Reading the Middle Generation Anew: Culture, Community, and Form in Twentieth-Century American Poetry

reading the middle generation anew culture, community, and form in twentieth-century american poetry edited by Eric Ha...

Author: Eric Haralson

36 downloads 644 Views 1MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

DOWNLOAD .DOCX DOWNLOAD .PPTX

reading the middle generation anew

culture, community, and form in twentieth-century american poetry

edited by Eric Haralson

Reading the Middle Generation Anew

reading

Culture, Community,

the middle

and Form in

generation

Twentieth-Century

anew

American Poetry

Edited by Eric Haralson University of Iowa Press, Iowa City

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2006 by the University of Iowa Press http://www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Design by April Leidig-Higgins No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reading the middle generation anew: culture, community, and form in twentieth-century American poetry / edited by Eric Haralson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.  0-87745-956-8 (cloth) 1. American poetry — 20th century — History and criticism. 2. World War, 1939 – 1945 — United States — Literature and the war. 3. Literature and society — United States — History — 20th century. 4. War poetry, American — History and criticism. 5. Literary form — History — 20th century. 6. Community in literature. 7. Culture in literature. I. Haralson, Eric L. 310.6843 2006 2005052950 811'.5209 — dc22 06 07 08 09 10  5 4 3 2 1

For John Hollander — who got this whole business started — most warmly and appreciatively

Contents Eric Haralson Introduction 1

1 Elisa New Confession, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation in the Career of Robert Lowell 13

2 Rei Terada Writing as a Child: Lowell’s Poetic Penmanship 33

3 Susan Rosenbaum Elizabeth Bishop’s Theater of War 53

4 Benjamin Friedlander The Best Years of Our Lives: Randall Jarrell’s War Poetry 83

5 Diederik Oostdijk Randall Jarrell and the Age of Consumer Culture 113

6 W. Scott Howard Resistance, Sacriﬁce, and Historicity in the Elegies of Robert Hayden 133

7 Jim Keller Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times 153

8 Trenton Hickman Theodore Roethke and the Poetics of Place 183

viii | Contents

9 Eleanor Berry Paradoxes of Form in the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker 203

10 Stephen Burt My Name Is Henri: Contemporary Poets Discover John Berryman 233 Contributors 253 Acknowledgments 255 Index 257

It is the human habit to think in centuries and centuries are more or less a hundred years. — Gertrude Stein, Narration (1935) middle adj. (ME middel, from OE; akin to Latin medius),  : equally distant from the extremes : ;  : being at neither extreme :  — Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed.

Introduction Eric Haralson In this collection of ten original essays by a team of stellar contributors, the middle generation of American poets is represented by what might be called the usual suspects — Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman — but also by several contemporaries juxtaposed for purposes of dialogue and contrast: Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hayden, and Lorine Niedecker. This cadre of poets meets the most obvious deﬁnition of “middle,” adumbrated in Stein’s quizzical remark above, since their seasons of prime productivity fell between the 1940s and the 1970s. Yet this collection makes the forceful case that these poets were central in more than just chronological terms. Both formally and politically, their poetry constitutes the center of twentieth-century American poetry — the bull’s-eye, pulsating heart, eye of the storm (choose your metaphor). As the contributors well demonstrate, this middle generation held its own on an emergent literary scene in ways that belie another connotation of its label — namely, that of second ﬁddle, turning in a “middling” performance after the bravura and (admittedly) the bombast of high modernism. This is not to say that these poets did not feel the pressure of the Pound-Eliot legacy, or that Lowell and Berryman, for all their admiration, weren’t also warding oﬀ a precursor in, say, “Robert Frost at Midnight” or “Dream Songs” 35 – 38, “(Frost being still around).” As Edward Hirsch observes, it is a measure of the middle generation’s success in making it new,

2 |     

yet again, that we sometimes forget “how seriously they struggled with feelings of belatedness,” with the worry that the songs had all been sung; it was their distinct inspiration, as Hirsch says, to write against the ethos of “heroic impersonality” fostered by Eliot and Pound, and “to bring a messy humanity, a harsh luminosity, a well of tenderness, back into poetry.”1 By the same token, these authors lived amid the human mess, paid dearly for their illuminations, and came by their tender sympathies honestly, feeling what Niedecker called “life’s raw push” and actively seeking out that push more keenly than most of their peers.2 At least some of the ravages scarring the middle generation — alcoholism, mental health crises, pervasive loneliness and alienation, romantic extravagances, suicide — resulted from the eﬀort of proving themselves worthy: “No layoﬀ” from that hard “trade,” to quote Niedecker again.3 These poets became central to their generation by going to extremes in experience and expression, often at great personal cost. Lowell’s note of wry introspection, riﬃng on the romantics — “Ought I to regret my seedtime?” — speaks for the group as a whole, as does, to varying degrees, Berryman’s plaint in Dream Song 153: “I’m cross with god who has wrecked this generation,” who harvested “a ﬁrst rate haul” of poets even as “He left alive / fools I could number like a kitchen knife.”4 Throughout their collective body of poetry, whether dealing with the most private or the most global ordeals, a “sense of having come through,” in Steven Gould Axelrod’s phrase, balances uneasily with “a counter-dynamic” of damage and trauma, “a sense of having lost what can never be found again.” From another angle, what Axelrod calls Lowell’s “ultimate triumph in turning . . . psychic deﬁcits into a struggle with language that would alter the course of twentieth-century poetry” also applies across the board, encompassing the life and work of every poet treated in this book.5 If, conceptually, this middle generation mediates the so-called American century and its complex articulations in verse, the conﬁguration of poets discussed here also complicates standard historical and aesthetic categorizations. Such attempts at sorting and packaging (as in modernist versus “middle” versus postmodern) often neglect the multiple facets of the given poet’s cultural situation, or restrict interpretations of well-known poets while slighting the impact of those who are less well known. The essays in this volume track unforeseen connections across semantic boundaries, looking back to the formative impress of modernist writing on these poets, to be sure, but also looking forward to the profound inﬂuence they, in turn, have exercised on later authors and on American cultural life generally. Using an array of methodological approaches — ranging from the

Introduction | 3

biographical-historical to the textual-deconstructionist (compare the two Lowell chapters, in this respect) to more traditionally formalist accounts (e.g., the Niedecker and Roethke chapters) — all of the essays convey an appreciation for the broader social dialectics informing American poetry of the period. They examine the interaction between the writers and their writings, on one hand, and such shifting cultural formations as religious discourse (Lowell), consumerism (Jarrell), militarism and war (Bishop, and again Jarrell), the ideology of “nature’s nation” (Roethke, and to a lesser extent Niedecker), and American race relations and ethnic histories (Hayden and Schwartz, but also Berryman and his successors). As will become evident, the essays in this collection are steeped in an ongoing critical conversation about the middle generation, whether in close argumentation conducted in the text or in more implicit colloquy. Benjamin Friedlander’s essay extends insights about Jarrell’s gendered personae from James Longenbach’s Modern Poetry after Modernism (1997).6 Diederik Oostdijk in a sense responds to responses to his own earlier work from the likes of Richard Flynn and Nelson Hathcock, as well as to fellow contributor Stephen Burt’s recent Randall Jarrell and His Age (2003).7 Susan Rosenbaum furthers Meg Schoerke’s revaluation of Bishop by resituating her war poems athwart the “ironic-versus-sentimental” divide that usually governs interpretations of twentieth-century poetry.8 And Rei Terada’s essay, composed before the appearance of Suzanne Ferguson’s excellent Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co. (2003), manifestly speaks to Axelrod’s claim in that collection for Lowell’s “postmodernity.”9 As for organization of content, pride of place still goes to Lowell, whose continuing stature is attested by the recent publication of his monumental Collected Poems — an event heralded by such diverse critics as William Pritchard, Anthony Lane, and Charles McGrath.10 In chapter 1, Elisa New oﬀers a sweeping retrospective on Lowell’s evolution from the persona of “vatic impersonality” heard in Lord Weary’s Castle to that of “implicated confessor” in Life Studies, and ﬁnally to the poet and man who “thrives in provisional, rather than providential, time” in For the Union Dead and Day by Day. New rejuvenates the psycho-biographic account of Lowell’s positioning in the Winslow family line (including his mother, maternal grandfather, and so on, back to the “Mayﬂower / screwballs”)11 by infusing that account with an ambitious religio-cultural reading, charting this pilgrim’s progress away from the “aﬀective parsimony” of American utilitarianism and toward “an embrace of need and an openness to ministration.” Lowell upsets ancestral deﬁnitions of success and failure, discovering another New

4 |     

England Way in which the Winslow rigor has no place, and spiritual bearings are “redeemed” of both sectarian and patriarchal premises. Key to appreciating this self-revising Lowell, New argues, are his poems on Jonathan Edwards, the Puritan divine turned “Christian-poet without portfolio.” Lowell himself turns from a portrait of severity in “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” to a more sympathetic understanding of Edwards’s “genius of feeling” in “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts.” For New, this un-churched, more aesthetically attuned Edwards served as Lowell’s exemplary guide, helping him break out of “the iron casket of the jeremiad” and become the tempered, quotidian visionary of the late poetry. In chapter 2, Rei Terada approaches the same poet from a diﬀerent angle, enriching the overall proﬁle. Attending to Lowell’s curious tendency to distinguish among the “physical varieties of writing, from script to printing to typeface,” Terada discusses how these distinctions factor into his lifelong quest for a poetics of cogent, verisimilar voicing of the self. Whereas for Lowell the visual layout of print letters conjures up “epitaphic deadness” and degradation, often coded as male and paternal, “the act of pursuing and recording” the world, associated with cursive writing, is coded female and maternal (albeit the somewhat martial variant of motherhood embodied in Charlotte Lowell). This presumptive “feminization of empirical composition” sets Lowell’s case in opposition to psychoanalytic accounts of coming-to-language; by the same token, it functions as both the ideal governing self-representation in Life Studies and the psychic impediment to realizing that ideal. In a fascinating close reading of “Father’s Bedroom,” Terada ﬁnds the poet teasing out the connections between and among “handwriting, authenticity, and gender dynamics,” showing how even a book’s ﬂyleaf and dedication can become a theater of identity and absence, with consequences for composition. According to Terada, the dual aspirations of Lowell’s project, “to embody the self and to ‘say what happened,’ cannot conceptually merge”; instead, as in the family melodrama whence these motives originate, Lowell’s narrative of narrative amounts to “a tragicomic story of continuance and incompatibility” in which a kind of permanent immaturity (“writing as a child”) becomes the poet’s last resort. As Lowell’s life experience and poetic career attest, war looms over the middle generation of poets: World War II, the Korean War, the cold war, and the Vietnam War. The next two chapters extend treatments by Axelrod and others of the war poetry of Lowell’s boon companions, Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Bishop.12 Susan Rosenbaum begins chapter 3, “Elizabeth Bishop’s Theater of War,” by observing that recent criticism, in correct-

Introduction | 5

ing an older view of a disengaged poet, foregrounds Bishop’s critique of militarism but misses her associated point about “the limits of modern war poetry, including her own.” In a sustained reading of the Vietnam War – era “12 O’Clock News” as “an agonized war poem” in running dialogue with Denise Levertov’s political poetry, Rosenbaum asserts that Bishop’s poem “turns its critical blade inward as well as outward, confronting its own investments in the representation of and the market for suﬀering.” In the process, this poetry conditions the received wisdom that more or less clean lines can be drawn between the ironic and sentimental modes of modernism. Bishop reminds us instead that irony “constitutes a position within [the] historical discourse of poetic aﬀect” and can “work toward varied ends in sentimental culture,” including a poet’s self-implication in large-scale spectacles of suﬀering. In “12 O’Clock News,” writes Rosenbaum, Bishop simultaneously “presents and destabilizes, owns and disowns,” the pretension to a superior perspective on the random, destructive events of the world by “bring[ing] the war home.” Anticipating the insights of Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Bishop calls attention to the “privileges and prejudices of the sympathetic gaze,” further suggesting that “sympathy and apathy are related aﬀective responses generated by sentimental culture.” In the last analysis, Bishop’s war poetry rules out the possibility of innocent observation. In chapter 4, Benjamin Friedlander demonstrates how Jarrell’s poetry of World War II — whether exploring the persona of a homesick soldier in the barracks, dealing with the “crisis of subjectivity” that inheres in the new technological battleﬁeld, or reﬂecting on postwar trauma and disability — evokes the “dislocation,” powerlessness, and compromised understanding that typify all wars. In Jarrell’s handling, though war permeates the lives of soldiers, families, and communities, its “totality” of meanings eludes comprehension. Memory becomes a salvage operation, reassembling prior selves into a serviceable ﬁction of selfhood and resisting the tendency to forget or to repress as “civilization” ostensibly marches onward. In Jarrell’s verse, Friedlander suggests, “we convert loss into experience by accepting its dislocations as a structural element in the story of our lives.” This poetry performs an “act of recovery” meant to bring within “manageable bounds” what is by nature chaotic and overwhelming. The war poems oﬀer an interesting twist on the confessional impulse, for they rely less on personal experience and more on documentary study — war correspondent Ernie Pyle, Anna Freud’s War and Children, and Jarrell’s own research on air war. Friedlander strikingly compares the war poems with William Wyler’s

6 |     

famous postwar ﬁlm The Best Years of Our Lives. Against contemporary attacks on Jarrell’s appeals to readerly feeling, Friedlander sees the war poetry as protofeminist in its refutation of the modernist penchant for rarefying sentiment. Jarrell’s poetry and Wyler’s ﬁlm concur that the huge cultural task of mopping up the psychological mess of war — absorbing chaotic experience into a sustainable understanding of self and history — is a “homefront activity,” a kind of “women’s work” men ﬁnd they must perform to survive. Turning to another quarter of social critique, Diederik Oostdijk’s essay (chapter 5) delves into poet-critic Jarrell’s ambivalence, as a nominally hightoned intellectual, toward American popular and consumer culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Jarrell’s staunchest statements (“A Sad Heart at the Supermarket,” “The Taste of the Age”) inveigh against the corrosiveness of lowbrow magazines and media (including celebrity icons like Elvis Presley) and fret about the declining audience for serious art and literature. At the same time, Jarrell participated in the commercializing practices and consumerist ethos he criticized: he authored pieces for Mademoiselle and Vogue, and his interview with the Saturday Evening Post (which he elsewhere ridiculed) became the basis for poems that muse earnestly on the interplay of the mundane and the poetic (an elegy for a famous football player, for instance, that also explores the metaphoric thrust of insurance slogans). As Oostdijk chronicles, Jarrell made use of pop-culture motifs, brand names, and advertising language for purposes of social analysis in “Sears Roebuck” (the retail-catalog phenomenon), “The Lost World” (the movie industry), and “Next Day” (the modern “supermarket”). Oostdijk neatly disentangles and elucidates Jarrell’s love-hate relationship with American popular culture at midcentury. Chapter 6 traverses the color line — the “problem of the Twentieth Century,” in W.E.B. Du Bois’s prophetic phrase — as W. Scott Howard reclaims the vibrant political conscience of Robert Hayden’s elegies. In ﬁne-tuned readings of half a dozen key poems, Howard shows how Hayden “invests concrete personages” from history with the “generative powers of metaphor,” checking the transcendental drift of conventional mourning practices and converting “grief into an aesthetic form of oppositional cultural work.” Confronted with an American social environment and racial past of seemingly intractable violence, Hayden achieves a “vital balance between acknowledging a desire for transcendence” and subordinating that desire to “ongoing engagement with the wayward course of human action” — a philosophical stance thematized in “The Peacock Room.” For Hayden, “loss

Introduction | 7

becomes a catalyst for persistent ethical activism” and the socially conscious witnessing of American turmoil, as Howard demonstrates through readings of such powerful poems as the “Elegies for Paradise Valley,” “Night, Death, Mississippi,” and especially “John Brown,” which Hayden composed in response to Jacob Lawrence’s gouache sequence entitled John Brown (1941). As if annealing the spiritual authority of the sorrow songs to a hard-earned, hard-edged modernity, Hayden’s elegies play the “desire for spiritual release” against a “compassionate return to the world of interminable conﬂict.” Yet another charged intersection among models of historicity, modes of self-conscious diﬀerence (here, ethnicity), and meditations on change can be found in the brilliant, disturbing career of Delmore Schwartz, according to Jim Keller’s chapter 7. Starting with scholarship’s ﬁxation on the threeday lag between Schwartz’s death (in a New York hotel room in 1966) and the identiﬁcation of his body, Keller contemplates some associated critical anxieties: What concept of time underlies the fetishizing of this delay? How is literary history haunted by a related sense of deferral, a sense that Schwartz’s reputation is imminently due to be revived on terms yet to be deﬁned? Keller suggests that Schwartz’s own poetry, in trying to reconcile a complex present with his family’s past — that of eastern European Jewish immigrants — joins in the project of “identifying the body” of the man with the body of his work; yet that poetry also queries the construction of mythical chronologies that treat a poet’s fate or reception as predestined. Keller’s Delmore oﬀers a critique of modernist time-consciousness — the idea of innovation subsuming tradition, of the future as a constant, meaning-making horizon — while the poet’s urban-immigrant background inspires a type of historicity in which the subject perpetually grapples with unintegrated elements of the past. Thus Schwartz ﬁgures as a writer productively concerned with, yet also beset by, the limits of “the modern.” The next two chapters have a more pastoral bent, but the human ﬁgure in the foreground of the poetry is still recognizably modern and en route to postmodern — which is to say, a troubled, searching self. In chapter 8, Trenton Hickman maintains that Theodore Roethke’s artistic trajectory carried him away from the quasi-confessional mode of the “greenhouse” poems to the more cosmopolitan vision of W. H. Auden and the more place-based, nature-oriented poetics of Bishop. Roethke aligned himself with these two poets in the growing belief that the “principal clues to the age” (in his own phrase) were to be found not in the interior spaces plumbed by a Sylvia Plath, for instance, but rather in the vast territory of history as revealed in

8 |     

landscape. Hickman argues that Roethke’s version of history is not composed of human-driven events — wars, social unrest, personal ordeal — but rather holds protagonists “accountable to the natural places from which they and their nominally privileged stories, denominated as ‘histories,’ emerge.” Though Roethke’s seemingly apolitical stance has been dismissed by critics past and present, Hickman suggests that his poetry is “not an escape from history and its contexts but rather a reorientation of what constitutes history and its contexts.” In The Far Field, Roethke’s America is not the political construct of America, nor a catalogue or critique of the nation’s deeds and misdeeds, but rather the literal terrain of America. In this sense Roethke sets a precedent for later, “environmental” poets such as Gary Snyder. Roethke rejects the confessional tendency to ﬁnd a “universal / Angst” (of the kind that both Lowell and Berryman saw embodied in Schwartz, for instance) inscribed in every instance of individual (lowercase) angst.13 Instead, says Hickman, Roethke’s understanding comes from immersing the ego in the larger landscape to which it belongs. Eleanor Berry’s chapter 9 is the most technically attuned, focusing on the once undervalued Lorine Niedecker, whose Collected Works (2002) drew rave reviews from the Times Literary Supplement and the Nation, and garnered accolades from members of the guild such as Adrienne Rich (“acrid, vitally alive”), Robert Hass (“quiet, original, and exact”), and Robert Creeley (“Niedecker deﬁned [her] time . . . with such genius”).14 Berry demonstrates how Niedecker’s expertly condensed prosody and care for sound and shape achieve far-reaching emotional and intellectual eﬀects. Niedecker’s poems are at once “folky-literary, oral-silent, aural-visual, song-speech, condensed-expansive, metrical-free verse,” as she steers topically between her rural, working-class origins and the cultural reﬁnement that inevitably set her at odds with “home.” Blending quotidian speech (“Get a load / of April’s / fabulous / frog rattle”) with the prose of classical antiquity, Asian lyric forms (haiku, tanka) with Western rhyme, and Dickinson with Williams with Zukofsky, Niedecker forged a highly personal style, oﬀering what Berry calls “post-imagist lyrical ballads.” Berry details how Niedecker’s formal devices — visual presentation, syllabic practice, compressed and strong-stressed lines, compact syntax — re-present natural speech, capture the “sensuous properties and thingliness” of words describing seasonal rhythms, and render such varied experiences as the “unsettling encroachment” of a spring ﬂood, a forerunner-poet’s “passion for subtle pattern” in both botany and verse, a mother’s “withdrawal into deafness,” and a child’s

Introduction | 9

immersion in the sense experience of “water and wind-blown foliage.” In poems like “Wintergreen Ridge,” Berry shows, Niedecker’s aesthetic of condensation actually promotes a mood of expansion, as “close scrutiny reveals cosmic process.” In “Paean to Place,” as well, Niedecker’s insistent impulse to condense serves “to propagate meaning to inﬁnity in readers’ minds.” Yet Niedecker, Jarrell, Lowell, Bishop, “& Co.” (to borrow Suzanne Ferguson’s styling) are not the only middle-generation poets currently enjoying the limelight. Stephen Burt’s concluding chapter 10 shows that an appreciable John Berryman revival is under way among today’s American poets. According to Burt’s compelling survey of the contemporary scene, one now encounters conscious reprises of Berryman’s trademark loose sequences, featuring fractured personae and extremes of diction or ﬁguration; tonally, one ﬁnds rehearsals of his erudite dark comedy, annexing American racial discourse; while thematically, one notices a return to Berryman’s preoccupation with mourning and guilt — this last component grounding Burt’s assertion of unexpected aﬃnities between Berryman and Frank Bidart. Burt’s principal exemplars of stylistic leanings-on or temperamental gleanings-from Berryman are Mark Levine (Debt, 1992) and Mary Jo Bang (Louise in Love, 2001), although he cites other poets who renovate Berryman’s misgivings about the lyric ﬁrst person, and who have found in the Dream Songs a “source for always-plural voices,” for the “unstable selves” that deﬁne the postmodern condition. Levine, says Burt, extends the Berrymanesque “idea of poetry as self-indictment” — as a sardonic view of the pitfalls of middle-aged manhood — and also mobilizes a persona (Henry’s “voraciously self-destructive” descendant Henri) who is at once greedy for the reader’s attention (toying with suicide as one type of bait), disruptive of the reader’s conﬁdence that a genuine, nontheatrical self is on display, and intent on persuading the reader that the character’s propensities of “lust, shame, tenderness, and ambition” add up to a self that is “repulsive, abject, deserving moral or aesthetic dismissal.” Berryman’s multivocal performativity has become a standard for suggesting the seriocomic arraignment or dispersal of the self — in Burt’s phrase, “a lyric form as unstable, guilty, and anxious as American life.” Going a step farther, Bang’s “disillusioned interrogation of lovers’ behavior, her appalled deconstructions of men in pursuit, . . . raise a feminist answer to the decidedly masculinist Berryman.” Burt ends by revealing a kinship between the world evoked in the Dream Songs and that of Bidart’s widely prized dramatic monologues — a world

10 |     

populated by riven psyches and bewildering passions, oﬀered in “clashing registers of diction” and suﬀused with an air of existential guilt. On the showing of Bidart — not coincidentally a coeditor of Lowell’s Collected Poems — and that of the current crop of American poets (including half the contributors to this volume), the middle generation continues to make itself felt as a shaping force in American poetry. These midcentury poets, socially astute and critical minded, grandly or quietly suﬀering, tincturing every high with an admixture of irony and pathos, spoke well enough, and movingly, for themselves — and now, with the aid of ten strong readers, they speak once again. To adapt another statement from Gertrude Stein, we all “adore” the middle of any story as much as we do beginnings and endings. 15 And so without further ado, here is the prodigious middle of last century’s story in American poetry, retold with verve and penetration.

Notes 1. Edward Hirsch, “ ‘One Life, One Writing!’: The Middle Generation,” American Poetry Review 29, no. 5 (September – October 2000): 12. 2. Lorine Niedecker, “The Graves,” in Collected Works (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 175. 3. Lorine Niedecker, “Poet’s Work,” in Collected Works, 194. 4. Robert Lowell, “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” in “Life Studies” and “For the Union Dead” (New York: Noonday Press / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 85. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 172. 5. Steven Gould Axelrod, “The Middle Generation and WWII: Jarrell, Shapiro, Brooks, Bishop, Lowell,” in War, Literature and the Arts 11 (Spring – Summer 1999): 34, 29. 6. James Longenbach, Modern Poetry after Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 7. Richard Flynn, “Jarrell’s Wicked Fairy: Cultural Criticism, Childhood, and the 1950s,” and Nelson Hathcock, “ ‘Standardizing Catastrophe’: Randall Jarrell and the Bomb,” in Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co.: Middle-Generation Poets in Context, ed. Suzanne Ferguson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 93 – 125; Stephen Burt, Randall Jarrell and His Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); David Bergman, “Disturbing Randall Jarrell,” American Literary History 16 (Summer 2004): 350 – 62. 8. Meg Schoerke, “ ‘The Divided Heart’: Reticence and Emotional Expression in Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetry,” in Ferguson, Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co., 199 – 216. 9. Steven Gould Axelrod, “Lowell’s Postmodernity: Life Studies and the Shattered Image of Home,” in Ferguson, Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co., 251 – 68.

Introduction | 11 10. Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). 11. Robert Lowell, “Waking in the Blue,” in “Life Studies” and “For the Union Dead,” 82. 12. For Jarrell, “WWII functions as a metonym for the impersonal and destructive elements of modernity itself”; in Bishop’s case, the poem “Roosters” and its corrective counterpart “The Fish” evince “two verbal realms,” poetic description and the discourse of war, that serve “as tropes for each other” (Axelrod, “The Middle Generation and WWII,” 4, 21). 13. Robert Lowell, “To Delmore Schwartz,” in “Life Studies” and “For the Union Dead”, 53. Berryman, The Dream Songs, 165 – 77. 14. Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002). Reviews cited at: http://www.ucpress.edu/books/ pages/9019.html. 15. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage, 1990), 203.

Calvinism is a too-conceived abstract-expressionist Church of Rome.— Robert Lowell, Collected Prose

1

Confession, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation in the Career of Robert Lowell Elisa New

At the end of his career, in the poem “Phillips House Revisited,” Robert Lowell reﬂects on the ﬁgure of his dead grandfather, the Yankee entrepreneur he had remembered in the early poem “In Memory of Arthur Winslow.” Now, checked into Phillips House with a chest complaint, his room in the same elite wing inhabited forty years before by the dying Arthur Winslow, Lowell meditates on the martial eﬃciency of his closest Protestant forebears, the Winslows. Represented in this poem, as throughout Lowell’s work, by the team of mother Charlotte, still the “femme militaire” (Day by Day, 78), and her redoubtable father, Arthur, the Winslows can be relied on always to get the last word, even on the matter of their own extinction: But these forty years grandfather would insist have turned the world on its head — their point was to extinguish him like a stranded crab. He needed more to live than I, his foot could catch hold anywhere and dynamite his way to the gold again —

14 |   

for the world is generous to the opportune, its constantly self-renewing teams of favorites. (Day by Day, 87 – 88) A few poems earlier, in a lyric addressed “To Mother,” the poet had used his own arrival at middle age to conjure what sympathy he could for his mother’s complacent domination of “dour, luxurious Boston.” Lowell probes his mother’s ability to make the elegance of her parlor itself a reproach; or, more exactly, to furnish the stiﬀ-backed milieu that Boston deems elegant. In “Phillips House Revisited” Lowell discovers what undergirds this perverse aesthetic of discomﬁture: a classic Protestant knack for turning disadvantage to advantage. Embracing discomfort as badge of honor and birthright, Lowell’s family solicits and bestows the “gracious aﬄiction” Sacvan Bercovitch has called the mark of the American “self.”1 No surprise, then, that Robert Lowell’s recollection of his mother’s rebuke — “Why do we keep expecting life to be easy, / when we know it never can be?” (Day by Day, 79) — resonates in his memory of Arthur Winslow, as Arthur Winslow’s ferocity tints all his representations of her. Arthur Winslow, like his daughter, does not need good fortune to feel his chosenness. Quite the contrary, Winslow assumes that the world’s generosity to “the opportune” ﬂows chieﬂy to those who “improve the time” without expecting improvement to bring pleasure — or progress to mean change. The elect are those opportunely situated in the same straits their forebears endured: down the generations, God beaches these elect on the same lonely strand their forefathers found. Arthur Winslow’s pilgrim’s progress is thus fulﬁllment of a destiny not despoiled by vulgar luck. God’s “self-renewing teams of favorites” become so precisely by never courting His favor. Charlotte’s joyless exploitativeness, like Arthur’s grim instrumentalism, makes her a charter member of this team. Her courting of adversity is not a personal or even a family trait; rather, it is a broad cultural pattern. And this is why, of course, Lowell’s indictment of his family’s vices has never been mistaken for simple indiscretion, but rather always been taken as a profound, or at least thorough, reevaluation of the American soul. Indeed, Lowell’s deployment of confession and of the personal to myth-making ends is what best sustains his reputation. Lowell survives chieﬂy as the poet whose auto-da-fé of representative Americanness unwrites the exemplary Protestant self. As the title of Philip Cooper’s synthetic study tellingly suggests, Lowell’s claim to posterity’s notice is as “autobiographical myth.” Insofar, then, as critics of Lowell have regarded his self-scourgings as

Confession, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation in Lowell | 15

addressed to the self as construct, and thus as much to the “American individual” as to his own tortured person, they have not much heeded the precise aﬀective deﬁcit Lowell observes to aﬄict his New England culture. Namely, they have not much noticed that what Lowell ﬁnds wanting in Protestantism is its very repudiation of want and, in his immediates, a Yankee disaﬀection as corrosive as Yankee instrumentalism. In the ﬁnal analysis, Lowell indicts Charlotte and Arthur for making conveniences of those whom they do not in any personal way want, but more, for wreaking a kind of vengeance on the idea of want itself. Kin to New England’s most corrupt native son, the self-suﬃcing Gilbert Osmond of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Arthur and Charlotte see need itself as lack of mettle. Reacting, then, to this heritage of aﬀective parsimony, Lowell will develop beyond his early vaticism to shape a poetics and a career more hospitable to human need. Speciﬁcally, he cultivates a model of selfhood not mythic but quotidian, not representative but historical, and, most importantly of all, not suﬃced by aﬄiction but beseeching succor from day to day. If for Charlotte and Arthur there is nothing so base as Lowell’s own “fear of not being wanted” (“Unwanted,” Day by Day, 124), the poet’s rejection of their legacy necessitates an embrace of need and an openness to ministration that profoundly marks his subsequent work. As he crafts and reﬁnes a poetics of exacting and quotidian mediacy, Lowell consecrates himself to possibilities of lesser immediacy, and greater satisfaction, than Protestants countenance. As the heir to Protestant immediacy becomes the poet of mediacy, the artist ﬁnds in the “blessèd structures, plot and rhyme” forms capable of appeasing soul and talent both (Day by Day, 127). This is to say that Lowell’s lines above shed light on a less Reformed, more catholic — and in some ways more Catholic — Lowell than we are used to seeing, which is also to say a less ambivalent poet. Albert Gelpi has asserted that “there is no way of telling how Lowell’s poetry would have developed had he remained a Catholic; or whether the . . . style of Life Studies, which we now associate with his lapse of faith, would have occurred anyway and been accommodated into the expression of a developing religious sensibility.”2 I want to suggest, on the contrary, that Lowell’s poetic development is cognate with the development of this genuinely “religious sensibility,” a sensibility that, while no longer expressing itself in any kind of orthodox observance, ﬁnds full and complex expression in the poems themselves. As I want to show, by the time of Day by Day (1977) Lowell will have separated himself from the exhausted, Weberian Protestantism of Arthur and Charlotte Winslow by casting oﬀ from the suﬃciencies of

16 |   

Protestant selfhood and the eternalities of Protestant time. He will have learned rather to make his poems hold the spiritual charge of a relation to time more tenuous and “day to day,” a relation to the material world more sacramental than eﬃcient, and most crucially a relation to relation itself more open. While classic Protestantism is deﬁned by its liberation of the self from any agency but that installed in the self by God Himself, Lowell will avail his later work of forms external to the self. Openly supplicant, candidly in quest of confessors, Lowell’s poetic persona — whether he addresses the Virgin Mary or his last wife, Caroline; whether his subject is Easter or his own old lapsing into mental illness — is that of a man soliciting intercession, charity, and understanding, and of a poet making his poetry the vestibule of such plaints. Lowell’s voice takes on the plangency of one who knows the absolution he seeks cannot come from within. As a young convert to Catholicism, Lowell had spent hours in the confessional; as a lapsed Catholic, he makes his poetry hold the imprint of that experience as he seeks structures of regularization, avenues of displacement, custodians of want. What come to be Lowell’s most characteristic poetic gestures — the solicitation of a hearing ear, the discovery of a conveyancing image or voice — are transactions between the solitary imagination and the interlocutor or substance that holds this absolution. The poet whom Robert Lowell becomes and the brief, revelatory event his mature poems strive to record are both born in a counter-Reformational rediscovery of confession. To synthesize, the “confessional” school that Lowell earns credit for inventing may trace a greater share of its origins than we have supposed to the confessional: a place where articulation given into the hands of another secures absolution. The poems of Lowell’s maturity read, one after another, like missives to a mediating power from the mouth of one who knows he cannot cure himself, who knows, as Lowell famously puts it in “Skunk Hour,” that “I myself am hell.” Lowell’s work demonstrates how the Protestant liberation of self to its own recognizance, soul to its own rigor, is an enterprise doomed to fail, since the self is not cleansing but polluting. As the poet of “Unwanted” knows when he compares himself to a “sailor dying of thirst on the Atlantic” (Day by Day, 121), the native element of the Protestant hypos is inimical to genuine self-knowledge. Protestant selfcleansing is easily degraded into sanctimonious narcissism or the notebook ramblings of the conﬁrmed “case.” Charlotte Winslow “go[es] on cleaning house / for eternity” (Day by Day, 124) and making it unlivable; the poet’s own self-examination risks the same sterility and stasis:

Confession, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation in Lowell | 17

Alas, I can only tell my own story — talking to myself, or reading, or writing, or fearlessly holding back nothing from a friend, who believes me for a moment to keep up conversation. (Day by Day, 121) To make of determined work more than another kind of inversion; to produce art whose power to heal extends beyond quelling the symptoms of one suﬀerer; to shape a space of interlocution not narrowed by monomania or compromised by patronage — these are the goals of Lowell’s mature creative life and the achievements of his “confessionalism” at its best.

  just how thoroughly Lowell’s voice is altered, tempered, over time by the mediating inﬂuence of the confessional mode requires us to go back to Land of Unlikeness (1944) and to listen in on an earlier Lowell: namely, on the Catholic apologist girded, paradoxically, in full Protestant armor. Lowell’s elegy for Arthur Winslow, the most memorable poem in that volume, sets Protestant cupidities in stark distinction to Catholic mercies, but does so in the manner of the classic Protestant jeremiad. Setting oﬀ from the convert’s smug “This Easter,” Lowell would make his elegy express all his disappointment at the failure of Winslow and his forefathers to know failure for failure, aﬄiction for aﬄiction. Eventually, Lowell’s exquisitely turned ironies in this poem backﬁre. Irony turns back on the ironist himself, who deploys the genre of gracious aﬄiction as instrument in a critique of the genre of gracious aﬄiction, and Lowell seems never so thoroughly the Puritan as when inveighing as anti-Puritan. The contradictions of Lowell’s own position aside, however, the poem has great power. Winslow is a sharply etched depiction of self-aggrandizing self-eﬀacement. His career telescopes a family knack for turning any setback into an advantage. Though eventually consumed by the “crab,” cancer, Winslow is a man whose very crablike tenacity allows him to prosper anywhere. Thus as a young man on the make, Winslow’s familiarity with bottom feeding allowed him to turn a spell of western exile into a literal gold mine, and thus to make alienation pay. Lowell presses the crab imagery as far as it will go, allowing the ironic interplay between Arthur Winslow’s consumption by the cancer and the casual consumption of luxury seafood

18 |   

by his still hale coevals to suggest the inevitable isolation of a man “set up” in an elite hospital and left to fend for himself by “people” just like himself. Left to die alone, Winslow is, in fact, paid the highest compliment “Your people” can pay: he is left in peace to enjoy the aﬄiction God visits only on favorites (Selected Poems, 11). As the above explication should indicate, Lowell’s chief poetic device at this stage is the image. Just as images of the crab — mythological and culinary — are set in pugilistic pas de deux, one against the other, Lowell makes similar symbolic use of the heralding trumpets of the judgment day. The faulty hearing of Lowell’s doddering Massachusetts kin evokes the invalidism and invalidation over time of the Congregational faith. While this faith’s vitality once inhered in its preaching, now the trumpets of the End devolve into ear trumpets for the insensible. These, deafened rather than roused by preaching, are pathetic shadows of their sermon-drunk kin. Fittingly, Arthur Winslow is conveyed to the afterlife on a “trumpeting black swan,” the image cousin by pun to the “trumpeter swan.” Lowell’s revision, which imbues the descriptive “trumpeter swan” (the stylized bird of genteel parlor prints) with sound and present action, only sharpens the irony ﬂowing against the Winslows, whose triumphalist individualism is, as it were, trumped, both from the social and religious standpoint: from the commoners’ “Boat Club,” Boston Garden, the swanboats cast oﬀ. They “coast” while Arthur founders. At the same time, the man once contemptuous of all aid but his own is transported from his “adjusted” bed by a Jesus who “runs” him “Beyond Charles River to the Acheron” (Selected Poems, 11). He who despised charity is now the object of it. He whose feet could catch hold anywhere, who was, above all, “opportune,” is demoted from martial pilgrim to patient sinner, or sin-consumed patient. Either way, patience, a Catholic virtue, is Protestant indignity. The indignity, though, is apparently no more than Winslow deserves. Poetic justice requires that the man who has hogged the American road lose driving privileges in the afterworld. To be sure, by the end of the poem’s ﬁrst stanza, the trope of Protestant pilgrimage — capable, as Bercovitch has shown, of sacralizing great swaths of secular history — is indicted for its partiality to “favorites.” Lowell exposes in Winslow the specious rationalization of self-interest that may occur when the expanse of a continent is made to incarnate individual designings: when expansionism is ratiﬁed as destiny on the belief, in Bercovitch’s terms, that “America was consecrated from eternity for the New England Way.”3 Anticipating Myra Jehlen’s work by rejecting any seamless or “natural” identiﬁcations of “individual,” “con-

Confession, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation in Lowell | 19

tinent,” and “nation,” Lowell puts down the romance of divine design for mere “craft.” Winslow’s journey across America, his archetypal push west, is not Manifest Destiny, but adventurism, pure and simple. A ﬁsher after booty (“the craft that netted you a million dollars, / Hosing out gold in Colorado’s waste,” Lord Weary’s Castle, 27), Arthur Winslow sustains a family instinct for the main chance, reprising the equivocal ethics of Revolutionary-era ancestors who either “whipped” or backed the king, depending on how the wind blew. In the instance of the Winslows, the diﬀerence between good timing and craven opportunism is eﬀectively null. Lowell’s elegy for his grandfather, Arthur Winslow, is a New Critical tour de force: it maintains its energy and texture through the complex imbrication of image chains. Yet the poem’s particular eﬀectiveness ﬂows from other sources as well: namely, from Lowell’s experimentation with temporal elements, his striving to create a certain range of moods, and his marked (though not markedly successful) attempt to transfer authority outside and away from the thunderous voice of its prophetic and autochthonous speaker. Temporally speaking, it is worth marking how Lowell arranges the details around Arthur Winslow in a manner peculiarly arrested, without dynamic thrust, while the poet writes from the vantage point of a time more vital, that signaled by a vibrantly present refrain: “This Easter.” Indeed, as Lowell proceeds in itemizing what there was to remember about Winslow, the aﬀective dynamism of the elegiac form seems oddly to spend or exhaust itself; and where elegy was, now there is only epitaph. This formal hardening is, Lowell’s poem seems to demonstrate, not inevitable, but rather a result of the process of Protestant hagiography that arrests and inscribes individual persons in eternal types. As Protestant saint, Arthur Winslow lies in the bed his forebears made. The poem that traces his life’s progress is, ﬁnally, a portmanteau of inert epithets, or epitaphic tags, that signify the satisfaction of Protestant progress in stasis. The Protestant elegy is easily preempted by a headstone. This attention to lyric time is, then, one way that Lowell uses his early poems to distinguish the sterility of Protestant certainties from the more contingent ethos he will go on to explore. Another way will involve his ﬁrst sustained use of the second-person addressee, and, in particular, his development of a newly tentative, or what we might call subjunctive, quality of tone. Gabriel Pearson long ago argued that Lowell’s objects are always being “reapprehended, and, as it were, redeemed for attention by being locked and cemented into larger structures” and that Lowell’s end is to achieve a “controlled remoteness.”4 Let me qualify Pearson’s evocative observation

20 |   

by suggesting that Lowell’s aim is not so much the achievement of remoteness from the subject and objects of his existence, but rather a literally mediated relation to them. The poet presents — admits into evidence, as it were — objects, perspectives, and reminiscences whose ultimate meaning will be revealed only by a trusted interlocutor, by a mediator in whose hands burdens may be deposited. This shift in authority — from the poet to his addressee, from an immediate to a displaced source of wisdom — shows up in the elegy for Arthur Winslow only in the last stanza, where, unrelated to any species of Protestant address, the shift jars. The maladroitness, even near ludicrousness of the stanza entitled “A Prayer for My Grandfather to Our Lady” serves to suggest how momentous for Lowell is this renunciation of authority. Mother, for these three hundred years or more Neither our clippers nor our slavers reached The haven of your peace in this Bay State: Neither my father nor his father. Beached On these dry ﬂats of ﬁshy real estate, O Mother, I implore Your scorched, blue thunderbreasts of love to pour Buckets of blessings on my burning head. (Lord Weary’s Castle, 28) Renouncing the jeremiad of the foregoing stanzas as well as the prophetic authority of his own current practice, Lowell commends his soul and those of his “people” to the mercy of a Mother bountiful in forgiveness. That these lines are perhaps among the worst Lowell ever wrote suggests the necessary crisis and ﬁnal explosion of confession as self-exposition to which Lowell’s work was building, and the brilliant impending resolution of this crisis in the justly hailed volume Life Studies. Subsequent volumes, however, will reveal a poet ﬁnding the poetic, but also cultural and even spiritual, usefulness of a more mediated poetic practice. In these volumes Lowell will move away from Protestant historicism as he seeks to deﬁne a poetics and assemble a body of work capable of thriving in provisional, rather than providential, time.

     discover this poetics entirely on his own. As is well documented, Lowell was a poet who took inﬂuence from a variety of sources. Axelrod has shown just how inﬂuential William Carlos Wil-

Confession, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation in Lowell | 21

liams was, in this regard as in others.5 The poet, dissatisﬁed with his earlier method, learns from Williams the aﬀective as well as formal advantages of a diﬀerent kind of poetics. After hearing Williams read “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” at Wellesley College in 1956, Lowell marvels at the impact of Williams’s “simple confession, something that was both poetry and beyond poetry.”6 If Lowell’s description of Williams’s poem as “confession” is notable, he was in fact probably predisposed to such description. “Simple confession” was a characteristic Lowell had already discovered in the work of a host of religio-literary changelings like himself — Augustine, More, Herbert, Newman, Hopkins. Even closer to home, he had given considerable study to another middle-aged poet-thinker and Protestant heir who, like him, put by prophecy for more candid genres. Jonathan Edwards, whose biography Lowell had planned to write at the precise time of his conversion to Catholicism, is a crucial ﬁgure, for in Edwards, Lowell discovers another kind of faithful poetics. This poetics is neither precisely Catholic nor Protestant, but rather grounded in an Augustinian confessionalism, which, at the source of both, renders the Protestant/Catholic distinction factitious. In Edwards, Lowell rediscovers, in eﬀect, the lost soul of his heritage in a New England Way redeemed of sectarian sharpness, patriarchal self-possession, and Weberian ruth. Lowell’s Edwards is not the pitiless and martial Christian soldier of the Winslow way, but rather a genius of feeling, a theorist of aﬀective life. True legatee to the school of Cambridge Protestants made visible in Janice Knight’s groundbreaking Orthodoxies in Massachusetts, Edwards has more in common with the recondite John Cotton than the outgoing Benjamin Franklin, more in common with Nathaniel Hawthorne than his more “representative” neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. By the end of his career, this Edwards has become for Lowell the quintessential model of the Christian poet without portfolio, his temple the page. Exiled, but actually liberated, from the burden of representative Protestantism as Lowell is himself, this Edwards serves as Lowell’s most important instructor in the poetics of the “day by day.” In short, it is probably not going too far to say that while Lowell never writes his biography of Edwards’s career, Edwards, in a very real sense, writes Lowell’s. In his poetic treatments of Edwards, Lowell maps two related but ultimately opposed Puritan traditions: one deﬁned by typological repetitions that subsume process, change, and variety; the other adopting a stance expectant and penitent before the contingencies of history. Not accidentally, these are the two primary movements of Lowell’s own career as well.

