form part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time . . .” (Tomlinson 61). Between 1932 and 1935 Moore had 241 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.018

Celeste Goodridge

published over a dozen new poems, ten of which Eliot placed at the beginning of Selected Poems. Moore’s poems from this period represent a notable departure from her poems of the 1920s. She abandoned her previous use of free verse and adopted stanzas with rhyme patterns. We no longer race to keep up with her eye; the aesthetic of the glimpse or partial disclosure is replaced by a more controlled marshalling of quotations, facts and assertions; all are offered with a certain dogged conviction of incontrovertibility. Moore’s relationship to her “American” landscape has changed as well: she moves from an affrmation of epistemological uncertainty in “An Octopus” to the certainty of elegiac mourning in “Virginia Britannia”: The live oak’s darkening fligree Of undulating boughs, the etched Solidity of a cypress indivisible From the now aged English hackberry, Become with lost identity, Part of the ground, as sunset fames Increasingly Against the leaf-chiseled Blackening ridge of green . . . (111)

Many of these poems, particularly the ones that take as their ostensible subject certain animals, have led critics to see Moore as someone whose aesthetic required that she conceal herself. For such readers, Moore becomes “the frigate pelican who hides / in the height and in the majestic / display of his art” (25), “the jerboa who honors the sand by assuming its color” (14), or “the plummet basilisk . . . alive there / in his basilisk cocoon beneath / the one of living green” (24). Critics have been divided about the quality of Moore’s poetry in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Costello sees a decline after the 1930s, while Stapleton argues that Moore’s later poems represent an advance. I agree with Costello, fnding poems such as “Baseball and Writing” and “To Victor Hugo of My Crow Pluto” hollow. In 1945 at Auden’s request, Moore began her translation of La Fontaine’s Fables; nine years later – after seven revisions – she published The Fables with Viking Press. During the early 1940s she tended her mother, who by 1946 was bedridden. Mrs Moore died in 1947, leaving Marianne with a deep grief and an uncertain freedom. Moore produced several additional translations in the 1950s, including three Perrault fairy tales. She also wrote a play titled The Absentee based on Maria Edgeworth’s novel of the same title. By the time her Collected Poems appeared in 1951, Moore had received The Helen Haire Levinson Prize from Poetry (1932), the Ernest Hartsock Memorial Prize (1935), the Shelley Memorial Award (1940) and a 242 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.018

Marianne Moore

Guggenheim Fellowship (1945). She had also been elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. And she had adopted the tricorn hat and black cape. One story has it that she purchased the hat in the late 1940s with the request that she be attired so as to look like Washington crossing the Delaware; another story states that she purchased the hat for the National Book Award dinner. What is clear is that Moore consistently carved out an image of herself as an American public poet; and she offered this persona to her audience as she once had offered her poems and essays. N OT E S 1 Pound, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London:  Faber and Faber, 1950):  143. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 2 Biele, Joelle, ed., Elizabeth Bishop and the New  Yorker:  The Complete Correspondence (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011): 284. 3 A Marianne Moore Reader (New York: Viking Press, 1961): xvi. 4 Martin, Marianne Moore:  Subversive Modernist (Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1986):3; Tomlinson, ed., Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969): 12. 5 Costello, Marianne Moore:  Imaginary Possessions (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1981):  6, 5; Miller, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995): 6, 18. 6 Jarrell, “Her Shield,” in his Poetry and the Age (New  York:  Alfred A.  Knopf, 1953; New York: Ecco Press, 1980); Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women (New York: Octagon, 1976): 46; Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1986): 53. 7 Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Macmillan and Viking Press, 1967; rev. ed., New York: Viking Press, 1981): 6, 43, 73, 177. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 8 Charles Tomlinson, ed., Marianne Moore:  A  Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969): 27. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 9 Poems (London: Egoist Press, 1921): 13. 10 Slatin, The Savage’s Romance:  The Poetry of Marianne Moore (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987): 71. 11 The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, ed. Patricia C. Willis (New York: Viking Press, 1986): 59. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 12 Bishop, The Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984): 145–146. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. F U RT H E R R E A DI NG Blackmur, R. P., “The Method of Marianne Moore,” in The Double-Agent: Essays on Craft and Elucidation (New York: Arrow, 1935): 141–171. 243 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.018

Celeste Goodridge Engel, Bernard F., Marianne Moore (New York: Twayne, 1964; rev. ed. 1989). Goodridge, Celeste, Hints and Disguises: Marianne Moore and Her Contemporaries (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989). Holley, Margaret, The Poetry of Marianne Moore:  A  Study in Voice and Value (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Kalstone, David, “Trial Balances:  Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore,” Grand Street 3 (Autumn 1983): 115–135. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, ed. Robert Hemenway (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989). Keller, Lynn, “Words Worth a Thousand Postcards:  The Bishop-Moore Correspondence,” American Literature 55 (October 1983): 405–429. Molesworth, Charles, Marianne Moore: A Literary Life (New York: Athenaeum, 1990). Phelan, Margaret M., “H.D.  and Marianne Moore:  Correspondences and Contradictions.” Ph.D. dissertation. Rutgers University, 1987. Quarterly Review of Literature 4.2 (1948). Special Marianne Moore issue. Sagetrieb 6.3 (Winter 1987). Special Marianne Moore issue. Scheik, Susan, “Writing War Poetry Like a Woman,” Critical Inquiry 13 (Spring 1987): 532–556. Schulman, Grace, Marianne Moore:  The Poetry of Engagement (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986). Stapleton, Laurence, Marianne Moore:  The Poet’s Advance (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1978). Steinman, Lisa M., Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Twentieth Century Literature 30.2–30.3 (1984). Special Marianne Moore issue. Willia, Patricia C., Marianne Moore: Vision into Verse (Philadelphia: The Rosenbach Museum and Library, 1987). ed., Marianne Moore: Woman and Poet (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1990). M A N U S C R I P T S A ND PA PERS

The Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia. Houses Moore’s correspondence, manuscripts, notebooks and library. The Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Houses Moore’s correspondence and correspondence and papers associated with Moore’s tenure at The Dial. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Houses additional Dial correspondence:  Moore’s letters to and from James Sibley Watson, Jr.

244 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.018

18 J O H N XI ROS   C O O P ER

T. S. Eliot and American Poetry

T. S. Eliot spent the winter of 1910–1911 in Paris, France. It was his “gap year” from Harvard University, and it was his frst concrete experience of Europe. He arrived in the French capital beguiled by an imaginary Europe he had construed out of a variety of intellectual and affective materials in his youth. Essentially, it was a Europe drawn chapter by chapter from books. His reading and studies of European literature, especially late nineteenth-century French poetry, European philosophy such as that of Henri Bergson, and European society with its rootedness in ancient tradition and customary practices, a rich and vivid civilization that had fourished for a long time in one place – all this created a fantasy that as a mature poet and thinker Eliot would come to celebrate for the rest of his life. Happily for him, unlike most fantasists, his taste of the real Europe in that Parisian winter of content did not disappoint. It was everything he expected and more. Of course, his imaginary Europe was not the saccharine construction of a simpleton. His vision of the old continent was sprinkled with the sugar and salt of real life. He was no wide-eyed Pollyanna or guileless Prince Myshkin lost in the labyrinth of his own idealistic conceptions. The reality he encountered there had the effect of making his homeland, the America into which he had been born, seem fat, dull, and vulgar by comparison. And there, in the personal experience of difference between Europe and America, lies the root of the problem of assessing Eliot’s infuence on American poetry in the twentieth century. Eliot was not alone in turning his back on the land of his birth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Henry James was already ensconced in Lamb House at Rye in Sussex when Eliot arrived for a year of study at Oxford University in 1914. From that moment on, he was never to return to the United States on a permanent basis. Ezra Pound also resided in London that year and had been in Europe since 1908. James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, the painters, had preceded all of them, and there were many other Americans resident in Europe as well. Even 245 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.019

John Xiros Cooper

that quintessentially American literary fgure Robert Frost had established himself in England for a time before returning to his native land. But for the history of American literature, T. S. Eliot was the most important and divisive case in the early twentieth century. Perhaps this was so because he came to self-exile relatively late. Like Pound, Eliot never hid his disdain for what his compatriot called “a half savage country.”1 But Pound had left under a cloud and assiduously maintained his American personality and contacts through most of his life. Although living abroad, Pound remained an American through and through. Eliot’s migration was different. He seemed to have left his American persona behind because he believed his homeland to be boorishly immature, garish, and rootless. He took to Europe and especially England with what seemed far too much eagerness, becoming, some would say, more English than the English. After his literary fame grew to the point where he could no longer be ignored, his departure was seen, back home, as a rebuke of everything American and, for some, as treachery. That it came at a time when the United States was establishing itself not only as a political and economic power but also as a cultural centre seemed particularly offensive. London was still in many ways the capital of the English-speaking literary world, but it was also clear that things were changing.2 American writers were beginning to assert themselves in ways that emphasized the uniqueness of the American experience. New styles of writing, formal experiments in poetry and prose, and new ideas about literary value and criticism were taking root on native soil. Yet it was Eliot and Pound, in London, who seemed, at frst, the more important innovators, who seemed more in tune with modernity than those back home just entering the century that America would make its own. Of course London was not the only centre; there were many American émigrés in Paris during the 1920s, but it was clear that they had not left their “new world” personalities behind, and, further, it was clear that their absence from home was temporary. All of them would eventually return. But it was the two Americans in London who were revolutionizing poetry, heeding the call to make it new. Yes, back home, poets, novelists, and critics were feeling their way towards the new but without the confdence and brio that characterized the productions and supporting polemics emanating from overseas. It was London, Paris, and other European centres that led the revolution in the arts eventually known as modernism. It all came to a head in late 1922 when Eliot’s early masterpiece, The Waste Land, was published in the New York literary periodical The Dial. This most challenging and enigmatic of poems had an immediate impact. It had its champions and its detractors. The chorus of approval was led by the distinguished critic Edmund Wilson, who concluded his second review 246 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.019

T. S. Eliot and American Poetry

of the poem in a month by writing that Eliot “has bought a new personal rhythm into the language and . . . has lent even to the words of his great predecessors a new music and new meaning.”3 Wilson’s reference to Eliot’s use of the “words of his great predecessors” points to the use of allusion and quotation in the poem as one of its special features. As the inventor and, along with Pound, one of the major exponents of the modern “quoting poem,”4 Eliot attracted intense hostility from some critics. The leader of the opposition was Louis Untermeyer in his review of The Waste Land in early 1923. Declaring the poem a messy chaos in need of a “pattern,” Untermeyer wrote that it is distorted and broken by Mr. Eliot’s jumble and narratives, nursery-rhymes, criticism, jazz-rhythms, Dictionary of Favorite Phrases and a few lyrical moments. Possibly the disruption of our ideals may be reproduced through such a mélange, but it is doubtful whether it is crystallized or even clarifed by a series of severed narratives – tales from which the connecting tissue has been carefully cut – and familiar quotations with their necks twisted, all imbedded in [a] formless plasma.5

It soon became evident that The Waste Land was not a poem to be read, appreciated, and then set aside; it was a new kind of text – complicated, diffcult, and erudite, one that was headed for the college lecture theatre and the seminar room and not the gentle reader’s nook. It was The Waste Land that brought Eliot to the attention of the American literary scene most fully, and it was the work that had the most infuence not only on the generation of American poets contemporary with him but on the younger poets as well. Some, such as William Carlos Williams, were astonished by Eliot’s embrace of European culture and saw it as a kind of cultural treason. The poem and Eliot’s allegiance to the old world could be seen as subverting the growing cultural autonomy of America by maintaining it as an artistic and intellectual colony of Europe. Williams was deeply suspicious of Eliot’s infuence not only because he had turned his back on the idea of an American future but also because he had turned his back on America as a source of concrete experience in time and place. The poem seemed abstract and weightless by being supremely ahistorical and placeless even as it referred to specifc times, places, personages, and historical events. Its paradoxical character was further complicated by its allusiveness and its relentless show of learning. Williams remembered his reaction on reading the poem for the frst time: It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it and our brave sallies into the unknown were turned to dust. 247 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.019

John Xiros Cooper To me especially it struck like a sardonic bullet. I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years, and I’m sure it did. Critically Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt that we were on the point of escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself – rooted in the locality which should give it fruit. I knew at once that in certain ways I was most defeated.6

Williams seems most offended by the poem’s abstract character. It was rootless and unproductively restless, without any real sense of the local and, as a result, without those associative attachments that bring mind, feeling, and place into fruitful union. Williams’s reaction was not typical; indeed it was in its time the minority view. Although he was not the only poet to fnd Eliot’s path in some ways deplorable, many who were irritated by Eliot’s supposed pedantry and elitism found his formal and stylistic experiments energizing. The poem’s disjunctive form was perhaps best expressed by the poem itself in one of its most famous and characteristic lines, “These fragments I  have shored against my ruins” (line 430). This one line seemed to capture in eight words the central themes of the poem, which resonated for Eliot’s contemporaries. First, the idea of fragmentation, both as a formal strategy in the making of the poem and as a comment about the disintegration of the socio-cultural unities of the old world after the catastrophe of the First World War, gave the poem a bizarre kind of affective unity-in-disunity. For a reader such as Untermeyer, the lack of a discernible “pattern” was a grievous fault. For others it refected accurately the experience of dislocation and injury in times of distress. The need, then, to shore up a world in ruins pointed not only to the fragmentation of society but also to something more personal, the breakdown of the sense of self that the poem so vividly conveys in its play of anxious, panic-stricken voices and broken spirits. Not only does society need to be shored up but the self, the “I,” does as well. The frailty of the “I” in the poem had been anticipated in Eliot’s earlier dramatic monologues such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” and especially the pronominal slippages among you, one, he, she, and I in “Preludes.” What The Waste Land seemed to convey in a despairing mood of disquiet and dissonance were subjective states shared by all in modern times. But it also implied that the poet who dared to plumb this abyss of post-war nihilism could become the heroic reparative agent to make subjectivity whole again from the surviving fragments in the general ruin. The modern poet could not fall back on the familiar lyrical or narrative forms inherited from the past. They too were forms emptied of their power to contain the clamour and clangour of modernity. The Waste Land seemed a work of formal renovation in this regard as well. Eliot had already supplied 248 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.019

T. S. Eliot and American Poetry

a critical concept that seemed to suggest a way in which the modern poet might deal with the disparateness of experience in modern times. The idea of the “objective correlative” had come in an essay on Shakespeare’s Hamlet that Eliot published in 1919. The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by fnding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be a formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.7

As a general idea among professional literary critics and scholars, the “objective correlative” has not fared well, but perhaps this was not Eliot’s aim. As a poet, he was trying to fnd a way of talking about the unity of a work of art that didn’t rely on old ideas of form, ideas of lyric or narrative unity. Instead the materials of the poem yield a “formula” that he carefully describes as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events.” This approach to form does not require a discernible narrative plot with characters, in appropriate settings, nor does it require the materials of a work to be organized around a moment of lyric intensity that acts like a magnet to arrange the iron flings of language in a discernible pattern. Eliot is careful in choosing the phrase “chain of events” not to exclude other forms of combination of elements. That he also allows for “a set of objects” and “a situation” – perhaps even fragments – to be equally important opens the text to wider formal possibilities than was the case in the past. Arrange the materials in the proper order and, Eliot believes, the whole affective experience from which the poem emerges will be “immediately evoked.” Immediacy is crucial here; if the work is perfectly constructed, its effect will be immediate, whole, and certain. As a general, if somewhat vague, description of the combinatory procedure of The Waste Land, this is spot on; as criticism of Shakespeare’s “problem” in Hamlet, it’s probably rubbish. Whether Eliot succeeds in bringing off his wasteland formula well is altogether another matter. A major poet who one might argue was infuenced by Eliot’s formal experiment in fnding the proper “formula” for a poem was Hart Crane. The Bridge (1930) drew on the various characters, tales, images, and voices that make up the mosaic of American life and history. In a book-length poem of over 1,200 lines, he juxtaposed fragments from the myths of Native Americans, Columbus’s voice as he dreamt of his voyage west to India, the waves of immigrants fowing into the American melting pot, the Civil War, the First World War, the urban landscape of New York City, and the hobos travelling the “empire wilderness of freight and rails.”8 The method was modernist in the form Eliot had made his own in 1922. 249 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.019

John Xiros Cooper Sing! “ – that spiracle!” he shot a fnger out the door . . . “O life’s a geyser – beautiful – my lungs – No – I can’t live on land – !” I saw the frontiers gleaming of his mind; or are there frontiers – running sands sometimes running sands – somewhere – sands running . . . Or they may laugh and dance the axletree – steel – silver – kick the traces – and know – (72)

The Bridge alludes again and again to Eliot, but instead of a European wasteland, Crane discovers something more vibrant and alive, a propulsive, modern, and sexual America. Eliot had taken poetry out of its pastoral swoon among the Romantics and their successors and brought it into the twentieth-century city but found there only the haunted, sere dead end of history. Crane found a pulsing Manhattan full of life that “Bursts suddenly in rain” (100). Performances, assortments, résumés – Up Times Square to Columbus Circle lights Channel the congresses, nightly sessions, Refractions of the thousand theatres, faces – Mysterious kitchens . . . You shall search them all. (97)

He was also able to fnd a living literary tradition that was American through and through, stretching from Walt Whitman whom he greets lovingly in the section called “Cape Hatteras” (84) to a tradition that then moves through Crane to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1955) and Frank O’Hara’s city poems and the poetic sequence called “Biotherm (for Bill Berkson)” (1962). Eliot, it seems, had his uses, but these were limited in most cases to matters of form and style. The despair and hapless negativity that works its way through The Waste Land was not in the American grain. Eliot was celebrated as a poet whose work registered the extent of the psychological and cultural devastation of modernity especially in its post-Great War forms. But his early work could not point the way ahead to a remedy. His poems could enact wounded states of feeling but could not heal them. This for Eliot would come later with his conversion to the Church of England in 1927. For Eliot the frst task was to abandon Romantic affrmations of the ego, to divorce art-making from the personality of the artist and focus instead on the making itself, to bring our attention to the media and materials of the art and not to the way these elements are arranged simply to convey egotistically the preciousness or grandeur of the maker’s nervous system. 250 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.019

T. S. Eliot and American Poetry [T]he poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.9

As Hannah Arendt has argued in a different context “romanticism provided . . . unlimited idolization of the ‘personality’ of the individual. . . . Whatever served the so-called productivity of the individual, namely, the entirely arbitrary game of his ‘ideas,’ could be made the center of a whole outlook on life and world.” She refers to this as the ruthless individualism of the Romantic temper, which never means anything more serious than that “everybody is free to create for himself his own ideology.”10 Critics and scholars have sometimes supposed that Eliot was opposed to the expression of “emotion” in poetry. This misses the point. Eliot thought that the supposedly inspired eruption of feeling, the wallowing in one’s own emotional bath, was wrong. It made for bad poetry. Emotion was not in itself a bad thing, but it had to be dealt with as material for art, not simple gushing. For Eliot the Romantic ego lay in ruins, and its power as social and/ or cultural agent had vanished. The resulting sense of impotence brought down as well Romantic conceptions of the self-suffcient, self-authorizing imagination. The dynamism of art could no longer be located in the expressive will of the artist. It was the arbitrariness of the ego-centred personality that he found most offensive. Eliot worked out these ideas in a series of critical essays and in his early poetry, and they dealt a severe blow to nineteenth-century cultural and artistic values. It’s not surprising therefore that after 1927 he began to elaborate a socio-cultural vision based on the need for the individual to submit to authority. Not just any authority of course, but a submission to deeply historical institutions such as, for example, an apostolic church, an ancient monarchy, and a traditional Tory conservatism. It was only through such general acceptance of legitimate authority that the process of re-integrating shattered psyches and worlds could begin. That this ran against the grain of a deeply individualistic America need hardly be emphasized. If Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” was the starting point for most twentieth-century American poets, Eliot’s ideas fell mainly on deaf ears, even though his formal methods held out a certain promise. The problem lay in how one might reconstruct individual agency from the disjointures of modernity and yet not fall into an imprisoning egoism that isolates and stifes the person from acting and speaking in the world. Perhaps 251 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.019

John Xiros Cooper

the way forward was already to be found in Whitman and what survived in the 1920s as the spirit of American democracy. I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.11

The word “assume” in these lines keys the whole poem, not in its primary meaning as inferring something or taking something for granted, but in its other meaning, that of becoming or taking on something, as in assuming a role or an offce. These latter meanings become increasingly important as the poem proceeds, acting to unite different people, to make the “I” of the poem into an identity that makes room for all without judging or differentiating. It is a kind identity-in-difference. We are all individuals but we are all one, and the poem is the process by which we all become aware of our union. Behind it stands the idea of a free, egalitarian society, a true democracy that both spends itself and renews itself moment by moment in time. This conception is completely alien to Eliot’s conservatism, but it informs the work of many American poets in the twentieth century. It can be found at work in the poems of William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, John Ashbery, and others. However, Eliot’s notion of impersonality did have an infuence on the work of some poets. The “Objectivists” – Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Lorine Niedecker, among others  – evolved a poetics in the 1930s based on the earlier Imagist movement (1911–1913) that featured Pound and Eliot with its emphasis on the poem as a crafted artifact rather than as the spontaneous overfow of powerful feeling as Wordsworth had written in the heyday of British Romanticism. Although the Objectivists did not usually refer to Eliot specifcally as a source of their ideas (their Marxism clashed with Eliot’s theocratic conservatism), they nonetheless worked themselves free from a poetics of personality or what Charles Olson later in the century would deride as the “lyrical interference of the individual as ego.”12 Olson explored more fully the poetics of impersonality in his long opus, The Maximus Poems, in which the history of the United States, the geography of Cape Ann in New England, and the thought of ancient thinkers such as Maximus of Tyre (Olson’s alter ego in the poem) are brought into conjunction in a kind of epic of place. The method of juxtaposition was further developed among the poets who were associated with Black Mountain College near Asheville in North Carolina during Olson’s period as rector in the 1950s, writers such as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, and others. Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and other adherents of the Language School of poets beginning in 252 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.019

T. S. Eliot and American Poetry

the 1970s bring the story of the modernist poetics of impersonality to the present day. We have been looking at the infuence of Eliot’s The Waste Land, but Eliot himself continued to develop as a poet. To some extent he overcame the crisis of belief that runs through his earlier masterpiece like a scar. With his religious conversion in 1927, his poems achieved a measured discursiveness and composure that was new. The nervous agitation of his early work disappeared, and Four Quartets was the result. It is a different kind of masterpiece than The Waste Land but nonetheless brilliant for all that. It is true, however, that the latter sequence did not have the same impact as the former. The randomness and discontinuity of modern experience was still there, but Eliot had backed away from the notion that the juxtaposing of fragments of experience without explanatory connectives was suffcient in conveying, with immediacy, the affective energy of a work. Instead he adopted a style of writing that talked about the experience rather than enacted it in the poem’s formal procedures. The modern world was still modern, perhaps even more so; it was still full of loss, grief, and pain, but his newfound faith also made it possible to imagine grace and redemption as spiritual possibilities in the midst of suffering. Poets such as John Ashbery may not have embraced Eliot’s religious sensibility, but the example of Four Quartets offered positive embodiment of what a secular settledness and calm might look like, a calm by which the honest acknowledgment of the fragmentariness of modernity was, in the words of Charles Altieri, “complemented by a compelling concern for completeness in the rendering of the life of the mind.”13 A  typical critique of Four Quartets stems from the poem’s discursiveness, its more prosaic, or perhaps better to say prosy, textures. Ashbery’s Three Poems (1972) grants the poetic validity of Eliot’s discursiveness by extending the lyric impulse directly into prose. Eliot builds his poem on the lyric impulse to create a moment of stillness in the midst of temporal fow, and that lyric impulse gains a specifcally Christian centre when Eliot identifes the “Incarnation” as the ultimate “still point” of “the turning world.” Ashbery’s three prose poems constitute his most complex exploration of the life of the mind. He dramatizes the intricacies of consciousness as an attempt to both grapple with the external world in all its jagged solidity and record the velleity and slipperiness of the thinking process itself. The sequence is a masterpiece of sustained contemplation and attention without Eliot’s puritanical reservations about the seductive allure of the aesthetic. Ashbery is not afraid to give himself to beauty, but it is a beauty that is not conceived as a refuge or haven from the hard lessons of living. Three Poems neither ends with an unattainable Christian vision of a paradaisal state as does Four Quartets nor fnds 253 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.019

John Xiros Cooper

fnal solace in aesthetic contemplation. Ashbery leaves us very much in the midst of things, at the intersection where the conscious mind and language meet the world. I don’t fnd any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fts and starts and by indirection. I don’t think poetry arranged in neat patterns would refect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life.14

Christianity allowed Eliot to move from the ruins of subjectivity in The Waste Land to a more composed sense of the subjective in Four Quartets. The bad nerves of the former poem are calmed, and the poet can imagine in the latter the stillness of submission and spiritual ascent. Of course, Eliot is too much of a modern to say that Four Quartets achieves the fnality of beatitude, but he can say the poet is able to imagine it and wait patiently for its arrival. What can its arrival be but death? Ashbery makes his way in a lonelier world without the consolation of belief in a death that is simply the portal to a promised bliss. Wallace Stevens had trod the same path as Ashbery in a number of his extended meditations,15 but he could only fnd the promised land by revisiting aestheticism, surely a more hardy and austere aestheticism than the material hedonism of the art-for-art’s-sake movement in the 1890s but aestheticism nonetheless. Stevens, like Eliot, encountered the wasteland of modernity, a world that God and the gods have abandoned. Eliot in The Waste Land found himself in a desert full of stony rubbish where words fail and the poet falls into silence. Instead, Stevens fnds himself in a sensuous world where words fail in a different way, by becoming as lush and gaudy as a tropical rain forest, covering the bareness with the tropic exuberance of language. “Banal Sojourn,” published in 1919 and later in Stevens’s frst volume, Harmonium (1923), illustrates well how the poet can allay the harshness of modern times with sensuousness of image and sound. Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the stone steps. The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black. The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air. Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom. Pardie! summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew, Our old bane, green and bloated, serene, who cries, “That bliss of stars, that princox of evening heaven!” reminding of seasons, When radiance came running down, slim through the bareness. And so it is one damns that green shade at the bottom of the land. For who can care at the wigs despoiling the Satan ear? And who does not seek the sky unfuzzed, soaring to the princox? One has a malady, here, a malady. One feels a malady.16 254 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.019

T. S. Eliot and American Poetry

One certainly feels a “malady” here, but Stevens responds to it with aesthetic gaiety rather than with the frozen stare of the anxious depressive. There is, as in Eliot, an air of resignation in the face of the “malady,” but where one poet pales and falls silent, the other sings. Stevens was never haunted by heaven as was Eliot. Instead, he gives us “earthy anecdotes” (to adapt the title of the frst poem in Harmonium) in which the imagination is recognized as the supreme faculty of cognition: “The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifes what is unreal, while its frst effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.”17 This is not the thoroughgoing aestheticism of Oscar Wilde, but it nevertheless fnds solace and, more importantly, the courage to carry on, not in pursuit of Eliot’s heaven, but in a reality transfgured by art. Stevens and Ashbery could take from Eliot’s work what they needed and make something new from it. Robert Lowell, who stands generationally about midway between them, found himself more fully entangled in Eliot’s snares. Lowell’s enduring battle with self, his “Alas, I can only tell my own story,”18 seems to sound a challenge to Eliot’s dictum about impersonality. But the note of regret in that “Alas” and Lowell’s own practice as a poet place him frmly in Eliot’s camp. Of course, in Four Quartets, Eliot himself had made use of his “own story” and made great poetry from it. To tell one’s own story did not mean simply making interesting-sounding confessions about one’s trials and tribulations. Lowell’s poetic materials were certainly his own particular experiences, but they were inevitably transfgured in the making of poems. Indeed, his use of the voices of others in his translations and “imitations” maintained a disciplined distance between maudlin confession and art. Lowell’s painful awareness of self, in a world that seemed to him suffused and distorted by isolation and egoism, put him on a path already trodden by Eliot, a path that led eventually to an affrmation of Christian faith. All through his life and poetry, Lowell returned again and again to the problem of faith in a world that seemed to have been abandoned by God. When will I see Him face to face? Each day, He shines through darker glass. In this small town where everything is known, I see His vanishing emblems. His white spire and fagpole sticking out above the fog, like old white china doorknobs, sad, slight, useless things to calm the mad.19

That Lowell eventually left the embrace of the Catholic Church to which he had converted in 1940 does not diminish his quest for spiritual fulfllment. 255 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.019

John Xiros Cooper

In this passion for a vivid faith, Lowell is very much in the Eliotic line. They share many of the same concerns: the loss of tradition, our uncertain connection to the historical past, and the Emersonian infections of American culture, namely, the obsessive focus on the individual as a self-reliant, self-actualized social atom. And although some critics have argued that Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) represents a break with the impersonal poetics of Eliot, Pound, and the various successor schools of Modernism, nothing could be further from the truth. It is easy to say that Life Studies takes Lowell in a new direction that rejects the old dictum from The Waste Land period that poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from it. Easy, because it can also be said of Eliot himself. We should not forget that Eliot with Four Quartets also moved into a new understanding of the place of emotion in a work of art. Like Eliot’s late masterpiece, Life Studies transcends mere confession, “the poems do not document psychological crises so much as enact and embody them, placing the diffcult events of the speaker’s internal life in a specifc cultural and historical context which it is the book’s great labor to discover and name.”20 Both the late Eliot and Lowell, and perhaps the other American poets we’ve touched on in this chapter as well, make a unity around one principal idea, that against all odds in a spiritually destitute time it is possible to fnd a measure of grace in the midst of a wasteland everywhere made desperate by suffering. N OT E S 1 Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” in Personae:  The Collected Poems (New York: Horace Liveright, 1926): 187. 2 See Hugh Kenner, A Sinking Island:  The Modern English Writers (New York: Knopf, 1988), passim. 3 Edmund Wilson, “The Poetry of Drouth,” Dial 73 (December 1922): 616. 4 See Leonard Diepeveen, Changing Voices:  The Modern Quoting Poem (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). 5 Louis Untermeyer, “Disillusion vs. Dogma,” Freeman 6 (January 17, 1923): 453. 6 William Carlos Williams, Autobiography (New  York:  New Directions, 1971): 174. 7 “Hamlet and his Problems,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1919; rpt. London: Methuen, 1957): 100. 8 The Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon (New  York:  Liveright, 1986):  58. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 9 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1950): 11. 10 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London:  George Allen & Unwin, 1958): 168. 11 Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982): 188. 256 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.019

T. S. Eliot and American Poetry 12 “Projective Verse,” in Human Universe and Other Essays (New  York:  Grove Press, 1967): 59. 13 “Eliot’s Impact,” in The Cambridge Companion to T.  S. Eliot, ed. A.  David Moody (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 204. 14 John Ashbery, interview with Bryan Appleyard, “The Major Genius of a Minor Art,” Times of London (August 23, 1984): 22. 15 I have in mind poems by Stevens such as “The Comedian as the Letter C,” “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” 16 The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1968): 62–63. 17 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Random House, 1965): 6. 18 Quoted in Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell:  A  Biography (London:  Faber, 1983): 233. 19 Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, eds. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003): 385. 20 Mark Doty, “The 1950s,” in A Profle of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, eds. Jack Myers and David Wojahn (Carbondale:  Southern Illinois University Press, 1991): 153.

F U RT H E R R E A DI N G Altieri, Charles, “Eliot’s Impact,” in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. A. D. Moody (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Breslin, James E. B., From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Brooker, Jewel Spears, ed., T. S.  Eliot:  The Contemporary Reviews (New  York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Miller, James E., T. S.  Eliot:  The Making of an American Poet (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). Myers, Jack and David Wojahn, eds., A Profle of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). Oser, Lee, T. S. Eliot and American Poetry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998). Sigg, Eric, The American T.  S. Eliot:  A  Study of the Early Writings (New  York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

257 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.019

19 ROB E RT B E R NA R D HA SS

Hart Crane’s Visionary Company

Hart Crane has always been the odd man out in modern American poetry. Semi-openly gay, bereft of a formal education, and possessed of an elevated lyricism reminiscent of Marlowe and Keats, Crane never quite ft the model of the expatriated, Ivy League polyglot that so often characterized the major practitioners of the movement. To say that Crane was already an enigma long before he ever published his frst poem would be putting it mildly. A scion of the industrial Midwest who rejected the bully ethos of modern commerce, Crane nevertheless embraced, with futuristic zeal, the exciting new technology and innovative machines that were its byproducts. Although a robust participant in the loosening morals of the 1920s, Crane surprisingly yearned to rescue religious belief from early twentieth-century materialism and thus infused his poetry with his own peculiar amalgamation of Blakean and Ouspenskian mysticism. That even his closest literary friends – Gorham Munson, Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, and Waldo Frank – were not entirely sure what to make of either his life or his art, often later contradicting their early praise of his work, speaks to the great diffculty of placing Crane in the modernist canon. No modern American poet has so polarized critical opinion. To his supporters, Crane endures as the consummate visionary, an exemplar of the “Orphic tradition,” whose “new thresholds” and “new anatomies” of consciousness distinguish him as the twentieth century’s most legitimate heir to Blake and Shelley. To his detractors, Crane is little more than a poète maudit, an undisciplined bohemian, whose verbal abstractions and sentimentality are the predictable outcomes of a besotted attempt to exhume Walt Whitman. Much of the diffculty here derives in part from Cane’s complex aesthetics. Unlike Robert Frost, who saw the poem as a “momentary stay against confusion,” or T. S. Eliot, who considered the poem an “objective correlative” of the poet’s interior psychological landscape, Crane’s ambitions for poetry were far more elaborate. For Crane, the poem was never simply an act of clarifcation; it was a release from ordinary self-awareness, its 258 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.020

Hart Crane’s Visionary Company

narcotic effects capable of transforming conventional pieties into startling moments of novel perception. In an important essay, composed when he was only twenty-six, Crane reasserts, as did the Romantic poets more than a century before him, the lofty purposes of an art form that had been steadily relinquishing its cultural infuence to the demands of commerce and science: It is my hope to go through the combined materials of the poem, using our “real” world somewhat as a spring-board, and to give the poem as a whole an orbit or predetermined direction of its own. I would like to establish it as free from my own personality as from any chance evaluation on the reader’s part . . . Such a poem is at least a stab at a truth, and to such an extent may be differentiated from other kinds of poetry and called “absolute.” Its evocation will not be toward decoration or amusement, but rather toward a state of consciousness, an “innocence” (Blake) or absolute beauty. In this condition there may be discoverable under new forms certain spiritual illuminations, shining with a morality essentialized from experience directly, and not from previous precepts or preconceptions. It is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader’s consciousness henceforward.1 (163)

This remarkable passage exposes the contradictions inherent in any visionary aesthetic. As Crane attempts to repair what he once called “the broken world” (106), he also risks producing an art that cannot be easily understood or “enunciated.” As is the case with any visionary, the poet in search of an “essentialized” experience often alienates readers, who fnd themselves torn between rejecting the poem’s ecstatic formulations as too hermetically private and tolerating the poem’s irrational obfuscations on the grounds that they contribute to a greater holistic aesthetic performance. Such was Harriet Monroe’s problem in 1926, as she wondered whether to place “At Melville’s Tomb” in Poetry. Although genuinely fascinated by the poem’s “ideas and rhythms,” Monroe was clearly bewildered by Crane’s “process of reasoning” and his “succession of champion mixed metaphors.”2 In a skeptical letter to Crane, built out of his own phrases and included with the poem in the October issue, Monroe prudently identifes the problem of reading Crane: Take me for a hard-boiled unimaginative unpoetic reader, and tell me how dice can bequeath an embassy (or anything else); and how a calyx (of death’s bounty or anything else) can give back a scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph; and how, if it does, such a portent can be wound in corridors (of shells or anything else).3

In a thoughtful reply (also published in the issue), Crane systematically argues against Monroe’s objections, asserting that he is “more interested 259 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.020

Robert Bernard Hass

in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness . . . than in the preservation of their logically rigid signifcations.” He then further declares that the poet has “the authority” to take “certain liberties” with “the nuances of feeling and observation” that can culminate in a poetry equivalent to “some of the richest genius of the past.”4 Despite this eloquent defense, Monroe, for her part, while certainly willing to grant Crane some of the aesthetic liberties he encouraged, was not inclined to grant him the authority to be technically sloppy. In reminding him that there is a good deal of difference between “mystery,” which is an asset to verse, and “mystifcation,” Monroe, in a follow-up letter, scolds Crane for carrying “to an excessive degree ‘the dynamics of metaphor’ ” and for infusing his poem with “crowded and tortured lines.” “I fnd you pushing logic to the limit in a painfully intellectual search for emotion, for poetic motive,” she wrote. Without elaborate explanations that can “lead readers by the hand,” she declared, even the “most sympathetic” audience cannot begin to comprehend metaphors that “telescope three to four images by mental leaps.”5 To her credit, in spite of these reservations, Monroe published “At Melville’s Tomb,” fully admitting to Crane she “might be entirely wrong” and that “a number of other poets and critics would think so.”6 Her prediction, of course, would prove accurate. As high modernism quickly exhausted its aims, never fully maturing into the enduring literary epoch its devotees anticipated, Crane’s renouncement of the movement’s most severe experimental ruptures gradually came to be regarded as a virtue – his disciplined meters, traditional forms, and visionary eloquence clear proof that romanticism was alive and well, its purported death merely a temporary hiatus. Indeed, in the ninety years since Yvor Winters’s scalding assessment of The Bridge as a “form of hysteria” and a “wreckage,”7 Crane’s defenders, like Robert Frost’s, have been working steadily to rehabilitate his reputation. Although most of these reclamation projects have focused primarily on the early lyrics of White Buildings (1926), thoughtful apologists such as Warner Berthoff, Langdon Hammer, John Irwin, Herbert A.  Leibowitz, R.  W. B.  Lewis, and Paul Mariani have also identifed The Bridge as a major literary achievement. Some go so far as to claim for the poem a special postmodern resonance. Resolute in his claim that The Bridge is the best long poem in the American canon, John Irwin, for example, argues that “a generational change in attitudes in the mid-1960s made [Crane’s] vision of American origins . . . seem less a matter of extravagant optimism than one of practical necessity.” “Since then,” he asserts, “the reputation of The Bridge has continued to increase as readers have come to see its vision of the American future (devoted to conserving the natural world) as a prophecy not romantically boisterous and naive but unavoidably realistic.”8 260 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.020

Hart Crane’s Visionary Company

Identifying the urban sophisticate Crane as a prescient environmentalist is perhaps a bit excessive, but Irwin is nevertheless correct in judgment: each new generation must read The Bridge afresh. The Frank/Tate/Winters view of the poem as a spectacular failure no longer has the authority it did in the thirties and has become something of a cliché; and Winters’s condemnation of Crane’s epic as “ejaculatory, and over-excited”9 seems less an indictment of the poem than of the poet’s transgressive sexuality. In hindsight, Winters’s prominent review of The Bridge in Poetry, which unfortunately set the tone for many subsequent appraisals, emerges as bizarrely impressionistic, its sweeping moral judgments clearly maneuvers in Winters’s general campaign to restore classicism to a position of prestige and to set reason over decadence, emotion, and sensation. “Poetry should increase the intelligence and strengthen the moral temper,” Winters insisted. “These effects,” he believed, “should naturally be carried out over into action, if, through constant discipline, they are made perfect acquisitions.”10 Although having once praised Crane’s early drafts of The Bridge, suggesting in a 1927 letter to Allen Tate that “the thing is on a grand scale . . . and on the whole is new, tremendous,”11 by 1930 Winters recanted his assessment. Newly aware of Crane’s devolution into a bohemian lifestyle spiraling rapidly out of control, Winters, it seems, saw as The Bridge’s chief defect its inability to amend what he considered the poet’s deviant behavior. In Winters’s view, Crane’s lack of an “antecedent discipline of ethical thinking” had culminated in a Whitmanian relativism in which, “if nothing is bad, it follows equally that nothing is good.”12 To younger generations untroubled by Crane’s lifestyle and sexuality, The Bridge has gradually reclaimed a prominent place in the American canon. Despite the blandishments of such readers as Adam Kirsch, who sees The Bridge as faltering under the burden of its didactic mythologizing,13 and William Logan, who once opined that “reading The Bridge is like being stuck in a mawkish medley from Show Boat and Oklahoma,”14 The Bridge has remarkable staying power. Decades of informed scholarship have elucidated the poem’s diffcult allusions, and contemporary readers are better equipped to see how Crane’s epic is much closer to modernist practices than previous generations were willing to concede. In fact, a clear-eyed reconsideration, one unencumbered by a latent and disfguring homophobia, reveals that The Bridge participates fully in many of the new century’s aesthetic innovations. The poem’s well-modulated personae and array of mythical characters (for which an ambiguous narrator serves as ventriloquist) recall one of Eliot’s most important strategies in The Waste Land. Its complex circular structure and Bergsonian confation of time  – in which the past, present, and future merge to establish a Platonic vision of American possibility – predict 261 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.020

Robert Bernard Hass

Joyce’s structural experimentation in Finnegan’s Wake. Finally, the poem’s use of a shared mythology, which Crane seamlessly melds with the quotidian minutiae of daily life, seems straight out of Ulysses, whose early chapters Crane had frst read alongside his own poems in the Little Review. At times, moments of lucid, accessible language seem so completely in the “American grain” that a contemporary such as William Carlos Williams would surely have approved had he ever bothered to take notice:                                       Behind My father’s cannery works I used to see Rail-squatters ranged in nomad raillery, The ancient men – wifeless or runaway Hobo-trekkers that forever search An empire wilderness of freight and rails. Each seemed a child, like me, on a loose perch, Holding to childhood like some termless play. John, Jake, or Charley, hopping the slow freight  – Memphis to Tallahassee – riding the rods, Blind fsts of nothing, humpty-dumpty clods. Yet they touch something like a key perhaps. From pole to pole, across the hills, the states,  – They know a body under the wide rain; Youngsters with eyes like fjords, old reprobates With racetrack jargon, – dotting immensity They lurk across her, knowing her yonder breast Snow-silvered, sumac-stained, or smoky blue – Is past the valley-sleepers, south or west.  – As I have trod the rumorous midnights, too. (42–43)

While clearly affliating him aesthetically with his contemporaries’ verse, these moving lines serve to exemplify the residual Whitmanian optimism that distinguishes Crane’s poetry from that of his modernist peers. As he made clear in a letter to Louis Untermeyer, Crane, like William Carlos Williams, was deeply troubled by Eliot’s verse and set out to write poems “designed to erect an almost antithetical spiritual attitude to the pessimism of the Waste Land.”15 In a letter to Gorham Munson, Crane further admitted that he had conceived The Bridge as a counterpoint to Eliot’s vision and foresaw his poem “as a mystical synthesis of ‘America.’ ”16 “Dotting immensity” and “rumorous midnights” notwithstanding, there is nothing particularly mystical here. There is, however, an unfinching devotion to the tradition of American questers who, like Gatsby and Ishmael, yearn for an elusive happiness and take to the road or sea (or, in this case, the rails) in search of something far more satisfying than the life of physical labor 262 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.020

Hart Crane’s Visionary Company

or crass materialism can provide. Reprobate, dispossessed, and childlike, these “rail-squatters,” with eyes “like fjords,” remain confdent that an itinerant life will terminate, like the river for which this section is named, in an ecstatic goal  – the misty “Gulf”  – where one can hear “hosannas silently below.” Crane never fully defnes the nature of his teleological impulses, yet the mythical Cathay toward which Columbus set his sights is not, in Crane’s vision, simply an imagined ideal. Unlike Eliot, whose Waste Land concludes in a series of fragmented ruins and obscure allusions to East Indian religious traditions  – the signifcance of which remains ambiguous  – Crane fully believes in the possibility of a redeemed future. The Bridge resurrects Whitman’s steadfast belief in America as a place destined to cultivate a universal brotherhood. Nowhere is Crane’s faith in Whitmanian optimism more fully on display than in “Cape Hatteras,” the central and longest section of The Bridge, and the section Winters singled out for his most severe condemnation. In what might accurately be described as a shrewd rejoinder to the heroic age of Italian Futurism, the loosely structured sonnet sequence of “Cape Hatteras” functions in form and theme as a stern jeremiad against the false idols of technology and machines. Although Crane had certainly heeded the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s call in “L’Esprit Nouveau et les Poètes” to “mechanize poetry as the world has been mechanized,”17 his lyric sequence is no arte meccanica. Even as he happily celebrates the Brooklyn Bridge as both utilitarian object and mythical subject, Crane’s disgust with the Great War-era exaltation of the aerial dogfght led him ultimately to reject  – as Apollinaire did  – the martial valor and overt nationalism of futurism. Whitman, whom Crane fervently read to salve his despair over the battle of the Somme, had earlier intimated, in “Passage to India,” that a proper use of technology might humanize the machine by binding together disparate peoples in greater mutual understanding. In “Cape Hatteras,” Crane extended those ideas. World War I  had clearly demonstrated to him that the modern, Promethean urge to harness energy with mechanical ingenuity had disrupted the Whitmanian compulsion to recover a deeper spiritual heritage. In their efforts to control nature and “reconstruct” the universe, the futurists, in Crane’s view, had forgotten Whitman’s call in Democratic Vistas to augment the modern intellect with a “force-infusion for purposes of spiritualization”18 and had instead threatened to subjugate or conquer other human beings. Whitman’s belief that technology must always serve greater spiritual ends had to be renewed. In vibrant language that imitates modern industrial processes, Crane celebrates creative ingenuity but also cautions us against mechanization’s destructive alternative purposes: 263 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.020

Robert Bernard Hass The nasal whine of power whips a new universe . . . Where spouting pillars spoor the evening sky, Under the looming stacks of the gigantic power house Stars prick the eyes with sharp ammoniac proverbs, New verities, new inklings in the velvet hummed Of dynamos, where hearing’s leash is strummed . . . Power’s script, – wound, bobbin-bound, refned – Is stropped to the slap of belts on booming spools, spurred Into the bulging bouillon, harnessed jelly of the stars. Towards what? The forked crash of split thunder parts Our hearing momentwise; but fast in whirling armatures, As bright as frogs’ eyes, giggling in the girth Of steely gizzards – axel bound, confned In coiled precision, bunched in mutual glee The bearings glint, – O murmurless and shined In oilrinsed circles of blind ecstasy! (55–56)

To counter such danger, Crane symbolically crashes a warplane near the shoals of Kitty Hawk, the site where the Wright Brothers pioneered powered fight. In doing so, Crane proposes that if humanity is to escape the Faustian bargain that inevitably accompanies innovation, it must fnd an alternative to the classical idea of kleos, the central ethic that not only undergirded the Iliad but, for Crane, had driven the West’s bloodlust and dominionist ideologies. With Whitman as his guide, Crane seeks to “conjugate infnity’s dim marge – ” (57) and restore to the modern world the countervailing compassion that Whitman had proffered to dying or wounded soldiers during the Civil War: And now, as launched in abysmal cupolas of space, Toward endless terminals, Easters of speeding light – Vast engines outward veering with seraphic grace On clarion cylinders pass out of sight To course that span of consciousness thou’st named The Open Road – Thy vision is reclaimed! And see the rainbow’s arch – how shimmeringly stands Above the Cape’s ghoul-mound, O joyous seer! Recorders ages hence, yes, they shall hear In their own veins uncancelled thy sure tread And read thee by the aureole ‘round thy head Of pasture-shine, Panis Angelicus!                                      yes, Walt Afoot again and onward, without halt, – Not soon, nor suddenly, – no, never to let go      My hand 264 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.020

Hart Crane’s Visionary Company               in yours,                       Walt Whitman –                                        so –                                          (59–60)

Whether or not one takes “Cape Hatteras” as “desperately sentimental,”19 as does Winters, depends on how plausible one fnds the poem’s fnal gesture. To those who see this moment as a retrograde solution to lost-generation calamities, Crane’s concluding lines will appear inadequate. The “power of the poet’s mind over a universe of death”20  – Harold Bloom’s account of Crane’s purposes in The Bridge – will seem weak and ineffective against the overwhelming forces of history. Winters, however, wrote his critique before the advent of the atomic bomb, and, in a postmodern age, it is more diffcult to rebut Crane’s invective against a world made barren by apathy and machines. Who among us, for example, would not be inclined to celebrate the integrating promise of the iPod (and the networks it places us in) while simultaneously deploring the destructive power of the unmanned drone? More certain, however, is Winters’s prediction that no poet would ever again wrestle so hard with “Whitmanian inspiration.”21 Crane exerted considerable infuence upon many American poets (most prominently John Ashbery), but no contemporary has come close to appropriating Whitman with an equivalent confdence. When Crane leapt into the Atlantic from the USS Orizaba in April 1932, his legacy of poetic ambition, post-Christian mysticism, and vatic prophecy, all of which he had derived from Whitman, sadly perished from American poetry with him. What never perished is the inimitable lyric genius Crane’s most enduring poems display in abundance. Such vocal magnifcence originates most obviously in Crane’s fascination with the Elizabethan poets – Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and Donne  – whose verbal richness, understated irony, and emotional expressiveness he had fully come to appreciate through his immersion in Eliot and his late-night conversations with his good friend, the literary critic Matthew Josephson. In his best work, Crane’s plundering lexiphilia abstains from linear logic, giving rise to wonderfully sonorous sequences of associative, emotional tones. Combined with one another, these tonal registers create, rather than mirror, lived experience and express an intractable Platonic idealism. Augmenting these tonal registers, Crane’s wonderfully strange concatenation of industrial images and rapturous language not only brings him to moments of sublime vision but also enables him, as he once said of Marlowe, to “set the key for the divinest human feasting.”22 Such feasting occasionally borders on verbal gluttony. But more often than not Crane’s diapasonal profusion perfectly fgures his vision, as 265 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.020

Robert Bernard Hass

in “Voyages II,” Crane’s emblematic, six-part sequence of love poems composed to commemorate his relationship with the Danish sailor Emil Opffer:  – And yet this great wink of eternity, Of rimless foods, unfettered leewardings, Samite sheeted and processioned where Her undinal vast belly moonward bends, Laughing the wrapt infections of our love; Take this Sea, whose diapason knells On scrolls of silver snowy sentences, The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends As her demeanors motion well or ill, All but the pieties of lovers’ hands. (25)

Surely we can celebrate this wonderful verbal performance without labeling Crane an eccentric stylist. William Pritchard has argued that “what is being said” in these passages “is not terribly complicated or even particularly interesting.”23 But a closer look at the opening stanzas reveals a complicated Freudian structure that juxtaposes a clash between erotic desire and personal censorship. In the opening stanza, Crane confgures the sea and moon as lovers. The sea’s “undinal vast belly” bends toward the moon, which, through its gravitational forces, controls the sea’s tidal attraction, thus making any resistance impossible. In “laughing the wrapt infections of our love,” the enthralled sea appears sympathetic to the lovers’ giddy infatuation. Their moonstruck affection, like the tide, ebbs and fows in varying states of emotional intensity, fully congruent with natural forces. In a sudden turn, however, the second stanza converts that sympathy into something far more ominous. Introducing the possibility that the sea, with its court “sessions,” “sceptred terror,” and fckle “demeanors,” might pass judgment against such love, Crane transforms the words “scroll” and “sentences” from lovely descriptions of the sea into legal terms, suggesting that the sea, rather than sanctioning the love affair, will condemn the lovers and sentence them for breaches of propriety or fdelity. Although the fnal line affrms that the sea cannot “rend” the “pieties of lovers’ hands,” a nagging undertow of doubt pervades this stanza, highlighting the insecurity of the narrator who, poised on the brink of a headlong plunge into love, appears willing to risk all possible consequences for its successful consummation. It is dangerous, of course, to read “Voyages,” or any other poem for that matter, as an affdavit. The transcendent, enduring qualities of love that prevail in the fnal lines of “Voyages” seem to suggest that Crane had found, at least once, a lasting and mutually satisfying love affair. But the evidence from letters and friends’ testimony indicates that his quest for love was relentless 266 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.020

Hart Crane’s Visionary Company

and purely “visionary.” Like many of the writers he admired, Crane could only fnd the affection he desired in the products of his imagination. In reviewing a posthumous edition of his letters, Allen Tate traced the source of Crane’s “desperate, melancholy life” to the poet’s homosexuality. Adhering to common prejudices, Tate, in assessing his friend’s tragic decline, mistakenly described Crane’s homosexuality as a “neurosis.” Nevertheless, he correctly identifed one of the primary motivations behind Crane’s lyric fury and exposed a hitherto unnoticed quality in his poetry, namely its undercurrents of alienation and isolation. Although Tate was reluctant to use those terms in his review, euphemistically suggesting that Crane manifested “an incapacity to live within the limitations of the human condition,”24 his judgment is correct. Despite Crane’s many public declarations of love’s capacity to transport one to higher realms of consciousness, his poems, as Tate later suggested, appear to vindicate rather than resist Eliot’s major premise that “the integrity of the individual consciousness has broken down.”25 Much of this breaking down of consciousness can be attributed to the tension between Crane’s desire to come out as a gay man and the cultural injunctions against it. As Thomas E.  Yingling astutely observes, Crane’s poems have “hidden, erased, universalized, or otherwise invalidated not only their homosexual desire but also the shape (or mis-shape) their lives have taken as a result of the social taboos against it.”26 The continual threat of familial and cultural censure  – Crane’s mother, for example, distanced herself from her son when she learned about his sexuality – not only made it impossible for Crane to express his homosexuality openly but also forced him to mask, in coded language, his true inclinations and identity. His embrace of Whitman’s national rather than homosexual identity, his perpetual engendering of love objects as female, and his cultivation of a forid style all testify to a man clearly “out of key with his time.”27 The fnal lines of “My Grandmother’s Love Letters” are a fne example: Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand Through much of what she would not understand; And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof With such a sound of gently pitying laughter. (5)

Ostensibly a journey to understand through his grandmother’s love letters the spiritual union and domestic order his maternal grandparents shared, the poem, read in the context of Crane’s sexuality, also demonstrates the great gulf that exists between his grandmother’s love bond and his own unsuccessful attempts to fnd a similar satisfying relationship. As the speaker tries to navigate through great time and distance to summon his grandmother, the cloud-obscured stars cannot serve as ample guides. Thus Crane 267 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.020

Robert Bernard Hass

creates a fctive union (in a conditional sentence) that depends on the quality of his imaginative vision. That union metaphorically collapses, however, and the fnal two lines suggest both the inadequacy of his imagination and his grandmother’s inability to “understand” his sexual proclivities, despite her being led “by the hand.” Thus, the “gently pitying laughter” that closes the poem is not simply a lamentation for an irredeemably lost grandmother but also a projection of self-recrimination, with nature itself “pitying” the poet’s own stumbling efforts to fnd love. Such recrimination fnds its most poignant and disturbing expression in “The Broken Tower.” The poem celebrates his love affair with Peggy Cowley, the only heterosexual relationship of his life. Crane questions whether this unfamiliar form of love might re-inspire his rapidly fagging creativity. Figuring the poet as a bell ringer and the bell music as poetry, Crane wonders if his work has been signifcant enough to create a lasting or important music: My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored Of that tribunal monarch of the air Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word In wounds pledged once to hope, – cleft to despair? (106)

Crane’s insecurity over the quality of his art translates easily into insecurity over the quality of this new, and, what must have seemed to him, profoundly strange sexual orientation. In a series of images that recalls the primordial bond between mother and son, the poet yokes homosexual and heterosexual love, describing the confict between them as an “angelus,” a catholic prayer in which Mary, “the handmaid of the Lord,” is chosen as the divine conduit of the “Word made fesh”: And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes My veins recall and add, revived and sure The angelus of wars my chest evokes: What I hold healed, original now, and pure . . . (107)

The idea that Crane would celebrate the “healing” of his primary sexual orientation is for Yingling the unfortunate triumph of a culture that forced Crane to surrender his identity to a debilitating “trope of heterosexual transcendentalism.”28 Such a surrender, Yingling asserts, eventually culminated in a nothing less than a “homosexual erasure.” That erasure would come just three weeks later. Convinced that the editors he had sent “The Broken Tower” were not interested in publishing it and unable to resolve the contradictions of his identity, Crane, in his abjection, seems to have concluded that his poems were no longer worthy or capable of keeping him alive. Having been savagely beaten on board the Orizaba by an unidentifed man who 268 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.020

Hart Crane’s Visionary Company

refused his advances, the next day Crane neatly folded his topcoat and leapt over the rail – forever consigning his battered body to the sea and his poetry to a nation that had grossly misunderstood him. N OT E S 1 All citations of Crane’s writings are to Hart Crane: Complete Poems & Selected Letters, ed. Langdon Hammer (New York: Library of America, 2006) and are indicated by page number. 2 Harriet Monroe, “A Discussion with Hart Crane,” Poetry 29:1 (October 1926): 35. 3 Monroe, 35. 4 Monroe, 36. 5 Monroe, 40. 6 Monroe, 40–41. 7 Yvor Winters, “The Progress of Hart Crane,” Poetry 36.1 (June 1930): 161, 165. 8 John Irwin, Hart Crane’s Poetry: “Apollinaire Lived in Paris, I Live in Cleveland, Ohio” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press): xii. 9 Yvor Winters, Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry (New York: Haskell House, 1937): 6. 10 Winters, Primitivism and Decadence, 14. 11 Yvor Winters to Allen Tate, March 19, 1927, in R. L. Barth, ed., Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 2000): 109. 12 Winters, “Progress,” 156. 13 Adam Kirsch, “The Mystic Word,” The New  Yorker 82.32 (October 2006): 82–86. 14 William Logan, “Hart Crane’s Bridge to Nowhere,” New  York Times Book Review (January 28, 2007): 19. 15 Hart Crane to Louis Untermeyer, January 19, 1923, in Hammer, 310. 16 Hart Crane to Gorham Munson, February 18, 1923, in Hammer, 321. 17 Guillaume Apollinaire, “L’Esprit Nouveau et les Poètes,” Selected Writings:  Guillaume Apollinaire, ed. Roger Shattuck (New  York:  New Directions, 1971): 237. 18 Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas:  The Original Edition in Facsimile, ed. Ed Folsom (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010): 73. 19 Winters, “Progress,” 163. 20 Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Infuence:  Literature as a Way of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011): 271. 21 Winters, “Progress,” 165. 22 Hart Crane to Yvor Winters, June 27, 1928, in Hammer, 592. 23 William Pritchard, Lives of the Modern Poets (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1980): 236. 24 Allen Tate, “Crane:  The Poet as Hero,” New Republic 127 (November 17, 1952): 25. 25 Allen Tate, “Hart Crane,” Essays of Four Decades (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1999): 321. 26 Thomas E. Yingling, Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990): 26. 269 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.020

Robert Bernard Hass 27 Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,” Personae (New York:  New Directions, 1972): 187. 28 Yingling, 185. F U RT H E R R E A DI N G Berthoff, Warner, Hart Crane:  A  Reintroduction (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Bloom, Harold, Hart Crane (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publisher, 2003). Brunner, Edward J., Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of “The Bridge” (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1985). Combs, Robert, Vision of the Voyage: Hart Crane and the Psychology of Romanticism (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1978). Corn, Alfred, Hart Crane’s “Atlantis”:  The Metamorphoses of Metaphor (New York: Viking Press, 1987). Fisher, Clive, Hart Crane: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Gabriel, Daniel, Hart Crane and the Modernist Epic: Canon and Genre Formation in Crane, Pound, Eliot and Williams (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Horton, Philip, Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1937). Hammer, Langdon, Hart Crane & Allen Tate:  Janus-Faced Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Irwin, John, Hart Crane’s Poetry: “Apollinaire Lived in Paris, I Lived in Cleveland, Ohio” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Leibowitz, Herbert A., Hart Crane:  An Introduction to the Poetry (New  York, Columbia University Press, 1968). Lewis, R. W.  B, The Poetry of Hart Crane:  A  Critical Study (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1967). Mariani, Paul, The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999). Nickowitz, Peter, Rhetoric and Sexuality:  The Poetry of Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Pritchard, William, Lives of the Modern Poets (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1980). Reed, Brian, Hart Crane:  After His Lights (Tuscaloosa:  University of Alabama Press, 2006). Trachtenberg, Alan, Brooklyn Bridge:  Fact and Symbol (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1979). Untrecker, John, Voyager:  A  Life of Hart Crane (New  York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969). Woods, Gregory, Articulate Flesh: Male Homoeroticism and Modern Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Yingling, Thomas E., Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

270 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.020

20 S T E V E N   T R ACY

The New Negro Renaissance

You take              one part rock-headed savage              one part brutish rapist or wanton Jezebel              one part giant genitalia or massive mammalia              one part voodoo fetishism              one part ludicrous cackling              one part sticky-fngered servant one part subservient, cotton-wooled, work-shirking, malodorous, low-life animal and              one part DuBoisian double conscious, divided self              shaken, not stirred              season to taste

and you have the nineteenth and twentieth century Caucasian concoction known as the Negro. When Alain Locke wrote in his essay “The New Negro” (1925), published in the groundbreaking volume of the same name by Boni and Liveright  – also the publisher of avant-gardists T.  S. Eliot, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, and Hart Crane – that “for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being,” he had in mind obliterating the formula.1 The old Negro  – the Negro of the John Pendleton Kennedy-Thomas Nelson Page “plantation tradition” – was “more a myth than a man”; the new Negro was “vibrant with a new psychology” (3) – a rebellion telegraphed by Charles Chesnutt’s satire of the plantation tradition in the character of Uncle Julius McAdoo in The Conjure Woman (1899) a quarter century before Locke’s essay as well as by the wily preacher of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “An Ante-Bellum Sermon.” This new Negro vibrancy bespoke the excited, nervous, anxious – partly sexually throbbing and socially frightening  – movement then afoot in contemporary art and life:  the extraordinary racial threshold that Americans (including for the frst time African Americans) were about to cross in noticing, recognizing, 271 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.021

Steven Tracy

accepting, and even encouraging the artistic expression of an undifferentiated group of human beings one generation out of chattel slavery. The DuBoisian notion of looking at oneself though one’s own racial eyes as well as through racist societal eyes bespeaks a warring sociopolitical and aesthetic mentality, a concept DuBois may or may not have intended to propound in his vague exposition of fn de siècle/nadir black psychology. This idea certainly infuenced a generation of self-conscious artists intent on liberating themselves from a self-alienating primitivist defnition of “blackness” that placed them in what Hart Crane described in “Black Tambourine” as a “mid-kingdom” of myth and mayhem. Indeed, DuBois himself sought – through various Pan-African Congresses (beginning with the frst in London in 1900), through the founding of the Niagara Movement in 1905, and perhaps less successfully through his co-founding of the interracial NAACP in 1909  – to pull together a coherent and intellectually consistent set of principles and strategies for combating a self-defeating double consciousness that would fower increasingly as, post-New Negro Renaissance, he himself moved further Left politically, further liberal socially, and further Afro-Asiatic geographically. At this time, Old Guard theorist DuBois (born in 1868) and New Guard philosopher Locke (born in 1885) were at loggerheads as to the proper function of art. DuBois’s “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926) called for propaganda, while Locke took an “art for art’s sake” position in “The Negro Takes His Place in American Art” (1929), but each man clearly incorporated elements of the opposing view into his own practice. Both belonged to a “talented tenth” cultural elite, as DuBois described it in The Negro Problem (1903), they felt was necessary to guide the movement, though the notion tended to antagonize the masses rather than promote unity. Younger artists sided more closely with the more independent-minded Locke, as in such essays as Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926). But the audacious journal Fire!! (1926), edited by Wallace Thurman, printed gritty poetry by Hughes (“Elevator Boy” and “Railroad Avenue”) and contributions from Cullen, Bontemps, and Helene Johnson – all of which showed they were willing to go further than Locke appreciated. Not that all elements of American society responded to African American assertion and agency; there were many hidden holdouts, among the worst the Ku Klux Klan, which had an astonishing, disturbing revival in 1915. But the transformation of American art had begun in earnest, with the crossover recognition and employment of African American genres such as minstrelsy, spirituals, ragtime, jazz, and blues in the musical, visual, and literary arts. And while this transformation did not immediately bring about the parity with whites for which New Negro artists hoped, it did set in 272 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.021

The New Negro Renaissance

motion a chain-breaking series of events that improved the sociopolitical and artistic outlook for future citizens and writers: the Black Chicago Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and contemporary writers all mapped out a realm of diverse and liberated African American agency literature that did much to destroy the “formula” bemoaned by Locke. The new and ever-renewing “New Negroes,” whom black leaders John M. Anderson, Booker T. Washington, Sutton E. Griggs, and Hubert Harrison had sought by name before Locke’s clarion call would resurrect them from Frederick Douglass’s tomb of slavery to the struggle for freedom, to fght, and write, in a developing spirit of the African and African-American ancestors of the New Negro Renaissance – these “New Negroes” had arrived, with various ideas about what it meant to, as Pound and other modernists were seeking to do, “make it new” and “make it whole.” While critics have used the term “Harlem Renaissance” to characterize this literary and sociopolitical moment in American history, in recognition of the geographical location of a major outpost for some of the important writers of the era, New Negro Renaissance is a more comprehensive and accurate label, if label we must, for the collection of diverse writers confned under a chronological and aesthetic umbrella too small to shield the crowd from the critical rain showered upon them. Harlem was a most important cosmopolitan outpost, a teeming beacon of leadership, uplift, and talent to a concatenation of diasporic presences, as indicated by the presence of its sometimes tawdry, sometimes idealized (sometimes atavistically both) landscape in poems such as Helene Johnson’s “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem,” Claude McKay’s “The Harlem Dancer,” Cullen’s “Harlem Wine,” and Hughes’s “The Weary Blues.” However, Harlem was not alone or exclusive in this position. With the end of the Civil War and the failure the Reconstruction by 1877 to address adequately the institutional racism that limited access to full citizenship, education, and personal autonomy and safety, waves of migration from South to North ensued. The Ku Klux Klan, after all, was frst formed by Confederate veterans in Tennessee in 1865, and, though it fzzled out by the mid-1870s, its spirit remained frmly entrenched in one southern mindset. Re-emerging in 1915 in Georgia, as the New Negro Renaissance was gearing up in its quest for African American agency, the Klan was one major impetus for the great migrations seeking, in the North, what the Chicago Defender claimed to be freedom and greater employment and sociopolitical opportunities. The fact that this major call came from Chicago shows there were other cities where groups of activists, artists, and writers sought social equality and artistic freedom. Highways 49 and 61, and the railroad lines, would swell the ranks of northern cities; to Chicago and New  York, add Philadelphia and 273 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.021

Steven Tracy

Washington, D.C., as registered in Hughes’s “Bound No’th Blues,” and in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poetic defnition of “The True American” who had arrived at his time and place. As a result, a transitioning generation of African Americans who remembered the old dispensation but sought, with an optimistic spirit, the promise a new one staked their claims in what would become the urban ghettoes of the North. Besides this heightened geographical mobility, there was, within limits, social mobility as well. Middle- and upper-class African Americans increased in number, but were, unfortunately, not always attuned to the needs of their black brethren and sistren. Some “classed off” – which implied to many a “racing off” as well – by embracing Eurocentric, capitalistic values that demeaned and burdened the lower classes, widening a split among African Americans and ensuring that intra-racial warfare would continue to hamper collective action and progress. Nonetheless, the artists and institutions associated with various urban settings all contributed to the spirit of the New Negro Renaissance. Philadelphia, for example, was the birthplace of writer and philosopher Alain Locke and sculptress Meta Warwick Fuller; the location where writer and Crisis literary editor Jessie Fauset received her early education; and a touchstone for jazz musician Sam Wooding, operatic contralto Marian Anderson, and “exotic” entertainer Josephine Baker. Boston boasted the presence of activist William Monroe Trotter and the writers William Stanley Braithwaite, Angelina Weld Grimké, Helene Johnson, and Dorothy West (West later associated with the Black Chicago Renaissance). Southern-northern Washington, D.C., offered the prestigious Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, teaching home of Jessie Fauset and Grimké (who memorialized the school in “To the Dunbar High School” and “Then and Now”) and alma mater of Jean Toomer (who captured, in Cane, the unharnessed urban fury of “Seventh Street”) and Richard Bruce Nugent; the distinguished Howard University, where Philadelphian Locke presided and writer Zora Neale Hurston received part of her education; and the literary salon of Georgia Douglas Johnson, where many Renaissance fgures such as DuBois, Hughes, Countee Cullen, William Stanley Braithwaite, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Anne Spencer, and Wallace Thurman socialized. Of course, many of these fgures were born in or traveled to the South during their careers and were inspired variously by their experiences there. Sterling Brown, for example, was born in Washington, D.C., attended Williams College and Harvard in Massachusetts, and taught in Lynchburg, Virginia; Jefferson City, Missouri; Tennessee; and Washington, D.C., during the Renaissance years. He wrote with insight of the wandering “Odyssey of Big Boy” and the “Southern Road,” just as Toomer described the deep-rooted spiritual and material heritage of the “Georgia 274 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.021

The New Negro Renaissance

Dusk” and as Hughes wandered widely  – geographically, temporally, and spiritually – in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Clearly the Renaissance was a moveable feast. The Renaissance provided opportunities for interracial cooperation and a sense of old connections and contemporary beginnings. The North was a magnet, after all, for immigrants from around the world, including those from the African diaspora. There were Jamaicans such as the African Black Brotherhood’s Cyril Briggs, the activist Wilfred Domingo, and the expatriate (from 1922 to 1934) Claude McKay, whose early vernacular poetry gave way to fery sonnets such as “Baptism” in the formal European literary tradition. There was the Pan-African Universal Negro Improvement Association’s Marcus Garvey, whose journal was edited by West Indian Eric D. Walrond.2 No one should underestimate the importance of Martinique writer René Maran’s novel Batouala (1921) for Pan-African thought and the Renaissance. Consider also the emergence of Negritude, associated with the poetry of Aimé Cesaire, Léon Damas, and Léopold Senghor  – themselves inspired variously by the celebratory Pan-African pride of Hughes’s “My People” and “Dream Variations.” Connections established in fve Pan-African Congresses between 1920 and 1929 were also important. And the foregoing only highlights the most prominent instances of Francophone African and Caribbean infuences on the Renaissance. These forces awakened many African Americans, including the largely working-class followers of black nationalist Garvey, to notions both accurate and mythical concerning African civilization and their African heritage, to relativist cultural and social considerations, and to diasporic relations and responsibilities. Further, the organization of racial uplift groups from the women’s club movement to the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, and the Urban League helped produce a sense of group identifcation and social, political, and educational responsibilities. Newspapers and journals – the Chicago Defender, the Chicago Bee, and the Chicago Whip; the Baltimore Afro-American; Harlem’s Crisis and Brownie’s Book (both of the NAACP); Opportunity (of the Urban League); A. Philip Randolph’s The Messenger; Hubert Harrison’s The Voice; Garvey’s Negro World; and the short-lived Fire!!, among many others – spread the gospel of hope, progress, and commitment. Given the historical, though not always accurate, idea that the urban North offered greater opportunities and better relations with whites, and the prominence of northern philanthropic interests, certain kinds of economic cooperation, including patronage for literary artists, emerged as a force driving the Renaissance. However serious, discerning, or socio-politically committed white patrons were, the contributions to the support of (sometimes to the detriment of) Hughes, Locke, Hurston, and others by whites such as Carl 275 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.021

Steven Tracy

Van Vechten, Charlotte Mason, Nancy Cunard, Mary White Ovington, and Joel, Arthur, and Amy Spingarn were crucial to access to publishing houses and reviews, and in some cases to the author’s ability to commit full time to writing. Still, as Helene Johnson’s “A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America” and Brown’s “Cabaret” demonstrate, fnancial support could be a mixed blessing. Black support of journals such as Charles S. Johnson’s Opportunity – by businesses and individuals such as Virgin Islands native, businessman, and numbers racketeer Casper Holstein – was also essential. Unfortunately, the achievement of the frequently common general goals was as frequently sabotaged by the varied, sometimes conficting, means of getting there. Back-to-Africa colonizationists, socialists, communists, capitalists, Republicans, Democrats, and Ku Kluxers found themselves, at times, competing for the same money. The Renaissance drew upon the African American oral and written traditions that preceded and coexisted with them. The strong autobiographical slave narrative tradition, with its distinctive voices, images, and symbols; the strong polemical tradition represented by James Monroe Whitfeld (“America”) and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (“Bury Me in a Free Land”); the epic poems of Albery Allston Whitman, who wrote The Rape of Florida in Spenserian stanzas; Joshua McCarter Simpson, who verbally and formally employed folk songs in ironic and satiric ways; Dunbar’s important dialect poetry – all these anticipate elements of the Renaissance. The Renaissance also drew upon trends in world literature in confronting modern existence in a violent (WWI), hostile (Jim Crow laws and Constitutional rulings such as Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896), value-challenged (Lost Generation), impoverished (frst era of black ghetto formation, 1880–1930), and mechanized (Ford assembly line, 1908–1915) industrial world. All the time, however, those trends were touched by the transforming power of black artistry. The Romantic preoccupation with the imagination and the dialect poetry popularized by John Greenleaf Whittier – adapted so masterfully by Dunbar, Daniel Webster Davis, and James Edwin Campbell – became an ever more nuanced tool in the hands of James Weldon Johnson (in his folk sermons in God’s Trombones), Hughes (the blues of “Hard Luck”), and Brown (in the spiritual tradition of “When de Saints Go Ma’ching Home”). Realism and the local color movement found expression in the work of Chesnutt, Dunbar, and Fenton Johnson and then in the vivid swan-song portraits of Toomer (“Karintha”) and Effe Lee Newsome (“Mattinata”). Dunbar, in particular, leads African American literature out of the post-bellum, Reconstruction era into an age of agency and strategy. He made possible characters whose double conscious tricksterism exemplify the mother-wit that would inform Brown’s “Slim” poems, Hughes’s 276 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.021

The New Negro Renaissance

“Simple” and “Madam,” and, post-New Negro Renaissance, Ellison’s “Peter Wheatstraw” (in The Invisible Man) and social realist Alice Childress’s “Mildred Johnson” (in Like One of the Family). The tough, gritty New Poetry of the city bards Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay was expressed brilliantly by Hughes (“Esthete in Harlem”) and Helene Johnson (“Poem”). The harsh socio-political environment for African Americans did offer some strong aesthetic traditions on which to draw. But the movement was not restricted to native infuences. James Weldon Johnson identifed an immediate template in the Irish Literary Renaissance of Yeats, Synge, Gonne, and company in his seminally important historical and aesthetic “Preface” to The Book of Negro Poetry (1922; reissued in 1931). That movement matched the New Negro movement in its 1) nationalism grown out of pride and its rejection of colonial domination; 2) response to a racist, Euro-dominated elevation of style and theme and devaluation of poor and common folk; 3) adoption of oppressed, group-identifed language, folklore, poetry, art, and music; 4) establishment of a cultural elite in strong centers of operation; 5) establishment of organs of uplift and publication; 6) shared political and cultural aims; 7) idealization of rural life and people; 8) strong theatrical component; 9) cultural and aesthetic manifestoes; and 10) international response and acclaim. The parallels are striking and signifcant, showing once again that confning the Renaissance to Harlem constricts artists who were “Sailing,” as Grimké wrote in “Little Grey Dreams” (1924), “Into the black, / At the horizon’s edge.”3 Beyond these infuences, a number of New Negro writers seemed to follow the path of literary “respectability” and gentility demonstrated by the infuence of British Romantic and Victorian poets such as Keats (Cullen’s “To John Keats”) and the Brownings (Anne Spencer’s “Before the Feast at Shushan”), though again their Renaissance work frequently confronted personal and racial issues in an individual manner. These poets have often been portrayed as putting their best (read “white”) foot forward to demonstrate, in the manner of Phillis Wheatley, their ability to master European verse. But, like Wheatley, they sometimes brought into traditional forms, such as the heroic couplet and the sonnet, meanings not found in the tradition, as in McKay’s “Red Summer”-inspired sonnet “If We Must Die” (judged by some the poetic starting gun of the Renaissance) or Georgia Douglas Johnson’s 277 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.021

Steven Tracy

“Sonnet in Memory of John Brown.” Determining the path to legitimacy, acceptance, and freedom was diffcult because white defnitions of African Americans frequently eschewed diversity for the convenient hook, the representative of the race. Emerging modernist aesthetics played its part in the Renaissance as well. Since the time of minstrelsy in the 1840s, African American art had been infuencing mainstream American culture. The formation in 1866 of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and the publication of Slave Songs of the United States (1867), popularized spirituals and jubilee songs, though few were willing to grant vernacular or folk poetry a status equal to that of the elevated poetry of the “beaux arts” tradition – even such forward thinkers as Hughes and Brown. But with the emergence and commodifcation of ragtime (possibly as early as 1847), jazz, and blues – through tent shows, saloons, bawdy houses, theatres, sheet music, piano rolls, and phonograph recordings  – African American music transformed American, and world, music from the turn of the twentieth century. The words for the various musical genres were sometimes used interchangeably, and variations on black originals, along with new compositions by whites, were alternately tinted by pop (Sophie Tucker), country (Jimmie Rodgers), and international classical (Milhaud, Gershwin, and Schulhoff) sensibilities. They were transplanted to advertisements, movies (The Jazz Singer), cartoons (“Betty Boop”), Broadway (Paul Green’s “In Abraham’s Bosom”), the WSM Barn Dance/Grand Ole Opry (where black harmonica player DeFord Bailey appeared beginning in 1926), and the New  York Metropolitan Opera. Of course, some black entrepreneurs (Pace and Handy), songwriters (Clarence Williams, Eubie Blake), musicians (Duke Ellington), composers (William Grant Still, Will Marion Cook, and Harry Burleigh), and shows (“Runnin’ Wild”) broke through as well – and it seemed like various manifestations of black culture were everywhere, in folk, popular, and angular and cacophonous modernist forms. It seemed that, as Hughes wrote in The Big Sea (1940), “the negro was in vogue,” and it was time for poets to show their stuff to varied and ever-larger audiences, holding to their own ideas of just who this New Negro was. The earliest Old Guard representatives of Renaissance poetry come from a generation born in the 1870s and 1880s – some distance from the 1920s heyday of the Renaissance and the turn of the twentieth century birthdates of the New Guard. Coming of age at the turn of the century meant being a near contemporary of Dunbar, fully conversant with the broad and deep acceptability and infuence of minstrelsy and dialect poetry in American culture from childhood. It meant approaching DuBois’s epochal The Souls of Black Folk upon its release in 1903 as desperate and dogged adults in an era of coon shows, medicine shows, and minstrelsy, and with the broken 278 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.021

The New Negro Renaissance

promises of Reconstruction still fresh. It meant growing up as the realist, local color, and naturalist movements developed, with their sometimes racist “verisimilitude” and their interior and exterior determinism. It meant seeing through mature eyes how the Irish Renaissance galvanized Irish art, nationalism, folklore, and theater, even as Washington published his autobiography Up From Slavery (1901), as the Wright brothers (who knew Dunbar) few (1903), as the Wobblies and the Niagara Movement were born (1905), and as Charles Ives, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, T.  S. Eliot, and sociologist-folklorist Howard W.  Odum began their innovative work. We might date the advent of the Renaissance to the publication of DuBois’s Souls, though some look to Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” (1919), Grimké’s play “Rachel” (1920), or Toomer’s multi-genre Cane (1923) for their touchstone. To have grown up in the old dispensation, and to confront the turning of the page at maturity, is one thing. Merely reading about the past and being born to – even in – the future was another thing altogether. The young guard was, perhaps, unburdened by personal allegiances that might have led them to resist the “new,” whatever that might mean in sociopolitical and aesthetic terms. For example, even the most phallocentric and hetero-normative critic of African American literature must now acknowledge that the gifted queer and women poets of the Renaissance make it impossible to impose male heterosexual attitudes on a diverse, even lopsidedly non-“traditional,” artistic community. Three women  – Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar Nelson (1875–1935), Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877–1966), and Angelina Weld Grimké (1880–1958) – are now acknowledged as forerunners and parties to the Renaissance. Their queerness (Nelson and Grimké) and occasional homoeroticism (as in Johnson’s “To a Young Wife”) inform the literary and geographical landscape of a Harlem also inhabited by the queer or bi-sexual Mae Cowdery and Gladys Mae Casely Hayford, as well as Cullen, Hughes, Locke, McKay, Richard Bruce Nugent, Wallace Thurman, and Carl Van Vechten. Considered by many a vivid, torrid, counter-traditional sexual zone for its drag balls and buffet fats, Harlem, in its subtler considerations of queer life, drifted about the arts, should anyone care to notice (think of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Gladys Bentley, and Frankie Jaxon). Dunbar Nelson provides another example. Too long subordinated to the poetic reputation of the alcoholic and abusive husband  – Paul Laurence Dunbar – with whom she lived only for a few years, Dunbar Nelson was in fact a Renaissance “renaissance woman”; she exemplifed the commitment to art that helped achieve sociopolitical integration and parity – a true heir to women such as Frances E. W. Harper and a sister to writer-editor-activist and 279 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.021

Steven Tracy

NAACP co-founder Ida B.  Wells Barnett. A  poet-teacher-journalist-fction writer-suffragist whose status as a “voluntary” Negro indicated the extent of her commitment, she wrote, early on, her own volume of stories, poems, and sketches, Violets and Other Tales (1895), and also the short-story collection The Goodness of St. Rocques (1899). She coedited an elocutionary volume, Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence (1914), and a newspaper, The Wilmington Advocate. More importantly, she was later a strong presence in the journals that defned Renaissance poetry during the 1920s, counting The Crisis and Opportunity among her poetic outlets, along with celebrated anthologies such as Robert T. Kerlin’s Negro Poets and their Poems (1923), Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1927), Charles Johnson’s Ebony and Topaz (1927), and James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). Dunbar Nelson was deeply committed to racial and social justice. She emphasized the high standards of elocution and expression that typifed the upwardly mobile black middle class. Yet she kept her eyes fxed on questions of gender and class that hindered mobility or prevented the transgression of conventional boundaries, and in this her own bisexuality likely fgured. While women writers of the Renaissance have sometimes been typed as excessively middle-class in orientation, a closer look sometimes reveals what Effe Lee Newsome described in “Wild Roses” as “the very shadow / Of daddy’s big rough cows” (SD 226) in a deceptively serene pasture. By contrast to Dunbar Nelson’s elegant but undistinguished nineteenth-century poetry, in Newsome’s poetry of the 1920s we fnd socially probing verse in highly varied styles. The feminist complaint “I Sit and Sew” (1927) makes appropriate use of elevated, at times almost Homeric, language in the tradition of martial poetry, here carved out in an alliterative, seven-line stanza (AABBCC+Refrain) that approximates iambic pentameter and yet has a natural grace. While the intelligent, restless speaker resists conventional domestic activity in what she says, in action she continues to subordinate herself to tradition, though she moves from assertion of to questioning of convention in the course of the poem  – a necessary stage, perhaps, in the progression toward resistance to marginalization and commitment to action. Enjambed lines such as “beyond the ken / Of lesser souls” and “grotesque things / Once men” double her images, and her vivid imagery and references to the mundane things of her life contrast sharply with the energy and action she desires. In the third stanza, patience runs out and rhyme seemingly “fails,” as the word “seam” is made to rhyme with itself; however, she allows be to be fnale of seam/seem as she puns on the failure of the “seam” to satisfy her quest for rosy (satisfying and bloody, activist and sexual) fulfllment. If, indeed, the speaker is female, she expresses a decidedly “un-ladylike” sentiment, though, of course, many whites did 280 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.021

The New Negro Renaissance

not accord “true womanhood” to African American women anyway. Still, the restlessness bubbling underneath the formal considerations of the poem emphasizes a commitment and desire that is addressed not only to men but, in shocking bursts, to God and Christ as well (SD 87). By contrast, “The Proletariat Speaks” (1929) presents in free verse/open form the spacious-roomed sociopolitical and artistic aspirations of those supposed to have no such dreams, too often typifed by their tawdry surroundings than by their commitment, labor, and love of beauty. It is again as if Dunbar Nelson is unmasking the desire for transcendence, attempting a revelation of class prejudices as she contrasts desire and reality, beauty and the pattern of working, sleeping, eating, and rising that dominates the dime-store world. Describing the dreamscape of African Americans was a major element in the poetry of the time, be it the fevered, conficted nightmare of Cullen’s “Heritage,” the evocative and wistful “Little Grey Dreams” of Grimké’s horizons, or the Euro-aesthetic fervor of Mae Cowdery’s “A Brown Aesthete Speaks.” Even Dunbar Nelson’s nature poetry – then a common genre – is a locus of strength and resistance in an adverse time and setting. “Snow in October” (1927) trumpets in open form strength, defance, and pride in the survival of a young tree resisting premature winter blasts – a theme also broached by Toomer in “November Cotton Flower” – a tree that itself calls to mind the ravages of worry in a disordered world. For literature that has been thought of as limited, bourgeois, and Eurocentric, the poetry of black Renaissance women from Dunbar Nelson on down is remarkably diverse, as refected in anthologies such as Maureen Honey’s Shadowed Dreams. Like Dunbar Nelson, women make use of traditional European forms, as in Marjorie Marshall’s sonnet “To a Dark Dancer,” Spencer’s alternating rhymes in “Innocence,” Georgia Douglas Johnson’s couplet quatrains in “The Heart of a Woman,” and the haunting and hypnotic improvisation on form of Gwendolyn Bennett’s “Fantasy.” Grimké’s stunning “To Keep the Memory of Charlotte Forten Grimké” uses its carefully controlled meditative form to contrast eternity, ironically mentioned in the shortest line, to the everlasting legacy of her ancestor, whose gentle effect is implicitly, brilliantly contrasted with a conquering warrior in the paraphrase of Julius Caesar’s “Veni, vidi, vici” in the fnal line. African American folk forms and vernacular language appear in Lucy Ariel Williams’s “Northboun,” Bennett’s “Song,” and Elma Ehrlich Levinger’s “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” And open form abounds, as in Spencer’s brilliantly plain-spoken “Letter to My Sister,” the alliteration of which (in line two) produces the lingual movement she describes; in Helene Johnson’s lush, Christianity-challenging “Magalu”; and again in Spencer’s “At the Carnival,” a celebration of imagination, spirit, and form in the midst of a 281 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.021

Steven Tracy

mundane mechanical world, in (and out of) the tradition of Poe’s “Sonnet – To Science.” The well-known male writers of the period refected a similar variety and diversity of form and subject matter. Cullen, the darling of the middle-class strivers of the time, frequently revealed his inspiration in Romantic poets such as Keats but also refected on the “Colored Blues Singer” and strayed from Keats’s Grecian urn to the knowing mother-wit of “Uncle Jim.” McKay’s well-known sonnets “Baptism” – with its formal entry to and exit from the furnace and its hissing alliteration – and “The White House” also make use of traditional and altered sonnet forms and stray from the love conventions of early sonneteering to a raging love-hate that quite modifes the tradition, as does McKay’s “On a Primitive Canoe,” which praises the evocative nature of a beautiful vessel that, though now encountered in an urban and commodifed setting, once afforded agency, rather than enslavement, to its makers in their native rural setting. Cullen’s “Tableau” complicates what seems to be a poem about race with homosexual overtones and thus swipes at two taboos with one blow, as does “To a Brown Boy,” dedicated by a gay Cullen to a gay or bi-sexual Hughes, advising Hughes never to resist sexual attraction for superfcial reasons – advice also offered in the Cullen-Hughes-Locke queer triangle. In the justly famous “Incident,” childhood racism pokes out its “old” and ugly institutional tongue in a deceptively sing-song-y ballad stanza, delivering a stunning single blow in the caesura-slowed line eight, and then skipping off to its ending as the repetition of “that” makes the single moment replay with haunting repetition. Cullen’s take on race and class in the ballad quatrain “For a Lady I Know” is a marvel of ironic diction and feminine rhyme begun in medias res, with the epic foreground reverberating back of the mere thirty syllables of the poem. On the other hand, Sterling Brown mastered southern folk forms and language, brilliantly re-working the blues ballad “Frankie and Johnny” into a southern color-line tragedy; he praises blues singer Ma Rainey in deft, realistic detail, adopting stanzas and voice from the blues; and he captures the “Strange Legacies” of John Henry, Jack Johnson, and an old couple, all persevering with strength, style, and grace to the rhythm of the “John Henry” ballad. The vigorous folk trickster of the “Slim” poems and the peacockish strutting folk rhythms of “Sporting Beasley” and “Puttin’ on Dog” chart different stylistic strategies in energetic fashion. Further, Brown combines folk materials and blank verse worthy of Robert Frost in his affecting “Virginia Portrait,” and defnes sheer craft and grace in the mighty blank verse paean “Coolwell Vignette.” The tour de force “Cabaret” juxtaposes jazz bands, showgirls, Tin Pan Alley, Bessie Smith blues, and white elite condescension with a 1927 food to parallel South and North and expose engineered white illusions. 282 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.021

The New Negro Renaissance

More problematic is the poetry of Toomer, whose work seemed attuned to the modernist elements of Greenwich Village writers, though it shifted through phases described by Robert Jones as the Aesthetic (1919–1921), Ancestral Consciousness (1921–1923), Objective Consciousness (1924–1939), and Religious (1940–1955) periods, in a restless search for modes of expression equal to his conceptions of race, consciousness, and humanity.4 Toomer’s ambivalence about race, and his embrace of a so-called blue man who was American and not racial, caused him ultimately to reject identifcation as a Negro author and promulgate his racial ideas in Essentials (1931) and in the Whitmanian, and perhaps Hart Crane-ian, epic poem The Blue Meridian (1936). Though Toomer was an early icon of New Negro work, he quickly became a fgure of some ambivalence. Renaissance scholars are most interested in the frst two periods, particularly the Ancestral Consciousness period, during which Toomer produced his blended-genre masterpiece, Cane (1923). In this period, he combined mysticism with the infuence of imagist (“Face”), symbolist (the burning irony of “Her Lips Are Copper Wire”), impressionist (“Fern”), and expressionist (“Esther” and Rhobert”) experimentation to produce perhaps the greatest work of the Renaissance. Toomer combines poetry, prose poems, fction, and drama in a unique, barrier-breaking portrait of the sweet-suffering legacy of black culture on the cusp of urban sprawling, characterized in “Song of the Son” as “Caroling softly souls of slavery.”5 Cane fts comfortably alongside Eliot’s The Waste Land, Hemingway’s In Our Time, and Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, shoring thematic and stylistic fragments against social ruin. Notwithstanding hints of unity, wholeness, and eternity suggested by the curved symbols preceding each section of the book, Toomer’s a-chronological and multi-geographical journey suggests both cyclical and chronological development, bringing the book to both end and beginning, like Whitman before him, in one colossal artistic birth pang that demonstrates how poetry, prose, and drama are all the stuff that dreams, and nightmares, are made on. A remarkable early peak of the Renaissance, Cane unfortunately marked the high point of Toomer’s career, his major contribution to the Renaissance, and a distinctive blend of Euro- and Afro-American creative traditions unlike anything else. Though some have judged the New Negro Renaissance a failure, it should only be seen as such with regard to its excessive optimism and ambition. To expect literature to overcome the juggernaut of institutional racism minimizes the dilemma of “[denying] / The gods their god-like fun,” as Spencer puts it in “Letter to My Sister” (SD 258). The Renaissance channeled the accumulated sociopolitical and aesthetic issues of previous generations through the alembic of a new spirit that tapped into the modern historical moment. Insofar as its proponents were convinced that exposing 283 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.021

Steven Tracy

race, sex, and gender inequities through a strongly rooted and probingly beautiful African American art would usher in a truly democratic society, the “movement” was doomed to failure in its most prominent decade (the 1920s), eclipsed in a decade of Depression (the 1930s) during which Leftist arguments often took center stage (anticipated by some Renaissance writers, as in Hughes’s 1925 “Rising Waters” and “America”), and minimized in decades (1940s–1950s) when post-war optimism and civil rights advances bred a fervor and focus that lived altogether in the moment. But the Renaissance was never gone: the lessons it taught about African and African American heritage, the aesthetic infuences of vernacular materials (spirituals, ragtime, blues, and jazz), the urban adaptations it developed out of the great migration, and the organizational and publishing connections it provided continued to resonate in all of the urban outlets where it had fourished. Artists associated with that era lived into the thirties (Dunbar Nelson, James Weldon Johnson), forties (Cullen, Garvey, McKay), ffties (Cowdery, Grimké, Fenton Johnson, Locke), sixties (Braithwaite, DuBois, Fauset, Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Toomer), seventies (Bontemps, Spencer), eighties (Bennett, Brown), and nineties (Helene Johnson), some continuing to write prolifcally. By the late 1950s–1960s, the time was ripe for a rediscovery of the era. Republication of The New Negro with an introduction by poet Robert Hayden, republication of Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry, poet Michael Harper’s championing of the work of Sterling Brown, Arna Bontemps’s own American Negro Literature and The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, and the Arno Press New  York Times reprints of historical and cultural texts all testify to the fact that later generations were listening and learning. If the goals of the Renaissance have not yet been achieved, its poetry will not allow us to forget them. Nor has it allowed the gap between so-called high and low culture to go unchallenged, nor allowed America to ignore its African American heritage. Perhaps we just don’t realize how much the Renaissance has contributed. Think: when Hughes placed himself in the tradition of Whitman and Sandburg in his poem “I, Too,” he recognized that singing America was being America, that art is an irrevocable refection of place and spirit. The New Negro Renaissance was an American Renaissance. N OT E S 1 Locke, ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925; rpt., with an introduction by Arnold Rampersad, New  York:  Touchstone, 1999):  3.  Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 284 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.021

The New Negro Renaissance 2 Garvey, though himself a mediocre poet, recognized the importance of poetry, even as he disliked McKay, DuBois, J. W. Johnson, and others. 3 Maureen Honey, ed., Shadowed Dreams:  Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, revised and expanded edition (New Brunswick:  Rutgers University Press, 2006): 128. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as SD. 4 See Jones, Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought: A Phenomenology of the Spirit (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993). 5 Toomer, Cane (rpt., with afterwords by Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., New York: W. W. Norton, 2011): 12. F U RT H E R R E A DI N G Amos, Shawn, compiler, Rhapsodies in Black: Music and Words from the Harlem Renaissance (Los Angeles: Rhino Records, 2000). Bontemps, Arna, The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (New  York:  Dodd Mead, 1972). Hemenway, Robert, Zora Neale Hurston (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977). Hull, Gloria T., Color, Sex, and Poetry (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1987). Hutchinson, George, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Rampersad, Arnold, The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume 1:  1902–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Schwartz, A. B. Christa, Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University, 2003). Tidwell, John Edgar and Steven C. Tracy, eds., After Winter:  The Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Tracy, Steven C., Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015). Langston Hughes and the Blues (Champaign-Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 1988). Watson, Steven, The Harlem Renaissance:  Hub of African American Culture, 1920–1930 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995). Wintz, Cary and Paul Finkelman, eds., Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 2004).

285 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.021

21 H E N RY   AT M OR E

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes is fortunate in the possession of one of the great literary biographies of recent times: Arnold Rampersad’s volumes, I, Too, Sing America (1986) and I Dream a World (1988).1 Rampersad rescued Hughes from the falling-off his reputation had suffered in his desuetude and in the years immediately following his death. Hughes’s militancy did not sit comfortably with the militancy of LeRoi Jones and Huey Newton, but with memories of those radicalisms fading, Hughes’s vision of mid-twentieth-century African-American community can now be regarded as defnitive. The blurbs on his books – of which there were many, with many still in print – announce things like “Langston Hughes is one of modern literature’s most revered African-American authors”; “Langston Hughes is revealing here that mysterious quality in writing that we call genius”; “Langston Hughes is a titanic fgure in 20th-Century American literature.” Well, with Rampersad in hand, it can be agreed that the laurels could not be awarded to a nicer guy, although Hughes himself would note the predictable irony of them coming too late to boost his bank balance. Nonetheless, I  want to use this essay to test such claims to greatness because the grounds for their acceptance are not clear to me and will not be clear, I think, to many readers coming to Hughes for the frst time. Their effect is to impose a duty to appreciate Hughes, and nothing could be more inimical to the spirit in which he wrote. The abiding impression of Hughes’s biography is melancholy. Its causes are diffcult to pin down. Hughes was a man of parts, but for all the gifts his natal deities bestowed  – good looks; charm; languages; a talent for friendship (including the friendship of the very rich); astounding productivity; a Hemingway-esque thirst for adventure that landed him in Mexico City bullrings, West African shanty-ports, Jazz-era Paris, Madrid during its bombardment by General Franco, Moscow at the time of the great famine, and Uzbekistan for one of the frst of the Stalinist show trials  – he seems always thwarted in what he is trying to achieve and in the artistic opportunities available to him. An explanation Hughes himself on occasion 286 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.022

Langston Hughes

proffered  – although it is clearly not the whole story  – is that this was because he was an African-American born at a time (1902) when it was unpropitious to be born an African-American. The great evil confronting earlier generations of activists had been defeated, but the scale of the challenges ahead and the cunning of the enemy (in reversing the terms of his defeat) were beginning to strike home. “One little moment / To dance with glee / Then sadness again,” Hughes wrote in a poem published in the organ of black American cultural reconstruction, Crisis, in 1932.2 Even outside of the febrile milieu of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes belonged to a moment when the possibility of activism, still more of heroism, rested on unstable foundations. The tonal variety of his early (and best) poetry in the 1920s, from gutter-blues to the almost Swinburnean cadences of “The Last Feast of Belshazzar” (Collected Poems 33), does betray – in the kind of ideological reading Hughes cannot help but invite – something of this ambivalence. Most everyone is enigmatic if we stop to think about it, and if they leave suffcient printed record of their thoughts and doings the posthumous judgment comes, as it were, pre-packaged, that the enigma was all. Hughes makes the critical task easy in this regard. He was a leading light in and diligent publicist of the Harlem Renaissance who later mocked the gamine quality of that movement’s bohemianism and deplored the way it was hijacked by wealthy white thrill-seekers. He was, by all accounts, a funny, genial, generous man, but his life was punctuated by fallings-out with fast friends: Countee Cullen, Charlotte Mason, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison. Not all of these were Hughes’s fault – even Hurston’s biographer admits that she was mostly to blame for the severance of their relations in 1931 – but there does seem to have been something about Hughes that people who knew him well learned to distrust.3 His sexuality has been the subject of much speculation: if he was homosexual, and wanted to hide it, he did an exceptionally thorough job; if he was asexual, as Rampersad argues, he spent an awful lot of time in brothels and in the company of good-time girls. He is perhaps a better, and certainly a more consistent, writer of prose than poetry. Not Without Laughter (his frst and only novel, 1930), The Ways of White Folks (1934), The Big Sea (1940), I Wonder as I Wander (1956), The Best of Simple (1961): these are the core of a considerable achievement. But it is for his poetry that he is and was best known. This raises a puzzle, because the mean quality of his poetic output is not high; we return to the poems, even the bad ones, I think, because it is here that the enigmas of his character fnd most compelling expression. Hughes, as noted above, wrote his best poetry while young. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” composed on a train in July 1920, with the poet just out of high school, is still probably the most anthologized of his poems. It is 287 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.022

Henry Atmore

a remarkable performance for an eighteen-year-old, but its portentousness makes it about as unrepresentative of its author as a poem can get: I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the    fow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. (CP 23)

Poetry written in Cleveland some years earlier, when Hughes was in his mid-teens, in many ways strikes more authentic “Hughesian” notes: the artlessness of African-American idiom (“Just because I loves you – / That’s de reason why / My soul is full of color / Like de wings of a butterfy”); the stresses of working-class subsistence (“The mills . . . / That grind out steel / And grind away the lives / Of men”); the smiling-through-clenched-teeth gaiety-of-the-oppressed (“I know a lover of all the living / Sings then”).4 So in one light, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” looks like the attempt, by a young writer growing conscious of his powers, to write a poem in the modality of “serious” literature: the route taken by the other highly gifted African-American poet of Hughes’s generation, Countee Cullen. But Hughes was to reject, with an acerbity that caused a permanent breach with Cullen, the idea that the poet’s duty is to “develop” along lines prescribed by mainstream literary culture. The style and in some ways the substance of the juvenilia, not the precocity of “Rivers,” were to be the templates for most of Hughes’s later poetry. The Cleveland poems stand comparison with much that he wrote in the 1930s – indeed, in that company they look rather better than average. Hughes’s refusal of development was principled – because in his view, to develop in the way Cullen developed was to become safe and “white” – but it did come at a cost. In another light, though, “Rivers” deserves its place at the head of the Hughes canon (and, it would seem, in Hughes’s own affections). As Hughes tells the story of the poem’s origins in The Big Sea, his train had just crossed the Mississippi at St Louis; it was bearing him south, into Dixie and the Jim Crow humiliations he feared he would suffer there, but thence to Mexico, which would always shine for Hughes as a beacon of (comparative) racial tolerance and where he knew his father had prospered; inspired by this conjunction of personal circumstance and the complex historical geography of North American black experience, “the thought came to me: ‘I’ve known rivers,’ ” and the poem rose within him entire: No doubt I changed a few words the next day, or maybe crossed out a line or two. But there are seldom any changes in my poems, once they’re down. Generally, the frst two or three lines come to me from something I’m thinking about, or looking at, or doing, and the rest of the poem . . . fows from these 288 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.022

Langston Hughes frst few lines, usually right away. If there is a chance to put the poem down then, I write it down. If not, I try to remember it until I get to a pencil and paper; for poems are like rainbows: they escape you quickly.5

Writing poetry, for Hughes, was the capturing of a mood, a situation, a moment, more than it was the practice of a craft. Arna Bontemps, who knew him better than most, wrote that he “practised the craft of the short story no more than he . . . practised the forms of poetry”:  I  dissent from the frst because I feel that Hughes worked on his prose harder – or that it came to him ready-polished (try to fnd a misstep in The Big Sea) – but the general point stands.6 Craft is what the upper-middle-class Carraways do in his 1933 short story “Slave on the Block,” an unengaged and humanly stunted endeavour that Hughes always associated with “whiteness” at its most blinkered.7 The black poet, by contrast, must feed on and make use of the merest scraps of experience. In part this was because the continuing history of racial injustice in America meant that scraps were all members of the African-American community ever got, an ignominy of circumstance and opportunity that Hughes connected repeatedly to a sense of incompletion, of yearned-for wholeness, in even the liveliest of souls. More positively, the radical fragmentation of black urban experience – the deep communion of Christian revival; the careless, sinful, jazzy joys of liquored-up Saturday nights; the energy-sapping desperation of the daily grind – was grist to an aesthetic mill that white poets of the city and its folkways could only hope to emulate. This comes out in the poetry of destruction and steadfastness Hughes wrote in Spain in 1937 (“Air Raid: Barcelona”), and especially in Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), the be-bop inspired volume that, as Hughes put it, was “marked by conficting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms” in an effort to describe the “disc-tortions” of “a community in transition” (CP 387). In a more minor but to my mind more successful key, the poignancy of the Saturday-night moment, its relation to both personal and race history, its dialectic of wholeness, is the subject of a 1927 poem that drew censure8 from black conservatives, “Red Silk Stockings.” Here, Hughes exhorts a good-time girl to dress fne and let white boys look at her legs, knowing both the desirability and shame of the inevitable outcome: “An’ tomorrow’s chile’ll / Be a high yaller” (CP 123). However tawdry the decisions the poem presents may be, the glamour of the moment is real, a counter-spell to the boredom, compromise, and equivocation of life on the white majority’s terms. It is Harriet, the younger, prettier aunt in Not Without Laughter – she works in a cathouse; she turns bad – who both can insist on the hero’s education (where his mother is 289 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.022

Henry Atmore

content for him to be a bellhop) and has the wherewithal to enable it.9 And even when the glamour fails, as it nearly always does (in the poem following “Red Silk Stockings” in Fine Clothes for the Jew, a young girl upset by a visit to an aging relative in the poorhouse vows “I’d rather be dead than / To be ugly and old” [“Young Gal’s Blues,” CP  123]), the transitory pleasures of the fesh and their unbridled indulgence are always real currency for Hughes. Life for a woman like this does not amount to anything more than the sum of its moments, and Hughes both sympathizes with and – with reservations – celebrates the mentality. But the tension between respectability and sin is not clear-cut: Hughes’s sympathy is with the girl, but not his whole sympathy. For one thing, he admired the example of Booker T.  Washington suffciently not to dismiss honesty and rectitude as the paths to racial advancement. In middle age he would come to regret his earlier fascination with low-life, as reproducing negative stereotypes of African-American character.10 Also, the wages of sin were highest, of course, when the enticement was aimed at “de white boys.” This was another diminishment of wholeness, the only wholeness, Hughes sometimes believed African-Americans could lay claim to: that of not being white. Something of the intangible melancholy that seems to have enveloped Hughes has been attributed to the fact that he was himself a “yaller” (although not a high one), possessing as he did a prominent white abolitionist as a grandfather. (It should be noted, however, that Hughes’s mother was not born out of wedlock.) Much of his most powerful work – the poem “Mulatto,” the play of the same name, the short story “Father and Son” – deals with the wrenching dislocation, to everyone involved, that came of racial mixing in conditions of manifest racial inequality. The way that, within post-bellum black communities, gradations of skin tone mapped onto social and aesthetic distinctions that mirrored the evaluative rubrics of the antebellum slave economy, infuriated Hughes, as it infuriated other African-American writers. Tomorrow’s child being a “high yaller” might well represent a step up for the girl, and she could not be condemned for thinking so. It is a step, however, in the wrong direction. The history-haunted implications of the choice are brought into relief by Hughes’s imagining of the opposite, in “Mellow,” one of the best poems from Montage: the attraction of white women for “black celebrities.” Again, the thrill is real but the danger is deeper, and it is to the latter – as we shall see shortly – that Hughes felt it more urgent to alert African-American audiences. *** The discussion so far has skirted around a central issue. Hughes eschewed “development” for authenticity; Hughes fashioned, via his 290 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.022

Langston Hughes

“back-of-the-envelope” working methods, a tool for the articulation of black experience, grounded equally in a history of racial suffering and his milieu’s embrace of moments of pleasure, and refective of the fragmentation these opposed forces produced. These are true statements, inasmuch as such statements are ever true. But they are only a part of the story of Hughes’s poetry  – the part that comes into focus through application of the principle of charity. For the fact of the matter is that too many of the poems Hughes wrote are simply not very good. In candid moods he could admit to the problem, attributing it to over-production – and attributing the over-production to a perennial shortage of money. We can admire Hughes’s determination to be the frst African-American writer to live solely by his pen, and tolerate the shrifts to which this sometimes brought him. And all poets’ oeuvres are uneven. But in Hughes the unevenness is extreme, and a balanced assessment of his signifcance must accommodate this. Two qualifcations must be made. The poetry is often not good to read – but it might be good consumed in other fashions; we will return to this later. And the quality of Hughes’s output varied widely over the course of his career. The best poems, as noted above, are from the 1920s, in The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), his most impressive book, albeit one whose title he came to regret. The smaller body of verse he wrote in the mid-1960s is also of a high standard, although it is tired: there is little of the blazoned festivity of his pomp, and what feels a more genuine and considered estrangement, but we do sometimes miss the blazoning. “Special Bulletin” encapsulates in short, deft lines, the blend of absurdity and terror in the antics of the Ku Klux Klan (“For the dead become alive, / Play hillbilly dirges / That hooded serpents may die” [CP 556]); “Dinner Guest: Me” is a wry refection on the politics of literary fame (“I know I am / The Negro Problem / Being wined and dined” [CP  547]) and the diffculty of maintaining integrity when one is hungry and the “lobster is delicious”; “Small Memory” is an aging man grasping, quite beautifully, at the ineffability of frustration and loss. The 1930s are a low point, a time when Hughes’s political radicalism led him to write a great deal of what he admitted to be “propaganda.”11 The most infamous of these poems are “Goodbye Christ,” written during his sojourn in the USSR in 1932–1933 (“Beat it on away from here now / Make way for a new guy with no religion at all . . . / Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME  – ” [CP  166]), and the self-explanatory “One More ‘S’ in the U.S.A.” (CP 176–178). The war years also saw a rash of poems praising the Soviet Union, exhorting the peoples of the third world to overthrow their imperial masters, and heaping scorn on the perfdious polity of England (whose people nastily combed their hair before eating dinner). Such 291 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.022

Henry Atmore

forthright statements of political principle landed Hughes in trouble with HUAC in the 1950s: he discerned, with good reason, more than a touch of thuggery in the open contempt with which the McCarthyites regarded him. His subsequent omission of the offending poems from the Selected Poems he compiled in 1959 is generally taken as a measure of the trauma of this experience. He had, though, good artistic reasons not to want them reread. “Fascist foes surround you with their ring of steel, / But your warriors crush them with a workman’s heel” (from “Salute to the Soviet Armies,” [CP 300]); “Then out of the West the wreckers came  – / Luftwaffe! Panzers! Storm Troopers! / Men with guns and an evil name: Nazis!” (“Stalingrad: 1942” [CP 286]): even allowing for the perils of the mid-twentieth-century world situation, this is wretched stuff. The 1950s themselves were bookended by the be-bop collection Montage of a Dream Deferred and the formally original Ask Your Mama (1961). The passion that in the 1930s had driven him toward revolutionary socialism was sublimated, in this period, into a quest for a modernist idiom that could express the frustration of living in an America where, after two world wars, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, atomic bombs, color TV, better living through chemistry, and so on, segregation was still enforced in the southern states, African-Americans still systematically denied their voting rights, black workers still excluded from higher-paying jobs, house rents still increased whenever black tenants came into view. These volumes have their admirers, but however much one applauds their aims, it must also be admitted that they mostly miss the mark. It would be foolish to deny that Hughes’s power as a poet sprang from the intensity of his political commitments, but it is too often the case that the explication of the political moment Hughes was addressing is more interesting than the poetry itself.12 The challenge of deriving pleasure or instruction from reading Hughes in this vein is best illustrated by Ask Your Mama. This long, diffcult work, printed entirely in UPPERCASE, is unabashed in its hectoring of the reader, the poet evidently convinced that in dangerous times – Hughes wrote it at the point when opposition to the Civil Rights movement began to ratchet up its violence – a soft, courteous, conciliatory, lyric voice was not the thing needful. No concessions should be made to the unrighteous, that is, to people unversed in the intricacies of African-American history, unacquainted with the cream of New York black society – or, worst of all, unresponsive to jazz. It is diffcult, now, to escape the feeling that this poem has been written at a party to which one was not invited. Hughes knows that this is how some readers will respond. He teases them with the “Liner Notes: For the Poetically Unhep” at the end of the book, which in the manner of such texts in the 1950s and 1960s, further mystify the contents rather than elucidate 292 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.022

Langston Hughes

them; he makes the poetry as rebarbative as possible, so as to discourage the hope, for those who do not already understand it, of ever becoming “hep” to its meaning. We can surmise the insult is calculated because Ask Your Mama is structured around insult (what the reader is principally asked to inquire of his mother is the history of her sex life). This works at a number of different levels (for example, the white suburbanite who rings his new Negro neighbour’s doorbell “TO ASK ME / COULD I RECOMMEND A MAID / I SAID, YES, YOUR MAMA” [CP 501]), but the most consistent and consternating is the repeated undercutting of what might reasonably be expected of the poetry as poetry. Rare moments of lyric beauty, evoking emblematic historical experiences of courage and endurance (“SO THE WHITENESS AND THE WATER / MELT TO WATER ONCE AGAIN”), are followed closely by lines such as “BONGO-BONGO! CONGO!” (CP 490). One supposes, exhaustedly, that this can be explained, perhaps even justifed. We could read it, for example, as ironic commentary on the vogue for the “primitive” that had played an ambiguous role in the cultus of the Harlem Renaissance and that had contributed to Hughes’s painful and irrevocable separation from arguably the only woman he truly loved, Charlotte Mason. Some of Hughes’s earliest poetry (“Danse Africaine,” “Poem (1)”), inspired by his travels around West Africa in the early 1920s, is itself caught up in the seductions of “primitive” rhythm: this was a tradition in which he was implicated but also sometimes scornful. We must wonder, though, whether it is appropriate to lend such mede of dignity to lines that are so brazen in their refusal to be dignifed. “[A]ll the human world is vast and strange,” Hughes had written as early as 1932, “And quite beyond his Ph.D.’s small range” (“Ph.D.,” CP 162). What looks like pure nonsense “written down” is the eruption of forms of speech actively resistant to appropriation by scholarship, however sympathetic the scholar to the cause: “Oop-pop-a-da! . . . Salt peanuts! De-dop!” (“Children’s Rhymes,” CP 390). This is a secret language, as hermetic in its way as the Grail-lore in The Waste Land, only requiring a very different kind of training to decipher. “It all sounds like pure nonsense syllables to me,” says Hughes’s prissy alter ego to Jess B.  Semple, that ‘womens’-troubled repository of untaught Harlem wisdom – the nonsense being be-bop, with its deliberate tangling of the lines of melody and conventional lyric sense, and also much of the poetry Hughes himself was writing at this time. (No one could fairly accuse Hughes of lacking wiliness.) “Nonsense, nothing!” Semple replies. Bop! Be-bop! Mop! in their various enunciations are, he argues, the percussive effects of police clubs landing on the heads of unarmed negroes. The reason why “white folks don’t dig Bop” is “White folks do not get their heads beat just for being white.”13 293 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.022

Henry Atmore

A problem here is that the frst of these statements just wasn’t true, as James Baldwin noted in his 1959 New  York Times review of Hughes’s Selected Poems. A  diffculty black musical and literary idioms shared was the unstinting labour the “white world” devoted to mastering their “vocabulary,” so that they “had to become more and more complex in order to continue to express any of the private or collective experience.” The music could turn inwards, although the gains in the teeth of respectability (and, by 1959, recording technology, and the burgeoning of a mass market for African-American music, albeit not commonly performed by African-Americans) were perforce feeting. Literature could not: the impersonality of the medium did not really allow for its restriction to the initiated. (Hence the odd feel of Ask Your Mama: poetry to be shouted loudly in a small room.) Hughes’s quandary – which was also in some ways Baldwin’s own, as the ambivalence of the following passage suggests – was that the act of translating the musical into the literary idiom presupposed an ideal of communicability beyond the racially delimited sites of musical production. Either, as an African-American poet of jazz and the blues, you wrote good poetry, poetry for readers in general to enjoy, and in so doing betrayed the essential privacy of your sources. Or your poetry was simply bad, firting with the unarticulated emotions of a people oppressed, but emptying them out in the logic of representation: Hughes knows the bitter truth behind these hieroglyphics:  what they are designed to protect, what they are designed to convey. But he has not forced them into the realm of art where their meaning would become clear and overwhelming. “Hey, pop! / Re-bop! / Mop!” conveys much more on Lenox Avenue than it does in this book, which is not the way it ought to be.14

*** With hindsight we can see that the circumscription Hughes seems to have desired for Montage of a Dream Deferred and Ask Your Mama is not only defned by racial identity. Understanding of the material would be the refex of a particular mode of being “hep,” which was something one either was or wasn’t, and if one wasn’t, had no chance of becoming. Nothing is sadder than the retrospective spectacle of invidiousness in those who are now food for worms: Hughes surely was aware of this. For the truth is that the hep necessary to even the pose of engagement with a book like Ask Your Mama is now to be kenned only in the archives, in the bound volumes of jazz weeklies, in box-set classic remasterings: as dusty as the learning you have to put into appreciating Eliot and Pound. So there is a pull of poignancy beneath the brassy, off-putting music of Hughes’s poetry in the 1950s. It appears to make no concession at all to posterity, and posterity mattered to Hughes: its 294 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.022

Langston Hughes

shape, and the violence that would attend its forming, are the subject of a great deal of his poetry (“Freedom’s Plow,” “Prelude to Our Age,” “In Explanation of Our Times”). He would not willingly or wilfully have written himself out of it. But something in his poetic practice made this diffcult to avoid. We should not, therefore, take the “Mops! De-dops! Bops!” and “BONGO! BONGO! CONGOS” as tangential to Hughes and just focus on the pleasures vouchsafed by his lyric gifts. Paradoxically, he is at his most distant when he is shouting loudest and when the pressures of his message fatten its sound to near-nonsense: we cannot know Hughes without thinking about that distance and the elusiveness that led him to create it. Hughes was one of those people, Rampersad’s biography attests, where the physical presence of the man conduced to positive evaluations of his importance. Hughes realized this early on. His account of the genesis of his frst reading tour stresses its contingency, but thenceforth he thought of his poetry as handmaiden to his performances, not the other way round. In the 1930s, they were his principle means of making money, and, revolutionary socialism or no revolutionary socialism, Hughes liked money. Performance was also the route – Hughes believed, for an African-American writer denied access to Hollywood and commercial radio, the only one available  – to becoming a genuinely demotic poet, to touch a constituency that poetry, by dint of the social and educational disadvantages African-Americans suffered under, otherwise never would touch. On his incendiary tour of the southern states in 1931, Hughes would speak in halls containing hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people. These were spaces he could command: outside, in refectories, hotels, diners, restrooms, parking lots, railway carriages etc., he was confronted with strict curtailments of freedom and made occasionally, humiliatingly aware that his duties, as a Negro, were silence, passivity, and obedience. In those fraught, heady circumstances the African-American community’s embattlement created a ritual threshold past which the initiates to the poetry had to step. The urgency that is one of the few things clearly communicated in Ask Your Mama, of sealing-off space in which Hughes could practice his art, had its origins in these experiences. Hughes would begin, he tells us, by giving a brief biographical account of himself and then, to “show how my poetry has changed over the years,” recite one of the poems of his mid-teens: “I bought a new hat, / Sho’ is fne, / But I wish I had back that / Old gal o’ mine.”15 This raises once more the puzzle of Hughes’s “development,” or lack thereof, because it doesn’t seem much different from the lesser poems in The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew. The difference Hughes would fag, to laughter, was the innocence of his ffteen-year-old self’s self-pity: an innocence guaranteed, Hughes implies, 295 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.022

Henry Atmore

by a basic lack of knowledge of the real sufferings of other people. The “I” of “I bought a new hat” is Hughes; the “I” of “Porter,” to which he would then come, is not: “I must say, / Yes, sir, / To you all the time.” Hughes said that he liked Fine Clothes to the Jew more than The Weary Blues because the frst was more “impersonal,” more alert to the rhythms of peoples’ lives and language.16 And it is true that Fine Clothes to the Jew is more coherent than any of his other books of poetry, as if, by giving up pieces of himself to a myriad of others – or absorbing all those fragments of overheard reportage and complaint – he became, as close as he ever got, whole. In performance, Hughes’s adoption of other voices, those of “women domestics, workers on the Florida roads, poor black students . . . the sharecroppers of Mississippi,” enabled him to draw in the “non-literary,” the large segment of the audience who Hughes well knew would be prone to boredom, inclined to scepticism, and maybe hostile to the presumptions of a northern college boy. By returning their voices to them, the aim was to inculcate – in people with their hands too full of their own troubles to pay much heed to such matters  – a specifcally political solidarity:  he would then proceed to one or more of his poems on Dixie’s current cause celebre, the Scottsboro Case (“Justice is a blind goddess. / To this we blacks are wise: / Her bandage hides two festering sores / That once perhaps were eyes”17). This is one of the things Baldwin meant when he wrote of Hughes’s concern for the “hieroglyphics” of the African-American condition: a deep insight into the reality of the sham institutions white America put on pedestals in conviction of the polity’s manifest virtue. One can imagine the frisson the Scottsboro poems must have generated; it is always fattering to be told that one is the bearer of secret knowledge, however unhappy the occasion. But, Hughes recalled, this was sometimes not enough; the audience would get restless, a little blasé in the intimacy he had fashioned for them. The inexplicable hostility of the white world, the injustices that could not be easily derided or understood, had to be allowed ingress – on Hughes’s terms, which he recognized would not be the terms of everybody he was addressing. Sensing complacency, he wrote, he would “pull out my ace in the hole, a poem called ‘Cross’ ”: It is a poem about miscegenation – a very provocative subject in the South. The frst line, intended to awaken all sleepers – I would read in a loud voice: My old man’s a white old man . . . And this would usually arouse any who dozed. Then I  would pause before continuing in a more subdued tone: My old mother’s black. Then in a low, sad, thoughtful tragic vein:     But if ever I cursed my white old man     I take my curses back. 296 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.022

Langston Hughes     If ever I cursed my black old mother     And wished she were in hell,     I’m sorry for that evil wish     And now I wish her well     My old man died in a fne big house.     My ma died in a shack.     I wonder where I’m gonna die,     Being neither white nor black. Here I would let my voice trail off into a lonely silence.

In the silence, if Hughes had done his job properly, would be pathos, pity – and the admixture of terror. He wanted his listeners to feel the implacability of the forces raging outside the magic circle; he wanted, as in “Red Silk Stockings” and the many other poems of the 1920s that dealt with the problem of “yallers,” them to feel the imprint of their history on their bodies and in their most intimate relations. The deservedly renowned “Dance” chapter in Not Without Laughter  – which is a fawed novel but contains enough fne things for us to regret that he never completed another one – treats the performance of blues/jazz as, initially, ecstatic communion (“Couples began to sway languidly, melting together like candy in the sun as hips rotated effortlessly to the music”), then as a calculated deflement (“Cruel, desolate, unadorned was their music now, like the body of a ravished woman on the sun-baked earth”), then as cosmic solitude (“their minds had gone off to the heart of loneliness”).18 Hughes in his performances aimed at the same rhythm of shared, but also incommunicable experience. Not Without Laughter ends with the loneliness; Hughes did not, and this is another enigma of his character, because although we might feel that his talents lay in that direction, he did not want to be a poet of fear. Audiences at that time and in those places may well have been paying Hughes to interpret their misery for them, but they were not paying him to make them miserable. So he would end with “I, too, sing America,” in other words with uplift, the Walt Whitman- and Booker T.  Washington-inspired uplift that infects some of his better poetry and mars a good deal of his worse. And so Hughes has become one of the great Americans, at table with the literary divinities. Another way of putting the challenge of his poems is that they require some separation of the greatness from the America, and Hughes, for all the fury his actual country could rouse in him, could never affrm disbelief in the ideal. He sang America like Whitman, and he sang America like Charlie Parker: like both his models he sang, sometimes beautifully, sometimes stridently, often willfully, sometimes incomprehensibly, to a native elect. If the separation of Hughes from his constituency can’t be done  – I suspect it can’t be done – he will not be anything more or less than the 297 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.022

Henry Atmore

parish-poet of Lenox Avenue. No shame there, but as Baldwin said, not the way it ought to be. N OT E S 1 Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes:  I, Too, Sing America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) and I Dream a World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 2 “The Black Clown,” in Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, eds., The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Vintage Classics, 1995): 151. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as CP. 3 Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston:  A  Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977): 136–148. 4 Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993): 28–29. 5 The Big Sea: 55–56. 6 Bontemps quoted in Modern Black Writers: A Library of Literary Criticism, ed. Michael Popkin (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978): 233. 7 Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks (New  York:  Vintage Classics, 1990): 19–31. 8 Rampersad, I, Too, Sing America: 141. 9 Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter (New York: Dover, 2008): 212–218. 10 “How to be a bad writer (in ten easy lessons),” The Langston Hughes Reader (New York: George Braziller, 1958): 491–492. 11 Langston Hughes, In Wonder as I  Wander (New  York:  Hill and Wang, 1993): 173. 12 See, for example, John Lowney, “Jazz, Black Transnationalism, and the Political Aesthetics of Langston Hughes’ ‘Ask Your Mama,’ ” American Literature 84.3 (September 2012): 583–587. 13 Langston Hughes, The Best of Simple (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990): 118. 14 In Edward J. Mullen, ed., Critical Essays on Langston Hughes (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986): 85–87. 15 The following account is drawn from I Wonder as I Wander: 57–60. 16 The Big Sea: 263. 17 In fact this poem is of earlier provenance (dating from 1923), but Hughes repackaged it as Scottsboro-related in a chapbook, Scottsboro Limited, published by the Golden Stair Press in 1932. 18 Not Without Laughter: 63–67. F U RT H E R R E A DI NG Hemenway, Robert E., Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977). Hughes, Langston, The Langston Hughes Reader (New York: George Braziller, 1958). Lowney, John, “Langston Hughes and the ‘Nonsense’ of Bebop,” American Literature 72.2 (June 2000): 357–385. Mullen, Edward J., ed., Critical Essays on Langston Hughes (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986). 298 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.022

Langston Hughes Rampersad, Arnold, The Life of Langston Hughes:  I, Too, Sing America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). The Life of Langston Hughes:  I  Dream a World (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1988). Schwarz, A. B. Christa, “Transgressive Sexuality and the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance,” in George Hutchinson ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 141–154. Smethurst, James, “Lyric Stars:  Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance: 112–125. Stephens, Michelle Ann, “The Harlem Renaissance: The New Negro at Home and Abroad,” in Gene Andrew Jarrett, ed., A Companion to African American Literature (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010): 212–226. Tracy, Stephen C., ed., A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2004).