22 |   

The pivotal moment in Lowell’s characterization of Edwards surely comes in the greatly underesteemed For the Union Dead (1964). The volume is most often remembered for its scouring critique of war-mongering, colonialism, and racism at home, and perhaps also for the voice of its speaker, Lyndon Johnson’s scourge and the counterculture’s spokesman. Lowell’s focus in this volume is not so much on the victims of Manifest Destiny, circa 1968, as on the victors. These too bear the costs of Protestant duty as a kind of internalization of predation that rots or breaks down the soul while carapacing it in a rigid representativeness. If the younger Edwards, the anointed head of renascent orthodoxy at his Northampton lectern, had already showed signs of this syndrome in Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), here he is joined by others. In his company, on his graciously aﬄicted “team,” Lowell also ﬁnds Alfred Corning Clark, schoolmate and poor rich boy whose “triumphant diﬃdence” and “refusal of exertion” make him a paragon of the Protestant suﬃciency. The tense inversion of Clark’s life is poignantly transcribed in the palindrome of his birth and death dates, which Lowell carefully transcribes: 1916 – 1961. There is Robert Gould Shaw himself, the greatest of the “Union dead,” who, while honored as martyr to the cause of racial justice, is perforce rendered, in life as in death, a man too hard to give vent to mortal weaknesses. Whether trapped in death or its near cousin, duty, Shaw’s breathing is within bronze: he “seems to wince at pleasure, / and suﬀocate for privacy.” Even Moses appears in For the Union Dead as a misguided evangelist or a calloused casualty of a primeval Great Awakening — or a mere lobbyist, eaten up inside. Lowell’s Moses is not unlike those pols from “July in Washington” who arrive in the Capital “bright as dimes / and die disheveled and soft.” If, as Lowell laments in that poem, the rigid artillery of the New England Way rolls over the green earth without gentleness (“The stiﬀ spokes of this wheel / touch the sore spots of the earth”), the Protestant soldiers of this movement do not escape undamaged by its progress, even though it is they, in fact, who roll it along (Selected Poems, 110, 136, 127). Indeed, these men, like needles or daguerrotypes — each trapped in the static imperturbability his culture demands, each carrying his “house” on his back — are, unlike their preﬁguring types in Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary’s Castle, more sympathetic than earlier prototypes. They are “poor,” rather than graciously aﬄicted, sinners, and, as such, deserving a new charity. Lowell’s Christian soldier must be rescued from Winslow’s lonely deathbed, and who better for the mission than one of their own? While the nation may render his faculties of will and eternal vigilance all the honor

Confession, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation in Lowell | 23

rendered earlier saints (Shaw’s high-strung eliteness earns him comparison to a greyhound, while the monuments to his “wasp-waisted” comrades grow “slimmer and younger each year”), the poet has a more tender and pitying image to bestow, that of the encumbered turtle: outside, all armored plates; inside, all rot (Selected Poems, 136). This image — of fresh growth trapped in the casket of the past — makes For the Union Dead one of Lowell’s most uniﬁed and eﬀective volumes, for it dislodges and frees Lowell’s poetics from the recursive and ﬁnally sterile endeavor of writing jeremiads against the jeremiad. The critique of historical succession that commandeered the matter and form of earlier work, exhausting lyricism in hortatoriness and entangling the censor of Protestant selfhood in baroque reenactments of the very selfhood he censored, has found new ground, as the Protestant avatar now earns the poet’s solicitous pity. Poignantly unoriginal in his singularity, this paradigmatic Protestant cannot escape himself. His adamantine individuality is reproduced again and again in shields and commemorative busts, in urns spilling slime, and in statues uncannily breathing: a pathetic Boston drinker “snores in his iron lung,” while in Maine towns, “fresh paint / on the captains’ houses hides softer wood” (Selected Poems, 116, 130). Indeed, it is with what can only be called a new strain of charity that Lowell now regards those all outline, uniformly gray, unregenerate arrowheads sloughed up by the path there, or in the corners of the eye, they play their thankless, ﬁll-in roles. . . . (For the Union Dead, 16) As I have already intimated and want now to detail, this image of a petriﬁed integument constraining mere mortal ﬂesh gets most brilliant, and pivotal, deployment in “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts,” where the poet’s pity expands, and his former suspicion of Edwards as the Protestant Ironsides is replaced by close identiﬁcation: “I love you faded, / old, exiled and afraid.” On pilgrimage to Northampton, site of Edwards’s professional glory days, the poet recounts to have found nothing but “the round slice of an oak / you are said to have planted.” Now so brittle, it is “only ﬁt for burning.” This stump is all that remains of the renowned Edwards who “stood on stilts in the air” (For the Union Dead, 43, 42). The quintessential New Englander, elevated by training, temperament, and family heritage to high oﬃce, Edwards turns out, in the end, as just another turtle, one of the poet’s own kind. As Lowell had written in “The Neo-Classical Urn”:

24 |   

I rub my skull, that turtle shell, and breathe their dying smell, still watch their crippled last survivors pass, and hobble humpbacked through the grizzled grass. (Selected Poems, 126) Like the rotting Arthur Winslow, like the poet himself subject to “night sweats,” Edwards confesses to be nothing but “ﬂaccid solids, / vapid, sizzy, scarse ﬂuids” (Selected Poems 123). And if this seems, ﬁnally, an ignoble kind of fall for Lowell’s most august relation to suﬀer, the descent from Jeremiah to turtle is actually a moral rise, reﬂecting, not incidentally, Lowell’s own paradoxical rise from vatic impersonality to implicated confessor. Critics have long concurred that Lowell’s use of personal materials is, in the early years especially, far from personal. As Pearson asserts, “In explicitly treating his life as materials, he was not making his poetry more personal but depersonalizing his life.”7 Though a fair evaluation of Lowell’s autobiographical technique, this critical judgment may leave out Lowell’s more complex interrogation of the disingenuities and dangers of the impersonally personal. This depersonalization, for instance, had already come under scrutiny in Lowell’s earlier exploration of the unripe Edwards, the Edwards complicit in a revival with fearsome consequences. Edwards himself was hampered by a weakness for the vatic intimacies. Accordingly, it is his own misguided conﬂation of personal and particular investments into civic and rhetorical opportunities that Lowell learns to recognize in a callow alter ego, the younger Edwards of Northampton, whose “White wig and black coat, / all cut from one cloth” (Selected Poems, 122), blur together the man and his orthodoxy. Silhouette of his sect, anointed outline like Lowell himself, Edwards had commanded a rhetoric febrile and aﬀecting; his gift, not unlike Lowell’s, was for turning visceral horror to collective, homiletic ends. In “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” this Edwards had memorably deployed his own uncle in a thought experiment on hell (“Josiah Hawley, picture yourself cast / Into a brick-kiln where the blast / Fans your quick vitals to a coal” (Selected Poems, 28) that probably brought on Hawley’s suicide. Indeed, in Lowell’s clearly self-reﬂexive treatment of the episode, the mistake Edwards makes with Hawley follows from a broader confusion of general and particular, Adam’s sin and one’s own, that characterizes the Great Awakening. As Lowell reads his history, national and familial, a culture collapsing individual sins into typical ones creates fertile conditions for

Confession, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation in Lowell | 25

Josiah Hawley’s reversion to congenital madness, renamed intense spiritual “experience.” And if one man’s psychotic episode could be mistaken for a genuine religious experience, how then to prevent a more violent and widespread transmission of madness among a populace ready to call all kinds of irregularity “religious aﬀection”? The multitude, once unconcerned with doubt, Once neither callous, curious nor devout, Jumped at broad noon, as though some peddler groaned At it in its familiar twang: “My friend, Cut your own throat. Cut your own throat. Now! Now!” September twenty-second, Sir, the bough Cracks with the unpicked apples, and at dawn The small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn. (Selected Poems, 30) Here the vitality and changefulness of time that the seasons mark fall into neglect. Harvests are left unpicked, daytime sanity is broken by competing nightmares hawked by vying clerics, and the new is literally eaten by the old. Lowell shows Edwards apprehending in Hawley’s embrace of family pathology the literal consequences of a belief system that visits the patriarch Adam’s sin down the generations from father to child. The New England Way over which Edwards presides “awakens” men into their parents’ rather than their own days. The Puritan imperative “to live ancient lives,” as Theodore Bozeman has it, hostages the day. Awakening is, in this perspective, a reanimation of the past that gives no quarter to the present. The poet who will later regret walking in the “dinosaur / death-steps” (Selected Poems, 103) of the father hints early on at the revolt to come in his striking portrait of Jonathan Edwards literally waking out of the Awakening.

   ’ tutorial ﬁgure, what saves Edwards from the entombed stink of the archaic turtle is simply his fall oﬀ the “stilts” of his high Protestant sinecure. It is, in Lowell’s rendering, this fall that permits his rediscovery of a simpler, more “original” version of Christian confessionalism, the early Church confessionalism of Augustine who, as ancestor of both Aquinas and Calvin, Roman Church and Reformed congregations, bequeaths the forms of a piety genuinely catholic. Speciﬁcally, the strain of orthodoxy that Lowell will observe Edwards to pursue post-Awakening is an orthodoxy reinfused with the soul that predestinarian applications

26 |   

(and particularly a covenant theology collectivizing individual into eternal communities) perforce occlude. Infused with this new, yet also quite normative, strain of piety, Jonathan Edwards in western Massachusetts sheds the thickened sensibility of sectarian fathers to cultivate other faculties, and more responsive ones: attention to beauty, susceptibility to love, readiness to imagine the Mind that imagined its own mind and so to train imagination as a pious faculty. One of the most moving and remarkable achievements of Robert Lowell’s poetic career must be this counterintuitive yet acute reinterpretation and rehabilitation of Jonathan Edwards from mainline evangelical paragon to devotionalist and mystic. Writing in “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts,” Lowell addresses the spirit of Edwards, musing, “You too must have been green once” (Selected Poems, 122) — and then ﬁnds it is so. Edwards evicted from his station of wooden eminence is precisely master of the present and of the spiritual fertility of the common day. No longer standardbearer of individual Will, apocalyptic appetite, and ostentatious self-denial, this other Edwards is a poet of highly developed perceptual sense, an empiricist of what Marianne Moore later calls “observatory nerves,” and a lover paying nearly Marian homage to a beloved wife. This Edwards makes “aﬀection” and aﬀectedness the constitutive principles of redemption. Whereas Lowell cannot help but ﬁnd the millennialist Edwards complicit in partitioning God’s country into sectarian principalities (“I could almost feel the frontier / crack and disappear. / Edwards thought the world would end here,” 120), Edwards in western Massachusetts is released from the invidious eliteness and interests of his former “circles” to a genuine catholicity of interests and pursuits. On a further frontier, wandering that zone Dickinson would call “circumference,” Edwards ﬁnds a world exfoliating itself from minute to minute. He delights in what Hopkins called Creation’s “pied beauty,” reading the variety and complexity of nature to body forth Being’s gracious, and ongoing, consent to Itself. This same delight in mimetic reciprocities — in the call and response of growth and creation — is now expressed in Edwards’s touching submission to his wife’s ministry. If Nature is the sacramental book where God records his consent to Himself, earthly marriage schools His creations in the harmonics of the Divine benevolence. Nature’s symmetries and a woman’s voice inspire Lowell’s ecstatic Edwards to a kind of creative action modeled on God’s making. The soul of Sarah Pierrepont!

Confession, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation in Lowell | 27

So ﬁlled with delight in the Great Being, she hardly cared for anything — walking the ﬁelds, sweetly singing, conversing with some one invisible. Then God’s love shone in sun, moon and stars, on earth, in the waters, in the air, in the loose winds, which used to greatly ﬁx your mind. Often she saw you come home from a ride or a walk, your coat dotted with thoughts you had pinned there on slips of paper. (Selected Poems, 121) In these verses Jonathan Edwards — in the line of Augustine and More, Newman, Hopkins, and Lowell himself — forgoes narrow dogmatisms. He trades in the sectarian’s coat to put on God’s surplice. The change is expressed in the diﬀerence between, on the one hand, “White wig and black coat, / all cut from one cloth” and “from a ride / or a walk, your coat dotted with thoughts.” Uncanny metrical cousins, the former line describes a man of self-suﬃcient rigor and unvarying consistency, a representative Puritan; the latter, a man who wears his longing for God on his literal sleeve and who seeks fresh terms for his devotion day by day. Lowell’s depiction of Edwards “writing, writing, writing” (123) shows Edwards converted to a kind of creative activity eschewing predestinarian certainty for a more plangent and instantaneous mode. The very singing echo of the phrase, “writing, writing, writing,” evocative of Sarah Pierrepont’s own song, suggests Edwards’s assent to the reality of human incompleteness and his embrace of constant mimetic eﬀort as a making in God’s image. At what he saw as a parallel stage in his own life, Robert Lowell adopts a style of writing informed by a similar imperative to make creative action the wellspring of constant devotion. “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts” is, in eﬀect, a displaced rehearsal of Lowell’s spiritual process; it depicts an Edwards born to walk the “dinosaur / death-steps” of his line instead of ﬁnding a more spontaneous and imaginative mode of spiritual exercise. By means of “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts” and other poems in For the Union Dead, Lowell readies himself for the shift into a more traditional “confessionalism” than he had yet practiced, indeed a

28 |   

confessionalism that is, perhaps, the one element of his Roman Catholicism to survive into his maturity. Then there is a question whether my poems are religious, or whether they just use religious imagery. I haven’t really any idea. My last poems don’t use religious imagery, they don’t use symbolism. In many ways they seem to me more religious than the early ones, which are full of symbols and references to Christ and God. I’m sure the symbols and the Catholic framework didn’t make the poems religious experiences. Yet I don’t feel my experience changed very much. (Collected Prose, 250) I have been suggesting that the confessionalism of Lowell’s late years is characterized by a more literal reading of Augustinian time than the Protestantism Lowell inherited. This is to say that it shows a greater attention to, and investment in, what may be realized in a “day.” Augustine’s celebrated Book 11 of the Confessions describes the wonder of such a day in this way: “Of these two divisions in time, then, how can two, the past and the future, be, when the past no longer is and the future is not yet?”8 As Lowell had occasion to ponder while editing the Confessions at Sheed and Ward in the 1940s, and as his intense reading in such Catholic thinkers as Étienne Gilson and E. I. Watkin taught him, an Augustinian temporality mandates responsive devotion to the advancing of Glory in our own time and in our own estate: Glory cannot be endowed or inherited. Such works as Watkin’s Catholic Art and Culture and Gilson’s The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, the primer texts of Lowell’s conversion, only reinforced this sense. The table of contents of Gilson’s The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (chapter 3, “Beings and Their Contingence”; chapter 4, “Analogy, Causality and Finality”; chapter 5, “Christian Optimism”; chapter 6, “The Glory of God”) is itself a suggestive digest of Lowell’s developed poetics. Such a poetics requires an activist image-maker, the poet as upholder and actualizer of a revelation exacting constant renewal. Poetic achievement, in this view, proceeds from a discipline necessarily quotidian; and revelation from a certain assiduity of vision never suﬃcient in itself, but responsive to, vibrating with, exigent phenomena. As Gilson puts it: “to realize this gloriﬁcation not only being is required, but action.”9 If the New England Way squandered this poetics, and Edwards fell, only to be lifted up by it, its modern hero for Lowell will be a poet like Hopkins, whose “sanctities” Lowell describes in an essay of the forties entitled “Hopkins’ Sanctity”: “to be thoroughly in act is human perfection; in other words it is to be thoroughly made. According to Catho-

Confession, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation in Lowell | 29

lic theology, perfection demands a substantial transformation.” As he goes on: “for Hopkins’ life was a continuous substantial progress toward perfection,” while “the beliefs and practices of most modern poets more or less exclude perfection, . . . and . . . insofar as perfection is shut out the poetry suﬀers” (Collected Prose, 168). I am not contending that Lowell remains in any sense a regular Catholic. Three wives and many lovers; the disorientations of a career alternating spells in the asylum and lockup with seasons on the cover of Time; residence on two continents and years of manic-depressive illness: these all took their toll on any kind of regularity, religious or otherwise. His lapse from Roman orthodoxy aside, Lowell is too much the ironist in the end to continue fashioning verse paraphrases of such sentences as this: “The contemplation of our Lady, type and exemplar of the contemplative Church, sees horizontally the ends of becoming, the issues of history.”10 Subtract the Church, however, and what remains is a discipline and a set of predilections that a poetry, like a Church, may harbor. And Lowell’s mature poetics may be said to harbor these with a kind of vehemence. A receptiveness to ministration; a sense of history as determined by small daily transactions; a search for some more tender guide to personal redemption than the past had bestowed — these are the obsessional givens of Lowell’s later work. After Lowell no longer writes poems to the “Lady of Walsingham,” a thematic constant remains the invocation of the wife given salviﬁc power — an “old ﬂame” of “ﬂaming insight”; the “Tenth Muse . . . in [her] white and red / check dresses like a table cloth”; the “nymph” with “her soaring armpits and her one bare breast,” or the “Dolphin” who “guide[s] . . . by surprise” (Selected Poems, 101 – 2, 124, 125, 246). More fundamental, though, will be the structural integration, and architectonic integration, of mediate form expressed in Lowell’s embrace of the blank verse sonnet. The sonnet is Lowell’s Herbertian temple. With its historic openness to female intercession, its intense durée, and its opportunities for aﬀective shift within the compact span of its fourteen lines, the sonnet proves one of Lowell’s most durable and eﬃcacious forms. In it, personal materials may be exposed to the pressure of historic time and so to the response of an interlocutor, screened but ever present. In the sonnet, Lowell can allow the “blessèd structures, plot and rhyme,” to enable supplications of an older sort. Sometimes, the lyrics are overly private, and sometimes, too, the form itself overstylizes. But the cumulative eﬀect of the sonnet sequences is to purchase release for a poet once encased in the iron casket of the jeremiad

30 |   

and arrested in a cartoon of his own representativeness. The evanescent temporality of the sonnet as Lowell practices it makes complacency fatal, and insight urgent. Nothing may be relied on to exist but the moment. As Lowell writes in “Fall Weekend at Milgate”: The day says nothing, and lacks for nothing . . . God; but it’s moonshine trying to gold-cap my life, asking fees from the things I lived and loved (Selected Poems, 231) Renouncing the Weberian sanctiﬁcations of use value in such lines, Lowell puts aside all those devices by which we redeem time past with a specious “improvement.” The world instead vibrates with sights, actions, whose value may not outlive the instant. Snagged on time passing, admitting he is “counterclockwise,” Lowell lets his lines stall with paradox, accumulating the tension of what’s lost as it’s found: I watch a feverish huddle of shivering cows; you sit making a ﬁshspine from a chestnut leaf. We are at our crossroads, we are astigmatic and stop uncomfortable, we are humanly low. (Selected Poems, 231) All the progress obtainable in the lines above is that availed in a view of cows hoarding warmth, or in the sight of one’s wife making “a ﬁshspine from a chestnut leaf” — revelatory sights that emerge from the crucible of Augustinian time. Making by unmaking, his lines “under pressure,” as Mark Rudman puts it, “of a moment that will not recur,”11 Lowell assembles images of ambitious diminishment, fertile desiccation. Sonnets like the above render the human day a mystery replete with nothing but itself. And if Lowell’s late work is wracked by the pain of this, it is also infused with a certain devotional awe and agape. It turns out that the very “astigmatic” view, drastically foreshortened and feeling the strain of its reach as an emptiness of grasp, opens a space for sudden, brimming instants of vision. It happens that the valves of confessional open inward, too. Revelation rushes in: “It’s amazing,” Lowell observes in his last volume, the day is still here like lightning on an open ﬁeld, terra ﬁrma and transient swimming in variation,

Confession, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation in Lowell | 31

fresh as when man ﬁrst broke like the crocus all over the earth. (Day by Day, 53) By the end of his career, writing poems under the motto “let nothing be done twice,” Lowell is no longer writing autobiographical myth or reprising the gracious aﬄictions of Arthur Winslow. Positioned within history rather than outside as its representative, the “confessional poet” of Day by Day is obliged to renew all vision, readdress all suits each day. From his early intense exposure to Catholicism and from such guides as Edwards and Hopkins, Lowell has come to recognize the “one unpardonable sin” is not, as his mother had it, want, but rather want’s denial. Thus the mature poet may ﬁnd release from the stance of the self-possessed visionary. He may embrace the necessity of an artistic vision imbued with need and the humility of action that substantiates need. On this, his “Epilogue” does no less than insist. Lowell writes at the last: “The painter’s vision is not a lens, / it trembles to caress the light” (Day by Day, 127).

Notes 1. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), passim. 2. Albert Gelpi, “The Reign of the Kingﬁsher: Robert Lowell’s Prophetic Poetry,” in Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry, ed. Steven Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 57 – 58. 3. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 11. 4. Gabriel Pearson, “The Middle Years,” in Robert Lowell, ed. Harold Bloom (New Haven, CT: Chelsea House, 1987), 31. 5. Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). 6. Paul Mariani, Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 244. 7. Gabriel Pearson, quoted in Philip Cooper, The Autobiographical Myth of Robert Lowell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), vi. 8. F. J. Sheed, ed., The Confessions of Saint Augustine (London: Sheed and Ward, 1944), 264. 9. Étienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (New York: Scribners, 1936), 145. 10. E. I. Watkin, Catholic Art and Culture (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1944), 218. 11. Mark Rudman, Robert Lowell: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 27.

32 |   

Bibliography Axelrod, Stephen Gould. Robert Lowell: Life and Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. Axelrod, Stephen Gould, and Helen Deese, eds. Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968. ———. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Robert Lowell. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Bozeman, Theodore Dwight. To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Cooper, Philip. The Autobiographical Myth of Robert Lowell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970. Gelpi, Albert. “The Reign of the Kingﬁsher: Robert Lowell’s Prophetic Poetry.” In Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry, edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese, 51 – 69. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Gilson, Étienne. The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. New York: Scribners, 1936. Jehlen, Myra. American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Knight, Janice. Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Lowell, Robert. Collected Prose. Edited by Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1987. ———. Day by Day. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. ———. For the Union Dead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964. ———. Land of Unlikeness. New York: Cummington Press, 1944. ———. “Lord Weary’s Castle” and “The Mills of the Kavanaughs.” New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. ———. Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Mariani, Paul. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Pearson, Gabriel. “The Middle Years.” In Robert Lowell. Edited by Harold Bloom. New Haven, CT: Chelsea House, 1987. Perloﬀ, Marjorie. The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973. Rudman, Mark. Robert Lowell: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Sheed, F. J., ed. The Confessions of Saint Augustine. London: Sheed and Ward, 1944. Watkin, E. I. Catholic Art and Culture. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1944. Williamson, Alan. Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974.

Your profession of making what can’t be done the one thing you can do . . . — Robert Lowell, “Art of the Possible”

2

Writing as a Child: Lowell’s Poetic Penmanship Rei Terada

Robert Lowell’s contemporaries often recall the pathos of his handwriting: an “awkward printing” that did not seem to deserve the name of writing.1 Lowell’s sad and funny draft of a letter applying for a teaching position at Catholic University (ﬁg. 1) is a fascinating example of this awkwardness, in which Lowell not only seems to have trouble writing, but initially misspells the word “write” (as “right”).2 In “91 Revere Street,” the prose memoir contained in Life Studies, Lowell blames his autographical aﬄictions on his childhood education at the Brimmer School: “At Brimmer I unlearned writing. The script that I had mastered with such agony at my ﬁrst school was denounced as illegible: I was taught to print according to the Dalton Plan — to this day, as a result, I have to print even my two middle names and can only really write two words: ‘Robert’ and ‘Lowell.’ ”3 True writing, Lowell suggests, is cursive script; he can “really write” only his name. But Lowell is also playing on the ironic homonymity between “writing” and “writing,” between penmanship and composition. For it is equally true that when it comes to writing “really” or realistically — with empirical reference or the illusion of it — Lowell feels poetically restricted to making confessions, or to writing “Robert Lowell.” “Alas, I can only tell my own story,” he complains.4 The concurrence between “writing” and “writing” is more than a casual irony. From Life Studies onward, Lowell considers what

34 |     

it means to write — “really” to write — by thinking about cursive, printed handwriting, and type. Physical varieties of writing allegorize Lowell’s poetic dilemmas. Script and print, literal embodiments of writing, show the problems involved in writing in a literal fashion. Because handwriting is thought to express personal idiosyncrasy, extending unique rhythms of the body to the page, Lowell uses cursive script to ﬁgure an ideal writing able to convey this singularity. Printed type, for its part, is supposed to negate by supplementing the personal illusion. Lowell’s own printed handwriting, a legacy of the Dalton Plan, is to him a nether realm between script and type, a realm that corresponds to the poetic limbo he makes a profession of occupying. Attention to Lowell’s allegorization of the material forms in which his own poetry may appear contributes to contemporary thought about the cultural meanings — in particular, the gendered meanings — that these forms may have.5 The problems of writing are allied, like many forces in Lowell’s thought, with the ﬁgures of his parents.6 This alliance actually genders writing feminine for Lowell. Female relatives model the possibilities of writing: they attempt the realistic style to which he aspires, then serve as unwitting agents of their own discredit, showing realism to be closer to insistence on one’s own rightness than to authenticity. Although the ideal of “real” writing naturally tends to collapse, this doesn’t keep Lowell from feeling inferior to it. Because all writing is in a sense feminine for Lowell, he necessarily “writes as a woman,” yet sees himself as something other and less — a younger boy, a child. The femininity of writing is a sign of Lowell’s alienation from writing as such, even as the personal uniqueness evoked by handwriting is both a quality that Lowell believes no writing achieves and one that he believes his own writing especially lacks. Lowell’s concern about handwriting also oﬀers entry to a side of his work that is persistently ignored: his poetics as such, his genuine puzzlement about the capacities and incapacities, the possible signiﬁcance and insigniﬁcance of poems. Lowell writes grandly and laconically, as though writing does and doesn’t matter, I suggest, because that is the attitude that corresponds to poetry’s seeming to him to be founded on certain epistemological conﬂicts. Neither a postmodern accepter of these conﬂicts nor a transcender of them, Lowell can seem to be writing halfheartedly, writing to please no one. Although aestheticist attempts to assess the success or even interest of Lowell’s writing have been anything but useful, recent discussions of Lowell as the modiﬁer of inherited cultural tendencies — paradigmatically Elisa New’s treatment of his processing of Puritanism —

Writing as a Child: Lowell’s Poetic Penmanship | 35

1. Draft of Robert Lowell’s letter to Catholic University. Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

do not approach his strangeness either, as though it were diﬃcult even to notice what Lowell’s writing is like.7 These diﬃculties might be better understood as diﬃculties admitting how awkward Lowell’s writing is. Lowell himself had massive limitations, but resistance to looking at the awkwardness of poetry wasn’t one of them. Lowell’s poems often imply that ﬁnished or published writing is epitaphic; the writing that remains vibrant is writing on books, not the words that compose them. “Reading Myself,” with its imagination of the “open book” as the poet’s “open coﬃn,” 8 presents the conclusion of Lowell’s broader insinuation, from Life Studies through Day by Day, that writing ex-

36 |     

poses language’s interior deadness. Language production in Lowell is never seamless: like the name of the family farm, “entitled Char-de-sa” after Lowell’s “Grandfather’s children: Charlotte, Devereux, and Sarah” (LS, 60), it is portmanteau and overly systematic. Errors bring these qualities to light, as when “the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coﬃn” misspells “Lowell” “LOVEL” (LS, 78). Linguistic deadliness is most pronounced in Lowell’s descriptions of his father, whose death-in-life Lowell associates with the halting of painfully separated letters. Bob Lowell extends the unease of print to speech by the use of acronyms: Lowell reﬂects that his father’s corpse in its coﬃn “looked entirely alive, or as he used to say, W& H: Well and Happy.”9 In “91 Revere Street” Bob Lowell “letter[s] his three new galvanized garbage cans: R.T.S. L — U.S.N.” — a detail Lowell thinks interesting enough to mention twice (LS, 32, 45). “L” is suspiciously legible, displayed and overemphasized at the cost of a disjunction between it and the rest of the signature. Bob Lowell’s given names are represented by “disturbingly evident initials,” as Lowell calls them, and his naval status by more. “L” emerges from this alphabet soup as though recently assembled out of components. The disconnection of graphemes seems to suggest the mere conventionality of their coherence. This episode too metaphorizes the liabilities of confession: In “Skunk Hour,” as Frank O’Hara observed with disapproval, Lowell compares his vocation to the skunks’ as they “[swill] the garbage pail” (LS, 90). The well-wrought garbage can is Lowell’s anecdotal jar or Grecian urn, which its author ostentatiously but unconvincingly claims. Lowell orders the script-print relation into a sequence and uses that sequence to ﬁgure his poetic development as a whole. Lowell’s transition from the postsymbolist Lord Weary’s Castle to the up-to-date, prosaic, and empirical Life Studies resembles the transition from script to print that he made at the Brimmer School, when “the script that [he] had mastered with such agony at [his] ﬁrst school was denounced as illegible.” Brimmer trains Lowell to print as a response to one kind of illegibility, which corresponds, in the running comparison to Lowell’s poetic career, to Lord Weary’s Castle’s densely artiﬁcial and rhetorical mythography (“my ﬁrst school”). Brimmer’s training, however, as well as Lowell’s middle style in Life Studies, produces a new kind of illegibility. Likewise, in his referential phase Lowell’s illegibility seems to withdraw from ﬁguration and syntax only to burrow further into his writing, to inhabit it on an even more fundamental level. When Lowell’s work becomes more “readable” or less encoded, it demonstrates

Writing as a Child: Lowell’s Poetic Penmanship | 37

more clearly that identity is not writable. It is no wonder that Lowell considers “each school . . . more constraining and punitive than its predecessor” (LS, 28).10

The Empirical Feminine When the Brimmer School ushers Lowell into print, it also shows him into a regime that is explicitly and fantastically motherly and feminine. The Brimmer School revives the atmosphere of Lowell’s very early childhood in his parents’ ﬁrst house on Brimmer Street (CP, 300 – 301).11 “To be a boy at Brimmer was to be small, denied, and weak” — so weak that Lowell “wrote Santa Claus for a ﬁeld hockey stick” (LS, 27). Brimmer’s “eight superior grades were limited to girls,” and its “tone . . . was a blend of the feminine and the military” (LS, 25), like that of Charlotte Lowell, “la femme militaire” (Day by Day, 78). Lowell’s maternal ﬁgures’ monopoly on speech, expected as part of Life Studies’ family constellation — domineering mother, weak father, and confused son — is also a monopoly on writing. Ignoring the cultural cliché of viewing bodies or facts as feminine, Lowell instead renders feminine the act of pursuing and recording such facts. At the same time, this pursuit is ultimately impossible for the women who attempt it and even more clearly impossible for Lowell himself. Many of Lowell’s poems adopt female perspectives, from The Mills of the Kavanaughs, with its female narrator, to The Dolphin, with its paraphrases of Elizabeth Hardwick.12 Yet the feminization of empirical composition helps Lowell to mark its practice as “what can’t be done.” When Lowell closes his late “Jean Staﬀord, A Letter” with “You have spoken so many words and well, / being a woman and you” (Day by Day, 29), he does not merely oﬀer Staﬀord a backhanded compliment to her loquaciousness. Staﬀord was a person whose presence, Lowell suggests, was like a book: “Roget’s synonyms studded [her] spoken and written word.” The eﬀect is both brilliant and a little ridiculous: Jean Staﬀord is “a Letter.” Still, her lived synthesis of artiﬁce culminates, as Lowell’s never does, in literal confessions of literary merit: her “confessions had such a vocabulary / [she was] congratulated by the priests.” Now that’s “really writing.” Lowell excludes himself from Staﬀord’s linguistic level with a mixture of irony and resignation, concluding that his own role is to “have forgotten / or never heard, being a man” (Day by Day, 29). Life Studies in particular highlights the inﬂuence of female predecessors. In explaining his fondness in this volume for realistic detail, Lowell has

38 |     

credited the inﬂuence of Elizabeth Bishop, whose empirical style came to represent a poetic “sense of reality” to Lowell even though he never felt that her methods could be entirely his. By working in the genre of family history, Lowell also follows female ancestors; many of the literary members of Lowell’s family were women, as was not untypical in their educated New England milieu.13 Although Lowell observes in his interview with Frederick Seidel that “it would have been unimaginable to take either Amy or James Russell Lowell as models” (CP, 256), he did draw on lesser family writers, including his own mother. Charlotte Lowell composed an autobiographical sketch in the third person; according to Lowell, her writing was, like his own, in part an attempt at self-analysis, “written in 1937, when she had just begun to have interviews with a psychiatrist” (quoted in Hamilton, 385). Lowell found his mother’s notebook in 1954, during the groping, exploratory phase of his career that produced his own autobiographical prose writings and Life Studies. Lowell would eventually rewrite some of his mother’s piece in the sonnet “The Next Dream,” a miniature dramatic monologue for Charlotte.14 Lowell also notes that he pieces together his grandparents’ lives “from [his] mother’s scrapbooks and from her reminiscences” (CP, 292). His father’s productions, meanwhile, are also empirical, but in comparison nonverbal: “the twenty-page booklet of scaled diagrams executed in inks of ﬁve colors, a page to each room at Beverly Farms . . . a similar booklet ﬁlled with hypothetical alternative plans for a rearrangement of the Salem Museum’s display cases . . . estimates and drawings for the installation of the new Sears, Roebuck furnace, which by its low fuel consumption was to pay for itself in ten years” (CP, 356 – 57). Bob Lowell’s sphere is the formal one of calculation, his instrument the slide rule. When he engages reference, he does so in few words, leaving to women the combination of empirical reference with words that Lowell would deﬁne as writing proper. As Lowell considers his female relatives’ energetic eﬀorts, he also exposes their failure to make their authority convincing. “91 Revere Street” shows another feminization of empirical prose in its opening discussion of a work of a distant relative, “Cousin Cassie Mason Myers Julian-James’s privately printed Biographical Sketches: A Key to a Cabinet of Heirlooms in the Smithsonian Museum” (LS, 11). Lowell’s reading of Cousin Cassie’s pamphlet is an autocritical act: “Biographical Sketches” is a synonym for Life Studies, which aims similarly to unlock family secrets, and Cassie’s private printing indicates her connection to Lowell’s second empirical school. Cassie

Writing as a Child: Lowell’s Poetic Penmanship | 39

strains to uphold the reputation of a father ﬁgure, her own ancestor, Major Mordecai Myers: The account of him is platitudinous, worldly, and fond, but he has no Christian name and is entitled merely Major M. Myers in my Cousin Cassie Mason Myers Julian-James’s privately printed Biographical Sketches. . . . The name-plate under his portrait used to spell out his name bravely enough: he was Mordecai Myers. The artist painted Major Myers in his sanguine War of 1812 uniform with epaulets, white breeches, and a scarlet frogged waistcoat. . . . The pose was routine and gallant. The fulllipped smile was good-humoredly pompous and embarrassed. Mordecai’s father, given neither name nor initial, is described with an air of hurried self-congratulation by Cousin Cassie as “a friend of the Reverend Ezra Styles, afterward President of Yale College.” . . . After “the successful engagement against the British at Chrysler’s Field, thirty shrapnel splinters were extracted from [Mordecai’s] shoulder.” During convalescence, he wooed and won Miss Charlotte Bailey, “thus proving himself a better man than his rivals, the united forces of Plattsburg.” . . . . . . There was something undecided, Mediterranean, versatile, almost double-faced about his bearing which suggested that, even to his contemporaries, he must have seemed gratuitously both ci-devant and parvenu. (LS, 11 ) Cassie documents Myers’s unlikely sounding exploits with fastidious details (“thirty shrapnel splinters” etc.) but evades a complete portrait. The component facts remain diﬃcult to interpret; each is socially, psychologically, and sexually “almost double-faced.” If Cassie’s muscular enthusiasm makes her une femme militaire, Myers himself was at once military and eﬀeminate.15 Cassie disqualiﬁes Myers’s father, whose unacceptable name cannot be written at all, from fully entering her account. But Cassie’s scrupulousness, or desire to appear scrupulous, also conspires with her omission to call her account into question. As though she could not resist the impulse to be as complete as possible, she refers to Myers’s father, spells out other family names with compensatory ostentation, and goes as far as Myers’s initial M. — overstressed inclusions that make her omission visible. These tensions converge on the literally underscored letter M. Because Cassie reduces the name to its initial, yet preserves the initial to cover the reduction, she conveys what she wants to conceal. The lack of a “Christian name” in the text mimes that actual state of aﬀairs: that Myers is not Christian, but “a dark man, a

40 |     

German Jew” (LS, 11 – 12). Cassie’s eﬀort to glorify Myers loses itself in its method, so that his identity emerges negatively as “undecided.” Most of all, Cassie’s determination itself appears here. This authorial assertion is for Lowell the exclusive and unwitting right of women who mean to promote men. Miss Manice, for example, headmistress of the Brimmer School — whose name connotes a mixture of the virginal, the authoritarian, and the masculine — has a “pet theory . . . that ‘women simply are not the equals of men.’ ” She therefore enjoys “browbeating [Lowell’s] white and sheepish father, ‘How can we stand up to you? Where are our Archimedeses, our Wagners, our Admiral Simses?’ ” (LS, 26). In the same style, Charlotte Lowell “noisily stay[s] behind” when she sends her husband and son on outings (LS, 27). Her verbal assertion is as empty as it is energetic. The women of Lowell’s empirical poetic school succeed in asserting assertion itself at the expense of what they are saying — a problem to which Lowell’s own writings are not immune.

Theater of Signature Lowell’s investigations of the links between handwriting, realism, and gender dynamics appear starkly in “Father’s Bedroom,” a tiny, apparently insigniﬁcant, and almost completely overlooked poem in Life Studies. “Father’s Bedroom” embodies Life Studies’ poetics in a manner so compressed that it has sometimes been taken as saying nothing at all. This trompe l’oeil eﬀect is one of the poem’s messages: “Father’s Bedroom” is the place where Lowell thematizes the substantial emptiness of empirical style.16 Again, the gender of the writing in the poem makes its point. The poem’s twenty-three short lines present a list of items; they contain one indirect reference to the ﬁrst person and only two similes. Lowell’s details seem to speak for themselves in a language of nouns.17 The more strictly Lowell conveys the literalness of objects, however, the more he establishes his presence as their witness. Thus “Father’s Bedroom,” the poem in Life Studies that seems most purely referential, an exercise in rhetorical restraint, is the poem that most clearly depicts a search for a missing authority: In my Father’s bedroom: blue threads as thin as pen-writing on the bedspread, blue dots on the curtains, a blue kimono,

Writing as a Child: Lowell’s Poetic Penmanship | 41

Chinese sandals with blue plush straps. The broad-planked ﬂoor had a sandpapered neatness. The clear glass bed-lamp with a white doily shade was still raised a few inches by resting on volume two of Lafcadio Hearn’s Glimpses of unfamiliar Japan. Its warped olive cover was punished like a rhinoceros hide. In the ﬂyleaf: “Robbie from Mother.” Years later in the same hand: “This book has had hard usage on the Yangtze River, China. It was left under an open porthole in a storm.” (LS, 75) In the family drama of the poem, the poet looks for signs of his father’s psyche in his most private space; the interior of the bedroom should indicate, shell-like, the outline of Bob Lowell, who inhabited it. Bob Lowell’s characteristics matter because the poet’s journey into his father’s private room (a glimpse of territory as unfamiliar as it is familial) reﬂects on himself. Lowell consistently ties his identity to writing and to books; but it’s clear even without this association that the poet of “Father’s Bedroom” expects to read himself in his father’s book, because Lowell identiﬁes with his father in spite or because of his father’s ineﬀectuality. Their shared name, which the inscription in the ﬂyleaf highlights, represents their actual commensurability. Another poem, “Robert T. S. Lowell,” comprises a dialogue between father and son, and its title gives a single name to father, son, and poem (Day by Day, 80 – 81). (Lowell’s choice of names — Cal, Robert, “Bobby” to his family — made him self-conscious about his name and signature, so that he closes one letter to his aunt Sarah Winslow, “I don’t know how to sign myself.”)18 The possible double reference of the name “Robbie” at least “remind[s] us of the poet’s problematic relationship to his own mother”19 and at most “conceals the designation of one entity beneath the formally identical designation of another” (Simons, 107). The mirroring between the poet-detective and his suspect-father is both his emotional

42 |     

search warrant and evidence that implicates him in turn. The rhetorical silences of “Father’s Bedroom” — including its omission of the poet’s entry into the bedroom and its absence of statement and of the pronoun “I” throughout — can therefore be read as the poet’s attempts to eﬀace the appearance of his own image. He enters wearing gloves of objectivity so as not to leave ﬁngerprints. At the same time, “Father’s Bedroom” implies by its sequence of images the movement of the poet — in whose position the reader too is placed — from the door of the bedroom and across the sandpapered-smooth ﬂoor to the bedside table, where he lifts the lamp in order to pick up the book and read the two inscriptions in its ﬂyleaf. “Father’s Bedroom” is about writing Robert Lowell in both senses of Lowell’s wordplay. Its structure suggests inﬁnite regression: “Father’s Bedroom,” the piece of writing, refers to a glimpse of Lowell’s father’s bedroom, the place, which is also presented as a kind of writing, and which contains another piece of writing (Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan). Hearn’s book both refers to still another glimpse (of Japan; since the bedroom too is an unfamiliar glimpse, the room itself is metaphorically contained in the book it contains) and physically contains still more samples of writing (the two inscriptions). The poem ends within the inscriptions and begins with “blue threads as thin / as pen-writing”; the entire poem is suﬀused with this expressly inky blue. In this context the blue dots on the curtains — a print fabric pattern — evoke newsprint, and the ﬂoor, with its “sandpapered smoothness,” resembles paper. (Lowell revised in this direction from an earlier draft, in which he wrote “sand-blasted.”)20 Lowell’s suppression of rhetoric, which encourages readers to interpret the poem “really” as so much data, hides in plain sight the fact that the poem literalizes an “open book,” Lowell’s ﬁgure for confession. Similarly, the outcome of the poem’s familial drama literally depends on what is written within that open book, and the poem probes the identity of an absent person literally named “Robert Lowell.” If the poem were as transparent as some critics have believed, it would be the strictly literal interpretation of “Father’s Bedroom” that must perceive its commitment to the characteristics and limitations of writing. After surveying the objects in the room for signs of character, the poet looks inside the book at the ﬂyleaf, where we might expect a signature. Here it’s important to notice Lowell’s interest in the physical characteristics of books. Lowell’s ﬂyleaf bears a relation to “the summery veils of tissue paper” over the opening of “Cousin Cassie Julian-James’s memorial volume” (LS, 43). These ﬁne sheets are like the diﬀerence between art and life, or like the “blank befogging of forgetfulness” (LS, 13), which is,

Writing as a Child: Lowell’s Poetic Penmanship | 43

for Lowell, analogous to art’s selection of details. The tissues give Cassie’s photographs of furniture an “air of unhurried condescension” that never belonged to them in daily life (LS, 43). The writing paper in the contemporaneous memoir “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium” is a less cooperative medium, anthropomorphic and resistant: “On a sallow sheet of onionskin paper, whose semitransparency half revealed and half concealed the pink pads of my ﬁngers, I tried to write some lines of verse” (CP, 348). In a later poem, “Onion Skin,” Lowell’s typing paper is more alive than his writing: it “creased when [he] pulled the last sheet, and seemed to scream” (N, 43). Lowell uses the ﬂyleaf conceptually to shift emphasis from the idea of person implied by a signature to the idea of a text transmitted from one person to the next. True to form, Bob Lowell’s signature does not appear. The ambiguity of character in the room’s objects extends to the inscriptions on the ﬂyleaf. This ambiguity is proper to the ﬂyleaf, the blank sheet between the lining papers and the ﬁrst or last signature. Discussing the single page Nietzsche includes between the preface and beginning of Ecce Homo, Jacques Derrida remarks that its “topos, like (its) temporality, strangely dislocates . . . the time of autobiography.”21 Nietzsche declares on the ﬂyleaf that it is his forty-fourth birthday and that he will “tell [his] life to [him]self.”22 This unconventional inscription clariﬁes the ﬂyleaf’s ritual function of mediating between a book’s two potential signatories, its author and its holder. The ﬂyleaf defers to the holder and suggests the propriety of consent. The holder may sign in acknowledgement of the book’s ownership or of its transmittal to a third party. On the ﬂyleaf the holder asserts an attitude toward the book, either formally appropriating it or, out of deference or disinterest, making no mark. Nietzsche plays against this ritual by choosing this place to name himself both author and addressee (Derrida, 12). In “Father’s Bedroom” the ﬂyleaf becomes the theater of authenticity, where the identity of the signatory is on trial. The poem pointedly does not identify the writer of the inscriptions, and so calls its own authority into question. The two inscriptions vary in character: the ﬁrst is a conventional transmittal note, but the second aggressively incorporates the book into a narrative. The ﬁrst inscription is fragmentary and makes no argument, while the second editorializes (“hard usage”) and overstresses the exoticism of the book’s itinerary (“Yangtze River, China”). The ﬁrst inscription appears innocent; the second, less so, to the degree that it insists on its own evidentiary value. The very existence of the second inscription — one is the usual number — raises questions. Suppose Bob Lowell did bring the book through a storm on the Yangtze — what is the

44 |     

point of recording that fact? What is being insinuated and why? Who is insinuating this? Lowell testiﬁes only that “the same hand” produced both; the information he provides can imply but not determine the writer’s identity. If the inscriptions belonged clearly either to Bob Lowell or his mother, we would still have to account for Lowell’s evasiveness on this point (why this circumlocution, “the same hand,” why this absence of the name?), but even this is not the case. The ﬁrst inscription does not read “To Robbie,” but, like a signature even if it isn’t one, “Robbie.” Paul Breslin assumes that Robbie did write the inscriptions: “by these words, the father may have meant to express devil-may-care bravado” (P. Breslin, 67). Indeed, would Mrs. Lowell have returned “Years later” to a book she had given her son, a book she didn’t own and that she couldn’t have seen for some time, in order to explain its storm damage? Why would she care to? (At least two critics suggest that she intends a “motherly reproof” about the treatment of her gift.)23 On the other hand, would Bob Lowell, on receiving the book, have signed his name “Robbie” and noted that his mother had given it to him? Both possibilities seem implausible, which is why Lowell makes a point of noting that both inscriptions are “in the same hand.” Without that piece of information, the reader would assume that the two inscriptions were written by separate hands. This plausible hypothesis is the only one Robert Lowell rules out. The reader can conclude only that whoever the writer was, he or she felt compelled to record events, to the point at which that compulsion is most clearly recorded. It is Robert Lowell who best matches that description. As it happens, Lowell’s inscription in an edition of Herbert he gave to Elizabeth Bishop is, like the ones in “Father’s Bedroom,” documentary, aggressive, and melodramatic: THESE TWO VOLUMES GIVEN ONE AUGUST MORNING WITH ALL HIS HEART BY ROBERT T.S. LOWELL (4th) TO ELIZABETH BISHOP Robert Lowell 8/8/57 (“THE MOUTH WAS OPEN, BUT THOU COULDST NOT SING.”) (quoted in Kalstone, 175)

Writing as a Child: Lowell’s Poetic Penmanship | 45

Lowell betrays the characteristic impulse of the inscriptions in “Father’s Bedroom” to register facts and to deﬂate them by overemphasis. Because the qualities of Lowell’s writing parallel the qualities of the specimens, the question of the authorship of the inscriptions is linked to the question of the authorship of the poem and Life Studies itself. “Father’s Bedroom” answers the question by asking the reader to recognize the diﬀerence between inscriptions in a ﬂyleaf and its own representations of them. The ability to identify an author falls short of handwriting analysis just where print replaces script: print cannot produce that “same hand,” the sight of which would impart the illusion of authenticity. Lowell makes this point in “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium,” the memoir upon which “Father’s Bedroom” draws. The passage leading to the inscriptions reads: “On the ﬂyleaf my Grandmother Lowell had written: ‘Rob, from Mother. September 1908.’ The book had originally been given her by someone named Alice on January 23, 1908. This, too, was noted down. On another page, she had written: ‘This book had hard usage on the Yangtsze River, China, when R.T.S.L. was on the gunboat Villalobos. It was left under an open porthole in a storm’ ” (CP, 355). This time Lowell speciﬁes the author of the two inscriptions, but not of the third inscription naming “Alice.” “This, too, was noted down” — by whom? If we suppose that Mrs. Lowell notes it since she makes the other notes, then we ﬁnd here the less likely sounding possibility in “Father’s Bedroom.” The common-sense logic that in “Father’s Bedroom” averts the harder reading, in which the book’s recipient inscribes its transmission, leads in “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium” to that very reading. But the point is that the dubiety of authorship would not clear up if Lowell did name the writer of each and every inscription. The concentric structure of these pieces of writing about writing always suggests the further question, Who notes down that this was noted down? Not the omitted name but the very fact that this is a printed text precludes the illusion of authenticity, whether Lowell’s or anyone else’s; the missing name merely ﬁgures that lack of authority. A face-value reading of “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium” similarly overturns the face-value reading of Bob Lowell’s bedroom generally as a revelation, however anticlimactic, of Bob Lowell’s character. “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium” has this to report about the room’s decor: “the blueness of the bedroom had been achieved by Mother through an accumulation of inconspicuous touches” (CP, 355). Bob Lowell, whose room it is, is not the author of the bedroom; Mother (la femme militaire) wrote it, as the femmes militaires of the Brimmer School revise Lowell’s signature, as Cousin Cassie tells Major Myers’s story.

46 |     

The pattern of feminine writerly initiative is the best evidence internal to Life Studies that Bob Lowell’s mother writes the inscriptions. The tone of the inscriptions resembles Cassie’s when she promotes Myers’s virility, Miss Manice’s when she argues for masculine supremacy, and Charlotte Lowell’s when she exclaims to her young son, “Oh Bobby, it’s such a comfort to have a man in the house” (LS, 24). Absence best characterized Lowell’s father, whose “recessiveness, within the family portrait,” Lowell notes, “was not, alas, an accidental aspect . . . but the genuine and enduring placement at all times” (CP, 295).24 Since “Father’s Bedroom” investigates the possibility of writing “Robert Lowell,” this ﬁnding puts an ironic end to this investigation; the would-be trail to a primal scene ends with a whimper, or with an “oval Lowell smile” (LS, 73). In Lowell’s autographical and familial allegory, the mother’s emergence from behind the father carries the child from one kind of writing to another. Despite the traditional association between women and matter as opposed to symbol, this pattern is implicit in Freud’s assertion that early education is the province of women who transmit the insights of literature to children in folkloric forms. Nietzsche makes a comparable argument in Ecce Homo: “I am, to express it in the form of a riddle [Rätselform], already dead as my father [als mein Vater bereits gestorben], while as my mother, I am still living and becoming old [als meine Mutter lebe ich noch und werde alt ]” (Nietzsche, 222). Derrida writes that “you will not be able to hear and understand [Nietzsche’s] name unless . . . attuned to the name of the dead man and the living feminine” (Derrida, 16). Since “only the name can inherit,” the name “is always and a priori a dead man’s name,” the name of a father “already dead . . . during his own life” (Derrida, 17). Indeed, Day by Day makes the point that Bob Lowell’s own father — Robert’s grandfather, also named “Robert T. S. Lowell” — has literally “died before [Bob] was born” (Day by Day, 80). We should also remind ourselves of the absence in Cassie’s pamphlet of Major Myers’s father. Bob Lowell is a priori dead as well, in the sense that “recessiveness” is his “enduring placement”; but in “Father’s Bedroom” he is twice dead. An earlier draft, “Beverly Farms after Father’s Death,” conﬁrms what the poem’s atmosphere insinuates, that the scene takes place after his literal demise. His corpse lies on the bed: on my Father’s bed . . . lay that cold thing, his body — pink, at ease, obedient,

Writing as a Child: Lowell’s Poetic Penmanship | 47

aﬀectionate, though unable to keep its eyes open.25 Lowell’s suppression of his father’s death — the absence in the text of his ﬁnal absence — emphasizes his a priori death during life. The products of the invisible ﬁgure of the mother-writer ﬁll in the negations of “Robert Lowell,” as though in “a pact or alliance with the living language and language of the living feminine against death, against the dead” (Derrida, 21). Again, for Lowell as for Nietzsche, the act of writing is feminine in that the mother corrects, displaces, and outlives the father, even when what is written is the father’s name or written in his name. As Bob Lowell’s life is unconvincing, so is Charlotte’s death. It is typical of Charlotte to be pervasive, even invasive. So in “Father’s Bedroom” she seems absent because she is everywhere, because every stroke of “pen-writing” in the room belongs to her. Like a reality too large to be perceived, Charlotte is never present but always and only omnipresent as the writing that, by saturating “Father’s Bedroom,” insinuates the a priori death of the entity named “Robert Lowell.”