299 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.022

22 S U SA N   M C CA B E

Elizabeth Bishop

“About suffering they were never wrong,” W. H. Auden’s memorable speaker says of the old masters. About suffering, Elizabeth Bishop knew a very fair portion, and it fueled her poems, which operate in multiple registers:  the literary, personal, philosophical, queer, ecological, and anti-colonial. Her writing engenders surprise, mystery (qualities Bishop saw as central to poetry), and admiration for her formal accomplishments. A little more than a decade after Bishop died in 1979, an outpouring of literary criticism sealed her reputation as among two or three of the most signifcant poets of her generation. In 1995, Thomas Travisano called the immense attention the poet was beginning to garner “the Elizabeth Bishop phenomenon.”1 Despite her Pulitzer Prize in 1956, she was, for at least a couple of decades, anthologized only through the same few poems. Bishop was the darling of other poets, such that Anne Stevenson’s short book was the only book on her work and life for some twenty years.2 The relative lack of scholarly interest derived chiefy from the diffculty in fully appreciating the unsettling quality of her poems and the inadequacy of literary categories: Bishop has been called a modernist, a formalist, a surrealist, a postmodernist, a feminist, and a confessional poet, yet these categories are incommensurate with her achievement. Her reputation as a major American poet was only consolidated in the mid-1990s.3 However, David Kalstone had earlier assessed Bishop’s signifcance and, moreover, “the autobiographical strength of her poems”: Bishop lets us know that every detail is a boundary, not a Blakean microcosm. Because of the limits they suggest, details vibrate with a meaning beyond mere physical presence. Landscapes meant to sound detached are really inner landscapes. They show an effort at reconstituting the world as if it were in danger of being continually lost.4

This imprinting of loss upon landscape, together with an assertion and dissolution of boundaries between self and other (whether person, country, 300 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.023

Elizabeth Bishop

landscape, object), inform most, if not all, of Bishop’s work. Kalstone made it possible to read Bishop differently, not exclusively through a modernist lens. As a modernist, she was too self-revealing; as a potentially confessional poet (a school of poetry Bishop outwardly disdained), she wasn’t revealing enough. Bishop was born on February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts. When she was eight months old, her father died from Bright’s disease. For the next fve years, her depressed and grieving mother, Gertrude Bulmer, originally from Great Village, Nova Scotia, was in and out of sanitariums. After her mother’s breakdown and institutionalization in 1916, Elizabeth never saw her again. She died in May 1934, the same year Elizabeth graduated from Vassar. Bishop lived in Great Village until she was six years old and then was uprooted by her paternal grandparents, who took her to live with them in Worcester, Massachusetts. There she suffered intense homesickness as well as numerous physical ailments  – asthma (which Bishop struggled with all her life), bronchitis, and eczema. Her Aunt Maud (her mother’s sister) offered a reprieve from Worcester, and her spirits and health apparently improved while she lived with Maud in Boston. As an adult, she was a closeted lesbian whose alcoholic bouts numbed her almost overpowering experience of isolation and loss, her persistent sense of being an outsider; she wrote nearly “perfect” poems that practiced a poetics of uncertainty and dislocation. In the autobiographical story “In the Village,” written over the course of two or three nights (under the infuence of gin and cortisone), Bishop memorialized her early rural life alongside the catastrophic nervous collapse of her mother. Signifcantly, Bishop wrote the story in 1952 when she was frst living with her lover Lota de Macedo Soares in Brazil. She had suffered an allergic reaction to a cashew fruit while traveling in South America and ended up falling in love while being nursed back to health by Lota. Bishop stayed in Brazil for nearly ffteen years, for the most part productive ones. In a letter to her doctor in New York, she wrote about her newfound ability to work more and drink less, attributing it to Lota’s “good sense and kindness”: she could not help but “still feel [she] must have died and gone to heaven without deserving to.”5 To adopt Henry Abelove’s phrase about Bishop and other gay poets of the 1950s, she was a “Queer Commuter.”6 Bishop resided in Brazil for an extensive period before returning to the United States to teach, frst at the University of Washington, and, later in the 1970s, at Harvard University. Living in Brazil allowed Bishop to tap into early memories. “In the Village” opens with her mother’s scream, which persisted and became emblematic of entire loss: “A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian 301 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.023

Susan McCabe

village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies, skies that travelers compare to those of Switzerland, too dark, too blue, so that they seem to keep on darkening a little more around the horizon – or is it around the rim of the eyes? – ”7 Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream,” with its palpable sonic embodiment, comes to mind. So does Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” in which the child narrator, overhearing her “foolish” aunt’s scream of pain in the dentist’s offce, vertiginously plummets, coming unmoored: How had I come to be here, like them, and overhear a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse but hadn’t?8

Inner and outer worlds bled into one another for Bishop. Her poems braid new losses with old ones, echoing and refning her experience of personal and philosophical disjointedness. She was born in Massachusetts and also died there (on October 6, 1979, of a cerebral aneurysm), but “dates and places conceal her existence as a chronically displaced person,” as biographer Brett C. Millier puts it.9 While Brazil became a “home,” a place to attain perspective and a modicum of security (inversely refective of her small home in Nova Scotia), Bishop travelled extensively, to Paris, Key West, Mexico, and such far-fung places as Bergen, Norway, and the Galapagos Islands. Her relationship with an overworked and exhausted Lota  – who had been in charge of planning a vast public park in Rio – deteriorated after fourteen years, and she sought love elsewhere. In an effort at reconciliation, Lota arrived in New York in 1967 and, tragically, died of an overdose of sleeping pills. Intentional or not, the suicide reanimated all of Bishop’s losses, triggering terrible guilt and self-incrimination. *** Bishop, often dubbed a poet’s poet, for whom reticence and restraint were of signal importance, began writing poetry while a student at Vassar. She then traveled with friends to France and, with the help of Marianne Moore, a poet-mentor, started to publish her poems, frst in the anthology Trial Balances. In this volume, Moore introduced her, praising her circumspection and noting her debts, through her syntactic and verbal inventions, to poets such as John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins. “Man-Moth,” a poem in her frst volume, North & South, was initially published in Bryher’s Life & Letters To-Day in 1936. It is the ultimate poem of the outsider, her half-human creature riding subways “always facing the wrong way” and tremendously fearful of the “third rail,” “a disease / he has inherited the 302 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.023

Elizabeth Bishop

susceptibility to” (CP 15). During World War II, Bishop perfected North & South, which was awarded the Houghton Miffin Poetry Prize in 1945 and published in 1946. Randall Jarrell wisely assessed this debut: “All her poems have written underneath, I have seen it.”10 North & South, like her subsequent books, broadly addresses topics of displacement and travel. Its poems were composed over the course of a decade, during which time she traveled with Louise Crane to Paris in 1936 and then to Florida to fsh, where she discovered Key West. She returned to France in 1937 where she was involved in a terrible car accident, memorialized obliquely in “Quai d’Orléans,” dedicated to her friend Margaret Miller who lost an arm. Bishop would try for years to write a poem from the point of view of the amputated arm, but fnally this poem registered an agonized muteness in the face of severe trauma: “We stand as still as stones to watch / the leaves and ripples” (CP 28). From 1938 to 1941, she lived in Key West; its dramatic thunderstorms form the backdrop for the unpublished love poem beginning “It is marvelous to wake up together” (written to Marjorie Carr Stevens). These various landscapes – Paris, Florida, Key West – are her initial geographic touchstones. The inability to settle down spurs the poet on in her seemingly doomed quests: “We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship, / although it meant the end of travel” (“The Imaginary Iceberg,” CP 4). “The Map” (written on New Year’s Eve 1934)  establishes mapping as emblematic of her poetic activity, valorizing the indeterminate and instable. The frst lines offer an interaction between perceiver and object that depends upon visual and verbal slippage, “shadows” that could be “shallows”:  “Land lies in water, it is shadowed green. / Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges” (CP 3). The questions that follow begin with Bishop’s preferred conjunction “or,” offering alternatives:  “Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under, / drawing it unperturbed around itself?” “The Map” obliquely animates the seemingly impersonal object with its “tugging” and lifting; likewise, the map enlivens the observer into a passionate engagement:  “We can stroke those lovely bays.” In the end, “The Map” provides a template of provisional substantiality and introduces what will become one of Bishop’s key vocal registers – the curious voice asking intransigent questions and whimsical queries: “Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?” The crucible of the Great Depression and, after it, World War II brought Bishop’s work to maturity. There are thirty poems in North & South, and only nine (albeit electrifying) poems in the volume considered her best, Geography III, published in 1974. Between North & South and Geography III, Bishop published a collection of poems each decade. She won the Pulitzer Prize for a combined edition titled Poems: North & South – A Cold Spring 303 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.023

Susan McCabe

(the latter was her second book) in 1956. Questions of Travel (1965), her third collection, is divided into poems about Brazil and poems from “elsewhere” – mostly from childhood, like the section’s well-known “Sestina,” which staged the poet’s compulsive reenactment of loss, and her animation of inanimate objects (“Birdlike, the almanac / hovers half open above the child . . . I know what I know, says the almanac. . . .”). Most of Bishop’s writing plays out the three qualities she admired most in other poets: “Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery,” and her three favorite poets were George Herbert, Hopkins, and Baudelaire, each contributing to her triad of poetic virtue, as she points out in an unpublished essay, “Writing poetry is an unnatural act.”11 It is “unnatural” because of the “great skill” it takes “to make it seem natural” (EAP 207), a point very indicative of the seamlessness she strove for – as well as of the way she revealed glimpses of the seams and the “unnatural” act of craft. All the poems in Geography III were originally published in The New  Yorker along with her translation of Octavio Paz’s “Objects & Apparitions.” She had played poker with Paz, and she also deeply admired the artist celebrated by Paz, Joseph Cornell. The most crucial lines in the poem are: “One has to commit a painting,” said Degas, “the way one commits a crime.” But you constructed boxes where things hurry away from their names. (CP 275)

Paz refers to Cornell’s box-art where the artist devised “[m]inimal, incoherent fragments: / the opposite of History, creator of ruins.” This translation, in fact, is a microcosm of the entire arc of Bishop’s career and a lens through which we can approach her poetic proclivities and reputation in the twenty-frst century. As an ars poetica, “Objects & Apparitions” aligns Bishop not only with Cornell – scavenger of New York scraps and objects, which he arranged to make new or “unnatural” constellations  – but also with Paz and Degas. The lines above echo Bishop’s own belief in the carefulness needed to “commit” a poem: much staking out of territory, going over details, and not missing a beat in the master plan, with the caveat that it was inevitable that signs of the “crime” were sure to surface. Her whimsical gender-bending “Gentleman of Shalott” (N & S) who, divided by a mirror, lives precariously in terror of the glass slipping, calls to mind the poet’s fear of slipping up in her poems, yet “the Gentleman” thrills with dangers: “The uncertainty / he says he / fnds exhilarating. He loves / that sense of constant re-adjustment” (CP 9–10). The poem ends with an emphasis on the fractured:  “He wishes to be quoted as saying at present:  / ‘Half is enough.’ ” The poem calls to mind Paz’s interpretation of Cornell’s deep sense of craft, 304 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.023

Elizabeth Bishop

always attended by an uneasiness about pinning objects down (“things hurry away from their names”), and brings to mind also the abiding notion that artists, especially after World War II, could not grasp “History” but rather only its “ruins” or “minimal, incoherent fragments.” By the end of her life, Bishop had become modestly famous, beloved by many and especially by a gay coterie that revolved around the poet James Merrill. Her tumultuous friendship with Robert Lowell, who once pledged his love, opened the canon to her work, which had initially escaped wide critical attention; “ ‘[m]ore delicate than the historians’ ” (“The Map”), hers was not the virile writing of Auden, Yeats, or even Lowell. Lowell admitted that Bishop had encouraged a way of writing that allowed him to let down his poetic armature for a more colloquial, personal style: thus his “Skunk Hour” directly responded to her “Armadillo.” Both poems are about animals who need defensive mechanisms but who illuminate the similarity of human and animal vulnerability. Still, Lowell’s poem went further in Life Studies (1956) towards what M. L. Rosenthal called “confessionalism,” the poet’s letting down the “mask.”12 “Skunk Hour,” with its “my mind’s not right,” and the poet, admittedly a voyeur, watching “love cars,” would not have found its way into a published Bishop poem. Instead, she employed the armature of persona, as in the long “Crusoe in England” (Geography III), which is a poignant, complex meditation on her own grief, on the problems of colonialism, and on the conundrum of being a lesbian poet in the mid-twentieth century. Unlike her peers, and bucking the current trend, Bishop quipped that she “wrote poems by not writing them.” Like most major poets, she wrote ahead of herself in a fresh way, paving a path to the future; she can be read for her postmodern approach to the self and the lyric. Her poems unseat the lyric “self,” making it contingent. “In the Waiting Room” is exemplary: the child speaker falls into “cold, blue-black space,” groping to the limit: “Why should I be my aunt, / or me, or anyone?” (Geography III, CP 161). Such self-estrangement riddles most of Bishop’s poems with a wry if understated tragic perspective. Isolated and grieving his losses, her persona Crusoe, a channel for her own obsessions, asks: “Now I live here [in England], another island, / that doesn’t seem like one, but who decides?” (Geography III, CP 166). These pivotal poems exemplify Bishop’s interrogative mode, which unhinges identities, objects, and landscapes; their constant pulse is uncertainty. Her poems are neither strictly closed nor open, neither cohesive nor utterly fragmented, but they nod to both interpretative possibilities, a fact to some degree clarifed with the publication, in 2006, of Alice Quinn’s Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments. (The hunger for more of Bishop’s writing led to the publication of her letters, and, 305 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.023

Susan McCabe

earlier, a collection of her watercolors emerged, underscoring her painterly qualities.13) Before Quinn’s edition appeared, scholars visited the Bishop archives at Vassar College to examine drafts of poems she thought unfnished, unft for the light of day; yet she saved these drafts, and in handing them over to her executrix, Alice Methfessel (lover and companion at the time of her death), she essentially consigned them to publication. Many of her unpublished works as well as drafts of fnished works (such as the seventeen drafts for “One Art”) serve, along with some of her more quickly written short stories, as glosses on the published poems. The unfnished works and drafts not only call into question what Bishop constituted as “the fnished” but are also revelatory for the practicing poet trying to understand process: typewriting, handwriting, and cross-outs are especially signifcant as we slip further into the digital age. Bishop was and is rightly acknowledged by many critics as a poet whose care and precision prohibited “offcial” publication of unfnished work. Still, Quinn’s volume allows contemporary readers to see more of what lies behind the tapestry, where the yarn knots or strands are purposely loose, the poet’s “raw” material as it emerged as “spontaneous” poetic introspection. It is true that Bishop’s poems were not “complete” when they were published at the time of her death; the short section of four “New Poems” suggests this as much as Bishop’s own aesthetics of incompletion. One need only consider a poem frst collected in A Cold Spring, “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” an improbable yet detailed description of a childhood book that jumps from “The Seven Wonders of the World” to other diverse scenes: “In Mexico, the dead man lay / in a blue arcade; the dead volcanoes / glistened like Easter lilies.” The “book” under scrutiny shows the “old Nativity,” but can’t culminate: “Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’ ” If parataxis equalizes, there persists longing and thwarted epiphany: “Why couldn’t we have seen / this old Nativity while we were at it?” John Ashbery admired Bishop, partly because of his own fondness for incompletion, as manifest in poems such as “As You Came from the Holy Land” (from his 1975 volume, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror), upon which she may have had some indirect infuence. Bishop reinforced the idea of the poet driven to perfect the poem and capture all the details, knowing that these details, the more precise they become, threaten to be less coherent. This paradox is borne out in the oblique self-portrait she draws in “Sandpiper” (collected frst in Questions of Travel): “His beak is focused; he is preoccupied, / looking for something, something, something. // Poor bird, he is obsessed!” (CP 131). Bishop sometimes complained of her twenty-twenty vision, the extraordinary acuity 306 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.023

Elizabeth Bishop

Jarrell noted (and that might account for her need to drink to excess). The sandpiper, a creature of “controlled panic,” enacts the duality of a world that has both “precision” and “mystery”; things can be both over-clarifed and vague: “The world is a mist. And then the world is / minute and vast and clear.” Bishop often presents, as in this poem, an obsessive-compulsive’s nightmare as well as fantasy: “The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray, / mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.” The sandpiper is a forerunner for her Crusoe who worries over islands stretching to “infnities,” leaving the explorer poet the task of cataloguing, endlessly, the fora and fauna of each, as if forever. Bishop spent ffteen years revising the long poem “The Moose” (Geography III), using a clothesline to pin up lines that she would constantly rearrange. Her poems thus operate between the poles of the objective world (objects and things she intently describes with hallucinatory precision) and the subjective arrangement of them, between an aim towards “perfection” and a haunting incoherence or fragmentation. In her fnished poems, this fragmentation emerges in a speaker’s hesitations, self-revisions, and a decisive cleaving to uncertainty. On a frst reading, Bishop’s gemlike villanelle “One Art” seems to imply that the singular aim of art is to “master” loss, and that art, bearing Robert Frost’s words in mind, should act as a “momentary stay against confusion.”14 However, the poem uniquely makes the formal requirements of the villanelle more fuid. In some sense, “One Art” is perfect by being “almost perfect”; the speaker’s insistent, even perky, denial that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master” crumbles in the envoi, unmasking the impossibility of mastering both art and loss. Exploiting the villanelle’s necessary dualities – in this case, implied by the rhyme of “master” with “disaster”  – “One Art” highlights the way words are lost only to be recovered, recovered only to be lost. Disaster wins, as with the careful disarray of her speaker’s fnal lines: Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident The art of losing’s not too hard to master Though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. (CP 178)

There are the parentheses (enclosing the most signifcant moments), the oddly archaic “shan’t have lied,” the small augmented revision of the “not” to “not too,” the stuttered reiteration of “like” surrounding the fnal parenthesis that enacts the forcing of admission through an injunction and exclamation point. Writing “it” is to write of language’s continual displacement, deferral, and non-fxity:  this condition “may look like” “like” “disaster” 307 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.023

Susan McCabe

because this poem enacts a disavowal and, in doing so, further inscribes “losing.” Notwithstanding the poem’s merits as an ars poetica, it is made more poignant in being, ultimately, about the inevitable loss of loved ones. Drafts show Bishop working frst in a mode akin to stream-of-consciousness that gradually flled in the blanks opened up by the villanelle’s architecture. What strikes a reader of both the published and unpublished work is how they speak to one another; it is not just the drafts of “One Art” that help us understand its bid for a universality of sorts but also the poem’s link to other unfnished pieces, such as “A Drunkard,” a draft poem that shows another side of Bishop, drawing details from a very specifc memory of witnessing a fre when she was three (“the beach was strewn with cinders, dark with ash”). She frst positions herself watching from her crib, seeing her “mother’s white dress” turn “rose-red,” and then skips to her presence amid the wreckage, calling out to her mother that she was thirsty (EAP 150–151). Although the draft was clearly on its way to being a fnished poem, Bishop’s motif of the mingling of memory and imagination is hardly confned to “A Drunkard”; the theme surfaces again and again in her fnished work. For instance, “Poem” meditates upon a “minor family relic,” her uncle’s humble “little painting” of a Nova Scotia landscape “cramped” on a “Bristol board” so that “life and the memory of it” are “so compressed / they’ve turned into each other” (CP 176–177). “Which is which?” she probes. The poem closes by speaking of the “yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese,” insisting upon temporal fux and the way memory is inevitably altered by imagination “A Drunkard” seeks an etiology for both Bishop’s closeted homosexuality and her drinking, pivoting from these three lines:  “I picked up a woman’s long black cotton / stocking. Curiosity. My mother said sharply / Put that down! I remember clearly, clearly –.” This leads to an incantatory denial: “But since that night, that day, that reprimand / I have suffered from abnormal thirst – / I swear it’s true –.” If the “I shan’t have lied” in “One Art” attempts to shore up the villanelle’s form as a talismanic protection from disaster and functions, in fact, as a visible lie of sorts, then by inversion “A Drunkard,” which ends “And all I’m telling you may be a lie . . .” is a covert admission that the draft, in its rawness, was telling the truth (EAP 150). Bishop relished all the shades of doubt. Whether or not the mother’s “reprimand” in “A Drunkard” is imaginary, the speaker has internalized the admonition  – which paradoxically inspired poetic “curiosity.” “A Drunkard” may not be fnished, but, reading it with “One Art,” we may see how it refracts Bishop’s characteristic themes. When we read unfnished poems, such as “A Drunkard,” alongside published ones, a tension surfaces between “poetry as an unnatural thing” and 308 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.023

Elizabeth Bishop

the seamlessly natural “feel” many of her poems give (a continuum ranging from the more ragged to the more polished). But plainly the two are related in Bishop’s effort to render the jagged fow of contemplation, with its interruptions and ongoing punctures, as both artifcial and natural. As was only ftting, Bishop was familiar with Morris W.  Croll’s 1943 essay “The Baroque Style in Prose”; he characterized the baroque as trying to capture “the motions of souls, not their states of rest,” and further affrmed that “an idea separated from the act of experiencing it is not the idea that was experienced.”15 In Croll’s view of baroque design, “symmetry is frst made and then broken . . . There is a constant swift adaptation of form to the emergencies that arise in an energetic and unpremeditated forward movement” (221). These notions inform all of Bishop’s poems, which attempt to recreate a spontaneous contact with crisis in thought and feeling. Bishop’s poems perform an exhilarating “re-adjustment” (“Gentleman of Shalott,” CP 9); hence her characteristic use of “or” to intimate that no conclusion is fnal, no vision absolute. Such an “or” appears in the center tercet of “One Art”: “I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or / next-tolast, of three loved houses went.” Enjambment occurs with the small word “or” (to rhyme with “master” and “disaster”), emphasizing fux:  there’s always another object, vessel, person to be lost while we look helplessly on; the poem can’t guard against this reality, only enact it. Further, perception, Bishop understood, was an unsteady negotiation between the seer and the seen. Thus the walk described in “The End of March” renders a speaker who, in spite of her acuity  – “the tide far out, the ocean shrunken” and a “rackety, icy, offshore wind” sets the stage  – knows that seeing is an unraveling that language can only try to accommodate: she fnds “A kite string? – But no kite.” Trying to “get as far as [her] proto-dream-house, / [her] crypto-dream-house,” her questions proliferate. The house is        shingled green, a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener (boiled with bicarbonate of soda?), protected from spring tides by a palisade of – are they railroad ties? (CP 179–180)

“The End of March” confesses: “(Many things about this place are dubious.)” Description is enlivened by emergency, as Croll might have it, yet rather than upon the “baroque,” Bishop draws upon the surreal to animate the inanimate (much as she does in “The Map”). Her surrealist exploration of altered states appears throughout North & South, including “Chemin de Fer,” “Love Lies Sleeping,” “Sleeping on the Ceiling,” and “Paris, 7 A.M,” 309 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.023

Susan McCabe

where she makes “a trip to each clock in the apartment” and looks down into the courtyard:  “It is like introspection / to stare inside, or retrospection” (CP 26). These poems, like many of her unfnished ones, often begin with her link to the unconscious, to dreams (see, for instance, “Dream –,” “Current Dreams,” “I had a bad dream . . .” EAP 37, 69, 74). “The Weed” opens, for example, with the lines, “I dreamed that dead, and meditating, / I lay upon a grave, or bed” (CP 20). “Cirque d’hiver” draws upon trance, the poet identifying with the “melancholy soul” of a “little circus horse,” a mechanical toy: “Facing each other rather desperately – / his eye is like a star – / we stare and say, ‘Well, we have come this far’ ” (CP 31). Bishop never explains the “desperation,” yet it circulates through this animist poem. As I noted above, her later “Sestina” (Questions of Travel) animates common objects – an almanac, a tea kettle, a child’s drawing, her grandmother’s tears – to express defected grief. The fact that she titles her poem after a form suggests the way Bishop saw formal poetics as a means, not to constrain emotion, but to underscore its ritualistic enactment. The poet, keen on the experience of perception itself, often stares (a recurrent Bishop word) at an object until it turns into a temporary “vision,” what she spoke of in a letter to Anne Stevenson: “glimpses of the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important.”16 Bishop’s “peripheral vision” remains limited, often suddenly foreclosed. Her early sestina, “A Miracle for Breakfast” (written in 1936, during the Great Depression), relies on lucid details to both conjure up and undercut the visionary (CP 18). In Bishop’s imagination, the quotidian “makings of a miracle” – “one lone cup of coffee” and “one rather hard crumb” – transmute into “galleries and marble chambers.” A  hyperbolic imbibing of “gallons of coffee” precedes defation: “the miracle,” the very thing we waited to see, we miss: “A window across the river caught the sun / as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.” “The Fish,” often held up as exemplary of Bishop’s descriptive talent, provides a protracted look at a caught fsh: its “brown skin hung in strips,” “speckled with barnacles” and “infested / with tiny white sea-lice” (CP 42). We overhear the speaker in the spontaneous act of observing the “frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood,” “his aching jaw.” The trapped creature who would “not return [her] stare” becomes a testament to survival:  “a fve-haired beard of wisdom / trailing from his aching jaw.” Through her over-intricate scrutiny of the fsh, the poet exposes the limitations of our ability to comprehend otherness. After the speaker has “stared and stared,” the “little rented boat” provides a transfguring climax: the oil in the boat 310 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.023

Elizabeth Bishop

has spread into a rainbow, “until everything / was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! / And I let the fsh go.” It is tempting to differentiate this poem, with its more personal style, from Moore’s syllabic one of the same title, yet Bishop shares with Moore an ethical allegory: observation with empathy leads to letting the fsh go, forecasting her “practice” of renunciation in “One Art.” *** In the same letter to Stevenson cited above, Bishop names another of her major infuences, Charles Darwin, which prods us to read her work in the context of other disciplines; he acts as a path to an eco-poetical, as well as a queer, analysis of her work. She wrote to Stevenson: “I can’t believe we are wholly irrational – and I do admire Darwin – But reading Darwin one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of his endless, heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic – and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fxed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown.”17 Irrationality is not a word generally used in relation to a formalist poetics nor in relation to the sciences. What Bishop does, in her identifcation with the nineteenth-century scientist Darwin, and with his painstaking methods of observation, reverses our expectations – as do so many of her poems, in their acts of surprise and mystery. Bishop was most immersed in reading Darwin while trying to make sense of life in Brazil and during the composition of Questions of Travel. In the titular poem of the volume, she asks: “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” The danger of trying to possess other places, made over by our projections, spurs the traveler to ask: “Oh must we dream our dreams / and have them too?” As a fellow explorer, Darwin’s great belief in the essential struggle of life, and in the precariousness of preservation, must have been compelling for Bishop, who saw herself as an outsider. Yet Darwin’s theories also depicted the freakishly beautiful and the dramatics of diversity, variation, and extinction. Not only does Bishop make Daniel Defoe’s “boring” novel (or so she thought) into a poem that reveals the calcifed master/slave paradigm present in the narrative; she also supplies a queer twist. Insofar as “Crusoe in England” is about modes of reproduction, bodily and imaginative, the poet rehearses the apparent dead end that exists between Crusoe and Friday who “wanted to propagate his own kind,” and that exists also for Bishop, who writes in a double register (Defoe and her own voice), exclaiming: “If only he had been a woman!” Species obligation and “natural selection” haunt the poem, sounding Bishop’s deep “regrets” over “childlessness” as well as her 311 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.023

Susan McCabe

self-incrimination (Millier 452). “Crusoe” reads like a layered palimpsest told retrospectively from “another island.” Once he has fnally been rescued, Crusoe’s loss of Friday, and his sense of guilt, have, by the end of the poem, and without the reader at frst sensing it, permeated the whole of the text. The last line marks time and, with a rupturing dash, shows the heavy significance (perhaps only realized after the fact) of a lover gone forever: “ – And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles / seventeen years ago come March” (CP 162–166). Darwin needs the anomaly to make normative cases. Bishop, too, concentrates on the markedly unusual – from “The Man-Moth,” with its hybrid being haunting “the pale subways of cement he calls his home,” down through “Pink Dog” (CP 190–191), begun in 1963 and completed just before her death. She veers from the plain in “Armadillo” with her empiricist assertion that “[t]he ancient owls’ nest must have burned” to the “surrealism of everyday life” that can be obtained through peripheral vision. “Pink Dog” – with its depilated animal “(a nursing mother, by those hanging teats)” hobbling through Rio’s streets just before Carnival – lays bare the grotesque diffculties of survival; there is an almost diabolical inevitability in Bishop’s rhyming tercet that binds “rabies,” “scabies,” and “babies.” She pans out from the dog to the impoverished homeless in Rio who, like her dog, can’t dress up for carnival and then mimics the disdaining voice of convention while subverting the very “look” of her rhyming: Tonight you simply can’t afford to be an eyesore . . . But no one will ever see a dog in máscara this time of year.

One feels the naturalist’s surreal intensity in many of Bishop’s landscapes. I return to “Crusoe in England,” with its lumbering tortoises, bleating goats, and extinguished volcanoes (either “Mont D’Espoir” or “Mont Despair,” depending on the speaker’s mood), and with its “home-brew,” “crazy fute,” and “self-pity.” Cut off from the mainland of literary tradition, Bishop’s Crusoe can’t recall William Wordsworth’s “Daffodils,” though the erased phrase best sums up the persona’s condition of solitude: Because I didn’t know enough. Why didn’t I know enough of something? Greek drama or astronomy? The books I’d read were full of blanks; the poems – well I tried reciting to my iris-beds, “They fash upon that inward eye, which is the bliss . . .” The bliss of what? 312 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.023

Elizabeth Bishop

Not knowing enough sets a limit. But each of Bishop’s limits opens a new horizon, a new query, the mystery of possibly, as with her imagined Darwin, “sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown.” Likewise, Bishop studied the uneasy meeting between the natural and the human in early poems such as “The Fish” up through “The Moose” (Geography III), the latter a poem where the two, through a “dreamy divagation,” coexist though remain separate; as the bus driver “shifts gears” upon sighting the moose, there persists “a dim / smell of moose, an acrid / smell of gasoline” (CP 169–173). This marking of territory informed her persistent sense of cities as sites of pollution as well as unwelcome emotion: “The city burns guilt” in a landscape of “Broken glass, broken bottles, / heaps of them” (“Night City,” CP 167), recalling the “dripping jawful of marl” observed in the dredge-work in “The Bight,” the scene “littered with old correspondences” (an allusion to Baudelaire’s more hopeful “Correspondences”) (CP 60–61). Over the course of the last two decades, Bishop’s stature has risen tremendously. She is one of the century’s major poets; her soundings continue to inspire new approaches, though she herself was never part of any particular movement. Bishop’s inventive address to her readers in “Crusoe” is a cue to her aesthetics of an American self-reliance gone wrong, a shipwrecked self’s groan: “Home-made, home-made, but aren’t we all?” Hers is a poetics of loss, and her poems persist in bridging the mysterious gap between dream life and consciousness, between the known and unknown. One of Bishop’s many gifts was translation: she translated some of Clarice Lispector’s stories and The Diary of Helena Morley from Portugese; she also translated from the French (Max Jacob) and Spanish. I  want to conclude with the end of Paz’s “January First,” addressed to a sleeping beloved, which like the unfnished poems shows another side of Bishop, an undercurrent beneath her best-known, “almost perfect,” reticent, and object-full poems: Time, with no help from us, invents houses, streets, trees and sleeping women. When you open your eyes We’ll walk, once more, Among the hours and their inventions. We’ll walk among appearances And bear witness to time and its conjugations. Perhaps we’ll open the day’s doors. And then we shall enter the unknown. (CP 274) 313 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.023

Susan McCabe N OT E S 1 Travisano, Thomas, “Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon,” New Literary History (July 1995): 4. 2 Stevenson, Anne, Elizabeth Bishop (New York: Twayne, 1966). 3 Costello, Bonnie, Questions of Mastery (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1991); Goldensohn, Lorrie, Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1991); Lombardi, Marilyn May, ed., Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender (Charlottesville:  University Park of Virginia, 1993); McCabe, Susan, Elizabeth Bishop:  Her Poetics of Loss (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). 4 Kalstone, David, Five Temperaments (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1977): 22. 5 Letter to Dr.  Anny Baumann (September 16, 1952)  collected in One Art: Elizabeth Bishop Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994): 246. 6 Abelove, Deep Gossip (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003): 79. 7 Collected Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984): 251. 8 Bishop, Complete Poems:  1927–1979 (New  York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979):  161. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number, following the abbreviation CP. 9 Millier, Elizabeth Bishop:  Life and the Memory of It (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1993): xi. 10 Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1953). 11 “Writing poetry is an unnatural act,” unpublished fragment of an essay in Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments. Edgar Allen Poe & The Juke, ed. Alice Quinn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006): 208. Henceforth cited parenthetically by page number as EAP. 12 M. L.  Rosenthal, “Poetry as Confession,” The Nation (September 19, 1959): 109–112. 13 Exchanging Hats: Paintings, ed. William Benton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996). 14 The phrase, often quoted, appears in Frost’s 1939 essay “The Figure a Poem Makes.” 15 Croll, Morris W., “The Baroque Style in Prose,” in his Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943): 207–233. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 16 Quoted in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (288). 17 January 8, 1964, Washington University Library. Cited in Millier’s biography of Bishop, 336. F U RT H E R R E A DI NG Costello, Bonnie, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Goldensohn, Lorrie, Elizabeth Bishop:  The Biography of a Poetry (New  York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Jarrell, Randall, Poetry and the Age (New York: Knopf, 1953). 314 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.023

Elizabeth Bishop Kalstone, David, Five Temperaments:  Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1977). Becoming a Poet:  Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989). Lombardi, Marilyn May, The Body and the Song:  Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1995). MacMahon, Candace, ed., Elizabeth Bishop:  A  Bibliography, 1927–1979 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980). McCabe, Susan, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). Millier, Brett C., Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Schwartz, Lloyd, and Sybil P. Estess, eds., Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983). Travisano, Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop:  Her Artistic Development (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1988).

315 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.023

23 J A M E S S M E T H U RS T

Gwendolyn Brooks

It is still common to regard Gwendolyn Brooks’s literary career as a Saul/ Paul conversion story, a narrative Brooks herself at times encouraged, particularly in her autobiographical sketches, Report from Part One (1972), though she sometimes resisted it, too, in important ways. Basically, this narrative divides her literary life into a relatively apolitical thematic and formal white-oriented high neo-modernism, deriving from T.  S. Eliot and other New Critical heroes, and a more direct black nationalist/Black Arts Movement aesthetic, with the 1967 Fisk Negro Writers Conference, and her encounter with Amiri Baraka and other leading Black Arts writers, marking the transformation. My argument here runs contrary to, or at least complicates, this account of Brooks’s artistic and ideological development. My claim is that Brooks’s work was always politically radical, always by, for, and of the African American community (particularly the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side in which she lived practically all her life); and that it was formally far more consistent that some have allowed. There is, in fact, a change in her work, both formally and ideologically, but it is far more gradual than many assume and connects two apogees of black radicalism, the extended Popular Front era of the late 1930s, the 1940s, and early 1950s, and the Black Arts era of the 1960s and 1970s.1 Like many black veterans of the earlier radical era, notably Langston Hughes, Alice Childress, and Lorraine Hansberry, Brooks took it upon herself to remind the younger activists of Black Power and Black Arts of earlier African American political and cultural radicalism. The cultural and political world in which Brooks came of age artistically in the late 1930s and 1940s was distinctly leftwing; the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) was its predominant political organization. This milieu was undergirded by an infrastructure of cultural, political, labor, and social organizations, such as, to name a relative handful, the Chicago Defender (a newspaper), Negro Story (a magazine), the League of American Writers, the Abraham Lincoln School, the South Side Arts Center, 316 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.024

Gwendolyn Brooks

the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Artists Project, the NAACP Youth Council, the Federal Theater Project, the United Packinghouse Workers of America, the International Workers Order, the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers Union, and the National Negro Congress.2 While Brooks was never as publicly identifed with the Communist Left as her friend Margaret Burroughs, it was in this leftwing milieu that Brooks did her apprentice work, began publishing, and received material (including fnancial) support. One of the fascinating things about Brooks’s frst major publications in the 1940s is her literary voicing of a black intersectionality, or what such black women Communists, most notably Claudia Jones, would term “triple oppression” (race, class, and gender). All three categories had to be understood synergistically and combatted collectively in order for an accurate assessment of society and social progress to take place. This was an important strand of thought on the Communist Left, particularly (but not solely) as promoted by black women artists, intellectuals, and activists. True, one can see Brooks’s early books as part of a larger neo-modernist revival, promoted by the unlikely aesthetic-political-ethnic alliance of the New Critics (largely conservative, white, Protestant Southerners) and the New York Intellectual circle (largely leftwing [or post-leftwing], Jewish New  Yorkers); the two camps were united in their love of high modernism and their anti-Communism (or anti-Stalinism, if one prefers). However, like her black contemporaries Robert Hayden and Melvin Tolson, who also drew deeply on high modernism, Brooks retained far more personal, thematic, and aesthetic connections to the late Popular Front than her white neo-modernist peers, such as Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, and John Berryman. A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and Annie Allen (1949), Brooks’s frst two books of poetry, document and memorialize the lives and struggles of the black South Side community, creating a collective portrait of a neighborhood much as did Langston Hughes and Melvin Tolson with Harlem, Frank Marshall Davis also with the South Side, and Robert Hayden with Detroit’s Paradise Valley. Recalling W.  E. B.  Du Bois’s formulation of African American dualism as, among other things, the peculiar or alienating sensation of looking at one’s self through the eyes of another, the narrative perspective of these poems is often that of a Bronzeville insider who is nevertheless estranged or at least partly alienated by the social vision of high and popular culture through which she sees herself as a working-class black woman and sees also her fellow residents in Bronzeville. Consequently, A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen, and the 1953 novel Maud Martha are deeply engaged critiques of the pleasures, 317 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.024

James Smethurst

uses, and costs of both high modernism and popular culture for black people, particularly black women. Even the diction and vocabulary of much of A Street in Bronzeville is a strange mash-up of popular culture and high modernism  – though one might see this as part of an Eliotic inheritance, with the landscape of the London bedsit transposed to the South Side kitchenette apartment. In fact, the second poem of the collection, “kitchenette building,” begins with such a transposition of Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” and “Gerontion,” with their images of dreams and aridity, to Bronzeville. The vivid details of the poem attest to the claustrophobia, the sense of confnement, the “gray” of the miniscule apartments with their shared bathrooms that were a direct result of the housing shortage caused by the explosive growth of Chicago’s black community in the 1940s as well as by the city’s hyper-segregation, the “involuntary plan” beyond the control of the inhabitants of Bronzeville (as Brooks phrases it). Again, the speaker of the poem is both an insider and an outsider, an observer and participant, who seems to affrm the impossibility of dreaming, of making “high” art in the grayness and everyday press of poverty, in the limited imaginative vocabulary of mass culture, and within racist circumscription, even as she presents, in her own art, the very thing she appears to suggest isn’t possible. Such doubleness (or tripleness) is also displayed in poems that more directly engage the signature Popular Front notion of popular culture as a terrain in which fascism, racism, and the fnancial oligarchs could be  – really had to be if one was going to avoid the fate Germany and Italy – battled. One of the recurring strains of the collection, and, indeed, of much of Brooks’s work before the Black Arts era, is the imprisoning nature of a feminized “high” culture and “genteel” propriety, perhaps related to earlier notions of “true womanhood,” but in any event linked to a reifed white “middle-class” aesthetic and social and consumer sensibilities. Once again the speaker, which is to say a black working-class woman, looks at herself and those around her through the eyes of others, a certain socially mediated vision, largely refracted through mass culture. However, this mass culture provides a vehicle for rebellious reinterpretation and action, even if that action is largely symbolic. In “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith,” Smith and his fellows are not simply consumers of or ideological receptacles for mass culture but actively contest or invert the narratives that exclude or oppress them. This is not to say that Smith or anyone else in Bronzeville is immune to ideological and psychological dislocations. There is a strong sense that, not unlike Jay Gatsby (who declares his love for Daisy Buchanan through a parade of shirts), the dreams and even the vocabulary of revolt of Smith and his peers (such as “the cat with 318 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.024

Gwendolyn Brooks

the patent-leather hair” in the poem of the same name) are constrained by mass culture to the point that they see themselves as a sort of product with exchange value – a notion that would be a major feature of Brooks’s later novel, Maud Martha. While this sort of internalized commodifcation of a human subject is shown to have a particular cost for black women (as seen in the end of “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith,” where a black woman’s body is literally imagined as a sort of cafeteria fast food to be consumed), it affects all black people (and, to some degree, all people, period). Much of the speaker’s lampooning of Smith turns on the absurdity of such internalizations. At the same time, the special blessing or curse of a sort of triple self-consciousness pulls the speaker up short, allowing her to remind herself (and the reader) how little we may understand, how poor our historical memory and class and racial consciousness may be, with respect to Smith. He and his affectations, rebellions, and deformations are shaped by a life of poverty in the Jim Crow South and the rigidly segregated urban North. By single-mindedly pursuing the most basic and immediate hungers, and by viscerally responding to the most blatant cultural expressions of Jim Crow in its Chicago mode, Smith is able to repress the larger pattern of his life, but he is not able to free himself (nor is the speaker through her mockery of Smith able to free herself) of a sense that such a larger pattern exists. Again, this sort of simultaneous reappropriation and critique of mass culture was an important, even defning, feature of African American Left literature and art in the late 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. For example, a similar mockery and horror is accorded Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas in Native Son. Almost certainly, the ringing alarm clock, the sound of an airplane, and the transgressive moment in the movie theater in “The Sundays of Satin Legs Smith” refer directly to iconic moments in Wright’s novel. Like Thomas, Smith is clearly a victim of American hungers induced or warped by mass culture, notably the movies  – though, as in Native Son, it is the black woman who suffers most immediately and brutally from this culture in many respects. It is worth noting, however, that virtually the only fgure in A Street in Bronzeville to project an undivided subjectivity and sense of self-worth (and class consciousness) is the domestic worker Hattie Scott; the series of poems about her may well establish a subgenre of Left literature in which the black woman domestic worker is projected as the iconic race and class hero, a subgenre to which Langston Hughes, Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and others contributed. Brooks’s next collection, Annie Allen (1949)  – for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 (the frst African American to do so)  – moves from an intense portrait of the development of a black women’s 319 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.024

James Smethurst

subjectivity to another group portrait of the Black South Side. Through recondite neo-modernist diction and a repurposing of the mock epic and the sonnet, a heavily ironized sense of estrangement and indirect approach to intense loss, alienation, anger, and even rage characterize the collection. To some extent, this sense of loss is peculiarly personal, somewhat indirectly elegizing the death of her close friend and black Chicago Left stalwart Ed Bland in the Second World War. As in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, this personal sense of loss is infused with an anger at masculine entitlement and arrogance as Bland’s death is represented as in part a result of a macho recklessness. Brooks takes this sense of loss as a launching pad for describing a black woman’s romance with a soldier, a “tan man,” who abandons her after her pregnancy, goes off again to war, and returns to die, leaving multiple layers of loss and anger and overlapping circles of race, gender, and class oppression. She is described at the end of the poem as sitting in her kitchenette apartment bereft of romance except through memory, old at twenty-four. However, as we reach the fnal section of Annie Allen, the intense, if obliquely approached, emotion is a communal anger generated by the frustrations of the ghetto, the “involuntary plan” in which black dreams are starved, blocked, or endlessly deferred. Much like Langston Hughes’s “Harlem” in Montage of a Dream Deferred and Walter Lee Younger’s fnal monologue in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, the United States (and white people) are offered a political choice: do the right thing, allow African Americans true citizenship, or suffer the consequences as black people revolt and follow a path perhaps extreme or radical. The precise outlines of this protest are not delineated, in part because oppression, particularly within the context of deepening Cold War and anti-Communist repression, has so constrained organized revolt that rebellion often manifests itself culturally or through what is seen as anti-social behavior. Like Hughes and Hansberry, Brooks is not overly optimistic about the choice the United States will make. She ends Annie Allen with a call to action, to black self-reliance, and to some sort of organized, collective revolt that defes duly constituted authority in the Jim Crow United States: “Let us combine. There is no magic or elves / Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must.”3 The reviews of Brooks’s 1953 novel, Maud Martha, were generally favorable in both the “mainstream” press and the African American press. (Langston Hughes wrote an enthusiastic review in the Chicago Defender.) Most reviewers, particularly in the “mainstream” press, saw the book basically as a series of sweet and/or bittersweet portraits, which were simple, straightforward, and not particularly deep. However, Maud Martha was anything but simple, whether sweet, bittersweet, or simply bitter. Brooks further developed the registers in which the mixed voices of class, race, and 320 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.024

Gwendolyn Brooks

gender are heard. As in A Street in Bronzeville and Annie Allen, mass consumer culture – what the characters of Maud Martha consume, or wish to consume  – largely defnes their self-identity. In this scheme of things, not only did self-identity (and group identity) depend on objects of consumption but also people themselves became such objects. Obviously, such a transformation was literally dehumanizing for everybody, but it had a particularly destructive effect on African American women, especially poor, dark-skinned African American women who lived in kitchenette apartments. Consumer goods are arrayed in a hierarchy of relative desirability based often on arbitrary characteristics (size, shape, color, cost, etc.); in the same way, the “market value” of human objects of consumption clearly refects power relations in the United States. In such a market, everyone has to sell him- or herself  – to make a pitch. In Maud’s case, since she is not white, not light, not male, and not rich (and intelligence is clearly not a marketable female attribute in this book), her marketing strategy is to be good and “nice” in a stereotypical female manner. The psychic cost of such a strategy is obviously enormous. One of the most obvious costs of defning your dreams in such a consumerist manner – when your poverty, your femininity, and your blackness (and, to paraphrase Ralph Ellison, the relative blackness of your blackness) put the goods you desire out of reach – is that your dreams are endlessly deferred and eventually die. Again, it would seem that Brooks is one of those literary cultural critics who see mass culture in an extremely negative light. In fact, her critique is in some ways even bleaker because Brooks adds gender as a category of oppression, which was largely missing from these earlier critiques, which tended to focus on economic class and race. But the fnal message is not entirely bleak. To the degree to which there is a discernible plot in the novel – which is a series of poetic sketches that were conceived as poems in the earliest iteration of the book – it is the education and development of Maud, who, too, works briefy as a domestic worker. For most of the novel, this takes the form of a series of disappointments, embarrassments swallowed, dreams deferred, frustrating compromises, and so on. But towards the end of the book a new Maud begins to develop. The beginnings of this Maud may be dated to the birth of her frst child about halfway through the book. (In Maud Martha, the commercial is often opposed to the natural – dandelions, childbirth, etc.). Certainly, by the end of the chapter titled “the self solace,” we begin to see a fercer, more active, more assertive Maud, when she stares relentlessly at a black beautician who failed to object when a white cosmetic salesperson used the word “nigger” in her shop. From this point on, one sees Maud in a series of encounters with white people – a hat saleswoman, a white employer, a department store Santa Claus – in which Maud refuses 321 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.024

James Smethurst

to defer, refuses to subscribe to a sense of herself as damaged or inferior goods, whereas her husband would have evaded or sputtered ineffectually, taking out his anger at home. Tellingly each of these encounters takes place in the context of the economic exchange of goods or labor. Finally, the book ends on a note of relative triumph as to the ability of the average African American to endure or overcome: “And in the meantime, while people did live, they would be grand, would be glorious and brave, would have nimble hearts that would beat and beat. They would even get up nonsense, through wars, through divorce, through evictions and jiltings and taxes.”4 In Maud Martha, Brooks joins the conversation about mass culture somewhere between the two poles of reifcation and utopia, to use Frederic Jameson’s formulation. She lacks the fat-out optimism of Langston Hughes as to the nature of mass culture and its uses. At the same time, though she shares much of the more negative assessments of mass culture, she lacks faith in the possibility of establishing an alternative culture, whether a folkloric utopia or an avant-garde utopia  – and, like it or not, we are all immersed in mass culture and cannot exist outside it. Indeed, as she points out in her early fantasies of New York, even so-called high culture objects, whether texts, paintings, or vases, become consumer items in our culture. Nonetheless, Brooks does not completely despair but provisionally allows a possibility of hope, of human growth and human survival, particularly female African American hope, growth, and survival. But at the same time, Brooks insists that the costs of using, of consuming, and of being consumed by mass culture always be placed in the foreground. In her 1960 collection of poetry, The Bean Eaters, Brooks uses – in order more directly to engage specifc political events in ways she hadn’t since publishing her frst book  – the ideological space cleared in the Cold War United States by the Civil Rights Movement, by the emergence of a “third” or “Bandung” world from the struggle against colonialism, and by the rise of new independent nations, often led by Communists, socialists, or radical nationalists. As elsewhere, the domestic Cold War had taken a heavy toll on the black Popular Front and the formerly vibrant black Left cultural scene of Chicago. Brooks was practically the only writer of that milieu with any sort of prominence who hadn’t moved away, fallen silent (or ceased to publish), or died. Still, much of the old network of personal acquaintanceships, collaborations, and political sensibilities remained in the late 1950s and early 1960s – albeit increasingly marked by black nationalism of various stripes, particularly that of Malcolm X and the locally headquartered Nation of Islam. And nowhere else – with the possible exception of the San Francisco Bay Area  – did so many black Left, basically Communist institutions survive and even thrive. There were the Washington Park Forum, 322 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.024

Gwendolyn Brooks

a public speakers’ platform on the South Side to which Brooks alludes in “Leftist Orator Pleasantly Punishes the Gropers” in The Bean Eaters; the Afro-American Heritage Society; the Packinghouse Workers’ Union, which had a pronounced Left strain in its Chicago leadership, and whose union hall was a major venue for Black Arts and Black Power events throughout the 1960s and early 1970s; and even the Nation of Islam’s Muhammad Speaks, edited and produced by a staff led by Communists and ex-Communists. As Mary Helen Washington notes, The Bean Eaters remains signifcantly grounded in this transformed but still extant ideological, social, and cultural black Popular Front network and is flled with indictments of incidents of class and gender oppression and of racism and racial violence – notably the 1955 murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi (a rallying point for the Left and the struggle against Jim Crow in the mid-1950s). At the same time, as Washington also points out, most of the themes that characterized Brooks’s work in the Black Arts era were already present in The Bean Eaters, if not before. In fact, perhaps the most famous poem of the volume, “We Real Cool”  – about a gang whose members, like Satin Legs Smith, are well aware that their anti-social rebellion will result in early deaths but who still feel that they must rebel – was one of the frst publications of Broadside Press, the preeminent Black Arts publisher. As before in Brooks’s poetry, the voices in many of these poems are cloaked in a tone of mocking irony. But as in Maud Martha, the intense emotions, particularly anger and sorrow, rise closer to the surface than in Annie Allen, as for example in “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” where the emotion is so direct that reviewers, such as Harvey Shapiro in the New York Times, criticized the poem as “sentimental.”5 Thus, Brooks’s move toward the Black Arts Movement and radical black nationalism was not as drastic a turn as some, including Brooks herself at times, alleged. Brooks was identifed with the movement more closely than almost any established writer of her generation.6 Still, other than eschewing the sonnet in work written during and after the Black Arts Movement, the formal differences distinguishing her pre-Black Arts writing, particularly The Bean Eaters, from her frst Black Arts collection, In the Mecca (1968), were overestimated by some Black Arts participants, particularly Haki Madhubuti and Brooks herself. While she did give up the sonnet the better to mark the boundary between her pre- and post-Fisk conference careers, traits found in her earlier work continued to characterize it: an ironic tone and a diction that somewhat obliquely – if less so than in work done at the height of the Cold War, for example  – approached intense emotion. One possible exception lies here:  perhaps pride as much or more than anger, despair, and sorrow continued to characterize her post-Fisk poetry. 323 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.024

James Smethurst

I would add one point more. Brooks associated herself with the Black Arts Movement, but like Langston Hughes in The Panther and the Lash (1967) and Margaret Walker in her novel Jubilee (1966), she combined her earlier work about The Mecca – an infamous slum South Side apartment building destroyed in 1952 – with new poems issuing directly from the political and cultural moment, such as “The Wall” (dedicated to the Wall of Respect) and “The Blackstone Rangers.” She herself underscored the fundamental historical continuity linking Black Arts to earlier moments of black cultural and political radicalism; works written over the course of three or four decades ft the framework of the Black Power/Black Arts moment. Of course, this should not be surprising. The Fisk Conferences of 1967 and 1968 were organized by the novelist John O. Killens, a veteran of the cultural and political world of the Communist Left who had not renounced his ties with that world. The conferences themselves allowed for affliations of still-radical black Popular Front veterans such as Killens with younger radical black nationalist artists such as Amiri Baraka, Ron Milner, Sonia Sanchez, and Haki Madhubuti. The 1967 Fisk Conference was undoubtedly important in Brooks’s public affrmation of her affliation with Black Arts and Black Power. But signifcant also was that she joined, the same year, the former Communist Oscar Brown, Jr., in working with the most powerful black Chicago street gang, the Blackstone Rangers. Brooks ran a poetry workshop with the Rangers that ultimately came to include Madhubuti, Carolyn Rodgers, Johari Amini, and other young Black Nationalist poets of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement. Like Madhubuti’s other mentors, Margaret and Charles Burroughs (founders of the Du Sable Museum in Chicago), Brooks helped carry forward the old Left imperative of building stable institutions  – a hallmark of the Black Arts Movement in the Midwest that set it apart from other regions of the United States. Perhaps Brooks’s most important contribution to Black Arts institution-building was her decision to leave Harper & Row and publish new books only with black-run presses, starting with Riot (1969), issued by Detroit’s Broadside Press (whose publisher, Dudley Randall, made a point of linking different eras of black radicalism in his work). Brooks’s example, in giving up a relatively lucrative and high-profle (for poetry) contract with a “major” commercial publishing house, provided tremendous impetus for other African American writers to do likewise. This is not to say that Brooks’s work remained, in the Black Arts era and its aftermath, what it had been during the late Popular Front. As noted before, in her impressionistic autobiography A Report from Part One  – which basically consists of sketches and fragments that, like the chapters 324 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.024

Gwendolyn Brooks

of Maud Martha, feel as if they started as poems forming a composite picture – Brooks goes to some length to portray herself as a sort of political naïf prior to the 1967 Fisk Conference and more particularly before the Civil Rights Movement. This sort of heightening of the contradictions – to use a favorite black Marxist formulation of the 1960s and 1970s – helped dramatize the political impact of Black Power and Black Arts, and it was a common move for many Black Arts activists. One might also see a certain residual Cold War caution in such a move; even Margaret Burroughs, a political and cultural activist with still-active ties to the Communist Left, remained, for the rest of her life, circumspect as to the precise nature of those ties. Black Arts era black political and cultural institution-building and self-determination certainly had roots in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s Left. But Brooks, like other Black Arts stalwarts, espoused a nationalism – an imperative for a black nation and for a black aesthetic, artistic training, and practice – that certainly marked a departure from the Popular Front (and even artistic Garveyism, for that matter). Nonetheless, as in her poem to Paul Robeson in her 1970 volume Family Pictures, Brooks remained committed to reminding younger generations of earlier moments of black radicalism, of earlier black heroes, who, as in the voice and songs of Paul Robeson, proclaimed, “we are each other’s / business: / we are each other’s / magnitude and bond.”7 N OT E S 1 For studies which place Brooks’s pre-Black Arts work within the context of the Popular Front, see Bill Mullen, Popular Fronts:  Chicago and African American Cultural Politics, 1935–1946 (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 1999):  151–180; James Edward Smethurst, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1945 (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1999):  164–179; and Mary Helen Washington, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014): 165–204. 2 For surveys of the black literary, political, and cultural scene in Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s, see Robert Bone and Richard Courage, The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932–1950 (New Brunswick:  Rutgers University Press, 2011) and Steven C. Tracy, ed., Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2012). 3 Brooks, Blacks, 140. 4 Brooks, Blacks, 321–322. 5 Harvey Shapiro, “A Quartet of Younger Singers,” New York Times Book Review (October 23, 1960): 23. Tellingly, Shapiro’s comments were included in an omnibus review of “younger poets,” even though Brooks was forty-three years old and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. 325 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.024

James Smethurst 6 For Brooks’s own account of her quasi-religious meeting with what she describes as “New Black,” see her Report from Part One (Detroit:  Broadside Press, 1972): 84–86. 7 Brooks, Blacks, 496. F U RT H E R R E A DI NG Bone, Robert, and Richard Courage, The Muse in Bronzeville:  African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932–1950 (New Brunswick:  Rutgers University Press, 2011). Gayles, Gloria Wade, ed., Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003). Kent, George, A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks (Lexington:  University of Kentucky Press, 1980). Melhem, D. H., Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1987). Mootry, Maria K., and Gary Smith, eds., A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). Mullen, Bill, Popular Fronts:  Chicago and African American Cultural Politics, 1935–1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). Smethurst, James Edward, The New Red Negro:  The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Tracy, Steven C., ed., Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). Washington, Mary Helen, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Wright, Stephen Caldwell, On Gwendolyn Brooks:  Reliant Contemplation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).

326 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.024

24 S T E V E N GOU L D A XE LROD

The Three Voices of Robert Lowell

So much of the effort of the poem is to arrive at something essentially human, to fnd the right voice for what we have to say. – Robert Lowell1

I take as my starting point Christopher Ricks’s generative review of Lowell’s For the Union Dead written back in 1965.2 Ricks posited that Lowell had “three lives,” which he also termed “contexts” and “sources of Lowell’s imagination.” The lives were “personal experience,” a “social and political we,” and an outer layer that was “historical, literary, and religious.” Revising that model, I’m going to leave Lowell’s life to the side and focus instead on his texts and career. I’m going to identify three “voices” that alternate and sometimes blend in his work, voices that were right for what he had to say. Although these “voices” bear a family resemblance to Ricks’s “lives,” they represent a somewhat different set of categories. As I  see it, Lowell’s frst voice does indeed speak of what seems to be personal experience. Lowell claimed that “autobiography” was the thread that strung his work together.3 Yet he also admitted, “My ‘autobiographical’ poems are not always factually true . . . I’ve invented facts” (Interviews 94). This autobiographical voice – a somewhat contradictory compound of memory and invention – produced the “confessional” style he pioneered and for which he is still famous today.4 As I shall try to show, this voice is as much a technical achievement as a refocusing of the subject matter of lyric poetry. Lowell’s second voice is public, combining Ricks’s notion of a “social and political we” with a speaker who also evokes “historical . . . and religious contexts.” Lowell’s self-positioning as spokesperson of conscience and communal memory contributed importantly to his cultural aura back in the day but is overshadowed now by what Deborah Nelson has called his “transformations of privacy.”5 Yet I hope to show that Lowell’s public voice was essential to his achievement – and that the private and public voices were not oppositional to each other but interdependent. 327 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.025

Steven Gould Axelrod

Finally, I wish to focus attention on Lowell’s least noted voice, which I will term metapoetic. Throughout his career, Lowell cited and revised the words of his precursors, letting them speak again while simultaneously recalibrating his relation to them. In his latter days he also meditated self-refexively on his own contributions to poetry. These three voices  – autobiographical, public, and metapoetic – are distinguishable though confuent. Together they moved American poetry along new pathways, helping to create an ever-changing, ever more complicated network of words. 1 Lowell’s renovation of the poetics of privacy occurred in 1957–1959 with his work Life Studies. Critics have often termed the volume “a breakthrough,” though James Longenbach has ironized this perspective by referring to it as the “ ‘breakthrough’ narrative.”6 That is, it is merely a story we tell ourselves rather than an accurate descriptor. Longenbach’s point is that Lowell did not really “break” from the canons of modernism but repeated them. Certainly there is some truth in Longbach’s demurral. Literary change does not obliterate the past but modifes practice in some crucial regard, selecting from the usable past in some novel way. That almost goes without saying. Lowell modestly framed his change of direction in Life Studies thusly:  “Literary life is just one little wave after another . . . One manner seems as bad or as good as another; it freshens the atmosphere for a moment and then seems to have faults as disastrous as the ones they were fghting against” (Interviews 74–75). Reacting to and against the anonymity of modernism, Lowell created in Life Studies a poetry that was clearly identifed with his own “experience” (Interviews 55). Instead of listening to Tiresias or to a voice from nowhere, we hear the fgure of Robert Lowell. It is telling that when Longenbach turns to Lowell’s texts to prove his point about modernism’s endurance, he largely avoids Life Studies. Attached to modernism, he minimizes resistance to it as a mere narrative in scare quotes and then defects attention to modernism’s lingering vestiges. It was not simply Lowell’s critics who have spoken of a breakthrough but also Lowell himself and the poets who were infuenced by him. In an interview after the publication of Life Studies, Lowell argued that writing had become “divorced” from culture and unable to “handle much experience” (Interviews 55). “It’s become a craft, purely a craft, and there must be some breakthrough back into life.” Lowell was not characterizing his own volume as a poetic breakthrough but rather expressing the hope that he had broken through to lived experience by constructing a style linked to interior 328 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.025

The Three Voices of Robert Lowell

monologue and refocusing subject matter on heretofore private matters. Yet the notion of breakthrough metonymically expanded soon enough to include his contribution to literary history. Plath attributed her own achievement in Ariel to Lowell’s “breakthrough” in Life Studies.7 Lowell himself tried to minimize this perspective while still recognizing the change he had installed. He initially attributed qualities found in Life Studies to achievements in the work of earlier poets such as Frost, Eliot, Pound, Williams, and Bishop. Later he refected, “When I wrote, most good American poetry was a symbol hanging on a hatrack. Many felt this” (Interviews 168–169). When pressed, he named W. D. Snodgrass and the Beats as other “breakthrough” poets. Yet he also tried to differentiate his own practice from what he termed Snodgrass’s “expert little stanzas” and Ginsberg’s “stirring sermon” (Interviews 56, 169). His modesty had its limits. In a time of widespread cultural interest in issues of conformity, surveillance, privacy, and public confession, Lowell’s poetry – along with that of Ginsberg, Sexton, Plath, and others – gathered cultural anxieties and desires together in a compelling way. It turned out to be a way that has intrigued readers and empowered poets ever since. Poets are still inventing new languages for the exploration of personal, domestic, and inter-subjective spaces. This exploration has become a central endeavor for contemporary lyric poets and increasingly for those infuenced by Language poetry. Lowell and his cohort stumbled into a new terrain for poetry, or perhaps they purposefully broke through to it. Lowell later refected that getting his personal story and memories into Life Studies was largely “a technical problem, as most problems in poetry are” (Interviews 83). Perhaps we might say that his “breakthrough” was not into experience but into a new permutation of free verse, one quite different from that practiced by his mentors. Having nothing to do with breath and only something to do with conversation, Lowell’s free verse occupied a shifting borderland between free verse and traditional versifcation. If rhyme and meter originally had mnemonic purposes for oral recitation, Lowell reimagined them as feeting features just palpable enough to reveal the artifcial nature of the discourse and to provide an almost jazz-like pleasure. Lowell’s free verse, enhanced by fragments or samples of traditional prosody, foregrounded the tension between self-disclosure and verbal design that set his project in motion. He had developed a technique that simultaneously reached out to generic memory and to linguistic play. Lowell observed that his poems achieved their contradictory density in “four or fve different ways” (Interviews 41). He composed “Commander Lowell” in regular meter and rhyme, which he then dismantled in revision, 329 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.025

Steven Gould Axelrod

leaving shards of the original devices to appear and disappear unpredictably in the fnal text. Conversely, he wrote “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” as prose and then revised it into poetry with fashes of meter, off-rhyme, assonance, and consonance. He composed and kept “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage” in iambic couplets, though with different numbers of feet per line. And he gave “Skunk Hour” six-line stanzas in which many lines rhyme but none scans. Whether metered or not, rhythm remained crucial to Lowell’s new style because “the rhythm is the person himself” (Interviews 34). Most of the poems have a superabundance of sonic effects, deployed in arbitrary fashion. The poems vibrate with a contradictory sense of freedom and artifce, of real-seeming memories and foregrounded style. Technique then was the arena in which Lowell explored and problematized the border between the fgure of the poet and the fgure a poem makes. His autobiographical poems appeared to be an escape from poetry while actually being an immersion in it. They built something new and generative out of the remains of past poetic practice. Collages of remembrance, they are just as importantly pastiches of loved poetic devices. They say, “I am a poem” even while adding, “I am not just a poem.” Technique, however, is never the whole story. The key to the power of the “Life Studies” sequence is that it tells a story and uses lyric poems to tell it. It’s not a great story, as Lowell himself knew, but it’s a relatable one, and it only gains interest upon rereading. Perhaps it’s accurate to say that you come for the story and you stay for the way the story is told. On both macro and micro levels, the text begins off center and gradually homes in on its essential topic. The result is a pattern of an ever-thickening structure suddenly yielding a surprise – that is, a dance between the familiar and the strange. We see this pattern on the macro level in the unsettling way the chronological structure of Part I folds back on itself in Part II. The familiar stabilizing element of time passages, signaled by the recurrent highlighting of dates and the speaker’s age, disappears as Part II loops back to the events just preceding “Waking in the Blue” and then (in “Memories of West Street and Lepke”) loops back again to an even earlier time. Uncovering the diffcult material the chronological narrative has repressed, Part II zeroes in on domestic disappointment (“Memories of West Street and Lepke”), marital confict (“Man and Wife”), sexual aggression and impotence (“To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage”), and fnally loneliness, voyeurism, and mental disorder (“Skunk Hour”). We see this pattern of familiarity leading to discovery recur on the level of the individual poem as well. For example, “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” begins with a scene from the child’s broken home life: he 330 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.025

The Three Voices of Robert Lowell

shouts to his parents at Sunday dinner, “I won’t go with you, I want to stay with Grandpa!” (Poems 163). The poem contrasts his discord with his parents to his harmony with his grandparents. The style complicates conversational rhythms with a startling array of dictions and an extensive network of irregular off rhymes (water-dinner-summer-farms-poplars; Norman-garden; pine-pioneering). The only line in the frst verse-paragraph that doesn’t end in an off rhyme is that frst dissonant rebuke to the parents – an exception that highlights the rebellion articulated in the line and indeed the poem. But the poem’s very last verse-paragraph reveals a till-then unspoken detail that gives new focus to the entire poem: “My Uncle was dying at twenty-nine” (Poems 166). The poem thus moves unexpectedly from an already momentous topos, the shattered family, to one even more destabilizing: the presence of death. The dissonance of the poem’s initial unrhymed line is counterpoised by the poem’s awkward last couplet, which refers back to the poem’s recurrent image of black earth and white lime: “Come winter, / Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color” (Poems 167). A similar pattern of an already disturbing scene eventually yielding a further shock occurs in “Commander Lowell.” The poem begins with a depiction of the mother-son dyad, indicating the father’s insignifcance even in a poem named for him. When he does fnally appear, he is far from commanding: “ ‘Anchors aweigh,’ Daddy boomed in his bathtub” (Poems 173). The childlike father receives no praise, and the poem offers little consolation for his demise. If “My Last Afternoon” surprises us by turning into an elegy, “Commander Lowell” disturbs us by hardly being one. “Sailing Home from Rapallo” similarly defates the fgure of the dead mother. In the opening lines, we encounter the speaker expressing a more or less traditional grief: “tears ran down my cheeks” (Poems 179). But by the end, he wears an unnerving smile: “The corpse,” he says, “was wrapped like panetone in Italian tinfoil.” The corpse, not even her corpse. Once an eminence capable of elbowing her husband aside, she has now disappeared from her own poem, leaving a loaf of festive bread in her stead. The pattern of deferred shock reaches its apogee in “Skunk Hour.” Lowell explained: “The frst four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or less amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town . . . Then all comes alive in stanzas V and VI.”8 Again, his wandering description enfolds a revelation that troubles the preceding discourse: “I myself am hell” (Poems 192). The poem and the sequence lead to this. Afterward the poem recovers its rueful humor while implying the ironies of survival. Lowell continued to employ a personal mode throughout the rest of his career, though for some years he resisted returning to the autobiographical. He had a congenital fear of repeating himself. The autobiographical 331 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.025

Steven Gould Axelrod

topos eventually revived in some of the diary-like poems frst collected in Notebook 1967–68 and then revised in Notebook, History, and For Lizzie and Harriet. He carried the story even further in The Dolphin, a sequence based on his love for Caroline Blackwood, the birth of their son Sheridan, his divorce from Elizabeth Hardwick, and his troubled marriage to Blackwood. Whereas Lowell intended Life Studies to be as clear as a photograph album, The Dolphin was opaque. It was a dream vision of events, composed “under heavy [Thorazine],” a counterpoint of “introspection and art speculation.”9 Lowell returned to his autobiographical voice one more time, in Day by Day. Rather than tell a recollected story (as in Life Studies), and rather than frame his refections in sonnets (as in Notebook 1967–68), Day by Day casts about for topics in the least ornamented style of Lowell’s career. As he wrote to me, “I fear it comes close to tragic, though that’s not clear either in the book or life” (Letters 671). Perhaps the volume’s key poem is “Unwanted.” No off rhymes, sound play, or traditional meter here. No “evasion,” either, the term he uses in “Unwanted” to dismiss the “Life Studies” sequence (Poems 831). Nothing but meditations on himself and his mother. He asks: “Is the one unpardonable sin” (echoing but altering Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand”) “our fear of not being wanted?” (Poems 834). And: Is “art a way to get well?” Two questions, not answers. But perhaps for Lowell, they were always the key questions, never asked till now. Having asked them, he attaches three further poems to the sequence, including one called “Thanks-Offering for Recovery.” The volume is over, and the career essentially concluded. Robert Lowell reimagined the autobiographical voice. Few have written in precisely the autobiographical styles he invented. His poems are too idiosyncratic for that; no one could write them but him. Yet in making lyric poetry accessible to autobiography, he opened a door that many have passed through. He functioned, in that sense, as a culture hero. 2 Lowell’s public voice sounded at the very outset of his career, in the privately printed Land of Unlikeness, in his frst trade book, Lord Weary’s Castle, and in a publicly circulated letter to President Franklin Roosevelt refusing the draft (Prose 367–370). This voice continued to speak, in poetry and other discursive genres, until the end of his life, though its period of greatest fuency was surely the 1960s, evidenced in such texts as “For the Union Dead,” “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” “Central Park,” and Notebook 1967–68. In midcareer, Lowell told Stanley Kunitz that a poem should include a poet’s “contradictions” (Interviews 85). He described one side of himself as 332 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.025

The Three Voices of Robert Lowell

“a conventional liberal, concerned with causes, agitated about peace and justice and equality.” His other side, though, was “deeply conservative, wanting to get at the root of things, wanting to slow down the whole modern process of mechanization and dehumanization.” (Interviews 85–86). Clearly, he was articulating here a conception of conservatism rather different from the ones prominent in popular discourse today. The point is that Lowell believed that “all of our compulsions and biases should get in, so that fnally we don’t know what we mean.” This willingness to delve below the ideological ego and superego to explore the political unconscious has subjected Lowell to some critique.10 He seemed to turn political poetry into another arena for inner debate rather than a basis for action. Lowell’s early work burst at the seams with “compulsions and biases.” Infuenced by such thinkers as Pound, Eliot, Allen Tate, and Etienne Gilson, Lowell presented himself as an idiosyncratic conservative, conditioned by his New England Puritan infuences, his southern agrarian mentors, and his newly acquired Roman Catholic beliefs. Jerome Mazzaro has termed this phase Lowell’s “early politics of apocalypse.”11 Lowell himself eventually looked back and ruefully commented, “I thought that civilization was going to break down, and instead I did” (Interviews 77). Lord Weary’s Castle found two strands in the political sphere particularly to condemn. The frst was the materialism and uniformity bred by corporate capitalism. He japed in the opening lines of “Concord” that “ten thousand Fords are idle here” in search of “a tradition” (Poems 30). The poem suggests that the pallid affrmations of the Unitarian Church, as Emerson called them, ultimately proved powerless to control “Mammon’s unbridled industry.” The second, worse strand of our politics was war and the drive for dominion. “Concord” ends by mourning the Indians slaughtered in King Philip’s War or Metacom’s Rebellion (1675–1678). In Lowell’s view, it was not the revolutionists’ “shot” that was “heard round the world,” as Emerson put it, but rather Metacom’s “scream” whose “echo girdled this imperfect globe.” As we will see, the early, “conservative” Lowell had much in common with the “liberal” and at times radical fgure he later became. In Life Studies, Lowell fagged his turn from “the city of God” to a secular “tragic liberalism.”12 He did so overtly in the sonnet “Inauguration Day:  January 1953,” which mourns Eisenhower’s election in imagery of iron and ice, paralysis and death. The bathos of “the Republic summons Ike” says it all (Poems 117). One imagines a pause between the frst three words and the fourth as if to say, is this all you can come up with? Not even “General Dwight David Eisenhower,” the crusader in Europe, but rather the anodyne, smiling stick fgure of “Ike”? Moreover, Lowell implicitly 333 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.025