Description without Signiﬁcance Lowell’s thoughts about handwriting illuminate the gendered tension between meaning and its material manifestations. Michael Fried, reﬂecting upon material and referential capacities of writing in Stephen Crane, argues that in Crane’s prose “the materiality of writing turns out to be simultaneously elicited and repressed” because “were that materiality to come unimpededly to the surface . . . the writing in question would cease to be writing and would become mere mark” (Fried, xiv). Indeed, writing bears meaning to the extent that it is not merely material. Handwriting, Lowell points out, identiﬁes its writer by its nonmeaningful qualities alone: the content of the writing has nothing to do with the process of identiﬁcation. Similarly, Unfamiliar Japan is evidence of Bob Lowell’s whereabouts not because of what it says — it’s about Japan, not China — but because of its physical damage. Writing embodies to the extent that it is material and not meaningful, and means to the precise extent that it exceeds its material status. The requirements of Lowell’s writing — to extend the self and to “say what happened” — can occur simultaneously, but cannot conceptually merge. For Lowell, writing is therefore an embarrassed and discontinuous aﬀair. The writing of adults — in Lowell’s world, the writing of women —

48 |     

attempts to force the eﬀect of personality through artiﬁce, as when Charlotte expresses for Bob interests he does not possess. Looking on ironically and enviously at the nerve of feminine realism, Lowell writes not as a woman but as a child, “unable to align / his toppling, elephantine script, / the hieroglyphic letters / he sent home” (Day by Day, 85). His narrative of writing, reﬂecting his parents’ marriage, is a tragicomic story of continued incompatibility. The semantic and material aspects of the signature “Robert Lowell” assume and are intended to support one another: the material qualities of “Robert Lowell” as handwriting are supposed to instance the person of that name, and the name “Robert Lowell” is supposed to label the source of the handwriting. The former without the latter is blind, and the latter without the former is empty. Yet the aspect of the materiality (and thus of the instantiation) of “Robert Lowell” must alternate with that of its referentiality as a name. Writing splits along, and is formed by, this duality. It is safest to grasp at credibility by means of what Day by Day calls “universal consolatory / description without signiﬁcance” (Day by Day, 120), particulars from which the reader learns little: “In the realistic memory / the memorable must be foregone” (Day by Day, 85). The illusion of reference is strongest where signiﬁcance is weakest; the power to confess is most visible when it remains hypothetical, where the motive to confess is absent. The physical position of Unfamiliar Japan (under the lamp) oﬀers a parable of this mutual exclusivity. The lamp by the bedside is there for reading: the book lies beneath the lamp to raise it “a few / inches,” to a height at which it sheds light more eﬃciently. Unfamiliar Japan’s usefulness and its meaningfulness are at odds: remove the book from the lamp and it’s too dark to read perfectly; put it back and there’s perfect readability, but nothing to read. Similarly, the real writing that a signature represents, even if it existed, could be expressed only where the signature’s content was not expressed — where there was no illusion of meaning. It would be possible for Lowell to avoid these problems by avoiding the pursuit of self-extension, and Lowell admires poets who choose this option. But for Lowell it is not an option, because then he would not be “really writ[ing].” Writing just is the double bind that the autographical claim entails. Lowell might “want to make / something imagined, not recalled,” but “can only tell [his] own story.” To do otherwise would be to join “Mallarmé who had the good fortune / to ﬁnd a style that made writing impossible” (Day by Day, 120).

Writing as a Child: Lowell’s Poetic Penmanship | 49

Notes 1. David Kalstone, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, ed. Robert Hemenway (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 175. Subsequent references appear in the text. 2. Robert Lowell Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1905 (1522). 3. Robert Lowell, “Life Studies” and “For the Union Dead” (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964), 25. Subsequent references will appear in the text abbreviated LS. 4. Robert Lowell, Day by Day (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 121. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 5. On the conceptual implications of handwriting and signature, see Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disﬁguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Peggy Kamuf, Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). Subsequent references appear in the text. 6. Terri Witek remarks on Lowell’s need “to include everything and its opposite in his rendering of experience, acted out in the autobiographical prose by the conﬂicting pulls of Mother and Father” (Robert Lowell and “Life Studies”: Revising the Self [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993], 68). Subsequent references will appear in the text. 7. The absurdity alone of Lowell’s poems, even his early poems, makes it questionable to claim that his work is “fruitfully exercised by those appurtenances of the Logos Emerson foreswore” (Eliza New, Regenerate Lyric: Theolog y and Innovation in American Poetry [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 3). 8. Robert Lowell, History (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 194. 9. Robert Lowell, Collected Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 357. Subsequent references will appear in the text abbreviated CP. 10. For alternative views of Life Studies in Lowell’s poetic development, see Stephen Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 84 – 133; Vereen Bell, Robert Lowell: The Nihilist as Hero (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); and Stephen Yenser, Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975) 118 – 64. On the gender dynamics of the Lowell family, see especially Katherine Wallingford, Robert Lowell’s Language of the Self (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 91 – 95, and Witek, 88 – 116. 11. See also Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982), 48. Subsequent references appear in the text. 12. See Lorrie Goldensohn, Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 167. 13. James Russell Lowell’s linguistically gifted sister, Mary Traill Spence Lowell,

50 |      wrote poetry, prose, and an abolitionist account of African American life (David Heymann, American Aristocracy: The Lives and Times of James Russell, Amy, and Robert Lowell [New York: Dodd, Mead: 1980], 39, 145); his ﬁrst wife, Maria White, belonged to a group of literary women who met regularly at the home of Margaret Fuller (Heymann, 62). James Russell also received his early education at a girls’ school (Heymann, 56). 14. Robert Lowell, Notebook, 3rd ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 42 – 43. Subsequent references will appear in the text abbreviated N. 15. Lowell’s version of Rilke’s “The Cadet Picture of My Father” stresses a similar ambiguity: “There’s absence in the eyes. The brow’s in touch / with something far. Now distant boyishness / and seduction shadow his enormous lips, / the slender aristocratic uniform” (Imitations [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961], 98). 16. Stephen Matterson, Berryman and Lowell: The Art of Losing (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1988), 62. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 17. Stephen Matterson observes, “In ‘Father’s Bedroom’ the list of objects does not amount to a symbolic discourse representative of the dead father; the things merely exist on a material level” (Matterson, 63). James Breslin uses “Father’s Bedroom” to support his claim that Life Studies’ “objects become the rocklike ground upon which writing and the self can be rebuilt” (From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945 – 1965 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985], 132): “In Lowell’s book physical objects — say, the items in ‘Father’s Bedroom’ — possess a matter-of-fact literalness” (J. Breslin, 140). Breslin mistakes the apparent randomness of the objects depicted with randomness in the poem; even Matterson, though he understands Lowell’s negative message — the objects are telling in the way they are not telling — underestimates Lowell’s pointedness. The poem is given its only extended treatment by John Simons in “Mise en abyme and Tradition in Two New England Poems” ( Journal of American Studies 21 [1987]: 104 – 8). Subsequent references appear in the text. 18. Robert Lowell to Sarah Winslow, March 1937; Robert Lowell Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1905 (1525). 19. Paul Breslin, The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 66. Subsequent references appear in the text. 20. Robert Lowell Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1905 (2197). 21. Jacques Derrida, “Otobiographies: The Teaching of and the Politics of the Proper Name,” trans. Avital Ronell, in The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie V. McDonald (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 11. Subsequent references appear in the text. 22. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 221. Subsequent references appear in the text. 23. Lawrence Kramer assumes that Bob Lowell’s mother writes both inscriptions, and reads the second as “infantaliz[ing] the elder Lowell” and “deprecat[ing]

Writing as a Child: Lowell’s Poetic Penmanship | 51 the naval episode” in “motherly reproof” (“Freud and the Skunks: Genre and Language in Life Studies,” in Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry, ed. Stephen Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 86); Williamson hears “an abiding strain of motherly reproach” (Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974], 72). 24. Anne Dick, Lowell’s ﬁrst ﬁancée, describes her ﬁrst meeting with Bob Lowell in this way: “There they were, at the door. Mr. Lowell had the most inane smile on his face. He was in the background. He was like some kind of ﬂabby Halloween pumpkin, long after Halloween, long after it had any point” (Hamilton, 38). 25. Robert Lowell Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1905 (2197). Lowell would eventually turn parts of this draft into three separate poems: “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms,” “For Sale,” and “Father’s Bedroom.” The phrases describing Bob Lowell’s corpse are drawn from “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium,” in which Lowell describes his father in his casket (CP, 357).

Bibliography Axelrod, Stephen Gould. Robert Lowell: Life and Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. Bell, Vereen. Robert Lowell: The Nihilist as Hero. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Breslin, James E. B. From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945 – 1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Breslin, Paul. The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. “Otobiographies: The Teaching of and the Politics of the Proper Name.” Translated by Avital Ronell. In The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, edited by Christie V. McDonald. New York: Schocken Books, 1985. Fried, Michael. Realism, Writing, Disﬁguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Goldberg, Jonathan. Writing Matter: From the Hands of the Renaissance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Goldensohn, Lorrie. Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1982. Hartman, Geoﬀrey. “Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry.” In From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, edited by Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom, 389 – 414. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Heymann, C. David. American Aristocracy: The Lives and Times of James Russell, Amy, and Robert Lowell. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980. Kalstone, David. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert

52 |      Lowell, edited by Robert Hemenway. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. Kamuf, Peggy. Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Kramer, Lawrence. “Freud and the Skunks: Genre and Language in Life Studies.” In Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry, edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese, 80 – 98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Lowell, Robert. Collected Prose. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987. ———. Day by Day. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. ———. History. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. ———. Imitations. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961. ———. “Life Studies” and “For the Union Dead.” New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964. ———. Notebook. 3rd ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970. ———. Notebook 1967 – 68. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. Matterson, Stephen. Berryman and Lowell: The Art of Losing. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1988. Mills-Courts, Karen. Poetry as Epitaph: Representation and Poetic Language. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. New, Elisa. Regenerate Lyric: Theolog y and Innovation in American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1989. Simons, John. “Mise en abyme and Tradition in Two New England Poems.” Journal of American Studies 21 (1987): 104 – 8. Wallingford, Katharine. Robert Lowell’s Language of the Self. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Williamson, Alan. Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974. Witek, Terri. Robert Lowell and “Life Studies”: Revising the Self. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. Yenser, Stephen. Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975.

But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal. — John Ashbery, “Soonest Mended” Let us then by way of a very elementary beginning lay before you a photograph — a crudely coloured photograph — of your world as it appears to us who see it from the threshold of the private house; through the shadow of the veil that St. Paul still lays upon our eyes; from the bridge which connects the private house with the world of public life. — Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

3

Elizabeth Bishop’s Theater of War Susan Rosenbaum

At this moment in the history of Elizabeth Bishop scholarship, it is a truism that one of Bishop’s greatest subjects was war — whether rendered explicitly, as in “Roosters,” or obliquely, through the eﬀects of human aggression on what would seem to be far removed from war, a baby rabbit transformed, by the light of illegal ﬁre balloons, into “a handful of intangible ash / with ﬁxed, ignited eyes” (“The Armadillo”). Susan Schweik, Margaret Dickie, and Camille Roman in particular have argued that Bishop’s response to war is central to her poetics and politics, guiding her critique of militarism, patriarchy, and “territorial aggression” against the natural and human worlds.1 Although few Bishop poems could be classiﬁed narrowly as war poems, as Susan Schweik states of North and South, “wars are everywhere” (Schweik, 234); or as Camille Roman puts it, “war is not a marked space but can be anywhere” (Roman, 69). This scholarship has crucially countered the view of Bishop as a quietist poet, limited by gendered conventions of decorum from writing explicitly political war poetry: the Bishop who emerges is subtly yet critically engaged with the violence and destruction of twentieth-century warfare. While I admire this scholarship and will draw on many of its insights here, I think that we have emphasized Bishop’s critique of militarism at the expense of one of her central insights into writing about war: the limits of modern war poetry,

54 |     

including her own. While Bishop connects these limits to a culture and tradition of sensibility in which her poetry is complexly implicated, most critics have overlooked — or more pointedly, dismissed — her sentimental inheritances.2 I will show how Bishop’s poetry that engages war turns its critical blade inward as well as outward, confronting its own investments in the representation of and the market for suﬀering; further, I argue that this is a mode of reﬂection fundamental, not foreign, to the sentimental tradition, one that reveals how deeply aﬀective culture has shaped the kinds of debates that accompany verbal and visual representations of war. The arguments for Bishop’s critique of war hinge on reading her as a modernist who rejects the sentimental treatment of war, speciﬁcally foremothers such as the British romantic poet Felicia Hemans, with Bishop’s poem “Casabianca” (1936) advanced as a case in point: “Casabianca” has been read almost universally as an ironic and damning restaging of Hemans’s poem (1826) of the same name (though often identiﬁed by its ﬁrst line as “The boy stood on the burning deck”).3 Like nineteenth-century women poets in the sentimental tradition such as Hemans, and like her contemporaries Denise Levertov and Adrienne Rich, Bishop uses “war as metaphor for conﬂicts in the home or bedroom or psyche” (Schweik, 234), connecting the personal and the political spheres.4 However, critics have assumed that modernist irony distances Bishop from the “problems” of sentiment attributed to nineteenth-century women’s poetry. For instance, Susan Schweik argues that the “matrix” of Hemans’s poem is “the cliché of cliché itself, the cliché of the bad foremother who is addicted to victimization, who vicariously identiﬁes with the suﬀering of (male) others, who in her own way gloriﬁes war, and whose water is not lovely” (Schweik, 241). Hemans’s “Casabianca” here functions as a synecdoche for the problems with sentimental literature more generally, as described by Ann Douglas and Lauren Berlant: the sentimental writer represents society’s victims and their suﬀering, but to conservative ends, maintaining rather than subverting the status quo, ignoring the privileges that enable the sentimental gaze, and proﬁting from the market for others’ pain.5 Schweik articulates a widely shared view when she suggests that Bishop’s irony rescues her from these faults: Bishop “expose[s] these vicarious operations . . . deﬁnitively linking private loss and masochism to martial myth” (Schweik, 239). This reading of Bishop’s use of irony is guided by what Suzanne Clark calls modernist antisentimentalism, a bias pervasive in Bishop scholarship.6 The proclivity to read her as antisentimental ironist not only simpliﬁes the complex (even ironic) stances toward sentiment among earlier women

Elizabeth Bishop’s Theater of War | 55

writers, but has caused us to simplify modernist writers’ engagements with their sentimental inheritances. Bishop scholars continue to conﬂate modernist irony with a rejection of sentimental culture, assuming that irony distinguishes author from persona and enables critical distance — a kind of moral insulation — from the problems of vicarious feeling and its absorption in a marketplace. I argue here that irony does not remove modernist writers from the sentimental tradition but rather constitutes a position within this historical discourse of poetic aﬀect. The antisentimental bias has resulted in a rigidiﬁed understanding of irony’s aims and eﬀects: positioning modernism (early and late) as part of a longer culture of sensibility can help us to see that conventions of irony work toward varied ends in sentimental culture. Bishop’s use of irony often serves to implicate the poet in, rather than to remove her from, the spectacle and economy of suﬀering, reminding us that ironic critique can be self-directed as well as deﬂective. In short, Bishop’s war poetry asks us to reconsider the relationship between modernism and aﬀective culture. Bishop’s poetry engages long-standing debates about the role and political eﬃcacy of representations of suﬀering, debates that are fundamental to sentimental culture, that did not end with modernism, and that would become especially pressing during the Vietnam War. Indeed, the Vietnam War made politics unavoidable for poets in the United States; as Subarno Chattarji points out, “At no other comparable period in American history, not even during the Civil War . . . was poetry such a major mode of protest.”7 Many of Bishop’s contemporaries used their poetry to further the ends of the antiwar movement, rendering the poet’s representations of the Vietnam War and its victims a fervent issue. Bishop’s discussion of Denise Levertov’s Relearning the Alphabet (1970), in her unpublished 1970 “Notes for Poetry Reviews,” suggests how deeply the general trend toward politicized poetry had aﬀected her: “It is unfair to single out Miss Levertov as an example, since many other poets of her generation do the same thing; but when she starts a poem ‘Biafra. Biafra. Biafra.’ one’s heart sinks, and not because of the suﬀering in Biafra, alas. A kind of resentment comes over one, ‘Oh, I’m not up to feeling that much; I can’t . . .’ . . . When have politics ever made good poems? Miss Levertov has great gifts. The poems that she apparently considers frivolous, and calls ‘Embroideries’ for example, are much more real.”8 Levertov was one of the most politically committed poets of the Vietnam War – era,9 and Relearning the Alphabet discusses not only the famine in Biafra but the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement, the Detroit riots, and the civil rights movement — a chosen combination

56 |     

of topics that, “at the risk of appearing ivory-towerish, cold hearted, reactionary, pro-war, everything wrong,” Bishop planned to discuss in her proposed review under the rubric “Against the Topical” or “Dangers of the Topical.” Bishop’s primary response to Levertov’s poem about Biafra is not sympathy for the suﬀering of others, but resentment. Her statement, “I’m not up to feeling that much; I can’t . . . ,” implies the diﬃculty and even the pointlessness of the exercise, of asking poetry to bridge the reader’s situation and that of famished and disease-ridden Biafrans; even if Bishop had wanted to feel that much, she “can’t” — the distance and diﬀerence in perspective and experience suggest a gap that vicarious feeling cannot close. Curiously, the inability to feel what one “should” feel when viewing images of the plight of Biafrans, as well as the frustration with what vicarious feeling can and cannot accomplish, is the subject of Levertov’s poem about Biafra (“The Gulf”). I suggest that while Bishop’s approach to representations of suﬀering diﬀered from Levertov’s in certain respects, “The Gulf” elicited an emotional response because Levertov had put her ﬁnger on the very trials and misgivings in writing about war that troubled Bishop, and that she would address in her poem “12 O’Clock News” (1973). This shared frustration may help to explain why Bishop never published the poetry review. Bishop’s resentment is not simply directed at Levertov’s didacticism or topicality, in other words, but voices a more general frustration with the aims and eﬀects of war poetry. In this light, Bishop’s reading of Levertov suggests grave doubts about whether poetry — not just didactic poetry — can be an adequate or desirable response to war and suﬀering. Bishop implies that there are other, better media through which to address politics, and that the poet must not overlook aesthetics: “When have politics ever made good poems?” More pointedly, she wondered what Levertov was accomplishing: “but is it poetry and is it not just boring the already convinced? oh dear, oh dear, so nice, so humorless, so right, so boring — ” (“Notes,” 4). Similarly, in a letter to Lloyd Frankenberg, a conscientious objector during World War II, whose paciﬁst views were shaped by the British World War I poet Wilfred Owen, Bishop wrote, “I only wish poetry hadn’t to be brought in at all — but then I suppose there’s no use in protecting it, either.”10 Admittedly, this last concession sounds the note of resignation, but more importantly, it gives us a poet deep in the midst of ambivalent self-dialogue. To account for the politics of Bishop’s engagement with war poetry, we need to grapple with such statements more explicitly — to what extent do they ask us to reconceive our understanding of Bishop’s response to

Elizabeth Bishop’s Theater of War | 57

war? Critics have tended to back away from such statements, to read them as evidence of Bishop’s aesthetic conservatism, or to recuperate them as evidence of Bishop’s oblique, subversive engagement with militarism.11 I want to shift this discussion altogether: The complexity of the politics of Bishop’s war poetry can best be understood as a product of the culture of sensibility. While Bishop articulates clear feminist beliefs, her acute awareness of poetry’s implication in a sentimental economy rendered any form of political advocacy through poetry a suspect endeavor.12 I read much of her late poetry as a meditation on the particular kinds of complicities elicited from the poet and the average citizen who follow — or, in the case of the Vietnam War, who watch — the war from the home front: Bishop confronts the possibility that she is indeed a poet “addicted to victimization, who vicariously identiﬁes with the suﬀering of (male) others, [and] who in her own way gloriﬁes war” (to rehearse Schweik’s formula, 241). While I think it is a mistake to return to the view of Bishop as a quietist, genteel poet — her awareness of the “risk” of being regarded as such indicates that she was not — I will argue that any understanding of her poetry’s critique of war must account for her reﬂections on the compromised investments of such endeavors. Bishop is critical of representations of suﬀering that distance the viewer or reader from implication in the spectacle of suﬀering. As she remarked of her peers in her “Notes for Poetry Reviews”: “a too easy irony — I’m sick of it” (“Notes,” 4). While Bishop’s irony contributes to the overt staginess and rhetorical self-reﬂexivity of many of her poems that engage war,13 I read this heightened artiﬁce not as a means of distancing the poet or reader from what’s being staged, but rather, as a means of interrogating and even collapsing such distance. Bishop’s use of irony has much in common with that of the French surrealists, whose playful aesthetic would profoundly shape post-1945 conceptual art and the poetry of the “middle generation,” particularly the work of New York School poets such as John Ashbery.14 Irony functions less to separate the audience from what they read or see than to make their perspective integral to the work of art; it does so by drawing attention to the frames that shape how representations are received, deﬁned, and valued — the institutional contexts of exhibition and reception, the technologies of art’s reproduction and dissemination, the national and historical assumptions that may inﬂuence one’s particular standpoint.15 Bishop inherits from the sentimental tradition not only the use of war as metaphor, then, but a self-reﬂexive engagement with the connections between poetic spectatorship and the war economy. As Julie Ellison com-

58 |     

ments, “Sentiment is not simply a taste for pathos. The ambivalent culture of vicariousness can reﬂect on itself.”16 If the “middle generation” of American poets works to expose the interpenetration of private and public spheres, the personal as index of the public and political, Bishop would reveal this understanding of identity to be a double-edged sword: the personal — and in turn, the lyric — is not just deﬁned by, but is implicated in, wartime economies and ideologies.17 In the remainder of this essay I discuss Bishop’s Vietnam War – era poem “12 O’Clock News,” which explores how the poet’s desk is connected to the war theater, and which responds to a new “theater” of war in the Vietnam War era, the television set.18 As it ﬁrst appeared in the New Yorker (1973) and later in Geography III (1976), “12 O’Clock News” is a prose poem consisting of two columns. In the left-hand column, the poem lists objects one might ﬁnd on a desk: a lamp, a typewriter, envelopes, a bottle of ink, a pile of manuscripts, a typed sheet, an ashtray, an eraser. The right-hand column consists of prose paragraphs which correspond to each desk item; however, these items are described from the perspective of a miniaturized narrator who appears to be a television news reporter, and who describes the desk items as features of a vast, war-torn landscape. For instance, the speaker describes an ashtray as “a sort of dugout, possibly a shell crater, a ‘nest’ of soldiers. They lie heaped together, wearing the camouﬂage ‘battle dress’ intended for ‘winter warfare.’ ”19 The poem has been read as a “clever” exercise, a critique of Western imperialism and of the American media’s role in the Vietnam War; most critics have understood the title “12 O’Clock News” to refer to the body counts reported on the nightly news.20 As the word “clever” suggests, critics see the poem as a puzzle that asks the reader to ﬁgure out the relationship between the list of desk items and the prose descriptions; most readers assume that this “key,” once grasped, unlocks the poem’s meaning. Critics have uniformly depicted the relationship between the two columns as one of ironic, even satiric, undercutting of the speaker-newscaster’s perspective, arguing that the identiﬁcation of the desk items asks the reader to see through the reporter’s distorted perspective of these items. In exposing the arrogant, self-interested agenda that governs the speaker’s self-proclaimed “superior vantage point,” Bishop uses irony to distinguish her perspective from that of the speaker, and by extension, from the Western news media and American military actions in Vietnam. Readers who assume Bishop’s ironic distance implicitly align themselves with Bishop’s perspective, taking up the “superior vantage point” over the

Elizabeth Bishop’s Theater of War | 59

wartime news media. However, in typical Bishop fashion, the poem is interested in destabilizing such vantage points, not in “boring the already convinced.”21 The poem conspicuously lacks instructions about how to connect the two columns, and thus the assumption that the elaborate rhetorical structure and manipulation of scale constitute Bishop’s attempt to comment ironically on the narrator-reporter’s perspective is but one possible reading. Perspective is surely put into question in this poem, but as I will show, the poem explores and problematizes, rather than resolves, how to connect the two columns. It does so by oﬀering diﬀerent angles of vision on the spectacle of war. If the poem seems to invite ironic distance from the scenes of battle on the desktop — allowing us to belittle the speaker’s distortions and sympathize with war’s victims — it also collapses that distance, asking us to align ourselves with the speaker’s perspective, to become immersed in the gigantic battleﬁeld. More speciﬁcally, the complexity of perspective qualiﬁes any easy distinction between the point of view of the poet and that of the narrator-reporter, suggesting that the poet, like the reporter, can not easily sever her vantage of perception and judgment from national interests. Bishop’s experience of the Vietnam War was far removed from that of a roving television reporter in the ﬁeld, yet she was certainly a spectator of such news reports, and was aware of their impact. As Susan Sontag argues, “It was in Vietnam that television became the deﬁning medium for showing images of war,” and many felt that the shocking nature of such images contributed to the antiwar movement.22 Television rivaled photography as what Woolf (in my epigraph above) called “the bridge which connects the private house with the world of public life”: through television, the images and violence of war were brought into the home, blurring boundaries between living room and military front, actor and soldier. Television was both window and miniature theater, and watching news reports from Vietnam — a macabre theatrical — “became one of the western world’s most compulsive pastimes.”23 Television, however, did not originate an understanding of war as theater; as Paul Fussell reminds us, war and theater had long been linked for good reason: If killing and avoiding being killed are the ultimate melodramatic actions, then military training is very largely training in melodrama. . . . It is thus the very hazard of military situations that turns them theatrical. And it is their utter unthinkableness: it is impossible for a participant to

60 |     

believe that he is taking part in such murderous proceedings in his own character. The whole thing is too grossly farcical, perverse, cruel, and absurd to be credited as a form of “real life.” Seeing warfare as theater provides a psychic escape for the participant: with a suﬃcient sense of theater, he can perform his duties without implicating his “real” self and without impairing his innermost conviction that the world is still a rational place. (Fussell, 191 – 92) The television screen — and by extension, the television audience — formalized and extended the reach of what had always been, for the soldier, a theatrical endeavor. Through television, the military understanding of “theater of war” as a “scene or ﬁeld of action” 24 and the civilian understanding of “theater” as visual spectacle coincided in discomﬁting ways. If television enabled visual intimacy with scenes of war, it also enabled alienation from, even indiﬀerence to, the spectacle of suﬀering: as Subarno Chattarji argues, “Television allowed the viewer to spectate without responsibility, to maintain a comfortable distance from the war” (Chattarji, 58). Bishop’s exploration of perspective in “12 O’Clock News” is connected to the poet-spectator’s experience of watching the war on television, which permits a simultaneous sense of estrangement from and vicarious participation in the war theater. More pointedly, television’s circulation and marketing of images of war and violence, coupled with the act of watching this spectacle — the voyeuristic consumption of suﬀering — are of a piece with, indeed an extension of, a sentimental tradition of war representation. If “12 O’Clock News” comments on the televising of war as a surreal kind of theater, it works to destabilize the poet-spectator’s sense of “comfortable distance” from that theater: what seems to be the superior vantage point can quickly shift, like the moving sand in “Sandpiper” or the burning deck in “Casabianca” — with poet, newscaster, and reader all becoming participants in the drama. While the Vietnam War inﬂuenced the ﬁnal version of “12 O’Clock News,” its origins can be traced back to the late 1930s, and drafts from the 1950s reveal that Bishop had her own desk and writing anxieties in mind.25 Brett Millier notes that Bishop had worked with the ideas and images that would become “12 O’Clock News” from her time at Vassar College. While in New York City in 1937, Bishop recorded her dreams, and many “expressed anxiety about writing”; one included “sleeping on a giant typewriter” and may have inﬂuenced the poem (Millier, 121). In 1950, Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop’s Theater of War | 61

completed several drafts of the poem, which she titled variously “Little Exercise” and “Desk at Night.” She did not revise the poem again until the early 1970s, when she completed a substantially expanded version ﬁrst titled “Late News” (with “from the desk” crossed out), “News Report,” and in its ﬁnal draft in the fall of 1972, “12 O’Clock News.”26 Hence, in its initial drafts, this poem was obviously not a commentary on Vietnam; Bishop remarked in an interview with George Starbuck that the early version “had nothing to do with Viet Nam or any particular war . . . , it was just fantasy. This is the way things catch up with you” (Schwartz and Estess, 320). As Camille Roman points out, most readers of “12 O’Clock News,” unaware of the 1950s drafts, have assumed that the desk items belong to the news reporter. Not only did Bishop have her own desk and writing anxieties in mind, but her comment to Starbuck suggests that she noted the resonance between the Vietnam War “news” and her “fantasy” about her desk. Bishop draws on the military understanding of “theater of war” in both early and late drafts of the poem: the speaker describes each item on or region of the desktop as a distinct part of the war landscape, and in the 1972 draft, Bishop visually demarcated these “regions” by giving each a separate prose paragraph. If the televising of the Vietnam War prompted Bishop to revisit the war theater as it shapes the poet’s desk, she was not alone: since Vietnam, poetry about watching war on TV has become a genre in its own right.27 Given Bishop’s criticism of Denise Levertov, it’s worth comparing “12 O’Clock News” with Levertov’s interpretation of the theater of war in her contemporaneous poem “Scenario” (1972): The theater of war. Oﬀstage A cast of thousands weeping. Left center, well-lit, a mound of unburied bodies, or parts of bodies. Right, near some dead bamboo that serves as wings, a whole body, on which a splash of napalm is working. Enter the Bride. She has one breast, one eye, half of her scalp is bald.

62 |     

She hobbles towards center front. Enter the Bridegroom, a young soldier, thin, but without visible wounds. He sees her. Slowly at ﬁrst, then faster and faster, he begins to shudder, to shudder, to ripple with shudders. Curtain.28 Levertov’s use of the term “theater of war” foregrounds the pretense of the military’s use of this metaphor by literalizing it. Describing the scene of horror as if it actually took place on stage, with actors, set, dramatic action, narrative arc, and ﬁnal curtain, the poem exposes the brutality that lies beneath oﬃcial discourse about the war and the massive suﬀering (“A cast of thousands”) that war causes “oﬀstage.” The poem stages war as a romance gone awry,29 a mockery of the purported values that the war is supposed to defend: the groom’s shudders — which may be a response to seeing his bride’s wounds, a physical reaction to his own invisible wounds, or a parody of consummation — model the kind of shudders Levertov seeks to elicit from her readers. However, as Chattarji points out, the poem “seems to contain the horror of the war in a manner similar to that of military strategists. ‘Scenario’ is dominated by the silence of its victims and forced participants: the ‘other’ is imaged, but has no voice” (Chattarji, 74). The graphic description of bodily suﬀering caused by napalm recalls the kinds of images made prevalent by television and photojournalism during the Vietnam War. Chattarji’s insight raises the question: what is the poem’s commentary on its own use of theatrics and visual iconography? In choosing to title the poem “Scenario” and to structure the poem as a script that unfolds before the reader’s “eyes,” the poet is clearly using theatrical tropes, but does the poem implicate its language in or distinguish it from the logic of military theatrics? It is possible that Levertov presents suﬀering as a visual drama so as to position both poet and reader in front of the television screen, emphasizing the spectator’s implication in war theatrics. It is also possible that she does not implicate poem or reader in the spectacle of war, but rather, that her ironic commentary on the theater of suﬀering is guided by a sense of moral righteousness and indignation, meant to elicit the reader’s sympathy for war’s victims and to inspire outrage at American military policy. Fairly or not, Bishop suspected that Levertov’s protest poetry used graphic

Elizabeth Bishop’s Theater of War | 63

imagery to solicit sympathy, and this imputed aim informed Bishop’s sense of the “Dangers of the Topical.” Susan Sontag has eloquently pointed out the limits of such sympathy:30 “The imaginary proximity to the suﬀering inﬂicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the faraway suﬀerers — seen close-up on the television screen — and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystiﬁcation of our real relations to power. So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suﬀering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent — if not an inappropriate — response” (Regarding, 102). Like Sontag, Bishop was quite suspicious of the poet’s ironic distance from the war theater, and of sympathy for war’s victims as an appropriate or adequate response to war.31 Bishop’s “12 O’Clock News” diﬀers from Levertov’s “Scenario,” and from the conventional academic critique of sympathy, in that it explicitly presents and destabilizes, owns and disowns, the “superior vantage point”: Bishop brings the war home, literally to the poet’s desk, as a means of questioning her implication in and contribution to the war theater. In Bishop’s hands “theater” is not simply a military metaphor to be debunked but a fundamental aspect of what poetry does: Bishop engages poetic representation as a form of spectatorship and the poem as a highly artiﬁcial stage, connected, like the poet’s desk, to public and national stages. In this respect it is telling that Bishop began working on the early drafts of the poem in 1950: as Camille Roman suggests, Bishop’s experience as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress from September 1949 to September 1950 implicated her in the cold war, and she may have had her desk at the Library of Congress in mind. The poetry consultant position (equivalent to today’s poet laureate) was created in 1937; as the most public position for an American poet in the postwar era, the consultancy signiﬁed the postwar poet’s increasing dependence on sources of government and institutional patronage.32 Bishop felt great ambivalence about this position, writing Randall Jarrell at the end of April 1950, “I am so sick of Poetry as Big Business I don’t know what to do. What on earth is the happy medium — readers, certainly, but this recording & reading & anthologizing is getting me” (One Art, 202). Bishop’s use of the term “Big Business” to describe her duties as poetry consultant was partially ironic, given the small income generated by sales of poetry, but nevertheless indicated her discomfort with the commercial aspects of the profession, particularly insofar as they aligned her with the acquisitive values underwriting cold-war ideology.33 As a published author,

64 |     

Bishop necessarily contributed her copyrighted works to the Library of Congress collections, but as poetry consultant, she was forced to confront her dependence on and contribution to the national archive, both as grand symbol of the convergence of poetry and nation, and on a smaller scale as a feature of her service as library employee, involved in acquiring and cataloging poetry and recordings for the collections.34 As Roman argues, “Bishop’s anxieties about militarization in the United States from World War II placed her in conﬂict with Cold War Washington and national expectations for poets”; these anxieties were personal as well as political, for “her lesbian identity further intensiﬁed her contradictory high-risk position in a Cold War homophobic culture” (Roman, 19). Bishop’s critique of cold-war militarism has inﬂuenced the dominant reading of “12 O’Clock News” as a satire of the Western news media. In the published version the speaker appears to be a reporter, who begins by describing what is identiﬁed as a “gooseneck lamp”: “As you all know, tonight is the night of the full moon, half the world over. But here the moon seems to hang motionless in the sky. It gives very little light; it could be dead. Visibility is poor. Nevertheless, we shall try to give you some idea of the lay of the land and the present situation.” The speaker addresses a “you” who is assumed to share the speaker’s perspective, although located “half the world over.” Hence the speaker describes an alien land for a faraway audience, and does so with the help of “aerial reconnaissance” and “reports” from the ﬁeld. Given the title, most readers have assumed that the speaker is a reporter, perhaps for the TV news;35 at stake in the speaker’s explanation of what he/she sees is the media’s complicity in the voyeuristic spectacle of war. Critics who distinguish Bishop from the poem’s speaker suggest that Bishop uses distortions of scale and perspective to indicate the speaker’s blocked vision. What the speaker describes as visual, documentary facts are revealed to be examples of the self-interested prejudice of the aggressor. For instance, in describing what Bishop identiﬁes in the left-hand column as an “ink-bottle,” the speaker states: We have also received reports of a mysterious, oddly shaped, black structure, at an undisclosed distance to the east. . . . The natural resources of the country being far from completely known to us, there is the possibility that this may be, or may contain, some powerful and terrifying “secret weapon.” On the other hand, given what we do know, or have learned from anthropologists and sociologists about this people, it may

Elizabeth Bishop’s Theater of War | 65

well be nothing more than a numen, or a great altar recently erected to one of their gods, to which, in their present historical state of superstition and helplessness, they attribute magical powers, and may even regard as a “savior,” one last hope of rescue from their grave diﬃculties. (Collected Poems, 174 – 75) Similarly, of an envelope, the speaker states: “In this small, backward country, one of the most backward left in the world today, communications are crude and ‘industrialization’ and its products almost nonexistent.” From a “superior vantage point,” the speaker also describes an ashtray as a “nest” of dead soldiers (Collected Poems, 175). Most have read the speaker’s distortion of the scale and identity of the desk objects as the source of the poem’s satire; the poem diminishes the representational and economic interests at stake in imperial aggression. Bishop mocks the speaker’s “superior vantage point,” the assumption that the “small, backward country” he/she describes is primitive, backward, childish. In doing so, she implies that the way in which the speaker marshals “science” (anthropology) and “visual technology” (“aerial reconnaissance”) to conﬁrm the accuracy of his/her visual perspective — an accuracy she has put into question — reveals that the “superior” angle of vision is a reﬂex of power and self-interest rather than a measure of intrinsic truth or moral value. In this way, Bishop criticizes the assumption that seeing is equivalent to knowing or possessing the object of vision: Television and the photographic media conceal their artiﬁce, disingenuously claiming to present the “truth” as perceived by the human eye, to allow the viewer to see things as if present on the scene. The poem reveals that the interests of Western science, big business, and military aggression merge in the journalist’s description, and that the claim of “objective truth” is ﬁctive. Like Levertov’s “Scenario,” Bishop’s “News” aims to denaturalize and expose the interests behind the aggressor’s portrayal of the “enemy.” Every commentator on the poem has put forth some version of this reading. Roman, for instance, argues that “the news commentator-narrator . . . is clearly aligned with the imperialistic Cold War ideology,” and adds, “It is the two-column format of the poem that discredits the news commentator and the Cold War rhetoric of quagmire rather than the country or the dead soldiers and unicyclist-courier” (Roman 147, 148). Similarly, Margaret Dickie argues that the poem discredits the newscaster’s perspective: “Admitting ignorance . . . s/he admits also the stupidity of his/her knowledge. . . . It becomes

66 |     

increasingly clear that the reporter can tell us very little about the other country and even less about the war itself” (Dickie, 123). In distinguishing Bishop’s perspective from the newscaster’s, critics implicitly align the poet with the “natives” who are both exploited and misrepresented by the newscaster and the national interests he/she serves. From this perspective, enlightenment resides with written rather than visual media: in contrast to the newscaster, the poet can see both the “real” objects described and the interests that shape their representation; thus she occupies the “superior vantage point.” In this light we could read “12 O’Clock News” as a defense of poetry’s oblique engagement with war. Instead of the competition, stage-managing, and arrogance that guide the televised industry of war, Bishop valorizes the slightness, struggle, and even anonymity of literary productions that attempt to generate sympathy for other perspectives. Her labor into the night, though not overtly “productive” in the language and economy of postwar American culture, signiﬁes the arduous trials involved in such representation, versus the easiness of marketing violence and suﬀering. A gendered claim can be made as well: despite her well-known anxieties about writing on war as a woman, “News” engages the masculine themes of war and empire through the limits of the poet’s desk. Bishop shows that the “home front” — with its particular connotations for the female poet as a gendered, domestic space — is not a location that limits her writing about war, but one that enables her to decenter the visual perspective provided by purportedly “objective” communications such as the nightly news. The problem with this reading is that it operates with the kind of “easy irony” Bishop objected to in her 1970 review of her peers: locating the problems of the Western viewpoint in the news media, critics position the poet and her audience outside the war theater, as innocent spectators, sympathizing and even identifying with the “elusive natives.” Certainly the poem presents satirical distance from the speaker as one possible stance. However, the poem oﬀers up another perspective that destabilizes, and even undermines, the possibility of standing outside the war theater, a perspective that critics have tellingly ignored:36 the poem invites the reader to take up the scale and visual angle of the speaker-reporter, to become immersed in the nightmarish battle scene. On this reading, Bishop does not criticize the television news media, but rather, reﬂects on the connections between her war poetry and the wartime news: her irony is self-directed rather than self-deﬂected. Manipulations of the scale and identity of the desk objects do not serve to undercut or satirize the speaker’s perspective,

Elizabeth Bishop’s Theater of War | 67

but rather, bode forth a hidden or latent anxiety about the complicity of the poet’s “news.”37 Lastly, the verbal realm is not privileged over the visual realm; rather, anxieties about the verbal realm are translated into the visual realm, with the magniﬁed descriptions of the desk objects providing darkly humorous truths about “Poetry as Big Business.” Eﬀectively, Bishop stages a battle on a desktop so as to consider how the poet’s theatrics contribute to and are contained within the reach of military theatrics. As Chattarji comments, “The fact that a majority of citizens treated [the war] as being ‘outside’ their domain and their lives was indicative of dislocated violence; treating the violence . . . as if it was being done by anonymous ‘others.’ These ‘others’ could be the politicians or the soldiers, but the fact that they constituted an integral part of the nation was often overlooked” (Chattarji, 58). While Bishop’s position as poetry consultant fed her dislike of cold-war militarism, it also forced her to confront her economic dependence on and symbolic support of the cold-war state. In locating war’s violence on the poet’s desk — ostensibly a scene of private, lyric removal — Bishop makes the war personal, much like Martha Rosler’s series of photomontages, “Bringing the War Home (House Beautiful), 1967 – 72,” which overlay images of soldiers in battle onto images of suburban interiors (ﬁgs. 1 and 2). As Val Williams comments, “Audiences of the 1960s and ’70s consumed the images of the Vietnam War just as they consumed the furniture, wall decorations and domestic appliances of the post – Second World War boom. Deeply rooted in the American popular consciousness is the notion of the sanctity of the home, the importance of property. Rosler’s photoseries usurps an idea of comfort and privacy, introduces the danger of violation, as ordinary Americans watch television or cook in their kitchens” (Williams, 54). Bishop’s role as consumer, spectator, and propagator of images of war is at stake in her choice to introduce the “danger of violation” to the poet’s desk. While Levertov’s “Scenario” draws attention to the theatrics of war and the symbolic register of what she describes, the actions depicted on stage also ostensibly correspond to actual victims of the war. To some degree, then, the poem depends on the graphic visual iconography of the time: “Left center, well-lit, a mound / of unburied bodies, // or parts of bodies.” Bishop’s poem describes a similar mound of bodies, but simultaneously reveals that the “bodies” are cigarettes in an ashtray: From our superior vantage point, we can clearly see into a sort of dugout, possibly a shell crater, a “nest” of soldiers. They lie heaped together,

1. From the series Bringing the War Home (House Beautiful). 1967 – 72, 1990. Martha Rosler. Courtesy Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne/Berlin.

2. From the series Bringing the War Home (House Beautiful). 1967 – 72, 1990. Martha Rosler. Courtesy Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne/Berlin.

70 |     

wearing the camouﬂage “battle dress” intended for “winter warfare.” They are in hideously contorted positions, all dead. We can make out at least eight bodies. These uniforms were designed to be used in guerrilla warfare on the country’s one snow-covered mountain peak. The fact that these poor soldiers are wearing them here, on the plain, gives further proof, if proof were necessary, either of the childishness and hopeless impracticality of this inscrutable people, our opponents, or of the sad corruption of their leaders. (Collected Poems, 175) If we read the speaker’s description as articulating a latent truth about war poetry, then Bishop’s dark humor is certainly at work here: Levertov’s bodies have become Bishop’s cigarettes. Bishop’s poem explicitly reﬂects on its own theatrics and the ways in which they are shaped by the distance between the poet’s desk and the battleﬁeld. Thus, while Levertov uses the metaphor of “theater of war” to interrogate and even debunk it, we could read Bishop’s quotation of military language as the poet’s self-directed mockery, a reﬂection on the poet’s own use of artiﬁce: the poet, writing about war from afar, necessarily uses metaphor, transforming what she knows, what is at hand — cigarettes — into dead soldiers in uniform. Bishop suggests that this act of theatrical ﬁguration, or better, of displacement, is of a piece with the military’s use of theatrical metaphor as a means of distancing and containing death and suﬀering: the poet, too, plays her part in the war drama. Read thus, the poem reveals the privileges and prejudices of the sympathetic gaze, the inevitable misprision that arises when one assumes this gaze, and suggests that there is no innocent position from which to describe war. If we read the newscaster’s report not as a satire of the media but as the poet’s self-mockery, with the world of poetry not a site of lyric removal but a battleﬁeld, then the unwitting truth of the reporter’s distortions are none too ﬂattering: “it gives very little light.” He/she adds: “In this small, backward country, one of the most backward left in the world today, communications are crude and ‘industrialization’ and its products almost nonexistent.” The poet — one of the natives, or their leader — wields ink as her “powerful and terrifying ‘secret weapon.’ ” The description of the inkbottle as “a great altar recently erected to one of their gods, to which . . . they attribute magical powers” for meeting “their grave diﬃculties,” pokes fun at the poet’s personal and professional reliance on her writing. In short, the reporter’s descriptions of the land of poetry suggest that the poet is a relic of some earlier century or “primitive” nation, relying on antiquated instruments such as ink and envelopes, hopelessly powerless to confront

Elizabeth Bishop’s Theater of War | 71

war and its visual technologies, but equally powerless to avoid it (Collected Poems, 174 – 75). Viewing the poet’s desk as a scene of battle evokes a number of conﬂicts: Bishop’s personal struggles, well documented by her biographers; her professional anxieties, exacerbated by her economic dependence on writing; and the gendered struggle to write poetry in a century deﬁned by wars. In this sense the occasion of the poem — a desk at night, after the day’s labor is normally completed — suggests some latent meaning within or anxiety evoked by the desktop, obscured during the light of day or invisible to the workaday world. Certainly, Bishop’s eﬀort to make the familiar strange — to give shape and form to hidden meaning — inﬂuenced the choice to set the poem at midnight, an eﬀort that resonates with the theme of night’s “inversion” of perspective in poems such as “Sleeping on the Ceiling,” “Sleeping Standing Up,” “Love Lies Sleeping,” and “Insomnia.”38 If we read the description of the desk as a measure of poetry as battleﬁeld, then night assumes the proportions of nightmare: the poet, like the speaker-reporter, wanders an eerie landscape, estranged from the gigantic instruments of writing and unable to decipher their meaning, forced to encounter textuality in purely visual terms (a “typed sheet” is “darkspeckled. An airstrip? A cemetery?”). The speaker has been reduced to a spectator of a battle over which he/she lacks control. What were the proportions of Bishop’s nightmares? The possibilities are too numerous to explore here, but given my interests in the problems of poetic spectatorship, Bishop’s anxieties about the poetry profession — “Poetry as Big Business” — loom large and help to explain the darkness and pathos beneath the poet’s humor. More speciﬁcally, Bishop may address not only her rhetorical but her economic connection to a war economy through the spatial distortions of “12 O’Clock News.” The description of the oversized typewriter, the one instrument that one would also ﬁnd on the desk of a news reporter, suggests the costs of the business of poetry: “The escarpment that rises abruptly from the central plain is in heavy shadow, but the elaborate terracing of its southern glacis gleams faintly in the dim light, like ﬁsh scales. What endless labor those small, peculiarly shaped terraces represent! And yet, on them the welfare of this tiny principality depends” (Collected Poems, 174). The typewriter is clearly the economic lifeline for this country — on it, the poet’s welfare certainly depends, as it translates handwritten drafts into publishable print. Thus it is telling that Bishop chooses military vocabulary to describe it: “glacis” refers variously to the defensive slope of a fort that exposes enemies to defensive attack; a zone or region

72 |     

that buﬀers enemy countries; and a sloping armor plate that protects openings, as in a ship. Is the typewriter the poet’s armor, her Achilles’ shield, the act of making poetry public a symbolic entry into the battleﬁeld? Does the typewriter — a technology of writing — signify the ways in which letters “put teeth into the business of empire-building”?39 Does Bishop allude to the ways in which her eﬀorts to support herself professionally require political compromises, as in the poetry consultant position? The typewriter keys gleam “like ﬁsh scales”; these scales may allude to Bishop’s manipulations of scale; to the glittering scales in her poem “The Fish” (the ﬁsh is described as a kind of war hero); or may refer to the instruments used to weigh ﬁsh for market, translating size into economic value. However we might want to interpret it, the description of the typewriter gleams with a lifetime of writerly memory and struggle. It is also full of pathos, the speaker’s tone conveying resignation and fatigue about the “endless labor,” the ongoing battle. In this light, the newscaster’s reference to the “childishness and hopeless impracticality of this inscrutable people . . . or of the sad corruption of their leaders” can be read as a reﬂection on the poet’s response to war in its many senses — she is hopelessly impractical or sadly corrupt.40 Instructively, in her ﬁnal drafts, Bishop changed “military leaders” to simply “leaders,” suggesting that poet and television newscaster are themselves leaders, who resemble each other more than they diﬀer in their response to war. As Val Williams comments, “War journalists are volunteer witnesses, part of a media industry which has not only a mission to inform, but a need to sell its products to a waiting public” (Williams, 52). How far apart are the journalist’s and poet’s forms of witnessing war, particularly when their livelihood depends on selling their “news”? The conventional answer, guiding the criticism of this poem, is that the perspectives of the poet and newscaster are incommensurable; but Bishop, unlike her critics, considered their connection, even if only as a nightmare realized, which may also explain why she chose to write a prose poem, journalistic in tone and style. James Merrill, an astute reader of Bishop, perceived a merging of poet and newscaster in “12 O’Clock News”; he wrote to Bishop: “How I love the array on your worktable. It’s simply uncanny what you do with tone in that poem — the newscaster’s idiom grows into the saddest, truest analogue of that strange, remote ‘involvement’ even I have felt, those few nights I’ve ever been sober and lonely enough to work late. That snow-covered peak — ‘White is their color, and behold my head!’ This may be the saddest poem you’ve ever written.”41 Merrill suggests that the newscaster’s idiom expresses a writerly condition, the simultaneous loneliness and “strange,

Elizabeth Bishop’s Theater of War | 73

remote ‘involvement’ ” of working late. Noticing the pathos of the newscaster’s tone, Merrill attends to the ways in which Bishop has turned the ironic blade inward: inferring an allusion to George Herbert,42 he implies that Bishop has herself in mind when she states, “These uniforms were designed to be used in guerrilla warfare on the country’s one snow-covered mountain peak.” Merrill reads Bishop as the snow-covered peak and thus the “guerrilla warfare” as an internal strife. However we might understand “guerrilla warfare” — as an allusion to the habits of smoking and drinking, to psychic or professional conﬂicts, to the battle of writing, to the warfare in Vietnam — Merrill suggests that the poet’s irony collapses the distance between the poet’s desk and the battleﬁeld, the “private” self/lyric and the war theater; the desktop evidences the conscription of the poet and the failure of the battle. Herein, I think, lies Merrill’s sense that this is Bishop’s saddest poem. Merrill’s description of the “strange, remote involvement” that the writer feels working late also evokes the kind of involvement one might feel watching the late-night television news — removed from, but vicariously involved in, the events unfolding on the screen. While Bishop alludes to television through the title of her poem and through the speaker-reporter, she enacts the problem of perspective embodied by watching the war on TV through the two-column structure of the poem, which oﬀers the reader divergent (distant or immersed) perspectives on the war theater. I have suggested, on the one hand, that this poem invites us to assume the superior vantage point, and on the other hand, that it pulls this stable ground out from under our feet, oﬀering us not assurances about our own enlightened, sympathetic perspectives, but asking us to implicate ourselves in the economy of war and vicarious suﬀering. If the two-column structure comments on Bishop’s position both inside and outside the postwar establishment, a position of simultaneous privilege and powerlessness, distance and intimacy, it also suggests that this position engenders sentimental spectatorship and sentimental poetry. Bishop reveals a fault line in sentimental war poetry, including her own, which might be summed up as the problem of an ethical remove from economic and political commerce. The destabilizing of the “superior vantage point” in “12 O’Clock News” implies that the sympathetic viewer’s privilege is the dubious one of assuming an ethical stance above or beyond politics, a sort of washing the hands in innocence.43 On the other hand, collapsing this remove, revealing how sympathy’s ethics are embedded in a national economy, points to the failure of a disinterested sentimental project, but

74 |     

does not escape the terms of feeling. The ﬂip side of Bishop’s critique of sympathy is apathy, her “I’m not up to feeling that much; I can’t. . . . ” As Susan Sontag points out, “The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration” (Regarding, 102). Bishop’s poem articulates an emotional impasse, which is the impasse of emotion:44 “the intolerable sense both that you can do nothing about the (television) war and that you must do something about it” (Alter, xx). In other words, Bishop suggests that sympathy and apathy are related aﬀective responses generated by sentimental culture, contingent on the strange distance and intimacy the spectator feels when gazing at images of suﬀering.45 The aim of “12 O’Clock News” is thus loosely deconstructive: it enacts and destabilizes the ethical remove on which sentimental politics is founded.46 It is an agonized war poem critical of its very premise, that cuts oﬀ its own two feet. While the poem “tells the time” of Vietnam War – era America, its news proves to be remarkably long-standing, and its implied question relevant today: where will we place ourselves as potential spectators of the war theater?47 A powerful legacy of “12 O’Clock News” is to ask current readers to consider how their response to war is connected to the technologies and aesthetics of spectatorship, the ways in which (in Ashbery’s phrase) “the fantasy makes it ours.”

Notes 1. See Margaret Dickie, Stein, Bishop, Rich: Lyrics of Love, War, and Place (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Camille Roman, Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II – Cold War View (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Susan Schweik, “An Oblique Place: Elizabeth Bishop and the Language of War,” American Women Poets and the Second World War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Subsequent references will appear in the text. 2. The exception is the scholarship that connects Bishop to Dickinson; Dickinson is rarely regarded as a “sentimental” writer, however, but rather as a protomodernist. 3. Similarly, Dickie argues that “Bishop’s ‘Casabianca’ outrageously ﬂouts its predecessor’s sentimental celebration of willful military sacriﬁce” (Dickie, 110). 4. Most readers of Bishop agree that she uses war as metaphor. See, for instance, Roman, 55; Dickie, 106; Schweik, 239. For an insightful discussion of how feminist poets used war as metaphor during the Vietnam War era, see Michael Bibby, Hearts and Minds: Bodies, Poetry, and Resistance in the Vietnam War Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996).

Elizabeth Bishop’s Theater of War | 75 5. See Lauren Berlant, “The Female Complaint,” Social Text 19 – 20 (Fall 1988): 237 – 59; Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977). 6. Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 7. Subarno Chattarji, Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the Vietnam War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 40. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 8. “Notes for Poetry Reviews,” Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Vassar College Library Special Collections, box 59, folder 8. Subsequent references will appear in the text abbreviated “Notes.” Apparently Bishop was preparing this review for the New Yorker, but never completed it. See Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, eds., Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 275. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 9. On Levertov’s defense of didacticism as a necessary political strategy for antiwar poetry, see Chattarji, 70 – 81. 10. One Art: Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 112. Subsequent references will appear in the text abbreviated One Art. 11. While Camille Roman repeatedly draws attention to Bishop’s implication in and potential complicity with the cold war “victory narrative,” she ultimately uses this position to explain Bishop’s subversive strategies, her attempt to formulate a poetic response to a repressive cold war culture that she could not openly criticize (see Roman, 4, 20, 139). Margaret Dickie is the only critic to explicitly suggest that Bishop examines “poetry’s complicity with the theatrics of war” (Dickie, 106, 123). 12. Another way to put this is that Bishop’s feminism is shaped by sentimental culture. See Berlant. 13. See Schweik, 235. 14. On the inﬂuence of surrealism on Bishop’s poetry, see Richard Mullen, “Elizabeth Bishop’s Surrealist Inheritance,” American Literature 54 (March 1982): 63 – 80, and Barbara Page, “Oﬀ-Beat Claves, Oblique Realities: The Key West Notebooks of Elizabeth Bishop,” in Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender, ed. Marilyn May Lombardi (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 196 – 211. I have argued elsewhere that sentimental conventions of “fancy” meet surrealism in Bishop’s work. 15. See Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon Press, 1998), and Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the Twentieth Century (New York: Abrams, 1994), 236 – 55. 16. Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 7. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 17. See Deborah Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), and Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70 (September 1998): 581 – 606.

76 |      18. Paul Fussell, “Theater of War,” in The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Subsequent references will appear in the text. 19. Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927 – 1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 174 – 75. All references to the published poem are to this edition. 20. Brett Millier calls the poem “more clever than profound” (Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993], 526). Subsequent references will appear in the text. For a discussion of the poem as a commentary on Vietnam, see Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, “Perversity as Voice,” in Lombardi, Elizabeth Bishop, 188 – 89. Subsequent references appear in the text. 21. Thanks to Rei Terada for prompting me to question the “superior vantage point” in my own reading of this poem. That critics, myself included, have taken up this perspective suggests the ways in which the critical project can become aligned with a particular kind of sentimental project. 22. Susan Sontag, “Looking at War: Photography’s View of Devastation and Death,” New Yorker, December 9, 2002, 82 – 98; 93. See also Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 104. Subsequent references in the text will be abbreviated Regarding. Tellingly, in summer 1967 Bishop met Susan Sontag. In a letter to Ashley Brown, dated August 19, 1967, Bishop writes: “My publisher has now sent me all of Miss Sontag’s works and I’m trying hard — think she knows too much for me, however — about Hegel and all the latest French Thoughts. I’m supposed to go to a big party for her novel next week” (One Art, 467). Brett Millier notes that Bishop rented a television set in 1968 and watched the political conventions (Millier, 406). She purchased her ﬁrst color television in 1971, and apparently watched a lot of television while working on the late drafts of “12 O’Clock News” (Millier, 464 – 65). 23. Val Williams, Women, Photography, and the Iconography of War (London: Virago Press, 1994), 47. See especially “The Myth and the Media: Photography and the Vietnam War, 1968 – 92.” See also Nora Alter, preface to Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). Subsequent references will appear in the text. 24. The language of “theater” as used by the military refers to “a particular region or each of the separate regions in which a war is fought” or “the scene or ﬁeld of action” (as in “the Paciﬁc Theater” of World War II) (New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). 25. Camille Roman is the only critic who has discussed these early drafts. 26. “12 O’Clock News,” Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Vassar College Library Special Collections, box 59, folder 8. “Little Exercise” was completed at Yaddo, the writer’s colony in upstate New York; the draft states “Yaddo, Saratoga, NY.” Camille Roman suggests that Bishop may have completed the earliest 1950 draft while still working at the Library of Congress. The 1950s drafts are much shorter than the 1970s drafts, lack the later drafts’ two columns, and the speaker in the

Elizabeth Bishop’s Theater of War | 77 1950s drafts is not identiﬁed as a reporter. The twenty-year gap between drafts is not out of keeping with Bishop’s work on certain poems over a lifetime. Brett Millier notes that Bishop sent a ﬁnal draft of the poem to James Merrill on October 26, 1972 (Millier, 474). 27. See Subarno Chattarji’s discussion of Robert Bly’s “Watching Television” (Chattarji, 57 – 58). Other midcentury poets who write about watching violent struggles unfold on television or ﬁlm include Denise Levertov (“The Gulf”), Adrienne Rich, and Robert Lowell (“For the Union Dead”). See also Nora M. Alter’s discussion in Vietnam Protest Theatre of how dramatists responded to the televising of the war. 28. Denise Levertov, Footprints (New York: New Directions Books, 1972), 9. Subarno Chattarji cites this poem in Memories of a Lost War, 73 – 74. 29. Thanks to Tricia Lootens for pointing out that the Bride is an allusion to James Whale’s 1935 ﬁlm, The Bride of Frankenstein; thus Levertov positions the use of napalm and other innovations in war weaponry as the latest example of the West’s monstrous romance with technology. Adrienne Rich’s discussion of “Vietnam and the lovers’ bed” suggests that the connection poets made between war and romance was central not only to the antiwar movement but to second-wave feminism (Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979 – 1985 [New York: W. W. Norton, 1986], 181). 30. Kris Boudreau’s formulation is equally insightful: “Sympathy . . . relies on diﬀerence — either original or produced — in order to create a need for itself, for the imagination that conquers diﬀerence. Once this diﬀerence has been asserted, sympathy steps in to erase the gap between subject and object — not by bringing the two together, but by superimposing the spectator’s perceptions onto the body of the perceived image” (Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jeﬀerson to the Jameses [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002], 12). 31. Surely Susan Sontag’s Trip to Hanoi (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), which explicitly sets out to question the limits of the sympathetic perspective on North Vietnam, informs Bishop’s exploration of perspective in “12 O’Clock News.” 32. On the poetry consultant position, see John Y. Cole, Jeﬀerson’s Legacy: A Brief History of the Library of Congress (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1993); James Conway, America’s Library: The Story of the Library of Congress, 1800 – 2000 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with the Library of Congress, 2000). On Bishop’s tenure as poetry consultant at the Library of Congress, see Millier, 210, 220 – 24; Fountain and Brazeau, 110 – 18; and William McGuire, Poetry’s Catbird Seat: The Consultantship in Poetry in the English Language at the Library of Congress, 1937 – 1987 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1988): 125 – 31. Subsequent references to McGuire will appear in the text. 33. Bishop seems to object both to her dependence on positions such as the poetry consultantship and to the diﬃculty of making a living as a professional poet, that is, to poetry’s small value in the world of “Big Business.” McGuire

78 |      writes that toward the end of her term as poetry consultant, Bishop commented, in response to questions from the Department of State magazine Amerika: “I think it is undoubtedly true that there has been an enormous increase in interest in poetry in the United States since the war. Whether some of the present enthusiasm is well-directed or not remains to be seen. Of course it is still true that no poet can earn a living by poetry, that magazines pay very small sums for it, and that the various awards and fellowships are drops in the bucket; I do not believe that you can paint a really glowing picture of poets and poetry in the United States at present” (McGuire, 129). 34. Bishop was required to give a public reading in the Coolidge Auditorium, and to oversee the library’s project of recording poets reading their own poems, started under Robert Lowell’s tenure. She also organized Society of Fellows’ meetings, reviewed manuscripts sent in by amateur poets, wrote reviews for the library’s U.S. Quarterly Book Review, and answered reference inquiries (Millier, 210, 224; McGuire, 127). An “unoﬃcial” duty was visiting Ezra Pound, incarcerated at St. Elizabeth’s hospital, a task she came to loathe. Bishop was paid $5,000 for the year; her assistant recorded that their duties that year included “1,946 general and 1,070 administrative phone calls, 772 letters answered, 445 visitors seen and talked to, 120 readers assisted.” Of this work, Bishop stated, “it is a serious waste of the time of the Consultant and the Assistant and should probably be handled elsewhere” (McGuire, 127). 35. See Brogan, “Perversity as Voice.” Roman, however, suggests that the speaker’s identity is unclear: “Is the narrator a civilian eyewitness? A reporting writer? A military inspector?” (Roman, 143). 36. The exception here is Kirstin Hotelling-Zona, who has recently argued, “At issue in Bishop’s contemplation is that strange and inevitable condition of human consciousness, the realization that we are always somehow a part of that which we condemn.” My discussion of perspective in “12 O’Clock News” shares an understanding of what Hotelling-Zona names “ambivalence.” See The Feminist Poetics of Self-Restraint: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 65. 37. While she distinguishes Bishop from the poem’s speaker, Dickie does suggest that “Bishop had come to fear that the poet’s desk was not free from the world’s corruption, her own creativity not unconnected to the subject of war from which she so often has recoiled” (Dickie, 123). 38. Bishop wrote “Insomnia” during her stay at Yaddo in 1950, the same time at which she wrote the early drafts of “12 O’Clock News.” 39. The statement is that of a Bishop contemporary, Marshall McLuhan, in a discussion of the Greek alphabet as a technology connected to war. See Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 86. 40. As Thomas Travisano suggests, Bishop may also have had in mind her relationship to Brazil and its “natives.” See Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988), 193.

Elizabeth Bishop’s Theater of War | 79 41. James Merrill to Elizabeth Bishop, November 30, 1972, Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Vassar College Library Special Collections, box 11, folder 2. 42. Merrill cites lines from the ﬁrst stanza of “The Forerunners,” by Bishop’s favorite poet, George Herbert: The Harbingers are come. See, see their mark; White is their colour, and behold my head. But must they have my brain? must they dispark Those sparkling notions, which therein were bred? Must dulness turn me to a clod? Yet have they left me, Thou art still my God. Herbert, observing the signs of age as harbingers of death, reﬂects on losing his powers of language; ultimately he contrasts “sparkling notions” and “lovely enchanting language” with the humility of the speaker before God, a humility only strengthened by his loss of mental powers and death’s approach: “Let a bleak paleness chalk the door / So all within be livelier than before.” Similarly, I think, Bishop, also at an advanced age when she wrote the ﬁnal draft of this poem, ﬁnding herself still plagued by anxieties about her status as a poet, considers the limits of her powers (Poetical Works of George Herbert, ed. George Gilﬁllan [Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1853], 186). 43. Thanks to Eric Haralson for this formulation. 44. And here I want to return to Levertov, because if Bishop was critical of what she saw as Levertov’s solicitation of sympathy for war’s victims, her response to Levertov’s poem “Biafra” bespeaks deeper anxieties. Levertov depicts the failures of the poet’s sympathetic imagination while watching the news on television: Now we look sluggishly at photos of children dying in Biafra: dully accumulate overdue statistics: Massacre of the Ibos: Do nothing: The poisoning called ‘getting used to’ has taken place: we are the deads: no room for love in us: . . . ............... And all I see is coarse faces grinning, painted by Bosch on TV screen as Humphrey gets nominated: then, ﬂash, patient sadness, eyes in a skull: photo of Biafran boy (age 5?) sitting down to die:

80 |      And know no hope: Don’t know what to do: Do nothing: (Relearning the Alphabet, 17 – 18) Levertov plainly addresses the failure of images of suﬀering to awake compassion and trigger action; she confronts the feelings of numbness that result from “getting used to” such images, the physical and emotional distance that separates the suﬀering boy and the spectator. Does Bishop’s self-critical destabilizing of the sympathetic perspective in “12 O’Clock News” end up at a diﬀerent place than Levertov’s “Don’t know / what to do: Do nothing:”? Both Bishop and Levertov — usually considered very diﬀerent poets on the political spectrum — confront the limits of the sentimental response to war. 45. Adela Pinch deﬁnes sentimentality as “the aﬀective dimension of an epistemological conﬂict over the origins of feelings.” See Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 70. 46. As Julie Ellison argues, “much of the literature of sensibility exposes a complicated awareness of the human costs of national and imperial economies, as well as the knowledge that sensibility itself is a privilege. Sensibility is the admitted connection between speculation, mood, and power. We still operate within sensibility, deprived of epistemological superiority toward our sensible or sentimental forebears” (Ellison, 7). 47. Midcentury American poets were certainly not the last commentators on the televising of war as sentimental theater. John Forbes’s “Love Poem” about the ﬁrst Gulf War ends: Our precision guided weapons make the horizon ﬂash & glow but nothing I can do makes you want me. Instead I watch the west do what the west does best & know, obscurely, as I go to bed all this is being staged for me. See John Forbes, Collected Poems: 1969 – 1999 (Sydney: Brandl and Schlesinger, 2002): 158. Thanks to Brian Henry for pointing out this poem.

Bibliography Alter, Nora. Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Altshuler, Bruce. The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the Twentieth Century. New York: Abrams, 1994.

Elizabeth Bishop’s Theater of War | 81 Berlant, Lauren. “The Female Complaint.” Social Text 19 – 20 (Fall 1988): 237 – 59. Bibby, Michael. Hearts and Minds: Bodies, Poetry, and Resistance in the Vietnam Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems, 1927 – 1979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. ———. “Notes for Poetry Reviews.” Ca. 1970. Elizabeth Bishop Papers. Vassar College Library Special Collections. Poughkeepsie, New York. Box 53, folder 11. ———. One Art: Letters. Edited by Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. ———. “12 O’Clock News.” March 1973. Elizabeth Bishop Papers. Vassar College Library Special Collections. Poughkeepsie, New York. Box 59, folder 8. Boudreau, Kris. Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jeﬀerson to the Jameses. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught. “Perversity as Voice.” In Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender, edited by Marilyn May Lombardi, 175 – 95. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. Chattarji, Subarno. Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the Vietnam War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Cole, John Y. Jeﬀerson’s Legacy: A Brief History of the Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1993. Conway, James. America’s Library: The Story of the Library of Congress, 1800 – 2000. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with the Library of Congress, 2000. Dickie, Margaret. Stein, Bishop, Rich: Lyrics of Love, War, and Place. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1977. Ellison, Julie. Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Forbes, John. Collected Poems: 1969 – 1999. Sydney: Brandl and Schlesinger, 2002. Fountain, Gary, and Peter Brazeau, eds. Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Fussell, Paul. “Theater of War.” In The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Godfrey, Tony. Conceptual Art. London: Phaidon Press, 1998. Herbert, George. The Poetical Works of George Herbert. Edited by George Gilﬁllan. Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1853. Hotelling-Zona, Kirstin. The Feminist Poetics of Self-Restraint: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Kaplan, Amy. “Manifest Domesticity.” American Literature 70 (September 1998): 581 – 606. Levertov, Denise. Footprints. New York: New Directions, 1972.

82 |      ———. Relearning the Alphabet. New York: New Directions, 1970. McGuire, William. Poetry’s Catbird Seat: The Consultantship in Poetry in the English Language at the Library of Congress, 1937 – 1987. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1988. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Millier, Brett. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Mullen, Richard. “Elizabeth Bishop’s Surrealist Inheritance.” American Literature 54 (March 1982): 63 – 80. Nelson, Deborah. Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Page, Barbara. “Oﬀ-Beat Claves, Oblique Realities: The Key West Notebooks of Elizabeth Bishop.” In Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender, edited by Marilyn May Lombardi, 196 – 211. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. Pinch, Adela. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Rich, Adrienne. Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979 – 1985. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. Roman, Camille. Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II – Cold War View. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Schwartz, Lloyd, and Sybil P. Estess, eds. Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983. Schweik, Susan. “An Oblique Place: Elizabeth Bishop and the Language of War.” In American Women Poets and the Second World War, 213 – 41. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Sontag, Susan. “Looking at War: Photography’s View of Devastation and Death.” New Yorker, December 9, 2002, 82 – 98. ———. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. ———. Trip to Hanoi. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968. Travisano, Thomas. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988. Williams, Val. Women, Photography, and the Iconography of War. London: Virago Press, 1994.

4

The Best Years of Our Lives: Randall Jarrell’s War Poetry Benjamin Friedlander

When war wrenches the soldier away from home, his home stays with him; and when he returns home, the war returns with him. For Randall Jarrell, dislocation exempliﬁes the contradictory nature of loss. In “Thinking of the Lost World,” the last poem in his last book, he wrote, “All of them are gone / Except for me; and for me nothing is gone” — a succinct formula that captures well his characteristic distinction between empirical fact and psychological condition.1 Though time, he suggests, continually converts the vivid present into nothingness, memory can preserve it, even when oblivion — forgetting — might be preferable. A student of psychology, Jarrell knew the self is only coherent insofar as memory remains capable of unifying diﬀerent selves over time. Jarrell also knew, of course, that the self’s integrity is only partial, a necessary ﬁction that the mind edits out of memory’s raw data, like the dreams so prevalent in his poetry. Adapting his deﬁnition of “story,” one might say that Jarrell conceived of experience not as mere events, but rather as the way the mind apprehends those events, as “a wish, or a truth, or a wish modiﬁed by a truth.”2 The mind converts loss into experience by accepting its dislocations, as in dreams, as a structural fact. To speak of loss in these terms is to denaturalize experience by acknowledging its “discursive” character (to adopt a Foucauldian terminol-

84 |     

ogy) while insisting on the limits that empirical facts impose. A historical reading of Jarrell’s poetry, by emphasizing the narratological dimensions of subjectivity, shifts attention away from what Jarrell tells readers to how his telling converts events into experience. Implicit in this shift is the idea that experience is the culmination of a process. As Joan W. Scott argues in an essay on historical evidence, “It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience”; at the same time, the discourses that shape this experience are themselves shaped by material conditions.3 Loss, then, is a limiting fact in two senses. As an empirical fact that the subject fails to assimilate, loss establishes the limits of discourse, resulting in a psychological trauma, destructive of identity. As an imaginative fact that the subject fails to resist, loss establishes the limits of volition, resulting in a cultural trauma, constitutive of identity.4 Scott’s particular concerns — like Foucault’s — are the social processes that, through discourse, produce collective identities, not the psychological processes that produce individuation within the collective. Moreover, when she speaks of experience as a “linguistic event,” her model is not a poem or story, but the “established orders of meaning” within which poems and stories get written (Scott, 793). For a theoretical elaboration more explicitly concerned with psychology, I turn to Walter Benjamin, for whom the discursive character of experience is, as in Jarrell’s work, a matter of poetic and narratological discovery. “Experience” is a key term for Benjamin in his analysis of modernity, but to sharpen his interpretation he distinguishes between passive and active experience, expressed as Erlebnis and Erfahrung. The diﬀerence is often rendered as “living” and “lived” experience, but a translation truer to Benjamin’s distinction might be “lived” and “learned” — the diﬀerence, in eﬀect, between an event that is passively lived through (Erlebnis) and the event’s active integration into consciousness (Erfahrung). Benjamin’s primary model is the work performed by the traditional ﬁgure of the storyteller, whose “ability to share experiences” is dependent on memory’s capacity to “absorb the course of events on the one hand and, on the other, make its peace with the passing of these, with the power of death.”5 Modernity, for Benjamin, leads to an “atrophy” of this capacity because everyday events have become too threatening for consciousness to absorb, too traumatic.6 Drawing on Freud’s description of “shell shock” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Benjamin conceives of trauma as an Erlebnis excluded from becoming Erfahrung as a matter of self-preservation: “The greater the shock factor in particular impressions, the more vigilant consciousness has to be in screening stimuli;

The Best Years of Our Lives: Randall Jarrell’s War Poetry | 85

the more eﬃciently it does so, the less these impressions enter Erfahrung and the more they correspond to the concept of Erlebnis” (“On Some Motifs,” 319; translation modiﬁed). Erfahrung, then, becomes part of consciousness, but only as the end result of a process in which consciousness participates. To show how Jarrell’s work explores this assimilation, I will ﬁrst discuss two poems, “Absent with Oﬃcial Leave” and “Terms,” which analyze how soldiers struggle to come to terms with war, during and after their service. Second, I will examine Jarrell’s own struggle to come to terms with war through his construction of the war poetry as a body of work, showing how the individual poems work out, in ﬁctive case studies, processes of integration that Jarrell experienced when arranging his sequences. To clarify what I mean by integration, I will end by comparing Jarrell’s war poems to William Wyler’s Oscar-winning 1946 ﬁlm The Best Years of Our Lives.

    . He joined the army in 1942 in hopes of becoming a pilot: at age twenty-eight he was already a seasoned college instructor. He washed out of ﬂight school, but his high test scores led to stateside work as a celestial ﬂight navigator. Though the war engaged his imagination fully, by background and temperament he was ill disposed to put himself forward as its representative subject. In Jarrell’s view, this was not a disadvantage. To Robert Lowell he wrote: “If you’ll notice, I’ve never written a poem about myself in the army or war; unless you’re vain or silly you realize that you, except insofar as you’re in exactly the same boat as the others, aren’t the primary subject of any sensible writing about the war.” 7 His best-known poems — “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” “Eighth Air Force” — are lyrics that adopt the soldier’s point of view, which would seem to place him in the tradition of the soldier-poets of World War I. But Jarrell’s work draws freely on an extensive reading of newspapers (in particular the war correspondence of Ernie Pyle) and magazines, as well as on books such as War and Children by Anna Freud and Dorothy T. Burlingham (a source for the poem “The Truth”) and Jan Karski’s Story of a Secret State (reviewed for Commentary in November 1945); a number of poems also draw on Jarrell’s detailed knowledge of planes and pilots.8 Most noteworthy, however, is how the war poems depict the constrained, institutional world of the soldier without losing sight of war’s broader arena, in which families, workers in the war industry, and civilian casualties also have their place. Jarrell preserves a comprehensive memory of war on a scale larger than that of individual experience. This is one reason why it is so important

86 |     

to read Jarrell’s war poems as a group; in Benjamin’s terms, the focus on individual poems as isolated events threatens to reduce Jarrell’s sharing of a consciously constructed Erfahrung to mere Erlebnis. Where individual poems confront the problem of psychological trauma, Jarrell’s work as a whole becomes legible as a response to cultural trauma, to “an event . . . which is a) laden with negative aﬀect, b) represented as indelible, and c) regarded as threatening a society’s existence.” 9 The war poems were Jarrell’s ﬁrst sustained success in poetry, but it bears emphasizing that identifying these poems as a single body of work — as “Randall Jarrell’s war poetry” — is a convenience. The work as such has no deﬁnitive arrangement and even its contents are subject to disputation. Rather than resolve these problems, I want to argue that an attention to arrangement helps establish the parameters of Jarrell’s project — or rather projects, for the work has two distinct phases. Setting aside magazine appearances for the moment, the war poems were ﬁrst published alongside Jarrell’s other poetry in three individual volumes: Little Friend, Little Friend (1945), Losses (1948), and The Seven-League Crutches (1951). He subsequently reprinted the majority of this work in a separate section of Selected Poems (1955), arranged thematically into seven subsections (I exclude from this study the poems on World War II from Jarrell’s ﬁrst book, Blood for a Stranger [1945], as he himself excluded all but one from Selected Poems). The subsections were retained for the posthumous Complete Poems (1969), in which the work dropped from Selected Poems appears at the end, identiﬁed by original volume. There are thus two discernible tendencies in the work’s publication history: ﬁrst, Jarrell’s ﬁtting of the war into a larger frame of reference; and second, his treatment of the war as a frame of reference in its own right. Translated into psychological and social terms, Jarrell takes possession of the war ﬁrst by absorbing its unfolding event into contemporary consciousness and later by shaping it as experience for future generations.

I In “Absent with Oﬃcial Leave,” the soldier moaning in his sleep lies poised between the army’s darkened world of noise and the visual richness of a dream. The dream is his “life,” and the soldier’s body participates in it, but at a remove that is ﬁnally more painful to him than satisfying. Although he can block out the physical oppression of his surroundings, he escapes them only as a plume of smoke or puﬀ of wind returning to civilian life; the embodied aspect of his dream roots him in the barracks. Drifting over the

The Best Years of Our Lives: Randall Jarrell’s War Poetry | 87

roads and ﬁelds, he feels only dismay; and when, in sleep, he “turns . . . / His charmed limbs” to the ﬁres of home, it is in an “ecstasy” that is literally (as well as etymologically) ε`ζιστ´αναι [existanai], wrenched out of place (CP, 171). At issue in this poem, as in so much of Jarrell’s writing, is the partiality of “oﬃcial” life, and the pressure that this partiality exerts on the individual’s ability to make sense of his or her “real ” situation (here “real” recalls the last word of “Transient Barracks” [CP, 147 – 48], where Jarrell gives an ontological inﬂection to the diﬀerence between “real” and “oﬃcial”). In “Pilots, Man Your Planes,” oﬃcial life reveals itself as lethal, and comprehension occurs only at the moment when consciousness is threatened with extinction; in “A Field Hospital,” comprehension itself becomes a threat; and in “Siegfried” — in which the soldier’s missing leg concretely represents partiality — comprehension occurs belatedly, in the unoﬃcial world of civilians. “Absent” evokes this world ﬁrst with disdain (“the ignorant countries where civilians die / Ineﬃciently, in their spare time, for nothing”), and then with longing, suggesting that the soldier searches not for his home, but for a proper attitude toward home’s absence. Ultimately the poem concludes ﬁrmly in the grip of the oﬃcial. For this reason, I take exception to the common reading of the title, which assumes that the phrase “Oﬃcial Leave” refers to the dream, ignoring the fact that the soldier is marked as “absent” by the people in the cottages, not the army. In my reading, the title is not a parody of army oﬃciousness, but a bitter euphemism for conscription: The lights are beginning to go out in the barracks. They persist or return, as the wakeful hollow, But only for a moment; then the windows blacken For all the hours of the soldier’s life. It is life into which he composes his body. He covers his ears with his pillow, and begins to drift (Like the plumes the barracks trail into the sky) Past the laughs, the quarrels, and the breath of others To the ignorant countries where civilians die Ineﬃciently, in their spare time, for nothing . . . The curved roads hopping through the aimless green Dismay him, and the cottages where people cry

88 |     

For themselves and, sometimes, for the absent soldier — ................................................. He moans like a bear in his enchanted sleep, And the grave mysterious beings of his years — The causes who mourn above his agony like trees — Are moved for their child, and bend across his limbs The one face opening for his life, the eyes That look without shame even into his. And the man awakes, and sees around his life The night that is never silent, broken with the sighs And patient breathing of the dark companions With whom he labors, sleeps, and dies. (CP, 171 – 72) In his biography of Jarrell, William Pritchard says this poem “enacts a digniﬁed acceptance of the human lot as regimented into a collectivity by the fact of war, and does this without pitying the soldier or asking us to pity him.” 10 By “pity” Pritchard means to evoke Wilfred Owen in contrast to Jarrell, as have others. Robert Lowell once declared Jarrell’s war poetry better and also “more professional” than Owen’s — a barbed comment given Jarrell’s low opinion of professionalism.11 But without minimizing the diﬀerences between Owen and Jarrell, pity — compassion and tenderness tinged with sadness — is their common ground. For Owen, pity is what remains of the poetry of war when “glory, honor, might, majesty, dominion, or power” drain away.12 For Jarrell, pity is a natural response to the soldier’s powerlessness and ignorance. In his essay on Pyle, for example, Jarrell writes, “Nobody else in the world . . . makes you feel so intensely sorry for [the soldiers], makes you feel how entirely against their will and aside from their understanding it all happens” (KA, 116). Note also, in this connection, Lorrie Goldensohn’s essay “Randall Jarrell’s War,” which sees in “Absent” “the growth of a homely, deﬂationary realism about army life, at variance with the battleﬁeld detail . . . of Great War poetry,” yet draws a link between Jarrell’s “brooding maternal tenderness” and “another kind of tenderness, stemming from traits temperamentally, historically, and psychologically diﬀerent,” in Owen.13 To be sure, Jarrell is more restrained in his expressions of pity, but this is no more an acceptance of the soldier’s fate than an analyst’s impassiveness is an acceptance of a patient’s distress — and just here Lowell’s word choice begins to ring true, for if Jarrell adopts the

The Best Years of Our Lives: Randall Jarrell’s War Poetry | 89

demeanor of a “professional,” it lies not in his approach to poetry, but in his response to human suﬀering. As Stephen Burt writes, “Where other professions and disciplines seemed to him to threaten private life, Jarrell found in psychology, and especially in psychoanalysis, ideas that inform his interpersonal style.”14 This interest in psychoanalysis also informs “Absent.” In composing this poem, Jarrell drew freely on a number of sources, ﬁrst and foremost his own observations of army life. To his ﬁrst wife, Mackie, he wrote: “The barracks is queer at night; you’re in the middle of a justmoving sea of sleeping people who cough, or make little snoring sounds, or give little moans — at any time you wake there is someone making some sound” (RJL, 71). And to Sara Starr — the thirteen-year-old daughter of Nashville friends (later the dedicatee of Little Friend, Little Friend) — Jarrell evoked the same scene in fairy-tale terms that inch closer to those of the poem: “It is like being in an orphan asylum in a Dickens story, or in an oldfashioned ineﬃcient jail. . . . I sleep in a double-deck bed with a cowboy from Texas, a nice boy who never ﬁnished the third grade, just below me; if I stretch out my left hand I can touch a small dark pleasant Italian, about ﬁve feet high; with my right hand I can touch somebody who came from I don’t know where” (RJL, 100 – 101). Other sources are literary. The phrase “moans like a bear in his enchanted sleep” recalls the “heavy bear” of Delmore Schwartz, who “Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope / Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.”15 Likewise, the “grave mysterious beings” bent over this “bear” recall Walt Whitman, who begins “The Sleepers”: I wander all night in my vision, Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping, Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers16 In “Song of Myself” Whitman writes lines Jarrell would later quote: “The little one sleeps in its cradle / I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away ﬂies with my hand” (Whitman, 195).17 Jarrell adds his knowledge of psychological theories to this material, in particular his Freudian perspective on dreams as “wish-fulﬁllment.” But what is the wish here? To escape from the army, yes, but this does not entirely explain what occurs in the poem; nor does it touch on the most important aspects of Freud’s theory. The soldier’s homesickness — his desire to escape the barracks — is what Freud would call an “acknowledged” wish, “excited during the day” but “unsatisﬁed,” and now arising out of the preconscious, which retains access to consciousness while acting as

90 |     

a “screen” to the unconscious.18 Homesickness, in other words, is an acceptable feeling that masks feelings consciousness deems unacceptable. No surprise, then, that the poem’s most diﬃcult passage comes after this “preconscious” wish is resolved, in what Suzanne Ferguson rightly describes as an “apprehension of guilt”: the “unaccusing eyes / That even the dream’s eyes are averted from.”19 These unaccusing eyes may belong to the women; they may also belong to the soldier — who may, in turn, be his adult self returned from war, or himself as a child. What matters most in the present context is the “averted” gaze of the dream itself, which suggests the presence of another kind of wish: one that was “rejected” during the day and thus “forced back from the [preconscious] into the [unconscious],” or — more likely — one that has “no relation to daily life,” but which awoke “at night out of . . . suppressed material” and is thus “wholly incapable of leaving the [unconscious]” at all (ID, 498). In using the word “averted,” Jarrell may have been thinking of the following passage in The Interpretation of Dreams: “As the poet brings the guilt of Oedipus to light by his investigation, he forces us to become aware of our own inner selves, in which the same impulses are still extant, even though they are suppressed. . . . Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of the desires that oﬀend morality, the desires that nature has forced upon us and after their unveiling we may well prefer to avert our gaze from the scenes of our childhood” (ID, 308). Thus one might say that Jarrell’s narrator is a synthesis of Freud’s Sophocles and Freud himself: like Sophocles, his poetic “investigation” brings to light an instance of guilt; like Freud, he goes further and brings to light the suppression of guilt’s cause. Unlike either, however, he refrains from “unveiling” the “nature” of this cause, presenting instead the eﬀect. The soldier, in agony, “moans” like a beast, magically summoning “grave mysterious beings” who, “moved for their child,” “mourn above [him] like trees.” Again, it is uncertain if the soldier has regressed to childhood, or is, instead, the grown child of “his years.” Are the “grave . . . beings” parental ﬁgures towering over a wounded boy, or “trees” planted on the grave of a man? One might say, with Freud, that “the two interpretations . . . dovetail into one another” (ID, 227). The dream, then, would be a wish for absolution linking past to present in the pity of war. Boys with shameful secrets, suggests Jarrell, become soldiers later to make good on their lapses. He strips the sacriﬁcial element of battle bare of romanticism to reveal what Freud called the death drive: “ ‘ego-instincts’ . . . impelling [the subject] towards death.” 20 “Terms,” in which a disabled veteran thrashes through dreams toward

The Best Years of Our Lives: Randall Jarrell’s War Poetry | 91

self-acceptance, is too long and complicated to quote or discuss in the same detail as “Absent.” What matters most in the present context is its demonstration of the process of assimilating Erlebnis to Erfahrung. The veteran’s losses are at ﬁrst glance physical only, but the opening line’s wry tabulation of what remains of the man’s body hints at a psychological fragility (i.e., the possibility that the veteran might lose his head as well as his limbs), which the subsequent depiction of state-subsidized retirement hardly dispels: One-armed, one-legged, and one-headed, The pensioner sits in the sun. He is telling a story to the leaf Of the new maple in his new yard: “The Department of the Interior has sent Jack Frost with a spray-gun To paint you red.” The leaf pulls hard To get away — it believes the man — And a blue Chevrolet sedan Draws up and leaves a check for the man in the mail-box. (CP, 209) If “Absent” shows, in the guise of a poem about homesickness, the rifts in consciousness that a soldier brings to war, then “Terms” shows the rifts that a soldier brings home. In the poem’s ﬁrst section, the narrator presents Jarrell’s veteran in a scenario highly suggestive of a dream, using language that at times seems to be the veteran’s own. In the second section, the veteran himself presents a dream, followed by the narrator’s restrained description of the veteran’s self-acceptance. The overall eﬀect is of a delirium that the veteran gradually recognizes as such, then relegates to dream-life, and ﬁnally masters. The poem is at once more graphic than “Absent” in its depiction of war’s violence and more optimistic in its conclusion. These diﬀerences may be due to the dates of composition. “Absent,” ﬁrst published in Poetry in 1943, was written while the war was still in progress. This helps to explain why the soldier’s fate remains unsettled in the poem: the war itself was still unsettled when Jarrell was writing. “Terms,” by contrast, is a postwar composition (it appeared in Poetry ﬁve years after “Absent”), and the problem is no longer, Will I live? but how, or to what end? Despite an overall movement toward self-acceptance, the veteran in “Terms” cannot forget his loss. Waking from his nightmare, he tells himself, darkly, “I am a grave dreaming / That it is a living man,” and though

92 |     

he subsequently “laughs” and reaﬃrms “softly: ‘I am a man,’ ” the reader senses this is something “he has learned,” much as he learned to walk with his prosthetic leg (CP, 211; emphasis added). There is no reason to believe his nightmares are gone for good; the losses he endured in battle, having “changed” him forever, threaten to endure (CP, 209). As the title suggests, only a negotiated settlement brings peace of mind: survival alone is insuﬃcient. In this way, coming to “terms” with the war ends up reproducing the war psychologically; to adapt a well-known phrase, it continues the war by other means. The veteran’s dream makes this explicit when the death wish — repressed in “Absent” — agitates his sleep as if to force its way physically into consciousness: He says: “My arm and leg — My wooden arm, my wooden leg — Wrestled with each other all last night The way you whet a carving-knife Till they stood crisscross against dawn Over what seemed to me a tomb. . . . ” (CP, 210) The dream is much more terrifying than anything in “Absent,” but the eyes are not averted here. Looking into his tomb, the veteran looks into his own mind. Though “The grave [is] empty” (CP, 210), the poem concludes optimistically because the veteran is willing to look, because he accepts himself. As in “Siegfried” — where to have “understood / Your world at last” is to “have tasted your own blood” — the only wisdom is loss sustained (CP, 151).