Steven Gould Axelrod

undermines his own cultural privilege throughout Life Studies. He admires or identifes himself with various social others:  a “mad Negro soldier”; a Jewish “great-great-Grandfather”; “gangs of Irish, Negroes, Latins”; “an older girl”; a “homosexual” poet; “Agrippina” the Younger; a buffoonish mental patient also named “Bobbie”; a “fairy decorator”; and fnally a “mother skunk.” The self-certain young male poet of Lord Weary’s Castle has remade himself as a fragile fgure unsure even of his ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, or sanity. In such ways, even the most autobiographical poems take on public meanings. The title poem of For the Union Dead represents a high point in Lowell’s development as a political poet. Like some other poets of his generation, he sought to recover a public world and in some small way to heal it. His autobiographical voice does sound in the poem, recalling visits to the old South Boston Aquarium, which is “boarded” up as the poem commences and “gone” before it ends (Poems 376–378). But this private voice yields to a more robust public one, which laments commercialization, war, and thousands of Fords, in a vein similar to that of “Concord.” The difference is that there is no framework of institutional religion or cultural nostalgia to bolster this jeremiad. Lowell has made a move not only to “tragic liberalism” but also toward the free play of postmodernism. Yes, heroic acts punctuated the past (the sacrifce of Colonel Shaw and the African American enlisted soldiers), but they continue to happen in the present (the courage of the “Negro school-children”). Moral horrors have indeed occurred in the present (“Hiroshima boiling”), but they also occurred in the past (the “ditch” where Colonel Shaw and the enlisted men were thrown). Perhaps the poem aims too wildly. What is actually so terrible about those fsh-tailed cars and their parking spaces? But perhaps even there one can appreciate a moral vision far-seeing enough to include environmental awareness. “For the Union Dead” sets echoing words (“Servare,” “servility”) and rhyming images (aquarium “fsh,” “fnned cars”) into motion, thereby engaging the public sphere in a new and powerful way. In 1965 Lowell personally reentered the polis, the space of exposure. President Lyndon Johnson had invited him to participate in a one-day Festival of the Arts at the White House. Lowell accepted and then, in light of the escalating war in Vietnam, recanted the acceptance (Prose 370–371). It was the second time Lowell had refused a sitting U.S. president. The widely publicized act had resonance for many Americans, strengthening opposition to the war. As a result, Lowell became a temporary celebrity. He participated in the anti-war March on the Pentagon, helped guide Senator Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war campaign for the presidency, and published two volumes of political poetry. 334 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.025

The Three Voices of Robert Lowell

The frst was Near the Ocean (1967), which tied original poems together with translations of Horace, Juvenal, and others. In his preface, Lowell wrote that the connecting theme of the translations “is Rome, the greatness and horror of her Empire” (Poems 381). He then disingenuously added, “How one jumps from Rome to the America of my own poems is something of a mystery to me.” If it was a mystery, Lowell himself was the only person incapable of solving it. The frst original poem, “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” excoriates the rise of an American empire with its “hammering military splendor” (Poems 385). In the poem’s fnal stanza, arguably the greatest Lowell ever wrote, the speaker eulogizes not simply a fallen empire but a ruined planet, “a ghost” forever lost in “our monotonous sublime” (Poems 386). Another original poem, “Central Park,” also takes a distinctly Juvenalian tone, observing the nation’s endemic “stain of fear and poverty” and the “knife” or “club” hidden behind each bush (Poems 393). If Lowell’s “Near the Ocean” sequence depended on his rediscovery of “Marvell’s elegant baroque stanza,” his next book, Notebook 1967–68, required his development of “unrhymed, loose blank verse sonnets” (Interviews 156). Although both volumes juxtaposed Lowell’s public voice with his autobiographical and metapoetic voices, it was the public tone that dominated. Among the frst sonnets Lowell wrote for Notebook 1967–68 were “The March” I  and II, composed the very day he participated in the Pentagon March (Poems 545–546). These poems were soon joined by others on Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Che Guevara, the Napoleonic wars, the Civil War, World War II, the Vietnam War, the 1968 election campaign, and so on. Although Burton Feldman critiqued the volume as “protest-placard” poetry,13 it’s not that at all. It’s a complicated series of meditations on power, nation, and individual agency. Lowell reengaged with his political Furies one last time, in his valedictory poem, “George III.” Initially published in Newsweek, the poem compares and at times merges George III with Richard Nixon, both deformed by mental illness and tyrannical impulse. Yet the poem empathizes with these “mad, bad” fgures, leaving us with rather poignant images of George III singing a hymn to his harpsichord and Nixon listening disconsolately to his own voice on tape (Poems 843–845). Lowell’s public voice was resolutely complex. He once wrote, “I wish to turn the clock back with every breath I take, but I hope I have the courage to occasionally cry out against those who wrongly rule us.”14 His cry against others inevitably involved a self-critical awareness of his own investments in the iniquities of power. 335 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.025

Steven Gould Axelrod

3 Lowell’s metapoetic voice complements his private and public ones. Whereas the other voices speak of people, events, and an inner life inherently separate from literary discourse, the self-refexive voice is wholly textual and intertextual, making no effort to negotiate the world dimensional. This voice utters only a written language. One might say that it is Lowell’s most postmodern voice, though I think that his alternative voices – in addressing the problematics of author, culture, politics, and form  – also qualify as postmodern. Still, his metapoetic poems provide the spaces in which he most fully inhabits what J. Hillis Miller calls “the linguistic moment.”15 At frst Lowell’s metapoetic voice could be heard mostly through his translations and imitations, which appeared in almost every volume he published. His frst trade book, Lord Weary’s Castle, includes at least six such poems, and his later volume, Imitations, is composed of nothing but. In his imitations, Lowell engages with precursory poets, playing with both his own voice and that of the predecessor, and unfxing both frames of reference in the process. In a linked strategy, Lowell also deposited the language of others in what was essentially an original poem. He often took passages from prose, and, like Kathy Acker, did not identify his sources. For example, “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” silently adapts sentences from the Bible, Milton, Thoreau, Melville, Hopkins, and E.  I. Watkin’s Catholic Art and Culture. “Hawthorne” includes almost no words not written by Nathaniel Hawthorne himself. “George III” takes so much from Oscar Sherwin’s Uncorking Old Sherry that Lowell defensively labeled it a “translation.” Another of Lowell’s intertextual strategies was to pay homage to fellow writers, to celebrate and mourn their unique gift but also to search out creative qualities they shared with others. This strategy comes to the fore in Lowell’s poems about Ford, Santayana, Schwartz, and Crane in Life Studies. It reaches its apogee in History, where numerous poems depict creative masters from the distant past (Sappho, Cicero) and from Lowell’s personal experience (Eliot, Pound, Frost, Williams, Bishop, Berryman, Jarrell, Plath). Another manifestation of Lowell’s metapoetic project was his constant self-revision, especially in Notebook 1967–68, Notebook, For Lizzie and Harriet, and History. Some of the revisions there involve alternative phrasing, whereas others produce major reversals, as when “these are words” becomes “we are words” (Poems 600). Lowell’s revisionary practice subverts the traditional conception of a sovereign author who puts his thoughts into words and instead interpellates the poem as a differential textual endeavor, an assemblage of words upon words, something both written and rewritten. 336 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.025

The Three Voices of Robert Lowell

The fnal manifestation of Lowell’s metapoetic voice resides in his late meditations on his own artistic project. His poems do not ponder themselves, in the manner of Eliot’s “That was a way of putting it – not very satisfactory.” Rather, they look back on his oeuvre and try to make sense of it. In “Reading Myself,” for example, Lowell assesses his poetic production in self-ironizing ways. He wonders if he’s earned his “grass on the minor slopes of Parnassus,” taking for granted that his contribution is minor at best (Poems 591). By adding “circle to circle” in his expanding honeycomb of words, he had hoped to “prove its maker is alive,” yet his work will only be his “open coffn” in the end. Perhaps the greatest example of Lowell’s metapoetic voice occurred at the very end of his poetic career, in the poem called “Epilogue” (Poems 838). Worrying about the value of an art based on recollection, Lowell’s speaker persuades himself that his poetics of memory did indeed involve the imagination. He praises the “grace of accuracy,” an enigmatic concept suggesting both precise recall and spiritual well-being. He thus imputes a saving grace to his poetic aspirations (if not necessarily to his achievements). He sought to give each textual “fgure” its “living name.” In his last published essay, Lowell similarly prayed that his progress had been “more than recoiling with satiation and disgust from one style to another” (Poems 993). He hoped “there has been increase of beauty, wisdom, tragedy, and all the blessings of this consuming chance.” N OT E S 1 Jeffrey Meyers, ed., Robert Lowell:  Interviews and Memoirs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988): 85. Hereafter Interviews. 2 Christopher Ricks, “The Three Lives of Robert Lowell,” (1965; rpt. The Critical Response to Robert Lowell, ed. Steven Gould Axelrod (Westport, CT.:  Greenwood Press, 1999):  116–120. My analysis owes much less to T.  S. Eliot’s “The Three Voices of Poetry,” which posits the voice of the poet talking to himself, addressing an audience, or creating a dramatic character (1953; rpt. On Poetry and Poets, [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957]: 96). 3 Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, eds. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003): 992. Hereafter Poems. 4 M. S. Rosenthal installed the terminology of confession in his seminal review “Poetry as Confession” (1959; rpt. Critical Response, note 2: 64–68). 5 Deborah Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002): 42. 6 James Longenbach, Modern Poetry After Modernism (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1997): 5. 7 Peter Orr, ed., The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets (London: Routledge, 1966): 167. 8 Robert Lowell, Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987): 226. Hereafter Prose. 337 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.025

Steven Gould Axelrod 9 Robert Lowell, Selected Letters, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005): 671. Hereafter Letters. 10 See, e.g., Philip Metres, Behind the Lines (Iowa City:  University of Iowa Press, 2007): 27–49. 11 Jerome Mazzaro, “Robert Lowell’s Early Politics of Apocalypse,” Modern American Poetry, ed. Jerome Mazzaro (New York: McKay, 1970): 321–350. 12 Poems, 113; Lowell quoted in Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978): 193. 13 Burton Feldman, “Robert Lowell: Poetry and Politics,” Dissent 16 (1969): 550. 14 Robert Lowell, “Liberalism and Activism,” Commentary 74 (April 1969): 19. 15 J. Hillis Miller, The Linguistic Moment (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1985). F U RT H E R R E A DI N G Altieri, Charles, The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006): 157–173. Axelrod, Steven Gould, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). ed., The Critical Response to Robert Lowell (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999). Axelrod, Steven Gould, and Helen Deese, eds., Robert Lowell: New Essays on the Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Bloom, Harold, ed., Robert Lowell (New York: Chelsea House, 1987). Doreski, William, Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors: Poetics of the Public and Personal (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999). Hamilton, Ian, Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982). Kearful, Frank J., “ ‘Stand and live’:  Tropes of Falling, Rising, Standing in Robert Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle,” Connotations 17 (2007/2008): 29–60. Lowell, Robert, Collected Poems, eds. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987). Letters, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). Mariani, Paul, Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994). Perloff, Marjorie, The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1973). Ricks, Christopher, True Friendship (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2010): 143–222. Spiegelman, Willard, Imaginative Transcripts (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009): 247–284. Spivack, Kathleen, With Robert Lowell and His Circle (Boston:  Northeastern University Press, 2012). Tillinghast, Richard, Robert Lowell’s Life and Work:  Damaged Grandeur (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Travisano, Thomas, Midcentury Quartet:  Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, and Berryman and the Making of a Postmodern Poetics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999). ed. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). 338 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.025

The Three Voices of Robert Lowell Vendler, Helen, “Lowell’s Persistence:  The Forms Depression Makes,” Kenyon Review 22 (Winter 2000): 216–233. Walcott, Derek, “On Robert Lowell,” New  York Review of Books (March 1, 1984): 25–31. Wallingford, Katherine, Robert Lowell’s Language of the Self (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1988). Williamson, Alan Pity the Monsters:  The Political Vision of Robert Lowell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).

339 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.025

25 A L A N GOL DI N G

The Black Mountain School

In the preface to his groundbreaking anthology, The New American Poetry 1945–1960, Donald Allen writes: In order to give the reader some sense of the history of the period and the primary alignment of the writers, I have adopted the unusual device of dividing the poets into fve large groups, though these divisions are somewhat arbitrary and cannot be taken as rigid categories. . . . The frst group includes those poets who were originally closely identifed with the two important magazines of the period, Origin and Black Mountain Review, which frst published their mature work. Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley were on the staff of Black Mountain College in the early ffties, and Edward Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer, and Jonathan Williams studied there. Paul Blackburn, Paul Carroll, Larry Eigner, and Denise Levertov published work in both magazines but had no connection with the college.1

One would want to add the names of John Wieners, Hilda Morley, and M. C. Richards.2 Nevertheless, Allen’s remarks constitute the frst gathering and naming of the Black Mountain school – although it’s worth noting that nowhere does Allen use that exact term. We might also note that Allen defnes the group not aesthetically but via publishing, social, and geographical associations. At the most literal level, then, two central factors give meaning to the idea of Black Mountain poetry: attendance at the highly experimental and arts-centered Black Mountain College, as faculty or student, between 1948 (when Charles Olson taught his frst class there) and 1956 (when the last class met); and publication in a network of self-created and self-edited experimental small presses (Jonathan Williams’s Jargon Society, Robert Creeley’s Divers Press) and little magazines, especially Black Mountain Review (edited by Creeley) and Origin (edited by Cid Corman) but extending in the late 1950s and early 1960s to such magazines as Measure, Yugen, Floating Bear, Kulchur, and others. As Allen points out, through publication in these magazines and presses, as well as personal connections and shared 340 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.026

The Black Mountain School

poetic principles, poets who never attended the college come to be associated with Black Mountain poetics. Critics tend to use the terms “Black Mountain poetry” and “projectivist poetry” (after Olson’s infuential essay “Projective Verse”) interchangeably. It could be argued that the term “Black Mountain” emphasizes the social connections among the poets while “projectivist” foregrounds matters of poetics. The former term is more precise, however, in that poets associated with the Black Mountain label typically share various features of a projectivist poetics, while some poets whose work has certain “projectivist” features have little or no meaningful connection to the Black Mountain nexus.3 The uneasy terminology raises, in turn, the questions both of the parameters and the lifespan of the group or label. Narrowly, the term “Black Mountain poetry” refers to the work that Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, and Denise Levertov produced between the late 1940s and 1970.4 Olson, the group’s fgurehead and most visible theorist, died in 1970; by this time, the group had been long dispersed geographically and had started to diverge poetically (as evidenced in work such as Dorn’s ongoing long poem Gunslinger and in ferce disagreements such as Levertov’s and Duncan’s over appropriate poetic responses to the Vietnam War) to a degree that made it diffcult to talk any more about a shared Black Mountain aesthetic. Since it is impossible in a relatively short overview to do justice to the rich range of work associated with “Black Mountain poetics” in its largest sense, I  will concentrate here on the primary fgures of Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, and Dorn. We have many terms, with rather different connotations, for describing sets of affliations among poets – coterie, school, movement, group, nexus, community – and along these lines we can think of the Black Mountain poets as one of the most infuential avant-gardes in American poetry. Arguing for Black Mountain as one of the “four literary avant-garde scenes since 1945 [that] have mattered to poetry,” Robert von Hallberg goes on to propose a four-part defnition of a poetic avant-garde: 1) avant-gardists are motivated by a will to produce the dominant art of the future, not just by a desire to receive recognition of their own talent; 2) to this end, they form a public confederation of artists in different media, (3) who oppose the established conventions of a contemporary art community. Finally 4) an avant-garde has an explicit view of the relation between art and society.5

The Black Mountain school is the frst American poetic avant-garde to have its roots in the academy – though “the academy” hardly seems an adequate descriptor for this highly experimental, unaccredited, arts-centered small 341 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.026

Alan Golding

college in rural North Carolina that was founded in 1933 by John Rice and that closed due to bankruptcy in 1957. This larger context of committed experimentalism concentrated in a single geographical location with a self-conscious sense of community is crucial for understanding the ethos of Black Mountain poetry as a movement. Creeley taught there sporadically across a period of two years from 1954 to 1956 while maintaining his primary residence in Mallorca; Duncan taught for the spring and summer of 1956, though he had frst met Olson in 1947. Olson taught his frst course at Black Mountain as a visiting lecturer in 1948 and worked there full time, as faculty member and rector, from 1951 to 1957. Dorn did two short stints as a student in 1950–1951 and 1954–1955. Creeley, Duncan, and Olson were actually never on the Black Mountain campus at the same time, and Levertov never set foot there at all. Meanwhile, at various points, Black Mountain College included as students or faculty major cutting-edge post-World War II fgures in all the arts: in music, John Cage, David Tudor, Lou Harrison; in dance, Merce Cunningham; in painting and the plastic arts, Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Franz Kline, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, John Chamberlain. The poets interacted and collaborated regularly with these artists; their association with the college may have been relatively brief in most cases, but it was nonetheless formative. If the various poets’ connection with Black Mountain College is more diverse and contingent than the label might lead one to expect, and if their writing is similarly diverse, defnable shared principles still allow us to talk about a Black Mountain poetics. To defne that poetics means acknowledging the centrality of Olson’s 1950 manifesto-essay, “Projective Verse.” The essay has its origins in correspondence with Creeley and Frances Boldereff, a largely unacknowledged female source for signifcant aspects of Olson’s poetics.6 Like many manifestos, “Projective Verse” is designed as much to introduce and explain Olson’s own poetics as it is to found a movement or tendency, but it certainly had the latter effect. In reaction to a conservative late-modernist view of the poem as carefully shaped object or product, “Projective Verse” emphasizes formal and epistemological openness and process. Olson begins with what became infuential terms in the critical discourse around post-WWII American poetry, setting a “closed” verse that he associates with print and with “inherited line, stanza, overall form” against “open” forms, or the process of “composition by feld,” grounded in a breath-based line distinctive to the poet’s individual physiology and a view of the poetic process as exploratory and unpredictable. In the scientistic rhetoric that marks much of his writing about poetry, Olson isolates three central aspects of feld composition: “kinetics,” the poem defned as “a high-energy construct and . . . an energy-discharge”; the longstanding 342 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.026

The Black Mountain School

“principle” of organic form, most immediately derived from Creeley and subsequently adopted and adapted by generations of American poets, that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT”;7 and the “process” by which “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION.”8 Olson foregrounds breath as the basis of a (typically, free verse) poetic line rooted in the writer’s physiology. In a schematic but infuential parallel formulation, a projective poetics combines “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE” and “the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.” Again, the basis for poesis here is bodily. It is at the level of the minute details of language, the syllable, that “the dance of the intellect” (Olson borrows Ezra Pound’s phrase) manifests itself. As part of this “dance” and Olson’s emphasis on speed, “slow things, similes, say, or adjectives” must be minimized, “the conventions which logic has forced on syntax must be broken open,” and the conventions of page space must be stretched by inventive use of the typewriter to produce a visual prosody that suggests a score for performance, an attention to page layout infuenced by Pound, Williams, and Cummings (CP 242–244). These technical or aesthetic claims involve, for Olson, an epistemological change, a new “stance toward reality” that Olson terms “objectism,” or “the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego.” In an anti-humanist move, the poet’s self is to be thought of not as the source, center, or primary organizing force of the poem but as another object in a world of (especially natural) objects. Meanwhile, the poem’s object status is proposed in terms that harken back to the beginning of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All: the poet seeks “to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature” (CP 247).9 Olson himself considered “The Kingfshers” (1950) his most important single poem, a gateway into the rest of his work, and many subsequent readers and anthology editors have agreed, seeing it also as a crucial document of early postmodernism.10 (Olson was the frst American poet consistently to use and theorize the term “postmodern.”) The poem begins “What does not change / is the will to change,” the mid-line virgule an early example of Olson’s tendency to indicate pacing typographically and the line as a whole characteristically representing a thesis or proposition from which the poem will take off and explore but to which it will not necessarily return. Given Olson’s didactic ambitions as a poet in this poem about living in what is felt to be, post-WWII, a new historical era still in need of defnition, the changes in question are large-scale, historical, cultural. The poem takes off from one specifc shift in values: “ ‘The kingfshers! / who cares / for their feathers / now?’ ” In ancient Indo-Chinese cultural exchanges, “the kingfshers’ 343 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.026

Alan Golding

feathers were wealth,” but no longer is that the case. In Olson’s own historical moment, the key change is the end of World War II, marked by the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For Olson, this action, the Nazi death camps, and the war more generally inaugurated the postmodern by destroying once and for all traditional notions of the human and of an enlightened modernity, marking simultaneously an end, a beginning (represented by the accession of Mao Tse-Tung to power in China, a hoped-for new political dawn), and the need to search for new sources of cultural vitality outside of the received Western ones (one such source, which for Olson precedes the development of classical Greek culture, is the Oracle at Delphi). Thus the poem is organized partly around images of birth and death, of cyclical change. Rejecting a history of Western colonialism represented by Hernan Cortez’s invasion of Mexico, Olson turns in his career to non-Euroamerican sources of possible value:  the Maya, Mao (briefy), ancient Sumer. The challenge of that search is the poem’s central theme, as it closes with a challenge to the reader – “I pose you your question: // shall you uncover honey / where maggots are?” – and a statement of his own intent to uncover alternative origins – “I hunt among stones.”11 Like his precursor Pound, a central infuence, and like his fellow Black Mountaineer Robert Duncan, Olson writes a learned poetry of which large swatches are based on, or directly cite, other texts. Along with a wide range of allusion, “The Kingfshers” directly cites ancient and modern sources in history (Plutarch, William H. Prescott), communications (Norbert Wiener), and poetry (Pound, Rimbaud), along with the Encyclopedia Britannica. Consistent with his collagist use of a citational poetics, Olson typically juxtaposes multiple kinds of diction, moves from the narrative to the discursive to the polemical to the lyrical, between periodic or hypotactic and fragmented or paratactic syntax, and across wide variations in line length. Here is a typical passage: I thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said la lumiere’              but the kingfsher de l’aurore’ but the kingfsher few west est devant nous!              he got the color of his breast              from the heat of the setting sun! The features are, the feebleness of the feet (syndactylism of the 3rd & 4th digit) the bill, serrated, sometimes a pronounced beak, the wings where the color is, short and round, the tail inconspicuous. (CPCO 87) 344 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.026

The Black Mountain School

The range of superfcially incompatible or unrelated references and citations (Plutarch, Mao’s 1948 speech to the Chinese Communist Party, the legend of the kingfsher’s coloring, an Encyclopedia Britannica entry) purposefully defeats linear interpretation. Olson showed no interest in conventional notions of progression, development, or unity. The risk can be verboseness and a sense of structural randomness, but with close attention the parts of an Olson poem generally turn out to ft. In a move away from the modernist fetishizing of the concrete image, Olson tends toward deliberately abstract diction; he writes a poetry of ideas, pushing back against the norms and defnitions of the lyric and more generally of the poetic that dominated the literary scene under the aegis of the New Criticism for much of his career. His often fragmentary, self-revising syntax generates a sense of struggle to get something said, with frequent sentences and open parentheses (a trope that Olson was the frst to use consistently) suggesting the poem as exploration and discovery, intellectually mobile and resistant to formal closure. His poems are marked by discontinuous organization and unpredictable transitions, though his is not the high modernist discontinuity in search of a lost coherence that marks Eliot’s The Waste Land. Olson’s major long work is the multi-volume Maximus Poems, a locally based historical poem modeled partly on Pound’s Cantos (which Olson considered too self-centered, however) and Williams’s Paterson (which Olson considered too narrow in its historical range and in its understanding of the American city). The primary setting is the fshing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, founded in the seventeenth century, where Olson’s family vacationed in his childhood and where he eventually moved. Maximus becomes an open-ended lifelong poem with no preconceived pattern or direction and no claims to wholeness or totality, and after its heavily historical and documentary frst volume, it becomes more personal and mythological in its emphasis. Many of the individual poems are cast as “letters,” direct addresses sometimes to specifc individuals in the community’s present or past and sometimes to the town as a whole or an anonymous stand-in for the town:  “Isolated person in Gloucester, Massachusetts, I, Maximus, address you / you islands / of men and girls.”12 The fgure of Maximus – a rhetorical fction soon dropped  – is based on the fourth-century itinerant Neoplatonic philosopher Maximus of Tyre (“Maximus,” “the biggest” or “greatest,” is an appropriate punning stand-in for the six-foot-eight inch Olson), one of whose main teaching subjects was the possibility of human community, what Olson calls “polis.” Though Olson actually makes little of the connection, Tyre, like Gloucester, was a seaport central to its region’s history that fell from grace into corruption like, in Olson’s view, Gloucester 345 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.026

Alan Golding

itself. In turn, Gloucester becomes in The Maximus Poems a microcosm of the nation itself. Versions of the idea of organic form and of the Olson/Creeley aphorism “form is never more than an extension of content” appear in Black Mountain statements of poetics from Levertov’s “Some Notes on Organic Form” (“form is never more than a revelation of content”) to Creeley’s virtually verbatim repetition of it as “the frst rule” to Duncan’s sense of “that most real where there is no form that is not content, no content that is not form.”13 This principle, and the (unstable) distinction between open and closed forms – sometimes framed, as by Duncan, as the distinction between the imposition of a contrived order (closed) and the discovery of an immanent order (open) – is a central shared feature of Black Mountain poetics, widely discussed by the poets themselves and explicitly set against what Duncan called “the concept of form as the imposing of rules and establishing of regularities” (FC 102). This recurring view of content as shaping and inextricable from form also manifests itself in the Black Mountain poets’ frequent use of dance as a metaphor for poetic form: “who obeys the fgures of / the present dance,” at the very beginning of Olson’s Maximus Poems.14 In her poem “Overland to the Islands,” discussed below, Levertov twice refers to the poem’s movement as a dance.15 For Duncan the syllabic measures of Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” “form a dance immediate to the eye as a rhythmic pattern,” while the poem as an act of consciousness “comes in a dancing organization between personal and cosmic identity” (FC 94, 78). Poetic form is equally a process of discovery for the Black Mountain poets, and the poem an act of exploration: “poetry reveals itself to us as we obey the orders that appear in our work,” in Duncan’s words (FC 82). What Levertov calls organic poetry assumes “an intuition of an order,” “a form in all things . . . which the poet can discover and reveal,” and as such it is, in Levertov’s term, “exploratory,” with the poem’s “unique inscape revealing itself as [the poet] goes” (7, 9). The relationship between content and form “is discoverable only in the work, not before it” (9). In Levertov’s “Overland to the Islands,” a dog – her fgure for the poet – sniffs its way unpredictably but not haphazardly across the landscape: Let’s go – much as that dog goes, intently haphazard. The Mexican light on a day that  ‘smells like autumn in Connecticut’ makes iris ripples on his  black gleaming fur – and that too  is as one would desire – a radiance  consorting with the dance. 346 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.026

The Black Mountain School                  Under his feet rocks and mud, his imagination, sniffng, engaged in its perceptions – dancing edgeways, there’s nothing the dog disdains on his way, nevertheless he keeps moving, changing pace and approach but not direction – “every step an arrival.”16

A poem such as Levertov’s indicates the Black Mountain tendency toward self-refexiveness, toward writing poems that both embody and discuss their own poetics. Although the distinction is one of degree rather than of kind, this recurring tendency to write an ars poetica, along with the insistent prose theorizing of their work, separates the Black Mountain poets from many of their contemporaries and fellow travelers. Levertov’s “Illustrious Ancestors” and “Williams:  An Essay,” Duncan’s “Poetry, A  Natural Thing,” Olson’s “ABCs” (CPCO 171), Creeley’s “As real as thinking,” and much else in Pieces – these poems are all insistently self-commenting (CEP 77).17 “This is what I  wanted for the last poem, / a loosening of conventions and return to open form”: such directly self-refexive lines as these from Duncan’s “Food for Fire, Food for Thought” are unlikely to appear in most of his contemporaries’ work (OTF 95). Additionally, most of the Black Mountaineers authored signifcant and infuential books of criticism: Duncan’s Fictive Certainties and (posthumously published) The H.  D. Book, Creeley’s A Quick Graph (while Creeley rarely wrote an essay longer than a few pages, his Collected Essays runs to 603 pages), Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, Human Universe and Other Essays and The Special View of History, Levertov’s The Poet in the World and Light Up the Cave. One also fnds in Black Mountain poetry the embrace (not universally shared, with Levertov a notable exception) of abstract, conceptual diction already noted in Olson. The most piercing Creeley love lyric can take a sudden turn into diction like “here is tedium, / despair, a painful / sense of isolation and / whimsical if pompous // self-regard” (257–258). Dorn uses similarly discursive language to follow Olson’s interest in global migration and even geological patterns in various early poems and also to develop his own themes of class and economic exploitation: The misery is superfcial now. I have dwelt on that quality in other poems without attention to the obvious drain 347 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.026

Alan Golding        of social defnition the oblivious process of a brutal economic calculus . . .18

Often this abstraction is allied to a kind of earnestness and didacticism, in Olson, early Dorn, and a good deal of Duncan. Put another way, one fnds considerably less humor in Black Mountain work than in that of their contemporaries in the Beat movement or the New York School, until one gets to Dorn’s long poem Gunslinger, serially published starting in 1968. Gunslinger is a comic shaggy-dog narrative of the American West in which a motley crew led by the eponymous “semidios” Gunslinger, and including his talking horse, Lil the dancehall madam, the poet, and a character named “I” pursue a ghostly Howard Hughes “across / two states / of mind” in a never-to-be-completed quest.19 Dorn went on to become one of twentieth-century U.S. American poetry’s major and most incisive cultural satirists, a mode untypical of earlier Black Mountain work. A further nuanced articulation of the principles underlying Black Mountain poetics occurs in a handful of essays by Robert Duncan: “Notes on Poetics Regarding Olson’s Maximus” (1956), “Pages from a Notebook” (1960), “Ideas of the Meaning of Form” (1961), and “Towards an Open Universe” (1966). Far more of a Romantic poet than his Black Mountain peers, raised in theosophy and a student of medieval and Renaissance literature at UC Berkeley from 1948 to 1950, actively drawing in his work on fairy tale, classical myth, medieval romance, mystical and hermetic spiritual traditions, dream, and magic, Duncan can seem a long way from his poet colleagues.20 But his reading of The Maximus Poems shows deep sympathy with Olson’s “aesthetic based on energies,” including a prosody based on individual physiological rhythms – “the muscular realization of language is the latest mode of poetry” (FC 68, 72). Duncan is an insistently dialectical thinker and theorist (though quite authoritative in his pronouncements for all that), and any given term in his discourse on poetics usually invokes or assumes its opposite:  Dionysian-Apollonian, disorder-order, and so forth, as he lays out in “Ideas of the Meaning of Form,” all existing in a Blakean or Heraclitean “dynamic unity,” a term that is probably more faithful to Duncan’s vocabulary than “dialectical” (FC 81). Such are the dynamics of the “grand collage,” Duncan’s term for his poetic project taken as a whole, about which he once memorably remarked “I don’t seek a synthesis but a melee.”21 This revealing distinction between “synthesis” and “melee” is strikingly evident in Duncan’s “Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar,” a longish poem that asks us to connect a lot of apparently disparate elements – the mythical lovers Cupid and Psyche, the journey of the individual soul, 348 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.026

The Black Mountain School

American politics and manifest destiny, Walt Whitman, the dance and the children that appear frequently as fgures of “frst permission” or “human greenness” in early Duncan (OTF 7, 9). The poem includes a staggering variety of language and imagery: mythic, mundane, archaic, contemporary, abstract, concrete, analytic, sensual and erotic, prose, poetry. It is, in its own terms, “not a statue but a mosaic, an accumulation of metaphor” (OTF 69). As Olson does in “Projective Verse,” Duncan (politically an anarchist and also the author of an infuential early gay rights essay, “The Homosexual in Society”) claims connections – in ways typical of avant-garde movements – between aesthetic and social change:  “my longing moves beyond governments to a co-operation; that may have seeds of being in free verse or free thought” (FC 90). Later in the same essay, “the counterpart of free verse may be free thought and free movement” – not an equation, admittedly, that readers have taken seriously for a long time (FC 103). Generally with the Black Mountain poets, arguments about poetry extend into much broader cultural arguments – much more is felt to be at stake than the purely literary. “Ideas of the Meaning of Form” is a sustained argument against the then-dominant values of the New Criticism and against the institutionalized literary study of the time (a common object of Black Mountain critique), particularly against ideas of poetic form and prosody that Duncan saw as representing convention, control, the exclusion of Otherness, and limitations on vision and creative passion. Form is immanent, “a music in the heart of things that the poet sought,” discovered intuitively in the process of writing rather than consciously planned or mapped out: “our instant knowing of it as we work in the poem, where the descriptive or analytic mind would falter” (FC 92, 78). Duncan gestures toward Olson’s connection between composition by feld and a transformed “stance toward reality,” remarking that “it is a changing aesthetic, but it is also a changing sense of life” (88). He specifcally connects his ideas on “exposed, open form” to the shared enterprise of Louis Zukofsky, Olson, Levertov, and Creeley, and openly recalls “Projective Verse” and the work of Pound and Williams, saying “that the locus of form might be in the immediate minim of the work, and that one might concentrate upon the sound and meaning present where one was, and derive melody and story from impulse, not from plan” (FC 87).22 Proceeding similarly “from impulse, not from plan,” with the impulse embodied especially at the level of prosody, is the poetry of Robert Creeley. Creeley’s work through the mid-1960s  – up to the radical formal experimentation of his serial work Pieces that represents one logical extension of the Black Mountain emphasis on process – is marked by a short line and deliberately hesitant enjambement created across frequently non-lexical line breaks. “The unsure // egoist is not / good for himself”:  in these closing 349 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.026

Alan Golding

lines of “The Immoral Proposition,” a syntactically complete aphorism is fractured across two stanzas and three lines, moving haltingly toward full predication, adjective severed from noun, the semantically empty “not” suspended at line’s end (125). These prosodic features reinforce themes of isolation and alienation, hesitancy, lack of confdence, painful love relationships, and extreme self-consciousness, in ways that made Creeley one of the most widely imitated poets of the 1960s. In Creeley’s work, that is, line and stanza break, enjambement, syntax, and the pacing they create – all sites of experiment for the Black Mountain poets and discussed by Creeley in terms of the infuence of 1950s jazz – relate directly to its themes and emotional atmosphere.23 In particular, an acute sense of self-division is one prominent feature of Creeley’s poetry (“As soon as / I speak, I / speaks”) manifest not just prosodically but also in the wide range and sudden shifts of diction noted earlier (from the extremely simple, even minimalist, to the abstractly intellectual) in his poems (294). At the same time, more frequently than his peers, he will use regular stanzaic forms (he favors the quatrain in his ’50s and ’60s work) for a base of at least numerical, if not emotional or epistemological, stability. The so-called anthology wars of the late 1950s and early 1960s can be seen as an argument over dominant and emergent versions of poetic modernism.24 At the time of Black Mountain poetry’s emergence as a cultural formation, and its initial gathering in Allen’s The New American Poetry, his writers constituted for Allen “our avant-garde, the true continuers of the modern movement in American poetry” – the “true continuers” of their somewhat marginal precursors Pound and Williams – that he wished to counterpose against the mid-twentieth-century poetic hegemony of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden:  an opposition that has shown remarkable longevity as a way of structuring late modernist US literary history.25 In his pointedly titled ABC of Infuence (with its play on Pound’s ABC of Reading), Christopher Beach argues for the Black Mountain poets as the main inheritors (along with, to a lesser extent, the San Francisco Renaissance) of the Pound-Williams experimental tradition, and by now they are widely regarded as one of the most signifcant groups in mid-twentieth US poetry.26 Olson and Creeley have had their work collected in major editions from the University of California Press, which is also in the process of publishing Duncan’s collected works. Meanwhile, in 2012 and 2015, the British presses Carcanet and Enitharmon issued, respectively, a collected and a previously uncollected Dorn. While Levertov’s work still awaits a scholarly collected edition, her individual volumes remain in print. Major collections of correspondence include the Duncan-Levertov letters, ten volumes of the still-incomplete Olson-Creeley correspondence, and Olson’s selected correspondence with Frances Boldereff 350 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.026

The Black Mountain School

and Cid Corman. While work remains to be done in this area, biographies of Olson are available by Tom Clark and Ralph Maud, of Dorn by Clark, of Duncan by Ekbert Faas and Lisa Jarnot, of Creeley by Faas, of Levertov by Dana Greene and Donna Hollenberg. Their poetry and theorizing has infuenced a wide range of subsequent writers, most especially  – though often contentiously – the Language writers who formulated much of their poetics in sometimes agonistic dialogue with the Black Mountain poets and the New American poetry. The work of those poets whom Olson called “the sons [and daughters] of Pound and Williams” has proven both long-lived and remarkably generative.27 N OT E S 1 Donald Allen, The New American Poetry 1945–1960 (New  York:  Grove, 1960): xii. 2 Morley and Richards are likely to be the least familiar names on this list. Morley resided at the college, taught for the academic year 1952–1953, and started a long and increasingly productive poetic career there; included in the frst edition of Paul Hoover’s widely circulated Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry (New  York:  Norton, 1994), she was recently dropped from the second. Levertov locates Morley explicitly in the Black Mountain line: “It is evident that Hilda Morley’s poetics is based on that of Pound and Williams; that she learned much from Olson; and, like Duncan and Creeley and myself, has looked to H. D. also for help and wisdom” (Light Up the Cave [New York: New Directions, 1981]: 265–266). M. C. Richards taught pottery at Black Mountain, though not continuously (fall 1945 to summer 1951); she wrote the widely infuential Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (Middletown, CT:  Wesleyan University Press, 1989), and her Imagine Inventing Yellow: New and Selected Poems (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1981)  includes work from 1945 to 1980. On the pervasive homosociality of Black Mountain poetry and the gender politics of its production, self-construction, and reception, the critical loci classici include Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Purple Prose: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry (Iowa City:  University of Iowa Press, 2012):  especially 89–197; Michael Davidson, Guys Like Us:  Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004): 28–48; Kathleen Fraser’s widely reprinted essay “The Tradition of Marginality,” in her Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000): 25–38; and Libbie Rifkin, Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avant-Garde (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 2000):  32–71. At the same time, Olson remained important for a number of later women poets who had still to negotiate the gender politics of his strongly masculinist poetics. 3 See, for instance, Miriam Nichols’s discussion of Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and Susan Howe under the rubric “projective verse,” while observing that “Olson and Creeley have emerged as the two major architects 351 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.026

Alan Golding

4

5

6

7

8

9

of Black Mountain postmodernism. Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser are similarly situated in relation to the Berkeley Renaissance” (Radical Affections: Essays on the Poetics of Outside [Tuscaloosa:  University of Alabama Press,  2010]:  11). Duncan was indeed closely associated with the San Francisco Renaissance; he was also pleased to be considered a Black Mountain poet for the purposes of Allen’s anthology. Critics will also commonly use the more capacious “New American” label to refer to the nexus of poets gathered by Allen and to those infuenced by them. Andrew Mossin’s Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in “New American” Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), for example, treats Olson, Duncan, Blaser, and Nathaniel Mackey. Early scholarship on Olson frequently extends itself in ways that both help us defne the critical parameters of the term “Black Mountain” and suggest the lack of critical consensus on those parameters. Paul Christensen, in Charles Olson: Call Him Ishmael (Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1979), concludes by discussing Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, and Blackburn as “the core of Olson’s circle” (198) and touching briefy on Dorn, Jonathan Williams, Wieners, and the prose writer Michael Rumaker. Sherman Paul’s The Lost America of Love, the sequel to his 1978 Olson’s Push, treats Creeley, Dorn, and Duncan as the “younger poets . . . who were closest to [Olson] and shared his adventure” (The Lost America of Love: Rereading Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981]: xi). Later, Edward Foster’s Understanding the Black Mountain Poets (Columbia:  University of South Carolina Press, 1995) covers Olson, Creeley, and Duncan. Anne Day Dewey’s Beyond Maximus: The Construction of Public Voice in Black Mountain Poetry (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 2007), treats Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, and Dorn, with predecessors in Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. Lisa Jarnot refers to “the key Black Mountain poets [as] Olson, Creeley, Duncan, and Denise Levertov,” in Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus. A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012): 136. “Poetry, Politics, and Intellectuals,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 8, Poetry and Criticism, 1940–1995, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 83. While the Creeley-Olson correspondence is generally acknowledged as the central epistolary exchange in both writers’ careers, the Boldereff-Olson correspondence from 1947–1950 alone (it continued sporadically until 1969)  occupies 543 published pages and is the site of crucial exchanges that shaped some of Olson’s major early poetry, prose, and reading. See Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff:  A  Modern Correspondence, eds. Ralph Maud and Sharon Thesen (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999). “Longstanding” given the principle’s roots in, for instance, Coleridge’s distinction between “Form as proceeding and Shape as superinduced,” or Emerson’s idea (in “The Poet”) of the “meter-making argument.” The quotations from “Projective Verse” in this paragraph come from Olson, Collected Prose, eds. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): 239–240. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as CP. Compare Williams’s assertion that the poet “holds no mirror up to nature but with his imagination rivals nature’s composition with his own,” aspiring

352 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.026

The Black Mountain School

10

11

12 13

14 15

16 17

18 19 20

21

22 23

to “the perfection of new forms as additions to nature,” in Spring and All (New York: New Directions, 2011): 51, 78. For a book-length discussion of “The Kingfshers,” see Ralph Maud, What Does Not Change: The Signifcance of Charles Olson’s “The Kingfshers” (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998). All citations in this paragraph come from Charles Olson, The Collected Poems of Charles Olson Excluding the Maximus Poems, ed. George F. Butterick (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1987):  86–93. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as CPCO. Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems, ed. George F. Butterick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983): 16. Levertov, The Poet in the World (New York:  New Directions, 1973):  13 (hereafter cited parenthetically by page number); Creeley, The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1989):  466; Duncan, Fictive Certainties (New York: New Directions, 1985): 81. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as FC. In Levertov’s essay, the Olsonian terms “feld” and “ear” are also key. Olson, Maximus Poems, 5. Compare Creeley’s comment on “the exceptional grace – a dancer’s, I liked to think  – of [Levertov’s] work” (“Preface:  Denise Levertov,” Levertov, Selected Poems, ed. Paul A. Lacey [New York: New Directions, 2002]: xv, my emphasis). As a young girl and teenager in England, Levertov had trained as a ballet dancer. Levertov, Collected Earlier Poems 1940–1960 (New  York:  New Directions, 1979): 55. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as CEP. Also quoted:  Levertov, Poems 1972–1982 (New  York:  New Directions, 2001):  229–230; Duncan, The Opening of the Field (New  York:  New Directions, 1960): 50 (hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as OTF); Creeley, Collected Poems 1945–1975 (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1982): 379. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. Dorn, Collected Poems, ed. Jennifer Dunbar Dorn (Manchester:  Carcanet, 2012): 138. Dorn, Gunslinger (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989): 30, 41. At the same time, Olson and Duncan share a profound interest in myth, and Levertov and Duncan share a concern with spirituality and the sacred, a concern that phased into orthodox Christianity in Levertov’s later work. Duncan, Bending the Bow (New York: New Directions, 1968): vii; “Pages from a Notebook,” The New American Poetry 1945–1960, ed. Donald M.  Allen (New York: Grove, 1960): 406. Meanwhile, Duncan’s idea that “the line might be a notation of how it is to be read” (FC 94) echoes Olson on the use of the typewriter. For Creeley’s best-known statement of his poetry’s relation to jazz, see the essay “Form” with which he closes his Collected Essays and where he observes how, following the examples of Charlie Parker and other contemporary musicians, in his poetry “the beat is used to delay, detail, prompt, defne . . . the emotional feld of the statement” (Collected Essays 591). For further useful comments on Parker’s importance for his poetics, see Robert Creeley, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, eds. Rod Smith, Peter Baker, and Kaplan Harris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014): 116. He also remarks, in a December 1, 2003 e-mail 353

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.026

Alan Golding

24

25 26 27

to Ammiel Alcalay, that “if the question is, did Olson either listen to or pick up on Charlie Parker during his (Parker’s) lifetime, the answer, as far as I  know, is still no” (Selected Letters 415). In a much-quoted 1968 interview, Olson had claimed, rather hyperbolically, “Boy, there was no poetic. It was Charlie Parker. Literally, it was Charlie Parker”:  Olson, Muthologos:  The Collected Lectures and Interviews, ed. George F. Butterick, vol. II (Bolinas: Four Seasons Foundation, 1979): 71. For a valuable overview of the war of the anthologies, see Jed Rasula, The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940–1990 (Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996): 223–247. Allen, “Preface,” The New American Poetry, xi. See Christopher Beach, ABC of Infuence:  Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Olson, Collected Prose, 246.

F U RT H E R R E A DI NG Dewey, Anne Day, Beyond Maximus:  The Construction of Public Voice in Black Mountain Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). Duberman, Martin, Black Mountain:  An Exploration in Community (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009). Foster, Edward Halsey, Understanding the Black Mountain Poets (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995). Fredman, Stephen, The Grounding of American Poetry:  Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Harris, Mary Emma, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2002). Katz, Vincent, ed., Black Mountain College:  Experiment in Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). Nicholls, Miriam, Radical Affections:  Essays on the Poetics of Outside (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010). Paul, Sherman, The Lost America of Love:  Rereading Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 1981).

354 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.026

26 DA NI E L   K AT Z

Jack Spicer

“I like music. You don’t have to believe anything to hear it,”1 Jack Spicer has the title character of his play Troilus suggest. For Spicer, however, poetry was something you had to believe. His work relentlessly attacks hypocrisy, smugness, intellectual cowardice, deception, and self-deception, largely sharing the “quasi-hysterical demand for truth” that Jean-Michel Rabaté has associated with the writings of Jacques Derrida.2 His very last poem, addressed to Allen Ginsberg, concerns nothing other than this sort of demystifying, here quite literally presented as an unmasking: “At least we both know how shitty the world is. You wearing a beard as a mask to disguise it. I wearing my tired smile.”3 Spicer’s work, then, is ethical and – like that of his close friends Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, as well as Charles Olson – political in the etymological sense, that is, deeply concerned with the relationship between the poet, the reading public, and the “polis.” Spicer’s fnal book, the Book of Magazine Verse, whose central conceit is the “idea of writing poems for magazines which would not print them”4 is revelatory in this context. The whole project is designed to attack cultural institutions at the very heart of their complacency, to compel them to acknowledge what they cannot abide, and thereby make patent what they can and do. Elsewhere, explaining why he doesn’t want to publish in Poetry magazine, he remarks, “But a magazine is a society” and “I don’t believe in the society that it [Poetry] creates” (H 157). Similar concerns are central to Spicer’s entire writing life, but they date to the early days of the Berkeley Renaissance, during the time of his closest friendship with Duncan and Blaser and his studies with the famous German émigré Medievalist, Ernst Kantorowicz. Only a few years before meeting Spicer, Duncan had, in 1944, courageously outed himself in the article “The Homosexual in Society,” published in Dwight MacDonald’s infuential journal, Politics. When MacDonald offered to publish the essay anonymously, given the real risks posed to its author, Duncan pointedly refused, adding that “the whole thing has no meaning if it is not signd [sic].”5 As early as 355 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.027

Daniel Katz

the forties, then, Spicer found himself part of an uncloseted gay poetic community, and later he would be active in the underground gay rights organisation, the Mattachine Society;6 life as a gay man in the forties, ffties, and sixties everywhere informs how Spicer’s poetics position questions of integrity, responsibility, and address. Similarly, when the State of California imposed the anti-communist loyalty oath on state employees, Kantorowicz, although an arch-conservative anti-communist himself, saw it as an assault on civil liberties and free speech – and all too redolent of the Nazism he had fed – and refused to sign, leaving the University of California at Berkeley for Princeton. Spicer followed suit, also refusing to sign, spending two years at the University of Minnesota until a change in regulations allowed him to return to continue his graduate studies at Berkeley.7 Spicer’s poetry, then, is always one of commitment, engagement, and personal (even personalized) address and interpellation. It is a poetry of conviction and belief. But that’s only half the story, because music, or more precisely song, remains the favourite poetic model of this decidedly lyric poet. For Spicer, the archetypal fgure of the poet is Orpheus. In an important early prose piece, Spicer opines, “The truth is that pure poetry bores everybody. It is even a bore to the poet,” before continuing: Orpheus was a singer. The proudest boast made about Orpheus was not that his poems were beautiful in and of themselves. There were no New Critics then. The proudest boast was that he, the singer with the songs, moved impossible audiences – trees, wild animals, the king of hell himself. (H 130)

Poetry remains song for Spicer, as a survey of so many of his titles will indicate, and he incorporated popular songs in his later work. Yet the measure of song is not its formal beauty taken as an abstraction but that beauty’s effect as an action on its audiences, impossible or otherwise. And the effect that Spicer most often sought was not to sate or soothe but, on the contrary (and to use of one his favorite terms), to disturb. Thus his emphasis on and mimicking of the disjunctive, aggressively provocative wit of be-bop in “Song for Bird and Myself,” or, in another vein, these mock-elegiac lines from the earlier “A Postscript to the Berkeley Renaissance”: What have I lost? When shall I start to sing A loud and idiotic song that makes The heart rise frightened into poetry Like birds disturbed? (CP 45)

However, as Spicer well knew, truth and affect do not necessarily correspond as values. The uneasy relationship between them, along with the tendency of arguments to assume a formal power and coherence independent of their validity, are among the major problems that underlie and motivate 356 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.027

Jack Spicer

Spicer’s most famous interventions in poetics: the tropes of “poetry as dictation” and of the “serial poem.” Such non-coincidences and disturbances are critical in the strict sense for Spicer in that they necessitate decisions and provoke actual crises, at once personal and political; and, in this way, they are also at the core of the poetic itself, the poetic largely being the space where these contradictions can be brought to the fore. One of the things that makes Spicer such a rewarding but diffcult poet is that contradiction, negation, and their exposition as paradox are seen as values in and of themselves (a careful reading of his work obviates the surprising fact that John Donne is one of the poets he studied most closely). Yet he resists allowing these values to be simply reduced to the formal, or aestheticized. For Spicer, these factors mean that claims for the autonomy of either the poem as object or the poet as expressive subject must be resisted in favor of a model in which subjectivity, sociality, and text come to be seen as a play of forces, or a network of nodes of exchange. This is why telecommunications (including the archaic form of the written letter) are so crucial to Spicer, not only in his models of intertextuality, as in After Lorca, but also in his models of both inter- and intra-subjectivity, notably in his late masterwork of mediation and semiotics, Language. There, he writes of the “long distance / calls” made not only from the poet to his audience, friends, lovers, and enemies, but also those “routing” his emotions “within” himself: Long Distance calls. They break sound Into electrical impulses and put it back again. Like the long telesexual route to the brain or the even longer teleerotic route to the heart. The numbers dialed badly, the connection faint. Your voice consisted of sounds that I had To route to phonemes, then to bound and free morphemes, then to syntactic structures. (CP 393)

Language is the culmination of a certain thrust of Spicer’s poetics in its insistence that language is itself telecommunicational, that proximity itself is routed: “the lips / Are never quite as far away as when you kiss,” the poem just quoted insists, and Language represents one of Spicer’s most profound explorations of Emily Dickinson’s poetics of the letter, separation, and distance, which had interested him since the mid 1950s.8 But Spicer’s sense of poetry as dictation, more indebted to Arthur Rimbaud than to Dickinson, polemically problematizes the role of the sender of the letter, or the origin of the message, in a manner different from, though not incompatible with, Dickinson’s articulations of lack, misdirection, and slippage. Jean Laplanche 357 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.027

Daniel Katz

has written of the “hollowed out” transference the good analyst produces, in which the analysand speaks to an “other” who precisely does not correspond to the real people who underwrite the analysand’s fantasies.9 Spicer’s theory of dictation gives us a hollowed-out poet, not “speaking” his own desires but becoming the vessel of an alien signal – perhaps from Mars, as Spicer liked to joke – which he, himself hardly more than a radio receiver, tunes into and broadcasts.10 Spicer’s trope of the poet as radio – as espoused in his famous “Vancouver lectures” of 1965 and in some of the late poetry – is explicitly indebted to Jean Cocteau’s flm Orphée, in which the poet receives poetry broadcasts from hell on his car radio. But it also opens into complex intertextual play with two other poets who were important to Spicer. First is Pound, notorious for his radio broadcasts for Fascist Italy but whose practice of creative translation was crucial for Spicer’s After Lorca, the haunted project that, in Spicer’s own account, is where his practice of “dictation” had its start; it is Pound who takes Spicer from translation to radio, problematising the structuring role of the poet throughout. The second interlocutor is Charles Olson, as the ideally “receptive” aspect of dictation is in many ways a polemical inversion of the values of Olson’s famous “projective verse,” at least as frequently understood by Olson’s acolytes.11 To a considerable extent, then, the theory of dictation allowed Spicer at a single stroke to distance himself from four of the dominant poetic discourses of the time, cutting across many schools: Olson’s projectivism, the expressivist orthodoxy of Eliot’s “objective correlative,” Beat visions of spontaneity and authenticity, and academic “confessional” models of personal disclosure.12 The true self of the Beats is precisely what for Spicer destroyed the poem, no less than the “objective correlative,” which encourages the poet to invest personal experience into its objectifcation as art, in the hopes of an aesthetic return seen only as proft. As Spicer puts it, “It was not my anger or frustration that got in the way of my poetry but the fact that I viewed each anger and frustration as unique – something to be converted into poetry as one would exchange foreign money” (CP 163). This statement dates from 1957, and as any reader of Spicer knows, that moment most certainly does not mark the end of his poetry of anger and frustration, elements that remain central to his work until its bitter end. The goal then, despite Spicer’s criticism of the “big lie of the personal,”13 is not to achieve a poetry of Olympian detachment and universal appeal. It is rather to achieve a relationship to the personal – and certainly to the local – that would not be a “big lie.” A large part of that means, precisely, prohibiting those “personal” emotions from being converted into or consigned to a reifed “poetry,” which would thus underwrite their removal from the world. Hence Spicer’s frequent insistence on poetry as letters, that is, not as aesthetic objects but as real messages 358 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.027

Jack Spicer

exchanged on the nether side of that old division, “life” and “work”  – a division disturbed by Spicer’s bracketing of the poet as origin, or owner, of the “work,” which, in the absence of the poet as source, becomes something very different, belonging to the world and not to its putative “creator.” As Spicer put it in the Vancouver lectures, “I really honestly don’t feel that I own my poems, and I don’t feel proud of them” (H 15), a statement that has a political as well as a philosophical dimension. Though Spicer’s views and Duncan’s differ pointedly in many respects, Spicer’s “dictation” profits from being thought through in the context of refections like this one, from Duncan, commenting on the singular and the communal in terms that recall Spicer’s use of the adjective “idiotic” in “A Postscript to the Berkeley Renaissance”: For just there, where the arbitrary, self-expressive or self-saving, where the self-conscious voice comes, the idiotes, private howl or moan or the urbane sophisticated tone breaks or takes over from the communal voice. In the communal consciousness, the idiot is a member; is, in a sense, any and every individual member if he be separated from the imagination of the whole. But self-expression and likewise self-possession in verse would set up an “I” that is the private property of the writer in the place of the “I” in which all men may participate.14

As is well known, Spicer objected to copyright on poetry, believing it belonged to all. In certain ways, as the passage from Duncan suggests, “dictation” extends that principle to the poet, too, whose “I” is no more private property than her poetry is. While Spicer would probably have rejected as utopian Duncan’s sense that any “I” could be properly “communal” – Spicer valued dissension, dissonance, and confict  – Spicer’s thinking very much parallels Duncan’s critique of self-possession, in all the nuances Duncan lends the term here. The resistance to poetry as property is also intrinsic to Spicer’s “serial poem,” or composition by “book,” an idea and practice that grew out of intense exchanges with Duncan and Blaser upon Spicer’s return to San Francisco from Boston in late 1956, and is most persuasively articulated in the “letter” to the latter that Spicer included as a poem in his 1957 book, Admonitions. Just as dictation brackets the poet as origin of the poem, seriality brackets the poem “itself,” refusing a practice of writing and reading that foregrounds self-enclosed, self-suffcient verbal artefacts in favor of an emphasis not on the poem but on “poetry”  – an open-ended, unfnished, and progressive project of uncertain boundaries and borders. Spicer insists, “There is really no single poem”: “A poem is never to be judged by itself alone. A poem is never by itself alone” (CP 163–164). But the most powerful 359 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.027

Daniel Katz

implication of this is that the longer “serial” poem, or “book,” is not to be judged that way either; otherwise, it simply becomes a longer poem, but one that does not escape the ontological critique Spicer levels at the “single poem.” Spicer’s insistence on the worldly rather than expressive status of the poem in some ways links him to objectivism, but in an important sense, his is an objectivism without objects, perhaps analogous to the art without works of Antonin Artaud, a writer Spicer read. Spicer’s poetics cannot be separated from his “poetry”; indeed, a clear distinction between the two is something he set out to trouble, as After Lorca and Admonitions make clear. But by the same token, the poetry must not be reduced to an illustration of the poetics: on the contrary, Spicer’s poetry is fruitfully read as a response or a challenge to his poetics, as much as its confrmation. As Gilbert Sorrentino put it early on, “Spicer achieved that rare and diffcult feat  – he created an art which was at once subservient to, and dominant over, a set of ideas.”15 It is entirely in keeping with the spirit of Spicer’s intellect to assert that a decisive component of his poetry is how it doesn’t correspond to his poetics  – how it responds to and disturbs them, creating the kind of “interference” Spicer also prized. For all these reasons, one must at once respect but not mystify Spicer’s declaration from Admonitions, in which he posits a clean divide between his pre- and post-serial writing, as he dismisses his past, isolated lyrics as “foul” and “pointing nowhere, as meaningless as sex in a Turkish bath” (CP 163). This is, as Michael Snediker has argued, an oversimplifcation, and as Spicer himself makes abundantly clear, the statement needs to be read as part of his work, not as a safely quarantined and separate account of it.16 Still, despite a good number of brilliant early lyrics from before After Lorca, with that book Spicer’s work achieves a new dynamism, precisely by foregrounding as explicit formal features the dialogic and dialectical qualities prevalent throughout all his work. By Spicer’s own account, it is his Imaginary Elegies that frst pointed him towards this path, as this work is at once one and several poems, a long lyric and a sequence, to such an extent that the critic has diffculties deciding whether to refer to it in the singular or the plural. After Lorca, as Spicer emphasized when it was published, should be read “like a novel,” that is, as a narrative, and not as a collection of discrete lyrics. This emphasis on sequentiality, however, is not to establish the contours of a coherent story but to point to the relationship between time and the sorts of closure that the serial poem militates against: “Time does not fnish a poem,” Spicer pointedly wrote in the Elegies (CP 48–49). But if we are to ponder this assertion, the temporal cannot be set aside, and Spicer consistently stressed that an essential element of the serial poem is that it is written sequentially, with no 360 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.027

Jack Spicer

a posteriori reordering on the part of the poet (though it seems unlikely that Spicer consistently abided by this rule). In this light, it’s easy to see that not only are all of Spicer’s “books,” starting with After Lorca, “serial” in this sense, but that this form of dialogic seriality obtains in their relationships to each other also. For example, the device of Jack’s letters to Lorca, so crucial to After Lorca, is taken up and re-examined in Admonitions, not only through the “letters” to Robin Blaser and Joe Dunn that the book includes but also by addressing each lyric to a particular individual, as if the poems were themselves letters. An unpublished letter to Robin Blaser from 1958 clearly shows the link between seriality and contradiction, both within and between various books: “The Book of Music was written by a poet (not myself any longer) who wanted to explore the way that the contradictions of words and sounds . . . make themselves felt in the twin worlds of the intellect and the emotions . . . My new book ‘Billy The Kid’ is different. Its shape is the contradiction between speech and poetry and between sound and sight.”17 The contradiction between “words” and “sounds” will be given its most extended exploration in Spicer’s penultimate book, Language, in which Spicer, a trained linguist, proposes sections titled “Morphemics” and “Phonemics,” and consistently stresses the formal elements by which language constructs meaning, in a work that, as the title hints, was to prove central to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, especially Ron Silliman.18 Yet Language itself – in so many ways devoted to the question of “language” as a transcendental structure – fnds itself to some extent “contradicted” by Spicer’s next and last work, the Book of Magazine Verse, whose central conceit is addressed to nothing other than the specifc historical and social contexts governing and controlling poetic practice, drawing the parallel between “offcial verse culture” and offcial cultures of all varieties, including the military and imperial. Thus contradiction, or “speaking against,” is one of the central fgures for Spicer’s poetics, and even of his being in the world; he contrives a poetry that speaks out against the various forms of injustice, hypocrisy, and self-indulgence that incensed him throughout his life, but speaks out, with equal force and rage, against itself, denying the power of poetry to carry the outrageous burden he places upon it. In this way Spicer’s poetry is literally self-destructive, feeding on the very process of emptying itself out  – a process at the absent heart of The Holy Grail: “The grail is the opposite of poetry / Fills us up instead of using us as a cup the dead drink from” (CP 332). The grail, both the opposite of and the uncanny parallel to poetry, offers the ultimate transcendence that collapses almost as a condition of its advent. Spicer has his Arthur refect: 361 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.027

Daniel Katz I have forgotten why the grail was important Why somebody wants to reach it like a window you throw         open. Thrown open What would it mean? (CP 357)

For Spicer, the Outside that dictation tapped into prevented the poet from becoming the “beautiful machine”19 of subjective solipsism that had worried Eliot, not only in his positing of the objective correlative – which, as I’ve argued above, Spicer implicitly rejects – but all the more in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” If the latter essay displaces the poet from her centrality to ground her work in a collectivity, it is a collectivity whose integrity and coherence would for Spicer too closely have mirrored that of the very individual subject he set out to disturb. Thus, for Spicer, the Outside is not only an alien radio signal but also as Michael Davidson has argued, an assemblage of discordant and arguing voices.20 At the same time, the insistence on and disbelief in plenitude of all sorts, the desperate need to be recognized and the paranoid suspicion that such recognition can never be more than self-satisfed mutual complicity, makes Spicer the great love poet he is. Indeed, the term “love poet” is almost a pleonasm for Spicer, as lover and poet occupy similar positions of impossible address, both embarked on a project of utmost necessity and doomed to fail. In “Love Poems,” from the book Language, he writes: There is real pain in not having you just as there is real pain in         not having poetry Not totally in either case as a solace, solution, end to all the          minor tragedies But, in either case (poetry or you) As a bed-partner. (CP 385)

But for Spicer, neither the having of poems or of lovers holds. “What do you say? How come / Love isn’t as great as it should be?” Spicer asks in the Book of Magazine Verse. Love and poetry exist in the elegiac mode, pointing to a possibility that they can only gesture towards, and never realize. Death is built into them: No love deserves the death it has. An archipelago Rocks cropping out of ocean. Seabirds shit on it. Live out their          lives on it. What was once a mountain. Or was it once a mountain? Did Lemuria, Atlantis, Mu ever          exist except in the minds of old men fevered by the distances          and the rocks they saw? Was it true? Can the ocean of time claim to own us now adrift 362 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.027

Jack Spicer Over that land. In that land. If memory serves There (that rock out there) Is more to it. (CP 393)

Or was it once a mountain? Inevitably we arrive at the legendary tale of Spicer’s death, as told by Robin Blaser, recounting his visit to Spicer as the latter lay dying of chronic alcohol abuse, lapsing in and out of a coma in San Francisco General Hospital:  “Jack struggled to tie his speech to words. I leaned over and asked him to repeat a word at a time. I would, I said, discover the pattern. Suddenly, he wrenched his body up from the pillow and said, My vocabulary did this to me. Your love will let you go on.” As Blaser himself astutely points out, the second sentence is not a “recantation” of the frst, but rather, to use Spicer’s own term, an “admonition and a notice of danger.”21 Spicer’s last two sentences, whether apocryphal or no, neatly encapsulate many of his obsessive tropes and traumas:  the symmetrical, distorted, mirroring gazes of the “I” and the “you” it invokes, the claustrophobic self-made constriction as against an issueless wandering, the wit and solemnity mutually interfering, the balancing of language against love. Or as Spicer put it in Language, “Love is not mocked whatever use you put to it. Words are also not mocked.” That book ends with what it says is all that time leaves us: “Words, loves” (CP 402). N OT E S 1 Jack Spicer, Troilus, in No: A Journal of the Arts 3 (2004): 77–153; 93–94. 2 Jean-Michel Rabaté, Crimes of the Future: Theory and Its Global Reproduction (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014): 37. 3 Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, eds. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown:  Wesleyan University Press, 2008): 426. Hereafter CP. 4 Jack Spicer, The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, ed. and with an afterword by Peter Gizzi (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998): 102. Hereafter H. 5 Cited in Ekbert Faas, Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the Poet as Homosexual in Society (Santa Barbara:  Black Sparrow Press, 1983):  150, italics in the original. Faas provides a fascinating account of the entire episode, including Duncan’s subsequent correspondence with John Crowe Ransom. Ransom was so provoked by the essay that he rejected several poems by Duncan that he had previously accepted for publication in the Kenyon Review. 6 For an outstanding account, see Kevin Killian, “Spicer and the Mattachine,” in After Spicer: Critical Essays, ed. John Emil Vincent (Middletown:  Wesleyan University Press, 2011). 7 For Spicer’s studies with Kantorowicz, as well as all subsequent biographical information unless otherwise noted, see Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian, Poet, 363 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.027