II “Absent” and “Terms” both concern soldiers, but their primary subject is the nature of experience, not battle. This is not to suggest that Jarrell was uninterested in the war as event, only that an event could not impart meaning. As he notes in his appreciation of Ernie Pyle, “facts are only facts as we see them, as we feel them; . . . experience — especially in war — is ‘seeing only faintly and not wanting to see at all’ ” (KA, 112). Though the violence of battle does hang over these poems (as premonition in “Absent,” as memory in “Terms”), battle itself resists or disturbs representation. Depictions of battle are rare in Jarrell’s poetry, and when they occur (as in “Pilots, Man Your Planes”), they are not rhetorically coherent in

The Best Years of Our Lives: Randall Jarrell’s War Poetry | 93

the manner of John Ciardi’s “Poem for My Twenty-Ninth Birthday” or Edward Field’s later “World War II.” 21 This is surprising, perhaps, given Jarrell’s interest in imagining scenes and constructing narratives, but when it comes to battle, his language is often — in Ellen Bryant Voigt’s memorable phrase — a “heartrending paratactic stutter.” 22 This “stutter” is also, of course, a form of representation, but Jarrell uses it to show not the event of battle, but the pressure that battle brings to bear on consciousness. This is why he found grief so much more engrossing a subject than the scenes of war where loss originates. For Jarrell, the real trauma of violence is the consequent disintegration of identity. Thus, for the traumatized veteran of “Terms” (a “ghost” haunted by “The good dreams” from his prewar life [CP, 209]) and the traumatized child of “The Truth” (institutionalized after an air raid), the past has fallen out of sequence with the present and acquired the unreality of a dream. This is especially true for the child, trapped in the very confusion he is trying to describe: I heard Stalky bark outside. But really it was Mother crying — She coughed so hard she cried. She kept shaking Sister. She shook her and shook her. I thought Sister had had her nightmare. But he wasn’t barking, he had died. There was dirt all over Sister. It was all streaks, like mud. I cried. She didn’t, but she was older. I thought she didn’t Because she was older, I thought Stalky had just gone. I got everything wrong. I didn’t get one single thing right. (CP, 195) Only after a process of recovery is the child able to claim his losses as experience.23 Trauma is an extreme instance of disintegration and hardly serves as a model for all loss, but if losses are sustained in two senses — passively, as events, and actively, as experience — Jarrell’s territory is the transition between them, that is, the process of recovery, through self-scrutiny (as in “Terms”) and therapy (as in “The Truth”). Literary critical studies of trauma pay surprisingly little attention to recovery, perhaps because of a prejudice against any imputation of sentimen-

94 |     

tality, perhaps because, as Dominick LaCapra notes, “Those traumatized by extreme events, as well as those empathizing with them, may [feel that,] . . . in working through the past in a manner that enables survival or a reengagement with life, one is betraying those who were overwhelmed and consumed.” 24 Relevant here is Stephen Burt’s astute comment that Jarrell took on the role of analyst whereas his confessional colleagues identiﬁed with the analysand (Burt, 112). That this therapeutic stance risked a charge of sentimentality is evident, moreover, from comments such as this one by Elizabeth Bishop: “I just never did like . . . his understanding and sortof-over-sympathizing with the lot of women.” 25 I take up the continuity between his “over-sympathizing” in the postwar work and treatment of trauma in the war poems at greater length later. For now, in speaking of Jarrell’s war poetry as an act of recovery, I mean only to suggest that his overall approach to war worked to assimilate and preserve the event as experience rather than reproduce or reenact it. As noted earlier, this process of assimilation took shape in two phases, representing diﬀerent attitudes both about the war as an object of study and about the war’s place in consciousness. The ﬁrst, encompassing Jarrell’s publications of the 1940s and early 1950s, set the war within a framework that also included poems on civilian life, art, nature, and earlier periods in history. In this phase Jarrell’s approach is not the deﬁnitional but the relational; rather than determine what a “war poem” should be, he draws connections between war and everything else. In the second phase, memorialized in Selected Poems, Jarrell treats war itself as a framework, presenting the war in a totality of events preserved within manageable bounds of perception and emotion. To explore what it might mean to read the work in the context of these two phases, I would like to look at three poems: “The Emancipators,” “The Truth,” and “The Survivor among Graves.” Jarrell published “The Emancipators” as a war poem in the 1940s but later separated it from the war poems by placing it in section I of Selected Poems. Tracing this publication history shows the ﬂexibility of the borders that deﬁne the war poetry as a distinct body of work as well as Jarrell’s increasingly conscious selection of that grouping. “The Truth” ﬁrst appeared in book form in The Seven-League Crutches, alongside other poems about “Europe,” “Childhood,” and “Once upon a Time” (the volume’s three subsections). In Selected Poems, “The Truth” appears in section II, with the war poems, in the subsection “Children and Civilians” — a title that draws attention to the overlap between the lives of civilians and soldiers, one of Jarrell’s most persistent themes. In

The Best Years of Our Lives: Randall Jarrell’s War Poetry | 95

some poems, war spreads beyond the limits of the battleﬁeld; in others, war encroaches on the “cozily domestic” aspects of army life (Goldensohn, 54). There is a diﬀerence, however, between a poetry that operates within this common ground, in the midst of a traumatic event, and one that consciously reconstructs it, that shares in its collective memory. Jarrell takes up this diﬀerence in “The Survivor among Graves,” his ﬁnal war poem, ﬁrst published in book form in Selected Poems. This diﬀerence makes it crucial to read the poems as a group; in Benjamin’s terms, to focus on individual poems as isolated events threatens to reduce Jarrell’s consciously constructed Erfahrung to simple Erlebnis. “The Emancipators” originally appeared in the August 1943 issue of Poetry. A showcase for poets in the army, the issue also included work by Louis Aragon, William Jay Smith, Roy Fuller, and Stanley Kunitz, among others. Poems about the army were set beside political poems (Karl Shapiro’s “Nigger”), modernist exercises (Ted Boorum’s “Finnegans Wake”), and existential portraits of civilian life (James Schevill’s “Man Alone”). As the editor wrote in his note on the issue: “No special pains whatever have been taken in planning and compiling this number. We simply took from our ﬁles of poems those by servicemen and put them together.” 26 Of Jarrell’s four contributions, “The Emancipators” stretches the deﬁnition of “war poem” furthest, since, as he reveals in a note composed for Selected Poems, “the great emancipators addressed in the ﬁrst stanza” are not soldiers but “Galileo, Newton, and Bruno” (CP, 8). Nevertheless, the overall context in Poetry invites the reader to think about servicemen, drawing a correlation between the heroism of the scientist, emancipator of the imagination, and the heroism of the soldier, emancipator of occupied Europe and Asia. Yet the poem itself calls this correlation into question, arguing from Jarrell’s then-marxist perspective that the war was fought for money, not freedom: Man is born in chains, and everywhere we see him dead. On your earth they sell nothing but our lives. You knew that what you died for was our deaths? You learned, those years, that what men wish is Trade? It was you who understood; it is we who change. (CP, 120) The poem thus stands in marked contrast to a preceding poem in the issue, Howard Nemerov’s sonnet to Sigmund Freud (“Laureate of those who were afraid,” savior of “warring lands”), which accepts the correlation between scientist and soldier without irony.27

96 |     

Because Jarrell had no speciﬁc intention of appearing in such an issue, it makes sense to speak of this context as a “bibliographic code,” Jerome McGann’s term for the “textual dimensions,” “collaborative and socialized,” “that authors (and authorial intentions) do not govern.” 28 Even more apt, perhaps, would be George Bornstein’s term, “contextual code,” introduced to distinguish the “placement of a poem within a collection” of a composite text (such as Poetry magazine) from its material characteristics (page layout, typeface, book design), as well as from the wording, syntax, lineation, and prosody (what McGann calls the “linguistic code”) of individual poems.29 The “contextual code” is what interests me, since the magazine’s design elements are seemingly irrelevant, but the poem subsequently appeared — at Jarrell’s own suggestion — in the Oscar Williams anthology The War Poets, in which the contextual emphasis on war is heightened by an editorial or design decision to identify soldier contributors by rank, branch of service, and nation (thus, “Randall Jarrell, Sergeant, U.S. Army Air Force”). In a general sense, then, the bibliographic and contextual codes identify a single phenomenon: the poem’s participation in a history, textual and otherwise, that the author can address but not control. “The Emancipators” also appears in Jarrell’s second book, Little Friend, Little Friend, in which the overriding context was again the war. Only in Selected Poems (1955) did “The Emancipators” ﬁnd a print context without war as the predominant interpretive frame. Although section II of that volume is given over completely to war, “The Emancipators” appears in section I, in the subsection “The World Is Everything That Is the Case” (the title is the opening sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus). This is not to suggest that the war is no longer relevant. Indeed, if section I really does aim to include, as the subheading suggests, “Everything That Is the Case,” then some sense of the war assuredly belongs there. “The Emancipators” provides this sense, and in a thoroughly Wittgensteinian manner, for like the Tractatus it was written while the author was in uniform. Since the poem might easily have gone into section II, in the subsection “The Trades,” Jarrell appears to have accepted “The Emancipators” as a war poem only when thinking of the context that produced it. After the war, he found its rhetorical excess less suitable — no doubt because of its ideological leveling, which, in the context of the war poems, argues strongly against the Allied intervention.30 By contrast, “The Truth,” based on source material published while the war was still in progress, belongs both to the last of Jarrell’s war-era vol-

The Best Years of Our Lives: Randall Jarrell’s War Poetry | 97

umes (The Seven-League Crutches) and, as a story of recovery, to his postwar phase. The sense that the war is already becoming a province of history is especially clear in “Good-bye, Wendover; Good-bye, Mountain Home,” a poem about “Overseas Replacement Depots” and the men who passed through them. Jarrell’s narrator in this poem is a clerk of sorts, recording what happens to the soldiers and their families, but imperfectly, and mediating where necessary between the individual and institution, between memory and history. The poem takes as its subject precisely those aspects of the war that oﬃcial accounts are likely to forget (and Selected Poems to memorialize), yet this very perspective marks the poem as an expression of its time. The narrator has survived the war and now ﬁnds himself at the threshold of the postwar world, like the gunnery instructor in “Transient Barracks” and disabled veteran in “Terms.” Jarrell gives this veteran the last word in Selected Poems: “I am a man.” But there, where the overall view is retrospective, the aﬃrmation of humanity serves to bring the war to a close. Earlier, in The Seven-League Crutches, this same soldier’s trauma is likewise something that happened in the past (the poem appears in the subsection “Once upon a Time”), but the emphasis in this earlier book is prospective. As James Longenbach says of “A Game at Salzburg,” also in The SevenLeague Crutches: “Jarrell remains conscious of the Second World War but explores the odd ways in which the world absorbs its own destructiveness, moving forward.” 31 In 1951 the war is still raw material for experience, a compromised childhood pointing toward some emergent future. The book’s title — an allusion to the fairy tale “Hop o’ My Thumb” — evokes that journey forward and at the same time proposes the war as a privileged point of intersection. From such a vantage point, “The Truth” serves as this volume’s central poem. But this interpretation places too much emphasis on the editing as statement and not enough on the editing as achievement, as the end result of Jarrell’s assimilation of war into experience. In his previous books the assimilation was only partial, owing in large part to their sheer number of war poems, as well as to what Wallace Stevens called (in an essay published in 1942) “the pressure of reality,” that is, “the pressure of an external event or events on the consciousness to the exclusion of any power of contemplation.” 32 For Stevens, the “nobility” of art lay precisely in its resistance, explicitly described as “psychologically . . . escapist” (Stevens, 662). Jarrell’s perspective is quite diﬀerent. The dreamlike states of mind in “The Truth” and the dreams in “Absent with Oﬃcial Leave” delineate the limits of es-

98 |     

capism. Jarrell’s own “nobility” as an artist lies not in his evasion of reality, but in his struggle to absorb it, much as the boy in “The Truth” assimilates his family’s fate. The centrality of “The Truth” in The Seven-League Crutches has no equivalent in Selected Poems, where the seven categories of section II (“Bombers,” “The Carriers,” “Prisoners,” “Camps and Fields,” “The Trades,” “Children and Civilians,” and “Soldiers”) have no discernible intersection and describe a totality with no knowable center. In Selected Poems, representative subjects have given way to a range of partial samples. The scale of Jarrell’s attention has shifted, decisively, from that of the individual to that of the collective: from the psychological trauma in “The Truth” to the cultural trauma in “The Survivor among Graves.” In this latter poem, Jarrell’s survivor speaks of the war as a terrible dream, something the nation loses not by being defeated, but by waking. Looking upon a granite monument, he asks: That all-replacing dream Through which our dark lives led in waiting — The dream I woke to, that holds you sleepers still — What is it now, The War? A war now, numbered As your lives and graves are numbered; that one can lose. That we have lost. (CP, 206) The danger in such thinking, of course, is that the war’s survivors (former soldiers, bereaved family members, mourning civilians) will come to devalue recovery altogether and see a “reengagement with life” (recalling LaCapra’s words) as a betrayal of those who died. Jarrell, recognizing this danger, has his survivor struggle to articulate some sense of connection with the dead: We sleep lightly; waking, Some still success, succession, weighs us down, Enchanting our limbs to yours . . . our veins averted Into another world, our vacant hope Long since fulﬁlled. (CP, 207; ellipses in original) Complex, dreamlike associations coordinate this passage: “success” is “still,” like a river, suggesting time (“succession”), which in turn suggests a responsibility (“weighs us down”) that holds the poem’s “us” under water, in a

The Best Years of Our Lives: Randall Jarrell’s War Poetry | 99

connection with the dead that recalls in its diction the “enchanted sleep” of “Absent with Oﬃcial Leave.” Just here, however, using ellipses, Jarrell registers a dislocation. For if the living belong, even in sleep, to water, the dead belong to earth. The dead are like mineral deposits, but the “veins” of the living (another river) have been “averted” (another word that recalls the troubled sleep of “Absent”) to a world beyond. This other world — the successful afterlife of the postwar years, the future hinted at in The Seven-League Crutches — provides Jarrell with his vantage point in Selected Poems. In earlier volumes Jarrell had worked hard to give the war meaning by bringing it into consciousness. Now, however, with the war receding into history, its meaning began to dissolve in the larger context. As Jarrell notes in his introduction: “The war — the Second World War — has been over for a long time; there are names and events people knew they would never forget which, by now, they have forgotten they ever knew” (CP, 3 – 4). Selected Poems works against this amnesia.

III There is no published record of Jarrell’s having seen The Best Years of Our Lives, but if he had he might have noted many parallels between Wyler’s response to the war and his own. The ﬁlm opened in New York in November 1946, some nine months after Jarrell’s discharge from the army; Jarrell had already published Little Friend, Little Friend, and a number of the poems collected later in Losses — “The Dead Wingman,” “Burning the Letters,” “Pilots, Man Your Planes” — had appeared in magazines. More to the point, Jarrell’s view of the army as a depersonalizing institution had already led him to take on (in “Siegfried”) the central problem of Wyler’s ﬁlm: the soldier’s reintegration into civilian life. The particular interest of Wyler’s treatment of this problem is the compression and scale of his narrative, which brings together soldiers from diﬀerent generations, classes, and branches of the service to project the war’s larger dimensions while calibrating the diﬀerences and similarities between the individual cases. Wyler himself suggests a sociological guiding principal in his account of the ﬁlm’s production: “It is readily apparent that this is not a story of plot, but a picture of some people, who were real people, facing real problems. It was important for all of the people connected with the making of the picture to understand this.” 33 Visually, the ﬁlm’s compression and scale manifest themselves in an active (but never disorganized) frame, and in an innovative use of deep focus to bring into view relations that are usually

100 |     

organized through editing.34 The composition of individual shots and entire scenes continually invites the viewer to compare the characters; these juxtapositions, more than the “plot,” create the ﬁlm’s emotional power. Jarrell’s poems are, if anything, more compressed than Wyler’s ﬁlm, achieving their scale through juxtapositions between rather than within narratives. The end result is less schematic than Best Years but shares its subordination of drama to analysis, of expression to display. All three of Wyler’s soldiers — Captain Fred Derry, a bombardier; Homer Parrish, a sailor; and Al Stephenson, an army sergeant — reﬂect aspects of Jarrell’s work. Fred comes from a poor family, and before the war he worked as a soda jerk. Heroic in service, he carries himself with conﬁdence, but like the surviving pilot of Jarrell’s “The Dead Wingman” he is disturbed in sleep by thoughts of the death of a comrade. Homer, the youngest, returns home to an extended family and childhood sweetheart, Wilma. Like the pensioner in “Terms,” he is missing two limbs: his arms, burned oﬀ when his ship was torpedoed, have been replaced with hooks. Al, the oldest, will have the smoothest return. He has a knowing wife, Millie, and adult daughter, Peggy, to watch over him, and his boss has kept his job open at the bank. By age, training, and temperament, his view of the war is larger than Fred’s and Homer’s, and he has a clearer understanding of how the serviceman will ﬁt, economically, in the postwar world. He is, in this sense, closer to Jarrell than any of Jarrell’s own characters. Al’s understanding does not give him any particular advantage in accepting his place in civilian society, however. As a vice president of the bank, overseeing loans to returning servicemen, he is forced on a daily basis to abandon the democracy of the army (where he was one of the men, not an oﬃcer) in favor of “the fundamental principles of sound banking.” Over the course of the ﬁlm he will develop a drinking problem that remains unresolved at picture’s end. The men hold in common their inability or unwillingness to take up their prewar lives despite the encouragement (sometimes loving, sometimes self-interested) of those around them, but they diﬀer in the nature of their backgrounds and expectations, and in the nature of the wartime events with which they must now come to terms. These diﬀerences are made explicit shortly after the soldiers meet, on the plane ride home. When Al admits his fear that his family and friends will try to “rehabilitate” him, Fred answers thoughtfully, “All I want’s a good job, a mild future, a little house big enough for me and my wife — give me that much and I’m rehabilitated.” Al wants to insist on the diﬀerence the war has made in him; Fred’s position is more divided. He is eager to put the war behind him — playing

The Best Years of Our Lives: Randall Jarrell’s War Poetry | 101

down his nightmares and casting away his medal citations like so much junk — but when the opportunity arises to pick up where he left oﬀ, he continually refuses. He does not want to go back to the drugstore; his success in the army has made him too ambitious for that. The war has given Fred a seriousness that casts a shadow over his “mild” future and makes it impossible for him to ever be happy again with his fun-loving wife, Marie. For Homer, his amputated limbs are an ever-present, too vivid reminder of what happened. “Wilma’s just a kid,” he tells the others, “she’s never seen anything like these hooks.” For all three men, then, postwar life emerges as a series of dislocations, reminders of the slippage between their military and civilian selves. In the beginning of the movie, when the three men are looking out through the nose of a B-17, Fred remarks, “This used to be my oﬃce; that’s where the bombsight was, [I] spent a lot of time on my knees up there.” (“Praying?” asks Al. “Yeah, that too,” Fred answers.) The episode is recalled at the movie’s conclusion, when Fred — at the end of his options — climbs into an abandoned B-17 while awaiting a ﬂight to take him out of town for good. “For four years,” writes Wyler, “Fred was trained, disciplined, and formed into a precise human instrument for destruction. Now his work is done, and he too has been thrown to the junk pile” (Wyler, 110). To give the impression that Fred is having a ﬂashback, Wyler cuts between shots of the scrapped planes and Fred’s sweating face, ﬁlmed in part through the scratched, dirty Plexiglas of the bombsight. There is no dialogue or voiceover, and no representation of what Fred is thinking. Similarly, Jarrell’s “Siegfried” narrates a scene that is, like the one running in Fred’s head, resistant to assimilation. The poem begins in an air battle over Japan, in the “great glass dome” of a B-29 (CP, 149), an enclosure similar to the nose of Fred’s B-17. Though the subject of the poem is a gunner, not a bombardier, his estrangement from the violence going on around him is, as in Fred’s case, a mark of trauma. Jarrell is explicit about this estrangement. His gunner is “the watcher” of what he lives through; “the actor” is someone else: In the turret’s great glass dome, the apparition, death, Framed in the glass of the gunsight, a ﬁghter’s blinking wing, Flares softly, a vacant ﬁre. If the ﬂak’s inked blurs — Distributed, statistical — the bombs’ lost patterning Are death, they are death under glass, a chance For someone yesterday, someone tomorrow; and the ﬁre

102 |     

That streams from the ﬁghter which is there, not there, Does not warm you, has not burned them, though they die. Under the leather and fur and wire, in the gunner’s skull It is a dream: and he, the watcher, guiltily Watches the him, the actor, who is innocent. It happens as it does because it does. (CP, 149) The poem ends in the United States, with the gunner, now missing a leg, “standing irresolute / By the whitewashed courthouse,” seeing and being seen by the people of his hometown (CP, 150 – 51). Like Homer in Best Years, he is both spectacle and spectator, a guilty reminder of “missions done,” with no obvious future use to himself or those around him. Ultimately, however, “Siegfried” is less about air battles and disﬁguring violence, or even about guilt, than it is about the crisis of subjectivity that the war in its technological manifestation poses to its human agents: It is unnecessary to understand; if you are still In this year of our warfare, indispensable In general, and in particular dispensable As a cartridge, a life — it is only to enter So many knots in a window, so many feet; To switch on for an instant the steel that understands. Do as they said; as they said, there is always a reason — ................................................ So the bombs fell . . . ................................................ Yet inside the infallible invulnerable Machines, the skin of steel, glass, cartridges, Duties, responsibilities, and — surely — deaths, There was only you . . . (CP, 149) This crisis of volition and responsibility — transposed from the technological apparatus of war to the economic apparatus of the postwar world — is what Al confronts in his work at the bank and acts out in his leisure hours by getting drunk. Wyler, less penetrating than Jarrell in his analysis, presents this crisis in humanistic terms, as a betrayal of the “individual initiative” that won the war. Even so, there is a continuity between the critique of economic policy in Best Years and Jarrell’s critique of war in “Siegfried,”

The Best Years of Our Lives: Randall Jarrell’s War Poetry | 103

for each anticipates (as Thomas Travisano says of the latter) “the conﬂicted intimations of power, powerlessness, knowledge, ignorance, abundance, and anxious mortality” characteristic of the cold war.35 Best Years, although structured around the lives of returning soldiers, owes more to the conventions of the woman’s movie than it does to the heroic iconography of the war picture; by emphasizing emotion over action, the ﬁlm gives greater agency to the women characters than it does to the men. Linda Williams deﬁnes the woman’s movie (or “weepie”) as a ﬁlm “addressed to women in their traditional status under patriarchy — as wives, mothers, abandoned lovers.”36 Best Years is not addressed to these women; Wyler makes clear in his essay that the target audience — at least the one that he cared about — was the returning soldier. Yet the ﬁlm is certainly a “weepie”; its eﬀectiveness depends on the viewer’s emotional response to its depictions of the veterans’ plights. The women, moreover, are all shown comfortably bound in relationships constitutive of “patriarchy.” Wilma, Homer’s ﬁancée, still lives with her parents, a member of two households; Millie and Peggy — Al’s wife and daughter — have kept up the family’s social position in Al’s absence. Even Marie, the one woman who ﬂaunts her dissatisfaction with a “traditional” role, is shown fully at ease in her society, much more so than Fred, her husband. One weeps, in other words, for patriarchy, not women. Francis Davis aptly describes Best Years as a woman’s movie in which the gender roles are reversed, that is, in which “the characters in danger of being immolated by their emotions are disaﬀected ﬁghting men,” not the “wives and sweethearts” to whom those men return.37 Kaja Silverman makes an analogous point in psychoanalytic terms when she writes of the ﬁlm’s “deviation from gender orthodoxy”: “It is above all at the level of spectacle that Best Years of Our Lives breaks with the dominant ﬁction. Far from obliging the female subject to display her lack to her sexual other, it repeatedly calls upon her to look acceptingly at his.”38 Thus, Fred’s extramarital romance with Peggy and Homer’s postwar renewal of aﬀection with Wilma ﬁnd their true beginnings in emotionally explicit bedroom scenes in which the men, revealing their traumas, become like vulnerable children either accepting or wholly entrusting themselves to a reassuring mother. In the ﬁrst case, Fred sobs after waking from a nightmare as Peggy — called to his side by the shouting — wipes his forehead and ﬁrmly repeats, “go to sleep.” In the second, Homer brings Wilma into his bedroom to show her what living with him would entail. He takes oﬀ his robe, then shakes free of his harness and wriggles into his pajama top, which Wilma buttons.

104 |     

Standing before her now with neither arms nor prostheses, he enumerates the conditions of his helplessness, concluding: “I guess you don’t know what to say. It’s all right. Go on home. Go away like your family said.” As if to get away from her, he sits down on the edge of the bed, but Wilma follows. Getting down on her knees — the posture of a man proposing marriage — she replies, “I know what to say Homer. I love you. And I’m never going to leave you. Never.” There are no equivalent interactions between men and women in Jarrell’s war poetry. The veteran in “Terms” — puttering around his house and living oﬀ disability checks like Homer — is a solitary ﬁgure. The wife in “Burning the Letters” is bereaved. Yet Jarrell’s women invite empathy, and in this sense the poems conform more fully to the paradigm of the woman’s movie than does Best Years, in which Millie, Peggy, Marie, and Wilma are all subsidiary characters; their problems are not at issue in the ﬁlm, only those of the men.39 This is also true in “Second Air Force,” the opening poem of Little Friend, Little Friend, in which a mother visits her son and has a premonition of his death. Jarrell invites the reader to see the war from her perspective, not from her son’s: The soldiers pass like beasts, unquestioning, And the watcher for an instant understands What there is then no need to understand; But she wakes from her knowledge, and her stare, A shadow now, moves emptily among The shadows learning in their shadowy ﬁelds The empty missions. Remembering, She hears the bomber calling, Little Friend! To the ﬁghter hanging in the hostile sky, And sees the ragged ﬂame eat, rib by rib, Along the metal of the wing into her heart. (CP, 178) “Burning the Letters” explores a woman’s perspective even more fully than “Second Air Force.” The poem begins cinematically, as the widow imagines ﬁrst her husband’s death at sea, then his “yellowing face” superimposed on his letters home (CP, 158). The letters are her husband: his face is yellow because the paper is already old, the ﬂames lick at his “last questioning smile” (CP, 158). Much of the poem is taken up with the widow’s crisis of faith, but the reader retains more the intensity of her grief, which

The Best Years of Our Lives: Randall Jarrell’s War Poetry | 105

feeds on the ﬂames that burn her husband’s letters and does not subside even after she declares the process “ﬁnished” (CP, 160). Women will become more important for Jarrell’s poetry as time goes by, perhaps due to the aftereﬀects of the war. In 1963, introducing “Next Day” at a poetry reading in New York, he mused aloud: “I see in all these poems I haven’t got any about men, I’ve got them about animals, women, and children. . . . I guess all the men got killed in the poems I wrote about the war and I haven’t got any left.”40 The poems he has in mind here, prefeminist in perspective, are often melodramatic, and like the “weepies” of the 1940s were often dismissed by critics. Indeed, when the New York Times, reviewing The Lost World, decried “Jarrell’s familiar, clanging vulgarity, corny cliches, cutenesses, and the intolerable self-indulgence of his tear-jerking bourgeois sentimentality,” it might just as well have been describing a woman’s movie.41 Likewise, when Molly Haskell says of such ﬁlms, “The derisive attitude of the eastern critical establishment won the day and drove them out of business,” she might just as well be describing the critical reaction to Jarrell.42 Yet like the woman’s movie, the poems have had their advocates. Richard Flynn, emphasizing readership, speaks of Jarrell’s late work as “part of a humane enterprise . . . to reach an audience that is suspicious of poetry”; Gail McDonald, emphasizing pedagogy, praises Jarrell’s decision “to align himself with the feminine as a means of advocating values that had been dismissed by the modernist movement”; and James Longenbach, emphasizing point of view, sees in Jarrell’s “sympathy for women” a project that sometimes led him to occupy “a legitimately and productively feminized position.”43 That the war should have led Jarrell in this direction rather than ﬁxed him more ﬁrmly in his masculinity might seem anomalous were it not for the parallel example of The Best Years of Our Lives. There, as in Jarrell’s poetry, the assimilation of trauma is a home-front activity, and thus a kind of woman’s work, requiring of men what Jarrell once called (in a letter to Allen Tate) a “semifeminine mind” — that is, a mind without faith “in abstractions or systems,” able to carry thought beyond the point where “things get contradictory and incomprehensible,” where “if you look at anything long enough you stop moving and fall through the ice into the abyss” (RJL, 19). This is the point that Jarrell’s soldier reaches in “Absent with Oﬃcial Leave,” and that his veteran in “Terms” and child in “The Truth” push beyond. These are the abstractions and systems that enmesh Jarrell’s gunner in “Siegfried” and shut out his soldier’s mother in “Second Air Force.” This is the loss of faith that his “Survivor” suﬀers and his

106 |     

widow articulates in “Burning the Letters.” She, if anyone, gives this poetry its most ﬁtting epitaph: “O grave! Great grave of all my years, / . . . / Make yours the memory of that accepting / And accepted life whose fragments I cast here” (CP, 160).

Notes For leads, encouragement, and advice in composition, I am grateful to David Adams, Carla Billitteri, Joshua Clover, Laura Cowan, Duncan Dobbelman, Eric Haralson, Andrew Hewitt, and Tabitha Turri. 1. Randall Jarrell, The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 337. Subsequent references appear in the text abbreviated CP. 2. Randall Jarrell, A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays and Fables (New York: Atheneum, 1962), 140. 3. Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 779. Subsequent references appear in the text. 4. See the work of Ron Eyerman in Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2 – 3. 5. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935 – 1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 143, 153 – 54. 6. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938 – 1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 316. Subsequent references appear in the text abbreviated “On Some Motifs.” 7. Mary Jarrell, ed., Randall Jarrell’s Letters (Boston: Houghton Miﬄin, 1985), 151. Subsequent references appear in the text abbreviated RJL. 8. Jarrell cites Anna Freud as a source for “The Truth” in a letter to Elisabeth Eisler quoted in Stuart Wright, Randall Jarrell: A Descriptive Bibliography, 1929 – 1983 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 280. For the Karski review, see Kipling, Auden and Co.: Essays and Reviews, 1935 – 1964 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 126. Subsequent references appear in the text abbreviated K A. 9. Neil J. Smelser, “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, by Jeﬀrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 44. 10. William H. Pritchard, Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 116. 11. Robert Lowell, “On The Seven-League Crutches,” in Randall Jarrell, 1914 – 1965, ed. Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), 114.

The Best Years of Our Lives: Randall Jarrell’s War Poetry | 107 12. Wilfred Owen, The Collected Poems, ed. C. Day Lewis (New York: New Directions, 1965), 31. 13. Lorrie Goldensohn, “Randall Jarrell’s War,” War, Literature and the Arts 11 (Spring – Summer 1999): 50, 53. Subsequent references appear in the text. 14. Stephen Burt, Randall Jarrell and His Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 85. Subsequent references appear in the text. 15. Delmore Schwartz, Selected Poems, 1938 – 1958: Summer Knowledge (New York: New Directions, 1967), 74. 16. Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982), 542. Subsequent references appear in the text. 17. The two lines appear in the essay “Some Lines from Whitman,” composed in 1951 and published the following year in the Kenyon Review. 18. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1938), 491, 498. Subsequent references will appear in the text abbreviated ID. Because my interpretation of Jarrell’s poem depends in part on the English wording of Freud’s text, I have chosen to quote from the translation Jarrell would have known; the standard edition did not appear until 1953. 19. Suzanne Ferguson, The Poetry of Randall Jarrell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 51. 20. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. C.J.M. Hubback (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), 54; here again I am quoting from the contemporary translation. For a brief account of Jarrell’s interest in the death drive, see Burt, 86 – 89. 21. For the Ciardi poem, ﬁrst published in Other Skies (1947), see Saipan: The War Diary of John Ciardi (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988), 109 – 11. For the Edward Field poem, ﬁrst published in Variety Photoplays (1967), see Poets of World War II, ed. Harvey Shapiro (New York: Library of America, 2003), 195 – 200. Subsequent references appear in the text. 22. Ellen Bryant Voigt, “Lost and Found,” Southern Review 38 (Spring 2002): 390. 23. My formulation here is indebted to Cathy Caruth’s in Unclaimed Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), where, drawing on Freud, she deﬁnes trauma as “an experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs” (5). 24. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 22. 25. Quoted by David Kalstone in Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 226; the ellipses indicate Kalstone’s interpolation. 26. P.D. [Peter De Vries], “A Note on This Issue,” Poetry 62 (August 1943): 277. 27. Howard Nemerov, “Sigmund Freud,” Poetry 62 (August 1943): 261. 28. Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 58. 29. See, for example, George Bornstein, “What Is the Text of a Poem by Yeats?”

108 |      in Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 179. 30. See The War Poets: An Antholog y of the War Poetry of the 20th Century (New York: John Day Company, 1945) to compare Oscar Williams’s editorial stance — “when the poets were in the armed forces I allowed a wider range [of subjects] . . . since the poems were written while the poet was directly pressed upon by the exigencies of war” (Williams, 8 – 9) — with the more constricted aims of Harvey Shapiro in Poets of World War II (New York: Library of America, 2003) “to present . . . poems . . . written directly out of the experience of war, poems that contained the sights, sounds, and emotions of the war” (Shapiro, xxxi). 31. James Longenbach, Modern Poetry after Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 60. Subsequent references appear in the text. 32. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 654. Subsequent references appear in the text. 33. William Wyler, “No Magic Wand,” in Hollywood Directors, 1941 – 1976, ed. Richard Koszarski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111. The essay originally appeared in the Screen Writer, February 1947. Subsequent references appear in the text. 34. See André Bazin’s inﬂuential essay “William Wyler, or the Jansenist of Mise en Scène,” available in Realism and the Cinema: A Reader, ed. Christopher Williams (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 36 – 52. 35. Thomas Travisano, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 180 – 81. 36. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” in Film Genre Reader II, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 142. 37. Francis Davis, “Storming the Home Front,” Atlantic Monthly, March 2003, 128. 38. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 69. 39. Marjorie Rosen makes this point in Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1973), 205. 40. The Poetry of Randall Jarrell (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), audiocassette C325. 41. Quoted in Mary Jarrell, Remembering Randall: A Memoir of Poet, Critic, and Teacher Randall Jarrell (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 164. 42. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 187. 43. Richard Flynn, Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 139; Gail McDonald, “Sentimental Education: Randall Jarrell among the Women,” Modernism/Modernity 5 (1998): 18; and Longenbach, 63.

The Best Years of Our Lives: Randall Jarrell’s War Poetry | 109

Bibliography Bazin, André. “William Wyler, or the Jansenist of Mise en Scène.” In Realism and the Cinema: A Reader, edited by Christopher Williams, 36 – 52. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In Selected Writings. Vol. 4, 1938 – 1940, 313 – 55. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Translated by Harry Zohn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. ———. “The Storyteller.” In Selected Writings. Vol. 3, 1935 – 1938, 143 – 66. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Translated by Harry Zohn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Bornstein, George. “What Is the Text of a Poem by Yeats?” In Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, edited by George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams, 167 – 93. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Burt, Stephen. Randall Jarrell and His Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Ciardi, John. Saipan: The War Diary of John Ciardi. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988. Davis, Francis. “Storming the Home Front.” Atlantic Monthly, March 2003, 125 – 32. De Vries, Peter. “A Note on This Issue.” Poetry 62 (August 1943): 272 – 77. Eyerman, Ron. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ferguson, Suzanne. The Poetry of Randall Jarrell. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971. Flynn, Richard. Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Childhood. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by C.J.M. Hubback. London: Hogarth Press, 1942. ———. The Interpretation of Dreams. In The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. Translated by A. A. Brill. New York: Modern Library, 1938. Goldensohn, Lorrie. “Randall Jarrell’s War.” War, Literature & the Arts 11 (Spring – Summer 1999): 42 – 69. Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Jarrell, Mary, ed. Randall Jarrell’s Letters. Boston: Houghton Miﬄin, 1985. Jarrell, Mary von Schrader. Remembering Randall: A Memoir of Poet, Critic, and Teacher Randall Jarrell. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Jarrell, Randall. The Complete Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. ———. Kipling, Auden and Co.: Essays and Reviews, 1935 – 1964. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980.

110 |      ———. The Poetry of Randall Jarrell. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978. Audiocassette C325. ———. A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays and Fables. New York: Atheneum, 1962. Kalstone, David. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Longenbach, James. Modern Poetry after Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Lowell, Robert. “On The Seven-League Crutches.” In Randall Jarrell, 1914 – 1965, edited by Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren, 113 – 17. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967. McDonald, Gail. “Sentimental Education: Randall Jarrell among the Women.” Modernism/Modernity 5 (1998): 1 – 22. McGann, Jerome. The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Nemerov, Howard. “Sigmund Freud.” Poetry 62 (August 1943): 261. Owen, Wilfred. The Collected Poems. Edited by C. Day Lewis. New York: New Directions, 1965. Pritchard, William H. Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. Rosen, Marjorie. Popcorn Venus: Women, Movie, and the American Dream. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1973. Schwartz, Delmore. Selected Poems, 1938 – 1958: Summer Knowledge. New York: New Directions, 1967. Scott, Joan W. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 773 – 97. Shapiro, Harvey, ed. Poets of World War II. New York: Library of America, 2003. Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992. Smelser, Neil J. “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, by Jeﬀrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, 31 – 59. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1997. Travisano, Thomas. Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Voigt, Ellen Bryant. “Lost and Found.” Southern Review 38 (Spring 2002): 377 – 98. Whitman, Walt. Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1982. Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” In Film Genre Reader II, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 140 – 58. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.

The Best Years of Our Lives: Randall Jarrell’s War Poetry | 111 Williams, Oscar. The War Poets: An Antholog y of the War Poetry of the 20th Century. New York: John Day Company, 1945. Wright, Stuart. Randall Jarrell: A Descriptive Bibliography, 1929 – 1983. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986. Wyler, William. “No Magic Wand.” In Hollywood Directors, 1941 – 1976, edited by Richard Koszarski, 102 – 16. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

5

Randall Jarrell and the Age of Consumer Culture Diederik Oostdijk

The writing career of Randall Jarrell, like that of the other middle-generation poets, runs parallel with the golden age of modern consumer culture. Jarrell, however, was the only poet of his generation who engaged in extended, disciplined debate with social scientists and cultural critics about the eﬀects of popular and consumer culture on art, artists, and the general populace. In A Troubled Feast: American Society since 1945 (1973), the historian William Leuchtenburg summarized the postwar American experience as an aggregate of cold war and consumer culture.1 Jarrell addressed only indirectly the gloomy stalemate with the Soviet Union and the many skirmishes between the two superpowers.2 Yet he was vocal and incisive about the age of consumer culture and the societal changes within the United States from the 1940s through the 1960s caused by a rapidly changing economy and the emergence of the mass media industry. Although the theme of consumer and popular culture appears to be a leitmotif throughout Jarrell’s life and artistic career, it is rarely explored by critics; recent publications have shed more light on this issue.3 What was Jarrell’s attitude toward the age of pervasive consumerism, how did it develop from the 1940s through the 1960s, and how does it relate to the other cultural critics of his time? Furthermore, considering that he thought of himself foremost as a poet, how did his preoccupation with consumer culture aﬀect his poetry?

114 |   

Jarrell authored about a dozen essays on these issues, most of which are included in A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962). Other contemporary poets, such as Robert Lowell, John Frederick Nims, and Karl Shapiro, made oﬀhand comments or wrote an occasional poem about these developments. Yet for Jarrell the rise of consumer culture became a substantial theme in his entire oeuvre. Indeed, as Shapiro put it: “Jarrell’s generation, my generation, inherited the question of Culture — Mass Culture versus True Culture. It is our pons asinorum, and we all had to cross it. Jarrell worried the problem more than most of us.”4 Jarrell’s concern surfaced in a Taminent Institute symposium, “Mass Media and Modern Society,” in 1959 where he was the only poet present in a crowd of social scientists, historians, and philosophers. Besides his essays, Jarrell also wrote notable poems that addressed consumer culture, such as “Sears Roebuck” (1947), “Money” (1948), “Hope” (1961), “In Montecito” (1963), “Next Day” (1963), “Three Bills” (1963), and “Say Goodbye to Big Daddy” (1965), which are interconnected with the social critique of his essays. Most of Jarrell’s consumer-culture essays address the position of the poet in American society, arguing that the United States does not appreciate its intellectuals, in general, and that it is dumbing down, owing partly to a faulty educational system and partly to mass culture. Deprecating the Reader’s Digest’s inﬂuence, Elvis Presley’s popularity, and the dwindling public interest in poetry or any literature, Jarrell’s message nowadays comes across as conservative in its seemingly elitist bearings, not unlike the critiques of Matthew Arnold, F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Leavis, and T. S. Eliot in England before him.5 Jarrell’s arguments also owe much to the mass culture debate that erupted in the ﬁrst ﬁfteen years after World War II. Spurred on by the proliferation of the mass media and landmark publications on mass media and consumer culture — as diverse as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, Dwight MacDonald’s “A Theory of Mass Culture,” and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment — this debate dominated talk in intellectual circles for years.6 The three critics who inﬂuenced Jarrell the most during the 1950s were Riesman and two Jewish scholars who had ﬂed Europe during the war, Hannah Arendt and Ernest van den Haag, as Burt and Flynn have argued. Both Arendt and Riesman were important to Jarrell because they taught him how crippling and disabling conformity was for individuals.7 Yet it was van den Haag, “a made sociologist and a born poet,” according to Jarrell, whose psychological insights moved him the most and ultimately inﬂuenced his poetry.8 Jarrell’s critique echoes many of these critics’ most famous pessimistic

Randall Jarrell and the Age of Consumer Culture | 115

points, but his attitude toward popular and consumer culture was ambivalent and perhaps inevitably complicit. He partook fully in the consumerism of his time, writing pieces for women’s magazines such as Mademoiselle and Vogue, which helped him to buy a Mercedes automobile, as he gleefully remarked in his letters.9 An interview in the Saturday Evening Post, the very mass-market, low-brow magazine he ridiculed on occasion, inspired him to write a highly unusual and moving elegy, “Say Good-bye to Big Daddy,” about a professional football star. Moreover, Jarrell cleverly referred to and critically appropriated popular culture in his poetry. Allusions to brand names, advertisement slogans, and the movie entertainment industry abound in his poetry. In “Say Goodbye to Big Daddy,” Jarrell refers to a Prudential Insurance advertisement as a simile for the way Eugene Lipscomb — nicknamed Big Daddy — blocked his opponents: “like the Rock / Of Gibraltar in a life insurance ad.”10 For years, Prudential’s advertisement used the familiar image of the rock, with the accompanying claim: “The Prudential has the strength of Gibraltar.” Referring to a life insurance ad in an elegy is amusingly ironic, undermining the association of solidity between Lipscomb and Prudential with the suggestion of their shared vulnerability. In “Thinking of the Lost World” (1963), to mention another example, the middle-aged speaker drives past a factory in North Carolina that manufactures Vicks VapoRub ointment — then a widely used comfort for colds — and the smell transports him back in time to a childhood tree house in a eucalyptus near his grandparents’ home in California. The scene pays homage to Marcel Proust’s use of sensory experience to trigger memories that had seemed lost, but that a brand-name palliative sparks it is both witty and parodic of Proust. In 1925, as not only “Thinking of the Lost World” but also “The Lost World” documents, Jarrell spent time with his grandparents in Hollywood when his parents’ marriage was falling apart. “The Lost World” shares its title with a Hollywood movie whose set he frequently walked past. The poem, with its allusions to the Hollywood dream factory, was ﬁrmly rooted in Jarrell’s actual childhood memories, however. Another early encounter with consumer culture also had a bearing on his poetry. An uncle of his, Howell Campbell, owned a thriving candy business in Nashville, which manufactured Bell-Camp Chocolates and Goo-Goo Bars. Jarrell was supposed to succeed his uncle in the business and was accordingly sent to a commercial school to study accounting. “This was a disastrous experience,” Jarrell’s biographer William Pritchard writes, “which Jarrell responded to by becoming seriously ill with pleurisy and borderline pneumonia.” After

116 |   

some weeks of “convalescing, reading Marx and writing poetry,” he convinced his uncle to send him to Vanderbilt to pursue an academic or artistic career instead.11 Jarrell’s wife, Mary von Schrader Jarrell, has related how, much later in life — when he was an established poet — this same uncle told Jarrell to call him if he ever ran out of ideas for his poems. He had plenty of ideas “that will sell, son,” he assured Jarrell. The poet reportedly turned to his wife and said, “Uncle Howl thinks one can crank out poems like Peppermint Patties.”12 Thus, through family connections in diﬀerent parts of the United States, Jarrell came into provocative contact with the leisureculture commercialism that would animate his later writings. Jarrell’s ﬁrst consumer-culture poem, a long interior monologue entitled “Money,” concerned unbridled capitalism and was inspired by “Uncle Howl’s” speech. It was a poem, Jarrell told Arendt in October 1947, “about the greatest of all poetic subjects, that no one ever conceivably writes a poem about” (Letters, 180). Set in the prosperous 1920s, it is a rambling soliloquy of a dying millionaire who brags about his nefarious accomplishments. The speaker worked himself up from humble beginnings, but cut some corners along the way. His limited interest in high art is strictly mercenary. When his wife wants the famous Australian opera singer Nellie Melba to sing for her and her friends, he muses about the diva: “Birdie, I could buy you / The way you’d buy a piece of Melba Toast” (CP, 118). To the speaker, all art and all artists are mere products, which he can easily aﬀord. Mary Jarrell claimed that “Money” originated from Jarrell’s “anticapitalist and Marxist leanings in the thirties” (Remembering, 6). Jarrell’s implicit criticism of the capitalist system in “Money” is indeed similar to leftist readings of culture, for instance by members of the Frankfurt School. Like Jarrell, they believed that commercialization devalues “authentic” culture by turning it into yet another cultural commodity. In “Money,” the speaker makes it known that the only reason he bought his ﬁrst Rembrandt was to launder money. Opera music and paintings in twentieth-century America had become commodities rather than autonomous objects that are valuable for their own sake: “Works of art are in a sense quite beyond any use in society. Constant talking of function is an awful thing,” Jarrell had exclaimed in a panel discussion at the Taminent Institute (Jacobs, 186). Jarrell despised the notion that money is the sole criterion for vocational or personal success, which he ﬁrmly associated with American culture.13 In “A Sad Heart at the Supermarket” (1960), for example, Jarrell sums up this attitude in a rhetorical question, which he maintains is “the ground bass of [American] society”: “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” He goes on to say

Randall Jarrell and the Age of Consumer Culture | 117

that “society’s non-monetary values are directly convertible into money,” a deplorable reductiveness.14 The rich speaker of “Money” is the embodiment of this belief. Convinced that money can buy everything and everyone and that it is a panacea for all ills, he voices the opposite of Jarrell’s own personal views. When Jarrell organized his Selected Poems for publication in 1955, he grouped together “Money” with a number of other poems under the title “The World Is Everything That Is the Case.” Jarrell uses this statement from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to describe the multifarious but typically mundane subjects of these poems, which few other poets wanted or dared to tackle in those days. Like “Money,” another poem in this section, “Sears Roebuck,” also addresses a particular aspect of consumer culture. Whereas “Money” focuses on America’s preoccupation with the almighty dollar, “Sears Roebuck” deals with the phenomenon of the mail-order catalog that revolutionized retail marketing in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Sears and a few other companies had found a niche in the market as millions responded to the tantalizing oﬀers by ordering products as diﬀerent as china, ﬁrearms, musical instruments, shoes, and women’s underwear. The speaker of “Sears Roebuck” is a ﬁercely religious man who looks through his “baked, cream blinds” — ordered through the catalog, of course — at what he considers the “lambs of Satan” outside of his window. While ﬂipping through the hefty catalog in search of a pronouncing Bible, he comically encounters a picture of a girl sliding by in “ribbed ﬂannel panties” and gets stuck in “[a] wilderness of Women’s Intimate Apparel,” which conjures up images of hell ﬁre in his mind. The coda of “Sears Roebuck” presents a diﬀerent speaker, who says, “ — So John Doe, Don Juan — ah, poor Honest John, / Mailing your endless orders west from Patmos!” (CP, 109). Thus the poem concludes with a reference to the Book of Revelations, believed to have been dictated by God to Saint John the Divine on the Isle of Patmos, to which he had been banished. Like the apostle, his namesake, “poor Honest John” in Jarrell’s poem has apocalyptic visions of the end of the world, when mankind is punished for its sins. “Money” and “Sears Roebuck” are decidedly lighter than the war poems, such as “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” for which Jarrell had earned a reputation up until then. They show Jarrell experimenting with diﬀerent voices and his attempts to convey American speech patterns. At the time, they seemed comic distractions from the more serious themes that Jarrell typically addressed. In retrospect, it can be argued that by 1948 Jarrell

118 |   

was searching for new themes. Gradually consumer culture reared its ugly head as a novel preoccupation. “Money” and “Sears Roebuck” pertained to consumer culture from a more remotely historical perspective, but Jarrell would soon tackle consumerism as a current social and economic predicament, in both poetry and prose. An ideal opportunity to discuss consumer culture and other changes in American society arose when Jarrell lectured at a Harvard Summer School Conference on “The Defense of Poetry” in 1950. The essay that came out of it, “The Obscurity of the Poet,” was printed in Partisan Review and subsequently collected in Poetry and the Age. Playing on the ambiguity of the essay’s title, Jarrell argues that contemporary poetry is not diﬃcult to understand, but that contemporary poets are invisible because they are not read in the United States. It is a sophism to argue that current poetry is incomprehensible, Jarrell maintains, and usually uttered by people who seem to imply that “their happiest hours are spent at the ﬁreside among worn copies of the Agamemnon, Phèdre, and the Symbolic Books of William Blake” (Poetry and the Age, 21). Jarrell is convinced that the neglect of poetry as an art form is essentially an American problem because in other parts of the world the poet is appreciated and poetry is much more widely read. Jarrell’s principal aim in “The Obscurity of the Poet” is to shield contemporary poetry from attacks that it is too opaque, but he also snipes at mass culture in the process. Although Jarrell does not analyze the reasons for the neglect of the American poet in great depth, he broadly blames the mass media for eroding the capacity of people to grasp genuine art: “The poet lives in a world whose newspapers and magazines and books and motion pictures and radio stations and television stations have destroyed, in a great many people, even the capacity for understanding real poetry, real art of any kind. The man who monthly reads, with vacant relish, the carefully predigested sentences which the Reader’s Digest feeds to him as mother pigeon feeds her squabs — this man cannot read the Divine Comedy, even if it should ever occur to him to try: it is too obscure” (Poetry and the Age, 27 – 28).15 In its general contours, Jarrell’s argument anticipates a thesis about the cultural impact of mass media that would be made popular by more technologically minded contemporary experts, most notably Dwight MacDonald, Marshall McLuhan, and David Riesman. Like Jarrell, MacDonald bemoaned, three years later, in “A Theory of Mass Culture,” the homogenizing inﬂuence of mass culture and how — using Gresham’s Law in culture — it crowded out high culture. MacDonald’s famous article popularized the notions of high, middle, and low brow and oﬀered a theoretical

Randall Jarrell and the Age of Consumer Culture | 119

framework for Jarrell’s emotional arguments. McLuhan’s studies oﬀer a more rigorous analysis of how technology had shaped American society and its citizens, while Riesman’s groundbreaking sociological study of the changing American character, The Lonely Crowd (1950), also touched on many of the same issues that Jarrell, as a poet writing prose, was addressing from a diﬀerent, more personal angle.16 “What proved fresh and original” in Jarrell’s “The Obscurity of the Poet,” Pritchard convincingly claims, “was the way his cultural points were not so much substantiated as they were woven into extended satirical fantasies” (Pritchard, 189). His unique talent for metaphors, his imaginative ways of telling a story, his knack for creating catchy aphorisms, and his refreshing humor made his reviews and essays stand out from the crowd of critics in the Age of Criticism, as Jarrell himself dubbed this literary period. What made his essays on mass media and consumer culture worthwhile was less his cogency than his cleverness and readability. Two months after the Partisan Review printed “The Obscurity of the Poet,” in April 1951, Jarrell published a sprawling free-verse poem in Poetry called “A Conversation with the Devil.” Inspired by Goethe’s Faust, it is a poetic reworking of “The Obscurity of the Poet,” and its principal speaker is, like Jarrell, a poet who feuds with a devil, identiﬁed as “some poor empty part” of the poet himself (CP, 29). Although the devil had tempted the poet with alluring promises, such as “EACH POEM GUARANTEED” and “WE FURNISH POEMS AND READERS,” which sound remarkably like advertisement slogans, he now urges the poet to give up “this whining poetry” that nobody wants to read (CP, 29). Clearly confused by his lack of readership, Jarrell’s speaker wonders whether he should have written with an eye for the market instead. Like “Money” and “Sears Roebuck,” “A Conversation with the Devil” is “jocular in tone,” as Ferguson has observed,17 but the humor veils the serious and painful truth that Jarrell was plagued by people’s indiﬀerence to poetry and concerned about poetry as his chosen profession. From 1950 to 1960 Jarrell penned no fewer than ten essays — “The Obscurity of the Poet” included — on the permutations in American society during that decade.18 Unlike most of the essays in Poetry and the Age and Jarrell’s many book reviews, these essays were not primarily concerned with evaluating poetry. As Flynn has suggested, Jarrell was so “profoundly disturbed by Eisenhower’s America” that it “contributed to what Jarrell himself characterized as his depression and worsened his already debilitating struggle with poetic creativity” (Flynn 93, 94). By writing his essays, Jarrell

120 |   

was trying to come to terms with the immense changes in the postwar era, especially those concerning mass culture, education, and writing. Ironically, by entering into the critical debate on mass media, Jarrell stumbled on a theme that would inspire new poems.19 Historians have often emphasized the sedated nature of the postwar era, and Jarrell’s friend Robert Lowell famously summed up the decade as the “tranquilized Fifties.” 20 The cold facts, however, prove that American society witnessed some revolutionary changes during the 1950s. The population grew rapidly, impelled by the baby boom and a decreasing mortality rate. In the 1950s alone, the population of the United States increased by 29 million. Suburbs cropped up everywhere and metropolises emerged out of small towns, especially in California, which by itself accounted for 20 percent of the nation’s population expansion. The growth of Los Angeles was nothing short of phenomenal, with its population increasing “by 50 percent between 1940 and 1960.” 21 In “Thinking of the Lost World,” Jarrell summed up this transformation through a paradox that suggests both disorientation and disenchantment: “Back in Los Angeles, we missed / Los Angeles” (CP, 336). The enormous economic boom and the almost simultaneous increase in consumer spending were “perhaps the most striking feature of American society in the 1950s and early 1960s” (Brinkley, 803). Spurred on by the baby boom and the return of millions of American soldiers from the war, the gross national product skyrocketed. By 1955 the United States, with about 6 percent of the world’s population, produced and consumed nearly a third of all goods and services on this planet: “Never in the long annals of mankind had so many people in any nation enjoyed so high a level of prosperity,” Leuchtenburg states (38 – 39, 5). This economic prosperity went hand in hand with the invention of new products. The diﬀusion of electronic equipment was probably the most perceptible change that Jarrell and his contemporaries witnessed. In the title essay of A Sad Heart at the Supermarket, Jarrell describes a photo spread he came across in Life or Look of a family standing among its bounty of worldly goods. Jarrell seemed so bewildered by what a single family owned that he could only compare it to “a dream, a child’s dream before Christmas.” In one of his typical enumerations, Jarrell sums up these people’s possessions: “station-wagon, swimming-pool, power-cruiser, sports-car, tape-recorder, television sets, radios, cameras, power lawn-mower, garden tractor, lathe, barbecue-set, sporting equipment, domestic appliances — all the gleaming, grotesquely imaginative paraphernalia of [the family’s] ex-

Randall Jarrell and the Age of Consumer Culture | 121

istence. It was hard to get everything [pictured] on two pages, soon it will need four” (Sad Heart, 70). Jarrell’s sense of puzzlement is understandable when considering the speed with which these new products had become available to the masses. Nearly all the products on display on this family’s lawn, which had seemed either unimaginable or unattainable in 1940, had become a reality for millions of Americans two decades later. Of all these new electronic gadgets and inventions, the introduction of the television set had arguably the most far-reaching consequences. Yet Jarrell did not single out television as the sole culprit of cultural decline. More innovatively, he shifted the critical lens to the receiving end, the media consumer, and argued that “all these media — television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, and the rest — are a single medium” that “needs for us to be buyers; consumers; beings who want much and will want more — who want consistently and insatiably” (Sad Heart, 65, 66). Jarrell argues that the various media conspire — in fact, virtually fuse — to make people desire products and services.22 Surprisingly, Jarrell seems more sharp-tongued and facetious when criticizing general interest magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and Time than when he directs his arrows at television shows. Perhaps Jarrell is especially acerbic when discussing such magazines because, historically, print used to favor intelligent analysis and poetry but now is just as geared toward selling as commercial television programs: “buying something, going somewhere seems a necessary completion to the act of reading the magazine” (Sad Heart, 68).23 It is ironic, as Flynn has pointed out, that many of the articles in which Jarrell voiced these critiques were published in those or similar magazines (Flynn, 94). “The Taste of the Age,” for instance, was ﬁrst printed in the Saturday Evening Post — Jarrell clearly biting the hand that fed him. There is an explanation for this paradox, however. After ﬁnishing his poem “Money,” in 1947, Jarrell wrote to Robert Lowell explaining some of its allusions and contemplating where he should send it for publication: “If I only had a good place to print it I believe hundreds of thousands of readers could get a lot out of it — but there’s no such place and I’ll probably give it to Partisan or such” (Letters, 182). The poem was indeed published in the January 1948 issue of Partisan Review, a highbrow magazine that was widely read in academic and intellectual circles at the time but did not reach the general populace. Clearly, Jarrell wanted to rouse American audiences with his poetry and prose, wanted to reach “the television watchers and readers of Reader’s Digest,” as he was “a democrat at heart.” 24 If this meant publishing in magazines he objected to, so be it.

122 |   

The popularity of Reader’s Digest was another thorn in Jarrell’s ﬂesh, another occasion of his distaste for the current cultural climate. Reader’s Digest, which had a circulation of well over ten million copies during Jarrell’s lifetime, was a monthly magazine comprising a selection of popular, abridged articles culled from various magazines. Aware that Reader’s Digest mirrored middle-class culture and values, Jarrell used it as a “convenient symbol” for its time, “a palatable, timely, ultimately reassuring anecdote, immediately comprehensible to everybody over, and to many under, the age of eight” (Sad Heart, 28). Reader’s Digest, then, is a trope for the way American people are given intellectual pabulum and subsequently demand that everything they buy can be consumed eﬀortlessly. Jarrell’s ﬁgures are telling in A Sad Heart at the Supermarket. Queen Victoria, Jarrell’s touchstone for the nineteenth-century consumer, had to read books herself because “nobody was willing — or able — to digest them for her.” “In those days people chewed their own food or went hungry; we have changed all that,” Jarrell sarcastically remarks (Sad Heart, 24). The baby-food metaphor Jarrell uses here is convincing, making the readers of Reader’s Digest look like infants who are spoon fed “palatable” bits of news. The emphasis on passive consumption is also signiﬁcant. In a panel discussion on mass culture and the creative artist, Jarrell complained that there had been a cultural shift “from active to passive consumption, from reading to a passive looking” (quoted in Jacobs, 185). Jarrell’s metaphor for ﬁlms is harsher, equating the moviegoing experience with shooting heroin: he states that since Queen Victoria never went to the movies, she never had “an epic costing eight million dollars injected into her veins” (Sad Heart, 24). Comparing magazines to baby food and movies to hard drugs shows that Jarrell was convinced of the detrimental eﬀects they had by pacifying or drugging the masses and keeping them ignorant.25 The ﬁrst three essays in A Sad Heart at the Supermarket, “The Intellectual in America,” “The Taste of the Age,” and “The Schools of Yesteryear,” deal overtly with the perceived anti-intellectualism in American society. During the postwar era, the United States had the highest level of formal education in the world and more people attended college than ever before, but Jarrell nevertheless felt education was going downhill. “The Schools of Yesteryear” presents an imaginary dialogue between an Uncle Wadsworth and his nephew Alvin about the youth’s schooling. Alvin is amazed when he hears that Uncle Wadsworth memorized poetry at school. Alvin accuses Uncle Wadsworth of “nostalgia” and “sentimentality” when his uncle talks about “dear old golden rule days!” (Sad Heart, 43). Jarrell is fully aware that

Randall Jarrell and the Age of Consumer Culture | 123

he is being nostalgic and that his arguments are decidedly biased, but he makes no apologies for it. Instead he quotes Gallup polls that indicate that fewer and fewer Americans read books, even among college students, and he lapses into amusing anecdotes about what his students do not know. The veracity of his view that Americans were becoming more uncultured is debatable; the sentiment is perhaps repeated in every generation. Yet it is unquestionable that other critics shared Jarrell’s belief that they lived in an anti-intellectual society and age. With contempt, Jarrell quotes President Eisenhower, who had deﬁned an intellectual as “a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows.” He was “speaking not as a Republican but as an American,” Jarrell adds, suggesting the representativeness of Ike’s dismissal (Sad Heart, 5). Jarrell blames pragmatic impulses for American anti-intellectualism, notes how it has become widespread in the 1950s, and emphasizes the important role of intellectuals in American society in spite of all the ridicule. It is clear that Jarrell looked on the developments in mass media with concern and even sorrow, but his personal practice was not always consistent. Inevitably, he was a creature of technological civilization: he read and published in general interest magazines, was an avid listener to an FM radio station (albeit a classical one), and he owned a television set to boot. As Lowell has related, Jarrell was especially fond of Sunday “long afternoons of professional football,” when he could not be pulled from his television (CP, 98). Televised professional games were another novelty of the 1950s and made football “one of the important sources of entertainment (and one of the biggest businesses) in America” (Brinkley, 811). These football broadcasts and an interview with player Eugene Lipscomb, in the bourgeois Saturday Evening Post, were the materials he used for his elegy on Lipscomb, “Say Good-bye to Big Daddy.” Jarrell bemoaned the age of consumer culture, but he was inspired by it as well. “Who but Jarrell would write a poem to a professional football player?” critic Robert Weisberg asked indignantly in 1973, before arguing that Jarrell had an unusual “interest in mundane things like American football.” 26 It was indeed exceptional for a respected middle-generation poet like Jarrell to write a poem about a popular athletic icon. It was even more striking that Jarrell chose to write about an African American gridiron hero who had purportedly used drugs. Even though the boundaries between high and low culture had begun to crumble in the 1960s, popular culture was still not very widely considered an appropriate subject for a poem.27 A defensive tackle for the 1959 NFL Championship – winning Baltimore

124 |   

Colts, Lipscomb was surprisingly genteel despite his formidable size. He helped his opponents back up after tackling them, so that “the children / Won’t think Big Daddy’s mean,” Jarrell quotes from the Post interview. Lipscomb was orphaned at the age of eleven when his mother was stabbed to death, which left him traumatized. Consequently, he “found football easy enough, life hard enough” and reportedly took refuge in heroin, which may have killed him. In his devastating conclusion, Jarrell says that, The big black man in the television set Whom the viewers stared at — sometimes, almost were — Is a blur now; when we get up to adjust the set, It’s not the set, but a NETWORK DIFFICULTY. The world won’t be the same without Big Daddy. Or else it will be. (CP, 344) Those millions of viewers who admired, identiﬁed with, or vicariously were Eugene Lipscomb while looking at the little screen, Jarrell knows, have soon forgotten about him in a culture that quickly forgets its heroes. Lipscomb is “a blur now” not because of a problem with people’s television sets, but because of another, more serious problem: their short attention span and short memory. “Songs disappear in two or three months, celebrities in two or three years,” Jarrell had said on the same theme in “A Sad Heart at the Supermarket” (Sad Heart, 75). Despite this poem’s disheartening end, “Say Good-bye to Big Daddy” proves that Jarrell could ﬁnd inspiration and create art out of what mass media presented to him. Without NFL football on television or the Saturday Evening Post interview, Jarrell would not have written his elegy. Jarrell was also not immune to the lure of fast sports cars, one of the consumer crazes of the 1950s. On the contrary, the poet who seemed wary of ostentatious material culture relished his MG, his convertible MercedesBenz, and later his Jaguar. He attended car races and wrote two articles on this subject, in Vogue and Mademoiselle. “The Little Cars” comments on the popular car races in the 1950s, while “Go, Man, Go!” is “a sort of half-lyric half-mocking piece about sports cars and their drivers in the United States,” a perfect index of Jarrell’s ambivalence (April 1957, to Hiram Haydn, Letters, 424). Unlike his friend Robert Lowell, who equated cars with individualism and commercialism, as for instance in “For the Union Dead” when he complained about the “giant ﬁnned cars” that “nose forward like ﬁsh,” Jarrell could ﬁnd no fault with them (SP, 137). With an almost childlike

Randall Jarrell and the Age of Consumer Culture | 125

amusement, Jarrell completely reveled in the pleasures that this pastime gave him. Mesmerized by the skills of the professional drivers, the lore of driving-cult magazines, the diﬀerent squeals that cars make when they brake, Jarrell even took an antiquarian delight in a 1910 advertisement for a “collapsible rubber driver” meant to ward oﬀ prospective car thieves (Kipling, Auden & Co., 278). Even though Jarrell’s fascination with sports cars is undeniable, there is indeed a tone of “half-mocking” irony throughout these articles. When he was asked by an editor of Vogue to write an article on sports-car writing, he remarked to Karl Shapiro in June 1954: “isn’t this a case of Heaven smiling on one’s vices or hobbies or sillinesses or whatever they are?” (Letters, 397). It is as if Jarrell is not sure how to qualify his passion for cars, either. Jarrell was aware that it was odd for a poet to write on “so insigniﬁcant a subject as sports cars,” as he admits at the beginning of “Go, Man, Go!” Like football, car racing was for Jarrell — as for other aﬁcionados — a temporary escape from a humdrum existence. Asking himself why people love cars and like to speed, Jarrell ventriloquizes Thoreau or Emerson, who would reply that those people are running away from themselves: “It is because our own eyes are so dull that the chromium on our cars shines so” (Kipling, Auden & Co., 277). Strikingly, Jarrell’s acknowledgment that he himself fully indulges in this escapism seems at odds with his attack on the mass media industry. Watching a movie or a soap opera as a relief or a getaway from the pressures of everyday life is not too diﬀerent from the momentary thrills that football and car racing gave Jarrell. In his essay “About Popular Culture,” Jarrell joked about publisher Bennett Cerf that it was Cerf’s id that published cheesy best-sellers, while his superego decided that Robert Penn Warren’s Brother to Dragons ought to be in print (Popular, 1). In a similar way, it seems as if Jarrell’s superego made him translate Faust, while his id caused him to lose himself in football and car racing. Jarrell’s ultimate and most enduring statement on consumer culture was the poem “Next Day,” which is a direct result of Jarrell’s involvement in the debate on mass media and consumer culture. In the same way that “A Conversation with the Devil” was a companion piece to Jarrell’s essay “The Obscurity of the Poet,” “Next Day” is thematically linked to “A Sad Heart at the Supermarket.” In fact, “A Sad Heart at the Supermarket” would have been an accurate descriptive title for “Next Day,” as the speaker is a depressed middle-aged woman who wanders through a supermarket. The supermarket was preeminently a postwar American phenomenon, usually located in the newly created suburb and accessible ordinarily by car. The

126 |   

ﬁrst supermarkets had begun as converted warehouses and factories during the Depression years, as cheaper alternatives to neighborhood stores. “Next Day” is, like “Money,” an interior monologue, but the more appropriate diction, the unobtrusive allusions, and the accuracy in conveying actual speech patterns in the later poem show Jarrell’s growth as a poet. While “Money” is supposed to render the uneducated colloquial speech of a Southern millionaire, Jarrell frequently slips up. Also, the poem’s dependence on clever word plays and an understanding of such nineteenthcentury ﬁgures as Clay Frick, Nellie Melba, and Ida Tarbell makes it less appealing to a contemporary audience. The allusions in “Next Day” are unassuming and self-explanatory, as the opening of the poem shows: Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All, I take a box And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens. The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical Food-gathering ﬂocks Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James, Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise If that is wisdom. (CP, 279) The brands of dishwashing liquids and detergents all have upbeat names and happy colors to attract customers, yet their superﬁcial optimism contrasts sharply with the narrator’s gloomy mood. The fact that the speaker is able to paraphrase philosopher William James — the founding father of American pragmatism — implies that this housewife probably has had a college education, although she did not pursue a career outside the home. Her sense of loneliness and isolation, despite being surrounded by “Foodgathering ﬂocks,” reﬂects on the impersonality of the supermarket as well as on her sense of purposelessness and her perception that she is aging, as is established later in the poem. In “A Sad Heart at the Supermarket,” the supermarket is a metaphor for American society itself, where everyone and everything can be bought and sold. However, all the wealth that is acquired during the age of consumer culture does not lead to inner satisfaction. Even in stardom, with his ﬁve Cadillacs, Eugene Lipscomb was a deeply troubled individual. As Ernest van den Haag stressed, paraphrasing Freud, such consumer items as cars are only “substitute gratiﬁcations”: “They do not in the end gratify as

Randall Jarrell and the Age of Consumer Culture | 127

much, and they cost more psychologically than the real gratiﬁcations which they shut out” (Rosenberg and White, 533). The speaker in “Next Day” has everything that she wished for when she was a little girl, which looks in retrospect to us like the ideal 1950s family. Still, she is depressed. Part of her sadness can be accounted for by her friend’s burial the previous day, which makes her afraid for herself. Part of her melancholy can also be explained by her feeling of uselessness now that her children are oﬀ to school and she has nothing to do. Yet another piece of the puzzle is that she has everything she could have wished for and now has what Sigmund Freud called “the wish for an unsatisﬁed wish.” 28 This explanation seems particularly relevant when bearing in mind three lines from “Hope,” another poem in The Lost World. This poem does not deal with consumer culture directly, but in the middle of the poem its speaker says that he often watches “My favorite serial, A Sad / Heart at the Supermarket: / The Story of a Woman Who Had Everything” (CP, 308). The protagonist of “Next Day” seems to be that “Woman Who Had Everything” and the “Sad / Heart at the Supermarket.” A psychology major as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt, Jarrell had a lifelong interest in the subject and shared his birthday with Freud. Wish fulﬁllment is an important theme in Jarrell’s poetry, as Ferguson and others have pointed out, and the word “wish” crops up four times in “Next Day.” Having got all the worldly possessions she needs, the poem’s speaker now wishes nostalgically for her children, who are away at school, and her husband, who is away at work. She also wishes to be desirable to men, as she used to be: “For so many years / I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me / And its mouth watered” (CP, 279). The speaker expresses her attractiveness in terms of her consumability, as if she were a food item. The age of consumer culture has permeated consciousness so deeply that people begin to measure themselves using its terms. It was van den Haag’s mixture of sociological insight and psychological training that appealed to Jarrell and made him realize why he and so many Americans felt lonely at the height of America’s prosperity. “The message of much popular culture,” van den Haag wrote in a book that Jarrell much admired, is “ ‘you, too, can be happy’ if you only buy this car or that hair tonic; you will be thrilled, you will have adventure, romance, popularity — you will no longer be lonely and left out if you follow this formula” (Rosenberg and White, 535).29 The result of this pursuit of pleasure is boredom and loneliness, van den Haag asserts, almost summing up the plot of “Next Day”: “Days go slowly when they are empty; one cannot tell one from the other. And yet the years go fast” (Rosenberg and White, 535).

128 |   

The tone of “Next Day” and its companion piece “A Sad Heart at the Supermarket” is gloomier than the optimism expressed in Jarrell’s letter to Lowell, when he believed he could inﬂuence hundreds of readers if they could only read “Money.” This new tenor may be indicative of Jarrell’s increasing pessimism regarding consumer culture. In the 1940s Jarrell still hoped he could help bring about a change in the minds of Americans, but he soon abandoned this idea. Despite his objections to the age of consumer culture, however, Jarrell also relished the creative opportunities presented by increased consumption and the proliferation of mass media industry, as shown by his fascination with sports cars and televised football. Jarrell’s views as expressed in his essays are aligned to the most pessimistic marxist theoreticians of the Frankfurt School, but they also show the inﬂuence of the sociological and psychological (mostly Freudian) insights of Arendt, van den Haag, and Riesman. What distinguished Jarrell from the lonely crowd of conservative consumer cultural critics was his emotional and witty expression of these developments, his concern about what happened to poetry as an art form, and his eﬀort to make such topics central in poems. Jarrell will be remembered for the poems on consumer culture, not for the essays.

Notes 1. William E. Leuchtenburg, A Troubled Feast: American Society since 1945 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973). Subsequent references will appear in the text. 2. See Nelson Hathcock’s “Standardizing Catastrophe: Randall Jarrell and the Bomb,” in Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co., ed. Suzanne Ferguson, 113 – 25 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), for the most elaborate analysis of Jarrell’s reﬂections on the cold war. 3. Both Stephen Burt in Randall Jarrell and His Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) and Richard Flynn in “Jarrell’s Wicked Fairy: Cultural Criticism, Childhood, and the 1950s” (in Ferguson, Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co., 93 – 112; subsequent references will appear in the text as Flynn) address Jarrell’s obsession with consumer culture. Burt explains how Jarrell’s essays on mass culture were informed by a fear of conformity and an antagonism toward institutions. Flynn views Jarrell’s preoccupation with consumer culture as the result of a creative block, which gave way when he embraced the theme of childhood. 4. Karl Shapiro, “The Death of Randall Jarrell,” in Randall Jarrell, 1914 – 1965, ed. Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), 206. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 5. See Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (London: Cambridge University

Randall Jarrell and the Age of Consumer Culture | 129 Press, 1960); F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (Cambridge: Minority Press, 1930); Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto and Windus, 1978); T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Deﬁnition of Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949). All these critics argued that the cultural elite had always produced culture, which was in decline since the industrial revolution. Like Jarrell, these critics blamed the educational system and mass culture, although Jarrell was more democratic in spirit. 6. A representative selection of this debate can be found in two anthologies: Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957; subsequent references appear in the text), and Norman Jacobs, ed., Culture for the Millions? Mass Media in Modern Society (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1961; subsequent references appear in the text as Jacobs). The latter is a selection of the conference proceedings of the Taminent Institute symposium and includes Jarrell’s essay “A Sad Heart at the Supermarket.” 7. The mass-media debate was greatly inﬂuenced by refugees from Europe, including members of the Frankfurt School who, like Arendt and van den Haag, resided in New York. Flynn has explained how Riesman’s theory of “other-direction” informs Jarrell’s poetry (Flynn, 99). Burt’s second chapter in Randall Jarrell and His Age, “Institutions, Professions, Criticism,” illustrates how Jarrell battled against conformist institutions and how Arendt’s views inﬂuenced Jarrell’s. 8. Randall Jarrell, About Popular Culture (New York: Paleamon Press, 1981), 3. Subsequent references will appear in the text abbreviated as Popular. 9. Jarrell to Karl Shapiro, June 1954, in Randall Jarrell’s Letters, ed. Mary Jarrell (Boston: Houghton Miﬄin, 1985), 397. Subsequent references will appear in the text abbreviated as Letters. 10. Randall Jarrell, The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 344. Subsequent references will appear in the text abbreviated CP. 11. William Pritchard, Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 22 – 23. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 12. Mary von Schrader Jarrell, Remembering Randall (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 5 – 6. Subsequent references will appear in the text abbreviated as Remembering. 13. Jarrell visited Europe for the ﬁrst time in 1948, and his admiration for European — especially German — high culture sheds light on his ostensible distaste for American popular culture. In “The Obscurity of the Poet,” Jarrell claims that “in Germanic countries people still glance at one with attentive respect, as if they thought that one might at any moment be about to write a poem” (Poetry and the Age [New York: Knopf, 1953], 18; subsequent references will appear in the text). His regard for Arendt and van den Haag was partly owing to their European cultivation. See also Jeﬀrey Meyers, “Randall Jarrell and German Culture,” Salmagundi 61 (1983): 71 – 89. 14. Randall Jarrell, A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (New York: Atheneum, 1962), 71 – 72. Subsequent references will appear in the text abbreviated as Sad Heart.

130 |    15. Coincidentally, van den Haag, like Arendt a Jewish intellectual who had ﬂed war-torn Europe and who inspired Jarrell, also used the analogy of the Reader’s Digest and Dante in 1957: “Dante was not tempted to write for Sports Illustrated, to condense his work for Readers’ [sic] Digest or to adapt it for the movies. He had no chance to write television scripts or commercial jingles, Saturday Evening Post stories or newspaper columns” (Rosenberg and White, 521). 16. Dwight MacDonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” Diogenes 3 (1953): 1 – 17. Marshall McLuhan’s most inﬂuential studies — The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man (1951) and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Men (1964) — were published almost simultaneously with Jarrell’s ﬁrst prose books, Poetry and the Age (1953) and A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962). Flynn has noted that Jarrell’s notebooks for the essay “A Sad Heart at the Supermarket” are “laced with references to sociological texts (especially Riesman and van den Haag)” (Flynn, 96). 17. Suzanne Ferguson, The Poetry of Randall Jarrell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1971), 142. 18. The essay titles alone suggest Jarrell’s growing social and vocational preoccupations: “The Intellectual in America” (Mademoiselle, 1955), “The Schools of Yesteryear” (New Republic, 1956), “The Age of the Chimpanzee” (Art News, 1957), “Go, Man, Go!” (Mademoiselle, 1957), “The Appalling Taste of the Age” (Saturday Evening Post, 1958), “About Popular Culture” (National Book Award ceremonies, 1958), “Poets, Critics, and Readers” (American Scholar, 1959), and “A Sad Heart at the Supermarket” (Dædalus, 1960). 19. See also Flynn, 103, 108. 20. Robert Lowell, Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 91. Subsequent references will appear in the text abbreviated as SP. 21. Alan Brinkley, The Unﬁnished Nation: A Concise History of the American People (New York: Knopf, 1997), 806. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 22. Jarrell was not the ﬁrst to claim that the various media are in fact one system. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno had so argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947; repr. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 120 – 21. It is unknown whether Jarrell was aware of their theories. 23. Dwight MacDonald noted that from 1901 to 1941 the attention paid to popular culture in Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post had increased by 50 percent, in favor of articles on politics or business. In “Poetry and the Media: The Decline of Popular Poetry,” John Spaulding describes how poetry gradually vanished from general interest magazines from the 1940s onward (Popular Culture Review 7, no. 1 [1996]: 145 – 58). 24. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 266. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 25. The belief that mass media drugs or paciﬁes the audience was a popular notion among marxist theorists. See, for instance, Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Like Jarrell, Benjamin was a friend of Hannah Arendt, who selected this essay for inclusion when editing

Randall Jarrell and the Age of Consumer Culture | 131 Benjamin’s Illuminations: Essays and Reﬂections (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968). 26. Robert Weisberg, “Randall Jarrell: The Integrity of His Poetry,” in Centennial Review 17, no. 3 (1973): 237, 238. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 27. Some emerging poets were much keener on using popular culture or icons in their poetry. See, for instance, Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died,” an unusual elegy about Billie Holiday. 28. Rachel Bowlby, “Sad Hearts and Supermarkets,” Textual Practice 11, no. 2 (1997): 199. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 29. The essay included in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America was reprinted from The Fabric of Society (1957), which van den Haag had coauthored with Ralph Ross. Jarrell’s address at the National Book Award ceremonies, “About Popular Culture” (1958), quotes extensively from The Fabric of Society.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reﬂections, edited by Hannah Arendt, 217 – 51. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968. Bowlby, Rachel. “Sad Hearts and Supermarkets.” Textual Practice 11, no. 2 (1997): 199 – 218. Brinkley, Alan. The Unﬁnished Nation: A Concise History of the American People. New York: Knopf, 1997. Burt, Stephen. Randall Jarrell and His Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Ferguson, Suzanne. The Poetry of Randall Jarrell. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1971. ———, ed. Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. Flynn, Richard. “Jarrell’s Wicked Fairy: Cultural Criticism, Childhood, and the 1950s.” In Ferguson, Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell & Co., 93 – 112. Hathcock, Nelson. “Standardizing Catastrophe: Randall Jarrell and the Bomb.” In Jarrell, Bishop, and Co., edited by Suzanne Ferguson, 113 – 25. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1947. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972. Jacobs, Norman, ed. Culture for the Millions? Mass Media in Modern Society. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1961. Jarrell, Mary von Schrader. Remembering Randall. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Jarrell, Randall. About Popular Culture. New York: Palaemon Press, 1981. ———. The Complete Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. ———. Kipling, Auden & Co. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980.

132 |    ———. Poetry and the Age. New York: Knopf, 1953. ———. Randall Jarrell’s Letters. Edited by Mary Jarrell. Boston: Houghton Miﬄin, 1985. ———. A Sad Heart at the Supermarket. New York: Atheneum, 1962. ———. The Third Book of Criticism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. Leuchtenburg, William E. A Troubled Feast: American Society since 1945. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973. Lowell, Robert. Collected Prose. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987. ———. Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. MacDonald, Dwight. “A Theory of Mass Culture.” Diogenes 3 (1953): 1 – 17. Meyers, Jeﬀrey. “Randall Jarrell and German Culture.” Salmagundi 61 (1983): 71 – 89. Pritchard, William. Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. Rosenberg, Bernard, and David M. White, eds. Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957. Shapiro, Karl. “The Death of Randall Jarrell.” In Randall Jarrell, 1914 – 1965, edited by Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren, 195 – 229. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967. Spaulding, John. “Poetry and the Media: the Decline of Popular Poetry.” Popular Culture Review 7, no. 1 (1996): 145 – 58. Van den Haag, Ernest. “Of Happiness and of Despair We Have No Measure.” In Rosenberg and White, Mass Culture, 504 – 36. Weisberg, Robert. “Randall Jarrell: The Integrity of His Poetry.” Centennial Review 17, no. 3 (1973): 237 – 55.

6

Resistance, Sacrifice, and Historicity in the Elegies of Robert Hayden W. Scott Howard I I listen for the sounds of cannon, cries vibrating still upon the air, timeless echoes in echoic time — imagine how they circle out and out — Robert Hayden, “On Lookout Mountain”

Robert Hayden is best known for his poems, such as “Middle Passage,” that draw upon African American history and link vivid scenes of brutality to an ongoing struggle for a greater humanity that might eclipse boundaries of race, class, gender, religion, and politics.1 During the late sixties, of course, Hayden was castigated by Melvin Tolson, Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker, and other adherents of Ron Karenga’s “black cultural nationalism” precisely because of those so-called apolitical, antihistoricist, high modernist, and humanistic values.2 Karenga declared that “all art must reﬂect and support the Black Revolution” and that “any art that does not discuss and contribute to the revolution is invalid.”3 As Pontheolla Williams reﬂects, however, Hayden’s “refusal to be categorized as a black poet was not a rejection of his biological inheritance or the black struggle but

134 | .   

was rather a refusal to be restricted in subject matter to ‘race’ or to be identiﬁed with . . . jingoism and propagandistic didacticism” (P. Williams, 31).4 Hayden’s repudiation of what has come to be called identity politics should be seen (then and now) as a passionate defense of the literary aesthetic: poetry fashions a ﬁgural reality engendered (but not contained) by the political and the historical.5 Despite these prevalent characteristics in the poet’s works, the pivotal role of both ﬁgural historicity and sacriﬁcial violence in Hayden’s elegies and elegiac texts has not yet been addressed by critics and scholars.6 This chapter accordingly advances a study of Robert Hayden’s elegies as vehicles for the poet’s historical imagination. In order to deﬁne more precisely that working context of analysis, I wish to make a distinction between three key terms already invoked by these opening paragraphs: history, ﬁgural historicity, and historical imagination. Hayden’s poetry often engages with the matter of historical personages (as in “Frederick Douglass”), historical events (as in “Belsen, Day of Liberation”), and historical documentation (as in “A Letter from Phillis Wheatley”), which together establish his grounding in and commitment to history, strictly deﬁned. History (as such) conditions Hayden’s poems, which, in turn, constitute their own terms of ﬁgurative confrontation with the known world in order to form a contiguous reality, or what I will call ﬁgural historicity.7 In his landmark challenge to “all evolutionary/progressive styles of thought, not excluding Marxism,” Benedict Anderson observes that “ﬁction seeps quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable conﬁdence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations.”8 Just as Anderson theorizes relationships between ﬁgurative discourse, politics, and nationalism, Hayden’s historical imagination invests concrete personages, events, and documentation with the generative powers of metaphor.9 Hayden’s poetry ultimately celebrates a long-standing notion of praxis, one that bespeaks his humanistic politics and conﬁdence in the artist’s social responsibility as both maker and visionary.10 The elegy and elegiac mode of writing predominate in Hayden’s oeuvre, thereby illustrating a poetics of loss at the heart of this writer’s life and artistic achievement. He was raised in Detroit as a devout Baptist and would have been acutely aware of key books and passages from the Old and New Testaments (such as Isaiah 51:6, 11, 12; and 2 Corinthians 4:18) in which grief is apprehended as a transitory, yet useful, worldly and temporal precondition for the believer’s acceptance of consolation that rests with the everlasting, atemporal joys of heaven.11 However, in the majority of his texts

Resistance, Sacriﬁce, and Historicity in Robert Hayden | 135

about losses both personal and public, Hayden writes against conventional Western mourning practices (that celebrate transcendent spiritual remedies to aﬄiction and suﬀering) in order to shape his own private grief into an aesthetic form of oppositional cultural work and a linguistic mode of social resistance.12 By transgressing religious, literary, and cultural norms, Hayden’s elegies brave the world’s intractability, thus articulating the negotiation of loss within a dynamic context of interpersonal, textual, and social transformation. Hayden’s poetics of loss, in this regard, participates in an emerging tradition of the modern Anglo-American elegy, illustrated richly and diversely by his forerunners and contemporaries who also, in pivotal texts, qualify solace and place it within and against predicaments of artistic strife and cultural crisis.13 Hayden’s elegies, I will argue, wield sacriﬁcial violence in order to critique atemporal visions of poetic apotheosis and thereby infuse unorthodox consolations with an imaginative historicity that is at once autonomous and yet, in another sense, contingent. My thesis thus counters Charles Davis’s claim that Hayden’s “activity of truth-telling from memory, of reconstructing the past, is purgative” (C. Davis, 97), and also challenges Wilburn Williams’s interpretation that Hayden’s artistic contract between symbolism and history strives toward “the ultimate redemptiveness of the universal and timeless order of spirit that threatens to kill the life of his art” (W. Williams, 69). The crux of my argument complements Vera Kutzinski’s assertion that, for Hayden, “identity, or selfhood, is a matter of history and of historicity” because his work — the historical poetry in particular — seeks not to escape from the past, but to revise the “linguistic surfaces” of the text of history, thereby achieving a historical and poetic truth that “emerges from . . . the limbo of [the poet’s] ever-transﬁguring poetic imagination” (Kutzinski, 308, 319). Six major themes or modes inﬂect Hayden’s works of mourning: transience, transcendent consolation, resistant consolation, the contingent present, the presentness of the past, and what I shall call sacriﬁcial historicity. Within this thematic context, I will argue more speciﬁcally, Hayden achieves a precarious yet vital balance between, on the one hand, acknowledging a desire for transcendence and, on the other, subverting that possibility for atemporal solace and subordinating it to the poem’s ongoing engagement with the wayward course of human action. The occurrence (real or imagined) of violence often serves as the fulcrum for that crucial leverage in the text’s ﬁguration of grief within a temporal sphere for mourning and social progress, as the above quotation from “On Lookout Mountain” sug-

136 | .   

gests: “the sounds of cannon, cries / vibrating still upon the air, / timeless echoes in echoic time.” Images of violence in Hayden’s elegies and elegiac poems consequently embody a dialectical tension that may be represented in terms of the following equation: sacriﬁcial violence equals a desire for transcendence multiplied by an acknowledgment of historical contingency. Hayden often accentuates images of such tension with the technique of chiaroscuro — “what / auroral dark”; “Sol y sombra”; “brightness / so bright that it was darkness” — oxymora that underscore the knife edge “covenant of timelessness with time” that drives his work’s tenacious (if paradoxical) commitments to aesthetics, politics, and human conditions.14 Hayden’s elegies thus deliver a ﬁgural historicity comparable to Nietzsche’s theory of critical history that entails a threefold critique: the origin of any new age “must itself be known historically, history must itself resolve the problem of history, [and] knowledge must turn its sting against itself.”15 For Nietzsche, as for Hayden, poetry is the catalyst in this formulation; only poetry regenerates life in apposition to both unhistorical and suprahistorical knowledge that would together otherwise annihilate life (Nietzsche, 116 – 23). Hayden’s reputation has withstood much misplaced criticism, due mainly to generalized reﬂections on his confrontations with black nationalists in the late 1960s: his professional life, as one of bourgeois hypocrisy; his publications, as apolitical and antihistoricist. The majority of Hayden’s critics have responded defensively by interpreting his poetry largely in terms of biography and formalist methodologies.16 However, when placed within such a tradition of poetics and historiography (one that depends on a vital link between aesthetics and praxis, as discussed above), Hayden’s texts, and the elegies in particular, should be seen as ultimately entrusted to social justice in terms of their achievement as autonomous and contingent works of modernist art. Hayden’s critique of normative mourning thereby engenders a rather paradoxical solace: the given poem allows for (yet also undermines) a hope for transcendence, positing instead the resistance to consolation as a call for the ongoing work of ethical involvement among poet, text, readers, and world-at-large. In this way, his poetics of loss “does make something happen” (as he consciously rebuts Auden’s famous declaration to the contrary): Hayden’s elegies and elegiac poems fashion “an instrument for social and political change” in keeping with his own reﬂections on, and hopes for, the worldly work of poetry (“How It Strikes,” 197).17

Resistance, Sacriﬁce, and Historicity in Robert Hayden | 137

II Triste metaphor. Hiroshima Watts My Lai. Thus history scorns the vision chambered in gold and Spanish leather, lyric space; rebukes, yet cannot give the lie to what is havened here. (CP, 118) “The Peacock Room” — one of Hayden’s ﬁnest poems on the elegiac theme of transience — poignantly embodies these tensions between the poet’s desire to praise the timelessness of art — “the vision chambered in gold” — and his concomitant awareness that the “lyric space” of artistic autonomy turns upon the work’s apprehension of the historicity of unspeakable sacriﬁcial suﬀering — “Hiroshima Watts My Lai” — that “rebukes, yet cannot give the lie / to what is havened” within and against the “here” of the text. This elegy of six stanzas dedicated to the memory of Betsy Graves Reyneau (the portrait artist who introduced Hayden to James McNeill Whistler’s “Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room” at the Smithsonian)18 complements the transience and tragic joy evoked by other poems that convey this theme of the poet’s crafting of an intricate counterpoise among personal and public, transcendent and contingent resolutions to the hard facts of loss: “Locus,” “The Night-Blooming Cereus,” “Theme and Variation,” “October,” and “Monet’s ‘Waterlilies.’ ” Critics have often observed, in tandem with Dennis Gendron, that “cycles of depression, sterility and self-doubt . . . bedeviled this man and poet” and that Hayden’s emotional and psychological suﬀering, his “feelings of futility,” deeply inﬂect “the subject of his poetry” (Gendron, 11 – 12).19 Hayden’s writing, though often personal, is not confessional; his consummate art transﬁgures private crises, as well as his empathy for and indignation against social suﬀering, into ﬁctions at once lyrical and dispassionate, worldly and autonomous. Here, for example, in the ﬁfth stanza Hayden transposes the image of the “spread tails” of Whistler’s peacocks — “concealing her, / then folding” — onto the imagined presence of Reyneau’s corpse:

138 | .   

her eyeless, old — Med School cadaver, ﬂesh-object pickled in formaldehyde, who was artist, compassionate, clear-eyed. Who was belovéd friend. No more. No more. (CP, 119). Of the symbolism at work here, Hayden remarks, in a 1973 interview, that the “peacocks lead me into this pain, and they also help me get away from it” (O’Brien, 122). Through such striking (if disturbing) contrasts, Hayden permits yet qualiﬁes this elegy’s ache for transcendence, foregrounding the theme of contingency (introduced in the second stanza) that returns again in the sixth by means of a subtle juxtaposition of two images: the redemptive “Rose-leaves” and the fallen “ashes.” These ashes drift “toward / a bronze Bodhisattva’s ancient smile” (CP, 119), which intimates unﬂinching compassion for the world of human suﬀering, rather than an ascetic wish for eternal release from social conﬂict and temporality. Hayden’s achievement in “The Peacock Room” — a poem he considered to be “one of [his] most important” (O’Brien, 120) — resonates with his remarks on the ultimate purpose of art: to “transcend our diﬀerences and underscore our similarities as human creatures” (Gendron, 181): pain, suﬀering, and often shocking images of violence deeply inform this writer’s articulation of those existential commonalities that continually bind his commitment to the realm of human time, action, and social progress. Hayden translates his personal grief into public mourning through the text’s deft and qualiﬁed acknowledgment of a wish for transcendent consolation within a context of social suﬀering: “weaving a wish and a weariness together / to make two wings” (CP, 55). Hayden’s ﬁgurations of grief thus engage in a personal and public work of mourning that does not eclipse a search for faith, but grounds spiritual truths in the ongoing accomplishment of cultural praxis. His ability to negotiate this diﬃcult path derives partly from his religious inclinations as a follower of the Baha’i faith, largely from his life experience and remarkable skill as a poet, and also at least in part from the inherent resources in the tradition of the poetic elegy. This transition, though, from internal, inchoate grief to public mourning demands troublesome and unpredictable work. In his foundational essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud theorizes that the outcome (positive or negative) of the related processes of mourning and melancholia funda-

Resistance, Sacriﬁce, and Historicity in Robert Hayden | 139

mentally hinges on the degree to which the individual consciously checks the desire to form new attachments through object-cathexis. In the case of what Freud terms “normal mourning,” the greater the resistance to new love-objects, the more positive the ultimate result; while in “melancholia,” the less the opposition, the more negative the consequence.20 The “work of mourning” — Freud’s phrase that has been appropriated by numerous scholars and writers in diverse ﬁelds — thus depends on the work of resistance to consolation and thereby shares a strong aﬃnity with the poetics of loss embodied by Western elegies and elegiac literary texts. Elegies often achieve their most profound and beautiful moments at crisis points in that labor of shaping sorrow, praise, and consolation — the three fundamental modes of expression integral to grief, mourning, and the genre’s rhetorical dimensions. In the wake of Freud, the majority of studies in the tradition of the Anglo-American poetic elegy have, until recently, emphasized the genre’s psychological dynamics. Eminent ﬁgures in the ﬁeld diﬀerentiate the premodern from the modern poem with respect to various iterations of psychoanalytic resistance-theory.21 The general paradigm, roughly shared by all of these scholars, assesses the genre’s struggle either toward or against consolation: the premodern elegy attains positive solace, while the modern elegiac poem thwarts, qualiﬁes, or at least complicates resolutions to grief expression and mourning. This epistemology, though, warrants further scrutiny since one of the elegy’s oldest preoccupations involves movements toward and against unqualiﬁed resolutions to loss and suﬀering.22 What, then, is distinctively “modern” about Robert Hayden’s elegies if the frustration of consolation holds true, as a dominant theme, across the genre’s avatars from the classical, through the Renaissance and early modern, and into the modern and postmodern eras?23 First of all, it should be noted that the trajectory of the poetic elegy’s modernity is not linear but progressive (if erratic at times). While ﬁgural resistance to consolation might not be the most telling sign of the elegy’s modern tendencies, the genre’s increasing concern with voicing oppositional resolutions with regard to secular, political, and social contexts as a call for cultural critique indicates, I believe, a truly “modern” predicament. An elegy serves as a vehicle for the transformation of loss into gain, absence into presence, sorrow into solace, and also of the past into the wished-for present or future. Since at least the early seventeenth century, I contend, the Anglo-American elegy and elegiac poem has, with greater frequency, situated resistant consolation within secular contexts as a mecha-

140 | .   

nism for delivering political and social criticism, and consequently becomes increasingly implicated in the philosophy of human time.24 Works by black American poets articulate, in their own way, that emerging modulation of praise and protest, devotion and dissent, as the poetic elegy forms (and is informed by) changes in artistic craft and social consciousness. Phillis Wheatley’s “On the Death of General Wooster,” for example, stands apart from the majority of her elegiac poems (which celebrate transcendental solace) and, through the utterance of General Wooster’s dying wish, admonishes white slave owners to heed the call for social justice: “While yet (O deed Ungenerous!) they disgrace / And hold in bondage Afric’s blameless race?” 25 In “Frederick Douglass” Paul Laurence Dunbar breaks from his own rhetorical patterns and concludes the elegy by invoking “The kindling spirit of [Douglass’] battle-cry” to teach “thy race how high / her hopes may soar” and how to “[rise] from beneath the / chast’ning rod.”26 And “From the Dark Tower” departs from the main current of Countee Cullen’s elegiac poetry through a lament for the “abject and mute” labor of generations of blacks that reaches a deﬁant consolation of tenacious perseverance for the day of earthly (not heavenly) justice: “So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds, / And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.”27 These works, though, illustrate notable exceptions from the more conventional elegiac texts by Wheatley, Dunbar, and Cullen, which seek transcendent spiritual resolutions to suﬀering. The writings of Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Audre Lorde, by contrast, include far greater numbers of resistant elegies and elegiac poems that formulate, through their unraveling of solace, social and political critiques, such as: (by Hughes) “Death of Do Dirty: A Rounder’s Song” (ca. 1921 – 30), “The Bitter River” (ca. 1941 – 50), and “Montage of a Dream Deferred” (ca. 1951 – 60); (by Brooks) “of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery” (1945), “Memorial to Ed Bland” (1949), and “Malcolm X” (1968); and (by Lorde) “The Same Death Over and Over” (1978), “Power” (1978), and “For the Record” (1986). Of course, the political edge to these works highlights the particular sensibility and vision of each writer; at the same time, however, such manifestations of the elegy underscore both the genre’s vitality and its increasing potential to deliver social criticism through a secular poetics of loss that challenges a consolation grounded on purportedly universal, sacred, atemporal principles. While Hayden’s elegies address primarily the intractable work of mourning that necessitates varying degrees of resistance against consolation, the poet’s modernity, I believe, resides in his predominant concern with articu-

Resistance, Sacriﬁce, and Historicity in Robert Hayden | 141

lating solace (however qualiﬁed or negated) within and against interpersonal, cultural, and historical contexts rather than with positing any ﬁrm belief that loss may be compensated by the intervention of immutable transcendent values. A diﬃcult paradox here, though, at the heart of Hayden’s life and work, emerges from the productive tension between his personal quest to surpass racial, cultural, and social diﬀerences and his artistic commitment to remaining engaged, through his work’s crafted autonomy, with the speciﬁc conﬂicts and contexts of human time. In a letter from December 1970, which has since become a touchstone for the poet’s philosophy of writing, Hayden describes his work as “one way of coming to grips with inner and outer realities — as a spiritual act, really, a sort of prayer for illumination and perfection.”28 Hayden’s poetry indeed strives to grasp a nimble balance between “inner and outer realities,” between personal and public confrontations with tragic circumstances, while also voicing an attunement to spiritual truths. Although strong religious energy dwells within his writing, Hayden’s elegies and elegiac poems only occasionally seek unqualiﬁed, transcendent resolutions to conﬂict.29 Hayden incessantly struggled to believe fully in an immutable universal order behind the realm of human aﬀairs, as in his stated conviction, in 1974, “that there is a divine plan for the world” (Gendron, 159);30 yet his poetry shoulders the heft of a resilient and contingent skepticism.

III I saw his body shoved into a van. I saw the hatred for our kind glistening like tears in the policemen’s eyes. (CP, 163) Suﬀering is inherently political and ethical for Hayden because, as the above passage from “Elegies for Paradise Valley” illustrates, pain and violence demand from the poet what they often so gravely lack in their immediate historical contexts of occurrence: a witness.31 Hayden excels as a “symbolist poet struggling with the facts of history”32 in the eight balladlike poems that constitute this celebrated reﬂection on his early years in the Detroit ghetto (ironically called Paradise Valley) where he was born. Through the work’s concluding image of Hayden and Uncle Crip dancing together “to Jellyroll // Morton’s brimstone / piano on the phonograph, /

142 | .   

laughing . . . face[s] foremost into hell” (CP, 168, 170), “Elegies for Paradise Valley” brazenly challenges traditional themes of elegiac consolation that would have been so familiar to the poet, having been raised in the Baptist tradition. Composed late in life, this elegiac sequence from American Journal (1978) looks backward, from the perspective of liberated spiritual energy, to the poet’s childhood when he perhaps ﬁrst confronted his own ambivalence about moralistic dichotomies between the worlds of the living and the departed. Across the spectrum of his poems that counter transcendental resolutions to loss — such as “Full Moon,” “A Plague of Starlings,” “Killing the Calves,” “A Ballad of Remembrance,” and “Electrical Storm” — Hayden posits an ironic “anticonsolatory” consolation within the complexities of human time. His elegiac witnessing therefore forestalls the lapsing into oblivion of the past through the paradoxical premise that social progress may be achieved only when loss becomes a catalyst for persistent ethical activism. Through such qualiﬁcation, Hayden’s elegies and elegiac poems articulate brave (often bracing) repudiations of the dominant social order, political ideology, and historical consciousness characteristic of twentiethcentury American culture. “Night, Death, Mississippi,” for example, concludes with a variable refrain — “O Jesus burning on the lily cross . . . O night, rawhead and bloodybones night . . . O night betrayed by darkness not its own” (CP, 16) — that merges the speaker’s persona with that of the lynched slave “squealing bloody Jesus,” a ﬁgure ﬁrst invoked by the “old man” who, “in his reek / and gauntness” (CP, 15), laughs while fondly recalling his escapades with the Ku Klux Klan. “ ‘From the Corpse Woodpiles, from the Ashes’ ” opens with a lament for victims of brutality from Dachau to Johannesburg to Seoul, then shifts toward a ﬁnal ﬁgure of a “man beatiﬁed” who “lies chained” and delivers, through his pain, “our anguish and our anodyne” (CP, 46). Even the spare, imagistic “Approximations” underscores, in the last stanza, the context of quotidian aﬀairs within which the work of mourning continuously resides: “On the platform at / dawn, grey mailbags waiting; / a crated coﬃn” (CP, 11). In each of these cases, Hayden limns a double bind: suﬀering engenders the poet’s desire for solace as well as a concomitant and persistent awareness of the social conditions that warrant vigilance and correction. These thematic and existential factors also predominate in Hayden’s elegies that formulate resistant consolations within and against contexts of either the contingent present (e.g., “Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday,” “The Return,” and “The Year of the Child”) or the presentness of the past (e.g.,

Resistance, Sacriﬁce, and Historicity in Robert Hayden | 143

“Runagate Runagate,” “Belsen, Day of Liberation,” and “The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerﬁeld”). And, as argued above, in virtually every elegiac work, some type or instance of sacriﬁcial violence — often accentuated by light/dark imagery — serves as a matrix for Hayden’s faith, social critique, and historical imagination. “John Brown” powerfully illustrates this nexus of life experience, artistic craft, cultural discourse, and historical consciousness achieved through the resources inherent in the poetic elegy. Hayden had been fascinated by John Brown’s life and legacy from an early age. According to Frederick Cummings, Hayden often played with his friends, in Detroit, “near the house of William Webb, reputedly haunted by the ghost of John Brown.”33 (Brown, Frederick Douglass, and a group of prominent black citizens met at Webb’s house in the spring of 1859 in advance of the October raid on Harpers Ferry [Cummings, 6].) Pontheolla Williams notes further that, in writing the poem, Hayden drew deeply from his near thirty years of fellowship with the Second Baptist Church in Detroit, where “John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and church elders periodically rendezvoused” (in conjunction with the underground railroad) and where, two generations later, “Hayden received his ﬁrst poetic patronage and grew to manhood” (P. Williams, 171; see also C. Davis, 96 – 100). Hayden’s own contribution to the John Brown “story” emerged slowly, though, from an initial period of 1936 – 40 (when his time as a writer and researcher for the Works Progress Administration Federal Writers’ Project piqued his interest in black history) to the poem’s ﬁrst appearance in print in 1978 (Cummings, 7). According to Ellen Sharp, despite many years of planning, Hayden “could not bring himself to write a heroic poem” on John Brown that would equal the depth of feeling in his “Frederick Douglass” (1947) and “Runagate Runagate” (1949) because it “was diﬃcult for him to come to terms with the enigmas and paradoxes in the character of John Brown, and he could not stomach the violence and bloodshed of Brown’s activities in Kansas.”34 Three fortuitous events intervened: a colleague at the University of Michigan, Professor Marvin Felheim, “discovered that [Hayden] had been working on a poem on John Brown and persuaded him to ﬁnish it for publication” (Cummings, 8); the Detroit Institute of Arts subsequently commissioned the text from Hayden to accompany a photographic edition of Jacob Lawrence’s John Brown (1941), which depicts the abolitionist’s story through twenty-two sequential gouaches; and Hayden was given the opportunity to study Lawrence’s images at the institute, which, as Sharp believes, somehow “aided in resolving his diﬃculties with the subject”

144 | .   