Daniel Katz

8

9

10

11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21

Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). Hereafter P. Working at the Boston Public Library, which has an important collection of Dickinson’s manuscripts, Spicer was led to review Thomas Johnson’s pathbreaking edition of Dickinson in 1956. Spicer’s meditations on the imbrication of letter and poem as seen in Dickinson’s original texts anticipate, to some extent, Susan Howe’s crucial work, and they informed his poetics thenceforward. See H, 231–237, for his review, “The Poems of Emily Dickinson,” originally published in the Boston Public Library Quarterly. Laplance discusses the “transfert en creux” in many places. See, for example, his New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macey (Oxford:  Wi ley-Blackwell, 1989). For Rimbaud, a poet crucial to Spicer and the Berkeley Renaissance more generally, not only is it true that “I is another,” but the poet is also like a piece of wood who suddenly fnds herself to have become a violin – a conceit Spicer both updates and denaturalises with his trope of radio waves and receiver. For a more extended account of Rimbaud’s importance for dictation, see my The Poetry of Jack Spicer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013): 10–14. I explore the relationship between dictation and projective verse in detail in “From Olson’s Breath to Spicer’s Gait:  Spacing, Pacing, Phonemes,” in Contemporary Olson, ed. David Herd (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2015). See Peter Gizzi’s afterword in H for a brilliant account of this, especially 173–178. As “Jack” calls it in a letter to Lorca, CP 150. Robert Duncan, The H.  D. Book, ed. and with an introduction by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2011): 559. Gilbert Sorrentino, Something Said, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Dalkey Archive, 2001). See M. D. Snediker, “Prodigal Son (Midway along the Pathway),” Criticism 51.3 (Summer 2009): 489–504. Jack Spicer Papers, BANC MSS 2004/209, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. One of the most important essays ever written about Spicer is Silliman’s “Spicer’s Language,” in The New Sentence (New York: Roof Books, 1987). See H 5, for Spicer’s use of this phrase. I’m suggesting here that if Spicer fghts so fercely against this model, it’s because he recognizes the dangers it holds for him. See Davidson’s indispensable The San Francisco Renaissance:  Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Robin Blaser, The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser, ed. Miriam Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006): 162–163. F U RT H E R R E A DI NG

Blaser, Robin, “The Practice of Outside” and “My Vocabulary Did This to Me,” in The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser, ed. Miriam Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 364 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.027

Jack Spicer Chamberlain, Lori, “Ghostwriting the Text:  Translation and the Poetics of Jack Spicer,” Contemporary Literature 26.4 (1985): 426–442. Clarkson, Ross, “Jack Spicer’s Ghosts and the Immemorial Community,” Mosaic 34.4 (2001): 199–211. Conte, Joseph, Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Damon, Maria, The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Davidson, Michael, “Incarnations of Jack Spicer:  Heads of the Town up to the Aether,” Boundary 2 6.1 (Autumn, 1977): 103–134. The San Francisco Renaissance:  Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Ellingham, Lewis, and Kevin Killian, Poet, Be Like God:  Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). Eshelman, Clayton, “The Lorca Working,” Boundary 2 27.1 (1977): 31–49. Gizzi, Peter, “Afterword: Jack Spicer and the Practice of Reading,” The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). Hatlen, Burton, “‘Crawling into Bed with Sorrow’:  Jack Spicer’s After Lorca,” Ironwood 14.2 (1986): 118–135. Katz, Daniel, American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). The Poetry of Jack Spicer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Keenaghan, Eric, “Jack Spicer’s Pricks and Cocksuckers: Translating Homosexuality into Visibility,” The Translator 4.2 (1998): 273–294. Lerner, Ben, “My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer” (book review), Critical Quarterly 51.2 (2009): 89–95. Nealon, Christopher, The Matter of Capital:  Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Nichols, Miriam, Radical Affections: Essays on the Poetics of Outside (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010). Rasula, Jed, “Spicer’s Orpheus and the Emancipation of Pronouns,” Boundary 2 6.1 (Autumn 1977): 51–102. Riley, Peter, “The Narratives of The Holy Grail,” Boundary 2 6.1 (1977): 163–190. Silliman, Ron, “Spicer’s Language,” The New Sentence (New  York:  Roof Books, 1987). Snediker, M. D., “Prodigal Son (Midway along the Pathway).” Criticism 51.3 (Summer 2009): 489–504. Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Sorrentino, Gilbert, “Jack Spicer,” Something Said, 2nd ed. (Chicago:  Dalkey Archive, 2001). Vanderborg, Susan, Paratextual Communities: American Avant-Garde Poetry Since 1950 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001). Vincent, John Emil, ed., After Spicer: Critical Essays (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2011). Queer Lyrics: Diffculty and Closure in American Poetry (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 365 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.027

27 JONAH RASKIN

Allen Ginsberg: Irreverent, Reverential, and Apocalyptic American Poet

In Allen Ginsberg’s exuberant, electrifying brand of iconoclastic poetry, uncertainties rival assurances, self-doubts clash with self-confdences, and emotional paradoxes multiply. Walt Whitman’s rhetorical question in “Song of Myself” (“Do I contradict myself?”) resonated with Ginsberg, as did John Keats’s notion of “negative capability” – the ability to hold “opposite, contradictory thoughts . . . without an irritable reaching after fact and reason.”1 Between shrill argument on the one hand, and a quiet quest for Buddhist enlightenment on the other, Ginsberg walked a fne line. If he didn’t fulfll his youthful dream of making poetry after World War II as distinctive as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams made it after World War I, he rejuvenated American poetry by experimenting with language and with form. In several long works – “Howl” (1956), “Kaddish” (1959), and “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (1966)  – and in a dozen or so shorter, carefully crafted works – among them “Sunfower Sutra,” “A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley,” “America,” “To Aunt Rose,” and “Autumn Leaves” – he combined the irreverent, the reverential, and the apocalyptic and expanded the house of poetry. After his death, critics were unsure whether Ginsberg was a major poet, a minor poet, or a major minor. Moreover, few critics could agree which poems were his best poems. Still, he was certainly a looming cultural fgure linking modernists to post-modernists, hipsters to hippies, and the imagists of his father’s era to the rappers of the 1990s. In a singular way, he bridged rival camps in the culture of the Cold War and linked the “fellaheen” of Africa, Asia, and Latin America with rebels in North America and with dissidents such as Andrei Voznesensky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko in the Soviet Union. Moreover, for more than forty years, he performed his work before exuberant audiences and reinvented the poetry reading by breaking down the barriers between poet and audience and by connecting the spoken word to live music. Born in New Jersey to a Jewish family of artists, writers, and intellectuals, Ginsberg was infuenced by parents who straddled bohemianism and 366 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.028

Allen Ginsberg

radicalism. His mother, Naomi, who was born in Russia, was a painter and a member of the Communist Party of the United States; his father, Louis – a high school English teacher and a moderate socialist in his youth – wrote poetry, self-published his work, and went into debt. Eugene, Allen’s older brother, wrote poems and practiced law. Poetry was the “family business,” and radical political causes its credo. From his father, Allen learned frsthand to appreciate the craft of writing and the pleasures of the spoken word, though he also rebelled against Louis Ginsberg and his conventional brand of rhymed poetry and sought wilder models. An eclectic array of poets, such as Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake, and Carl Sandburg, were early cultural heroes, and in apprentice work that he published in high school and in college he expressed his own loneliness and communicated his vision of an apocalyptic age ushered in by the atomic bomb. At Columbia University, his teachers introduced him to the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets and the twentieth-century modernists, steering him away from romantics such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Walt Whitman, whom he admired in boyhood. In 1945, Columbia suspended him for writing obscenities on the window of his dorm room and for allowing Kerouac to sleep in his bed. In “Howl,” he refers obliquely to the incident: “publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull.”2 Away from campus, he worked as a sailor, traveled to Africa, wrote fction, took up photography  – a lifelong pursuit  – and briefy thought he might become a novelist in the manner of Thomas Mann and James Joyce until Kerouac persuaded him to write about the local and the provincial not the international and the cosmopolitan. In 1949, he was arrested as an accomplice to a series of robberies; his professors arranged for him to be a patient at the New York State Psychiatric Institute rather than serve prison time. In psychoanalysis for half a year, he made friends with another patient, Carl Solomon, who seemed in many ways his double: a rebellious Jewish intellectual and a poet uncertain about himself who appears under his own name in “Howl.” As a poet, Ginsberg plunged bravely into the wreck of his own life and the lives of those around him. He used drugs to stimulate his imagination and wrote enthusiastically about marijuana, LSD, peyote, Methedrine, and laughing gas – though unlike Coleridge he wrote no masterpiece, no “Kubla Khan,” under the infuence of drugs. “Mescaline” and “Lysergic Acid,” both from 1959, illustrate the kind of talky, unspectacular work he did when he used illicit substances. Indeed, he thrived on actualities and on the news of current events. As a boy, he had read the New York Times and written poems inspired by front-page stories about the rise of Fascism. An over-arching title 367 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.028

Jonah Raskin

for all his work might be Planet News, the title he gave to a collection of poems published in 1968. Fascinated with the tranquilizing power of the mass media, he wrote poetry and essays too about the numbing impact of newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV in “Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward that Deathchamber.” In the 1940s and early 1950s, he wore a suit and tie and worked as a market researcher in Manhattan while living a secret existence that he recorded in his journals, where he was far more candid about himself than he was in the polished poems he sent to magazine and book editors for publication. Signs of originality appeared as early as the 1949 poem “Paterson” – a forerunner of “Howl,” which emerged from his experience at the New York State Psychiatric Institute – in which he tapped into his angst and wrote, “I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping / in my veins” (CP 40). It was an exception to the rule of derivative work. Ginsberg’s self-appointed apprenticeship in poetry, which began in the early 1940s, came to a crescendo in the mid-1950s when he moved from New York to San Francisco, with a long detour through Cuba and Mexico where he immersed himself in Latin cultures, Spanish language poets such as Garcia Lorca, and the indigenous arts of the Americas. Everywhere he found writers to emulate and literary traditions to embrace. From his own wide reading, he cobbled together a self-sustaining body of global writers far beyond the Eurocentric tradition that T. S. Eliot offered in his seminal 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which had infuenced several generations of teachers and writers including Ginsberg himself. In California, away from parents, teachers, and mentors, and in therapy with Dr. Philip Hicks – a young psychiatrist who encouraged him to accept his fuid sexual identity  – Ginsberg found his voice, consciously created a famboyant persona, and cast himself as a performance poet. His own evolution in California is refected in “Love Poem on Theme by Whitman,” “Over Kansas,” and the exuberant “Malest Cornifci Tuo Catullo,” in which he wrote, “I’m Happy, Kerouac, your madman Allen’s / fnally made it” (CP 123). Briefy, he attended the University of California at Berkeley and considered a career in academia, but his seminal experiences were in literary circles off campus where he met young poets such as Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, and the grand old man of northern California arts and letters, Kenneth Rexroth, who brought him into his salon and whom he depicted in the short poem “Scribble.” In the 1950s, the San Francisco Bay Area was in cultural ferment; Ginsberg added to the volatile mix and to the legend of “The San Francisco Poetry 368 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.028

Allen Ginsberg

Renaissance,” as did Jack Kerouac, a mentor and surrogate older brother, who urged Ginsberg to write poetry without rewriting in much the same way that he imagined African-American musicians such as Charlie Parker played jazz: without rehearsing, without a score or an organizing principle. In the 1950s, improvisation and spontaneity were cultural rallying cries in the rebellion against conformity. Ginsberg and Kerouac echoed the cries and genuinely endorsed the idea. However, neither adhered in practice to the theory they espoused. Not even Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) went unrevised, as the Original Scroll edition of the novel written in 1951 and published in 2007 amply shows.3 Ginsberg would insist that “Howl” was written on the spur of the moment, without rational thinking. The original title for the poem was “Strophes.” “Howl,” the title he fnally selected for his work, as well as phrases in the body of the work itself, such as “ten years’ animal screams” (CP 132), suggest that he wanted it to be viewed as the cry of a wild beast or the rant of a patient in a hospital for the insane. His notebooks belie his assertion that “Howl” was an act of pure inspiration written without alteration. Ideas and images that he jotted down in notebooks showed up in the frst draft of Part I of “Howl,” written in 1955, and were revised over a year’s time. Stanzas and phrases were moved around to give the poem added coherence, and individual words were amended.4 Soon after he fnished the frst draft of Part I of “Howl,” Ginsberg performed it at “The 6,” an avant-garde San Francisco art gallery. Snyder, Whalen, and Lamantia read their work; Kerouac cheered from the audience, supplied the red wine that was passed around and later chronicled the watershed event in his novel The Dharma Bums (1958), in which Ginsberg appears as the poet “Alva Goldbook.” (In On the Road, he’s “Carlo Marx.”) Kerouac’s jabs at his friend notwithstanding, Ginsberg was the star of the show. Kenneth Rexroth predicted “Howl” would make him nationally as well as locally renowned, and even his normally reserved father raved about his son’s stunning achievement. Before it was published, “Howl” elicited attention from the media. The poet and critic Richard Eberhart wrote about the performances of “Howl” for the New  York Times in a September 2, 1956, article titled “West Coast Rhythms.” The author was no unschooled, primitive poet as he claimed, Eberhart explained, but rather a serious student of poetry who had served “years of apprentice” to develop his “brave new medium.” After performing Part I of “Howl” in public, Ginsberg wrote two more sections under the infuence of peyote, marijuana, and encouraged by his own newly acquired sense of freedom. In Part II, he indicts “Moloch,” the Old Testament deity to whom parents sacrifce their children, and Ginsberg’s 369 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.028

Jonah Raskin

poetic version of what U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower would call, as he left offce, “the military-industrial-complex.” Ginsberg’s Moloch begets bombs, factories, prisons, and tombs, though even in this hellish world heavenly beauty emerges. In Part III of “Howl,” Ginsberg turns playful and even silly; “we hug and kiss the United Sates under our bedsheets,” he wrote (CP 133). Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet in his own right and the founder and owner of City Lights Bookstore – the frst all-paperback store in the United States – published “Howl” in the Pocket Poets Series, and, expecting that it would be met with censorship, secured legal assistance from the American Civil Liberties Union. William Carlos Williams provided an introduction in which he confessed that he never thought that Ginsberg, whom he met as a young man, would “grow up and write a book of poems.” Williams warned polite readers, “we are going through hell.”5 Indeed, the poem descends into a psychological inferno. The frst edition of “Howl” and Other Poems was printed in England in 1956 and shipped to San Francisco. Copies were seized and then released by customs offcials when the local district attorney declined to prosecute. At seventy-fve cents and small enough to ft into a pocket, the book quickly became an underground classic passed from hand to hand and also into the hands of the local police and from there to the desk of the district attorney for the city of San Francisco who now eagerly brought an indictment against Ferlinghetti, hoping to protect citizens against foul language and indecent imagery. The 1957 trial of “Howl” on charges of obscenity backfred for the prosecution and made the poem famous and its author a celebrity. University of California professors of English such as Mark Schorer testifed brilliantly for the defense and argued that “Howl” was a signifcant work of art. It was a supreme moment for the critic and for literary criticism in America. The trial accorded notoriety to Ferlinghetti and City Lights Bookstore. San Francisco’s North Beach became a Mecca for “Beatniks,” as newspaper columnist Herb Caen dubbed the young men and women who drank cappuccinos, listened to jazz and poetry, smoked marijuana, and wore jeans and T-shirts. Ginsberg’s fans saw him as a latter-day Whitman and regarded “Howl” as a successor to Leaves of Grass. The poem’s epigraph from Whitman  – “Unscrew the locks from the doors!”  – encouraged the perception of Ginsberg as Whitman’s literary descendant, as did Ginsberg’s 1955 poem, “A Supermarket in California,” in which he describes Whitman as “dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher” (HOP 30). Like Leaves of Grass, “Howl” offers unrhymed poetry with long lines that spread across the page and that were meant to look and sound like prose. Like Whitman, 370 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.028

Allen Ginsberg

Ginsberg sang a “Song of Myself” at the same time that, like Whitman, he addressed America and spoke for the nation as a whole. He took a similar stance as the voice of the nation, albeit with slapstick humor, in the poem “America” that contains the infamous line, “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb” (HOP 39). What fans didn’t see or hear – and what Ginsberg no longer wanted to see in his new incarnation as the prince of Beat poets – were the echoes of Eliot’s The Waste Land with its apocalyptic images and grousing about civilization. Electrifying phrases such as “hydrogen jukebox” and “drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality” bear little if any resemblance to Whitman’s diction (HOP 11, 16)  but follow Eliot’s prescription, in “The Metaphysical Poets,” for “amalgamating disparate experiences” and “telescoping of images.”6 Near the end of Part I, Ginsberg uses the image of “the total alphabet soup of time” to describe the predicament in which his friend and fellow medical patient, Carl Solomon, found himself as a sane man in an institution for the insane. The soup image also serves as a metaphor for the poem itself into which the author adds “tortillas,” “stale beer,” “cock and endless balls,” “meat for the Synagogue,” “opium,” “lamb stew,” “crab,” “borsht,” “potato salad,” and more. If Ginsberg saw himself as a jazz musician uttering “a saxophone cry,” he also presented himself as a chef engaged in “wild cooking pederasty and intoxication” (HOP 11–18). In “Howl,” he mixed suicidal urges with sexual liberation, the sacred with the profane. Not explicitly about childhood, the poem nonetheless expresses a childlike sense of awe, terror, and beauty about the world. The demonic Moloch in Part II is a child-like representation of a superhuman monster; the individual human characters in the poem have child-like innocence. Based on Kerouac, Cassady, Burroughs, and others, they appear thinly and not so thinly disguised. Cassady is “N.C. secret hero of these poems” (HOP 14). The real hero of “Howl,” however, isn’t an individual but a whole generation: the “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the / starry dynamo in the machinery of night” (HOP 9). Ginsberg added that pivotal line when he revised the frst draft to provide a sense of coherence and to make the poem more than a mere cataloging of the bizarre, the grotesque and the outrageous. Ginsberg himself – or at least his persona – is the least secret hero in the poem. He’s the “I” who appears in the frst line, again in Part II in lines such as “Moloch in whom I sit lonely!,” and fnally in Part III where he addresses Carl Solomon directly and chants the line “I’m with you in Rockland” that’s repeated nineteen times (HOP 22, 24). Writing “Howl,” Ginsberg learned the power of repetition. At the end of Part I, he depicts himself in the act of writing the poem and recreating “the syntax and measure of poor human 371 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.028

Jonah Raskin

prose” (HOP 20). “Howl” describes its own genesis and evolution. It’s an auto-telic and a post-modernist work that’s about itself and about its author: the artist as a young madman, a persona that appealed to beatniks, teens, and later to hippies who read “Howl” as a clarion call to rebel against authority fgures and to experiment with sex and drugs and to deviate from social norms. Ginsberg’s explosive poem arrived as a generation of Americans came of age idolizing wild ones such as James Dean and Marlon Brando and searching for literature that spoke to them and for them. “Howl” would go on appealing to adolescents, teenagers, students, and their teachers, too, for another two decades; ffty years after it was frst published in the Pocket Poets Series it had sold more than one million copies. Distinctly of its time and place, it also looked backward to surrealism and the surrealists and forward to the pop poetry of the counterculture. Though most of the scenes in “Howl” were lifted from New York in the 1940s, the poem anticipated the world that hippies and protestors would experience in the 1960s: the horror of a seemingly unending war in Vietnam and the nightmare of urban loneliness. Lines such as “Down to the river! into the street,” sounded like invitations to a “be-in” or a riot (HOP 23). The image of the poet at rest in his “cottage in the Western / night” presaged the pastoral dream of the 1960s utopians (HOP 26). In the mid-1950s, spurred by the creative fallout from “Howl,” Ginsberg wrote a series of poignant short poems, including “A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley” (1955), which is one long, seemingly artless sentence. It’s a carefully designed work, however, and shows how Ginsberg adapted a basic tenet of modernism: Eliot’s notion of “the objective correlative,” which he defned as “the only way to express emotion in the form of art.” Ginsberg didn’t agree that the “objective correlative” was the only way a poet could communicate sadness, anger, joy, and more. But he appreciated Eliot’s idea that a poem could create an emotional response in the reader through “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events.”7 The point was not to tell readers how or what to feel but to allow them to discover feelings in the process of reading and rereading a poem. “A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley” contains a dozen ordinary and yet unusual objects and things both animate and inanimate: blackberries, string beans, daisies, a fence, apricots, a coffeepot, a big tire, marijuana, plums, and the narrator’s tongue that’s emblematic of his whole persona. The discarded coffeepot and tire are trash, though they add to the richness and complexity of the scene. The blackberries and plums are organic treasures to be foraged and devoured. The marijuana – “my marijuana” the poet calls it, expressing pride in ownership – is nearly lost in the clutter (CP 135). Part 372 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.028

Allen Ginsberg

list, part catalogue, the poem offers a portrait of a strange and wonderful backyard in Berkeley, California, and a portrait of a man, too. Ginsberg doesn’t once use the frst person pronoun “I,” but he offers an intimate portrait of a himself in the open air, working with his hands, fxing the toilet, cleaning, and gardening. He’s Adam in a feral Berkeley garden giving “godly extra drops” of water to the vegetables and picking and eating plums from a small tree he calls an “angel” (CP 135). In the very last line, the poet suggests his own inner, emotional landscape when he describes his “dry and lovelorn tongue” (CP 135). Sadly, there’s no one else to share paradise with him. Still, without drugs, chanting, or meditation, the narrator reaches a state of beatitude – a key spiritual component of the beat aesthetic. Ironically, the poem never describes the interior of the cottage, only the garden beyond; the secrets are all on the outside not the inside, as one might expect. Ginsberg doesn’t prescribe happiness, but he offers “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events” that communicate emotions to readers and allow them to discover their own happiness – or not. In 1957, Ginsberg delighted in the sensational news about the San Francisco trial of “Howl.” But he was distressed by literary critics such as Norman Podhoretz, a classmate at Columbia, who blamed him and Kerouac for juvenile delinquency and also irked by James Dickey, the poet, who dismissed “Howl” as the work of “an American adolescent.”8 Kerouac went on television to defend himself – and sounded goofy. Ginsberg took his cause to Columbia and read his poetry there and to audiences from Seattle to Los Angeles. Then, he did what young American writers in search of fame had been doing for at least a century and a half: he went to Europe; met European writers, including the French surrealist novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine; and wrote ecstatically about European artists in angry and yet tender poems such as “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear” and “At Apollinaire’s Grave.” In Europe, he went on writing about death and dying; later, he would do much the same in Asia and in the United States, too. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he wrote everywhere he went with renewed self-confdence. A peripatetic poet on the road far more than Kerouac, he created memorable verse in Chile, France, Morocco, Cambodia, Japan, India, and Eastern Europe. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Snyder or with his lover, Peter Orlovsky, he met local poets and, as a pilgrim, quested for a spiritual destination. “Angkor Wat” – a long, self-mocking, self-aggrandizing poem set in Cambodia, recounts his own inner and outer journeys. He could easily have gone on writing about his Beat buddies, and indeed he continued to turn them into larger-than-life legends in poems such as “Many Loves,” “The Names,” and “Footnote to ‘Howl’ ” that begins with the word “Holy!” repeated ffteen times and that pays homage to Kerouac, 373 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.028

Jonah Raskin

Burroughs, and Cassady, the three men who are named in the dedication at the beginning of “Howl.” Ginsberg never stopped writing about his friends, but life interceded and altered the direction and the subject matter of his writing. His mother, Naomi, died at the age of 62, and that event profoundly shifted his emotional makeup and expanded the arena for his poetry. “My heart is empty,” he wrote in his journal. “I must continue writing. My youth is ending” (quote in AS 178). Ginsberg’s essay “How Kaddish Happened”  – an account of the birth and development of “Kaddish” – is not entirely accurate. Oddly or perhaps predictably, he was impelled to mythologize the origin and the evolution of his work, as though to be a post-modern poet meant creating narratives about the making of art as well as making art itself. The frst writing of the poem did not take place in Paris in 1958, as he asserted, but two years earlier in 1956 when he was at sea as a sailor aboard the U.S.N.S. Sgt. Jack F. Pendleton. The original title of the poem was “Kaddish or the Sea Power,” a fact that he did not remember or conveniently ignored when he described how it came into existence. Other details he remembered accurately. In Berkeley in 1956, he had in fact received a telegram from his brother, Eugene, informing him that Naomi had died in a mental hospital. “Telegram from Gene, Naomi dead,” he would write tersely in “Kaddish” (CP 224). No prayer had been said for his mother, and he realized he would have to write an elegy that would honor her troubled life and give meaning to her sudden death. In his initial journal entries about Naomi and in his frst attempts to write about her, he barely scratched his own emotional surface, though he knew that he wanted the poem to probe deeply and express sadness and “universal joy at creation” (quoted in AS 178). Little by little, he explored the complex knot that tied him to his mother and experimented with the shape of the poem. Like “Howl,” his new work would have an “I”: a persona who would narrate the story and yet not be in the foreground. If “Howl” took readers on a “teahead joy ride” with “angleheaded hipsters,” “Kaddish” led them across the epic life of an immigrant and then on a funeral procession that ended “over grave stones in Long Island” (CP 227). Sadder, and far less rambunctious than “Howl,” “Kaddish” refects Ginsberg’s emotional and artistic maturity. Many critics view it as his masterpiece. As he wrote, he remembered traumatic experiences that were buried in his subconscious. While he knew that he loved his mother, he also discovered his rage at her. “I . . . hate my mother,” he told Kerouac (quoted in AS 116). He also confessed to Kerouac, “How I hate women” (quoted in AS 148). His misogyny is apparent in “Howl,” in which many of the women characters are “shrews” (HOP 14). “Kaddish” enabled him to heal emotional wounds and expunge his sense of anger, resentment, and guilt. Then, too, 374 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.028

Allen Ginsberg

it transcends misogyny. Ginsberg moved through grief to honor his mother as a “Communist beauty” and a “beautiful Garbo of my Karma” (CP 223). Perhaps no twentieth-century American poem by a son about a mother is as profoundly moving. Ginsberg arranged “Kaddish” in fve parts:  “proem,” “narrative, “hymn,” “lament, and “litany & fugue.” The poem begins in the present in New York, with the word “strange” that reverberates from beginning to end as in the lines, “Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I  walk on/ the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village” (CP 209). In a series of “fashbacks” the poet recounts Naomi’s life and times, from 1905, when she arrived in the United States from Russia, through marriage and motherhood, and then traces her gradual descent into madness, hospitalization, and death. (For years, Ginsberg tried to make “Kaddish” into a movie by carving out cinematic scenes and by crafting dialogue, but the project never went into production.) In “lament,” he provides “a surrealist summary” and bids “farewell” to his mother. In the last section, he visits her grave, hears the “strange cry” of crows, and balances their death-like “caw caw caw” sound with the word “Lord” that he hears as “an echo in the sky.” The poem ends on a note of universal grief and acceptance of death: “Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw / Lord” (CP 227). In “Howl,” much of the religious imagery derives from the New Testament, though the poem also includes “Mohammedan angels” and “endless Jehovahs” (HOP 9, 21). In the mid-1950s, Ginsberg was fxated on the image of Christ on the cross, and Part I of “Howl” ends with Christ’s last words: “Eli Eli lama sabachthani?”9 In “Kaddish,” he looked toward Judaism and remembered the teachings of Abraham and the Old Testament prophets. Indeed, he was never more Jewish than when he wrote “Kaddish.” Afterward, he turned frst to Hinduism and then to Buddhism, though near the end of his life he returned to his own Jewish roots in poems such as “Yiddishe Kopf.” In photos of him taken in middle age he already looks like an old Jew. In the 1960s, he joined political causes and amplifed his own voice of protest. In Asia, he witnessed frsthand the infuence of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the U.S. State Department, and the Pentagon. In Eastern Europe, he saw the pernicious role of Communists and Communism. All through the Cold War, he denounced both Moscow and Washington in poems such as “Capitol Air.” In Chicago and New York, he lent his name to the burgeoning movement against the War in Vietnam, and in “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (1966) – published frst in underground U.S. newspapers and then in a City Lights volume entitled The Fall of America and Other Poems 375 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.028

Jonah Raskin

(1973) – he wrote a powerful work that he read aloud at rallies and that fueled opposition to U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. No longer cautious about expressing his deep-seated, long-simmering anger about American militarism, he poured out his passions in “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” He had long admired the revolutionary ardor of the nineteenth-century English romantic poets, such as William Blake, and he now adopted wholeheartedly Shelley’s celebrated defnition of poets as the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” In “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” he also describes the beauty of the American heartland, including Wichita, Kansas, and honors American writers from Melville and Whitman to Ezra Pound. What bothered him intensely during the Vietnam War was what he felt was the perversion of the American language by politicians and generals:  “language abused / for Advertisement, / language used / like magic for power on the planet” (CP 401). To counterbalance the power of the Pentagon and the White House, he chanted his own verbal magic. “I here declared the end of the War!,” he exclaimed, believing in the power of language to bring about peace (CP 407). In “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” the political is matched by the autobiographical. Ginsberg couldn’t escape writing about himself, especially about his abiding sense of loneliness. In much of the poetry that he wrote in the 1960s, he continued to reveal himself, even as he dissected the society around him. For years, he had predicted “the fall of America” – a fate he viewed as inevitable and that he wanted to accelerate. What he hoped for was a nation without borders or bravado: a big hippie commune built on peace and love. The euphoria of the era swept him up, as did many of its clichés and its uncritical assumptions about sex, drugs, and spiritual awakening. The revolution would materialize, Ginsberg insisted, if only Americans would take LSD, become Buddhists and meditate. His poetry became more formulaic; he repeated himself in work that he wrote without thinking deeply and without revision, and that suffered accordingly. Indeed, he came to believe the Buddhist mantra, “First Thought Best Thought,” though his best thoughts usually took time to unravel and mature, just as his most moving poems rarely went unrevised. “Kaddish” took three years to write. Even with the nine-line 1992 poem “Autumn Leaves,” he revised again and again to fnd the right words to express his feelings about aging. A companion piece to “A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley”  – written when he was twenty-nine – “Autumn Leaves” was written when he was sixty-six and “happy not yet / to be a corpse” (SP 390). Once again, the poet describes “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events.” In “A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley,” he’s alone in his backyard. In “Autumn Leaves,” he has a young companion to keep him company in his New York apartment, though he 376 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.028

Allen Ginsberg

calls himself a “solitary” man. In “Autumn Leaves,” he’s inside, not outside, and the domestic objects that he describes include dental foss, toothpicks, shirts, socks, and pants. The poem describes the poet’s morning rituals: writing in a notebook, making breakfast, brushing his hair, and pausing for a moment at the sink to refect on the fact that he’s fnally “learning how to take care of my body” (SP 390). To the end of his days, he wrote about his body. In “Autumn Leaves,” while he knows he’s aging, he’s also aware that he’s young enough at heart to learn new things about himself and to appreciate the mundane world of quotidian reality. Famous the world over, continually traveling, reading and lecturing, he became a captive of the personae he created. In “I’m a Prisoner of Allen Ginsberg” he looks at himself with detachment and asks, “Who is this Slave Master makes / me answer letters in his name / Write poetry year after year, keep up / appearances” (WS 40). He did not include “I’m a Prisoner” in Selected Poems, 1947–1995 (1996), the last major anthology of his work, perhaps because it made him feel too naked and too vulnerable. The price of the fame that he coveted had been the loss of privacy and anonymity that helped him write, and, though he boasted increasingly at the end of his life about his own candor, he could not help but conceal himself even as he revealed himself. From nearly ffty years, from 1947 to 1995, Ginsberg wrote poems that were never published, or else that were published and little noticed, such as his untitled elegy for his friend and lover Natalie Jackson, which he wrote after her death in San Francisco in 1955. Those uncollected, largely unknown poems would probably startle readers, critics, and teachers who have come to assume that they know nearly everything there is to know about the legendary Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, who wrote “Howl” in one sitting – or so they thought – told America to go fuck itself, and seemed to be eternally transparent about himself and ebullient about the causes he adopted. Sadly, as he recognized, he was too easily understood and often greatly misunderstood. Unfortunately, many of his fans were not alert to his complexities, insecurities, and ambivalences. “Quarrel with yourself,” Ginsberg insisted, invoking W. B. Yeats. “Your quarrels with yourself often make the best poems. Tell yourself your own secrets and reveal yourself” (quoted in AS xvi). His own deep-seated quarrels with himself, along with his unwillingness to hue to certainties, gave birth to his richest and most rewarding poems. Perhaps here, at the start of the twenty-frst-century, the global family of poets, visionaries, and seekers after truth that he helped to create might remember him for his self-doubts as well as for his self-promotions and look for the hidden meanings that lurk between the lines. 377 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.028

Jonah Raskin NOT E S 1 Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Edward Hirsch (New York: Modern Library Classics, 2001): xxv. 2 Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947–1980 (New  York:  Harper & Row, 1984). Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as CP. 3 On the Road: The Original Scroll, eds. Penny Vlagopoulos, George Mouratandis, and Joshua Kupetz (New York: Viking, 2007). 4 Many of the revisions along with the fnal text are reproduced in “Howl”:  Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript and Variant Versions, ed. Barry Miles (New York: Harper, 2006). 5 “Howl” and Other Poems (San Francisco:  City Lights, 1956):  7–8. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as HOP. 6 T. S. Eliot, review of Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler, ed. and with an introduction by Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921). The review frst appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in October 1921. 7 Eliot, The Sacred Wood (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1921): 92. 8 Jonah Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004): 225. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as AS. 9 “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” See Matthew 27:46.

F U RT H E R R E A DI NG Ginsberg, Allen, Collected Poems, 1947–1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). Holy Soul Jelly Roll:  Poems and Songs, 1949–1993, boxed set of four CDs (New York: Word Beat, 1994). “Howl”:  Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript and Variant Versions, ed. Barry Miles (New York: Harper, 2006). Journals: Mid-Fifties, 1954–1958 (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). Selected Poems, 1947–1995 (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). Snapshot Poetics:  A  Photographic Memoir, ed. Michael Kohler (San Francisco: Chronicle, 1993). White Shroud: Poems, 1980–1985 (New York: Harper & Row, 1986). Hyde, Lewis, ed., On The Poetry of Allen Ginsberg (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 1984). Kramer, Jane, Allen Ginsberg in America (New York: Random House, 1969). Miles, Barry, Ginsberg: A Biography (London: Virgin, 2001). Morgan, Bill, and David Stanford, eds., Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg:  The Letters (New York: Viking, 2010). Raskin, Jonah, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Schumacher, Michael, Dharma Lion:  A  Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). ed., Family Business: Allen and Louis Ginsberg, Selected Letters Between a Father and Son (New York: Bloomsbury, 2001). 378 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.028

28 M E L A N I E   WAT E RS

Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry

In a 1973 interview, Anne Sexton describes an awkward conversation with the poet and critic Ralph Mills in which Mills begins discussing the “dead brother” whom Sexton memorializes in one of her poems. Realizing that Mills believes the brother to be real, Sexton feels obliged to admit that he is actually a fction. “I write my brother,” she explains, “and of course [Mills] believes it. I mean, why not? Why shouldn’t he? But I was just telling him, incidentally, there was no brother.”1 The encounter Sexton recollects in this anecdote elegantly foregrounds the complications that have beset the reception of confessional poetry since its emergence in the 1950s. Part of the intention and the “trick” of confessional poetry is, of course, to evoke the perspective of an imagined speaker in terms so intimate, candid and persuasive that the reader falls into the trap of believing that the words of the poem are a direct translation of the poet’s own grief. As Mills fnds to his embarrassment, however, while the poem cajoles us into believing in the possibility that the “I” is autobiographically referential, any such assumption is categorically unsafe: the poet and the speaker are not synonymous, no matter how effective the poem might be in generating this illusion. The desire to read Sexton’s poetry as autobiography has been an irrepressible impulse in the critical scholarship that her work has inspired and one that is equally discernible in analyses of poems by her more lauded contemporary, Sylvia Plath. Contrary to the implications of the confessional label, which I  will discuss in greater detail as this chapter unfolds, the work of these poets is defned as much by tropes of concealment as by those of revelation. Critics have long relied on metaphors of exposure in order to capture the gestures of openness that characterise the post-war lyric, and these metaphors are especially operable in critical accounts of Plath and Sexton. In The Confessional Poets (1973), for example, Robert Philips singles out Sexton’s poetry as “nakedly autobiographical,” claiming that it enables the reader to “reconstruct” the facts of the poet’s “hellishly unhappy life” (73), while Edward Butscher contends that Plath’s late works chart the “agonized 379 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.029

Melanie Waters

purgation of a naked ego” (17).2 I  am unable to do justice to the diverse oeuvre of either poet here, but I will argue that the confessional poetics of Plath and Sexton are productively illuminated by those poems that use the “private” zones of the home and the female body as venues for exploring the unstable, provisional and contingent nature of the confessional utterance. By reviewing these thematic tropes through the lens of second wave feminism, and the anxieties, preoccupations and strategies by which it is characterised, I hope also to shed light on the suggestive ways in which Sexton and Plath exploit the rising currency of confession in the post-war period while simultaneously querying its suitability for the fguration of female experience. Confessional poetry frst came to prominence in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s as a lyrical mode that “violated the norms of decorum for subject matter prevailing in serious literature.”3 Defned through content, rather than form, the confessional poem took “private suffering” as its “ultimate referent,” negotiating the putatively taboo topics of mental illness, institutionalisation, domestic violence, sexuality, incest, bereavement and suicide.4 In this way, the confessional poem registered and responded to contemporaneous anxieties about the “death of privacy” that were inextricable from a snarl of post-war phenomena, including domestic anticommunism, the commercialisation of television and the growing popularity of psychoanalytic therapies.5 Coined by M. L. Rosenthal in his 1959 review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, the term “confessional” usefully describes the strategies of self-exposure that feature so prominently in mid-century American poetry. The “confessional” epithet, however, is freighted by an etymological legacy that has shaped the reception of those texts to which it has been grafted. Such has been the impact of this label that even Rosenthal himself wondered in 1967 whether it had in fact done “more damage than good” to the poems it was intended to illuminate.6 As a consequence of its protected status within the religious, legal and political discourses of the West, after all, the confession is uniquely revered as a vehicle of truth. The effect of this in a literary context is that the content of so-called confessional works is regularly assumed to correspond straightforwardly to the facts of the poet’s life. The reception of works by both Plath and Sexton has certainly been complicated by the compelling biographical mythologies by which they are each encircled – mythologies shaped by the fact that both committed suicide: Plath in 1963, following the breakdown of her marriage to the British poet Ted Hughes, and Sexton in 1974, after a prolonged spell of intractable depression. As Susan R. Van Dyne observes, readers and scholars alike have “assume[d] that the relation of creative writing to lived suffering is transparent and direct,” with Plath’s death, in particular, construed routinely as 380 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.029

Sexton, Plath and Confessional Poetry

“a tragic but inevitable by-product of her poetic method” and “proof that the violent unresolved materials of her unconscious, once courted or confronted as subjects for poetry, couldn’t fnally be transmuted, ordered and contained by words.”7 A  generation of scholars has now interrogated the scholarly inclination to understand the confessionalism of Plath and Sexton as a mode of psychobiography, highlighting instead the strategies of evasion and artifce that characterise the poetry and that militate against the notion of confession as a straightforward mechanism for the revelation of truth. The putative status of Sexton and Plath as confessional poets is, then, controversial. While Sexton repeatedly vocalised her ambivalence about this label, it was only ascribed to Plath’s work in the wake of her death.8 In a 1962 interview with Peter Orr, however, Plath was keen to distinguish between varied uses of the personal in the post-war lyric and in doing so touched on many of the issues that would later vex critical discussions of her own poetry. Acknowledging that her poems came out of her “sensuous and emotional experiences,” she expressed disdain for “cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife.” “I believe,” she continued, “that one should be able to manipulate and control experiences . . . with an informed and intelligent mind”; in short, the poem should never be a “mirror-looking, narcissistic experience” but must be “relevant to . . . the bigger things, such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.”9 For Sexton, “confessional” is an enduringly “diffcult label,” which she rejects and embraces by turns. “At one time,” she admits in a 1970 letter to Stanley Kunitz, “I hated being called confessional and denied it . . . Now I say that I’m the only confessional poet.”10 Even as she lays claim to her unique “confessional” status, though, Sexton disavows the presumed synonymy of confession and truth: “I’ll often confess to things that never happened . . . [I]f I did all the things I confess to, there would be no time to write a poem” (Heyen and Poulin 133–134). Despite the differences in scope and style that distinguish their poetry, Sexton and Plath are routinely conceptualised alongside one another, not only as a result of their shared interest in mobilising the mechanisms of confession in order to explore areas of experience  – particularly female experience  – that had yet to be assimilated to the realm of poetic representation but also because of other convergences that are, at least in part, biographical. Born in 1928 and 1932 respectively, Sexton and Plath grew up in adjoining Boston suburbs, but their paths did not cross until 1958, when each audited a writing class led by Robert Lowell. In her journal, Plath noted Lowell’s eagerness to “set her up” with Sexton, remarking that Sexton “has very good things, and they get better, though there is a lot of loose stuff.”11 Sexton, for her part, recalled in her memoir of Plath that the 381 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.029

Melanie Waters

poet she encountered at Lowell’s workshop hadn’t “found a voice of her own, wasn’t, in truth, free to be herself. Yet, of course,” Sexton continued, “I knew she was skilled – intense, skilled, perceptive, strange, blonde, lovely, Sylvia.”12 While Lowell’s class brought them together, the routes by which they arrived at that class could not have been more different. Plath had established herself as a precocious intellect and a talented creative writer while still at school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She had her frst poem published in The Boston Herald at the age of eight, and her work had appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and Seventeen by the time she left for Smith College in 1950. While at Smith, Plath took on the editorship of The Smith Review and in 1953 won a position as guest editor of Mademoiselle magazine, which meant spending a month in New York working alongside other talented college women. It was in the wake of her tenure at Mademoiselle that Plath suffered a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide for the frst time – events famously fctionalized in her 1963 novel The Bell Jar. After graduating from Smith summa cum laude, Plath won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge, and it was here that she met the British poet Ted Hughes, whom she married the following year in 1956, giving birth to their children, Frieda and Nicholas, in 1960 and 1962. While The Colossus was published in 1960 (the frst and only collection of Plath’s poetry to appear during her lifetime), it is the poems from the posthumous Ariel (1965), including “Daddy,” “Medusa,” and the bee poems, which have secured her reputation. These poems, many of which were written during the breakdown of her marriage to Hughes in 1962 and in the months leading up to her suicide, have been central in establishing her status as an iconic “confessional” poet and a symbol of brilliant, if doomed, female creativity. Sexton’s poetic beginnings contrast sharply with those of Plath. Raised in the affuent suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, Sexton was little interested in the rigours of formal education and eloped in 1948 at the age of nineteen. She only began composing poetry in 1956 when, following a debilitating bout of depression that culminated in an overdose and a spell in a private psychiatric hospital, she entered into therapy with Dr. Martin Orne. It was under the aegis of Orne that Sexton  – by then twenty-eight and a married mother to two young daughters  – was frst encouraged to write. As a direct outgrowth of her therapy, Sexton’s oeuvre is defned, in part, by its sustained, self-conscious preoccupation with the theories, displacements and evasions that characterise the psychoanalytic encounter. From the anxious transferences of early poems such as “Appointment Hour” (1957) and “The Psychosomatic Stomach” (1957), to the Oedipal phantasmagoria of Transformations (1971) and The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), Sexton’s writing is enduringly marked by a psychoanalytical understanding 382 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.029

Sexton, Plath and Confessional Poetry

of confession itself, in which the confession is less the royal way to truth than the fragile, mercurial and inherently unreliable product of an emotionally charged exchange between speaker and listener. While psychoanalysis is a useful instrument for understanding the testimonial dynamics of poems by Sexton and Plath, confession also has longstanding and equally pertinent links to feminist practice. As the basis of consciousness raising, personal testimony played a vital role in shaping the agenda of the Anglo-American women’s movement in the 1960s. Through the consciousness-raising exercises undertaken by feminist groups, which initially gave vent to women’s individual experiences of oppression, the personal was politicized; issues that had once seemed private, such as housework, domestic violence, rape, abortion and sexuality, became, increasingly, the impetus for collective identifcation and political action. By addressing these issues, Plath and Sexton negotiate a psychic landscape marked by many of the hazards and frustrations that would come to preoccupy feminist politics in the 1960s and 70s; in doing so they begin to map some of the polemical terrain later covered by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970). Like their feminist contemporaries, both poets respond powerfully to the cookie-cutter model of post-war bourgeois femininity that fnds its most lucid expression in the fantasy fgure of the “happy housewife heroine” who breezes through the pages of Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, “kissing [her husband] goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing [her] stationwagonful of children at school, and smiling as [she runs] the new electric waxer over the kitchen foor.” Famously characterised by Friedan as an “anonymous biological robot in a docile mass,” the fgure of housewife is marked by a similar uncanniness in women’s confessional poetry, where she is variously identifed with dolls, puppets and other forms of automata.13 The prospective housewife of Plath’s “The Applicant” (1962), for example, is a “living doll” that can “sew” and “cook” and “talk, talk, talk,” while the speaker of Sexton’s “Self in 1958” (1958–1965) imagines herself as a “plaster doll,” planted in “the all-electric kitchen” of her claustrophobic, miniature home. In these and other poems, the housewife tends to double for a stultifying, alienated and inauthentic femininity that is often understood as being at odds with the creative work of the poet.14 In this way, domesticated femininity is regularly invoked by Plath and Sexton as a means of examining the limited opportunities for self-expression afforded to women in the post-war period. Posing in her “advertised clothes,” the speaker of “Self in 1958” catches only occasional glimpses of the outside world through the “windows that fash open on someone’s city” but remains “walled in,” unable to leave or express herself:  “I would cry,” she laments at the end 383 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.029

Melanie Waters

of the poem, “rooted into the wall / that was once my mother / if I could remember how / and if I had the tears.” Conjuring the illusion of intimacy by inviting the reader to tour the private precincts of the home (in ways that recall Plath’s 1962 poem “The Tour”) and through recurrent images of open doors, windows and eyes (in concert with the insistent use of the frst-person pronoun “I”), Sexton’s poem bears all the hallmarks of the confessional style. In line with the poem’s haunting refrain, “What is reality,” Sexton uses the confessional mode to ask what kind of reality – if any – the confessional poem is capable of mediating. So disengaged is the speaker from her desires and fears, after all, that the only thing to which this “plaster doll” can reasonably confess is, paradoxically, her own inability to confess: she cannot provide, in other words, the full account of the self that is promised within the terms of the title.15 In another poem, “Housewife” (1962), Sexton again investigates the destructive effects of women’s over-identifcation with the home on their ability to achieve and narrate a coherent sense of selfhood. Just as Sexton’s sustained use of doll metaphors generates uncertainty about the ontological status of the housewife in “Self in 1958,” the housewife of her 1962 poem is no less uncanny. Absorbed into the architectural edifces of the home, she becomes a disquieting literalisation of the compound noun the poem takes as its title, a housewife, one of the women who “marry houses.” In contrast to the living, breathing organism of the home, which “has a heart, / a mouth, a liver and bowel movements,” the housewife’s routines are mechanical and unproductive, as “she sits on her knees all day, / faithfully washing herself down” (77). The poem’s tidy typography, like that of the four ten-line stanzas of “Self in 1958,” seems designed to replicate the orderly rituals of domestic femininity. At the same time, however, the poems’ irregular rhyme schemes and metrics militate against this outward adherence to the protocols of expectation. In this way, Sexton uses form to generate a tension between conformity and resistance dramatized at a thematic level by the fgure of the housewife, whose own irregularities are masked by a cultivated appearance of conformity, albeit one that both poems establish as illusory. Where Sexton’s poems tend to document the alienating or deadening effects of housewifery, the visions of domesticity fabricated by Plath in poems such as “The Tour” and “Lesbos” are actively endangering to the home’s inhabitants. As the speaker of “The Tour” invites her “maiden aunt” into the “wild machine” of her house, she is forced to warn her of its various hazards: the frost box that “might bite,” the furnace that “exploded one night” and the Morning Glory Pool that “boils” and “hurts” and “ate seven maids and a plumber” [emphasis in original].16 The potential toxicity of the domestic environment is no less potent in “Lesbos,” another of the poems 384 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.029

Sexton, Plath and Confessional Poetry

from Ariel. “Stinking of fat and baby crap,” the “windowless” kitchen, with its “fuorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine,” is a place where the violent fantasies of infanticide and cannibalism to which the poem gives voice seem thoroughly at home (227–229). If the home is positioned as a key site of women’s oppression in second wave feminism and confessional poetry alike, so too is the female body. Certainly the post-war incursions that feminism and confessionalism made into the private spaces of the home were exceeded only by their more daring forays into the intimate recesses of female anatomy. In Sexton’s “Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward,” “The Operation” and “The Abortion,” and Plath’s “Three Women,” “The Jailor” and “Lady Lazarus,” the female body – at times undressed, exhibited, restrained and violated  – is offered up for the reader’s scrutiny, mirroring (and in some cases anticipating) the debates about sexuality, reproduction, violence and objectifcation that dominated feminist thought in the latter half of the twentieth century. While metaphors of bodily exposure have provided critics with a convenient and evocative shorthand for discussing the exhibitionist gestures of confessional poetry, these metaphors surface just as frequently in the poetry itself. Whether waving her “nude arms at villages going by” (“Her Kind”), skinny-dipping in Capri (“Nude Swim”), eulogising the “sweet weight” of her womb (“In Celebration of My Uterus”) or fashing her genitals in a show of childish defance (“Hurry Up Please It’s Time”), Sexton’s speakers are forever exposing themselves, only for it to become apparent that this exposure is designed to disguise as much as it reveals (16, 182, 385). In Plath’s poetry, too, female speakers are prone to states of undress: one is left “[s]cared and bare” on a hospital gurney (“Tulips”), another is “nude as a chicken neck” in her “sleeveless summery dress” (“The Bee Meeting”) and the red-haired death goddess of “Lady Lazarus” famously mesmerises the “peanut-crunching crowd” with her “big strip tease” (160–161, 209–211, 245). In works by Plath and Sexton alike, the disrobed or disrobing female body is used to evoke the revelatory procedures of the confessional poem. Ultimately, though, such bodies tend to reveal only the limits of the confessional revelation. As Deborah Nelson refects, the confession “that appears to ‘tell all’ hides all the more effectively for telling only some, and so renders a paradoxical privacy” (89). The gestures of openness that characterise the confessional poem, then, are part of a shrewd sleight of hand enacted by the poet: what we “see” of the speaker is used to mask that which we do not. Perhaps the most striking encapsulation of this is in Sexton’s 1962 poem “The Operation,” which charts the speaker’s subjection to a series of intrusive medical procedures that unfold alongside memories of her mother’s recent hospitalisation and death. 385 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.029

Melanie Waters After the sweet promise, the summer’s mild retreat from mother’s cancer, the winter months of her death, I come to this white offce, its sterile sheet, its hard tablet, its stirrups, to hold my breath while I, who must, allow the glove its oily rape, to hear the almost mighty doctor over me equate my ills with hers and decide to operate. (56)

By opening the body up to the reader’s scrutiny, Sexton takes the metaphor of bodily exposure to its logical extreme: we are not only invited to visualise the speaker’s bare skin but also granted access to the most remote recesses of her anatomy. As she lies recumbent in the “sterile” space of the clinician’s surgery, submitting to the “oily rape” of the doctor’s disembodied glove, the reader is placed in a position in which he or she might almost see more of the speaker than the speaker herself. Exposed, vulnerable and unable to bear witness to the riddles of her own internal biology, she can do little more than concede to the doctor’s judgement and “nod” in response to his decision to operate. In the world of this hospital, where “the body is dumb, the body is meat,” the speaker struggles to remain “citizen and boss of [her] own body”: she is shaved “like a shorn lamb,” injected with drugs from “mysterious” needles, “hung up like a saddle,” cut open, and “tied” back together again, her “stomach laced up like a football / for the game” (56–59). “The Operation” illustrates many features that typify confessional poetry, but it is especially useful in highlighting the close identifcation of the body of the speaker with the body of the confessional text; both are sites of expert interpretation over which speakers and poets exert little or no fnal control. Plath’s 1961 poem “Tulips” also takes the hospital as a venue for exploring the female body as a site of exposure and vulnerability. Stripped of her clothing and possessions, the speaker’s “true” identity is not so much revealed as extinguished. As in “The Operation,” where the naked body is reduced to “meat,” the speaker – in her denuded state – becomes “nobody”: “I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses / And my history to the anesthetist and my body to the surgeons.” “They have,” she continues, “swabbed me clear of my loving associations / Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley / I  watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books / Sink out of sight.” Interestingly, the speaker very quickly remedies her apparent loss of identity by imagining her nudity as another kind of costume: “I am a nun now, I have never been so pure” (160–161). Plath famously extends this system of imagery in 1962’s “Lady Lazarus,” a poem that Rosenthal himself singled out as a paradigmatic example of the 386 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.029

Sexton, Plath and Confessional Poetry

confessional style (The New Poets 82). Written the year before her death, “Lady Lazarus” describes the “art” of dying; as a result, many of the most famous readings of the poem (including Rosenthal’s) are “underpinned by recourse to biography, which correlates the speaker’s cultivation of [the art of dying] with Plath’s suicidal career.”17 As in “Tulips” and “The Operation,” the creative staging of the bared female body evokes key aspects of the confessional project. Rather than confrming the confession as a magically prescient articulation of Plath’s self-destructive fantasies, however, the poem seeks instead to disentangle the confession from any biographical moorings and place it frmly in the register of performance: The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see Them unwrap me hand and foot – The big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies These are my hands My knees. (245)

In line with its formal role in religious, legal and political discourse, the confession retains its ritualistic shape in “Lady Lazarus,” though the terms of the ritual have changed. Here, confession is not sacrosanct but obscene; instead of functioning within systems of truth, catharsis or even punishment, it exists purely as a form of mass entertainment. As a psychic “strip tease,” moreover, the confession organises itself around a promise of revelation that it can never properly fulfll [emphasis added]. Divested of her ceremonial coverings, the speaker might offer the “peanut-crunching crowd” a tantalising glimpse of her hands or her knees, but such glimpses are part of a strategic and carefully managed economic exchange. There is a charge, a very large charge For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or clothes. (246)

At the very moment that the speaker courts the greatest intimacy, permitting her audience a “word or a touch / Or a bit of blood,” her body “melts to a shriek”: “I turn and burn. / Do not think I underestimate your great concern. // Ash, ash  – / You poke and stir. / Flesh, bone, there is nothing there – ” (246). If the speaker’s body has so far functioned as an objective correlative for a referential truth that the confession is supposedly capable of conveying, then its spectacular disintegration – at the very moment when 387 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.029

Melanie Waters

this “truth” seems closest to revelation – exposes its chimerical essence. Just as the body of the speaker disappears into the ether, so too does the “truth” of the confession; no matter how hard we might search for it, “there is nothing there.” In “Lady Lazarus,” then, confession becomes a mode of critique through which the snug alliance of truth and personal testimony can be performatively unsettled. We fnd an equally critical and self-refexive approach to confession in Sexton’s writing. In “For Mr. Death Who Stands with His Door Open” from The Death Notebooks (1974), Sexton, like Plath, positions dying – as it is constructed in the confessional poem – frmly in the register of art. In this context, death is personifed as an “actor,” a “kind of Valentino,” a man of “many masks” who takes on the role of principal male in her suicidal performances. Dying is a “puppet play,” an entertainment that the speaker plays out through fgures not herself. Such metaphors work to foreground the fact that the confessional revelation – no matter how intimate or how expressive it seems to be of the poet’s “true” state of mind – is always and already a ritualistic performance: But when it comes to my death let it be slow, let it be pantomime, this last peep show, so that I may squat at the edge trying on my black necessary trousseau. (Complete Poems 352)

Here, the death the speaker longs for is both a “pantomime” – a theatrical entertainment that is absurd, outrageous and even comic in its various excesses  – and the “last peep show,” a slow striptease that takes place in front of an audience hungry for salacious spectacle. As always, however, this fnal act of revelation is countervailed by a ritualized act of concealment: the speaker imagines death explicitly as a provisional “trying on” of a morbid ceremonial garment, the black trousseau that is so “necessary” to her deathly performance. Again and again, the promise of intimate revelation through which the confessional poem seduces the reader is coextensive with its abrogation. In seeking to understand the confession as unadulterated revelation then, we risk undermining the complexity of what both Sexton and Plath are endeavouring to convey: that the confession is less an act of ritual unmasking, as Rosenthal would claim, than one of knowing and elaborate psychic adornment. While it is inevitable that readers of Sexton and Plath will continue to speculate as to what the costume of confession might reveal about the lives of these poets, it is only by unpacking the methods by which it conceals them that their contributions to the post-war lyric can properly be recuperated. 388 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.029

Sexton, Plath and Confessional Poetry NOT E S 1 William Heyen and Al Poulin, No Evil Star:  Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose, ed. Steven E. Colburn (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 1985): 136. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Heyen and Poulin. 2 Robert Phillips, The Confessional Poets (Carbondale:  Southern Illinois University Press, 1973): 73; Edward Butscher, Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work (New York: Dodd Mead, 1977): 17. 3 Diane Wood Middlebrook, “What Was Confessional Poetry?,” in The Columbia History of American Poetry, eds. Jay Parini and Brett C. Millier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993): 633. 4 M. L. Rosenthal, The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1978): 67. 5 Deborah Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002): 1. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 6 Rosenthal, The New Poets:  American and British Poetry Since World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967): 23. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 7 Van Dyne, Susan R., “The Problem of Biography,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, ed. Jo Gill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 5. 8 See Rosenthal, “Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry,” in The Art of Sylvia Plath, ed. Charles Newman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970): 69–76. 9 Peter Orr, The Poet Speaks:  Interviews with Contemporary Poets (London: Routledge, 1966): 169–170. 10 Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters, eds. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1991): 372. Emphasis in the original. 11 The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–62, ed. Karen V.  Kukil (London:  Faber, 2000): 475. 12 Sexton, “The Bar Fly Ought to Sing,” in No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose, ed. Steven E. Colburn (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 1985): 9–10. 13 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (London: Penguin, 1965): 60, 16, 267. 14 Christina Britzolakis notes that Plath, too, “frequently pits the poet against the fgure of the domesticated woman” (113); see her “Ariel and Other Poems” in The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, ed. Jo Gill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 15 Complete Poems:  Anne Sexton (New  York:  Mariner Books, 1999):  155–159. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 16 Plath, Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London:  Faber, 1989):  237–238. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 17 Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1999): 151.

F U RT H E R R E A DI N G Britzolakis, Christina, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1999). Brain, Tracy, The Other Sylvia Plath (London: Longman, 2001). 389 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.029

Melanie Waters Broe, Mary Lynn, Protean Poetic: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980). Butscher, Edward, Sylvia Plath:  The Woman and the Work (New  York:  Dodd Mead, 1977). Colburn, Steven E., ed., Anne Sexton:  Telling the Tale (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 1988). Gill, Jo, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2006). Anne Sexton’s Confessional Poetics (Gainesville:  University of Florida Press, 2007). Lant, Kathleen Margaret, “The Big Strip Tease: Female Bodies and Male Power in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath,” Contemporary Literature 34.4 (Winter 1993): 620–669. Middlebrook, Diane Wood, “What Was Confessional Poetry?,” in The Columbia History of American Poetry, eds. Jay Parini and Brett C. Millier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993): 632–649. Newman, Charles, ed., The Art of Sylvia Plath (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1970). Phillips, Robert, The Confessional Poets (Carbondale:  Southern Illinois University Press, 1973). Rose, Jacqueline, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago, 1996).

390 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.029

29 A N DR E W E P S T E I N

“Street Musicians”: Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery

Today John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara are generally regarded as two of the most important and infuential American poets to have emerged since World War II. This was certainly not always the case: both poets started out “barely tolerated, living on the margin,” as one of Ashbery’s poems puts it, writing strange and experimental poems that were often met with incomprehension and ridicule.1 Along with Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest, O’Hara and Ashbery formed the nucleus of an avant-garde movement that emerged in the 1950s and came to be known as “the New York School of poets.” Together the young writers set about rejecting the poetic mode then ascendant by resisting its closed, traditional forms and somber, mythic subject matter in favor of a more open-ended and playful poetics. Less a literary “school” than a collection of friends with shared tastes, obsessions, and poetic strategies, the New York School has nonetheless come to be viewed as one of the most infuential of the many movements that sprung up in the period following World War II – shining more brightly today than the Beats and the Confessional poets who once overshadowed them.2 The emergence of O’Hara, Ashbery, and the New York School is a signifcant chapter in the evolution of American poetry because it represents a distinctive fusion of infuences that has proven to be a unique and lasting contribution to American letters. Finding existing, approved traditions of poetry in English largely stultifying, they defantly turned elsewhere, to alternative and less sanctioned sources of inspiration: they cast aside the dominant mid-century mode, promoted by T. S. Eliot and his disciples among the formalist New Critics, took up some of the more marginal strains of modern American poetry (Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude Stein), and turned, especially, to the European avant-garde of Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. The New York School’s achievement was to merge a profoundly American sensibility with the liberating formal experimentation of modern European painting; the French poetic 391 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

Andrew Epstein

tradition from Arthur Rimbaud to Guillaume Apollinaire, Andre Breton, and Pierre Reverdy; the Russian poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Boris Pasternak; and key avant-garde methods like collage, appropriation, abstraction, constraints, and collaboration. At the same time, the New  York School poets were particularly inspired by the preeminent school of postwar American painting, Abstract Expressionism, and sought to adapt its emphasis on spontaneity and art-asprocess to poetry. They saw this as a way of escaping the constraining notion that a poem must be a “well-wrought urn” or exquisitely crafted, symmetrical object  – a shift in orientation that had a dramatic impact on ideas about form and craft in American poetry.3 They found another model in avant-garde classical music, especially in John Cage’s exploration of chance methods, randomness, and the music of everyday sounds. They embraced the movies, comic books, and, to a lesser extent, jazz, breaking new ground by prying open the narrow confnes of poetry to let in the gaudy glory of American pop culture – in the process, opening the door to the blurring of “high” and “low” culture that became one of the hallmarks of postmodernism. They also were united in the belief that New York City itself offered boundless opportunities for inspiration and artistic community, bringing a new urban and urbane sensibility to American poetry. Deeply enthusiastic about one another’s work but wary of sounding too much alike, O’Hara and Ashbery deliberately moved in different directions in their poetry, as I  will show. But their writing also shares a great deal, including a tendency to yoke the absurd and surreal with an attentiveness to the everyday, a refusal of over-seriousness and pomposity, a fondness for chatty and colloquial language, and a love of verbal play and artifce. They are also both fascinated by the concept, drawn from Abstract Expressionism, that a poem could be what Ashbery calls “the chronicle of the creative act that produces it.”4 On a fundamental level, they also share a philosophical outlook that grows out of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the pragmatism of William James, characterized by an anti-foundationalist skepticism of absolutes, a resistance to all forms of fxity, and a generally affrmative response to a world they view as marked by absurdity, loss, transience, and contingency.5 The poetry of O’Hara and Ashbery – once seen as too outrageous, too lightweight or lacking in high seriousness, too deliberately diffcult  – has been gradually assimilated into the canon, like so many other radical works of the avant-garde, and now seems to speak in vital and memorable ways to central concerns of our time. From the vantage point of the early twenty-frst century, the infuence of O’Hara and Ashbery can be seen virtually everywhere across the variegated landscape of American poetry.6 392 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

The New York School

Frank O’Hara From the early 1950s to his tragic death in 1966 at the age of forty, O’Hara was the charismatic core of the New York School group, as poet, art critic, museum curator, and all-around dynamo. Like virtually all of the poets associated with the New York School, O’Hara grew up far from Manhattan’s buzzing, crowded streets and glittering skyscrapers and only made his way there in his twenties, seeking art, culture, and personal liberation. Born in 1926 in Baltimore, Maryland, raised in the small, rural town of Grafton, Massachusetts, and “sent against my will to Catholic schools,” O’Hara was a precocious, artistic child whose frst love and ambition was to be a pianist and composer.7 After graduating from high school, O’Hara enlisted in the Navy and served in the Pacifc during World War II. Upon returning, he attended Harvard University, thanks to the G.I. Bill, where his interests quickly shifted from music to literature, as he met fellow poets such as Koch and Ashbery, fell in with an artistic and literary crowd, and began writing poems. After receiving an M. A. from the University of Michigan, he followed in the footsteps of his poet friends as quickly as he could and moved to New York in 1951. Almost instantly, O’Hara found himself at the very center of a dynamic New York art world of painters, dancers, composers, and poets, during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, a moment of great excitement and creative ferment in the arts.8 No other American poet has ever been as deeply connected to major currents in visual art as Frank O’Hara. Soon after arriving in New York, he landed a job as a front desk clerk selling postcards at the Museum of Modern Art in order to simply be around art as much as possible. Rather remarkably, within a few short years, he had worked his way up to become an infuential associate curator at the museum. He grew close to many painters, both those already famous (Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline) and others soon to be (Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg), and began publishing fresh, perceptive, sometimes rhapsodic art criticism, including one of the frst monographs on Jackson Pollock, an artist whose work he revered. O’Hara delighted in playing the role of friend, supporter, and catalyst to the most exciting artists of his day, just as one of his heroes, Apollinaire, did for Picasso and the Cubists. O’Hara posed for portraits, dropped in on artists’ studios, wrote reviews, helped mount landmark exhibitions as a curator at MoMA, and even collaborated directly with artists, creating mixed-media “poem-paintings” (most famously in the series of lithographs he completed with Rivers titled Stones).9 O’Hara’s web of connections extended far beyond the art world, as he fostered close ties with fgures from the worlds of poetry, fction, drama, music 393 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

Andrew Epstein

(classical, avant-garde, and jazz), dance, painting, and sculpture. O’Hara saw no distinction between friendship and artistic creation and was always ready, even eager, to blur the lines between them by diving into collaborative ventures with his companions. Rejecting the traditional image of the American poet as a solitary genius, O’Hara and the New York School poets embraced the practice of collaboration, relishing the competitive interplay with other writers and artists as an exciting and unpredictable method of generating creativity.10 A notable feature of O’Hara’s life and work was his refusal to abide by the strictures of the closet, even at the nadir of the McCarthy-era persecution of homosexuals. During one of the most virulently anti-gay moments in American cultural history, O’Hara wrote openly about his sexual identity, treating it as just another facet of his daily life (“I live above a dyke bar and I’m happy”) and refusing to see homosexuality as “deviant” or abnormal (286). It was virtually unthinkable that a poet in 1954 could bestow the title “Homosexuality” upon a poem, let alone proudly proclaim in the piece that “it’s wonderful to admire oneself / with complete candor” (182) or be brazen enough in 1957 to publish a piece that exclaims “Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching (How discourage her?)” (197). Not surprisingly, O’Hara has become an important model and inspiration to legions of gay poets and readers and a subject of considerable interest for scholars of queer theory and literature.11 In July 1966, O’Hara was killed in a bizarre accident when he was struck in the middle of the night by a dune buggy on a beach on Fire Island, New York. At the time of his death, he had published only two full-length collections of poetry and was largely seen as an art world fxture and a coterie fgure with an underground following among young bohemian poets. Indeed, upon his death, the New York Times obituary read, rather shockingly given his posthumous reputation, “MUSEUM CURATOR: Exhibitions Aide at Modern Art Dies – Also a Poet.” Because O’Hara was notoriously casual about collecting and publishing his works – perhaps because he was always more interested in poetry as process and experiment than as a set of fnished, polished products – it was not until after his death, when the monumental Collected Poems was published in 1971, that the full range and power of his ambitious oeuvre became clear. O’Hara’s poems fuse surrealistic, rapidly shifting imagery with a chatty, conversational voice, creating a distinctive tone that fosters an unusual degree of intimacy with the reader. Shedding the “Waste Land” pessimism of Eliotic poetry, O’Hara’s poems are riddled with exclamation points and display an infectious, campy joie de vivre. Temperamentally allergic to 394 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

The New York School

dogmatism and absolutes, resistant to all forms of fxity and stasis, and deeply wary of the metaphysical and transcendent (“I am . . . the opposite of visionary,” he writes), O’Hara’s philosophical disposition might be thought of as an affrmative skepticism: a pragmatist embrace of the here-and-now, a belief in the inherent value of concrete, empirical experience in all its pluralistic variety, and a relatively cheerful response to doubt, contingency, and mortality (256). To put this philosophical stance into practice, O’Hara develops what Marjorie Perloff refers to as an “aesthetic of attention” – an alert responsiveness to the immediate particulars and absurdities of daily life, a commitment to tracking the “emergency” of ordinary experience as it unfolds moment by moment.12 As O’Hara wrote in an essay, “attention equals Life, or is its only evidence” (Standing 184). In the early poem “Today,” O’Hara offers a young poet’s declaration of purpose:  thumbing his nose at those who would police which subject matter is appropriate or “serious” enough for verse, he proclaims his commitment to the quotidian, to an art deeply rooted in the immediate present; as another early poem puts it, he wants his writing to be “the inexorable / product of my own time” (49). “Today” begins on a characteristically giddy note, joyfully enumerating a series of odd, concrete things: “Oh, kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful!” and ends by insisting that “These things are with us every day / even on beachheads and on biers. They / / do have meaning, they’re strong as rocks” (15). As the poem’s quiet reference to “beachheads” and “biers” suggests, beneath the charming, bright surfaces of O’Hara’s work run strong undercurrents of irony, sadness, anxiety, and awareness of time’s passing. As David Lehman observes, “O’Hara’s distinctive tone” is “two parts melancholy, three parts joy,” with both parts of that ratio essential to his work’s potency (Last 170). A  recognition that loss, defeat, and death lie around every corner lends O’Hara’s poems a gravity and density that is even more effective because of their exuberance and their often humorous and seemingly offhand qualities. During the frst phase of his work, O’Hara’s poetry displays the most direct impress of surrealism and Abstract Expressionism on his writing, especially in several radical longer poems, such as “Second Avenue” and “Easter,” where O’Hara experiments with smashing conventional syntax and using dreamlike, violent, and scatological imagery. After these liberating experiments in aggressive disjunction and surrealism, O’Hara’s work grows increasingly interested in rendering the dizzying variety of daily experience in a disarmingly conversational idiom. As Kenneth Koch noted in an essay about the evolution of his friend’s work, O’Hara’s poems “move in general 395 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

Andrew Epstein

from being experience-inspired outbursts of imaginative creation to being imaginative illuminations of ordinary experience,” although it is worth noting that these two sides of his work remain in play and in tension from beginning to end.13 O’Hara’s most famous piece of prose, the hilarious mock manifesto “Personism,” displays many of the crucial ingredients of his mature work. Composed in 1959, the piece is a send-up of Charles Olson’s infuential, didactic essay “Projective Verse” (1950) and a host of other manifestoes that lay out goals and promise a revolution in art or literature as we know it. In it, we see O’Hara’s breezy insouciance and wit, his irreverent impatience with dogma and the tendency to treat poetry with pretentious solemnity, and his unwillingness to rank high and low cultural forms (“I like the movies too”) (498). Less an essay than a bravura performance of his aesthetics, the piece both articulates and puts into action O’Hara’s credo of spontaneity and improvisation, as it proclaims: “I don’t care for rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve” (498). The idea behind the mock movement “Personism” itself also speaks to central concerns of O’Hara’s work. He explains that he thought of this new movement (which is so new it has yet to gain a single follower) when he began writing a poem for his new love interest only to realize “that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem” (499). Although he is only half-serious here, the notion of a mode of poetry that emerges from the push and pull of the writer’s friendships and personal relationships, where “the poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages,” underlies O’Hara’s entire body of work, including his penchant for writing poems addressed to specifc friends and lovers (499). It also indicates O’Hara’s fascination with friendship itself, which becomes one of the great themes of his work. He writes about and to a particular community, pens poems for specifc friends on specifc occasions (birthdays, weddings), and notoriously flls his works to the brim with the proper names of pals one has never heard of, opening up American poetry to what his friend Allen Ginsberg called, in an elegy for O’Hara, “deep gossip.”14 However, as I have argued elsewhere, O’Hara’s poems do not simply celebrate his own coterie or traffc in name-dropping and inside jokes; his work also engages in a sophisticated and moving investigation of the nature of friendship itself, both its pleasures and its discontents, the thrill of fnding like-minded collaborators and the need to maintain one’s independence and solitude.15 In the later 1950s, O’Hara perfected what came to be his best-known mode: the kind of pieces he called his “I do this, I do that” poems. Diaristic and chatty, often written during and after his lunch-break walks around 396 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

The New York School

Manhattan (many collected in the 1964 volume Lunch Poems), these works are primarily responsible for O’Hara’s well-deserved reputation as the quintessential poet of New York City. Poems like “The Day Lady Died,” “A Step Away From Them,” “Personal Poem,” “Steps,” and dozens of others chronicle the vertiginous experience of daily life within the mundane swirl of his beloved city. The poems track the speaker’s thoughts and actions as he moves through the jumbled, dynamic urban environment and revel in the cultural collisions of contemporary urban experience, where sweaty construction workers jostle with rich women in furs, and where white and black, highbrow and vulgar, foreign and native, beauty and ugliness all intermingle. Although he is best known for these urban “lunch poems,” O’Hara’s work is richer and more varied than it is sometimes taken to be. Alongside his “I do this, I do that” poems, O’Hara composed a number of expansive longer works, the most important of which are “Ode to Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and Other Births)” and “In Memory of My Feelings” – ambitious, philosophically rich experiments in writing the self and renovating the Whitmanic American long poem. “In Memory of My Feelings” is a pivotal poem for O’Hara, in which he most fully expresses his infuential vision of the self as radically protean and multiple, his belief that it is “Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible” (a line now inscribed in granite on O’Hara’s gravestone) (256). Also worth noting is O’Hara’s series of “movie poems,” which include “An Image of Leda,” “For James Dean,” “To the Film Industry in Crisis,” “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!),” and “Ave Maria” (“Mothers of America!,” the poem begins, “let your kids go to the movies!”) (371). At a time when many intellectuals and authors were anxiously fretting about the rapid spread of mass media and its negative effects, O’Hara provocatively declares it is “you, Motion Picture Industry, / it’s you I love!” (232). His movie poems display an infectious love of Hollywood cinema and a campy but genuine enthusiasm for its stars, mingled with a quite serious and ambivalent consideration of the pleasures, effects, and downsides of this new media and the dawning of celebrity culture.16 By blurring, or erasing, the boundaries between high and low culture, O’Hara anticipates one of the hallmarks of postmodernism across the arts and paves the way for the widespread engagement with pop culture to be found in contemporary poetry today. In the decades since his death, O’Hara’s reputation has soared. Marjorie Perloff’s 1977 book, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters, did a great deal to legitimize O’Hara as a writer of signifcance and drew the attention of literary scholars to his poetry and its connections to painting. Over the past two decades, there has been an explosion of critical interest in all aspects of 397 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

Andrew Epstein

O’Hara’s work and milieu. In recent years, critics have been particularly eager to situate O’Hara’s poetry within its cultural and historical contexts – they have considered, for example, O’Hara’s poetry in terms of gender and queer identity and have examined its relation to Cold War politics and postwar American culture, including such issues as race, class, consumerism, capitalism, the modern city, the visual arts, cinema, jazz, pop culture, and issues of community and identity, both national and personal.17 Immediately appealing, daring, and ahead of his time, in contact with so many criss-crossing currents of mid-twentieth-century American culture, O’Hara continues to fascinate readers and writers of American poetry decades after his death. John Ashbery O’Hara’s poetry, of course, screeched to a halt in 1966, leaving readers to ponder the mystery of how his writing might have developed over time. Fortunately, John Ashbery’s work has continued to appear and evolve over the half-century since his friend’s death. Even though he found some early success when W. H. Auden chose his debut, Some Trees, for the 1955 Yale Younger Poets prize, it was not until after O’Hara’s death that Ashbery’s reputation truly took off, reaching its pinnacle in the 1970s when he entered the upper echelons of contemporary literature. Widely considered to be the most important living American poet, Ashbery has loomed large over American poetry for the past several decades. However, his work remains controversial and polarizing, with the response to it divided between those who regard him as a preeminent poet whose challenging work has altered our defnition of what poetry can be and detractors who fnd him willfully diffcult and overrated. Nevertheless, because the central themes and obsessions of his work are so closely in sync with the philosophical and cultural temper of the times, Ashbery is often seen as an exemplary poet of the age. Grappling with the uncertainty and randomness of life in an absurd, chaotic universe; exploring how language and consciousness work (and do not work); probing the blurry lines between “reality” and fction and “truth” and image; confronting the multiplicity of identity in a media-saturated culture where we are constantly bombarded with information and images – Ashbery is in many ways the embodiment of postmodernism in poetry.18 Like O’Hara, Ashbery was born several hundred miles away from Manhattan, in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a rural farm in nearby Sodus. Extremely bright and interested in art, poetry, and classical music from an early age, Ashbery had a rather isolated childhood, marked by the haunting death of his nine-year-old brother when he was thirteen. He 398 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

The New York School

too attended Harvard, where he began to write poetry in earnest, and met O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, who would become his closest friends and artistic allies. He also steeped himself in the writers who would infuence his work, such as Auden, Stevens, and Stein, as well as French poets of the avant-garde, from Mallarmé and Rimbaud to the surrealists. After graduating in 1949, Ashbery moved to New York, where he earned an M.A. in English from Columbia University and became a central member of the thriving community of New York School poets and painters. Despite the proclivities Ashbery shared with O’Hara and the other New York poets, the writers deliberately cultivated their own poetic styles, aesthetic concerns, and personalities, creating bodies of poetry that are quite distinctive yet closely interrelated. From the start, he and O’Hara saw their work as mining adjacent but different territories. For example, Ashbery quickly began to defne his own writing as less interested than O’Hara’s in presenting autobiography and personal experience and more drawn to the realms of imagination and dream. In contrast to his friend’s materialist, empirical, and personal poetics, Ashbery developed his own idiom – a more overtly philosophical, meditative, and teasingly elusive poetic mode.19 Ashbery’s poetry has always provoked strong reactions because of its experimental handling of language and poetic form: his poems resist conventional explanation and paraphrase, refuse to present a coherent speaking self that can be identifed with the poet, and lack traditional subject matter and easily grasped signifcance. As he points out, rather than addressing “a particular subject and treating it formally in a kind of essay,” “my poetry . . . has an exploratory quality and I don’t have it all mapped out before I sit down to write.”20 Ashbery readily admits that this quality leads his poetry in unpredictable and even bewildering directions but defends such unsettling journeys into the unknown as an integral part of his work’s raison d’être: “my intention is to communicate and my feeling is that a poem that communicates something that’s already known by the reader is not really communicating anything to him and in fact shows a lack of respect for him” (Packard 112). Unlike many poets, Ashbery is less concerned with relating a specifc event than with conveying what he calls “the experience of experience”: “the particular occasion is of less interest to me than the way a happening or experience flters through me . . . I’m trying to set down a generalized transcript of what’s really going on in our minds all day long.”21 Rather than referring to friends by name, like O’Hara, and allowing the swirl of daily life in all its particularity into his poems, Ashbery chooses to fashion what I call “vague allegories” of his own life: skewed and indeterminate narratives that hint indirectly at the contours of his poetic career, his life, his friendships, 399 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

Andrew Epstein

and love affairs but that also suggest the shape and progression of any life. For example, Ashbery describes “Soonest Mended” (1969), one of his most highly regarded pieces, as “my one-size-fts-all confessional poem, which is about my youth and maturing but also about anybody else’s.”22 Certain stylistic features run through nearly all of Ashbery’s work, including the use of intentionally vague and shifting pronouns (which he has said helps “to reproduce the polyphony that goes on inside me”); the creation of indeterminate, rapidly changing, often surreal narrative situations; the collaging of various voices and discourses, including clichés and slangy conversational speech; and a wild mix of tones and diction that can swing from the high poetic to the ridiculous in the space of a line, as when he writes in an early poem “In a far recess of summer / Monks are playing soccer” (Packard 123–124).23 Furthermore, because he, like O’Hara, is more interested in process than any fnished product, the actual subject of his poems is often the “poem creating itself,” the process of its own coming into being, which means that his work is intensely self-refexive and flled with metapoetic commentary (Poulin 251). One of the trademarks of Ashbery’s work is a tantalizing elusiveness in which possible meanings and potential epiphanies are invoked but continually deferred or undermined. Creating the uncanny sensation that the poem is always on the verge of revealing something that trembles just out of reach has been a characteristic effect of his work from the very beginning, as can be seen in the closing lines of the very frst poem in his frst book, Some Trees: “In the evening / Everything has a schedule, if you can fnd out what it is.”24 In 1955, W. H. Auden chose the manuscript of Some Trees for the Yale Younger Poets prize (selecting it over O’Hara’s submission), an award that effectively launched Ashbery’s career. While these poems are still relatively traditional, showing the strong infuence of Stevens, Auden, and French poetry, they feature Ashbery’s characteristic voice, verbal brilliance, and range of concerns. Among them are the much-anthologized poem “The Instruction Manual,” an uncharacteristically straightforward revery about escaping from a dull publishing job on an imaginary trip to Guadalajara on the wings of poesy, and the title poem, a gentle yet oblique piece about covert and illicit love. Ashbery recalls that in the early 1950s, he “went through a period of intense depression and doubt” that was linked to the stifing cultural atmosphere of the repressive McCarthy years, in part because he had gone on record as a homosexual to avoid being drafted for the Korean War, which left him terrifed of persecution. Unlike O’Hara, who was brash and open about his sexual identity, Ashbery was understandably anxious about such 400 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

The New York School

self-revelation at a time of rampant homophobia. Critics have recently connected this discomfort to the evolution of Ashbery’s distinctive poetic strategies, not least the slippery, maddeningly unstable sense of self one fnds in his work, and have begun to examine issues of sexuality and queer identity more broadly in his poetry.25 Also in 1955, Ashbery received a Fulbright Scholarship to study in France for a year, but he enjoyed living there so much that he extended his stay for most of a decade. In France, he researched the eccentric French writer Raymond Roussel for a doctoral dissertation he never completed and began writing art criticism steadily, which he would continue to do for many years. In 1962, Ashbery published his controversial second volume, The Tennis Court Oath, a book comprised of highly experimental and radically disjunctive poems written at a time when Ashbery was “baffed as to what to do in poetry” (Packard 116). In works like the long collage poem “Europe,” with its fragmentary phrases and isolated words, Ashbery was self-consciously “taking poetry apart to try to understand how it works.”26 While some of his most ardent supporters, such as Harold Bloom, view the book as a regrettable detour on Ashbery’s path to greatness, the volume has been extremely infuential on later experimental poets, such as the Language poets, who take it to be a foundational text of postmodernist poetry and the poet’s most groundbreaking book. Although Ashbery himself sees The Tennis Court Oath as transitional and feels less close to it than to his other works, there is no doubt that the volume stands as a signifcant moment in his evolving aesthetic. In Rivers and Mountains (1966), his third book, Ashbery began “trying to ft [poetry] back together” in arresting new formations after the rigorous “dismembering of language” in his previous book (Osti 95), with poems like the dense, swirling “Clepsydra” revealing his growing interest in “how time feels as it is passing.”27 The long poem “The Skaters” signals a departure from the austere and fractured poems of his second book and can be seen as Ashbery’s breakthrough into full stride. This expansive and exuberant masterpiece, in which the questing poet is seen paradoxically “continuing but ever beginning / My perennial voyage,” is, by turns, conversational, lyrical, parodic, and meditative, as well as highly self-conscious about the process of its own composition (Mooring 204). Ashbery fnally returned from France in late 1965 to live in the United States permanently and, once again in New York, began working as an executive editor for Art News. Following the death of his father (1964) and the shocking loss of O’Hara (1966), one of his closest friends, Ashbery’s poetry became increasingly elegiac and concerned with temporality and transience, as exemplifed in the ruminative, lyrical poems in The Double Dream of 401 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

Andrew Epstein

Spring (1970), one of Ashbery’s fnest volumes. “In a way the passage of time is becoming more and more the subject of my poetry as I get older,” he explained in an interview (Packard 122). By the end of the 1960s, Ashbery had again grown restless with his poetry and decided to break new ground with a triad of long poems in prose, the critically praised volume Three Poems, which appeared in 1972. One of Ashbery’s major achievements and a favorite of his, this innovative sequence is a central expression of his philosophical and aesthetic outlook. By creating “an open feld of narrative possibilities” in the poems’ onrushing, serpentine language, Ashbery expanded the possibilities of both the American long poem and prose poetry and hit on a more inclusive, discursive, and meditative style that would become his dominant mode.28 The ecstatic response to Ashbery’s next book, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (New  York:  Viking, 1975), marked a crucial turning point in his career:  although he had been gradually gaining acceptance after years of indifference and even hostility from reviewers dismayed by the diffculty of his work, the 1976 National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Critics Circle Award suddenly vaulted Ashbery into relative stardom. The book’s long title poem is regarded by many to be Ashbery’s masterpiece, although the poet himself has often commented disparagingly about the poem and its celebrity. A brilliant and moving contemplation of a painting by the sixteenth-century Italian painter Francesco Parmigianino, the poem considers the problems of rendering the contingent self in art while musing on the complexities of subjectivity, perception, time, and the vexed relationship between art and life. After reaching this pinnacle, Ashbery continued to write at the height of his powers. His equally masterful next book, Houseboat Days (New  York:  Viking, 1977), features a number of frequently anthologized gems (such as “Syringa,” “Street Musicians,” “The Other Tradition,” and “And Ut Pictura Poesis is Her Name”), only to be followed by yet another bold experiment with form, the long poem “Litany” in As We Know, which appears in two parallel columns and is “meant to be read as simultaneous but independent monologues.”29 The recipient of countless awards and honors, Ashbery eventually retired from art criticism, taught at Brooklyn College, and later became the Charles P. Stevenson Professor at Bard College. He has remained remarkably productive through his sixties, seventies, and eighties, publishing a new book practically every other year, each flled with provocative poems. Highlights of this later phase include his longest poem to date, the book-length poem Flow Chart (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1991), a massive compendium of Ashberyean concerns with an autobiographical slant. 402 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

The New York School

In the 1970s, Ashbery found his work championed by one of the most prominent literary critics of the day, Harold Bloom, whose advocacy virtually assured the poet’s canonization as a major American poet. Bloom removed Ashbery from his origins and connections to the New York School and the avant-garde and proclaimed him the rightful inheritor of the long Romantic tradition that stretches from the British Romantics and Whitman through Wallace Stevens to Ashbery himself.30 However, Ashbery’s work was soon hailed in very different terms by scholars of the avant-garde, such as Marjorie Perloff, who connected him to a French lineage of “indeterminacy” stemming from Rimbaud, as well as by younger experimental writers, such as the Language poets, who saw him as an innovative trailblazer.31 This set the stage for an ongoing tug-of-war over the nature of Ashbery’s accomplishment: while some critics and poets deem him a master of the meditative Romantic lyric, proponents of a more experimental Ashbery have warned against such efforts to “normalize” him by taming his writing’s more radical qualities.32 The divided nature of this response may be due to Ashbery’s perfection of what he has called “a kind of fence-sitting / Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal”:  his inclusive aesthetic, like O’Hara’s, remains open to the impulses and techniques of the avant-garde and to the resources of poetic tradition at once (SP 88). From the frst, both poets were as stimulated by the avant-garde’s energy and innovations as they were skeptical of its pretension and rigidity, its macho heroics, and its strident claims that it could remain “pure” or unabsorbed by the culture it critiques. This dual stance, this ambivalence and shape-shifting, helps explain why O’Hara and Ashbery, unlike so many other members of their illustrious generation, have managed to appeal to both sides of the divide that has, for better or worse, structured the reception and practice of American poetry since the mid-twentieth century – the split between the “experimental” and “mainstream” or what Robert Lowell once referred to as “the raw and the cooked.” In that sense, O’Hara and Ashbery stand as models for the “American hybrid” poetics that has moved to the fore in the early twenty-frst century:  a mode that attempts to reconcile and synthesize the oppositional aesthetic camps of the last half-century. When one considers some of the most familiar features of contemporary American poetry – for example, a chatty, unpretentious, and self-deprecating voice, or a breezy familiarity with all registers of culture, from highbrow to pop  – it is the infuence of O’Hara, Ashbery, and the New  York School of poets one senses. The lightning-fast shifts of voice and scene, the resistance to lofty pronouncements and tidy conclusions, the presentation of self and narrative as slippery and elusive, the use of goofy surrealism and 403 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

Andrew Epstein

dream logic, the devotion to dailiness – all these elements of the poetry of our moment stem, at least in part, from O’Hara and Ashbery and their boundary-breaking reconception of what poetry could be, their aesthetic and conceptual daring, and their memorable and moving poems. N OT E S 1 Ashbery, Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 1985): 87. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 2 The most comprehensive group portrait of the New York School poets to date is David Lehman’s The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York:  Doubleday, 1998); the book is hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. For more on the New York School as a whole, see Ward, Watkin, Silverberg, Nelson, Kane (All Poets), Gray, Diggory, and Miller’s collection of essays, Scene of My Selves, and Diggory’s Encyclopedia; these, and all other essays and books mentioned in footnotes, are listed in the Further Reading section appended to this chapter. 3 The phrase appears in the title to Cleanth Brooks’s 1947 classic (in the New Critical vein) The Well-Wrought Urn:  Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock). 4 Ashbery, introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971): viii–ix. This edition, from which quotations of O’Hara’s poetry are drawn, is hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 5 For more on the poets’ pragmatist sensibility, see my Beautiful Enemies, as well as Epstein (“Crisis, Possibility”), Poirier, Magee, and Herd. 6 Examples of their infuence are too numerous and diverse to list here, but for a mostly negative, recent take on the pervasive infuence of the New York School, see Tony Hoagland, “Blame it on Rio:  The Strange Legacy of the New  York School Poetics”: “As of our present moment, the New York School of poetry, like the alluvial fan at a river mouth, has widened and stretched out into multiple strands of infuence, including shoals of post-Language ‘compositionalist’ work, playful surrealism, urban walking-around poetry, campy literary ‘personalism’ poetry, mildly dissociative party-poetry, post-Beat, etc.,” The Writer’s Chronicle (September 2011): 78. 7 O’Hara, Standing Still and Walking in New  York, ed. Donald Allen (Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox, 1975): 30. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 8 For more on O’Hara’s life, career, and milieu, see Brad Gooch’s biography, as well as works by Perloff, Lehman, and LeSueur. For memoirs, poems, and paintings that suggest the extraordinary range of O’Hara’s friends and admirers, also see Homage to Frank O’Hara (Berkson and LeSueur). Other important studies of O’Hara’s work include Shaw, Breslin, the essays collected in Elledge, and the recent volume of essays Frank O’Hara Now (Hampson and Montgomery). 9 There has been a great deal of attention to O’Hara and art. For example, see Perloff’s Frank O’Hara, Ferguson, and Shaw. 10 On collaboration and its importance for O’Hara, Ashbery, and the New York School, see Epstein (Beautiful Enemies), Smith, Herd, and Silverberg. 404 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

The New York School 11 For more on O’Hara, sexuality, and queer identity, see Crain, Kikel, Ross, Herring, Jarraway, and Smith. 12 Perloff, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977): 1. 13 Koch, The Art of Poetry: Poems, Parodies, Interviews, Essays, and Other Work (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996): 27. 14 See Ginsberg, “City Midnight Junk Strains (For Frank O’Hara),” Collected Poems of Allen Ginsberg (New York: Harper, 2007). 15 See Epstein, Beautiful Enemies. 16 On O’Hara and cinema, see Epstein (“I Want to Be at Least as Alive”), Elledge, Goble, and Kane (We Saw the Light). 17 For example, see works by Davidson, Glavey, Rosenbaum, Friedlander, Clune, Shaw, Gray, Silverberg, and Magee (“Tribes”). 18 Important works on Ashbery include book-length studies by Shapiro, Shoptaw, Herd, DuBois, and Vincent; essay collections edited by Lehman (Beyond Amazement) and Schultz; and articles and chapters by Bloom, Vendler, and Perloff. 19 See Epstein, Beautiful Enemies for more on Ashbery and O’Hara relationship. 20 Packard, ed., The Craft of Poetry:  Interviews from the New  York Quarterly (Garden City, NY:  Doubleday, 1974):  117. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 21 A. Poulin, Jr., “The Experience of Experience:  A  Conversation with John Ashbery,” Michigan Quarterly 20.3 (Summer 1981): 245. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 22 John Murphy, “John Ashbery,” Poetry Review 75 (August 1985): 25. Despite the widespread feeling among critics that Ashbery eschews the personal and interpersonal, I argue that he is, much like O’Hara (albeit in very different ways), a great and moving poet of friendship and love. See Epstein, Beautiful Enemies, especially chapter 4, and see also Mohanty and Monroe, and Altieri. 23 See Peter Stitt, “The Art of Poetry 33,” Paris Review 90 (Winter 1983):  30–59. Ashbery, Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 1985): 12. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number (with the abbreviation SP). 24 Ashbery, The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry (Hopewell, New Jersey: Ecco Press, 1997): 3. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as Mooring. 25 On Ashbery and homosexuality and queer identity, see Shoptaw’s extensive and provocative book, Imbriglio, and Vincent (“Reports of Looting”). For a discussion that contrasts how O’Hara and Ashbery approach their sexual identity in their poetry, see Epstein, Beautiful (especially 241–246); the 1976 interview in which Ashbery speaks of his “period of intense depression” is also quoted therein (43). 26 Louis Osti, “The Craft of John Ashbery,” Confrontation 9 (Fall 1974):  95. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as Osti. 27 Richard Kostelanetz, “John Ashbery,” Old Poetries and the New (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981): 101. 28 Ashbery, Three Poems (New York: Penguin, 1972): 3. 29 Ashbery, As We Know (New York: Penguin Books, 1979): 2. 30 See, for example, Bloom’s “Charity of the Hard Moments.” 405 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

Andrew Epstein 31 See Perloff’s chapter on Ashbery in Poetics of Indeterminacy. 32 “Normalizing John Ashbery,” Jacket 2 (January 1998), available on the web. F U RT H E R R E A DI N G Altieri, Charles, “Ashbery as Love Poet,” in Schultz, Tribe, 26–37. Ashbery, John, Collected Poems: 1957–1987, ed. Mark Ford (New York: Library of America, 2008). Berkson, Bill and Joseph LeSueur, eds., Homage to Frank O’Hara (Bolinas:  Big Sky, 1988). Bloom, Harold, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). ed., John Ashbery: Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1985). “The Charity of the Hard Moments,” in Bloom, Ashbery, 49–80. Breslin, James E. B., “Frank O’Hara,” in Elledge, 253–298. Clune, Michael, “ ‘Everything We Want’: Frank O’Hara and the Aesthetics of Free Choice,” PMLA 120.1 (January 2005): 181–196. Crain, Caleb, “Frank O’Hara’s Fired Self,” American Literary History 9.2 (1997): 287–308. Davidson, Michael, Guys Like Us:  Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Diggory, Terence and Stephen Paul Miller, eds., The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 2001). Diggory, Terence, Encyclopedia of the New York School Poets (New York: Facts on File, 2009). DuBois, Andrew, Ashbery’s Forms of Attention (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006). Elledge, Jim, ed., Frank O’Hara:  To Be True to a City (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 1990). Epstein, Andrew, Beautiful Enemies:  Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). “Crisis, Possibility, and Pragmatism: Frank O’Hara’s Early Journal and William James,” Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics 5 (2006): 184–204. “I Want to Be At Least As Alive As the Vulgar:  Frank O’Hara’s Poetry and the Cinema,” in Diggory and Miller, 93–121. Ferguson, Russell, In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O’Hara and American Art (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art/University of California Press, 1999). Friedlander, Benjamin, “Strange Fruit:  O’Hara, Race, and the Color of Time,” in Diggory and Miller, Scene, 123–141. Glavey, Brian, “Frank O’Hara Nude with Boots: Queer Ekphrasis and the Statuesque Poet,” American Literature 79.4 (2007): 781–806. Goble, Mark, “ ‘Our Country’s Black and White Past’:  Film and the Figures of History in Frank O’Hara,” American Literature 71.1 (1999): 56–92. Gooch, Brad, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Knopf, 1993). Gray, Timothy, Urban Pastoral:  Natural Currents in the New  York School (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010). Hampson, Robert and Will Montgomery, eds., Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010). 406 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

The New York School Herd, David, John Ashbery and American Poetry (New York: Palgrave, 2000). Herring, Terrell Scott, “Frank O’Hara’s Open Closet,” PMLA 117 (2002): 414–427. Imbriglio, Catherine, “ ‘Our Days Put on Such Reticence’: The Rhetoric of the Closet in John Ashbery’s Some Trees,” Contemporary Literature 36.2 (1995): 249–288. Jackson, Richard, “The Imminence of a Revelation,” interview with John Ashbery, in Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets, ed. Richard Jackson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1983): 69–76. Jarraway, David, Going the Distance: Dissident Subjectivity in Modernist American Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). Kane, Daniel, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). We Saw the Light:  Conversations between New American Cinema and Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009). Kikel, Rudy, “The Gay Frank O’Hara,” in Elledge, 334–349. Koch, Kenneth, “All the Imagination Can Hold (The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara),” in Berkson, 205–208. Lehman, David, ed., Beyond Amazement:  New Essays on John Ashbery (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). Magee, Michael, Emancipating Pragmatism:  Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004). “Tribes of New York: Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, and the Poetics of the Five Spot,” Contemporary Literature 42.4 (2001): 694–726. Mohanty, S. P. and Jonathan Monroe, “John Ashbery and the Articulation of the Social,” Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 37–63. Nelson, Maggie, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007). Perloff, Marjorie, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters (Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1977). The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Poirier, Richard, “Reaching Frank O’Hara,” in Poirier, Trying it Out in America:  Literary and Other Performances (New  York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). Rosenbaum, Susan, “Frank O’Hara:  Flaneur of New York,” in Diggory and Miller, Scene, 143–173. Ross, Andrew, “The Death of Lady Day,” in Elledge, 380–391. Schultz, Susan M., ed., The Tribe of John Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995). Shapiro, David, John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). Shaw, Lytle, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City:  University of Iowa Press, 2006). Shoptaw, John, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Silverberg, Mark, The New York School and the Neo-Avant-Garde: Between Radical Art and Radical Chic (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010). Smith, Hazel, Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara: Difference/Homosexuality/ Topography (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000). 407 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

Andrew Epstein Vendler, Helen, “Understanding Ashbery,” in Bloom, Ashbery, 179–194. Vincent, John, “Reports of Looting and Insane Buggery Behind Altars: John Ashbery’s Queer Poetics,” Twentieth Century Literature 44.2 (1998): 155–175. Ward, Geoff, Statutes of Liberty:  The New  York School of Poetry (New  York: St. Martin’s, 1993). Watkin, William, In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001).

408 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.030

30 W E N DY   M A RT I N A N D A NNA L I SA Z OX-WEAVER

Adrienne Rich: The Poetry of Witness

“To my grandmothers Mary Gravely and Hattie Rice whose lives I begin to imagine and to the activists working to free women’s bodies from archaic and unnecessary bonds.” So Adrienne Rich dedicated Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), in words that leave no doubt as to her aim: to explode the apparatus that had long subordinated women.1 Of Woman Born confronts head-on the institution of motherhood and takes issue with Rich’s father, who imposed on her his ideas about education from earliest childhood. He thought poetry no mere dalliance of youth; he taught his daughter Greek and Latin, advised strict adherence to established meters, and introduced her to nineteenth-century writers – Tennyson, Keats, Arnold, Swinburne, Pater – whose work would remain an evocative presence in her poetry. Her early work refects these infuences, but even as a young poet Rich recognized the seductive force of language. How can one be a poet and not a collaborator? How does one write poetry without ventriloquizing the voices that have confned and defned women? Poetic infuence stands over her shoulder: “Again I sit, under duress, hands washed, / at your inkstained oaken desk,” writes Rich in “Juvenilia.”2 However, her moral core confrmed, Rich wrote poetry that willfully but elegantly refused implication in cultural hierarchies, habits, and traditions – acknowledging language’s double bind while generating a new social and political vision. To her beneft, that same father urged Rich to write poetry – to “work, work / harder than anyone has worked before”3  – encouragement that brought her early acclaim and set her on the path to become a prolifc writer. By her mid-twenties, she’d published A Change of World (1951) and The Diamond Cutters, and Other Poems (1955), garnering praise from W.  H. Auden and Randall Jarrell. Her early work was stylistically bold and turbulent but gracefully remade poetic forms. Rich set into motion the metamorphosis that would transform her from a girl copying out passages from Blake, Keats, and Longfellow into a woman tending closely to the intimate give and take between formal experiment and thematic concern. 409 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.031

Wendy Martin and Annalisa Zox-Weaver

In the 1950s and 1960s, Rich confronted her twin needs to be loved and to be a writer. But she recognized that the entrenched position of the female muse, the vestiges of patriarchy and the Victorian family, the very infusion of language with “the powers of the father” (OWB 58) could not hold, for the cost was woman’s voice. “A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. / The beak that grips her, she becomes,” Rich writes in the title poem to Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (21). The burden of her argument lies here:  an all but tyrannical determination casts womanhood as incommensurate with artistic self-expression, constrains women in paradigms of romantic love, and perpetuates duplicities that glorify women as ornamental helpmeets alone. Women who submit to this cultural norm, Rich suggests, confrm their own alienation, relinquish their subjectivity, and sink into depression, self-loathing, madness, and suicide. Rich was well aware that this abduction of female identity involved the corrupt ideals of patriarchy. In developing a counter-poetics, she traced her genealogy to Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, and Simone de Beauvoir. Rich’s world-creating effort beckoned women poets of the past and enlisted new comrades in arms. But recognizing that poetry can resist conformity, complacency, and inequity did not alter the daily realities of her life as a wife and mother relentlessly tasked with domestic concerns. Battling the claustrophobia of motherhood and her legal and economic responsibilities to her husband, Rich refused to be immobilized by poetic proscription. Mimicking the form of a laundry list, Rich recorded in a 1965 diary entry: “Necessity for a more unyielding discipline of my life. Recognize the uselessness of blind anger. Limit society. Use children’s school hours better, for work & solitude” (OWB 31). Almost ffty years after composing it, Rich identifed Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law as a sharp break from her previous work, signaling her retreat from convention toward new forms refecting her identity as a female poet.4 Relatively controlled in structure, the poems in her frst collection were more likely to locate alienation in another woman’s experience, as in “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” where “The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band / Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.”5 Snapshots concerns her own subjectivity, her own female passivity; private concerns yield to a public vision. “Double Monologue” moves from inner-directed refection to a democracy of experience, a shift poignantly mediated though punctuation: “Find yourself and you fnd the world?” The question is, how? Her assertion that “We had to take the world as it was given”6 is thus both dispiriting and revelatory, an act of recognition and defance. She would face the given world through poetry and social action, through poetry as social action. With Snapshots, Rich began keenly to focus on timbre and an array 410 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.031

Adrienne Rich: The Poetry of Witness

of poetic voices: “Sometimes they’re conversational,” she said, “sometimes they’re more like the dialogues or choruses of Greek tragedy, addressing conditions of urgency in a communal order or disorder. The voices may be individual, but they’re searching for a shared moral reality” (Waldman). Necessities of Life: Poems, 1962–1965 locates her beyond roles and social conditioning; in it she seeks a creative life that circumspectly honors artistic legacies. Rich saw that violating cultural and historical preconceptions was essential to the formation of woman’s identity. One of Rich’s moral imperatives was to confront the wounding effects of separating mind and body. Dividing human beings from nature was intolerable, deleterious. Man’s propensity to abstraction had become a nihilistic assertion of mind over matter. “When you put your hand out to touch me,” she explains in “Moth Hour” (1965), “you are already reaching toward an empty space.”7 This reign of abstraction eradicated body in pursuit of mind; it devalued life, sacrifced community, and beckoned sorrow, war, and misery. Facing this destruction, Rich sought renewal. Creating a meaningful world through poetry, forming a community of women, and bridging the gap between art and life, aesthetics and politics, were imperative. Her willingness to bear the pain of these radical transformations is stark:  “I’d rather / taste blood, yours or mine, fowing / from a sudden slash, then cut all day / with blunt scissors on dotted lines / like the teacher told” (“On Edges”8). Rich now began to question the preeminence of the individual, rejecting the isolated self as an oppressive fction, a construct supported by a culture of hierarchies. Empathy for victims of the Algerian War and the War in Vietnam suffuses Leafets: Poems, 1965–1968. What other response to everyone caught in the common struggle? What medium better than poetry to modify consciousness and sensibility? “I wanted to choose words that even you / would be changed by,” she declares in “Implosions” (L 42). At the heart of Leafets is a rejection of apolitical aestheticism and a pointed confrontation with the twin aggressions of sexual and military oppression. By the time Rich published The Will to Change: Poems, 1968–1970, formal experimentation had become essential to her project. Words and the spaces between words were of equal importance. Rich also began to promote the values of visual communication, of witnessing. Film and photography became alternatives to poetic revelation, as is clear in poems such as “Images for Godard” and “Shooting Script.” In “The Blue Ghazals,” Rich writes: “The moment when a feeling enters the body / is political. This touch is political.”9 This would become one of her most enduring convictions: that the body and touch, sensuality and sexuality, could reclaim political meaning, and that emotional sterility was a patriarchal instrument of oppression. Rich’s counter-poetics made a virtue 411 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.031

Wendy Martin and Annalisa Zox-Weaver

of physicality, fesh, and blood, resisting the institutions and detachments of the disembodied patriarchal “I,” and using language to physically affect the reader or hearer. In the early 1970s, Rich seethed with censure in poetry and prose. Diving into the Wreck – considered by many critics her best work – defends a female ethic against patriarchal greed and collectiveness against fragmentation. Love, sex, marriage, and motherhood are reviewed with a fastidious pessimism, refecting Rich’s dedication to the era’s feminist movement. Nothing less than a new social order and community will do, with a new mythology fortifed against invasions by the male mind. The title poem posits each sentence as an act of repudiation and recreation: “I put on / the body-armor of black rubber,” “I go down. / Rung after rung.”10 The poet submerges herself, looking squarely at the object itself, repudiating the narratives that obscure it: “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth” (DW 23). Rich willfully confuses space and time: diving in is going back. Plumbing the sea’s depths becomes a confrontation with civilization, Western culture, the labors of the poet, the sediment of man-made error. Having reached the wreck, the narrator takes a clear-eyed look at the self: a fgure who embodies male and female, mind and matter, subject and object. It is the primordial world “where the spirit began”:  “We circle silently / about the wreck. / We dive into the hold. / I am she: I am he” (DW 23). The punctuation indicates that the diver-poet has found the parity she sought, in a time before the ancient quarrel began between sacred and profane, good and evil, feminine and masculine. In Diving into the Wreck, Rich’s anger entails a concentrated awareness. Women must overcome “self-trivialization, contempt for [themselves], misplaced compassion, addiction [to love, to depression, to male approval].”11 In her poems, and in the vision they uphold, women must write themselves into a world of mutual support, inter-subjectivity, reciprocity, and egalitarian empowerment – an aim inaccessible in a society that exploits women. Her ten-part poem “Phenomenology of Anger” exalts the challenge of facing demons. “Madness. Suicide. Murder. / Is there no way out but these?” (DW 25). Rich identifes the systematic evils: geopolitical violence, war, the technological subjugation of nature, oppression of third-world peoples. Wounds appear on psyches, bodies; on grotesque, scarred landscapes; on entire cultures. Rich is no longer just the mother at home, her soul evacuated by domestic demands and the tyranny of heterosexual romance; she is a soldier doing battle with men who “[gun] down babies at My Lai / vanishing in the face of confrontation.” As the machinery of patriarchy, war dehumanizes and decentralizes the other, co-opting the soul into its machine, sadistically 412 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.031

Adrienne Rich: The Poetry of Witness

exterminating people like so many pests. But Diving into the Wreck is nothing if not productive. It confronts war’s predators and prey, its horrors and unspeakable wounds, transporting the poet to the other side. A  pastoral vision peeks from behind the apocalypse: “I would have loved to have lived in a world / of women and men gaily / in collusion with green leaves, stalks, / building mineral cities, transparent domes” (DW 30). The distance between Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law and Diving into the Wreck is marked; more radical modes replace irony with emotional awareness, and reticent outsiders with a resolute narrative voice. Rage has been her catalyst: “my visionary anger cleansing my sight” (“The Stranger” [DW 19]). This testimony to productive anger leaves her lucid, making private perceptions public, establishing a coherent point of view, and a poetic vision that must bring about a sense of community. In Diving into the Wreck, Rich moves from pessimism and accusation – from indictments of the insidious and pervasive forces of patriarchy – to a specifc awareness of what her rage produced: forms of knowledge, power, creative velocity. Many of these major motifs appear in Rich’s prose of the period. Her essay “When We Dead Awaken:  Writing as Re-Vision” urges the very self-refection undertaken by the poet-diver.12 Its most hortatory, ambitious decree is that women, by “entering an old text from a new critical direction,” look squarely at how they’ve been written into human history. Women must renegotiate their place in literature, as sexual beings, and as casualties of the “old political order”; they must interrogate representation. Rich brings to the dock the language that has written male prerogatives into aesthetics and history – “the assumptions in which we are drenched.” The essay is uncompromising and unapologetic: “women can no longer be primarily mothers and muses for men: we have our own work cut out for us” (WWD 18, 25). Published in College English, “When We Dead Awaken” registers keenly what happens as a thirty-year-old woman poet, at about the time of her third child’s birth, roils in the conviction that she will inevitably fail at both motherhood and poetry. Rich thus produced volumes of work that lamented, convicted, and repudiated the burden of being a poet in a world that denies women lyrical mobility and invalidates their experience. From Snapshots of a Daughter-inLaw (1963), Necessities of Life (1966), Leafets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971) to Diving into the Wreck (1973), The Dream of a Common Language (1978), and A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981)  – books spanning twenty years – Rich sees darkness through to the end, recognizing the poet’s obligation, her obligation, to lay bare the foundations of patriarchy. Rich shines a light on positive images of women, becoming deeply concerned with how women might “re-vision” and witness their own 413 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.031

Wendy Martin and Annalisa Zox-Weaver

lives; the poetic act would be collective, inclusive; it would expunge heroic individualism and de-sanctify male virility. A leader among American feminists in the 1970s, Rich also began to speak of her women-centered lesbian identity. Rich’s poetry responded to her historical moment by imbricating lyrical assonance, consonance, slant rhyme, and onomatopoeia with antiwar slogans, women’s letters, disjunctive fragments of dialogue, anecdotes, and internal monologues. Activism dedicated to the feminist movement, gay rights, and opposition to the Vietnam War redoubled Rich’s commitment to create a more humane society. Integral to topical concerns was (again) her deep awareness of the power of language. Language, she felt, must be liberated from ideology, contest itself as a prepossessed form of representation, and live on its own. “Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language . . . Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe” (LSS 248). By the time she wrote Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution in 1976, Rich was a well-established poet. The book extends the theme of excavation and submersion, of going back in order to move forward. Faithful engagement with her feelings pivots into broad diagnostic assessments of how history, myth, psychology, and anthropology have sought to govern women’s most private experiences. The only triumphant fgure in the shift from totemic society to patriarchal culture is the male hero – as doctor, father, husband, author, and creator. The shift from fertility cults to the medicalization of the female body ensured patriarchal control over pregnancy and childbirth and, by extension, over abortion, contraception, methods of delivery, and gynecological surgical procedures; women became passive objects in the reproductive process. In a chapter titled “Motherhood and Daughterhood,” Rich confronts the legacy of matrophobia that has alienated women from one another. The “cathexis between mother and daughter” meant the loss of love and intimacy between women, symbolic and sacred bonds that must be healed through a “courageous mothering” that recognizes her struggle to “create livable space around her, demonstrating to her daughter that these possibilities exist” (OWB 247). Again, Rich saw only one way to proceed: radically alter the very soul of oppression, reversing a tragic destiny by writing in defance of the ethics, politics, and personal meaning that patriarchy upheld as sacred truths. Rich’s frst book after coming out as a lesbian, The Dream of a Common Language (1978), presents lyrical explorations of themes from Of Woman Born. The poems express her faith that personal experience, public discourse, and a new social vision are inextricable. Rich once again delves into the prehistoric past, recreating the realm of women’s primordial power. Through 414 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.031

Adrienne Rich: The Poetry of Witness

assonance and consonance, the six-part “Sibling Mysteries” emphasizes the bond shared by sisters with their mother: “Remind me how we loved our mother’s body / our mouths drawing the frst / thin sweetness from her nipples.”13 The primary social relationship between mothers and daughters becomes a lens through which to explore women’s erotic love for one another and the deep connections to be enjoyed in a community of women. Again, Rich places language at the fore. Communication is essential to any break from alienation toward companionship among women: “No one sleeps in this room without / the dream of a common language” (DCL 8). Consolation and hope are located in understanding and naming one’s experience. Marie Curie’s achievements elucidate how scientifc conquest comes at a cost, cavalierly sacrifcing women in the name of innovation: She died          a famous woman          denying her wounds denying her wounds          came          from the same source as her power (DCL 3)

Killed by the destructive power of her own discovery, Curie symbolizes the collateral damage of an arrogant cultural complex of patriarchal competitiveness. The poems in this collection empower caesuras with a force that surpasses language itself. Prominent spaces between words are declarations of struggle. In “Power,” the spaces signal Curie’s struggle – a Faustian bargain that cost Curie her life. In “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev,” caesuras serve a different purpose, indicating the efforts and possibilities of the team of women who climbed Russia’s Lenin Peak in August 1974 but ended – like Curie – in death. “We could have stitched that blueness together like a quilt” (DCL 5). However, Rich makes clear that their deaths did not obliterate their communal effort or the fact that their commitment to cooperative work bridged gaps and presented a revolutionary alternative to selfsh individualism. Rich moves from historical example to personal refection in the second part of The Dream of a Common Language. “Twenty-One Love Poems” exalts the everyday, the particular, and the immediate. Eloquence comes through the work’s conversational tone, repudiating the conventions of Romantic tradition. Here, Rich consecrates acts of self-referentiality, fearlessly affrming the value of domestic details and the tenderness of lesbian love. The lover speaks to her beloved: “But we have different voices, even in sleep, / and our bodies, so alike, yet so different / and the past echoing through our bloodstreams / is freighted with different language, different meanings  – ” (DCL 30). The poem weaves together the threads of Rich’s work: the complexity of communication, the body’s place in human 415 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.031

Wendy Martin and Annalisa Zox-Weaver

relations, vestiges of the past. But Rich does not idealize. Ambiguities and obstacles are part of this passionate attachment: “two women together is a work / nothing in civilization has made simple, / two people together is a work / heroic in its ordinariness” (DCL 35). Rich reassigns the meaning of “heroic,” overriding its legacy of idealized individualism. Being a lesbian in a phallocentric political system is an act so courageous that it can contain pain, fear, and anger as part of its intricacy. Rich’s 1979 book of essays, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978, continues her dialogue between prose and poetic expression, exploring contemporary questions related to women’s higher education, the meaning and future of feminism, lesbian issues, and the feld of women’s studies. In A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems, 1978–1981, Rich returns to examples of women’s lives – both exemplary and conventional – to underscore the deep value of positive female images. Public fgures such as Willa Cather, Simone Weil, and Ethel Rosenberg, placed in company with Rich’s grandmothers, Mary Gravely Jones and Hattie Rice Rich, present a collective of women who excelled in spite of hardship and adversity. Motifs of social inclusion are echoed in Rich’s incorporation of letters and diaries, texts that destabilize the reign of the master narrative. The terms of civilization are recalibrated here, as Rich traces moments of female friendship, community, and vision. Through coexistence with natural cycles, women can achieve holistic fuidity: “trust roots, allow the days to shrink / give credence to these slender means / wait without sadness and with grave impatience.”14 The bonds among these women are not isolated examples but embodiments of the possibility for productive social and literary infuence. Rich decries the use of words and images as instruments of denigration and violence, as insidious ways of normalizing brutal misogyny in the form of rape, pornography, and death-dealing objectifcation. The answer is not to “to become / free of language at last” (WP 5); instead, women must fnd appropriate syntax, images, and metaphors to produce their own realities. “[L]anguage is power,” Rich asserts, and poetry can be “used as a means of changing reality.”15 Several poems in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far enact this very process, presenting language that honors nature and the female experience. “Coast to Coast” (1978) portrays a woman’s face and body as inter-constituent with the landscape, “Your face, fog-hollowed burning / cold of eucalyptus hung with butterfies / lavender of rockbloom” (WP 6–7), an image sharply contrasted with Petrarchan fragmentation of the female body (as in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century blazons). The conventional naming of the parts becomes, in her hands, a form of emancipatory expressiveness and a reclamation of female corporeal grace. The ancient chthonic 416 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.031

Adrienne Rich: The Poetry of Witness

mysteries of blood and birth still stir in women’s bodies, explains Rich, just as historical predecessors inform present-day living and a pluralistic ethos bridges divides among race, caste, and nationality. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” published in 1980, renews Rich’s inexhaustible commitment to radical modes of articulation. The essay condemns institutionalized heterosexuality as another tool for the oppression of women. Refusing to be an agent of this system, Rich asserts the “lesbian continuum,” a capacious concept that binds lesbians and non-lesbians, trans-historically and across cultures, in a shared repudiation of sexual tyranny. The formidable threat of institutionalized heterosexuality “strips women of their autonomy, dignity and sexual potential, including the potential of loving and being loved by women in mutuality and integrity.”16 Individual resistance is one place to begin dismantling sexual imperatives, freeing women from the “sexual slavery” that plays an indispensable part in male dominance. Rich’s twenty-three-part poem “Sources” (1982) rejects accredited forms of expression for the deeper consciousness afforded by a collage of forms and styles. Short lyrical stanzas, conversational phrases, staccato dialogue, and long prose poems unite in a rich, textured cohesion that includes a range of voices. Importantly, this collection shows Rich deeply exploring the infuence of her Jewish heritage for the frst time, offering her father and husband as examples of the Jewish man’s detachment from his ethnic roots. Her disciplinarian father, and private, brooding husband are, however, cast in a sympathetic light. No one is immune to patriarchy’s insidious designs. Arnold Rich and Alfred Conrad embody the deleterious effects of the cultural equation between masculinity and invulnerability, and of the pervasive undercurrents of anti-Semitism. Woman’s condition becomes the human condition as both sexes suffer from a detached sense of self and the loss of a meaningful connection to the past. Without understanding one’s present-day lived experience, Rich maintains, one fails to be a citizen of the world. Rich’s literary acknowledgement of her Jewishness had come earlier, in 1960, with the poem “Readings of History,” which includes the oft-quoted lines “Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew, / Yankee nor Rebel, born / in the face of two ancient cults, / I’m a good reader of histories” (SDL 38). But her 1982 essay “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity” is more intrepid: “This essay, then, has no conclusions: it is another beginning for me. Not just a way of saying, in 1982 Right Wing America, I, too, will wear the yellow star.” Rich is “The poet who knows that beautiful language can lie, that the oppressor’s language sometimes sounds beautiful.”17 As Rich sees them, negotiations around sexuality and gender are not separate 417 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.031

Wendy Martin and Annalisa Zox-Weaver

from explorations of Jewish identity. She was raised Episcopalian by her father (a Southern Jew) and her mother (a Protestant). Running throughout these explorations is a sense of betweenness and an acknowledgment that, according to rabbinic law (whereby ethnic identity is matrilineal), Rich was not Jewish. In acknowledging  – indeed, claiming  – her Jewishness, then, Rich also came to terms with the oppositions between feminism, on the one hand, and the Jewish patriarchal tradition, on the other. Rich’s embrace of Jewish identity was conspicuously situated in a post-Holocaust world in which anti-Semitism nonetheless persisted in America. In 1945, Rich had gone to a downtown Baltimore theatre, she explained many years later, “to see newsreels of the liberation camps.” She confrms: “I knew it had something to do with me.”18 Rich saw both her father and her husband as deracinated Jews, distanced from any sense of a shared religious past. In “Sources,” Rich vacillates between perplexity and sympathy, issuing the query, “From where does your strength come, you Southern Jew? / split at the root, raised in a castle of air? . . . With whom do you believe your lot is cast?”19 Blood, Bread, and Poetry:  Selected Prose, 1979–1985 (1986) redirects questions about Jewish identity back onto the poet herself, expressing her “belated rage” that the silences of her childhood meant having to fnd her own way to Jewish self-awareness: “That I had never been taught about resistance, only about passing. That I had no language for anti-Semitism itself.”20 Readers of Rich’s poetry do not readily identify her as a Jewish poet, much less as a religious writer. But in books such as Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time’s Power: Poems, 1985–1988 (1988), and An Atlas of the Diffcult World: Poems, 1988–1991 (1991), Rich continued to draw upon her Jewish heritage. Many critics regard “Yom Kippur 1984,” from Your Native Land, as Rich’s exemplary study of Jewish themes. Named for the Jewish day of fasting and repentance, the poem brings motifs of affliation and identity, community and solitude, obligations and expectations to bear on Jewish self-identifcation. It opens with an effort to reconcile bifurcated identities:  “What is a Jew in solitude? / What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid / far from your own or those you have called your own? / What is a woman in solitude: a queer woman or man?” (YNL 75). Rich’s Time’s Power (1989) extends her preoccupation with land, geography, environments, remembered spaces, and designated sites of meaning. “The Desert as Garden of Paradise”21 situates the reader – as she puts it – “Where it began”: monotheism’s ground zero. But even as many of her poems asserted her Jewish identity, Rich was well aware of distinctions between Jewishness as religious identity and Jewishness as ethnic and social identity. She participated in Jewish activism, working with New Jewish Agenda, a 418 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.031

Adrienne Rich: The Poetry of Witness

progressive Jewish organization, and continued to explore issues related to the consciousness and visibility of Jewish identity in Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends, which she cofounded and published from 1989 to 1992. From her frst sparks of awareness, Rich remained committed to understanding “the Jewish question” and “the woman question” as kindred causes. In an interview with the American journalist Bill Moyers, Rich comments that her 1991 volume An Atlas of the Diffcult World: Poems, 1988–1991 “refects on the condition of my country, which I  wrote very consciously as a citizen poet, looking at the geography, the history, the people of my country.”22 In Atlas, Rich emphasizes feminist concerns as human concerns; violence against the individual is violence against humanity. As several scholars have noted, Rich’s extended meditation on the victims of brutality did not exclude men (Atlas uses the examples of the imprisoned George Jackson, the lynched Leo Frank, and the desperate conditions of emigration that brought Annie Sullivan’s father to America). In The Dream of the Dialogue, Alice Templeton underlines Rich’s gender inclusiveness, pointing to her ranging concerns with “the disenfranchised, the dispossessed, the ‘internal emigrant,’ and diffcult truths, not the mock-innocent, the colonizer, the madness of solitude, or the deception of simplistic alliances and oppositions.”23 In Atlas, seemingly dispersed moments and identities are actually part of a mutual struggle: “Where are we moored? What are the bindings? What behooves us?”24 Migrant workers become ill from malathion, a man beats his wife, two lesbians camping on the Appalachian Trail are attacked, and a younger version of Rich herself – married and living in Barton, Vermont – present divergent fragments whose specifcity resists incorporation into one totalized American experience. Oppressions are at once site-specifc and pervasive. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War, Rich grants symbols of national identity a prominent place, refusing to endorse the conservative, top-down patriotic values of Generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell. To Rich, war hadn’t to do with national confict alone; war involved everyday disruptions and dismantlings of human existence – countless instances of “possession and deprivation, economic and religious dogmas, racism, colonialist expansion, nationalism, [and] unequal power” (Waldman). In her characteristic way, Rich presses upon our attention examples of cultural and political despair, embodied here in indignation and horror over the predicament of national identity provoked by the Gulf War. Critical reception of Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems, 1991–1995 (1995) was markedly different from that of Atlas. This collection – which takes its title from The Great Gatsby  – assembles individuals from the 419 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.031

Wendy Martin and Annalisa Zox-Weaver

cultural present (Studs Terkel, Abbey Lincoln, Ethel Rosenberg) with fgures of the past (the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and the revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg), enacting an inter-subjective and spatio-temporal layering that suggests all people, past and present, coexist. Rich’s unwavering sense of moral and poetic responsibility meant that no oppression would escape condemnation – a dutiful responsiveness that some critics saw as harsh. “She is determined to be glum,” New York Times reviewer Denis Donoghue wrote in 1996 of Rich’s Dark Fields of the Republic, Poems, 1991–1995. “Few of her new poems achieve the autonomy of a work of art, foating free of their autobiographical context.”25 Rich’s work had long courted controversy; accusations that she was an angry poet or anti-male were not uncommon. But to Rich, poetic expression provided consolation and hope even as it presented powerful indictments of aggression. Three of the forty-two poems collected in Dark Fields concern her Jewish identity: “Then or Now” draws in part on the correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, both of whom survived Hitler’s Germany and explored notions of German guilt. As does “Eastern War Time,” “Then or Now” considers the trauma of the Holocaust in the lives of contemporary Americans. For all of her efforts, Rich submits that the troubling relationship between the personal and the historical is yet to be worked through. “1941,” published in Midnight Salvage: Poems, 1995–1998 (1999), refects Rich’s effort to grasp the atrocities suffered by European Jews for those only indirectly affected. Interviewing Rich in 1995, Lynne Meredith Golodner asked if Holocaustism had replaced Judaism as religion or identity, to which Rich responded: “It’s a huge question: How do American Jews frame their identity, in terms of the Holocaust or in terms of Israel? And what is it that we need to be doing here and now?”26 Abiding in her belief that history impinges on the present, Rich argued that, even after ffty years, the Holocaust still called into question Jewish self-identity and the very category of the human. Rich turned to the subject of aging in Time’s Power: Poems, 1985–1988 (1989). Questions related to aging had always been embedded in Rich’s treatment of history, time, death, and genealogies (literary, political, and biological); now she faced them squarely. In The Creative Crone: Aging and the Poetry of May Sarton and Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Henneberg describes Rich’s subtle meditations on aging: “Because Rich politicizes everything that is of consequence to her, aging too becomes political in her work.” Rich’s self-positioning in the discourse of aging is uneven; neither embracing the rewards of growing old nor disdaining time’s passage and its impressions on the body, Rich ranges along a spectrum of emotion. As Henneberg suggests, aging complicated Rich’s enduring themes. She “became more patient, 420 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.031

Adrienne Rich: The Poetry of Witness

more accepting of beginnings, dissonances, compromises . . . [more willing to] enter negotiations.”27 Once again, the structures, methods, and arrangements of language refect Rich’s poetic themes. Her embrace of more capacious forms is evident in her move from strict formalism to free verse. Voice, versifcation, and spatial order had been enduring ways in which her poems fxed meaning. In work as early as “Why Else But to Forestall this Hour” (from A Change of the World [1951]) to “Memorize This,” collected in The School Among the Ruins (2004), Rich shifts from refections on the directly personal feminist implications of aging to explorations of old age as a part of the human experience. Its wide range notwithstanding, Rich’s oeuvre fnds cogency in the local and the global. Her poetic practice amounts to a dedicated and – at times – raw effort to fortify her conscience against political and personal outrage. For Rich, political tyranny comes in the form of a poet/mother rising at 5:30 AM to feed her son and fnding time to work no less than it does in the anguish of Guantanamo Bay. That the very poet who said “poetry makes nothing happen”28 (Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”) had selected Rich for the 1951 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for A Change of World reads, in retrospect, like a dare. After receiving the US National Book Foundation 2006 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Rich wrote in The Guardian: poetry is either inadequate, even immoral, in the face of human suffering, or it’s unproftable, hence useless. Either way, poets are advised to hang our heads or fold our tents. Yet in fact, throughout the world, transfusions of poetic language can and do quite literally keep bodies and souls together – and more.29

In one of her fnal collections, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve:  Poems, 2007–2010 (2011), Rich continues to consider the revolution of the “woman citizen.” Her “late work,” as one may call it, is spiritually and intellectually aware. Moved by descriptions of Guantanamo, and by the vicious American recourse to torture, Rich addressed the possible failure of language to make sense of state-sanctioned brutality: “Syntax of rendition: / / verb pilots the plane / adverb modifes action / / verb force-feeds noun / submerges the subject / noun is choking / verb disgraced goes on doing [. . .]”30 Words fail to depict the realities of the body. Aggression in the name of history, national security, and war places harrowing pressure on language and bodies alike. Where her early work enlists language as a way of coming into a new consciousness, of facing terror and domination, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve sends a discouraging (but not necessarily pessimistic) message that to control language, to parse words, and to diagram sentences, may not repair the 421 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.031

Wendy Martin and Annalisa Zox-Weaver

damage. Her deep faith in the poetic line wavers; her syntax refects conditions of despair and urgency, the loss of a shared moral reality. But her faith endures. Poetry is a way of transforming the world, of integrating shards and mapping meaning, of making things happen. N OT E S 1 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born:  Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as OWB. 2 Adrienne Rich, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law:  Poems, 1954–1962 (New York:  W. W. Norton, 1963), 32. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as SDL. 3 Adrienne Rich, Sources (Woodside, CA: Heyeck Press, 1983): 9. Later reprinted in Rich, Your Native Land, Your Life (1993). 4 Kate Waldman, “Adrienne Rich on ‘Tonight No Poetry Will Serve,’ ” The Paris Review (March 2, 2011), available online. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Waldman. 5 Adrienne Rich, A Change of the World (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1951): 19. 6 Adrienne Rich, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (New  York:  Harper, 1955): 24. 7 Adrienne Rich, Necessities of Life: Poems, 1962–1965 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966): 47. 8 Adrienne Rich, Leafets:  Poems, 1965–1968 (New  York:  W. W.  Norton, 1969): 45. Hereafter cited parenthetically as L. 9 Adrienne Rich, The Will to Change:  Poems, 1968–1970 (London:  Chatto & Windus, 1972): 20. 10 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck:  Poems, 1971–1972 (New  York:  W. W. Norton, 1973): 22. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as DW. 11 Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (New  York:  W. W.  Norton, 1995):  122–213, Rich’s italics. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as LSS. 12 Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken:  Writing as Re-Vision,” College English 34.1 (October 1972): 18–31. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as WWD. 13 Adrienne Rich, Dream of a Common Language:  Poems, 1974–1977 (New York:  W. W. Norton, 1993):  48. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as DCL. 14 Adrienne Rich, A Wild Patience Had Taken Me This Far:  Poems, 1978–1981 (New York:  W. W. Norton, 1973):  44. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as WP. 15 Adrienne Rich, taped conversation with Wendy Martin, May 1978. 16 Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5.4 (Summer 1980): 637. 17 Adrienne Rich, “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity” in Nice Jewish Girls: A  Lesbian Anthology, ed. Evelyn Torton Beck (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1989): 73. 422 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.031

Adrienne Rich: The Poetry of Witness 18 Nan Robertson, “A Poet’s Political and Literary Life,” New York Times (June 10, 1987). 19 “Sources” is reprinted in Adrienne Rich, Your Native Land, Your Life (New  York:  W. W.  Norton, 1993):  3. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as YNL. 20 Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry:  Selected Prose, 1979–1985 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994): 107. 21 Adrienne Rich, Time’s Power Poems, 1985–1989 (New  York:  W. W.  Norton, 1989): 30. 22 Bill Moyers, The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets (New York: Doubleday, 1995): 345. 23 Alice Templeton, The Dream and the Dialogue: Adrienne Rich’s Feminist Poetics (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994): 164–165. 24 Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of the Diffcult World:  Poems, 1988–1991 (New York:  W. W. Norton 1991):  12. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as ADW. 25 Denis Donoghue, “Poetic Anger,” New  York Times Book Review (April 21, 1996): 32–33. 26 Lynne Meredith Golodner, “A Rich Tradition: Refecting on the Art and Empathy of Adrienne Rich,” available online at the site “Read the Spirit.” 27 Sylvia Henneberg, The Creative Crone: Aging and the Poetry of May Sarton and Adrienne Rich (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010): 17. 28 From W. H. Auden, Another Time (New York: Random House, 1940). 29 Adrienne Rich, “Legislators of the World,” The Guardian (November 17, 2006). 30 Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems, 2007–2010 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011): 25. F U RT H E R R E A DI NG Bennett, Paula, My Life, A  Loaded Gun:  Female Creativity and Feminist Poetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986). Cooper, Jane Roberta, ed., Reading Adrienne Rich:  Reviews and Re-visions 1951–1981 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984). Díaz-Diocaretz, Myriam, Translating Poetic Discourse:  Questions on Feminist Strategies in Adrienne Rich (Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1985). Dickie, Margaret, Stein, Bishop, and Rich: Lyrics of Love, War, and Place (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Erkkila, Betsy, The Wicked Sisters:  Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Henneberg, Sylvia B., The Creative Crone: Aging and the Poetry of May Sarton and Adrienne Rich (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010). Kalstone, David, Five Temperaments: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Keyes, Claire, The Aesthetics of Power:  The Poetry of Adrienne Rich (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986). Langdell, Cheri Colby, Adrienne Rich:  The Moment of Change (Westport: Praeger, 2004). 423 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.031

Wendy Martin and Annalisa Zox-Weaver Martin, Wendy, An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). McDaniel, Judith, Reconstituting the World: The Poetry and Vision of Adrienne Rich (Argyle: Spinsters, Ink., 1978). O’Reilly, Andrea, ed., From Motherhood to Mothering:  The Legacy of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004). Ratcliffe, Krista, Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich (Carbondale:  Southern Illinois University Press, 1996). Sielke, Sabine, Fashioning the Female Subject:  The Intertextual Networking of Dickinson, Moore, and Rich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). Soghra, Nodeh, Towards Female Dreamland:  Adrienne Rich’s Lifelong Literary Renewal (Saarbrücken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2013). Spender, Dale, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them: From Aphra Behn to Adrienne Rich (Boston: Routledge, 1982). Templeton, Alice, The Dream and the Dialogue:  Adrienne Rich’s Feminist Poetics (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994). Werner, Craig, Adrienne Rich: The Poet and Her Critics (Chicago: American Library Association, 1988). Yorke, Liz, Adrienne Rich: Passion, Politics and the Body (London: Sage, 1997).