(Sharp, 13). Hayden seems to have been especially moved by “Lawrence’s interpretation of Brown as a God-driven man, consumed by an ideal” as well as by the artist’s “symbolic use of color and form” and “the images of the series which are the least realistic and which suggest rather than illustrate their subject” (Sharp, 13). Several passages from Hayden’s “John Brown” indeed resonate most strikingly with Lawrence’s gouaches, such as the following lines from the elegy’s ﬁnal section: And now these mordant images — these vibrant stainedglass colors, elemental shapes in ardent interplay with what we know of him know yet fail to understand — even we for whom he died: (Shall we not say he died for us?) (CP, 153) The last words of Hayden’s text, in fact, conclude with a colon that gestures directly to Lawrence’s “haunting stark / torchlight images:” (CP, 153), such as the twentieth work in the series to which Lawrence added the following description: “No. 20. John Brown held Harpers Ferry for 12 hours. His defeat was a few hours oﬀ.”35 In “John Brown,” as in his other elegiac poems about speciﬁc individuals or historical events (“The Ballad of Nat Turner,” “Middle Passage,” “Words in the Mourning Time,” “El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz” [for Malcolm X], “Elegies for Paradise Valley”), Hayden witnesses violence in order to signify the transcendent realm that hinges on the contingent dimension of human time — “Fire harvest: harvest ﬁre:” (CP, 152) — thereby investing his texts with sacriﬁcial historicity. On the one hand, Hayden’s “John Brown” gives voice to private and public grief for the victims of the abolitionist’s rampages — “spent forlorn colossal / in that bloody light / death-agonies around him” — and, in reply, conveys a wish for transcendent consolation — or “ﬁre harvest” — that is, for an eternal release from human conﬂict: “I have failed: / Come, Death, breathe life / into my Cause, O Death” (CP, 152). On the other hand, the elegy does not rest here, but hastens forward

Resistance, Sacriﬁce, and Historicity in Robert Hayden | 145

1. “No. 20. John Brown held Harpers Ferry for 12 Hours. His defeat was a few hours off.” From the series of twenty-two gouaches The Legend of John Brown. 1941. Jacob Lawrence. By permission of Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

to the chiasmal legacy of such sacriﬁcial violence: “harvest ﬁre.” Hayden swiftly moves his text from the hanging of John Brown — “body turning clockwise / in the air” (CP, 153) — to a concluding trope of prophetic time grounded in the immanent/imminent moment of Lawrence’s gouaches, the poet’s lines, and the reader’s active interpretation: the hour speeding to that hour his dead-of-night sorrows visions prophesied: And now these haunting stark torchlight images: (CP, 153) Hayden, thus, often writes the elegy as a vehicle for personal and political resistance in which violence functions as a sign of the text’s dual responsibility: to invoke the sacred while underscoring the secular, social contexts

146 | .   

through and against which the poem’s expression of grief may intervene (as a work of mourning) in the entanglement among personal recollection, cultural memory, and oﬃcial historical discourse.36 This singular juxtaposition of an expressed desire for spiritual release together with a persistent, compassionate return to the world of interminable conﬂict shines with brilliant complexity and warmth throughout Robert Hayden’s poetics of loss. His elegies and elegiac poems enact a redemptive (but not transcendent) vision — a “voyage through death / to life upon these shores” (CP, 48) — through their witnessing of suﬀering and their shaping of the poet’s ﬁgural historicity. Hayden’s great determination for that hopeful journey, as in his symbolic elegy “The Diver,” engenders what may be the most impossible (and essential) work of mourning: to accept the want of deliverance from worldly suﬀering — “the numbing / kisses that I craved” — and yet relinquish such wished-for consolation, “somehow [begin] the / measured rise” (CP, 4) into the half-light of human time.

Notes This chapter is dedicated to John F. Callahan. I would also like to thank my colleague Clark Davis for his comments on an early draft. 1. The inclusion of religion here might appear dubious, if not contradictory, given Hayden’s conversion, in the early 1940s, to the Baha’i faith, except that Baha’i holds that all religions grow from a common ground. Hayden’s poetry, after that point, becomes increasingly informed by such a pluralistic spiritual (if secular) ideology, which also shapes his artistic concerns with politics and history. See Pontheolla Williams, Robert Hayden: A Critical Analysis of His Poetry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 115 – 16, 154 – 55. Subsequent references appear in the text as P. Williams. 2. Tolson led the attack against Hayden during the spring of 1966 at Fisk University’s First Black Writers’ Conference. See Brian Conniﬀ, “Answering ‘The Waste Land’: Robert Hayden and the Rise of the African American Poetic Sequence,” African American Review 33, no. 3 (1999): 487 – 506. 3. Ron Karenga, “Black Cultural Nationalism,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle Jr. (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 33. 4. Hayden’s wariness, in this regard, anticipates a resistance to (black) theory that would augment the comparative notions of literature, criticism, and theory advocated by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in “Authority, (White) Power, and the (Black) Critic; It’s All Greek to Me,” in Culture/Power/History, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoﬀ Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 252 – 258. 5. The inﬂuence of W. H. Auden and, through him, W. B. Yeats, plays a major role in this matter from as early as 1941, when Hayden participated in one of

Resistance, Sacriﬁce, and Historicity in Robert Hayden | 147 Auden’s classes at the University of Michigan. See P. Williams, 22 – 27, 30 – 33. See also Robert Hayden, introduction to Kaleidoscope, ed. Robert Hayden (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), 108; Dennis Gendron, “Robert Hayden: A View of His Life and Development as a Poet” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1975), 174 – 76; and Robert Hayden, “ ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary,’ ” in Written in Water, Written in Stone, ed. Martin Lammon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 195 – 96. Subsequent references appear in the text, the latter abbreviated “How It Strikes.” 6. See Charles Davis, “Robert Hayden’s Use of History,” in Modern Black Poets, ed. Donald B. Gibson (Englewood Cliﬀs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 96 – 111; Wilburn Williams Jr., “Covenant of Timelessness and Time,” in Chant of Saints, ed. Michael Harper and Robert Stepto (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 66 – 84; and Vera M. Kutzinski, “Changing Permanences: Historical and Literary Revisionism in Robert Hayden’s ‘Middle Passage,’ ” in Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry, ed. Laurence Goldstein and Robert Chrisman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 306 – 21. Subsequent references appear in the text as C. Davis, W. Williams, and Kutzinski. 7. For a more extended discussion of this theoretical formulation of ﬁgural historicity, see W. Scott Howard, “Companions with Time: Milton, Tasso, and Renaissance Dialogue,” The Comparatist 28 (2004): 20 – 22. 8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 18, 40. 9. For a useful reﬂection on Althusserian overdetermination vis-à-vis the symbolic power of metaphor, signifying practice, and hegemony, see Ernesto Laclau, “Metaphor and Social Antagonisms,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 249 – 57. 10. Sir Philip Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry,” in Critical Theory since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 157, 163. Pontheolla Williams describes Hayden as a poet who strove to balance a “reckless faith in his poetic genius and scholarship” with a “stern sense of self-discipline and selfcriticism” in order to contribute (through his teaching and writing) toward justice and social change (P. Williams, 81). On Hayden’s humanistic aesthetics and politics, see also P. Williams, 47, 51, 80 – 81, and 90. 11. On Hayden’s religious background and choice, in the early 1940s, to follow the Baha’i faith, see P. Williams, 115 – 16 and 154 – 55. In Isaiah 51:6, 11, and 12, sorrow and mourning are ﬁgured among the mutable substances of the earth that “shall wax old like a garment” while “everlasting joy” shall return to the “redeemed of the Lord.” Suﬀering from aﬄiction or loss may thus transpire within the tract of human time, yet the ﬁnite and particular experience of grief reveals, in the language of 2 Corinthians 4:18, an inﬁnite and universal pattern for salvation: “the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal” (The Holy Bible: King James Version [New York: Meridian, 1974], 586, 160). 12. My argument here that links the modern elegy to registers of social protest

148 | .    is strongly informed by two outstanding works of scholarship and interpretation: Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), and Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). Subsequent references appear in the text. On the relationship between the elegy and historical discourse, see W. Scott Howard, “Landscapes of Memorialisation,” in Studying Cultural Landscapes, ed. Iain Robertson and Penny Richards (London: Arnold, 2003), 47 – 70, and “ ‘Mine Own Breaking’: Resistance, Gender, and Temporality in Seventeenth-Century English Elegies and Jonson’s ‘Eupheme,’ ” in Grief and Gender, 700 – 1700, ed. Jennifer C. Vaught (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 215 – 30, 295 – 98. 13. See Arthur Davis, From the Dark Tower (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981), 1 – 14, 137 – 46, 174 – 80, and Ramazani, 1 – 31, 135 – 75, 361 – 65. This tradition, which my chapter addresses later, might include writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Elinor Wylie, W. B. Yeats, Countee Cullen, Georgia Johnson, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Michael Harper, Sapphire, and Carl Phillips. Such a gathering of poets represents some (but certainly not all) of the predecessors and contemporaries who shaped Hayden’s work as well as writers of more recent generations who continue to test the aesthetic and cultural limits (and possibilities) of the elegy and elegiac mode. 14. Robert Hayden, Collected Poems, ed. Frederick Glaysher (New York: Liveright, 1985), 99, 26, 56, 99. Subsequent references appear in the text abbreviated CP. 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 75, 102 – 3. Subsequent references appear in the text. 16. See note 19. 17. Hayden’s ﬁnal address (as consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress) in May 1978 underscores his hope that his own writing might contribute toward the improvement of social justice: “To be a poet, it seems to me, is to care passionately about justice and one’s fellow beings” (“How It Strikes,” 198). 18. John O’Brien, ed., Interviews with Black Writers (New York: Liveright, 1973), 120 – 21. Subsequent references appear in the text. 19. Biographical interpretations prevail in Hayden studies. See, for example, Robert B. Stepto, “After Modernism, after Hibernation,” in Harper and Stepto, Chant of Saints, 470 – 86; Frederick Glaysher, “Re-Centering,” World Order 17, no. 4 (1983): 9 – 17; John Hatcher, From the Auroral Darkness (Oxford: George Ronald, 1984); Fred M. Fetrow, Robert Hayden (Boston: Twayne, 1984) and “Portraits and Personae,” in Black American Poets between Worlds, 1940 – 1960, ed. R. Baxter Miller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 43 – 76; Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Black American Poets and Dramatists (New York: Chelsea House, 1995), 121 – 37; and Phillip M. Richards, “Robert Hayden (1913 – 1980): An Appreciation,” Massachusetts Review 40 (1999 – 2000): 599. 20. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth Press, 1934), 154 – 55, 159 – 60.

Resistance, Sacriﬁce, and Historicity in Robert Hayden | 149 21. In addition to Ramazani’s text, see Peter Sacks, The English Eleg y (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Celeste Schenck, Mourning and Paneg yric (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988); W. David Shaw, Eleg y and Paradox (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Melissa Zeiger, Beyond Consolation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Bryan Walpert, “Stanley Plumly and the Elegy of Relationship,” Papers on Language and Literature 38, no. 3 (2002): 227 – 43. 22. Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), and Ellen Lambert, Placing Sorrow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976). 23. On the postmodern elegy, see David Rigsbee, Styles of Ruin (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), and W. Scott Howard, “Formal Mourning, Transgression, and Postmodern American Elegies,” The World in Time and Space, ed. Edward Foster and Joseph Donahue (Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, 2002), 122 – 46. 24. See, for example, Kate Lilley, “Women’s Elegy, 1640 – 1740,” in Women, Writing, History, ed. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 72 – 92, and W. Scott Howard, “An Collins and the Politics of Mourning,” in Speaking Grief in English Literary Culture (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002), 177 – 96. 25. Phillis Wheatley, The Collected Works of Phyllis Wheatley, ed. John C. Shields (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 149 – 50. 26. Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, ed. Joanne Braxton (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 6 – 7. 27. Countee Cullen, Copper Sun (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927), 3. 28. Robert Hayden, “Statement on Poetics,” in Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry, ed. Laurence Goldstein and Robert Chrisman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 9. 29. “The Point” stands as Hayden’s singular articulation of unqualiﬁed solace in a moment of transcendent release from worldly contingency. Here poem and landscape merge as the elegiac text (“inscribed / on brightness”) of Hayden’s transﬁguration on the isthmus at Stonington, Connecticut, moves paradoxically toward a liminal and literal/littoral point — the instant (atomus) of spiritual illumination: All for a moment seems inscribed on brightness, as on sunlit bronze and stone, here at land’s end, praise for dead patriots of Stonington; we are for an instant held in shining like memories in the mind of God. (CP, 181) 30. Within the gathering of Hayden’s few elegiac works that, in my estimation, posit consolation beyond the measure of the clock or the record of history, other poems include “Soledad,” “Homage to Paul Robeson,” “Paul Laurence Dunbar,” and “ ‘Lear Is Gay.’ ”

150 | .    31. Brief portions in the following discussion of “Elegies for Paradise Valley” ﬁrst appeared in W. Scott Howard, “Elegies for Paradise Valley,” Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, ed. Eric L. Haralson (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), 283 – 85. 32. Michael Harper, “A Symbolist Poet Struggling with Historical Fact: Angle of Ascent by Robert Hayden,” New York Times Book Review, February 22, 1976, 9. See also Harper’s poems (such as “In Hayden’s Collage,” “Healing Song,” “Double Elegy,” and “Figments”) as well as his tribute to his friend, “Remembering Robert Hayden,” Michigan Quarterly Review 21 (1982): 182 – 86. 33. Frederick J. Cummings, preface to The Legend of John Brown (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1978), 6. Subsequent references appear in the text. 34. Ellen Sharp, introduction to The Legend of John Brown (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1978), 13. Subsequent references appear in the text. 35. Jacob Lawrence, The Legend of John Brown (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1978), 35. 36. On this notion of “entanglement,” see Sturken, 1 – 17.

Bibliography Alexiou, Margaret. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Black American Poets and Dramatists. New York: Chelsea House, 1995. Callahan, John F. In the African-American Grain. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Conniﬀ, Brian. “Answering ‘The Waste Land’: Robert Hayden and the Rise of the African American Poetic Sequence.” African American Review 33, no. 3 (1999): 487 – 506. Cullen, Countee. Copper Sun. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927. Cummings, Frederick J. Preface to The Legend of John Brown. Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1978. Davis, Arthur. From the Dark Tower. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981. Davis, Charles. “Robert Hayden’s Use of History.” In Modern Black Poets, edited by Donald B. Gibson, 96 – 111. Englewood Cliﬀs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Edited by Joanne Braxton. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988. Fetrow, Fred M. “Portraits and Personae.” In Black American Poets between Worlds, 1940 – 1960, edited by R. Baxter Miller, 43 – 76. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986. ———. Robert Hayden. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

Resistance, Sacriﬁce, and Historicity in Robert Hayden | 151 Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” Collected Papers, vol. 4. Translated by Joan Riviere. London: Hogarth Press, 1934. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Authority, (White) Power, and the (Black) Critic; It’s All Greek to Me.” In Culture/Power/History, edited by Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoﬀ Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, 252 – 58. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Gendron, Dennis. “Robert Hayden: A View of His Life and Development as a Poet.” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1975. Glaysher, Frederick. “Re-Centering.” World Order 17, no. 4 (1983): 9 – 17. Harper, Michael. “Remembering Robert Hayden.” Michigan Quarterly Review 21 (1982): 182 – 86. ———. “A Symbolist Poet Struggling with Historical Fact: Angle of Ascent by Robert Hayden.” New York Times Book Review, February 22, 1976, 9. Hatcher, John. From the Auroral Darkness. Oxford: George Ronald, 1984. Hayden, Robert. Collected Poems. Edited by Frederick Glaysher. New York: Liveright, 1985. ———. “ ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary.’ ” In Written in Water, Written in Stone, edited by Martin Lammon, 195 – 99. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. ———. “Statement on Poetics.” In Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry, edited by Laurence Goldstein and Robert Chrisman, 9. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. ———, ed. Kaleidoscope. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967. The Holy Bible: King James Version. New York: Meridian, 1974. Howard, W. Scott. “An Collins and the Politics of Mourning.” In Speaking Grief in English Literary Culture, 177 – 96. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002. ———. “Companions with Time: Milton, Tasso, and Renaissance Dialogue.” The Comparatist 28 (2004): 20 – 22. ———. “Elegies for Paradise Valley.” In Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, edited by Eric Haralson. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. ———. “Formal Mourning, Transgression, and Postmodern American Elegies.” In The World in Time and Space, edited by Edward Foster and Joseph Donahue, 122 – 46. Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, 2002. ———. “Landscapes of Memorialisation.” In Studying Cultural Landscapes, edited by Iain Robertson and Penny Richards, 47 – 70. London: Arnold, 2003. ———. “ ‘Mine Own Breaking’: Resistance, Gender, and Temporality in Seventeenth-Century English Elegies and Jonson’s ‘Eupheme.’ ” In Grief and Gender, 700 – 1700, edited by Jennifer C. Vaught, 215 – 30. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Karenga, Ron. “Black Cultural Nationalism.” In The Black Aesthetic, edited by Addison Gayle, Jr., 32 – 38. New York: Doubleday, 1971. Kutzinski, Vera M. “Changing Permanences: Historical and Literary Revisionism in Robert Hayden’s ‘Middle Passage.’ ” In Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry, edited by Laurence Goldstein and Robert Chrisman, 306 – 21. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.

152 | .    Laclau, Ernesto. “Metaphor and Social Antagonisms.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 249 – 57. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Lambert, Ellen. Placing Sorrow. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976. Lawrence, Jacob. The Legend of John Brown. Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1978. Lilley, Kate. “Women’s Elegy 1640 – 1740.” In Women, Writing, History, edited by Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman, 72 – 92. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” In Untimely Meditations, 59 – 123. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. O’Brien, John, ed. Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973. Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Richards, Phillip M. “Robert Hayden (1913 – 1980): An Appreciation.” Massachusetts Review 40 (1999 – 2000): 599. Rigsbee, David. Styles of Ruin. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. Sacks, Peter. The English Eleg y. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Schenck, Celeste. Mourning and Paneg yric. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. Sharp, Ellen. Introduction to The Legend of John Brown. Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1978. Shaw, W. David. Eleg y and Paradox. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Sidney, Sir Phillip. “An Apology for Poetry.” In Critical Theory since Plato, edited by Hazard Adams, 155 – 77. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Stepto, Robert B. “After Modernism, after Hibernation.” In Chant of Saints, edited by Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto, 470 – 86. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Walpert, Bryan. “Stanley Plumly and the Elegy of Relationship.” Papers on Language and Literature 38, no. 3 (2002): 227 – 43. Wheatley, Phillis. The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley. Edited by John C. Shields. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Williams, Pontheolla. Robert Hayden: A Critical Analysis of His Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Williams, Wilburn, Jr. “Covenant of Timelessness and Time.” In Chant of Saints, edited by Michael Harper and Robert Stepto, 66 – 84. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Zeiger, Melissa. Beyond Consolation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Time is the fire in which we burn. — Delmore Schwartz, “Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day” Nor can it be said that posthumous fame is the bitter reward for those who were ahead of their time — as though time were a racetrack on which some contenders run so swiftly that they simply disappear from the spectator’s range of vision. — Hannah Arendt

7

Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times Jim Keller

By the time his full-page obituary appeared in the New York Times on July 14, 1966, Delmore Schwartz’s body had lain unclaimed for three days at the Bellevue morgue.1 The poet’s name had only been noticed, in fact, by a Times journalist who regularly perused the morgue roster, and it would still be a matter of some time before Schwartz’s Aunt Clara, contacted by a family member who had read the Times, ﬁnally claimed his body. This series of delays is often used to measure the extent of what John Ashbery calls Schwartz’s “fall from grace” during his lifetime.2 And much similar commentary is devoted to noting the sadly “poetic” fact of Schwartz’s deferred physical identiﬁcation, given that his literary recognition had come so early and profusely in his youth. From the event of his well-attended funeral onward, though, Schwartz would be listed now and again among the century’s most underrated American poets, by turns one whose time had come too early and one whose time has not yet come. Schwartz’s delayed literary recognition almost compels the rhetorical links that have been drawn between the circumstances of his postmortem and his posthumous reception. Robert Phillips notes that “when the body was removed to the city morgue, it was unclaimed for some days,” in the process of lamenting that twelve years after his death, “a man whom many consider one of this century’s most important American poets” still went

154 |    

unread or, at best, remained underappreciated.3 Saul Bellow, in his thinly veiled ﬁctional account of Schwartz, Humboldt’s Gift (1975), also remarks on this time lag, indicting American Babbitry in passing, when he comments, “at the morgue there were no readers of modern poetry.”4 But in Bellow’s novelistic wish fulﬁllment, popular culture does ﬁnally appreciate Humboldt’s (Schwartz’s) “gift”: both his talent and the actual movie script that he wills to Bellow’s alter ego, Charlie Citrine. Though James Atlas understandably saves his treatment of Schwartz’s belated identiﬁcation until the end of his 1977 biography, the event seems profoundly present throughout, as Atlas consistently stresses the prophetic nature of Schwartz’s own claims (made throughout his lifetime) that his literary recognition would be deferred.5 In elegiac form, Schwartz’s friend John Berryman echoes Auden’s epitaph for Yeats in remarking that “[Delmore’s] death stopped clocks,” chagrined that “His good body lay unclaimed / three days.” 6 But Berryman also seems assured of Schwartz’s eventual return to the cultural forefront. In a 1972 interview for the Paris Review, Berryman admonishes that Schwartz is “the most underrated poet of the twentieth century,” pronouncing his ﬁrst book “a masterpiece” and oﬀering with cavalier ease that Schwartz’s reputation “will come back — no problem.”7 Similarly, numerous introductions and biographies evoke a more or less anxious sense of awaited recognition, an impression that Schwartz haunts literary history — or left to it an unappreciated gift, most likely hidden, it is supposed, beneath the “lurid cultural legend” 8 made of his life and isolation. In remarking that Schwartz’s insecurities outlived his young talents, Berryman suggests the image of someone advancing through time backward, “like a man death-wounded on the mend” (Song 152), though he takes solace from the sense that Schwartz’s inﬂuence will not diminish but draw strength as it continues to be tempered by the ﬁre of time. In later generations, Berryman believes, Schwartz’s reputation will be reanimated and “the young will read [Schwartz’s] young verse” (Song 156). Lou Reed, recalling Delmore in a quite literal sense, oﬀers a tribute set within a séance to his former Syracuse professor, in the song “My House,” from his 1982 album, The Blue Mask: Sylvia and I got out our Ouija Board to dial a spirit, across the room it soared We were happy and amazed at what we saw blazing stood the proud and regal name Delmore. ............................................

Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times | 155

My Daedalus to your Bloom, was such a perfect wit and to ﬁnd you in my house makes things perfect.9 If Schwartz had once outstripped our view, it seems, we may either catch up to him at our culture’s own, slower pace or look backward, with new eyes, and will his reappearance. Schwartz himself often rang arch variations on the way we think about our relation to time. A favorite foil of his was the Joycean notion of history: Schwartz would often claim that “history was a nightmare during which [he was] trying to get a good night’s sleep.” But he also thought of Leopold Bloom as exemplary in his ability to make his alienation a means of escaping “the annihilating fury of history” (Atlas, 302).10 Commentators suggest that both Schwartz’s delayed identiﬁcation, in the morgue, and his deferred recognition carry the pathos and “cautionary tale” (Ashbery, 2) of his astonishing decline into mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse, as he “painfully removed / himself from the ordinary contacts / and shook with resentment” (Song 150). But readers take something more than a “grim relish in the classic saga of a brilliant poet who burned himself out” (Ashbery, 2) from the story of Schwartz’s life, death, and literary reception. What also emerges from Schwartz’s poetry is a sense that something from the past — either a commentary on “old codes” or lessons in “new apperceptions” (Song 148) — has been left unresolved. In the customary accounts of Schwartz’s rise and fall lies the narrative of a poet who entered into a Faustian bargain and, by destroying himself, meant to survive history. Attached to this prediction-in-hindsight, though, comes the caveat that contemporary readers must become equal to the task of fulﬁlling this destiny. The popular and critical fascination that surrounds the time lag between Schwartz’s death and recognition assumes two stances toward time and language, both “modern” but opposed to each other. The tendency to consider the eventual — positive or negative — reception of a literary corpus as somehow destined from its creation suggests that, in the course of our everyday time-reckoning, our historical gaze falls forward from the present, that is, toward a future that will provide increasing clarity about the past. In Heidegger’s modernist statement, “authentic” time involves “a running ahead [that] seizes [and makes sense of] the past.”11 In this scheme or system of time, human being is deﬁnitively future directed. In his discussion of the Greek kairos as “the Moment that lies in resoluteness,” Heidegger borrows a term from Kierkegaard and thinks of authentic time as “the blink of an eye,” in which one receives an identity that gives new meaning to one’s

156 |    

past actions.12 Such a refocusing of one’s roles and goals makes a coherent, retrospective narrative of past events, reoriented toward one’s new way of being in the world.13 Heidegger’s sense of modernity also echoes Nietzsche’s rather poetic account of art’s possibilities in our age. For the later Nietzsche, art can direct “modernity against history, [as] a kind of forgetting that is a new origin, giving us a new past.”14 For Heidegger, the form most adequate to the task of “making it new” — of naming a new cultural paradigm — is poiesis (or Dichtung), and his examples are drawn largely from (German romantic) lyric poetry. On the other hand, assuming that literary reclamation also remains the duty of our enlightened vigilance in reexamining the past, criticism assigns an active role to remembrance and ﬁnds the past unresolved. In this alternative, past-directed account of temporality, “[even] the anticipation of what is new in the future is realized only through remembering a past that has been suppressed.”15 As Walter Benjamin thinks of it, in his view of an “authentic,” or all-encompassing, experience (Erfahrung) of history, “memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.”16 In Benjamin’s understanding, the past does not preﬁgure so much as it makes demands on the present, whose duty it is to reopen the past to radical scrutiny. In this scheme, the past stands before us, awaiting our reinscription of it with every present moment. To break from a view of history as continuity — as a series of developments predicated on earlier developments — is “to sacriﬁce the epic dimension of history” in favor of a speciﬁc and unique engagement with [the past].”17 The task of Benjamin’s historical materialist is to unveil moments in the past that seem discontinuous with their larger context, and to highlight their revolutionary but unrealized potential: “to set to work an engagement with history original to every new present,”18 before, that is, we are swept “backwards” into the future.19 The form most ﬁt to this cultural work of remembrance, Benjamin at times suggests, is poetry: “Remembrance must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or still less that of a report, but must, in the strictest epic and rhapsodic manner, assay its spade in ever-new places, and in the old ones delve to ever deeper layers.”20 For Heidegger, poetry becomes a futureoriented act, “founding as bestowing, founding as grounding, and founding as beginning,”21 a uniﬁed cultural understanding (which Heidegger

Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times | 157

calls “truth”). By contrast, in Benjamin, the rhapsodic insight that it enables makes poetry a form suited to unearthing the past. To some extent reconciling these oppositional tendencies, which locate revolutionary moments either in the future or the past, our modernist consciousness of time distinguishes itself from other epochs by rendering the present as an authentic moment seamlessly uniﬁed by both tradition and innovation. But as Schwartz’s poetry makes us aware — as much through its limitations as its successes — the smoothed-over consciousness of time needs constantly to be reaﬃrmed through our struggle to contain these opposed impulses. In thinking of the present as the site on which past experiences simply unfold into futural expectations, we yoke together, by a sort of intellectual violence, the incommensurate understandings of time contained in our sense of modernity. Schwartz ﬁnds that this everyday notion of the way that time ﬂows marks our attempts to smother a ﬁre that spreads in several directions at once.

Through the Mist of the Actual (Berryman) To reassess Schwartz’s poetry, as well as to theorize his position with respect to the “middle generation” of American twentieth-century poets, it seems necessary to adapt an angle that stresses Schwartz’s still-overlooked critique of the way that we experience history. For a recontextualizing of his life and work, readers should appreciate Schwartz less as a ﬁgure of the doomed poet than as someone who poetically perceived and lived the irreconcilable tasks of writing both a rhapsodic remembrance and a founding epic. As Marjorie Perloﬀ demonstrates, much early twentieth-century modernist poetry deﬁnitively set itself the task of directing our consciousness of time toward a futural dimension, within an epic sensibility, that would retrodetermine the past. Whether one thinks of Ezra Pound’s “Augustan” principles, or Wallace Stevens’s “Romanticism,” according to Perloﬀ, “the point . . . is to get back to something prior in time even as one is   .” 22 The new, or modern, must reclaim the past as its hitherto unrecognized destiny. And Schwartz attempts such reclamation, not only at the level of the verse and verse-play epics that he set out to write — Genesis (1943) and Shenandoah (1941), respectively — but in his lyrical poetry as well. At the same time, though, Schwartz writes about his divided origins — a reﬂective process of reinscription that involves, as Benjamin puts it, “res-

158 |    

toration and re-establishment . . . and precisely because of this [the past remains] something imperfect and incomplete.”23 By the mid-twentieth century, “American authors, like European authors, had to grapple with more than enough history,”24 and adding to the complexity of the past, Schwartz was guided by an epic sensibility to rewrite history within a bold new Eliotic structure, one that he increasingly despaired of ever ﬁnding, and the lack of which led him to conﬁde to James Laughlin his fear that he “had not fulﬁlled the promise of [his] youth.”25 The personal history that Schwartz would strive to transform into epochal history combined his parents’ migration from eastern Europe, on the one hand, and the inﬂuence of earlier modernists — particularly Eliot — on the other. As the son of Romanian Jewish immigrants, Schwartz repeatedly tried to interpret his heritage creatively, but as the inheritor of Yeats’s, Eliot’s, and Auden’s vast poetic theories of time, he also wanted to transform personal introspection into a broader cultural consciousness. He could only “break” with the past, then, through his eﬀorts to reclaim it in the irreconcilable terms of personal remembrance and future-oriented self-creation. In his writing, Schwartz’s central preoccupations are generally acknowledged to be his family, the event of his being named, his childhood in Brooklyn, and the Jewish immigration of the 1880s and 1890s to the United States (Atlas, 272), of which his parents — Harry Schwartz and Rose Nathanson — were a part. Especially in his parents’ choosing his name and in the experience of living in the mid-twentieth-century metropolis (New York City), Schwartz experienced two senses of time, each irreconcilable to the terms of the other. The contradictory experiences that emerge in Schwartz’s poetry can be thought of in terms of “shattered” time and “accretive” time. In shattered time, Schwartz considers the past as forever unﬁnished, soliciting our reinvestigation of and “delving into” past events and our exploration of the unexpected ways these events may have shaped our present. Within the experience of accretive time, however, the present stands as a site on which the future grounds new ways of constructing meaning and making sense of experience.

Shattered Time One of the possibilities open to modernity’s experience of time is reversing the direction of the arrow that usually points intelligibility toward the future. Instead of making choices and making sense out of a ﬁeld of op-

Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times | 159

portunities, one may think of the future as a way of living out opportunities made available but missed or misunderstood in the past. In meditating on past time as an Eliotic “heap of broken images,” Schwartz follows this modernist impulse to “twist the radical future-orientedness that is characteristic of modern times . . . into a yet more radical orientation toward the past” (Habermas, 12). One method Schwartz uses to reverse time’s arrow is his uncommon meditation on the way that ancestors will bear the guilt of their descendants. In “The Ballad of the Children of the Czar,” the narrator reﬂects on his childhood from a point of view that seems strange, both in terms of its time consciousness and in its range of dramatis personae: The children of the Czar Played with a bouncing ball In the May morning, in the Czar’s garden, Tossing it back and forth. ...................... A daylight moon hung up In the Western sky, bald white. Like Papa’s face, said Sister, Hurling the white ball forth. While I ate a baked potato Six thousand miles apart, In Brooklyn, in 1916, Aged two, irrational. (What Is to Be Given, 1 – 4) As the narrator recalls beginning to make sense of the world, less rationally than associatively, the ball metaphorizes itself into a potato, the moon, the foredoomed family of Czar Nicholas II, and the world spinning out of control (a favorite trope of Schwartz’s). Over the course of the poem, it becomes clear that one key role of poetic insight is to momentarily stop the past and to allow such new associations to emerge among past events, even as time “hurls” events and the reﬂective lyric poet “forth.” The poet, obviously older now, looks back at the lives of the children and a time when his life had more coherence, being deﬁned by simple appetites. Though

160 |    

none of these actors can see the immediate chaos that lies in wait for them, the poet can “freeze” them at the moment before they are swept away by historical forces, as though taking a poetic portrait. Freezing these moments, Schwartz renders time as spatial, almost as a painting or collage, the disparate elements of which are held together by the poetic act of ﬁnding unexplored connections. Thinking of the future in terms of the past, Schwartz reveals that what becomes of past fragments is a burden that the future has to bear: I am my father’s father, You are your children’s guilt. ......................... Even a bouncing ball, Is uncontrollable, And is under the garden wall. I am overtaken by terror Thinking of my father’s fathers And of my own will. (What Is to Be Given, 1, 4) Through this kind of novel association, the narrator suggests that poetic vision enables us to select past moments and recontextualize them, conferring new meanings upon history. In Schwartz’s “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon along the Seine,” written some twenty years later, this dynamic reappears: “A living child links generations, reconciles the estranged and aged so that a grandchild is a second birth, and the rebirth of the irrational, of those who are forlorn, resigned or implacable” (What Is to Be Given, 72).26 The future is not “rational” — in the sense of manifesting a predictability deduced from past actions — because the past is itself “inevitable,” urgently solicitous of our ability to make ever-new associations with it. Schwartz’s images of the old and new are woven by a capillary logic into each other, forming what Benjamin calls a “dialectical image” of the present amid the past, yet each past moment also has the air of being detachable.27 A cognitive faculty that drew Schwartz’s (and Berryman’s) special attention and poetic treatment, “apperception,” here and elsewhere guides Schwartz’s poetic meditations. Focusing on the special process of understanding by which newly observed qualities are related to past experience allows Schwartz to demonstrate that the claims the past makes on us extend to the point that our present actions

Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times | 161

are measured by whether and how well they respond to the hopes placed on us by previous generations. Insofar as the modernist project is deﬁned as calling for a decisive rupture with the past, the option of radically reclaiming that past has been available, if often overlooked. To Schwartz’s own past, which he often speedily generalizes into the entire history of Western civilization, he ascribes a horizon of unfulﬁlled expectations and the task of remembering in such a way as to fulﬁll them (see Habermas, 14). In “Socrates’ Ghost Must Haunt Me Now,” Schwartz can hear Socrates’ demands that the poet-philosopher (Schwartz) leave the allegorical cave and recognize his own ignorance and limitations, rather than continue in ignorance to indulge what Schwartz calls elsewhere “the heavy bear” of appetite: Socrates’ Ghost must haunt me now, Notorious death has let him go, He comes to me with a clumsy bow, Saying in his disused voice, That I do not know I do not know, The mechanical whims of appetite Are all that I have of conscious choice ................................. Socrates stands by me stockstill, Teaching hope to my ﬂickering will, Pointing to the sky’s inexorable blue — Old Noumenon, come true, come true! (What Is to Be Given, 27 – 28) To will his way out of ignorant repetition, to know the good and consequently to do it, would be to redeem in some small measure Socrates’ hope for the future, and this would amount to Schwartz’s animating and hearing the philosopher’s “disused voice” anew. Here it seems instructive to compare Schwartz’s understanding of history to that of his colleague and fellow poet Robert Lowell, who writes that, “History has to live with what was here, / clutching and close to fumbling all we had — / . . . / unlike writing, life never ﬁnishes.”28 For Lowell, history is made up of moments that are inscribed only once and then may be mined for exemplars. Though history is replete with missed opportunities, it is not for the future to realize them. Although we may reread the past and productively (i.e., poetically) compare it to the present, such rereading does not reinscribe the past with a new set of connections.

162 |    

For Schwartz, however, both writing and life are “unﬁnished” because past and present subscribe to the same laws as writing: historical events are not lapidary; though they may transpire and be marked in black and white only once, they are capable of being reread all over, in a completely new context, at any moment. Unlike psychoanalysis, which is meant to unveil the latent content of consciousness and to free the analysand from past habits and compulsions, Schwartz’s poetic “cure” for his anxious relation to history involves remembering in order to tie himself even closer to the past. Saul Bellow had ﬁttingly cast Schwartz’s doppelgänger, Von Humboldt Fleisher, as a cultural “remembrancer,” who, in the act of remembrance, causes others to remember. And in this role, Schwartz oﬀered new methods of enlisting the past for the purpose of reading the present in innovative ways. The shock of Schwartz’s juxtapositions parallels the balladeer’s arrested gaze in “The Children of the Czar” and “forces a cessation, crystallization, of the momentary event” as ball and ballad temporarily hold their positions (Habermas, 11). And the past, thus recalled, can bring the taken-for-granted ﬂow of history to a momentary stop, during which the poet links time frames through artistic vision and attempts to locate in the past those moments that might transﬁgure the present. As a poetic form, allegory is especially suited to the experience of “time out of joint.” For Benjamin, the return of allegory in nineteenth-century poetics indicates a special temporality, one marked by the historical trauma occasioned by urban modernity. “Baudelaire’s genius . . . is an allegorical genius,” Benjamin claims, noting that the allegorist ﬁnds in the modern city a kind of temporality fallen away from traditional sources of wholeness. In an alienating world reduced to commodiﬁed forms, “the allegorical form . . . is bound up with the speciﬁc signiﬁcation which the commodity acquires.”29 Representation through allegory strives not toward a universal message or simultaneity with its referent (as the romantic symbol had), but toward its own undoing in pursuit of “the new” itself. Signiﬁcation loses the aura of an authentic relation to its signiﬁed, and this relation is displaced by mere reproducibility. “La nouveauté,” for Benjamin, “represents that absolute which is no longer accessible to any interpretation or comparison.”30 As Fredric Jameson notes of Benjamin’s notions of allegory and empirical time, allegory “is the privileged mode of our own life in time, a clumsy deciphering of meaning from moment to moment, the painful attempt to restore continuity to disconnected instants.”31 In Schwartz’s early poem “In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave,” allegory

Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times | 163

plays such a role, insofar as it “presents the temporariness of truth in the ruination of appearance.”32 In modernity, the “life” that allegory “has temporarily breathed into forms has ﬂed,” and the past is felt as unintegrated. Here, in one of Schwartz’s most often anthologized poems, literary allegory represents a fallen form and employs a technique that bespeaks anxiety over a future that might not redeem the past: I rose from bed, lit a cigarette, And walked to the window. The stony street Displayed the stillness in which buildings stand, The street-lamp’s vigil and the horse’s patience. The winter sky’s pure capital Turned me back to bed with exhausted eyes. (What Is to Be Given, 4) These lines live out Thoreau’s sentiment: “that man who does not believe each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way.”33 In this poem and others, Schwartz’s persona intuits no more “auroral hour,” but mainly feels the full weight of the material present. The poem’s setting suggests ruin and signals a way of perceiving time as incomplete. Unlike Plato’s philosopher, who beholds the sun as the ideal form of forms — that is, he to whom ultimate reality (the “Old Noumenon”) is revealed — Schwartz’s poet-philosopher never leaves the cave. The Platonic truth is not recoverable through increasingly reﬁned consciousness. And as the narrator’s reﬂections continue, his thoughts darken outward: So, so, O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail Of early morning, the mystery of beginning Again and again, while History is unforgiven. (What Is to Be Given, 4 – 5) In an Eliotic strain, Schwartz ﬁnds that time is disjointed to the extent that the past has been cut oﬀ as a source of access to meaningful experience, and the future oﬀers no revelation but only a continuing series of present moments, of “beginning again.” Rather than awaken to light, the poet’s experience under the winter sky suggests the ideal form of a capital city in which the real material life of New York City does not participate, and his perception of time as a repetition of nonevents drives the speaker back to bed.

164 |    

Unlike Baudelaire, at times Schwartz held that art might make sense of history and become a category of the totality of existence. “The light cast by this essentially instantaneous experience of history as a whole” — an experience for which Benjamin used the term Jetztzeit, or “now-time” — is taken to reveal the present as unfulﬁlled, but also “thereby to provide an impulse to its radical transformation.”34 His alienation from history — as well as his consequent quest to survive its annihilating fury and rename his times — puts Schwartz in a more opportune position to survey the past as a ﬁeld of unfulﬁlled possibilities, ranging from his failure to participate in the Platonic forms to his inability to honor the memory of his grandfather who fought in Czar Nicholas’s army. Schwartz remains aware that every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. And so, insofar as modern timeconsciousness conduces to forgetting in favor of newness, Schwartz’s impulse is to inﬂect the new with disconnected moments in history and, like his personae who try to reconcile the ghostly past with the physical present, he “must knit / Time with apperception, bit by tiny bit” (from “Concerning the Synthetic Unity of Apperception” in What Is to Be Given, 15). The lack of a redemptive present does not signal history’s necessary end in a whimper.35 History may yet be redeemed, and a measure of hope arises in the poem “At This Moment in Time.” In this early work, a tone similar to that guiding “In Plato’s Cave” prevails, and a related rhetoric emerges: If we are Unﬁnished (we are, unless hope is a bad dream), You [the uncertain] are exact. You tug my sleeve Before I speak, with a shadow’s friendship, And I remember that we who move Are moved by clouds that darken midnight. (What Is to Be Given, 5) Referring to an instance during a party, Schwartz poignantly focuses on the shy, “shadow” time between being greeting by a friend and recognizing him. The friend awaits recognition but cannot assume it, and comes to ﬁgure as the speaker’s own unﬁnished past, awaiting the obscure forces that will bestow or withhold recognition. That we are “uncertain,” “unﬁnished” but mindful of it, becomes a source of hope, not insofar as we may one day come into full self-presence, but because the past continues to oﬀer memories that might become the source of new self-understandings.

Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times | 165

Accretive Time On the other hand, Schwartz maintained a sense of the radical future orientation that modernism assigns human being and history. In Heidegger’s lectures The Concept of Time (1924) and History of the Concept of Time (1925), which issued in Being and Time (1927), he thinks of futural temporality as the dimension in which experience makes sense and the work of art emerges. Linking art and time in What Is Called Thinking (1954), Heidegger will give the example of the way that a sculptor, attuned to the shape “slumbering” in his medium, brings out a new form. In telling contrast, Benjamin had considered that “what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked oﬀ in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one’s future must be hewn” (Benjamin, “Antiques,” One-Way Street, 76). In both cases, the present appears as unformed matter, but for Benjamin, making sense of our world amounts to making sense of the present by linking it to images of former wholeness from the past. Within Heidegger’s Promethean consciousness, however, the future compels — even assists us in — its own creation. To set time consciousness in this future direction, as Schwartz will also try to do, is not to imply that a particular future will be fully realized and history will then stop, but to assume that “the horizon open to the future [and not a reconstructive gaze] guides our access to the past” (Habermas, 13). Habermas contextualizes this view within a theory of what he calls “eﬀective history”: “inasmuch as we appropriate past experiences with an orientation to the future, the authentic present is preserved as the locus of continuing tradition and of innovation at once” (Habermas, 13). And in Heideggerian accounts, “the future-oriented gaze is directed from the present into a past that is connected as a prehistory with our present” (Habermas, 14; emphasis in the original). In terms of this sort of time reckoning, we might read Schwartz’s more rhapsodic poetic questions as signaling hope for the emergence of a purer presence destined from the past: Whence, if ever, shall come the actuality Of a voice speaking the mind’s knowing, The sunlight bright on the green windowshade, And the self articulate, aﬀectionate, and ﬂowing, Ease, warmth, light, the utter showing, When in the white bed all things are made?36

166 |    

In this instance, Schwartz thinks of time as a gathering and articulation. Though framed as a question, this stanza carries an assumption that a more authentic present and self-presence remain eventually possible in art, the way that snow lightens a landscape, clariﬁes a scene, and, “in the white bed all things are made.” In reading Yeats and Auden, but especially in thinking of Eliot as his heroic, if oppressive precursor, Schwartz appreciated that poets of epic, cyclic, or “great” time in fact set the tenor of their own times. That is, not only did these poets aspire to generate new cultural vocabularies, but they also sought to recreate the concept of time. Despite their formidable diﬀerences, and whether utopian or dystopian, Eliot’s shored fragments, Pound’s attempts to make paradise terrestrial, and Auden’s image of Hercules’ “Extraordinary promise / To reinvigorate the Empire”37 look toward the future for a consolidation of the fragmentary present. As Habermas says, the work of art that moves along this epic, modernist, futural arrow of time “proves its worth [in the present] as that which one day will be classic” (Habermas, 9). Though a rather grand ambition to share, the possibility of making a name for himself by coming up with his own epic propelled Schwartz toward this future dimension of poetic sense-making as strongly as his antithetical desire to document the past ﬁxed his gaze. Another early poem, “The Beautiful American Word, Sure,” takes a decisively futural, or accretive, stance and links the ﬂow of time and the event of signiﬁcation: The beautiful American word, Sure, As I have come into a room, and touch The lamp’s button, and the light blooms with such Certainty where the darkness loomed before, ....................................... Where the light is, and each thing clear, (What Is to Be Given, 5 – 6) In this poem’s commentary on time and language, “the beautiful American word, Sure,” provides an instance of le mot juste, illuminating the poet’s situation and lending what Stevens calls “a candid kind to everything.”38 Like a moment of shared understanding in a dialogue, the right word dawning on poetic consciousness can illuminate the present and provide at least a satisfying simulacrum of closure to the past. In one of Schwartz’s most ver-

Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times | 167

satile verse techniques, words metaphorically cast the light by which they are later to be understood, and naming gathers the past, “dark accidents,” into an emergent understanding of the speaker’s context. In his earlier writing, Schwartz keeps his focus narrowly ﬁxed on more local, immediate situations: lyric meditations, fragments of dialogue, ironic or humble apostrophes, and the like. Rather than simply poeticizing grand paradigms of time (as he would come to do later), in these instances Schwartz tried to embody, personalize, and even to render as intimate dialogue the interaction among speakers and between speakers and their future audience. This may explain why the American word “sure” so appeals to him: “sure” expresses an aﬃrmation that conveys while it creates a shared understanding. In the colloquial “speech of the place,” the word “sure” represents and comments on the way that the future can subsume local diﬀerences between interlocutors. Schwartz’s narrator’s speech act (saying the word “sure”), which creates a temporarily abiding sense of local community, mimics Wallace Stevens’s notion of the mind in the motion of ﬁnding “the suﬃcient,” which will bring speakers together, as most famously articulated in “Of Modern Poetry”: What will suﬃce. . . . ................... It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. It has to face the men of the time and to meet The women of the time. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It has To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and With meditation, speak words that in the ear, In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound Of which, an invisible audience listens, Not to the play, but to itself, expressed In an emotion as of two people, as of two Emotions becoming one. . . . It must Be the ﬁnding of a satisfaction, and may Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman Combing. . . . (Collected Poems, 239 – 40)

168 |    

In a decidedly romantic gesture, the mind creates the standards by which it will be judged. Parts of this 1942 poem, which appeared in Stevens’s Parts of a World, adumbrate his later, more encompassing and philosophical lyric sequence, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, especially in anticipating the latter’s imperative voice (the subchapters of Notes read, “It Must Be Abstract,” “It Must Change,” and “It Must Give Pleasure”). But “Modern Poetry,” it seems, is not yet concerned with presenting a totalizing vision. Appreciating Schwartz’s similar example of the right word (in the right place, at the right time) to show how poetic speaking provides increasing clarity, makes two emotions seem one, and synthesizes previously unrelated perspectives, it is tempting to focus on both poets’ advice to write what one knows: the idiomatic use of language, the humble nature of entering a room, the concrete images of a man skating and a woman combing her hair. But in both of these poetic statements also lies a privileging of the future as the stage on which what is currently fragmented will be made whole. The mind’s suﬃcient grace, and the mind in the act of ﬁnding what will suﬃce, both look forward to a time when their contemporary expressions will share a presence with their audience so completely that the poets’ speech will become the audience’s internal monologue. Merleau-Ponty, whom Schwartz had met brieﬂy, oﬀers a strikingly similar account of the way that the right word gives the body “a maximal grip” on its present.39 Merleau-Ponty oﬀers the example of someone walking into a dimly lit room, touching an unknown object, and, upon speaking its name (“a comb”), becoming instantly able to make much-increased sense of his or her surroundings. In futural accounts of meaning-in-time, poetic language brings about a form of temporalizing in which there arise new senses of things, and disparate aspects of given situations (“each thing clear,” integral, and distinctly placed) are brought together before a gradually unfolding view. “Time can be forgiven” explicitly in Schwartz’s poem “O Love, Sweet Animal” (What Is to Be Given, 6; my emphasis) when it renders the living present an unceasing synthesis, “gathered in on itself and gathering.”40 In the terms set by the “text” of Schwartz’s literary reception, Irving Howe assumes a similarly future-laden form of cultural intelligibility when he talks about the eﬀects that Schwartz’s ﬁrst story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” had on its ﬁrst readers.41 According to Howe, readers of the newly oriented 1937 Partisan Review experienced a “shock of recognition” (Howe, vii) on encountering this story. Second-generation Jewish readers especially heard “a voice that seemed our own, though it had never really existed until Schwartz invented it” (Howe, ix). Howe’s description of a

Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times | 169

“mimic motion” (again, shades of Stevens), which was known yet “not our own,” suggests a telling parallel to Schwartz’s notion of time as a horizon open to the future, circuitously guiding our access to and comprehension of the past. Schwartz’s second wife, Elizabeth Pollet, on the other hand, comments that she was struck, in the journal entries that she collected for her Portrait of Delmore, “with what is not present” to the act of remembrance. She tries to share her intuition of the Delmore Schwartz that she knew, situated in a past somewhere yet further beyond what he wrote, and can only draw from this feeling of incompleteness a sense of “the impossibilities, ﬁnally, of language to render life.”42 These two antithetical notions of time, “shattered” and “accretive,” combine to inﬂect the history of Schwartz’s reception. As testimony to the strange times (and time frames) that Schwartz embodied, he is read as both a poet who gave voice to his generation and as an excessively ambitious poet, trying to force together a series of disconnected cultural and personal memories. What led him to construct this kind of place for himself was his own structurally parallel experience of time. Toward documenting multiple pasts and unveiling a new epic sensibility, Schwartz was guided by two impulses, as we shall now see: the split consciousness of time that was embedded in the history suggested by his own name, and his experience of life in the contemporary metropolis.