424 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.031

31 DAV I D   K I R B Y

An “Empty Prescription”: Pleasure in Contemporary American Poetry

Who Are These People? Take a look at the latest issue of the premier magazine of the writing feld, the glossy one most professional writers and wannabes subscribe to. Typically, the cover features writers who are young, handsome, and diverse: all-American guys and gals, an Asian fellow, a vaguely Russian-looking woman or two. All are slim. What have they written, though? Not much: remember, they’re young. But these writers are certain to change the world; the article in the magazine assures us of that. And the article might be right, though the world of poetry is not what it used to be. Like every art form, in the last ffty years poetry has become much more horizontal in nature, much less vertical. To use music as an example, when my generation was in its twenties, fans divided their loyalties evenly between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones; the hippies were true to Bob Dylan and the more traditional types to Elvis, but no matter whom you idolized, the stars shown above you, and you gazed up at them in awe. Within an astonishingly short period of time, however, each of the big groups or individual artists had spawned ten thousand imitators. Before long, there were bands to the left and right as far as one could see, stretching from horizon to horizon. And if you could play three chords on a guitar, chances were that you might have belonged to one. Today, if you have a desktop computer with a few add-ons, you can replicate the studio the Beatles used to record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the corner of your dorm room. Anyone can be a musician; not a good one, necessarily, but at least you can claim the title. The same is true – truer, really – of poetry. To the poet’s shame, the frst question he or she is usually asked after self-identifying as a poet is “Oh – published?” There is no really good riposte to that implied insult. One might say, “Is there any other kind?” But the fact is that it’s even easier to write poetry than to record music, and the Internet makes it possible for everyone 425 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.032

David Kirby

to publish these days. The quality of poetry is greater than it has ever been, but as with music, the days in which Frost, Lowell, Bishop, and a few others occupied most of the feld are gone. Add to technological change the universality of higher education and especially the explosion of creative writing programs, and the result is a rich, crowded, bewildering, and, if you look in the right places, very rewarding profusion of poets everywhere, more than anyone can appreciate or even catalog. So when a friend sends me an article from The Huffngton Post titled “Ten Recent Books of Poetry You Should Read Right Now,” I’m not surprised that I only recognize the names of two poets.1 A few days later, an editor at the New York Times recommends fve new books of poetry, and I do better, since I can identify three poets this time. Still, that’s a score of 60 percent. On most tests for driver’s licenses, you have to score a 70 to pass. So I – who have published and taught poetry for more than forty years, who have written extensively on poetry and reviewed hundreds of books of poetry, and who attends poetry festivals and goes to dozens of readings annually and has more poet friends than he can count – am a failure. I am a poetry expert, and I don’t know who the poets are. Now why is that? There are a number of reasons, beginning with the recent population surge of poets described above. Too, poems and collections of poems are short, for the most part; they don’t have the heft of historical studies, or of the kind of novel old-school publishers used to refer to as “a doorstop.” Poetry collections are also printed in small runs (a thousand copies is typical) and never achieve the profle of more visible art forms. Finally, poets are quicker out of the starting blocks than other writers are. Their ffty-page collections, much of which is white space, get written and published a lot faster than the four-hundred page novels of their peers in fction, which means that the meadow where poets gambol and play is a lot more crowded. But no matter who these poets are, or how ephemeral or adamantine their reputations will be eventually, it’s safe to say that the genealogy of each can be traced back to the middle of the twentieth century. In order to map out the world of poetry we live in at present, let us step back a few decades. To sketch the landscape we discover there, and then note the subsequent changes in it, should make the perplexities of today’s crowded “poemscape” more manageable. A History Lesson Let’s begin with the outbreak of what is called the War of the Anthologies, which stemmed from the appearance of two infuential poetry compilations totally at odds with each other. The frst, edited by Donald Hall, Robert 426 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.032

Contemporary American Poetry

Pack, and Louis Simpson and titled The New Poets of England and America (New York: Meredian, 1957), solidifed and furthered a conservative way of writing whose most representative writer was W. H. Auden, that champion of good sense and plain speaking. Meanwhile, Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 (New  York:  Grove Press, 1960)  showcased experimental and avant-garde poets. What is most signifcant about these radically different texts is that while each pretends to speak for an entire generation, as their titles suggest, the two do not share a single poem or poet in common. Yet from these two books come the dominant schools of the rest of the twentieth century. The Hall et  al. anthology embodies the best of the Academic Poets, so called partly because the majority of them held teaching posts at colleges and universities but mainly because of the buttoned-down formalism of their verse. This group includes Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Eberhart, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, and Richard Wilbur, all believers in the traditional well-made poem in which consummate craftsmanship organized the materials of poetry according to the standards of such poet-critics as T. S. Eliot and (say) John Crowe Ransom, whose The New Criticism (New York: New Directions, 1941) argued that a poem is an object worthy of close scrutiny for itself alone and not as a product of the poet’s life or times. A sub-group of this school loosened the collar of academic attire somewhat and wrote poems that, while still chastely disciplined on the page, often spoke of the poets’ struggles with mental illness, divorce, and other intimate problems; this Confessional School includes John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. In contrast, the poets sanctioned by the Allen anthology were developing their own particular idioms. The groups in Allen’s compilation include the Black Mountain School, which challenged the Academic Poets by starting their own anti-academe in western North Carolina. Founded as an experimental school in 1933, Black Mountain College drew various avant-garde poets to its campus over the years, including Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Robert Creeley. After the dissolution of Black Mountain College in 1957, Olson and Creeley both ended up at the State University of New York at Buffalo, whose faculty and students have continued to be at the forefront of poetic experimentation. Creeley was also the link, through Allen Ginsberg, between the Black Mountain poets and the Beats, who claimed their school’s name was a diminutive of the word “beatifc,” though clearly “beat” evokes the sense of “exhausted” and “oppressed,” as well as the idea of musical time – especially that of the jazz that sometimes accompanied public performances of Beat poetry. The October 7, 1955, reading in San Francisco’s Six Gallery, 427 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.032

David Kirby

which announced the formation of the Beat School and which featured Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Philip Lamantia, became the standard for coffeehouse readings today. It was there that Ginsberg frst read Howl and a drunk Jack Kerouac urged the performers on as he shouted, “Yeah! Go! Go!” Much Beat poetry consists of social statements that grew out of the political turmoil of the time, a mode that becomes even more direct in the work of the Protest School, which included Civil Rights poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Imamu Amiri Baraka; feminists such as Carolyn Kizer and Adrienne Rich; and the antiwar poets, who numbered established writers such as Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, and Robert Bly among their ranks. Bly has had an enormous impact through his Deep Image Poetry, an outgrowth of both the Surrealism and Imagism movements of the early twentieth century. Eventually the Deep Imagists included James Dickey, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, Louis Simpson, and James Wright. With its emphasis on evocative metaphors, the Deep Image poem appeals to the anti-formalist by appearing to make what the poem says more important than how it says it. The often-somber portentousness of Deep Imagery was more than matched by the high spirits of the New York School. Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery produced poems that charmed and startled with their kaleidoscopic views of urban life and their sheer velocity. Many of these poets were art critics as well, and the same vividness they admired in such “action painters” as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning is mirrored in their writing. To sum up, then, beginning in Audenesque calm with the Academic poets, the postwar period was ruffed by the noisy gusts of the Beat and Protest poets and the mile-high thunderheads of the Deep Imagists. As the winds howled and the drops fell, the poetic weathervane began to spin wildly in every possible direction, sort of like the country itself. The History Lesson Simplifed Not all observers enjoyed the tumult. Following the War of the Anthologies, the second shock that jarred the poetry world was the assault on poetry itself that began in 1983 with the publication of Donald Hall’s essay “Poetry and Ambition.”2 That assault continued to rumble for more than a decade with the appearance of such essays and books as Joseph Epstein’s “Who Killed Poetry?” (1988), Dana Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter?” (1991), Jonathan Holden’s The Fate of American Poetry (1991), and Vernon Shetley’s After 428 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.032

Contemporary American Poetry

the Death of Poetry (1993).3 The most negative of these assessments not only addressed the marginalization of poetry but also attributed its decline largely to poets’ self-indulgence. As if to prove the naysayers right, the Language Poets, who are frankly hostile to the frst-person epiphanies of mainstream poetry, sought to subvert what they call “offcial verse culture” by taking modernist free-association techniques to new extremes. Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, and others juxtaposed ideas and images in a manner seemingly intended to baffe the uninitiated. On the other hand, New Formalists such as Dana Gioia, Marilyn Hacker, and Wyatt Prunty gave new life to the accentual-syllabic tradition of previous centuries. Meanwhile, such Prose Poets as Stuart Dybek and Russell Edson built on a century-old French tradition to produce playful, often surreal poems in paragraph form. For sheer showmanship, though, no group outdid the Performance Poets, whose work is mainly intended for live audiences, though it is gathered in such collections as Burning Down the House: Selected Poems from the Nuyorican Poets Café National Poetry Slam Champions (Berkeley:  Soft Skull Press, 2003).4 Certainly poets such as David Antin, Anne Waldman, Paul Violi, Jayne Cortez, and John Giorno have a signifcant presence in print even though they are known for their performances as well, and they are collected with other similar poets in more inclusive anthologies such as June King and Larry Smith’s Coffeehouse Poetry Anthology (Huron, Ohio:  Bottom Dog Press, 1996), and Charles Harper Webb’s Stand-Up Poetry, issued frst in 1994 (Long Beach: University Press), and re-issued in an expanded edition in 2002 (Iowa City: Iowa University Press). This brief catalog of the many types of poems that have appeared and continue to appear in recent years, while far from comprehensive, is intended to carve out of the crowded poetry world a visible landscape with a few skyscrapers here and there, some other buildings to the left and right, and enough signposts to make the scene navigable. When all’s said and done, though, there are really just three types of poems being written today. First, there’s the poem that approves of and transmits the received wisdom of our culture. This can be formalist poetry that adopts the rhymes and rhythms that poets have used for centuries; it can also be a free-verse poem that passes on traditional homilies (nature is good, war is bad, and so on). Or it can be a combination of traditional form and traditional sentiment. Much of this work is produced by writers, editors, and publishers who dominate the often lackluster poetry list at major trade presses. Many of these people aspire to be cultural transmitters and not much more; an uninformed reader who encounters their work in a magazine can say, “Oh, 429 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.032

David Kirby

well, it’s twenty lines long and talks about nature and approves of it, kind of, so I guess it’s a poem, maybe even a good one – who am I to judge?” Second is the kind of poem that declares war on the poem that embraces the dominant culture. It will be an example of postmodernist and possibly Language poetry, as described earlier, work whose adherents sometimes call the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school, fracturing the word and dramatizing the unconventional use to which it’s put. There’s often a Marxist tinge here, real or hidden, deliberate or accidental, because subversion’s the idea, not support, as in the frst type of poem. (No doubt the late English poet Adrian Mitchell was thinking of this type of poetry when he said, “Most people ignore poetry because most poetry ignores most people.”5) Taken together, these two poem types include the majority of poems written today; together, they explain why I  frequently get emails from readers like the one who said recently: “I am a highly educated person and a passionate lover of great music and art, and a sculptor myself. But except for Shakespeare and other verse dramatists, I’ve always had trouble with poetry.” It’s why, praising the writing of Frederick Seidel, Michael Robbins writes that “the clearest sign that American poetry is in disarray is that the best poet we have is Frederick Seidel. I say this approvingly, for one effect of reading Seidel closely is to realize just how sodden the rest of the poetic feld is. In one row we fnd mealy-mouthed banalities dressed up as wisdom literature; in the next, the stale avant-gardism of half-wits. No wonder no one reads the stuff.”6 There you have it. Two-thirds of the poetry written today is not only not very interesting to many people but also inimical to its own cause, since it baffes and repels would-be fans. But there is a third type that more than repays the reader’s interest; whenever I hear or read someone gushing about a poet the way my youthful peers raved about John Lennon or Keith Richards, I know it’s going to be someone who writes what might be called three-dimensional poetry. (Note on terminology: I use “three-dimensional” and “fully-dimensional” in this essay partly for variety but mainly because I  fnd it deforming and constrictive to speak of a single school of poetry or, for that matter, to rely too much on terminology of any kind. In the words of Paul Valéry, “it is impossible to think seriously with such words as Classicism, Romanticism, Humanism, Realism, and the other -isms. You can’t get drunk or quench your thirst with the labels on bottles.”7) Three-dimensional poetry had different names earlier. There was the Maverick Poetry gathered in an anthology by Steve Kowit, a group including Frank Bidart, Stephen Dobyns, Edward Field, Allen Ginsberg, Dorianne Laux, Sharon Olds, and Gary Snyder. These poets, neither Beat nor academic, write in a “contemporary Whitmanesque idiom,” as Kowit notes in 430 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.032

Contemporary American Poetry

his introduction; theirs is “an heroic and colloquial poetry: large-spirited, socially-engaged, heart-centered and defantly wacky,” work not “tepid, mannered and opaque.”8 For her part, Nancy Pearl singles out the Kitchen-Sink Poets, a “gang of fve” made up of Billy Collins, Campbell McGrath, James Tate, Dean Young, and myself, who share a “conversational, seemingly stream-of-consciousness approach to their subjects (which are wacky in their own right) and the ability to make readers feel that they’re about to become involved in often complicated and convoluted stories.”9 The most notable predecessor to three-dimensional poetry, though, is the “Stand Up Poetry” collected by Charles Webb in the 1990 and 2002 anthologies noted above, and practiced by many of the poets named above, as well as by Kim Addonizio, Catherine Bowman, Maxine Chernoff, Jim Daniels, Stephen Dunn, Russell Edson, Bob Hicok, Tony Hoagland, Jack Myers, Maureen Seaton, Maura Stanton, Judith Taylor, Natasha Trethewey, and Al Zolynas. Webb uses “Stand Up” in the double sense of both “Stand Up comic” and “Stand Up guy” and then lists the qualities of the “Stand Up” poem:  humor, performability, clarity, natural language, fights of fancy, a strong individual voice, emotional punch, a close relationship to fction, use of urban and popular culture, and wide-open subject matter. And whether they acknowledge it or not, most of the essayists and anthologists I’ve just surveyed owe much to the idea of “leaping poetry,” a term introduced by Robert Bly in a 1975 book of the same name (Boston: Beacon Hill Press); he has in mind the wild association and surrealism of such poets as Neruda, Lorca, and Vallejo. “A Wildly Enthusiastic Speech” By now, the reader with a sense of the poetic tradition will be saying, “What’s so new about all of this? Poets have been writing this way for years!” True: three-dimensional poetry is as old as poetry itself. Hasn’t some form of it been written, not for years, but for millennia? Make it new, said Ezra Pound, and it’s hard to be an artist of any kind without telling yourself that you’re going to do something absolutely unprecedented; the bane of every writing instructor is the sophomore who announces the intention to write “experimental poetry” this term. But the best kind of poetry being written today is, in a sense, the oldest. Let’s take a minute to look at that noble lineage. Long before there was Maverick or Kitchen-Sink or Stand Up Poetry or Leaping Poetry, there was dithyrambic poetry; the word “dithyramb,” which originally meant “a frenzied, impassioned choric hymn and dance of ancient Greece in honor 431 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.032

David Kirby

of Dionysus,” has come to mean “a wildly enthusiastic speech or piece of writing” or “poem written in a wild irregular strain.”10 Neither lyric nor narrative, the dithyramb embraces both the emotionalism of the former and the sprawl of the latter. The greatest poetry in the dithyrambic tradition may be found in Euripides’ Bacchae, and the six poetical books of the Old Testament – Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and Lamentations – stand as a fne example from the Judeo-Christian tradition. It may be no accident that religion and dithyrambs seem closely tied, since dialogue is at the heart of confrontations between mortals and their maker. All journeys to the underworld are dithyrambic in one way or another, as seen in The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and The Vision of Tundal, a twelfth-century account of an Irish knight’s trip through Hell. The master traveler to dark realms is, of course, Dante. Down to hell he goes, not alone but accompanied by his master, the Virgil who guided him as Dante guides us, and there he sees every manner of creature: bad popes, virtuous pagans, heroes from legend such as Odysseus, three-headed dogs, harpies, centaurs, imps and demons and Satan himself, his beloved Beatrice, angel-headed hipsters, saintly motorcyclists. Yes, it is Ginsberg’s Howl that is paraphrased at the end of this list, but that is because these two poets would have much to say to each other:  they would disagree violently on many matters, and Dante would not have hesitated to put Ginsberg in Circle Seven of his Inferno with the other sodomites, but they would have conversed brilliantly because each had a large mind and loved learning. In the years between Dante Alighieri and Allen Ginsberg, many “wildly enthusiastic speeches or pieces of writing” have been set down on paper, notably those that occur in the plays of Shakespeare, a master at mixing levels of rhetoric, speaking to both courtiers and groundlings alike when he uses a polysyllabic Latinate word and then “translates” it with a crisp Anglo-Saxon synonym, as in Twelfth Night, when Sir Andrew Aguecheek listens to a song sung by Feste and pronounces his voice “mellifuous” and then, in his next line, “sweet” (2.ii). Shakespeare was derided for his lack of education by such jealous contemporaries as Robert Greene, who sneered that he was “Maister of Artes in Neither University” (this enmity didn’t bother Shakespeare, who cheerfully flched the plot of The Winter’s Tale from Greene’s Pandosto:  The Triumph of Time). But he possessed a tool greater by far than any university could give him; he had at his command what Simon Winchester calls the “foxy and relentlessly slippery fexibility” of the English language.11 As with much else in contemporary poetry, a huge debt is owed to Shakespeare for using so many now-familiar words for 432 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.032

Contemporary American Poetry

the frst time, as when, for example, he added the Norman French -able to Old English laugh to allow Salanio in The Merchant of Venice to declare a jest laughable. And the rich stew of English that is compounded largely of blunt Anglo-Saxon and sleek Norman French has been further thickened by words from dozens of other languages, including Malay (bamboo, ketchup), Turkish (kiosk, sofa), Algonquian (raccoon, wampum), and Dutch (cruise, knapsack). Not every ayatollah (Persian) or mullah (Urdu) is likely to endorse Winchester’s chest-thumping description of English as “so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully unwieldy, so subtle, and now in its never-ending fullness so undeniably magnifcent” (11). Yet no one can deny the language’s utility to such word-drunk poets as William Blake, whose “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” blends the chatter of devils and angels with the screeches of copulating, cannibalistic monkeys as well as the speaker’s mid-journey refutations of Aristotle and Swedenborg. After Blake, the greatest dithyrambic poets of modern times are Whitman and Ginsberg; H.  D.  and Anne Waldman are their children, as are, in many ways, such performance artist as Tracie Morris and the poets of the Nuyorican Café. And while this is not the place to explore broader applications, surely Nietzsche and Melville wrote dithyrambic prose, work rich in Bakhtinian heteroglossia; there is much in their work of the “carnivalesque” and “poly-vocal,” to use terms borrowed from Continental criticism, or the “riotous” and “many-voiced,” as we Anglophones might say. In fact, as evidenced by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Camille Paglia themselves, there is even a dithyrambic criticism – indeed, much, and perhaps most, of post-structuralist theory might be called dithyrambic.12 Wit and Story Throughout the long history of the kind of writing that is described here, one consistent note is that of laughter, a sound heard too seldom in contemporary poetry. That, according to Billy Collins, is “the fault of the Romantics, who eliminated humor from poetry. Shakespeare’s hilarious, Chaucer’s hilarious. [Then] the Romantics killed off humor, and they also eliminated sex, things which were replaced by landscape. I thought that was a pretty bad trade-off, so I’m trying to write about humor and landscape, and occasionally sex.”13 What Collins refers to as comedy or humor might best be described as wit, that is, not pie-in-the-face slapstick but mental sharpness or a keen intelligence – cleverness, in a word. Note that Collins is saying that this quality may appear in poetry, not that it must. The same is at least as true and probably truer about the element of 433 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.032

David Kirby

narrative. Psychologist Drew Weston says that we are hard-wired to seek, listen to, evaluate, and accept or reject stories: The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. Our brains evolved to “expect” stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought. Our species existed for more than 100,000 years before the earliest signs of literacy, and another 5,000 years would pass before the majority of humans would know how to read and write. Stories were the primary way our ancestors transmitted knowledge and values. Today we seek movies, novels and “news stories” that put the events of the day in a form that our brains evolved to fnd compelling and memorable. Children crave bedtime stories; the holy books of the three great monotheistic religions are written in parables; and as research in cognitive science has shown, lawyers whose closing arguments tell a story win jury trials against their legal adversaries who just lay out “the facts of the case.”14

Later in his essay, Weston refers to “the repetition and evocative imagery that our brains require to make an idea, particularly a paradoxical one, ‘stick.’ ” Surely that description applies to contemporary poetry more than any other art form. Yet by its very nature, contemporary poetry offers nuance where none seems to exist and even opposes what it has proposed but a minute before. One of our best critics, Frank Kermode, wrote of how we love both the fow of story and that which impedes it. His New York Times obituary, written by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, notes that, despite the variety of his work, Kermode almost invariably tied what he wrote to a recurring central concern of his: what the English literary critic Lawrence S.  Rainey, writing in the London newspaper The Independent, described as “the confict between the human need to make sense of the world through storytelling and our propensity to seek meaning in details (linguistic, symbolic, anecdotal) that are indifferent, even hostile, to story.” Thus, as Lehmann-Haupt suggests, “in his best-known book, The Sense of an Ending, Mr. Kermode analyzed the fctions we invent to bring meaning and order to a world that often seems chaotic and hurtling toward catastrophe. Between the tick and the tock of the clock, as he put it, we want a connection as well as the suggestion of an arrow shooting eschatologically toward some fnal judgment. Yet, as he pointed out in The Genesis of Secrecy, narratives, just like life, can include details that defy interpretation, like the Man in the Mackintosh who keeps showing up in Joyce’s Ulysses or the young man who runs away naked when Jesus is arrested at Gethsemane in the Gospel according to Mark.”15 434 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.032

Contemporary American Poetry

A Philosophy of Composition Here’s a list of three-dimensional poetry’s most eye-catching features. Not every good poem is going to have the same characteristics. But a philosophy of composition for good poets and their readers would call for a poem that features the voice of a speaker but other voices as well, at least by implication (the speech of an actor standing alone in a pencil spotlight is made richer by the eloquence of the players who are only temporarily silent); a poem that focuses on the present moment but also conveys an awareness of a larger world of time and space (a moment is most resonant when it appears to have a past and a future as well as dimensions on every side); a poem that deals in comedy but acknowledges tragedy, and the other way around (the funniest poem will have a dark heart, just as a good sad poem will seem to have been written by a poet capable of laughter); a poem that tells a story, even though it is not a narrative poem on its surface (we are hard-wired to draw stories from, and impose them on, our lives, and yet a good poem contains elements that are indifferent, even hostile to story); and a poem that works on stage will work on the page as well (the best poems are a delight to hear aloud but will also grow richer during a silent rereading). It’s no accident that these characteristics of three-dimensional poetry are expressed as paired opposites, for the fully dimensional poem is willing to include or at least consider everything. You can open any magazine and fnd a wise poem (in the Longfellow tradition, say). Or an intellectually challenging one (Rilke). Or a comic poem, like one by Dorothy Parker or Ogden Nash. But an Emily Dickinson poem has all three of these elements. And so do the poems of hundreds of poets writing today. A number of these have already been named earlier in this essay. Recently, when I asked forty young writers who intend to make poetry their lives  – that is, the advanced undergraduates and graduate students in my writing workshops – what contemporary poets they considered their relatives, they listed Josh Bell, Jason Bredle, Louise Glück, Tony Hoagland, Philip Levine, Adrian Matejka, Sharon Olds, Carl Phillips, Lawrence Raab, Charles Simic, and Adam Zagajewski. These are all three-dimensional poets. Off the top of my head, I’d add to my students’ list Sherman Alexie, Michael Blumenthal, Matthew Dickman, Amy Gerstler, Terrance Hayes, John Koethe, and Lucia Perillo. And next term I plan to teach a handful of poets who may not be as well-known yet as some of these gray-hairs who write fully dimensional poems: George Bilgere, Frannie Lindsay, and Travis Mossotti. These three poets are a long way from collecting Social Security, yet they’re good writers already because they write very well in a way that, all things considered, is as old as Homer. 435 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.032

David Kirby

But to return to the never-heard-of-them theme with which this essay begins, the frst step on the road to madness would be to try to name all the good poets writing today. What I have given you here is an “empty prescription.” I’m not telling you what poets to like; I’m just telling you why you like them – they’re fully dimensional. N OT E S Some of the facts and opinions that appear here have been presented earlier in pieces written by me, alone or with others, for various newspapers, magazines, and books. These original sources are cited in the notes, as are the books and essays by others that I use to give my arguments a greater heft than they would have on their own. Unmentioned because they are too numerous to mention are the hundreds of students and dozens of colleagues who have shaped my view of poetry, though I will thank here the poet Barbara Hamby, an award-winning teacher and writer as well as my wife and someone who lives every day, in the words of Russian writer Varlam Shalamov, not for poetry but through poetry. 1 Seth Abramson, “Ten Recent Books of Poetry You Should Read Right Now,” Huffngton Post (August 25, 2011). 2 Kenyon Review, n.s., 5.4 (1983): 90–104. 3 Epstein, “Who Killed Poetry?,” Commentary 86.2 (August 1988): 13–20; Gioia, “Can Poetry Matter?,” Atlantic 267.5 (May 1991), later reprinted as the title essay to a collection of Gioia’s essays (Saint Paul:  Greywolf, 1992); Holden, The Fate of American Poetry (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 1991); Shetley, After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). 4 Edited jointly by Roger Bonair-Agard, Stephen Colman, Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Alix Olson, and Lynne Procope. 5 The remark dates to 1964 but has been often quoted since, whether by Mitchell himself (who died in 2008) or by others. 6 See “Frederick Seidel’s Sordid Glory,” Chicago Tribune (September 5, 2012). 7 The remark (from a notebook dated 1931–1932) is preserved in volume two of Judith Robinson’s edition of Valéry’s Cahiers (Paris, 1974): 1120–1121. 8 Kowit, The Maverick Poets: An Anthology (Santee, CA: Gorilla Press, 1988). 9 See Pearl’s Book Lust (Seattle: Sasquatch Press, 2003). 10 These and other defnitions are aggregated at: https://www.wordnik.com/words/ dithyramb. 11 See Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2004):  29. Subsequent references to this book are given parenthetically by page number. 12 See, for example, Paglia’s Break, Blow, Burn (New York: Pantheon, 2005). 13 Collins made the remarks in a July 8, 2001, interview with Malcolm Jones (of Newsweek) on the occasion of his appointment as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. 14 See Weston, “What Happened to Obama?,” New York Times (August 6, 2011). 15 See Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Frank Kermode, a Critic Who Wrote With Style, Is Dead at 90,” New  York Times (August 18, 2010). The Sense of an 436 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.032

Contemporary American Poetry Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction appeared in 1968 (New York: Oxford University Press), The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative in 1979 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). F U RT H E R R E A DI NG Hamby, Barbara and David Kirby, Seriously Funny:  Poems About Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010). “The Ultra-Talk Issue,” TriQuarterly 128 (Evanston:  Northwestern University Press, 2007). Howard, Richard, Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950 (New York: Atheneum, 1971). Kirby, David, Ultra-Talk:  Johnny Cash, the Mafa, Shakespeare, Drum Music, St. Teresa of Avila and 17 Other Colossal Topics of Conversation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007). “Why, Poetry?” The American Interest 2 (July/August 2007): 83–91. Orr, David, Beautiful & Pointless:  A  Guide to Modern Poetry (New York: Harper, 2011). Ruefe, Mary, Madness, Rack, and Honey:  Collected Lectures (Seattle and New York: Wave Books, 2012).

437 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.032

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.032

F U RT H E R R E A DI N G

Altieri, Charles, The Art of Twentieth Century American Poetry:  Modernism and After (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2009). Beach, Christopher, The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press: 2003). Bellamy, Joe David, ed., American Poetry Observed:  Poets on Their Work (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984). Bercovich, Sacvan, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature Volume 1: 1590–1820 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). The Cambridge History of American Literature Volume 4:  Nineteenth-Century Poetry 1800–1910 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The Cambridge History of American Literature Volume 5: Poetry and Criticism, 1900–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The Cambridge History of American Literature Volume 8: Poetry and Criticism, 1940–1995 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Blackmur, R. P., Form and Value in Modern Poetry (New York: Doubleday, 1957). Carr, Helen, Verse Revolutionaries:  Ezra Pound, H.  D.  and the Imagists (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009). Fredman, Steven, A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005). Gelpi, Albert, A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Haralson, Eric L., Encyclopedia of American Poetry:  The Nineteenth Century (New  York:  Routledge, 1998). Compiled as a companion to a landmark, two-volume anthology, American Poetry:  The Nineteenth Century, John Hollander, ed. (New York: Library of America, 1993). Hass, Robert, John Hollander, Carolyn Kizer, Nathaniel Mackey, and Marjorie Perloff, eds., American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume 1: Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker (New York:  Library of America, 2000). Volume one of the most comprehensive anthology of twentieth-century American poetry now in print, with biographical notes on the poets printed therein. See also the two-volume anthology of nineteenth-century American poetry, edited by John 439 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.033

Further Reading Hollander, and the one-volume anthology of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American poetry edited by David Shields. American Poetry:  The Twentieth Century, Volume 2:  E.  E. Cummings to May Swenson (New York: Library of America, 2000). Hollander, John, ed., American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume 1: Philip Freneau to Walt Whitman (New  York:  Library of America, 1993). Volume one of the most comprehensive anthology of nineteenth-century American poetry now in print, with a detailed chronology and biographical notes on the poets printed therein. See also the two-volume anthology of twentieth-century American poetry, edited by Robert Hass et  al., and the one-volume anthology of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American poetry edited by David Shields. American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume 2: Herman Melville to Stickney; American Indian Poetry; Folk-Songs and Spirituals (New  York:  Library of America, 1993). Howarth, Peter, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (New  York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Huggins, Nathan Irvin, Harlem Renaissance, updated edition, with a preface by Arnold Rampersad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Jarrell, Randall, Poetry and the Age (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1953). Kalsone, David, Becoming a Poet:  Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (New York: Noonday, 1989). Five Temperaments:  Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Larson, Kerry, The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth Century American Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Longenbach, James, Modern Poetry After Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Modernist Poetics of History:  Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Marcus, Greil and Werner Sollors, eds., A New Literary History of America (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2009). Not limited to poetry, but with some two-dozen lively essays devoted to it. Matthiessen, F. O., The American Renaissance:  Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1941). A  classic study, not devoted exclusively to poetry, but essential for understanding Whitman and Emerson. ed., The Oxford Book of American Poetry (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1950). A landmark anthology, with a substantial introduction. Mencken, H. L., “Puritanism as a Literary Force,” in Prejudices, frst series (New  York:  Alfred Knopf, 1919). A  blistering (and engaging) account of the legal and cultural diffculties against (and within) which modernists had to work. See also Potter, Obscene Modernism. Myers, Jack and David Wojahn, eds., A Profle of Twentieth Century American Poetry (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1991). Nelson, Cary, Repression and Recovery:  Modern American Poetry & Politics of Cultural Memory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). A revisionist 440 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.033

Further Reading history; brings back into view the leftist poetry of the 1920s and 1930s, which the New Criticism had laid aside. Nielsen, Aldon Lynn, Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Parini, Jay, ed., The Columbia History of American Poetry (New York:  Columbia University Press, 1998). With essays on topics ranging from Anne Bradstreet to contemporary American poetry. Pearce, Roy Harvey, The Continuity of American Poetry, 2nd ed. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1987). Perkins, David, A History of Modern Poetry, Volume I: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Perloff, Marjorie, A History of Modern Poetry, Volume II:  Modernism and After (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Chicago: Northwest University Press, 1990). Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Pinsky, Robert, Poetry and the World (New York: Ecco Press, 1988). The Situation of Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). Poirier, Richard, The Renewal of Literature:  Emersonian Refections (New York:  Random House, 1987). Notable for its pragmatist revision of histories of modernist poetry. Poetry & Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). A reassessment of literary modernism, placing American pragmatism at its heart (in discussions of Stevens, Frost, Stein, and others). Porter, Joy and Kenneth Roemer, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Potter, Rachel, Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship & Experiment, 1900–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Not limited to America, but valuable as a contribution to our understanding of modernism, American literary expatriatism, and the publishing environment, such as it was, in which modern poets worked. See also Mencken, “Puritanism as a Literary Force.” Pritchard, William, Lives of the Modern Poets (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). Reprinted by the University Press of New England in 1997. After more than thirty years, still a lively and indispensable introduction, with all but two chapters devoted to American writers. Ramey, Lauri, Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry (New  York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). Reynolds, David S., Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). A  revisionary treatment of (among other writers) Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson. Walt Whitman’s America:  A  Cultural Biography (New  York:  Alfred Knopf, 1995). Roberts, Neil, A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003). Though not limited to American writers, the book devotes considerable space to movements of which they were a major part (Imagism) or which they constituted (the New Negro Renaissance, the Black Mountain School, the 441 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.033

Further Reading Beats, Language Poetry); here also are readings of major works by Frost, Eliot, Stevens, Moore, Bishop, Plath, Pound, Lowell, and Ashbery. Shields, David S., American Poetry:  The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York:  Library of America, 2007). The most comprehensive such anthology now in print, with biographical notes on the poets printed therein. See also the anthologies edited by John Hollander and by Robert Hass et al. Shockley, Evie, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011). Showalter, Elaine, A Jury of Her Peers:  American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (New York:  Alfred Knopf, 2009). A groundbreaking, comprehensive study. Vendler, Helen, Last Looks, Last Books:  Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). The Music of What Happens:  Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1998). A  wide-ranging book, devoted chiefy to American poets from Whitman to Ashbery to Ammons to Sexton to Rich and beyond. Part of Nature, Part of Us:  Modern American Poets (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1980). Von Hallberg, Robert, American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). White, Peter, and Harrison T. Meserole, eds., Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986). Winters, Yvor, In Defense of Reason, with an introduction by Kenneth Fields (Athens:  Ohio University Press, 1987). Reprints three classics by one of the best, though most eccentric, Americans to have written about the nation’s poetry: Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry; Maule’s Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism (with three chapters devoted to poetry); The Anatomy of Nonsense (on Stevens, Eliot, and John Crowe Ransom); and a provocative (if infamous) essay, “The Signifcance of The Bridge by Hart Crane; or, What Are We to Think of Professor X?”

442 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.033

I NDE X

Aaron, Daniel, 49 Abelove, Henry, 301 Abstract Expressionism, 392, 393, 395 Acker, Kathy, 336 Act of Uniformity (UK, 1662), 18 Action Painting/painters, 428 Adams, John, 2, 181, 219 Addison, Joseph, 30 Addonizio, Kim, 431 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 5 Agassiz, Louis, 47 Aiken, Conrad, 11 Albers, Josef, 342 Alboni, Marrietta, 95–96 Aldridge, Owen, 84 Alexander, Elizabeth, 142 Alexie, Sherman, 435 Allan, John (Edgar Allan Poe’s foster father), 77, 78–79 Allen, Donald, 340–341, 350, 427; War of the Anthologies and, 425–427 works by, mentioned/quoted: The New American Poetry, 340, 350, 427 Amherst College, 123, 128, 129, 161 Amini, Johari, 324 Anderson, John M., 273 Anderson, Thomas, 182–183 Andrewes, Lancelot, 234 Angelou, Maya, 142; works by, mentioned/ quoted: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 142 Antheil, George, 218 Anthology wars (See War of the Anthologies) Anthony, Susan B., 181, 183 Antin, David, 429 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 263, 392, 393

Arendt, Hannah, 251, 420; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Origins of Totalitarianism, 251 Arensberg, Walter, 190, 208 Aristotle, 433 Armory Show (New York, 1915), 208 Arnold, Matthew, 104, 151, 169, 409 Artaud, Antonin, 360 Ashbery, John, 252, 253–254, 255, 265, 306, 391–393, 398–405 passim, 428; works by, mentioned/quoted: As We Know, 402; “As You Came from the Holy Land,” 306; “Clepsydra,” 401; The Double Dream of Spring, 401–402; “Europe,” 401; Flow Chart, 402; Houseboat Days, 402; “The Instruction manual,” 400; “Litany,” 402; “The Other Tradition,” 402; “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” 400; Rivers and Mountains, 401; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 306, 402; “The Skaters,” 401; Some Trees, 398; “Soonest Mended,” 400, 403; “Street Musicians,” 402; “Syringa,” 402; The Tennis Court Oath, 401; Three Poems, 402; “Two Scenes,” 400; “And Ut Pictura Poesis is Her Name,” 402 Auden, W.H., 164, 190, 239, 242, 300, 305, 350, 398, 399, 400, 409, 421, 427; works by, mentioned/quoted: “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” 421; “Musée des Beaux Arts,” 300 Avedon, Richard, 232 Bacon, Francis, 234, 238 Bailey, Deford, 278 Baker, Josephine, 274 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 433

443 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Baldwin, James, 294; works by, mentioned/ quoted: review of Langston Hughes’ Selected Poems, 294 Baltimore Afro-American (newspaper), 275 Bancroft, George, 38 Baraka, Amiri, 215, 316, 324, 428 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 36; works by, mentioned/quoted: Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, 36 Barlow, Joel, 1–2, 33, 35, 40; works by, mentioned/quoted: Columbiad, 1–2, 3, 33; “Vision of Columbus,” 33 Barnard, Ellsworth, 147 Barnett, Ida B. Wells, 280 Bartlett, John, 160 Baudelaire, Charles, 304; 313; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Correspondences,” 313 Baym, Nina, 36 Beach, Christopher, 350 Beach, Joseph Warren, 170 Beatles, The, 231, 425; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 425 Beaton, Cecil, 232 Beats, The (poets/writers), 211, 221, 329, 358, 391, 427 Beckett, Samuel, 217 Beecher, Henry Ward, 94 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 54 Bell, Josh, 435 Bennett, Gwendolyn, 281, 284; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Fantasy,” 281; “Song,” 281 Bentley, Gladys, 279 Benton, Joel, 66 Bergson, Henri, 216, 245, 261 Berkeley Renaissance/San Francisco Renaissance, 305, 350, 352, 355, 356, 359, 364, 368–369 Bernstein, Charles, 252, 429 Berryman, John, 317, 336, 427 Berthoff, Warner, 260 Bidart, Frank, 430 Bilgere, George, 435 Binyon, Laurence, 217 Bird, Robert Montgomery, 32; works by, mentioned/quoted: Calavar, 37 Bishop, Elizabeth, 231, 241, 300–315 passim, 329, 336, 426, 427; as translator of Octavio Paz’s “Objects and Apparitions,” 304; and “January First,” 313; of Clarice Lispector,

Helena Morley, and Max Jacob; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Armadillo,” 305; “The Bight,” 313; “Chemin de Fer,” 309; “Cirque d’hiver,” 310; A Cold Spring, 303, 306; “Crusoe in England,” 305, 311–313; “Current Dreams,” 310; “Dream–,” 310; “A Drunkard,” 308; Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (ed. Alice Quinn), 305; “The End of March,” 309; “The Fish,” 310–311, 313; “Gentleman of Shalott,” 304–305, 309; Geography III, 303; “The Imaginary Iceberg,” 303; “In the Village,” 301–302; “In the Waiting Room,” 302, 305; “Love Lies Sleeping,” 309; “Man-Moth,” 302, 312; “The Map,” 303, 305, 309; “A Miracle for Breakfast,” 310; “The Moose,” 307, 313; “Night City,” 313; North & South, 302–303; “One Art,” 306, 307–308, 309, 311; “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” 306; “Paris, 7 A.M.,” 309; “Pink Dog,” 312; “Poem,” 308; “Quai d’Orléans,” 303; Questions of Travel, 304, 311; “Sandpiper,” 306; “Sestina,” 304, 310; “Sleeping on the Ceiling,” 309; “The Weed,” 310 Black Arts Movement, 273, 316, 323–325 (See also Fisk Negro Writers Conference (1967) Black Mountain School (of poets/artists), 221, 252, 340–354 passim, 427 Blackburn, Paul, 340 Blackmur, R.P., 189 Blake, David Haven, 52; works by, mentioned/quoted: Whitman and Celebrity, 52 Blake, Eubie, 278 Blake, William, 258, 259, 300, 348, 367, 376, 409, 433; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” 433 Bland, Ed, 320 Blaser, Robin, 351, 352, 355, 359, 361, 363, 364 BLAST (magazine, London), 217 Bloom, Harold, 265, 401, 403 Blumenthal, Michael, 435 Bly, Robert, 428, 431 Boldereff, Frances, 342, 351 Bontemps, Arna, 272, 282, 289 Booth, Junius Brutus, 93–94

444 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Bowman, Catherine, 431 Brackenridge, Henry Hugh, 33; works by, mentioned/quoted: “The Rising Glory of America” (with Philip Freneau), 33 Bradstreet, Anne 10–17 passim, 19, 20, 21; works by, mentioned/quoted: “An Author to Her Book,” 15; “As Weary Pilgrim,” 17; “By By,” 13; “Childhood,” 13; “Contemplations,” 16–17; “A Dialogue Between Old England and New,” 14; “The Four Ages of Man,” 13; “The Four Elements,” 13; “The Four Humours,” 13; “The Four Monarchies,” 14; “The Four Seasons,” 13; “In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth,” 12–13; The Quaternions, 13; “In Reference to Her Children,” 13; Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, 17; The Tenth Muse, 10, 16, 17 Bradstreet, Simon, 11 Braithwaite, William Stanley, 271, 284 Brancusi, Constantin, 218, 240 Brando, Marlon, 372 Braque, Georges, 176, 178 Bread Loaf School of English and Writers’ Conference, 161 Bredle, Jason, 435 Breton, Andre, 392 Briggs, Cyril, 275 Brissett, Wilson, 19, 20 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 5, 127, 316–326 passim, 428; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Annie Allen, 317, 319, 321; The Bean Eaters, 322–323; “The Blackstone Rangers,” 324; “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” 323; Family Pictures, 325; In The Mecca, 323; “Leftist Orator Pleasantly Punishes the Gropers,” 323; Maude Martha, 317, 319, 320–322, 323, 325; Report from Part One, 316, 324; “Riot,” 324; A Street in Bronzeville, 5, 317, 318, 321; “Sundays of Satin Legs Smith,” 318–319; “The Wall,” 324; “We Real Cool,” 323 Brooks, Maria, 34, 41; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Zophiel; or, The Bride of Seven, 41–43passim Brown v. Board of Education (US Supreme Court decision, 1954), 221 Brown, John, 4, 109 Brown, Oscar Jr., 324

Brown, Sterling, 271, 282; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Cabaret,” 282; “Coolwell Vignette,” 282; “Frankie and Johnny,” 282; “Odyssey of Big Boy,” 274; “Puttin’ On the Dog,” 282; “Southern Road,” 274; “Sporting Beasley,” 282; “Strange Legacies,” 282; “Virginia Portrait,” 282 Browne, Thomas, 234 Brownell, Henry Howard, 4, 107; works by, mentioned/quoted: “The Battle of the Bay,” 107; “The Battle of Charlestown,” 4; War Lyrics and Other Poems, 107 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 124 Browning, Robert, 104, 144, 153, 216, 223 Brucker, Johann Jakob, 42 Bryant, William Cullen, 2, 3, 34, 40–41, 42, 43, 62, 78, 85; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “The Ages,” 3; “The Conjunction of Jupiter and Venus,” 40; “The Fountain,” 40; “The Night Journey of a River,” 40; “The Prairies,” 2, 40; “Thanatopsis,” 40–41 Bryher (See Ellerman, Winifred) Bulmer, Gertrude (mother of Elizabeth Bishop), 301 Bunting, Basil, 209 Bunyan, John, 152 Burleigh, Harry, 278 Burroughs, Charles, 324 Burroughs, Margaret, 324 Burroughs, William S., 371, 374 Burton, Richard (the writer), 234 Butler, Samuel, 71 Butscher, Edward, 379–380 Byron, George Gordon Lord, 77, 81, 104 Caen, Herb, 370 Caesar, Julius, 70, 71, 281 Cage, John, 179, 184, 342, 392 Campbell, James Edwin, 276 Carlyle, Thomas, 69 Carroll, Paul, 340 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 232 Cassady, Neil, 371, 374 Cather, Willa, 416 Catullus (Gaius Valerius), 217 Cavalcanti, Guido, 222 Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, 373 Celtic/Irish Literary Renaissance, 277 Cesaire, Aimé, 275 Cézanne, Paul, 193 Chamberlain, John, 342

445 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Channing, Ellery, 62 Chapman, John Jay, 5; works by, mentioned/ quoted: William Lloyd Garrison, 5 Chateaubriand, François-René vicomte de, 42 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 215, 433 Chernoff, Maxine, 431 Chesnutt, Charles, 271, 276; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Conjure Woman, 271 Chiasson, Dan, 166 Chicago Bee (newspaper), 275 Chicago Defender (newspaper), 27, 275, 316, 320, 323 Chicago Whip (newspaper), 275 Child, Lydia Maria, 32, 37; works by, mentioned/quoted: Hobomok, 37 Childress, Alice, 277, 316, 319; works by, mentioned/quoted: Like One of the Family, 277 Cicero, 336 Civil War (American), 4, 88, 99, 106, 107, 108, 110, 113, 119, 249, 264, 273, 335 Civil War (English), 18 Clampitt, Amy, 127 Clark, Tom, 351 Cocteau, Jean, 358; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Orphée, 358 Coker, Simon, 6 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 81, 217, 367; works by, mentioned/quoted: Biographia Literaria, 81; “Kubla Khan,” 57, 367 Collins, Billy, 431, 433 Columbus, Christopher, 2, 35–36, 43, 249, 263 Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), 316, 389 Compromise of 1850 (US), 4 Comstock, Anthony, 7 Confessional Poetry/Confessional School, 300, 301, 305, 327, 358, 379–390 passim, 391, 427 Confucius, 220, 222, 227; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Book of Odes (trans. Ezra Pound), 222 Conrad, Alfred Haskell (former husband of Adrienne Rich), 417 Cook, Will Marion, 278 Cooper, James Fenimore, 32, 37; works by, mentioned/quoted: Last of the Mohicans, 37 Corman, Cid, 340, 351

Cornell, Joseph, 304 Cortés, Hernán, 35, 344 Cortez, Jayne, 429 Costello, Bonnie, 232, 242 Cowdry, Mae, 279; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “A Brown Aesthete Speaks,” 281 Cowley, Peggy, 268 Cox, Sidney, 164 Crane, Hart, 8, 190, 249, 252–270 passim, 271, 272, 383; debate with Harriet Monroe: 259–260; works by, mentioned/quoted: “At Melville’s Tomb,” 259; “Black Tambourine,” 272; “Cape Hatteras” (section of The Bridge), 250, 263–265; The Bridge, 249–250, 260–265 passim; “The Broken Tower,” 268; “My Grandmother’s Love Letters,” 267; “Voyages II,” 266–267; White Buildings, 260 Crane, Louise, 303 Crane, Stephen, 8, 107; works by, mentioned/quoted: Black Riders, 8; War is Kind, 8 Creeley, Robert 205, 252, 340–343 passim, 346–347, 349, 350, 351, 427; works by, mentioned/quoted: “As real as thinking,” 347; “The Immoral Proposition,” 350: Pieces, 347, 349; A Quick Graph, 347 Crisis (newspaper, affliated with the NAACP), 4, 274, 275, 280, 287 Croll, Morris, 309; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “The Baroque Style in Prose,” 309 Cromwell, Oliver, 18 Cubism, 209, 391, 393 Cullen, Countee, 136, 139, 272, 273, 274, 277, 279, 280, 281, 282, 284, 287, 288; works by, mentioned/quoted: Caroling Dusk, 139, 280; “Colored Blues Singer,” 282; “For a Lady I Know,” 282; “Harlem Wine,” 273; “Heritage,” 281; “Incident,” 282; “Tableau,” 282; “To a Brown Boy,” 282; “To John Keats,” 277; “Uncle Jim,” 282 cummings, e.e., 239, 240, 343 Cunard, Nancy, 276 Cunningham, Merce, 342 Dada, 391 Damas, Léon, 275 Daniels, Jim, 431 Danner, Margaret, 138

446 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Dante, Alighieri, 104, 215, 226, 432; works by, mentioned/quoted: Commedia, 226; La Vita Nova, 222 Dartmouth, Earl of (See Legge, William, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth) Darwin, Charles, 112, 150, 311, 312, 313 Davidson, Lucretia, 41; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Amir Kahn,” 41 Davidson, Michael, 362 Davis, Daniel Webster, 276 Davis, Frank Marshall, 317 de Beauvoir, Simone, 410 de Kooning, Elaine, 342 de Kooning, Willem, 342, 393, 428 de Rachewiltz, Boris, 222 Dean, James, 372, 397 Deep Image Poetry, 428 Defoe, Daniel, 311 Degas, Edgar, 304 del Valle, Lt. Gen. Pedro, 221 Demuth, Charles, 206; works by, mentioned: “Tuberoses,” 206 Denham, John 33; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Cooper Hill, 33 Derricotte, Toi, 127 Derrida, Jacques, 355 Dickens, Charles, 122; works by, mentioned/ quoted: The Old Curiosity Shop, 122 Dickey, James, 152, 154, 155, 373, 428 Dickinson, Emily, 4, 119–135 passim, 138, 151, 357, 435; digital archives of: Dickinson Electronic Archives, 123, 126–127; Emily Dickinson Archive, 123, 129–130; Emily Dickinson Collection, 123, 128, 129–130; Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences: A Born-Digital Inquiry, 123, 126, 127; Emily Dickinson’s Papers, 123, 128; Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson’s Late Fragments and Related Texts, 1870–1886, 123, 127; fascicles of, 122; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Because I could not stop for death,” 130; “I dwell in Possibility,” 126; “I think I was enchanted,” 124; “It always felt to me – a wrong,” 124; “Morning might come,” 129; “My Life had stood a Loaded Gun,” 120; Poems of Emily Dickinson (1890), 119; “Show me eternity,” 129; “A solemn thing – it was I said,” 124; “‘Speech’ – is a prank of Parliament,” 129; “This is my letter to the world,” 121; “’Tis glory’s overtakelessness,”

131; “Wild nights – wild nights,” 121, 124 (See also Titanic Operas) Dickinson, Susan, 119, 122, 124, 125, 127, 129, 131 Dickman, Matthew, 435 Digital Humanities, The, 125–131 Dobyns, Steven, 430 Dods, John Bovee, 96 Domingo, Wilfred, 275 Donaldson, Scott, 145 Donne, John, 19, 265, 302, 357 Donoghue, Denis, 147, 420 (on Adrienne Rich) Doolittle, Hilda, 215, 217, 233, 235, 240, 433; works by, mentioned/quoted: Collected Poems, 233; HERmione, 215; Hymen, 233 Dorn, Ed, 252, 340, 341, 342, 347, 348, 350, 351; Gunslinger, 341, 348 Dos Passos, John, 283; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Manhattan Transfer, 283 Douglas, Clifford Hugh, 218; “social credit” theory of, 218 Douglass, Frederick, 1, 47, 273; works by, mentioned/quoted: “What to the American Slave is the 4th of July?,” 1 Doyle, Peter, 90 Dr. Seuss (See Geisel, Theodore Seuss) Drake, Joseph Rodman, 85 Dred Scott v. Sanford (US Supreme Court decision, 1857), 4 Dreiser, Theodore, 271 Dryden, John, 170; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day,” 170 Du Bartas, Guillaume, 12; works by, mentioned/quoted: Divine Weekes and Works, 13 DuBois, W.E.B., 3, 4, 6, 136, 137, 142, 271–272, 274, 278–279, 284, 285; concept of “double consciousness,” 137, 140, 142, 271, 272; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Criteria of Negro Art,” 272; The Souls of Black Folk, 3, 142 Duchamp, Marcel, 208; works by, mentioned: “Nude Descending a Staircase,” 208 Dudley, Thomas, 11–12 Dunbar Nelson, Alice, 139, 274, 279, 280, 281, 284; works by, mentioned/ quoted: The Goodness of St. Rocques, 280; Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence

447 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Dunbar Nelson, Alice (cont.) (as co-editor), 280; “The Proletariat Speaks,” 281; “Snow in October,” 281; Violets and Other Tales, 280 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 6–7, 136–143 passim; commemoration of, at the 1972 Dunbar Symposium, Dayton, Ohio (138, 142), and at the 2006 Dunbar Symposium, Stanford University (142); works by, mentioned/quoted: “An Antebellum Sermon,” 138, 141, 271; “Banjo Song,” 141; Candle Lightin’ Time, 140; “The Colored Soldiers,” 138; “Frederick Douglass,” 138; “Long Ago,” 139–140; Lyrics of Love and Laughter, 141; Lyrics of Lowly Life, 6, 141; Majors and Minors, 138; “A Negro Love Song,” 138; “The Ol’ Tunes,” 141; “The Poet,” 138, 139; “Sympathy,” 138; “We Wear the Mask,” 6, 138, 142; “When Malindy Sings,” 138, 141 Duncan, Robert, 252, 340, 341, 342, 344, 346–349 passim, 350, 351, 355, 359, 427; works by, mentioned/quoted: Fictive Certainties, 347; “Food for Fire, Food for Thought,” 347; The H.D. Book, 347; “The Homosexual in Society,” 349, 355; “Ideas of the Meaning of Form,” 347; “Notes on Poetics Regarding Olson’s Maximus,” 348; “Pages from a Notebook,” 347; “Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar,” 347, 348; “Poetry: A Natural Thing,” 347; “Towards an Open Universe,” 347 Dunn, Joe, 361 Dunn, Stephen, 431 Dwight, Timothy, 33, 35; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Conquest of Canaan, 35; “Greenfeld Hill,” 33 Dybek, Stuart, 429 Dylan, Bob, 5, 425; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “Desolation Row,” 5 Eberhart, Richard, 369, 427; works by, mentioned/quoted: “West Coast Rhythms” (review), 369 Edson, Russell, 429, 431 Eigner, Larry, 340 Eisenhower, Dwight David (“Ike”), 333, 370 Eliot, T.S., 8, 137, 138, 161, 162, 164, 165, 169, 188, 189, 193, 203, 205, 206, 208, 217, 218, 219, 222, 225, 226, 235, 236,

239, 241, 242, 245–257 passim, 258, 261, 262, 263, 265, 267, 271, 279, 283, 294, 316, 318, 329, 333, 336, 337, 345, 350, 358, 362, 366, 368, 371, 371, 391, 394, 427; “objective correlative” (Eliot’s concept of), 139, 248, 358, 362, 372, 387; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Ezra Pound: His Poetry and His Metric,” 161, 217; Four Quartets, 193, 253–254, 255, 256; “Gerontion,” 318; “Hamlet and His Problems,” 249; “The Hollow Men,” 318; “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 189, 217, 248; “The Metaphysical Poets,” 371; “Preludes,” 248; “Portrait of a Lady,” 248; Prufrock and Other Observations, 161; The Sacred Wood, 239, 239; “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 251, 362, 368; The Waste Land, 162, 169, 184, 191, 217, 218, 226, 246–249, 250, 253–254, 256, 261, 262, 263, 283, 293, 345, 371, 394 Elizabeth I (Queen of England), 12 Ellerman, Winifred (penname “Bryher”), 235, 238, 302 Ellington, Edward Kennedy “Duke,” 278 Ellison, Ralph, 277, 287, 321; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Invisible Man, 277 Embury, Emma (penname: Ianthe), 41; works by, mentioned/quoted: Guido, a Tale; Sketches from History and Other Tales, 41 Emerson, Lidian (wife of Ralph Waldo), 67 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 1, 3, 11, 55, 61–76 passim, 78, 88, 100, 104, 151, 203–204, 256, 333, 392; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “Alphonso of Castille,” 71–72; “The American Scholar,” 3; “Berrying,” 72–73; “Blight,” 62, 65, 67; “Brahma,” 62; “Concord Hymn,” 61, 67; “Days,” 67; “Each and All,” 68; “Earth-Song,” 72; “Fate” (poem), 65; “Fate” (essay), 72, 73; “Give All to Love,” 66, 67, 73; “Good-Bye,” 73; “The Harp,” 65, 68; “History,” 70; “Initial, Daemonic, and Celestial Love,” 64–65; May-Day and Other Pieces, 61; “Merlin I,” 55; “Monadnoc,” 62, 72; “Ode, Inscribed to William Ellery Channing,” 4; “The Over-Soul,” 61; “The Park,” 63; Poems (1847), 61, 62, 63; “The Poet,” 3; “Poetry and Imagination,” 62; “The Problem,” 66; “The Sea-Shore,” 67;

448 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Selected Poems, 61, 71; “Self-Reliance,” 63; “Song of Nature,” 62; “The Sphinx,” 62, 65, 67; “Sursum Corda,” 63–64; “To Rhea,” 66; “Uriel,” 65; “Unity,” 61, 73; “Walter Savage Landor,” 73; “Woodnotes I,” 62, 65, 70–71; “Woodnotes II,” 66, 72, 73; “The World Soul,” 65, 69, 72; “Xenophanes,” 62, 65 Epic of Gilgamesh, The, 432 Epstein, Joseph, 428; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “Who Killed Poetry?,” 428 Erasmus, Desiderius, 197; works by, mentioned/quoted: Adages, 197 Euripides, 432; works by, mentioned/quoted: Bacchae, 432 Faas, Ekbert, 351 Faggen, Robert, 157 Faulkner, William, 271 Fauset, Jessie, 274, 284 FDR (See Roosevelt, Franklin Delano) Feldman, Barton, 335 Feldman, Martin, 220 Felton, Cornelius, 47 Fenollosa, Ernest, 217, 222; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, 217 Fenollosa, Mary, 217 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 370 Ferry, David, 49 Field, Edward, 430 Fire!! (journal), 272, 275 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 141, 278 Fisk Negro Writers Conference (1967), 316, 323, 324, 325 (See also Black Arts Movement Flaubert, Gustave, 175, 225; works by, mentioned/quoted: Trois Contes, 175 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bouyer de, 42 Ford, Ford Madox, 216; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Good Soldier, 217 Ford, Henri, 201 Foster, Henri, 97 Fourierism, 89 Fowler, Lorenzo, 98 Fowler, Orson, 98 Franco, Francisco Bahamonde, 286 Frank, Leo (lynching of), 5, 419 Frank, Waldo, 258, 261 Franklin, R.W., 120, 128; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 120

Free, William, 152 Freneau, Philip, 33, 40; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “The Rising Glory of America” (with Henry Hugh Brackenridge), 33 Freud, Sigmund (and Freudianism), 195, 266 Friedan, Betty, 383; works by, mentioned/ quoted: The Feminine Mystique, 383 Frost, Carol (son of the poet), 165 Frost, Elinor Miriam White (wife of the poet), 165 Frost, Irma (daughter of the poet), 165 Frost, Isabelle Moodie (mother of the poet), 165 Frost, Jeanie Florence (sister of the poet), 165 Frost, Lesley (daughter of the poet), 165 Frost, Marjorie (daughter of the poet), 165 Frost, Robert, 2–3, 68, 120, 156, 160–171 passim, 188, 217, 246, 258, 260, 282, 307, 329, 336, 426; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Beech,” 168; “The Birthplace,” 168; A Boy’s Will, 160, 168; “The Census-Taker,” 168; “Christmas Trees,” 162; “Closed For Good,” 168; “Design,” 166; “Directive,” 168; “The Figure a Poem Makes,” 169; “Ghost House,” 168; “The Gift Outright,” 2–3; “The Hill Wife,” 168; “Home Burial,” 164; In the Clearing, 168; “Letter to The Amherst Student,” 168, 169; Mountain Interval, 162, 168, 170; “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” 168; “Neither Out Far Nor in Deep,” 166; North of Boston, 160, 168; “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” 168; “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” 166–170; “Provide, Provide,” 166; “The Road Not Taken,” 162–163, 166; “The Silken Tent,” 156; Steeple-Bush, 168; “Storm Fear,” 168; “The Times Table,” 168; “The Vantage Point,” 68; WestRunning Brook, 168; “The Witch of Coös,” 164; A Witness Tree, 168 Frost, William Prescott, Jr. (father of the poet), 165 Fugitive Slave Bill (US, 1850), 89 Fuller, Margaret, 67 Fuller, Meta Warwick, 274 Futurism, 216, 263, 391 Garfunkel, Art, 120 Garrison, William Lloyd, 5, 90, 91 Garvey, Ellen Gruber, 122

449 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Garvey, Marcus, 275, 284 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 216 Geisel, Theodore Seuss, 178; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, 178 George III (UK), 28, 335 Gershwin, George, 278 Gerstler, Amy, 435 Gilbert, Sandra, 127 Gilson, Etienne, 333 Ginsberg, Allen, 1, 205, 211, 250, 329, 355, 366–378 passim, 396, 427, 428, 430, 432, 433; obscenity case involving “Howl,” 370, 373; works by, mentioned/quoted: “America,” 1, 366, 371; “Angkor Wat,” 373; “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” 373; “Autumn Leaves,” 366, 376–377; “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear,” 373; The Fall of America and Other Poems, 375–376; “Footnote To Howl,” 373; “How Kaddish Happened,” 374; “Howl,” 250, 366, 367, 368–371, 373, 374, 375, 377, 428, 432; “Howl” and Other Poems, 370; “I am a Prisoner of Allen Ginsberg,” 377; “Kaddish,” 366, 374–375, 376; “Love Poem on a Theme by Whitman,” 368; “Malest Cornifc Tuo Catullo,” 368; “Many Loves,” 373; “The Names,” 373; “Over Kansas,” 368; “Paterson,” 368; Planet News, 368; “Scribble,” 368; Selected Poems, 1947–1995, 377; “A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley,” 366, 372–373, 376; “Sunfower Sutra,” 366; “A Supermarket in California,” 370; “Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward that Deathchamber,” 368; “To Aunt Rose,” 366; “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” 366, 375–376; “Yiddishe Kopf,” 375 Ginsberg, Eugene (brother of Allen Ginsberg), 367, 374 Ginsberg, Louis (father of Allen Ginsberg), 367, 369 Ginsberg, Naomi (mother of All Ginsberg), 367, 374–375 Gioia, Dana, 428, 429; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “Can Poetry Matter?,” 428 Giorno, John, 429 Giovanni, Nikki, 138, 142; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Like a Ripple on a Pond,” 138

Giscombe, C.S., 142; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “Dayton, O., the 50’s and 60’s,” 142 Glass, Philip, 183 Glück, Louise, 435 Golodner, Lynne Meredith, 420 Gough, John, 94 Grabo, Norman, 21 Grant, Ulysses S., 181 Gray, Thomas, 27, 30, 33; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” 27 Green, Paul, 278; works by, mentioned/ quoted: In Abraham’s Bosom, 278 Greene, Dana, 352 Greene, George Washington, 47 Greene, Robert, 432; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, 432 Greer, Germaine, 383; works by, mentioned/ quoted: The Female Eunuch, 383 Griggs, Sutton E., 272 Grimké, Angeline Weld, 274; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Little Grey Dreams,” 277; “Rachel,” 279; “Then and Now,” 274; “To the Dunbar High School,” 274; “To Keep the Memory of Charlotte Forten Grimké,” 281 Gris, Juan, 176, 207 Guantanamo Bay (US military base/ detention center), 421 Guest, Barbara, 391, 428 Guevara, Che, 335 Gulf War (1990–1991), 419 H.D. (See Doolittle, Hilda) Hacker, Marilyn, 127, 429 Hafz (Persian poet), 42 Hall, Donald, 235, 426, 427, 428; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Poetry and Ambition,” 428 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 85 Hammer, Langdon, 260 Hammond, Jeffrey, 19 Hampton Institute Camera Club, 140 Handy, W.C., 278 Hansberry, Lorraine, 316, 319, 320; works by, mentioned/quoted: A Raisin in the Sun, 320 Hardy, Thomas, 104, 150, 151 Harlem Renaissance (See New Negro Renaissance)

450 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 276, 279; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Bury Me in a Free Land,” 276 Harrison, Hubert, 273, 275 Hartley, Marsden, 235 Hartman, Barend von Groningen, 42 Harvard University/Harvard College, 18, 53, 54, 55, 123, 173–174, 217, 245, 274, 301, 393, 399 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 4, 11, 49, 57, 116, 332, 336; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Earth’s Holocaust,” 57; “Ethan Brand,” 332; The Scarlet Letter, 4, 11; “Young Goodman Brown,” 3 Hayden, Robert, 142, 284, 387; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Paul Laurence Dunbar,” 142 Hayes, Terrance, 435 Hayford, Gladys Mae Casely, 279 Hazlitt, William, 238 Hecht, Anthony, 196; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “Crows in Winter,” 196 Heckewelder, John, 35 Hejinian, Lyn 252, 429 Hemingway, Ernest, 218, 271, 283, 286; works by, mentioned/quoted: In Our Time, 283 Henneberg, Sylvia, 420; works by, mentioned/quoted: he Creative Crone: Aging and the Poetry of May Sarton and Adrienne Rich, 420–421 Henry, Patrick, 94 Herbert, George, 19, 304; works by, mentioned/quoted: “The Church Porch,” 19; The Temple, 19 Hesiod, 42 Heuffer, Ford Madox (See Ford, Ford Madox) Hicok, Bob, 431 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 121, 122, 124, 128 Hill, Geoffrey, 195 Hiroshima (See Nuclear weapons, etc.) Hoagland, Tony, 431, 435 Holden, Jonathan, 428; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Fate of American Poetry, 428 Hollenberg, Donna, 351 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr., 48–49, 55, 107; works by, mentioned/quoted: “At My Fireside,” 56 Holstein, Casper, 276

Homer, 1; works by, mentioned/quoted: Iliad, 2, 432; Odyssey, 432 Honey, Maureen, 281; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Shadowed Dreams, 281 Hooker, Richard, 234 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 151, 302, 304, 336 Horace, 85, 335 House Un-American Activities Committee (US), 292 Howe, Julia Ward, 108; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” 108 Howells, William Dean, 6–7, 139; works by, mentioned/quoted: preface to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), 6–7, 139 Huffngton Post, The, 426 Hughes, Howard, 348 Hughes, Langston, 4, 136, 137, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 282, 284, 286–299 passim, 316, 317, 319, 320, 322, 324, 428; juvenilia of: 288; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Air Raid: Barcelona,” 289; “America,” 284; Ask Your Mama, 292–293, 294, 295; The Best of Simple, 287; The Big Sea, 278, 287–288, 289; “The Black Clown,” 287; “Bound No’th Blues,” 274; “Children’s Rhymes,” 292; “Danse Africaine,” 293; “Dinner Guest: Me,” 291; “Dream Variations,” 275; “Elevator Boy,” 272; “Esthete in Harlem,” 277; “Father and Son,” 290; Fine Clothes to the Jew, 290, 291, 295, 296; “Freedom’s Plow,” 295; “Goodbye Christ,” 291; “Hard Luck,” 276; “Harlem,” 320; I Wonder as I Wander, 287; “In Explanation of Our Times,” 295; “The Last Feast of Belshazzar,” 287; Montage of a Dream Deferred, 289, 290, 292, 294, 320; “Mulatto,” 290; “My People,” 275; “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” 137, 272; “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” 4, 275; Not Without Laughter, 287, 289, 296–297; “One More ‘S’ in the U.S.A.,” 291; “Poem (1),” 293; The Panther and the Lash, 324; “Ph.D.,” 293; “Porter,” 296; “Prelude to Our Age,” 295; “Railroad Avenue,” 272; “Red Silk Stockings,” 289; “Rising Waters,” 284; “Salute to

451 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Hughes, Langston (cont.) the Soviet Armies,” 292; “Slave on the Block,” 289; “Small Memory,” 291; “Special Bulletin,” 291; “Stalingrad: 1942,” 292; The Ways of White Folks, 287; The Weary Blues, 291, 295, 296; “The Weary Blues,” 273; “Young Gal’s Blues,” 290 Hughes, Ted, 380, 382 Hulme, T.E., 216 Hume, David, 39 Hurston, Zora Neale, 274, 275, 287 Hutchinsons, The (singing group), 95; works by, mentioned/quoted: “The Old Granite State,” 95 Ianthe (See Embury, Emma) iPod, the, 265 Irigary, Luce, 14 Irwin, John, 260–261 Ives, Charles, 279 Jackson, Andrew, 37 Jackson, George, 419 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 119 Jackson, Natalie, 377 Jackson, Virginia, 130 Jacob, Max, 313 James, Henry, 181, 225, 239, 245; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Ambassadors, 225; Portrait of a Lady, 225 James, William, 153, 164, 173–174, 392; pragmatism of, 164, 392, 395 Jameson, Frederic, 322 Jarnot, Lisa, 351 Jarrell, Randall, 164, 166, 169, 189, 233, 303, 307, 336, 409, 427; works by, mentioned/quoted: “The Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity,” 164; Poetry and the Age, 164, 166 Jaspers, Karl, 420 Jaxon, Frankie, 279 Jazz Singer, The (flm), 278 Jefferson, Thomas, 3, 28, 33, 215, 219, 227 JFK (See Kennedy, John Fitzgerald) Johnson, Charles S., 276, 280; works by, mentioned/quoted: Ebony and Topaz, 280 Johnson, Fenton, 276, 284 Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 274, 277–278, 279, 281, 284; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “The Heart of a Woman,” 281; “Sonnet in Memory of John Brown,”

278; “To a Young Wife,” 279; “The True American,” 274 Johnson, Helene, 272, 273, 274, 281, 284; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Magalu,” 281; “A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America,” 276; “Poem,” 277; “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem,” 273 Johnson, James Weldon, 136, 138, 276, 277, 284; works by, mentioned/quoted: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 279; The Book of American Negro Poetry, 136, 277, 280, 284; God’s Trombones, 136, 276 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 334 Johnson, Thomas H., 120, 128; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955), 120 Jones, Claudia, 317 Jones, Leroi, 286 (See also Baraka, Amiri) Jones, Mary Gravely, (grandmother of Adrienne Rich), 409, 416 Jones, Robert, 283 Jonson, Benjamin, 265 Josephson, Matthew, 265 Josephus (Titus Flavius), 42 Joyce, James, 163, 217, 223, 226, 235, 262, 367; works by, mentioned/quoted: Dubliners, 163; Finnegan’s Wake, 262; Ulysses, 226 Juhasz, Suzanne, 233 Kalstone, David, 300, 301 Kansas-Nebraska Act (US, 1854), 4, 89 Kant, Immanuel, 179; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Critique of Pure Reason, 179 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 355, 356 Kasper, John, 221 Kaul, Suvir, 33 Keats, John, 42, 201, 202, 258, 277, 282, 366, 409; concept of “negative capability,” 366 Kelley, Abby, 94 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 3, 164 Kennedy, John Pendleton, 271 Kennedy, Robert Fitzgerald, 335 Kerfoot, J.B., 235 Kerlin, Robert T., 280; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Negro Poets and Their Poems, 280 Kermode, Frank, 434; works by, mentioned/ quoted: The Genesis of Secrecy, 434; The Sense of an Ending, 434

452 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Kerouac, Jack, 367, 368, 369, 371, 373, 374, 428; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Dharma Bums, 369; On the Road, 369 Keyes, Alicia, 142 Killens, John O., 324 King Philip’s War (New England, 1675–1678), 18, 20, 333 (See also Metacomet King, Georgiana Goddard, 234 King, June, 429; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Coffeehouse Poetry Anthology (as editor), 429 (See also Performance Poetry King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1, 335 Kinnell, Galway, 428 Kipling, Rudyard, 104 Kirby, David, 431 Kirsch, Adam, 261 Kitchen Sink Poets, 431 Kizer, Carolyn, 127, 428 Kline, Franz, 342, 393 Knight, Etheridge, 142 Koch, Kenneth, 391, 393, 395, 399 Koethe, John, 435 Kowit, Steve, 430–431; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Maverick Poets: An Anthology, 430–431 Kreymborg, Alfred, 235 Ku Klux Klan, 272, 273, 276, 291 Kumin, Maxine, 127 Kunitz, Stanley, 332, 381 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School, 252–253, 351, 361, 401, 403, 430 La Fontaine, Jean de, 242; works by, mentioned/quoted: Fables, 242 Lamantia, Philip, 368, 369, 428 Laplanche, Jean, 357 Larkin, Philip, 150, 157; works by, mentioned/quoted: “The Whitsun Weddings,” 157 Larson, Kerry, 2 Latham, H.S., 234 Laughlin, James, 210 Lauth, Laura Elyn, 133; works by, mentioned/quoted: Titanic Operas: A Poet’s Corner of Contemporary Women Poets Responding to Dickinson’s Legacy (ed. with Martha Nell Smith), 127 Laux, Dorianne, 430 Lawrence, D.H., 223, 240 Leavis, F.R., 218

Léger, Fernand, 218 Legge, William, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth, 28–29 Lehman, David, 395 Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher, 434 Leibowitz, Herbert A., 260 Lennon, John, 430 Levertov, Denise, 127, 211, 340, 341, 342, 346–347, 349, 350, 351, 427, 428; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Illustrious Ancestors,” 347; “Light Up the Cave,” 347; “Overland to the Islands,” 346; The Poet in the World, 347; “Some Notes on Organic Form,” 346; “Williams: An Essay,” 347 Levine, Philip, 435 Levinger, Elma Ehrlich, 281; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” 281 Lewis, R.W.B., 260 Lewis, Wyndham, 216, 217 Lincoln, Abbey, 420 Lincoln, Abraham, 1, 3, 94, 99, 112, 161; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Gettysburg Address,” 3; “Second Inaugural Address,” 3 Lindsay, Frannie, 435 Lindsay, Vachel, 277 Lispector, Clarice, 313 Locke, Alain, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 279, 282, 284; works by, mentioned/quoted: “The Negro Takes His Place in Art,” 272 Logan, William, 261 Longenbach, James, 328 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 11, 39, 47–54 passim, 56, 57, 85, 109, 215, 409, 435; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Evangeline, 39, 52–54; “The Fire of Driftwood,” 50–52; “The Republic,” 109–110; The Seaside and the Fireside, 49–50; “Three Friends of Mine,” 47–48 Lope de Vega y Carpio, Félix, 215 Lorca, Garcia, 368, 431 Lovejoy, Elijah, 3 Lowell, Amy, 152, 165; works by, mentioned/quoted: Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, 165 Lowell, James Russell, 4, 49, 54–55, 107; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Bigelow Papers, 4; “Commemoration Ode,” 107; “A Winter-Evening Hymn to My Fire,” 54–55

453 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Lowell, Robert, 1, 211, 255, 305, 317, 327–339 passim, 380, 381, 403, 426, 427, 450; writing seminar of, attended by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, 381–382; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Central Park,” 332, 335; “Commander Lowell,” 329, 331; “Concord,” 333, 334; Day by Day, 332; The Dolphin, 332; “Epilogue,” 337; For Lizzie and Harriet, 332, 336; “For the Union Dead,” 1, 332, 334; For the Union Dead, 327, 334; “George III,” 335, 336; History, 332, 336; Imitations, 336; “Inauguration Day: January 1953,” 333; Land of Unlikeness, 332; Life Studies, 256, 305, 328–329, 332, 333, 334, 336, 380; Lord Weary’s Castle, 332, 333, 334, 336; “Man and Wife,” 330; “The March” (I and II), 335; “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” 330; “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” 330, 331; Near the Ocean, 335; Notebook, 332, 336; Notebook 1967–68, 332, 336; “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” 336; “Reading Myself,” 337; “Skunk Hour,” 305, 330, 331; “Thanks-Offering for Recovery,” 332; “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” 330; “Unwanted,” 332; “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” 332, 335; “Waking in Blue,” 330 Lukacs, Georg, 38; works by, mentioned/ quoted: The Historical Novel, 38 Lynes, George Platt, 232 Ma Rainey (Gertrude Malissa Nix Pridgett), 279, 282 MacDonald, Dwight, 355 MacDonald, Erskine, 235 Madhubuti, Haki, 323, 324 Major, Clarence, 223 Malcolm X, 322 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 399 Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky), 208 Mann, Thomas, 240, 367 Mao Tse-Tung, 344, 345 Maran, René, 275; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Batouala, 275 Mariani, Paul, 260 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 216, 219 Marlowe, Christopher, 258, 265 Marshall, Marjorie, 282; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “To a Dark Dancer,” 281

Martial (Valerius Martialis), 217, 222 Martin, Taffy, 232 Marvell, Andrew, 115, 335 Mason, Charlotte, 276, 287, 293 Matejka, Adrian, 435 Matisse, Henri, 176, 178 Mattachine Society, 356 Matthews, Elkin, 224 Matthiessen, F.O., 48 Maud, Ralph, 351 Maverick Poetry, 430 Maximus of Tyre, 345 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 392 Mazzaro, Jerome, 333 McAlmon, Robert, 235, 238 McCarthy, (Senator) Joseph, 221, 292 McCarthy, Eugene, 334 McCarthyism, 221, 292, 394 McClure, Michael, 368, 428 McGrath, Campbell, 43 McKay, Claude, 136, 273, 275, 277, 279, 282; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Baptism,” 275, 282; “If We Must Die,” 277, 279, 284; “The Harlem Dancer,” 273; “On a Primitive Canoe,” 282; “The White House,” 282 Melville, Herman, 4, 49, 104–118 passim, 336, 376, 433; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “Apathy and Enthusiasm,” 109; “The Battle of the Bay,” 107; “The Battle for Mississippi,” 108; Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, 4, 105, 106, 107–116 passim; Benito Cereno, 106; Billy Budd, 111; “Billy in the Darbies,” 116; Clarel, 104, 108, 116; The Confdence Man, 4, 108; “Confict of Convictions,” 109, 110–113; “Donelson,” 114; “Fragments from a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century,” 105; “The Frenzy in the Wake,” 114, 115; “Greek Architecture,” 104–105; John Marr and Other Sailors, 111, 116; “Lee at the Capitol,” 112; “The Maldive Shark,” 111; “The March to the Sea,” 114; “Misgivings,” 109, 110; Moby-Dick, 4, 110; “The New Ancient of Days,” 112; “The Portent,” 109; “The Scout Toward Aldie,” 107, 112; “Shiloh,” 115; Timoleon, 104, 116; “A Utilitarian’s View of the Monitor’s Fight,” 113; White Jacket, 105, 106 Mencken, Henry Louis, 5, 7; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Puritanism as a

454 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Literary Force,” 7; “The Sahara of the Bozarts,” 5 Merrill, James, 189, 199, 305 Messenger, The (newspaper, founded by A. Philip Randolph), 275 Metacomet (also known as King Philip), 333 Methfessel, Alice, 306 Mexican War (1848–1849), 4, 91 Middleton, Charles Theodore, 41; works by, mentioned/quoted: A New and Complete System of Geography, 41 Milhaud, Darius, 278 Miller, Chistanne, 232–233 Miller, J. Hillis, 336 Miller, Margaret, 303 Miller, Perry, 17, 48 Millet, Kate, 383; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Sexual Politics, 383 Millier, Brett C., 302 Mills, Ralph, 379 Milner, Ron, 324 Milton, John, 11, 13, 27, 42, 71, 110, 111, 113, 115, 152, 167, 195, 336; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Lycidas,” 27; Paradise Lost, 42, 113, 115; Samson Agonistes, 114, 115 Missouri Compromise (US, 1820), 3 Mitchell, Adrian, 430 Modernism (and varieties of), 136, 138, 161, 163, 172, 179, 221, 226, 239, 249, 256, 260, 316, 317, 318, 328, 372 Monroe, Harriet, 182, 217, 224, 240, 259–260 Monroe, James, 38 Moody, William Vaughan, 1; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Ode in a Time of Hesitation,” 1 Moore, John Milton, 233 Moore, Marianne, 8, 188, 217, 231–244 passim, 302, 311; celebrity of: 231– 232; book reviewing of: 238–239, 240–241; editor of Dial: 240; work as translator of La Fontaine: 242; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Baseball and Writing,” 242; “The Buffalo,” 231; Collected Poems, 232; Complete Poems, 236, 242; Complete Prose, 239; “Critics and Connoisseurs,” 234, 236; “In Distrust of Merits,” 241; “England,” 237; “The Fish,” 236–237; “The Frigate Pelican,” 231; “The Jeroba,” 231; A Marianne Moore Reader, 231; “Marriage,” 232, 238

(William Carlos Williams’s comments on); “New York,” 237; Observations, 236, 239; “An Octopus,” 232, 234, 238, 242; “The Pangolin,” 231, 234; “Paradise Park,” 238; “Peter,” 234; “Picking and Choosing,” 236, 237; “The Plumet Basilisk,” 231; Poems, 235; “Poetry” (and the revision thereof) 236; “Predilections,” 239; “Reinforcements,” 236–237; Selected Poems, 241–241; “The Steeple-Jack,” 234; “To the Soul of Progress” (later retitled “To Military Progress”), 234; “To Victory Hugo of my Crow Pluto,” 242; “Virginia Britannia,” 242; “The Wood Weasel,” 231 Moore, Mary Warner, 233 Moore, Merrill, 164 Moore, Thomas, 81 Morison, Samuel Eliot, 17 Morley, Helena, 313; works by, mentioned/ quoted: The Diary of Helena Morley, 313 Morley, Hilda, 340 Morris, Tracie, 433 Morton, Sarah Wentworth, 33; works by, mentioned/quoted: Beacon Hill, 33 Mossotti, Travis, 435 Motherwell, Robert, 342 Mott, Lucretia, 94 Mount, William Sidney, 96–97 Mullen, Harryette, 142 Munch, Edvard, 302; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “The Scream,” 302 Munson, Gorham, 258, 262 Mussolini, Benito, 218–219, 220, 227 Muybridge, Eadweard, 176 Myers, Jack, 431 Myers, Reverend J.A., 141 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 4, 272, 275, 280, 317 Nagasaki (See Nuclear weapons, etc.) Napoleon, Bonaparte, 39, 74, 177 Napoleonic Wars, The, 335 Nash, Ogden, 435 Nation of Islam, 322; publications of, Muhammad Speaks, 323 Negritude, 275 Negro Improvement Association (founded by Marcus Garvey), 275

455 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Negro World (newspaper, owned by Marcus Garvey), 275 Nelson, Deborah, 385 Neruda, Pablo, 431 New Criticism/New Critics, 125, 345, 349, 392, 427 New Formalists, 429 New Negro Renaissance, 4, 5, 142, 271–285 passim, 287, 293 New York School, 348, 391–408 passim, 428 New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 7 Newsome, Effe Lee, 276, 280; works by, mentioned/quoted: “I Sit and Sew,” 280; “Mattinata,” 276; “Wild Roses,” 280 Newton, Huey, 286 Niagara Movement, 272, 275, 279 Niedecker, Lorine, 252 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 433 Nixon, Richard, 335 Norcross, Louise, 120 North American Review (Boston), 34 Norton, Mary Beth, 15 Nuclear weapons/atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, etc., 265, 292, 334, 344, 367, 371, 382 Nugent, Richard Bruce, 274, 279 Nullifcation Crisis (1832–1833), 3 O’Connor, William Douglas, 99 O’Hara, Frank, 250, 391–398 passim, 399, 400, 401, 403, 404, 428; interest in visual arts of, 393–394; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Ave Maria,” 397; “Biotherm (for Bill Berkson),” 250; “The Day Lady Died,” 397; “Easter,” 395; “For James Dean,” 397; “An Image of Leda,” 397; Lunch Poems, 397; “In Memory of My Feelings,” 397; “Ode to Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and Other Births),” 397; “Personal Poem,” 397; “Personism,” 396; “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!),” 397; “Second Avenue,” 395; Standing Still and Walking in New York (ed. Donald Allen), 395; “A Step Away from Them,” 397; “Steps,” 397; Stones (collaborative work with Larry Rivers), 393; “To the Film Industry in Crisis,” 397; “Today,” 395 O’Neill, Eugene, 271 Oates, Joyce Carol, 127, 164; Twitter account of, 164

Objectivism/Objectivists, 209, 253, 360 Occum, Sansom, 29 Odum, Harold W., 279 Olds, Sharon, 127, 430, 435 Oliver, Mary, 127 Olson, Charles, 205, 252, 340–354 passim, 355, 358, 418, 427; works by, mentioned/quoted: Call Me Ishmael, 347; Human Universe and Other Essays, 347; “The Kingfshers,” 343–345; The Maximus Poems, 252, 345–346, 348; “Projective Verse,” 341, 342–343, 349; The Special View of History, 347 Opffer, Emil, 266 Oppen, George, 209, 252 Oppenheimer, Joel, 340 Opportunity (newspaper, affliated with the Urban League), 275 Orage, Alfred Richard, 216, 218 Orlovsky, Peter, 373 Orne, Martin, 382 Orr, Peter, 381 Ostriker, Alicia, 127, 233 Ouspensky, Peter D., 258 Ovington, Mary White, 276 Owen, Wilfred, 108; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “Dulce et Decorum Est,” 108 Pack, Robert, 426–427 Packer, Barbara, 42; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “American Verse Traditions,” 42 Page, Thomas Nelson, 271 Paglia, Camille, 433 Paine, Thomas, 2 Palmer, Michael, 222, 429 Palmer, Michael, 429 Pan-African Movement/Congresses, 272, 275 Parker, Charlie, 297, 354, 369 Parker, Dorothy, 435 Parmigianino, Francesco, 402 Passenger Act (US, 1847), 54 Pasternak, Boris, 392 Pater, Walter, 409 Patterson, Raymond, 142 Paz, Octavio, 211, 304; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Objects and Apparitions” (trans. Elizabeth Bishop), 304; “January First” (trans. Elizabeth Bishop), 313 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 44 Pearl, Nancy, 430

456 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Pentagon, March on the (1967), 334, 335 Performance Poetry/Poetry Slams, 429; as represented in Burning Down the House: Selected Poems from the Nuyorican Poets Café National Poetry Slam Champions, 429 (See also King, June and Smith, Larry Perillo, Lucia, 435 Perloff, Marjorie, 395, 397, 403; works by, mentioned/quoted: Frank O7Hara: a Poet Among Painters, 397 Perry, Lila Cabot, 147 Peters, John, 29 Phelan, Peggy, 235 Philips, Robert, 379; works by, mentioned/ quoted: The Confessional Poets, 379 Phillips, Carl, 435 Phrenology, 97–98 Picasso, Pablo, 176, 177, 178, 181, 193, 235, 240, 393; works by, mentioned: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 176 Pierce, Franklin, 89 Pizarro, Francisco, 35 Plantation Myth (as propounded by white Americans), 5, 136, 142, 271 Plath, Sylvia, 329, 336, 379–390 passim, 427; children of, Frieda and Nicholas, 382; works by, mentioned/quoted: “The Applicant,” 383; Ariel, 329, 383, 385; “The Bee Meeting,” 385; The Bell Jar, 382; The Colossus, 382; “Daddy,” 382; “The Jailor,” 385; “Lady Lazarus,” 385, 386–388; “Lesbos,” 384–385; “Medusa,” 382; “Three Women,” 385; “The Tour,” 384; “Tulips,” 385, 386, 387 Plato, 62 Plessy v. Ferguson (US Supreme Court case, 1896), 7, 276 Plutarch, 344 Pocahontas (also know as Matoaka, Amonute, Rebecca Rolfe), 39 Podhoretz, Norman, 373 Poe, Adgar Allan, 71, 77–86 passim, 282; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Al Aaraaf,” 79; Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1829), 71, 78; “Annabel Lee,” 84–85; “The City by the Sea,” 80; “The Conqueror Worm,” 81; “DrakeHalleck Review,” 85; “Irene,” 80; “Israfel,” 80; “The Lake,” 78, 83; “The Lake – to –,” 79; “Letter to Mr –,” 80; “Ligeia,” 81–83; “The Philosophy of

Composition,” 83–85; Poems: Second Edition (1831), 80–81; “The Poetic Principle,” 85; “The Rationale of Verse,” 85; “The Raven,” 83–84; “Sonnet – To Science,” 282; “Tamerlane,” 77–78, 83; Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), 77; “To Helen,” 80, 81; “To One in Paradise,” 81; “Ulalume,” 84; “The Visionary,” 81 Poe, David (the poet’s father), 77 Poe, Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins (the poet’s mother), 77 Poets & Writers (as gone unmentioned), 425 Poirier, Richard, 164, 166 Polk, James K., 91 Pollitt, Katha, 127 Pollock, Jackson, 393, 428 Pope, Alexander, 26, 33, 71; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Windsor Forest,” 33 Porter, Cole, 73 Post-Modernism, 179, 334, 343, 352, 397, 398 Pound, Ezra, 1, 8, 137, 138, 160, 162, 163, 165, 188, 201, 202, 203, 205, 208, 209, 210, 214–230 passim, 231, 235, 238, 239, 240, 241, 245, 246, 247, 252, 256, 273, 279, 294, 329, 333, 336, 343, 344, 349, 350, 351, 352, 358, 366, 376, 431; anti-Semitic beliefs of: 214, 219, 221; Bollingen Prize controversy and, 221; Confucianism and, 219, 220, 222; fascist politics of: 214–215, 218–219, 220, 221, 227, 358; works by, mentioned/quoted: Cantos, 161, 164, 170, 214, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 226–227; “Canzone: Of Incense,” 223; Canzoni, 216; Cathay, 217, 222; Cavalcanti Rime, 222; Certain Noble Plays of Japan, 217; The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (as editor/publisher) 217; “Cino,” 216; Collected Early Poetry, 215; “Commission,” 224; “The Decadence,” 223; Draft of XXX Cantos, 219; Eleven New Cantos, 219; Exultations, 216; The Fifth Decad of Cantos, 219; Guide to Kulchur, 214, 219; Hilda’s Book, 215; “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” 225; Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 218, 225–226; Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 219; “Langue d’Oc,” 225; Love Poems of Ancient Egypt, 222; A Lume Spento,

457 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Pound, Ezra (cont.) 216, 221; Lustra, 161, 162, 217, 223– 224, 225; “Moeurs Contemporaines,” 225; “Na Audiart,” 216; Personae, 216; The Pisan Cantos, 220, 221, 227; Provenca, 221; “The Rest,” 223–224; Ripostes, 216, 221; “The Serious Artist,” 224; The Spirit of Romance, 216, 222; “Tenzone,” 223; Umbra: The Early Poems of Ezra Pound, 218 Pound, Homer, 215 Powell, Colin (US Army General), 419 Prescott, William H., 344 Presley, Elvis, 425 Price, Kenneth M., 133; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Classroom Electric (ed. with Martha Nell Smith), 133 Pridgett, Gertrude Malissa Nix (See Ma Rainey) Pritchard, William, 166, 266 Promey, Sally, 21 Prunty, Wyatt, 429 Queen Elizabeth I (See Elizabeth I) Quinn, Alice, 305 Raab, Lawrence, 435 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 355 Rainey, Lawrence S., 434 Rakosi, Carl, 252 Rampersad, Arnold, 286, 287, 295; works by, mentioned/quoted: I, Too, Sing America, 286; I Dream a World, 286 Randall, Dudley, 324; Broadside Press of, 324 Ransom, John Crowe, 363, 427; works by, mentioned/quoted: The New Criticism, 427 Rauschenberg, Robert, 342, 393 Reconstruction, The (US), 4, 5, 6, 100, 273, 276, 279 Reed, Ishmael, 142; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “Paul Laurence Dunbar in the Tenderloin,” 142 Reverdy, Pierre, 392 Rexroth, Kenneth, 368, 369 Reznikoff, Charles, 209, 252 Rice, John, 342 Rich, Adrienne, 122, 127, 215, 409–424 passim, 428; works by, mentioned/ quoted: An Atlas of a Diffcult World:

Poems 1988–1991, 418, 419; “1941,” 420; “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” 410; “The Blue Ghazals,” 411; A Change of World, 409, 421; “Coast to Coast,” 416–417; “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience,” 417; Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems, 1991–1995, 419–420; “The Desert as Garden of Paradise,” 418; The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems, 409; Diving Into the Wreck, 412–413; “Double Monologue,” 410; The Dream of a Common Language, 413, 414, 415; “Eastern War Time,” 420; “Images for Godard,” 411; “Implosions,” 411; “Juvenilia,” 409; Leafets: Poems, 1965–1968, 411, 413; “Memorize This,” 421; Midnight Salvage: Poems, 1995–1998, 420; “Moth Hour,” 411; “Mother and Daughterhood” (in Of Woman Born), 414; Necessities of Life: Poems, 1962–1965, 411, 413; Of Woman Born, 409, 414; “On Edges,” 411; On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 416; “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev,” 415; “Phenomenology of Anger,” 412; “Power,” 415; “Readings of History,” 417; The School Among the Ruins: Poems, 2000–2004, 421; “Shooting Script,” 411; “Sibling Mysteries,” 415; Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, 410, 413; “Sources,” 417, 418; “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity,” 417–418; “The Stranger,” 413; “Then or Now,” 420; Time’s Power: Poems, 1985– 1988, 418, 420; Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems, 2007–2010, 421–422; “Twenty-One Love Poems,” 415–416; “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” 413; A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, 413, 416; The Will to Change: Poems, 1968–1970, 411, 413; “Why Else But to Forestall This Hour,” 421; “Yom Kippur,” 418; Your Native Land, Your Life, 418 Rich, Arnold Rice (father of Adrienne Rich), 409, 417, 418 Rich, Hattie Rice (grandmother of Adrienne Rich), 409, 416 Richards, Keith, 430 Richards, M.C., 340 Ricks, Christopher, 327 Rilke, Rainer Marie, 435

458 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Rimbaud, Arthur, 344, 357, 367, 392, 399, 403 Rivers, Larry, 393 Robbins, Michael, 430 Robertson, William, 35, 42 Robeson, Paul, 325 Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 8, 144–159 passim; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Aunt Imogen,” 148; “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford,” 144; “Calverly’s,” 148; Captain Craig, 144; “Captain Craig,” 144, 151; The Children of the Night, 144; “The Children of the Night,” 152; “The Clerks,” 145, 149; “Demos,” 146; “Dionysus upon Demos,” 146; “Eros Turannos,” 148; “For a Dead Lady,” 148; “George Crabbe,” 152; “The Growth of Lorraine,” 148; “Isaac and Archibald,” 148, 153–156; “John Brown,” 144; “John Evereldown,” 148, 149; Lancelot, 144; “Lazarus,” 144; “Luke Havergal,” 148; The Man Against the Sky, 144; “The Man Against the Sky,” 151; “The Mill,” 146–147; “Mr. Flood’s Party,” 150; “The Poor Relation,” 148; “Rembrandt to Rembrandt,” 144; “Reuben Bright,” 148; “Richard Cory,” 149, 150; “The Sheaves,” 156–157; “The Three Taverns,” 144; “To a Dead Lady,” 157; The Town Down the River, 144; Tristram, 144; “Veteran Sirens,” 157 Robinson, Herman (brother of the poet), 148 Rodgers, Carolyn, 324 Rodgers, Jimmie, 278 Roethke, Theodore, 427 Rollin, Charles, 35 Rolling Stones, The, 425 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 219, 332 Roosevelt, Theodore, 2, 147 Rosenberg, Ethel, 416, 420 Rosenthal, M.L., 305, 380, 386, 387, 388 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 68, 100, 222, 223; works by, mentioned/quoted: “The Woodspurge,” 68 Roussel, Raymond, 401 Rudge, Olga, 218 Rukeyser, Muriel, 252 Russell, Bertrand, 164 Ruthven, K.K., 224

San Francisco Renaissance (See Berkeley Renaissance) Sanchez, Sonia, 324 Sandburg, Carl, 277, 284, 367 Santayana, George, 336 Sappho, 336 Sargent, John Singer, 245 Scalapino, Leslie, 429 Schoolcraft, Henry, 35 Schorer, Mark, 370 Schulhoff, Erwin, 278 Schuyler, James, 391, 428 Schwartz, Delmore, 317, 336 Schwarzkopf, Norman (US Army General), 419 Scott, Walter, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40; works by, mentioned/quoted: Waverly novels, 32 Seaton, Maureen, 431 Sedgwick, Catherine Maria, 32 Seidel, Frederick, 430 Seneca Falls Convention (US, 1848), 89 Senghor, Léopold, 275 Sexton, Anne, 329, 379–390 passim, 427; works by, mentioned/quoted: “The Abortion,” 385; “Appointment Hour,” 382; The Awful Rowing Toward God, 382; The Death Notebooks, 388; “For Mr. Death Who Stands with His Door Open,” 388; “Her Kind,” 385; “Housewife,” 384; “Hurry Up Please It’s Time,” 385; “In Celebration of My Uterus,” 383; “Nude Swim,” 385; “The Operation,” 385–386, 387; “The Psychosomatic Stomach,” 382; “Self in 1958,” 383–384; Transformations, 382; “Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward,” 385 Shakespear, Dorothy, 216 Shakespear, Olivia, 21 Shakespeare, William, 62, 94, 174, 188, 249, 265, 430, 432, 433; works by, mentioned/quoted: As You Like It, 174; Hamlet, 249; Macbeth 6; Merchant of Venice, 433; Othello, 94; The Tempest, 188; Twelfth Night, 432; The Winter’s Tale, 432 Shapiro, Harvey, 323 Shaw, Robert Gould, 334 Sheehy, Donald G., 158, 170; “Metaphor and Mental Health in Frost,” 170; “‘What Became of New England’: Frost and Rural Sociology,” 158 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 81, 234, 258, 367, 376

459 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Shepherd, Emma (wife of Herman Robison), 148 Sherwin, Oscar, 336; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Uncorking the Old Sherry, 336 Shetley, Vernon, 428–429; After the Death of Poetry, 428–429 Sidney, Sir Philip, 12 Sieburth, Richard, 227 Sigourney, Lydia, 34–40 passim, 42–45, passim; works by, mentioned/quoted: “The Huguenot Pastor,” 39; “Lady Jane Grey,” 39; Letters of Life, 39; “The Martyr of Scio,” 39; Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse, 34; “Napoleon at Helena,” 39; “Paul at Athens,” 39; “The Power of Friendship: the Ancient Legend of Franconia,” 39; “The Rival Kings of Mohegan, Contrasted with the Rival Brothers of Persia,” 39; Traits of the Aborigines of America, 34–39passim; “Zama,” 39 Silliman, Ron, 252, 361, 429 Simic, Charles, 435 Simms, William Gilmore, 32 Simon and Garfunkel, 120 Simon, Paul, 120 Simpson, Joshua Carter, 276 Simpson, Louis, 427–428 Six Gallery reading (1955, San Francisco), 427 Skelton, John, 71 Slatin, John, 236 Smith, Bessie, 279, 282 Smith, John, 35 Smith, Larry, 429; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Coffeehouse Poetry Anthology (as editor), 429 (See also Performance Poetry Smith, Martha Nell, 125, 131, 133; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Classroom Electric (ed. with Kenneth M. Price), 133; Dickinson Electronic Archives (executive editor of), 123, 126–127; Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences: A Born-Digital Inquiry (ed. with Lara Vetter), 123, 126, 127; Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (ed. with Ellen Louis Hart), 125, 128; Rowing in Eden, 132; Titanic Operas: A Poet’s Corner of Contemporary Women Poets Responding to Dickinson’s Legacy (ed. with Laura Elyn Lauth), 127

Snediker, Michael, 360 Snodgrass, W.D., 329 Snyder, Gary, 223, 368, 369, 372, 428, 430 Soares, Lota de Macedo, 301, 302 Solomon, Carl, 367, 371 Sorrentino, Gilbert, 360 Southern Agrarians (poets), 333 Southey, Robert, 41, 42, 43; works by, mentioned/quoted: Curse of Kehma, 41; Thalala the Destroyer, 41 Spencer, Ann, 274, 277, 283, 284; works by, mentioned/quoted: “At the Carnival,” 281; “Before the Feast at Shusan,” 277; “Innocence,” 281; “Letter to My Sister,” 281, 283 Spencer, Herbert, 150–151 Spenser, Edmund, 12, 170; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Faerie Queene, 170 Spicer, Jack, 351, 352, 355–365 passim; ideas about copyright of, 359; works by, mentioned/quoted: Admonitions, 359, 360, 361; After Lorca, 357, 358, 360, 361, 363; Billy the Kid, 361; Book of Magazine Verse, 355, 361, 362; A Book of Music, 361; The Holy Grail, 361; The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (ed. Peter Gizzi), 356, 359; Imaginary Elegies, 360; Language, 357, 361, 362; “Love Poems,” 362–363; “A Postscript to the Berkeley Renaissance,” 356; “Song for Bird and Myself,” 356; Troilus, 355 Spingarn, Amy, 276 Spingarn, Arthur, 276 Spingarn, Joel, 276 Squires, Radcliffe, 147, 152 Stanford, Ann, 12 Stanford, Donald, 19 Stanton, Maura, 431 Stapleton, Laurence, 241 Steichen, Edward, 235 Stein, Amelia (Milly), 173 Stein, Bertha, 173 Stein, Daniel, 173 Stein, Gertrude, 8, 172–187 passim, 209, 279, 399; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Ada,” 177; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 182; Brewsie and Willie, 183; Composition as Explanation, 179–180; “Cultivated Motor Automatism, A Study of Character in its Relation to Attention,” 173; Four Saints in Three

460 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Acts, 182–183; “The Good Anna,” 175; “The Gentle Lena,” 175; History or Messages from History, 181–182; How to Write, 180; “How Writing is Written,” 179; “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso,” 177, 181; Lectures in America, 182; The Making of Americans, 174–175, 176, 178; “Melanctha, Each One as She May,” 175–176; Mrs. Reynolds, 183; Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein (introduction by Thornton Wilder), 182; Patriarchal Poetry, 183–184; “Picasso,” 177; Q.E.D., 174, 176; Stanzas in Meditation, 184; Tender Buttons, 178; The Mother of Us All, 183; Three Lives, 175–176; Wars I Have Seen, 183; “The Winner Loses: A Picture of Occupied France,” 183 Stein, Leo, 173, 174, 176 Stevens, Wallace, 8, 68, 73, 182, 188–200 passim, 239, 240, 254–255, 391, 399, 400, 403; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Analysis of a Theme,” 196; “Anecdote of the Jar,” 189, 190; “Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks,” 190; “Angels Surrounded by Paysans,” 197, 198; “The Auroras of Autumn,” 197, 198; The Auroras of Autumn, 196–197; “Banal Sojourn,” 254–255; “Bantams in Pine Woods,” 191; “Chocorua to its Neighbor,” 195; “Credences of Summer,” 195; “Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule,” 191; Collected Poems (1954), 191; “The Comedian as the Letter C,” 191, 192; “A Completely New Set of Objects,” 196; “Description without Place,” 195; “Disillusionment of Ten O’clock,” 189; “Domination of Black,” 189, 190, 198; “Dry Loaf,” 194; “Emperor of Ice Cream,” 189; “Esthétique du Mal,” 195; “Farewell to Florida,” 192; “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” 199; “The Good Man Has No Shape,” 195; Harmonium, 188–191, 192, 195, 235, 254, 255; “A High Toned Old Christian Woman,” 191; “The Idea of Order at Key West,” 192–193; Ideas of Order, 191, 192; “Idiom of the Hero,” 194; “Imagination as Value,” 190; “In the Carolinas,” 190; “The Jack Rabbit,” 191; “Late Hymn from the Myrrh-Mountain,”

196; “The Latest Freed Man,” 193; “A Lot of People Bathing in a Stream,” 196; “Madame La Fleurie,” 199; “Man Carrying Thing,” 195–196; “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,” 191, 192; The Man with the Blue Guitar, 191, 193; “Meditation Celestial and Terrestrial,” 192; “Metaphors of a Magnifco,” 195; “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” 189, 190; “The Motive for Metaphor,” 195; The Necessary Angel, 198; “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters,” 196; “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” 199; “Nomad Exquisite,” 190; “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself,” 198; Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, 193, 194–195; “Of Mere Being,” 199; “Of Modern Poetry,” 194; “On the Road Home,” 68; “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” 194, 197–198; Owl’s Clover, 191; “Paisant Chronicle,” 195; Parts of a World, 193; “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” 188, 191; “The Plain Sense of Things,” 199; “The Planet on the Table,” 188, 198; “Poems of Our Climate,” 193; “The Pure Good of Theory,” 195, 196; “The Relations between Poetry and Painting,” 194; “The River of Rivers in Connecticut,” 199; “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz,” 192; “Sailing After Lunch,” 192; “The Snow Man,” 190; “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch,” 196; “The Sun This March,” 192; “Sunday Morning,” 188–189; “A Study of Two Pears,” 194; “Tea at the Palace of Hoon,” 188; “Things of August,” 198; “Thinking of a Relation between the Images of Metaphors,” 195; “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” 189; Transport to Summer, 195–196; “Two Versions of the Same Poem,” 196; “United Dames of America,” 194; “A Woman Sings a Song for a Soldier Come Home,” 195; “The World as Meditation,” 199 Stevenson, Anne, 300, 310, 311 Stevenson, Burton, 4; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Poems of American History, 4 Stieglitz, Alfred, 208, 235 Stiles, Ezra, 10 Still, William Grant, 278 Stock, Noel, 222 Stoddard, Samuel, 18

461 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Stone, Ruth, 127 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 36, 120; works by, mentioned/quoted: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 36 Strauss, Johann, 54 Sumner, Charles, 47, 48, 49, 56 Surrealism/surreal/surrealist, 300, 309, 310, 312, 372, 372, 375, 391, 392, 394, 395, 399, 400, 403, 428, 429, 431 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 165, 433 Swinburne, Algernon, 99, 100, 223, 239, 287, 409 Symonds, John Addington, 90 Synge, John Millington, 277 Tal-Coat, Pierre (Pierre Louis Jacob), 198 Tapscott, Steven, 203 Tate, Allen, 258, 261, 267, 333 Tate, James, 431 Taylor, Edward, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17–21 passim; works by, mentioned/quoted: God’s Determinations Touching His Elect, 20–21; “Huswifery,” 21; Metrical History of Christianity, 18; Preparatory Meditations, 19–20; “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly,” 21 Taylor, Elizabeth (wife of Edward), 19 Taylor, James (son of Edward), 20 Taylor, Judith, 431 Templeton, Alice, 419; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Dream of the Dialogue, 419 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 104, 224, 409 Terkel, Studs, 420 Tertullian, 25, 42; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “An Exhortation to Chastity,” 25 Thirteenth Amendment (US Constitution), 58 Thomas, Edward, 161, 163; works by, mentioned/quoted: Poems, 161 Thompson, George, 97 Thompson, Lawrance, 164 Thomson, Virgil, 182 Thoreau, Henry David, 4, 54, 203, 336; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Civil Disobedience,” 4 Thurman, Wallace, 272, 274, 279 Till, Emmett, 323 Tillman, Benjamin, 5–6 Timrod, Henry, 2; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “The Cotton Boll,” 2 Titanic Operas: A Poet’s Corner of Contemporary Women Poets

Responding to Dickinson’s Legacy (Martha Nell Smith and Laura Elyn Lauth, eds.), 127 Todd, Mabel Loomis, 119–120, 121, 124 Toklas, Alice Babette, 176, 177, 178, 182 Tolson, Melvin, 317 Tomlinson, Charles, 232 Toomer, Jean, 274, 276, 279, 281, 282, 284; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Blue Meridian,” 283; Cane, 274, 279; “Esther,” 283; “Face,” 283; “Fern,” 283; “Georgia Dusk, 274–275; “Her Lips Are Copper Wire,” 283; “Karintha,” 276; “November Cotton Flower,” 281; “Rhobert,” 283; “Song of the Son,” 283 Tracy, Steven, 5 Traherne, Thomas, 234 Traubel, Horace, 52, 89 Treaty of Versailles (1919), 218 Trethewey, Natasha, 431 Trilling, Lionel, 164, 166, 170 Trollope, Anthony, 238 Trotter, William Monroe, 274 Trowbridge, John Townsend, 88 Trumbull, John, 33; works by, mentioned/ quoted: “Prospect of the Future Glory of America,” 33 Tucker, Sophie, 278 Tudor, David, 342 Turner, Darwin, 138 Turner, Nat, 3 Tuve, Rosemond, 16 Twain, Mark (See Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) Twombly, Cy, 342 Untermeyer, Louis, 8, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 247, 248, 262 Urban League, 275 Valéry, Paul, 240, 430 Vallejo, César, 431 Van Dyne, Susan R., 380–381 Van Vechten, Carl, 276, 279 Vetter, Laura, 131; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences: A Born-Digital Inquiry (ed. with Martha Nell Smith), 123, 126, 127 Vietnam War (US phase of, 1965–1975), 107, 334, 335, 342, 372, 375, 376, 411, 412, 414 Violi, Paul, 429

462 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Virgil, 2, 14, 26, 71, 432; works by, mentioned/quoted: Aeneid, 2, 14, 35, 71, 432 Visions of Tundal, 432 Voice, The (journal, edited by Hubert Harrison), 275 Voltaire, 40, 42 von Hallberg, Robert, 341 Vorticism, 216–217 Voznesensky, Andrei, 366 Wadsworth, Isabel, 215 Wahl, Jean, 196 Waldman, Anne, 429, 433 Walker, Margaret, 324; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Jubilee, 324 Walrond, Eric D., 275 War of the Anthologies, 350, 425–427 (See also Allen, Donald; Hall, Donald; Pack, Robert; Simpson, Louis) Warner, (Reverend) John Riddle, 233, 236 Warner, John, 233, 240 Warren, (US Supreme Court Chief Justice) Earl, 221 Warren, Mercy Otis, 38; works by, mentioned/quoted: “A Political Reverie,” 38 Washington, Booker T., 136, 138, 142, 273, 279, 290, 297; works by, mentioned/ quoted: speech delivered at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition (so-called “Atlanta Compromise” speech), 142; Up From Slavery, 279 Washington, George, 28, 29, 38, 181, 243 Washington, Mary Helen, 323 Watkins, E.I., 336; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Catholic Art and Culture, 336 Webb, Charles Harper, 429, 431; works by, mentioned/quoted: Stand-Up Poetry, 429 Webster, Daniel, 94, 181, 238 Weil, Simone, 416 Werner, Marta L., 127; works by, mentioned/ quoted: Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson’s Late Fragments and Related Texts, 1870–1886, 123, 127 West, Dorothy, 274 Weston, Drew, 434 Whalen, Philip, 368, 369, 428 Wheatley, Phillis, 24–31 passim, 33, 138, 277; works by, mentioned/quoted: “An Elegy on Leaving” (“Farewell! Ye friendly bowers…”), 30; “Liberty

and Peace,” 33; “On Imagination,” 26; “On Messrs. Hussy and Coffn,” 24–25; “On Recollection,” 26; “On Virtue,” 25; Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral, 24; “Thoughts on the Work of Providence,” 26–27; “To His Excellency George Washington,” 28; “To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty,” 28; “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for North America,” 28–29; “’Twas Mercy That Brought Me From My Pagan Land,” 138 Wheatley, Susanna, 29 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 234, 245 Whitfeld, George, 24, 28 Whitfeld, James Monroe, 1, 4, 276; works by, mentioned/quoted: “America,” 1, 4, 276 Whitman, Albery Allston, 276; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Rape of Florida, 276 Whitman, Hannah (sister of the poet), 90 Whitman, Jess (brother of the poet), 90 Whitman, Louisa (mother of the poet), 87–88 Whitman, Walt 1, 2, 3, 4, 21, 49, 52, 71, 78, 80, 87–103 passim, 107, 119, 120, 125–127, 132, 138, 203, 227, 250, 251–252, 258, 261, 263–265, 267, 283, 284, 297, 349, 366, 367, 368, 370, 371, 376, 391, 397, 403, 433; digital archive of, Walt Whitman Archive, 125, 127; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Calamus,” 90, 91, 98; “Children of Adam,” 91, 98; “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 94; “The Dalliance of Eagles,” 91; “The Death of Abraham Lincoln,”, 99; Drum-Taps, 4, 107; “I Sing the Body Electric,” 96; Leaves of Grass, 2, 3, 4, 52, 80, 88–89, 91–93, 95, 97, 98–99, 119, 370; “Long, Long Hence,” 100; “Preface” to Leaves of Grass (1855), 3, 92, 98, 99; “O Captain! My Captain!,” 100; “The Sleepers,” 52; “Song of Myself,” 43, 92–98, 251, 366, 371; “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” 99 Whitman, Walter (father of the poet), 87–88, 90 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 4, 11, 49, 55, 58; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Burning

463 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Index Whittier, John Greenleaf (cont.) Drift-Wood,” 56–57; “Ichabod,” 4; Snow-Bound, 56 Wiener, Norbert, 344 Wieners, John, 340 Wigglesworth, Michael, 20; works by, mentioned/quoted: The Day of Doom, 20 Wilbur, Richard, 78, 427 Wilde, Oscar, 100, 255 Wilder, Thornton, 182 Willard, Emma, 39 Williams, Clarence, 278 Williams, Jonathan, 340 Williams, Luci Ariel, 281; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Northboun,” 281 Williams, William Carlos, 8, 188, 201–213 passim, 215, 238, 239, 240, 241, 247, 248, 252, 262, 329, 336, 343, 345, 346, 349, 350, 351, 366, 370, 391; works by, mentioned/quoted: Al Que Quiere!, 203; “April, 209; “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” 211; “At the Ballgame,” 205; “The Botticellian Trees,” 209; “By the road to the contagious hospital,” 206; “Della Primavera Trasportata al Morale,” 209; “The Descent of Winter,” 208; The Desert Music, 211; An Early Martyr and Other Poems, 209; The Great American Novel, 203; In the American Grain, 210; Journey to Love, 211; Kora in Hell, 208, 239; Paterson, 205, 208, 210, 211; Pictures from Breughel, 211; Poems (1909), 201; “The Poet of Flowers,” 206; “Rapid Transit,” 208; “The Red Wheel Barrow,” 205, 346; “Root, Branch and Flower” (working title for autobiography), 204; Selected Poems, 211; Spring and All, 205–206, 208, 343; “To a Poor Old

Woman,” 209–210; “To All Gentleness,” 204–205; “To Elsie,” 205; “The Uses of Poetry,” 202; “The Wanderer: A Rococo Study,” 202; “Yours, O Youth,” 203 Winchester, Simon, 432 Winters, Yvor, 151–152, 153, 258, 260, 261, 263, 265 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 410 Woodbridge, John, 16 Woolf, Virginia, 320, 410; works by, mentioned/quoted: Jacob’s Room, 320 Wordsworth, William, 33, 41, 104, 153, 169, 192, 198, 217, 227, 252, 312; works by, mentioned/quoted: “Daffodils,” 312; “Michael,” 153; “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” 153; Poems, in Two Volumes, 33; The Prelude, 192; “The Ruined Cottage,” 153 Work, James II, 141 Wright, James, 223, 428 Wright, Richard, 5, 175, 319; works by, mentioned/quoted: Black Boy, 5; Native Son, 5, 319; Uncle Tom’s Children, 5 Wright, Wilber (and Wright Brothers), 181, 264, 279 Yeats, William Butler, 116, 199, 216, 217, 223, 240, 277, 305, 377; works by, mentioned/quoted: “The Second Coming,” 116; The Wind Among the Reeds, 223 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 366 Yingling, Thomas E., 267, 268 Young, Dean, 431 Zagajewski, Adam, 435 Zinzendorf, Nicolaus, 39 Zolynas, Al, 431 Zukofsky, Louis, 209, 252, 349

464 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532

Ca mbr idg e C ompa nio n s   t o . . . au t h ors Edward Albee edited by Stephen J. Bottoms Margaret Atwood edited by Coral Ann Howells W. H. Auden edited by Stan Smith Jane Austen edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (second edition) Beckett edited by John Pilling Bede edited by Scott DeGregorio Aphra Behn edited by Derek Hughes and Janet Todd Walter Benjamin edited by David S. Ferris William Blake edited by Morris Eaves Jorge Luis Borges edited by Edwin Williamson Brecht edited by Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (second edition) The Brontës edited by Heather Glen Bunyan edited by Anne Dunan-Page Frances Burney edited by Peter Sabor Byron edited by Drummond Bone Albert Camus edited by Edward J. Hughes Willa Cather edited by Marilee Lindemann Cervantes edited by Anthony J. Cascardi Chaucer edited by Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (second edition) Chekhov edited by Vera Gottlieb and Paul Allain Kate Chopin edited by Janet Beer Caryl Churchill edited by Elaine Aston and Elin Diamond Cicero edited by Catherine Steel Coleridge edited by Lucy Newlyn Wilkie Collins edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor Joseph Conrad edited by J. H. Stape H. D. edited by Nephie J. Christodoulides and Polina Mackay Dante edited by Rachel Jacoff (second edition) Daniel Defoe edited by John Richetti Don DeLillo edited by John N. Duvall Charles Dickens edited by John O. Jordan Emily Dickinson edited by Wendy Martin John Donne edited by Achsah Guibbory Dostoevskii edited by W. J. Leatherbarrow Theodore Dreiser edited by Leonard Cassuto and Claire Virginia Eby John Dryden edited by Steven N. Zwicker W. E. B. Du Bois edited by Shamoon Zamir George Eliot edited by George Levine T. S. Eliot edited by A. David Moody Ralph Ellison edited by Ross Posnock Ralph Waldo Emerson edited by Joel Porte and Saundra Morris

William Faulkner edited by Philip M. Weinstein Henry Fielding edited by Claude Rawson F. Scott Fitzgerald edited by Ruth Prigozy Flaubert edited by Timothy Unwin E. M. Forster edited by David Bradshaw Benjamin Franklin edited by Carla Mulford Brian Friel edited by Anthony Roche Robert Frost edited by Robert Faggen Gabriel García Márquez edited by Philip Swanson Elizabeth Gaskell edited by Jill L. Matus Goethe edited by Lesley Sharpe Günter Grass edited by Stuart Taberner Thomas Hardy edited by Dale Kramer David Hare edited by Richard Boon Nathaniel Hawthorne edited by Richard Millington Seamus Heaney edited by Bernard O’Donoghue Ernest Hemingway edited by Scott Donaldson Homer edited by Robert Fowler Horace edited by Stephen Harrison Ted Hughes edited by Terry Gifford Ibsen edited by James McFarlane Henry James edited by Jonathan Freedman Samuel Johnson edited by Greg Clingham Ben Jonson edited by Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart James Joyce edited by Derek Attridge (second edition) Kafka edited by Julian Preece Keats edited by Susan J. Wolfson Rudyard Kipling edited by Howard J. Booth Lacan edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté D. H. Lawrence edited by Anne Fernihough Primo Levi edited by Robert Gordon Lucretius edited by Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie Machiavelli edited by John M. Najemy David Mamet edited by Christopher Bigsby Thomas Mann edited by Ritchie Robertson Christopher Marlowe edited by Patrick Cheney Andrew Marvell edited by Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker Herman Melville edited by Robert S. Levine Arthur Miller edited by Christopher Bigsby (second edition)

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.034

George Bernard Shaw edited by Christopher Innes Shelley edited by Timothy Morton Mary Shelley edited by Esther Schor Sam Shepard edited by Matthew C. Roudané Spenser edited by Andrew Hadfeld Laurence Sterne edited by Thomas Keymer Wallace Stevens edited by John N. Serio Tom Stoppard edited by Katherine E. Kelly Harriet Beecher Stowe edited by Cindy Weinstein August Strindberg edited by Michael Robinson Jonathan Swift edited by Christopher Fox J. M. Synge edited by P. J. Mathews Tacitus edited by A. J. Woodman Henry David Thoreau edited by Joel Myerson Tolstoy edited by Donna Tussing Orwin Anthony Trollope edited by Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles Mark Twain edited by Forrest G. Robinson John Updike edited by Stacey Olster Mario Vargas Llosa edited by Efrain Kristal and John King Virgil edited by Charles Martindale Voltaire edited by Nicholas Cronk Edith Wharton edited by Millicent Bell Walt Whitman edited by Ezra Greenspan Oscar Wilde edited by Peter Raby Tennessee Williams edited by Matthew C. Roudané August Wilson edited by Christopher Bigsby Mary Wollstonecraft edited by Claudia L. Johnson Virginia Woolf edited by Susan Sellers (second edition) Wordsworth edited by Stephen Gill W. B. Yeats edited by Marjorie Howes and John Kelly Zola edited by Brian Nelson

Milton edited by Dennis Danielson (second edition) Molière edited by David Bradby and Andrew Calder Toni Morrison edited by Justine Tally Nabokov edited by Julian W. Connolly Eugene O’Neill edited by Michael Manheim George Orwell edited by John Rodden Ovid edited by Philip Hardie Harold Pinter edited by Peter Raby (second edition) Sylvia Plath edited by Jo Gill Edgar Allan Poe edited by Kevin J. Hayes Alexander Pope edited by Pat Rogers Ezra Pound edited by Ira B. Nadel Proust edited by Richard Bales Pushkin edited by Andrew Kahn Rabelais edited by John O’Brien Rilke edited by Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain Philip Roth edited by Timothy Parrish Salman Rushdie edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah Shakespeare edited by Margareta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (second edition) Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists edited by Ton Hoenselaars Shakespeare on Film edited by Russell Jackson (second edition) Shakespeare on Stage edited by Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton Shakespeare and Popular Culture edited by Robert Shaughnessy Shakespearean Comedy edited by Alexander Leggatt Shakespearean Tragedy edited by Claire McEachern (second edition) Shakespeare’s History Plays edited by Michael Hattaway Shakespeare’s Last Plays edited by Catherine M. S. Alexander Shakespeare’s Poetry edited by Patrick Cheney

topics The Actress edited by Maggie B. Gale and John Stokes The African American Novel edited by Maryemma Graham The African American Slave Narrative edited by Audrey A. Fisch African American Theatre by Harvey Young Allegory edited by Rita Copeland and Peter Struck American Crime Fiction edited by Catherine Ross Nickerson

American Modernism edited by Walter Kalaidjian American Poetry since 1945 edited by Jennifer Ashton American Realism and Naturalism edited by Donald Pizer American Travel Writing edited by Alfred Bendixen and Judith Hamera American Women Playwrights edited by Brenda Murphy Ancient Rhetoric edited by Erik Gunderson

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.034

Arthurian Legend edited by Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter Australian Literature edited by Elizabeth Webby British Literature of the French Revolution edited by Pamela Clemit British Romantic Poetry edited by James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane British Romanticism edited by Stuart Curran (second edition) British Theatre, 1730–1830 edited by Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn Canadian Literature edited by Eva-Marie Kröller Children’s Literature edited by M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel The Classic Russian Novel edited by Malcolm V. Jones and Robin Feuer Miller Contemporary Irish Poetry edited by Matthew Campbell Creative Writing edited by David Morley and Philip Neilsen Crime Fiction edited by Martin Priestman Early Modern Women’s Writing edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers The Eighteenth-Century Novel edited by John Richetti Eighteenth-Century Poetry edited by John Sitter English Literature, 1500–1600 edited by Arthur F. Kinney English Literature, 1650–1740 edited by Steven N. Zwicker English Literature, 1740–1830 edited by Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee English Literature, 1830–1914 edited by Joanne Shattock English Novelists edited by Adrian Poole English Poetry, Donne to Marvell edited by Thomas N. Corns English Poets edited by Claude Rawson English Renaissance Drama, edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (second edition) English Renaissance Tragedy edited by Emma Smith and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. English Restoration Theatre edited by Deborah C. Payne Fisk The Epic edited by Catherine Bates European Modernism edited by Pericles Lewis European Novelists edited by Michael Bell Fairy Tales edited by Maria Tatar Fantasy Literature edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn Feminist Literary Theory edited by Ellen Rooney Fiction in the Romantic Period edited by Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener The Fin de Siècle edited by Gail Marshall The French Enlightenment edited by Daniel Brewer

The French Novel: from 1800 to the Present edited by Timothy Unwin Gay and Lesbian Writing edited by Hugh Stevens German Romanticism edited by Nicholas Saul Gothic Fiction edited by Jerrold E. Hogle The Greek and Roman Novel edited by Tim Whitmarsh Greek and Roman Theatre edited by Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton Greek Comedy edited by Martin Revermann Greek Lyric edited by Felix Budelmann Greek Mythology edited by Roger D. Woodard Greek Tragedy edited by P. E. Easterling The Harlem Renaissance edited by George Hutchinson The History of the Book edited by Leslie Howsam The Irish Novel edited by John Wilson Foster The Italian Novel edited by Peter Bondanella and Andrea Ciccarelli The Italian Renaissance edited by Michael Wyatt Jewish American Literature edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael P. Kramer The Latin American Novel edited by Efraín Kristal The Literature of the First World War edited by Vincent Sherry The Literature of London edited by Lawrence Manley The Literature of Los Angeles edited by Kevin R. McNamara The Literature of New York edited by Cyrus Patell and Bryan Waterman The Literature of Paris edited by Anna-Louise Milne The Literature of World War II edited by Marina MacKay Literature on Screen edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan Medieval English Culture edited by Andrew Galloway Medieval English Literature edited by Larry Scanlon Medieval English Mysticism edited by Samuel Fanous and Vincent Gillespie Medieval English Theatre edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher (second edition) Medieval French Literature edited by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay Medieval Romance edited by Roberta L. Krueger Medieval Women’s Writing edited by Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.034

Modern American Culture edited by Christopher Bigsby Modern British Women Playwrights edited by Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt Modern French Culture edited by Nicholas Hewitt Modern German Culture edited by Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der Will The Modern German Novel edited by Graham Bartram The Modern Gothic edited by Jerrold E. Hogle Modern Irish Culture edited by Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly Modern Italian Culture edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca J. West Modern Latin American Culture edited by John King Modern Russian Culture edited by Nicholas Rzhevsky Modern Spanish Culture edited by David T. Gies Modernism edited by Michael Levenson (second edition) The Modernist Novel edited by Morag Shiach Modernist Poetry edited by Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins Modernist Women Writers edited by Maren Tova Linett Narrative edited by David Herman Native American Literature edited by Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing edited by Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould Old English Literature edited by Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (second edition) Performance Studies edited by Tracy C. Davis Piers Plowman by Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway Popular Fiction edited by David Glover and Scott McCracken Postcolonial Literary Studies edited by Neil Lazarus

Postmodernism edited by Steven Connor The Pre-Raphaelites edited by Elizabeth Prettejohn Pride and Prejudice edited by Janet Todd Renaissance Humanism edited by Jill Kraye The Roman Historians edited by Andrew Feldherr Roman Satire edited by Kirk Freudenburg Science Fiction edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn Scottish Literature edited by Gerald Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney Sensation Fiction edited by Andrew Mangham The Sonnet edited by A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth The Spanish Novel: from 1600 to the Present edited by Harriet Turner and Adelaida López de Martínez Textual Scholarship edited by Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders Theatre History by David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski Travel Writing edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs Twentieth-Century British and Irish Women’s Poetry edited by Jane Dowson The Twentieth-Century English Novel edited by Robert L. Caserio Twentieth-Century English Poetry edited by Neil Corcoran Twentieth-Century Irish Drama edited by Shaun Richards Twentieth-Century Russian Literature edited by Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko Utopian Literature edited by Gregory Claeys Victorian and Edwardian Theatre edited by Kerry Powell The Victorian Novel edited by Deirdre David (second edition) Victorian Poetry edited by Joseph Bristow War Writing edited by Kate McLoughlin Writing of the English Revolution edited by N. H. Keeble

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781316403532.034