Time and Filiation The linking of Schwartz’s body to his literary reputation appears structurally similar to the way that Schwartz himself tried to reconcile his times with his family’s past, speciﬁcally the past event of his being named. Schwartz often discussed the “incongruity” of his name: the patrician-sounding “Delmore” preﬁxing, or prefacing, his Romanian-immigrant surname, “Schwartz,” both of which he loved and hated.43 Through his poetic onomastics, making the event of his naming central to his poetic meditation on time, he used this incongruity as a way of naming what he took as the combination of cultures that emerged from mass European immigration and the bourgeois model of success embodied in his ﬁrst name. Schwartz’s poetically imagined return to the scene of his identiﬁcation allowed him to expose and negotiate what Reinhart Koselleck thinks of as a central aspect inherent in modern time-consciousness: “modernity is ﬁrst understood as a new age from the time that expectations have distanced themselves . . . from all previous experience” (quoted in Habermas, 12). Repeating the

170 |    

history of his ambivalent naming, Schwartz attempted to rewrite his immigrant past in terms of an American poetic epic, though that heroic eﬀort ultimately involved opening past conﬂicts as much as giving a new voice to his generation.44 In the poem “Father and Son,” the two ﬁlial personae debate the nature of time, and the poet’s father ﬁnally qualiﬁes his son’s youthful optimism: Father : Guilt, guilt of time, nameless guilt. Grasp ﬁrmly your fear, thus grasping your self, Your actual will. Stand in mastery, Keeping time in you, its terrifying mystery. Face yourself, constantly go back To what you were, your own history. (What Is to Be Given, 9) The father’s directives to “keep time in you” and to “go back to your own history” oﬀer what in hindsight proved to be Schwartz’s unwitting ars poetica and anticipate Schwartz’s poetic project. He will investigate his quite insular upbringing, but set that project within a Whitmanian gesture toward a much broader inclusiveness: I am a poet of the Hudson River and the heights above it, the lights, the stars, and the bridges I am also by self-appointment the laureate of the Atlantic — of the peoples’ hearts, crossing it to new America.45 Schwartz makes himself an emblem for American poetry’s European bearings but also expands the Whitman-to-Williams lineage to gather in immigrants in a sweeping gesture meant to consolidate varied traditions. But this gesture is threatened the minute that he signs his name. Though Schwartz enjoyed playing with his ﬁrst name, citing as namesakes everyone and everything from actors to delicatessens and Pullman cars, the propernaming events of Schwartz’s birth and death threaten a failure to connect the past (the given-ness of one’s body and one’s surname) with the future (one’s self as ongoing creation, as a literary reputation). Delmore’s incorporation into the Partisan Review circle of middle-generation American modernism remained productively opposed to Schwartz’s rootedness in the earlier modernist experience of the émigré in the city. And Schwartz’s attempt to reconcile these time consciousnesses provides the guiding impulse (while

Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times | 171

also constituting the insurmountable obstacle) to his unevenly realized and poorly received personal epic, Genesis: Book I. In this narrative poem, as in his verse play, Shenandoah, Schwartz takes his own birth as both an actual historical event and the occasion for reﬂecting on modernity in its two conﬂicting dimensions of time. In terms of reconciling future ambitions and shattered pasts, Hershey Green, the protagonist of Genesis, looks back and traces his calling to vaguely oedipal feelings: Fame ﬁrst of all and audience began: There mother’s breast and father’s brutal hand Bred or struck in the child who is the man The ﬁrst of pieties or ﬁrst of wounds — 46 Here expressing an anxiety of inﬂuence, or a poetic Oedipal conﬂict, Schwartz self-consciously tropes Wordsworth’s “My heart leaps up when I behold” (1802): “The Child is father of the Man; / And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety.” Rather than beseeching the future to allow the man to enjoy the same sense of innocence that he had experienced a generation earlier, as a child, however, Schwartz ﬁnds that the child exists in an already fallen state, and this owes as much to the personal trauma of separation and violence as to inescapable, unresolved issues from past generations. And yet, Schwartz continues to act as though the repetition-compulsive act of revisiting these primal moments over and over might ultimately secure for him a resonance with future audiences. Schwartz generalizes the events from his “unremarkable” childhood in Brooklyn into transatlantic and indeed transhistorical phenomena as he grows to feel “exiled, humiliated, persecuted: Coriolanus, Joseph and Caesar,” claiming, “the child resumes history, each enacts all that has been” (Genesis, 101). In the meantime, the poem’s chorus of ghosts directs the narrator to remember his past in terms of his present. As a modernist artist self-conscious of modernity, Schwartz considers the event of his proper naming as artistic material and proposes a drastic reversal of the horizon of expectation and the space of experience. In his epic, the present experience of reﬂection opens up the past as that terrain on which he not only reveals the expectations he had once entertained, but on which the poet must continue to place expectations. And, looking to the future, from these fragments he might be able to create a poetic sequence as inﬂuential to coming generations as The Waste Land was to his. To the incommensurability of his names and heritages, Schwartz’s re-

172 |    

sponse, in his short stories, verse, and verse plays, is to rename formative moments: the events of his parents’ immigration and their courtship, and his own identiﬁcation, most famously in the short stories, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” and “America! America!” In the epiphany of this latter piece, Schwartz’s narrator rehearses a kind of temporal mirror stage that reveals his past self, however fragmentary, as a promising literary subject over whom the author might at least exercise some small measure of control: “He turned from the looking-glass and said to himself . . . ‘No one truly exists in the real world because no one knows all that he is to other human beings . . . and all the foolishness which the future will bring him.’ ”47 And the narrator of “The World Is a Wedding” begins his account by announcing that “there are no true beginnings, but only departures entitled beginnings,” since “each event lives in the heavy head forever, waiting to renew itself.” Yet In Dreams did mark the beginning of Schwartz’s promising career, and the future did bring acclaim to the writer, since his ﬁrst book introduced a new reﬂective voice in artistic production.

Time and the City As Tony Pinkney notes, a problem with the analysis of modernist time arises when criticism tries to locate the sources of such time consciousness in actual historical events, on the one hand, or in categorical features of its ideology, on the other. Raymond Williams resolves this dilemma by tracing the source of modernist time-consciousness to urban experience: “Modernism can be located, not on the inside of its self-validating ideologies, and not in the outside of political trauma, but in the intermediate zone of urban experience, in solution not as a precipitate, in a ‘structure of feeling’ that has not yet assumed the relatively formalized shape of aesthetic doctrine or political act.”48 Out of the series of shocks that Schwartz experienced as an idler or ﬂâneur wandering the streets of his favorite city, he appreciated possibilities for success as well as hidden pasts lurking in the metropolis, and this made the city the ideal site on which to lay the foundations for a poetics of his “haunted, hunted generation.”49 From the experience of the city, he could consolidate his future-directed notion of time simply by looking around, at everything from insurance companies’ actuarial statistics, which appeared to render the future predictable, to his father’s successes in real-estate speculation that made the future appear a matter of performance: acting successful often seemed to ensure success. And sharing ideas with colleagues creates a captive audience. Schwartz found in the city the

Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times | 173

possibility (and often the reality) of large numbers of like-minded intellectuals ready to become his listeners. Akin to Wordsworth’s perception of the city in The Prelude, Schwartz could appreciate that, among the multitudes Of that huge city, oftentimes was seen Aﬀectingly set forth, more than elsewhere Is possible, the unity of man, One spirit over ignorance and vice Predominant, in good and evil hearts; One sense for moral judgments, as one eye For the sun’s light. (The Prelude, 1805 version, VIII: 824 – 31) Urban experience occasionally suggests to the poet that — not despite, but because of cosmopolitan dynamics — the future may represent a development toward shared experience. Notwithstanding this promise, though, Schwartz also remained mindful of his immigrant forebears’ experiences in the city, and how they had withdrawn from more general cultural life into stories of the past and a self-consciousness about their use of the English language, as Shenandoah’s mother does in “America, America!” Schwartz’s resort to the optics of the idler in the city corresponds with Raymond Williams’s understanding of modernism as an essentially immigrant phenomenon: as émigré, the poet makes of his or her media — the past, language, the city, and the experience of alienation — a matrix for understanding experience as fragmentary, but no less generative for that.50 From his interest in the New York Giants baseball team to walks on Coney Island and fondly remembered life on President Street, Schwartz found in New York City a temporal porosity, a condition where one could not tell “if the architecture [were] in the process of being built or in decay and ruination,”51 and from this porosity emerged a time line open to reinscription. Schwartz likens the qualities and processes of the city to those of the mind in much of his work, such as “Sonnet: O City, City” and “The Mind Is an Ancient and Famous Capital.” This was a technique or ﬁguration he would have encountered and found suggestive in his readings of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.52 Having read Freud, Schwartz used New York as the terrain for poetic speculation into multiple pasts, not just his own. As Peter Caws says, in Freud’s metaphor of the mind as a city, “much of the history of the [city,] while still magically present, is similarly lost or forgotten — preserved, but brought to light again only when regression

174 |    

goes back far enough” (Caws, “The Unconscious”). Schwartz’s experience of the city, then, allows him in “The Mind Is an Ancient and Famous Capital” to reveal modernist time as a complex and conﬂicted process of disinterment and construction: The mind is a city like London, Smoky and populous: it is a capital Like Rome, ruined and eternal, Marked by the monuments which no one Now remembers . . . Then, the poet turns his gaze to the future, asking, when Will the houselights of the universe Light up and blaze? (Summer Knowledge, 226) In this and other poems, notably “Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day,” Schwartz’s metropolitan optics of the idler unveil the city and a correlative form of consciousness, or the city as a form of consciousness — comprising and in the process of comprising various pasts. As Habermas notes of the idler, the bohemian, the genius, and the child (all roles that Schwartz either explored poetically or tried to live out), their perspective is free from “the antistimulant of conventionally inculcated modes of perception.” These gifted outsiders, as outsiders, remain attentive to “the transcendent stimuli hidden in the most ordinary matters,” but while this status elevates them to a uniquely atemporal plane, it also secures, by the same token, their further isolation.53 Schwartz delved into his personal experience of metropolitan life with Baudelaire’s sense that he might reconcile everyday temporality with larger truths and produce high art or authentic experience from the mundane.54 Ultimately, his Janus-like foresight and hindsight come from his attempts to ﬁnd a vantage point outside of our everyday history, to ﬁnd a perspective from which the everyday might appear both memorable and memorializing. Though “rescue missions” of Schwartz’s reputation evoke the irony of a history that threatens to forget someone who sacriﬁced himself to history in order to overcome it, it seems unlikely that what Irving Howe calls our “sentimental exploitation” (Howe, vii) by stories of the modern poète maudit suﬃces to explain our interest in revisiting Schwartz’s body of work, with or without the text of its delayed recognition inscribed. Instead, the belated

Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times | 175

identiﬁcation of Schwartz provides the occasion to speak to the question of what kind of complex notion of time leads us, as readers, to fetishize this delay and where (and when) such a notion might have arisen. Aesthetically, Schwartz’s encounter with alternative states of time consciousness might to some extent explain why his later poetry inclines toward the rhapsodic and philosophical, at its best addressing ontological questions in a language that is controlled and energetic, meditative yet characterized by a richly expansive ﬁeld of imagery. At its worst, of course, Schwartz’s work suﬀers from his own pronounced “dissociation of sensibility,” orotund philosophizing expressed through increasingly monotonous and selfindulgent lines as his capacities and condition degenerated (as Berryman mourns in Song 150, “I’d bleed to say his lovely work improved / but it is not so” [Dream Songs, 169]). But Schwartz seemed also to believe, at least intermittently, that a heightened awareness of our own conﬂicted temporality might itself weave new depths of feeling into our experience of his otherwise abstract meditations. The reception of Schwartz’s poetic corpus redeems his insight into the ways that the present poetically transforms the past, and like modernity itself, Schwartz’s impossibly ambitious and yet intuitively plausible goal of examining our taken-for-granted consciousness of time, from a critically distanced yet poetic standpoint, remains an “incomplete project” (Habermas, 15).

Notes 1. Obituary of Delmore Schwartz, New York Times, July 14, 1966. The Times observed that Schwartz had died of a heart attack in the Columbia Hotel in Times Square, July 11, and that his body remained unclaimed at press time. 2. John Ashbery, “The Heavy Bear: Delmore Schwartz’s Life versus His Poetry” (lecture delivered at the 67th general meeting of the English Literary Society of Japan, May 21, 1995). Subsequent references will appear in the text. 3. Robert Phillips, foreword to Last and Lost Poems of Delmore Schwartz, ed. Robert Phillips (New York: Vanguard Press, 1979), xii, xi. 4. Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (New York: Viking, 1975), 16. 5. James Atlas, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977; repr., New York: Welcome Rain, 2000). 6. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), Song 151. Subsequent references will appear in the text as Song number. 7. John Berryman, interview by Peter A. Stitt, Paris Review 53 (Winter 1972): 176 – 207. 8. Irving Howe, foreword to In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories, by

176 |     Delmore Schwartz, ed. James Atlas (New York: New Directions, 1978), vii. Subsequent references appear in the text. 9. Lou Reed, “My House,” The Blue Mask. RCA, 1982. 10. Atlas, 302. 11. Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. William McNeill (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992), 15E. 12. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 387. Subsequent references are to this edition and appear in the text as Being and Time. 13. Stambaugh more or less concurs with Macquarrie and Robinson in translating Heidegger’s related assertions: “history has its essential importance neither in what is past nor in the ‘today’ and its connection with what is past, but in that historicizing that arises from the future” (Stambaugh, 353); “as a mode of human being, history has its roots . . . essentially in the future [which] ﬁrst gives to the having-been its unique priority in what is historical” (Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [New York: Harper and Row, 1962], 438). I have translated Heidegger’s Dasein as “human being” and, possibly even more controversially, sidestepped through ellipses his discussion of “Being-toward death” and “fate” in the above passage. My purpose is to situate Heidegger’s prioritization of the future among modernist notions of time. 14. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 150. 15. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 12. Subsequent references appear in the text. 16. Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), 314. Subsequent references appear in the text abbreviated One-Way Street. 17. Walter Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” in One-Way Street, 352. 18. One-Way Street, 352. 19. The reference is to Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, which Benjamin uses as his own allegory for our duty to the past, in Thesis IX of “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reﬂections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 257 – 58. 20. Benjamin quoted in Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), 74. 21. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 75. 22. Marjorie Perloﬀ, The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 22. 23. Walter Benjamin, “Epistemo-Critical Prologue,” in Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1998), 45. 24. Margaret Reid, “American Literature: Poetry,” Encarta Encyclopedia (Microsoft 2000).

Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times | 177 25. Delmore Schwartz to James Laughlin, January 16, 1953, in Delmore Schwartz and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, ed. Robert Phillips (New York: Norton, 1993), 310. 26. Schwartz, “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon along the Seine,” in What Is to Be Given, 68 – 75. 27. Benjamin introduces the concept of dialectical images in “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), passim. Such images enable a “leap in the open air of history, . . . which is how Marx understood the revolution” (Illuminations, 261). For a discussion of current uses of the dialectical image in lyric poetry, see Paul Naylor, Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999). 28. Robert Lowell, “History,” in Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 421. Subsequent references appear in the text abbreviated CP. See also “To Delmore Schwartz” in Life Studies (1946), which uses the trope of recollection-within-recollection to summon a time when Lowell and Schwartz summoned the spirits of Joyce and Freud (CP, 157). 29. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 22. 30. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 22. 31. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 72. 32. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 178. 33. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: Random House, 2000), 104. 34. Peter Osborne, “Modernity,” in A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Payne (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996), 346 – 49. 35. Just as there are diﬀerent poetic experiences of historical time-consciousness, I do not here engage other possible theories of time consciousness, such as Derrida’s essential belatedness of experience, Rank’s chronologist historicism, and the discontinuities revealed by the New Historicism. 36. Delmore Schwartz, “Sonnet: O City, City,” in Summer Knowledge: Selected Poems, 1938 – 1958 (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 52. Subsequent references appear in the text abbreviated Summer Knowledge. 37. W. H. Auden, “Advent,” in Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1991), 347. 38. Wallace Stevens, section III of “It Must Be Abstract,” “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1993). 39. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenolog y of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul., 1962), 174 – 99. 40. The quotation is Jacques Derrida’s, from “Diﬀérance” (1967), which summarizes Heidegger’s view before oﬀering a critique of it (Speech and Phenomena [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973], 129 – 60). 41. This short story appeared in the ﬁrst edition of the newly oriented Partisan Review, December 1937. 42. Elizabeth Pollet, Portrait of Delmore: Journals and Notes, 1939 – 1959 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), v. 43. Schwartz made up numerous accounts of the source of his ﬁrst name, imagi-

178 |     natively assuming, for example, that his parents named him Delmore to assure his success. Ashbery discusses Schwartz’s love-hate posture toward his name in “The Heavy Bear,” 2. 44. In the longer poems Genesis and Shenandoah, which seek to reconcile Schwartz’s past and present, the traditional experiences of previous generations appear in stark contrast to the promise of progress held out by America. For example, his sense of success as a teacher at Harvard and as a critic among the Kenyon Review “agrarians” was tempered by feelings of isolation owing to his eastern European Jewish background. 45. Delmore Schwartz, “America, America!” in Last and Lost Poems, 4. 46. Delmore Schwartz, Genesis (New York: New Directions, 1943), 19. Subsequent references appear in the text. 47. Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, 33. 48. Raymond Williams quoted in Tony Pinkney’s introduction to Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989), 11. Subsequent references appear in the text. 49. Delmore Schwartz, “The Mind Is an Ancient and Famous Capital,” Summer Knowledge, 226. 50. Unlike Gertrude Stein, who wrote from the idiom of fragmentary immigrant speech itself, Schwartz sought to create a modernist oeuvre using a classical idiom. 51. Howard Caygill, Alex Coles, and Andrzej Klimowski, Walter Benjamin (New York: Totem, 1998), 91. The authors note that a modernist, international style of glass architecture, originally intended to provide transparency, mirrored its surroundings and enforced the demarcation between public and private spaces. This failed utopian promise is analyzed in the conceptual art of Dan Graham, but could also apply to ﬁction about New York City, such as Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985). 52. Freud oﬀers a now-celebrated metaphor in which the history of Rome stands for the history of an individual’s psychic life. The psychoanalytic problem involves an “oceanic feeling” experienced as being religious in character (Civilization and Its Discontents [New York: W. W. Norton, 1961], 16). As Peter Caws says, “Freud thinks this must be a memory, from the earliest stages of the life of the subject, which has meanwhile gone on to build up and inhabit new psychic structures, rather as cities build new buildings in place of the old” (“The Unconscious Is Structured Like a City: Freud, Lacan, and the Project of the Human Sciences,” Janus Head, http:// www.janushead.org/jhinfo.cfm [accessed April 2005]; subsequent references appear in the text). We might also consider that we can uncover past cities through Schwartz’s optic of the present that continually transforms the past, or reshuﬄes the internal organization of history. 53. The artist “turns this type of passively experienced extraordinariness to the oﬀensive, in demonstrating the extraordinary by provocative means” (Habermas, 10). 54. In “Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day,” the experience of wan-

Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times | 179 dering the city — a central trope from Baudelaire through Frank O’Hara — leads Schwartz back to the modernist gesture of reﬂecting from a time consciousness that he is creating: What is the self amid this blaze? What am I now that I was then Which I shall suﬀer and act again, The theodicy I wrote in my high school days Restored all life from infancy, .......................... May memory restore again and again The smallest color of the smallest day: Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the ﬁre in which we burn. (What Is to Be Given, 31 – 32)

Bibliography Ashbery, John. “The Heavy Bear: Delmore Schwartz’s Life versus His Poetry.” Lecture delivered at the 67th general meeting of the English Literary Society of Japan, May 21, 1995. Atlas, James. Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet. 1977. Reprint, New York: Welcome Rain, 2000. Auden, W. H. Collected Poems. New York: Vintage, 1991. Bellow, Saul. Humboldt’s Gift. New York: Viking, 1975. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. ———. Illuminations: Essays and Reﬂections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968. ———. One-Way Street and Other Writings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: New Left Books, 1979. ———. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. New York: Verso, 1998. Berryman, John. The Dream Songs. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. ———. Interview with Peter A. Stitt. Paris Review 53 (Winter 1972): 176 – 207. Caws, Peter. “The Unconscious Is Structured Like a City: Freud, Lacan, and the Project of the Human Sciences.” http://www.janushead.org/gwu-2001 /caws.cfm. Caygill, Howard, Alex Coles, and Andrzej Klimowski. Walter Benjamin. New York: Totem, 1998. De Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971.

180 |     Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Eagleton, Terry. Walter Benjamin: Or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. London: Verso, 1981. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961. Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. ———. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. ———. The Concept of Time. Translated by William McNeill. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992. ———. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, 17 – 87. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Howe, Irving. Foreword to In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories, by Delmore Schwartz. Edited by James Atlas. New York: New Directions, 1978. Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971. Lowell, Robert. Collected Poems. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Body as Expression and Speech.” In Phenomenolog y of Perception, 174 – 99. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. Naylor, Paul. Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999. Osborne, Peter. “Modernity.” In A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, edited by Michael Payne, 346 – 49. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996. Perloﬀ, Marjorie. The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996. Pollet, Elizabeth. Portrait of Delmore: Journals and Notes, 1939 – 1959. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. Reed, Lou. “My House.” The Blue Mask. RCA, 1982. Reid, Margaret. “American Literature: Poetry.” Encarta Encyclopedia. Microsoft 2000. Schwartz, Delmore. Delmore Schwartz and James Laughlin: Selected Letters. Edited by Robert Phillips. New York: Norton, 1993. ———. Genesis. New York: New Directions, 1943. ———. In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories. New York: New Directions, 1937. ———. Last and Lost Poems of Delmore Schwartz. Edited by Robert Phillips. New York: Vanguard Press, 1979. ———. Letters of Delmore Schwartz. Edited by Robert Phillips. New York: Ontario Review Press, 1984.

Delmore Schwartz’s Strange Times | 181 ———. Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems, 1938 – 1958. New York: Doubleday, 1959. ———. What Is to Be Given. Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1976. Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1993. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. New York: Random House, 2000. Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. London: Verso, 1989. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. In William Wordsworth: A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

8

Theodore Roethke and the Poetics of Place Trenton Hickman

Gary Snyder has recalled how hearing Theodore Roethke read his poems at Berkeley in the early 1950s furnished him, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, and others with their ﬁrst model of how to “give a poetry reading.”1 It appears that Roethke oﬀered Snyder something more as well — a stylistic exemplar (as sociolinguist Ron Scollon has remarked),2 as well as a precedent for paying close attention to nature and physical place as poetic subjects in their own right. Indeed, the verse of many other American poets, such as Richard Hugo, Robert Bly, James Wright, and James Dickey, and even that of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, bears Roethke’s imprint. More importantly, Roethke taught these later poets an ethical commitment to the earth itself, eschewing an easy anthropocentrism in favor of a more complicated communion with the natural world. This is not to argue that Roethke was the best or strongest poet of the middle generation, nor the most representative, but rather that he deserves credit for elaborating a mode of American poetry that makes human experience accountable to natural and physical landscapes, and that externalizes such experience as one node of the biological “web” to which it belongs. Roethke’s ethos of human accountability to the spaces and places of earth is most obvious in The Far Field (1964), for which he posthumously received the National Book Award. This poetry is less interested in de-

184 |      

tailing the interior landscapes of the poet’s loss, angst, and trauma — as in his famed “greenhouse” poems — and more intrigued with how his idiosyncratic history resonates against the prehistory of the landscape on which he superimposes narrative. This shift derives in large part, I contend, from Roethke’s careful reading of W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Bishop, who decidedly inﬂuenced his career and his work’s metamorphosis. Roethke ultimately posits that poetry should allow the simultaneous awareness of landscape and human activity and emotion, since they are mutually imbricated in the discourse of history. In this way, Roethke’s work presages postmodern debates about history, story, and perception that would emerge not long after his death. By the same token, Roethke’s poetics of place was not immediately understood by many poets or critics of his time; it continues to be misunderstood by some contemporary scholars. M. L. Rosenthal alleged of Roethke that “no other modern American poet of comparable reputation . . . has absorbed so little of the concerns of his age into his nerve-ends,” unless one took the poet’s own “damaged psyche” to be a qualiﬁed register.3 Randall Stiﬄer catalogs several other contemporary critics on this purported dearth of the “historical” in Roethke’s poetry.4 Randall Jarrell felt the need to defend Roethke from these aspersions, conceding that although one “looks in vain” for “hydrogen bombs, world wars, Christianity, money, [and] ordinary social observations” in the poetry, readers should still ﬁnd Roethke to be a “forceful, delicate, and original poet” (quoted in Stiﬄer, 167). Yet Hilton Kramer’s assessment was more representative of the majority opinion: “[Robert] Lowell’s poetry is bound to have a greater range [than Roethke’s], for that is what history is: the whole range of life as we recognize it objectively” (quoted in Stiﬄer, 167). Even more recent, sympathetic critics, such as Cary Nelson, see “the conﬂict between poetic aspiration and a constrained sense of historical possibility” as being “less intense” in Roethke’s work, which seems “threatened by its exposure to American culture” and not robust enough to engage a contemporary event like the Vietnam War, for example.5 These critics unanimously center their “historical” view on time lines of human activity. But in Roethke’s conception, the natural world is not accountable to humanity and its “wars” or “hydrogen bombs”; rather, humans are accountable to the natural places from which they and their nominally privileged stories, denominated as “histories,” emerge. As such, Roethke’s poetry is not an escape from history and its contexts but rather a reorientation of what constitutes history and its contexts. Guy Debord use-

Theodore Roethke and the Poetics of Place | 185

fully diﬀerentiates between the human invention of “pseudo-cyclical time” and the “cyclical time” of nature, suggesting that modern capitalist society has severed itself from the rhythms of biological, meteorological, and geological time and adopted a calendar of cultural “spectacles” that encourage us to organize our lives around “pseudo-events.”6 Similarly, if Roethke asks readers to eschew a Western, consumer-capitalist “grand narrative” of human-engineered history, he also demands attention to the natural rhythms of the land, of physical place. In so doing, Roethke’s poetry does not ignore the reality of America; rather, it ignores power-broker, brandname “America.” Although Roethke never knew of the younger, Antillean writer Édouard Glissant, today Glissant’s ideas — elaborated during Roethke’s prime — seem remarkably well suited to understanding history as Roethke understood it in The Far Field. Even before his powerful summa, Poetics of Relation (1990), Glissant had asserted that “history is spread out beneath [the land’s] surface, from the mountains to the sea, from north to south, from the forest to the beaches,” and furthermore that “our landscape is our own monument: its meaning can only be traced on the underside. It is all history.”7 In Glissant’s view, we cannot deny diachronic human history, but we should harness that history to the synchronic relations between the human occupation of physical space and the accretion of geological and biological elements within those landscapes.8 In Poetics of Relation, Glissant’s vision culminates in what he calls “an aesthetics of the earth”: “under no circumstances could it ever be a question of transforming land into territory again,”9 since territory describes land “deﬁned by its limits.” “A land henceforth has no limits,” he declares, and is “worth defending against every form of alienation” through a poetics that accounts for physical place (Poetics, 151, 153 – 54). This kind of poetics strives to steer history away from “real-life” representation toward imaginative creation. If history is an act of interpretation, less indebted to sociopolitical spectacle and owing more to human interaction with the natural world, then possibilities emerge for a new understanding and exploration of the “historical” in Roethke’s poetry. In this conception of history, human experience “etches” itself onto place. I would further argue that the historical, in this sense, can be established in a lyric poem as well as it can be in a narrative poem. Michael Thurston extols Lowell’s “postwar American lyric” for its “ﬁgured language” and “vital music,” which invite readers to participate in “the overdetermined meanings of words, ﬁgures, images, and poetic forms, as well as in the more obvious

186 |      

historicity carried by the material.”10 Lowell’s treatment of “concrete public manifestations of the historical” (Thurston, 86) centers on monuments erected in Boston and elsewhere to commemorate spectacles of the past; yet the lyric evokes a response not merely to “monumental” history, but also to unadorned, unspectacular place, made noteworthy by its imaginative depiction. Roethke’s interlocking of person, poetry, and the particulars of a simple physical landscape in The Far Field can be seen in the ﬁrst poem, “The Longing,” in which he transforms the “congress of stinks and sighs” from his famous earlier poem “Root Cellar”: A kingdom of stinks and sighs Fetor of cockroaches, dead ﬁsh, petroleum, Worse than castoreum of mink or weasels, Saliva dripping from warm microphones, Agony of cruciﬁxion on barstools.11 The poem emphasizes that the human experience of the “saliva” on the “microphones” and the “agony of cruciﬁxion on barstools” cannot be separated from the natural and animal “fetor,” even though traditional historians would ﬁnd that fetor empty of meaning because of the lack of a traceable spectacle there. Roethke’s speaker asks, “How to transcend this sensual emptiness?” and then answers in the bardlike third section: I would unlearn the lingo of exasperation, all the distortions of malice and hatred; I would believe my pain: and the eye quiet on the growing rose; I would delight in my hands, the branch singing, altering the excessive bird; I would be a stream, winding between great striated rocks in late summer; A leaf, I would love the leaves, delighting in the redolent disorder of this mortal life, This ambush, this silence, Where shadow can change into ﬂame, And the dark be forgotten. (The Far Field, 14) The poem’s transcendence of the “sensual emptiness” of the earth’s “fetor” is akin to having the “mind of winter” evoked in Wallace Stevens’s “The

Theodore Roethke and the Poetics of Place | 187

Snow Man”; that is, Roethke’s speaker knows he must practice a new language adequate to the task of expressing humanity’s inextricable relation to the physical landscapes out of which it arises. Inasmuch as the human originated in its most primordial form from “the streams,” “the great striated rocks,” and “the leaves,” before any concept of land-as-territory existed, Roethke wants to elucidate the contact zones of discourse between these geological factors and his own biologics, prior to any sense of communal or national identity. The poem does not aim for Keatsian “negative capability,” but for something more radical; the speaker does not “inhabit” these diﬀerent topographies, with their varying ﬂora and fauna, to reﬂect back on his own egotism, but rather to grasp his indebtedness for his very existence. In “Journey to the Interior,” the speaker states this task diﬀerently, pushing the language toward the same reorientation of perception: I rehearse myself for this: The stand at the stretch in the face of death, Delighting in surface change, the glitter of light on waves, And I roam elsewhere, my body thinking, Turning toward the other side of light, In a tower of wind, a tree idling in air, Beyond my own echo, Neither forward nor backward, Unperplexed, in a place leading nowhere. (The Far Field, 21) To be sure, an awareness of “the face of death” is hard to put oﬀ, but as Roethke’s speaker gets his body to “think” of other matters (the shadows, the wind, trees), he succeeds in moving beyond his own mere “echo” (the repetitive self) into “a place leading nowhere.” This place is most usefully understood as a physical space not immediately concerned with the movement of person and landscape along a human diachrony, but rather as being engaged in the synchronic interrelatedness of nature-time that Glissant describes. Roethke does not move across the terrain that he describes so much as he moves into it, traveling from the social spaces of his history into what Henri Lefebvre has called the “ur-place” and its “natural indicators.”12 “There are those to whom place is unimportant,” reads the ﬁrst line of “The Rose,” “[b]ut this place, where sea and fresh water meet, / Is important” (The Far Field, 29). This conﬂuence of “sea and fresh water” proves

188 |      

important to Roethke’s persona, however, not to show the diachronic history of place, but to show how diachronic human history and the natural world together create a whole perception. The rest of “The Rose” details the sounds of that natural world — “American sounds,” yes, but ultimately sounds that leave behind reﬂexive national aﬃliation and lead the persona to “the true ease of myself”: As if another man appeared out of the depths of my being, And I stood outside myself, Beyond becoming and perishing, A something wholly other, As if I swayed out on the wildest wave alive, And yet was still. And I rejoiced in being what I was: In the lilac change, the white reptilian calm, In the bird beyond the bough, the single one With all the air to greet him as he ﬂies, The dolphin rising from the darkening waves; And in this rose, this rose in the sea-wind, Rooted in stone, keeping the whole of light, Gathering to itself sound and silence — Mine and the sea-wind’s. (The Far Field, 32) The sense of self developed in these lines is not self-reﬂexive, or worried about how the history of a particular geography arrives at one’s own self, so to speak, or one’s self-centered concerns. Instead, it is a sense grounded in what the self can enunciate, given the presence of place, and how what is said must function in harmony with the geo-logics and bio-logics of which it is part and parcel. In this new sense of self, the spectacle events of “becoming and perishing” are subordinate to externalizing self-perception (“And I stood outside myself”) and to correlating self-perception to place. Roethke himself seems to have intuited that the obligations to physical landscapes and to diachronic and synchronic histories would be diﬃcult to satisfy. In his notebooks, he laments, “O Muse, when shall I arrive at a true sense of history, / I who have served pre-history so long and well?”13 In “The Abyss,” we also see evidence of Roethke’s strenuous wrestling, as it were, with Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” as he invokes America’s primal bard for an ally:14

Theodore Roethke and the Poetics of Place | 189

Be with me, Whitman, maker of catalogues: For the world invades me again, And once more the tongues begin babbling. And the terrible hunger for objects quails me: The sill trembles. (The Far Field, 52) But the speaker’s struggle to move beyond the “babble” of the world and the “hunger for objects” ultimately cannot be answered by Whitman’s catalogs. Tired of the abundance of images, which Whitman would have savored as foils to his own ego-projection, Roethke writes, “Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit; / Too close immediacy an exhaustion” (The Far Field, 52), and asks, “How can I dream except beyond this life? / Can I outleap the sea — / The edge of all the land, the ﬁnal sea?” (The Far Field, 53). After the fatigue and frustration, the speaker asserts: I thirst by day. I watch by night. I receive! I have been received! I hear the ﬂowers drinking in their light, I have taken counsel of the crab and the sea-urchin, I recall the falling of small waters, The stream slipping beneath the mossy logs, Winding down to the stretch of irregular sand, The great logs piled like matchsticks — I am most immoderately married: The Lord God has taken my heaviness away; I have merged, like the bird, with the bright air, And my thought ﬂies to the place by the bo-tree. Being, not doing, is my ﬁrst joy. (The Far Field, 54) Unquestionably, the poem records a quest for metaphysical knowledge, as others have argued.15 Yet too much emphasis can be put on what Jay Parini calls “the Oriental concept of the empty mind” (Parini, 173) by focusing on the Christian and Buddhist resonances, because the spiral of Roethke’s persona through awareness lands him in the “counsel of the crab and the sea-urchin” and the wet of “the stream slipping beneath the mossy logs.” There is not, ﬁnally, a Buddhist renunciation of desire, but a longing rooted in an immoderate marriage of the persona and his situation in the physical

190 |      

landscape, replete with its plants and animals. Nor have the ﬂora and fauna been arrayed in a Whitmanian catalog that dissolves into a reinscription of self-absorbed human perception. Roethke’s speaker simply embraces the carnality and sensuality of his own belonging to the muck and ﬂutter of the woods. Though the ﬁnal line, “Being, not doing, is my ﬁrst joy,” does sound Buddhist in its sensibility, it is also consonant with Roethke’s personal ethos (as in “Journey to the Interior”) of remaining “unperplexed” and motionless in the “place leading nowhere,” once again drawing him away from a sense of “being” rooted in that emotion — unproblematized by topographic situation — and into a more responsible sense of “being” coterminous with the landscape originally giving rise to his exclamation. The poem’s last line also refutes the idea of being-as-buying promoted by American consumer culture and its pseudo-cyclical calendar of shopping holidays. If being is something other than “doing” the work of production and consumption that fuels the individual existence under capitalism, then Roethke points to an entirely diﬀerent horizon of self. Roethke makes every eﬀort to show that the physical elements of the forest cannot be separated from the psyche’s act of signiﬁcation and “the abyss” in question. Thus, the abyss seems to speak to the chasm of histories implicit in the landscape itself, as the ﬁnal lines discover, perception being mixed with the idiosyncrasies of a particular physical space. “There is a curious split in Roethke’s work,” Seamus Heaney notes, “between the long Whitmanesque cataloguing poem, which works towards resolution by accumulating signiﬁcant and related phenomena, and this other brisk, traditional artefact that dances to its own familiar music.”16 Heaney points to a palimpsest-like eﬀect in Roethke’s management of physical location: he does not subsume the landscape through a Whitmanian gesture of myself-in-nature-and-geography because he wants to show how his “dreaming” about the “place leading nowhere” allows the landscape to dominate and inform our understanding. In these poems, we cannot help but see earthy — and earthly — terrain, even as our perceptions strain toward the metaphysical. In the end, it might be true, as Richard Blessing has said, that Roethke’s typical persona is “the impossible possible sum of human experience and potential human experience, a ﬁnite ﬁgure vibrating with inﬁnite revelations,”17 but this layering of experience roots itself in the landscape. As Roethke proposes in “In a Dark Time,” “the eye begins to see” when I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood —

Theodore Roethke and the Poetics of Place | 191

A lord of nature weeping to be a tree. I live between the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. (The Far Field, 79) The speaker’s desire to “be a tree,” while futile, still allows him to live “between the heron and the wren,” where, one might say, he has been all along: between an absolute self and absolute nature.

 ’  of place represents a strand of American poetry embraced by younger writers, it is worth remembering that two major poets aﬀected Roethke’s own development — one as a mentor, and the other as a contemporary whose work he admired. When asked whom he most respected, Roethke named “[W. H.] Auden and Elizabeth Bishop” as the two fellow poets who “came ﬁrst to his mind.”18 The poetics of place adopted in The Far Field owes a debt to Auden’s cosmopolitan vision and to Bishop’s famous “questions of travel,” as Roethke drew on both to reinforce his sense that human experience “inscribes” itself on the landscape from which it originates. Since Roethke “did not scruple to cultivate the right persons,” as Allan Seager puts it, his close relationship to the accomplished and inﬂuential Auden seems unsurprising (Seager, 125 – 26).19 Though Roethke genuinely admired Auden’s poetry and assigned it in his university courses independent of their strong friendship,20 it is also signiﬁcant that Auden had been one of the ﬁrst to review Roethke’s work favorably. Auden’s praise for Open House (1941) had been especially eﬀusive, and the clipping was found among Roethke’s papers after his death in 1963 (Seager, 127). To have “Wystan” endorse his verse so enthusiastically at the beginning of Roethke’s career was no small thing. Peter Firchow has noted Auden’s “almost supernatural” stature for the whole group of middle-generation poets: Elizabeth Bishop, among others, would rush out to buy his latest book and try to imitate his work. John Hollander felt so “overwhelmed by Auden’s inﬂuence” that it later took great eﬀort to silence the “blatant echoes of his voice.”21 Auden believed that these young American poets coveted cosmopolitanism precisely because of their fraught perceptions of their historical relationships to place. In his midcentury essay “American Poetry,” he writes: “In a society whose dominant task is still that of the pioneer — the physical struggle with nature, and a nature, moreover, particularly recalcitrant and

192 |      

violent — the intellectual is not a ﬁgure of much importance. Those with intellectual and artistic tastes, ﬁnding themselves a despised or at best an ignored minority, are apt in return to despise the society in which they live as vulgar and think nostalgically of more leisured and reﬁned cultures.”22 To cast Auden’s argument in light of my own, the need of American poets to distinguish themselves as intellectuals created an adversarial and even “violent” relationship to nature, not allowing them to see how they were indebted to and connected with the land. For Auden, these poets were living in places that were felt as aﬄictions, and each yearned to become “a literary aristocracy of one” (“American Poetry,” 365 – 66), demanding a certain fealty of the land, and trying to make it more “tamed” or “leisured and reﬁned,” like Europe. Auden describes this longing for the subdued spaces of Europe again in “Please Make Yourself at Home.” Addressing Americans abroad, the poem’s second stanza reads, Claim, certainly, the stranger’s right to pleasure: Ambassadors will surely entertain you With knowledge of operas and men, Bankers will ask for your opinion And the heiress’ cheek lean ever so slightly towards you, The mountains and the shopkeepers accept you And all your walks be free.23 Auden’s speaker suggests later that “politeness and freedom are never enough, / Not for a life.” The poem’s point rings clear: the Americans — in the guise of “breezy visitor[s]” (Collected Auden, 82) — want Europe to change their perception of America; they want to be accepted not just by the reﬁned classes and the shopkeepers but by the “mountains” themselves. When these Americans think of Europe, they imagine a landscape already made subservient to the history of human spectacle, rather than one still resisting the pioneer — thus Auden’s vision of a certain “freedom” of experience and perception entices them.24 His poem understands the allure, for Americans, of the enduring ﬁction of the “Old World” with its domesticated, managed landscapes. Crucially, Auden oﬀered Roethke the chance to see Europe — ﬁrst metaphorically, through his poetry, and later literally, when he invited Roethke and Beatrice O’Connell to honeymoon at his villa at Forio d’Ischia, Italy, in 1953. They stayed several months, and there Roethke completed several poems that appeared in The Far Field, notably “The Storm (Forio d’Ischia)”

Theodore Roethke and the Poetics of Place | 193

and “I Waited.” The landscapes and places of Europe, however, invigorated Roethke’s poetry in ways quite diﬀerent from those predicted in Auden’s poem: It was as if I tried to walk in hay, Deep in the mow, and each step deeper down, Or ﬂoated on the surface of a pond, The slow long ripples winking in my eyes. I saw all things through water, magniﬁed, And shimmering. The sun burned through a haze, And I became all that I looked upon. I dazzled in the dazzle of a stone. (The Far Field, 91) Roethke’s vision deepened and “magniﬁed” in the Italian landscape, until he “became all that [he] looked upon,” renovating and expanding a romantic trope that recalls Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Emerson’s Nature.25 His developing poetics of place was not all about seeing the smiling aspects of Italy. Roethke wrote to Arabel Porter, on May 1, 1953, that “the impact of Italy has been considerable: the horror and the glory. I hate the ﬁlth, and the poverty distresses me, but I rejoice in the sea and the sky, and the sun, for the beautiful in these people” (Letters, 187). Roethke’s less than full sensitivity to an oppressed humanity is certainly a liability, but it also constitutes a strength of his poetics of place; the immediacy of human suﬀering is not allowed to become a historical spectacle, or to obscure its own ties to the landscape. Rather, Roethke’s poetry reveals, for better or worse, how the “horror and glory” of human experience cannot be separated from exultations about the “sea and sky.” Such a mixture of beauty and squalor — which Europe oﬀered American poets, in Auden’s view, and which, I am claiming, Roethke’s late work explores — engenders Roethke’s understanding of how human experience in America merges with the physical attributes of its corresponding landscapes. To be sure, Roethke had always understood the capacity of the natural world to represent human turmoil in his poetry. This new loosening of perception under the impress of Auden’s urbanity and general sponsorship meant, however, that Roethke now depicted the natural world not as a mere background for historical spectacles, but also as a foreground, worthy of equal consideration, still inseparable from human history. If Roethke had earlier posited that nature existed mainly to be “used” at the poet’s creative pleasure, as a source of metaphors for unconscious fears and libidinal de-

194 |      

sires, then Roethke’s new vision engaged more complicated, even sinister aspects of the relationship between humanity and nature. Indeed, Roethke surpasses his mentor and expands on the evocation of nature in a poem such as Auden’s “The Witnesses,” which reads: When the green ﬁeld comes oﬀ like a lid, Revealing what was much better hid — Unpleasant: And look, behind you without a sound The woods have come up and are standing round In deadly crescent. (Collected Auden, 187) Roethke’s perception of the metaphysical in The Far Field might be usefully understood as an outgrowth of Auden’s poem: as an increased awareness of how landscapes record and alternately hide or reveal the often “unpleasant” experiences that human time and history layer upon them. As the woods here loom up “in deadly crescent” in their testimony to human experience, they enunciate the suppressed, dark history of American colonialism and territorial expansion, a narrative in which landscape was viewed as a tabula rasa for commercial opportunity and for Anglo-Saxon supremacy rather than as a symbiotic part of communal experience. Similarly, Roethke’s “The Rose,” for instance, compels the reader to listen to the “American sounds” of commerce and technology obtruding in the “silence” of the landscape and competing with the songs of birds, carefully itemized as thrush, killdeer, catbird, bobolink, and so forth (The Far Field, 31). A noisy bulldozer, a “hiss[ing]” sandblaster, the “shriek of nails” as a roof is being reshingled, a “deep chorus” of car horns: these jarring notes issue from processes of appropriating and commodifying natural resources, and cannot simply be ﬁltered out from the landscape owing to an ideological or an aesthetic distaste for its invasive commercialization. Indeed, many poems in the “Mixed Sequence” section of The Far Field augment Auden’s perception that human experience constitutes an inevitable layer upon the substance and the history of “natural” landscapes. These poems reﬂect on various persons in Roethke’s life, the most poignant being “Otto,” an elegy for the poet’s father, who died when Roethke was only fourteen. Family dwellings are evoked as being ﬁrmly rooted within the history of place: “House upon house they built, / Whether for love or out of obscure guilt / for ancestors who loved a warlike show.” More particularly, the poem draws a provocative connection between Otto’s occupation

Theodore Roethke and the Poetics of Place | 195

as a ﬂorist and the lives of prior inhabitants of the land: “Frenchmen killed a hundred years ago, / And yet still violent men, whose stacked-up guns / Killed every cat that neared their pheasant runs.” The spirit of these pragmatically violent men suﬀuses place, the poem implies, surviving even — or perhaps especially — in the labors of a man who worked the same earth that they had once patrolled for his very livelihood: Roethke’s father “potted plants as if he hated them” (The Far Field, 56 – 57).

   Roethke’s intimate relationship with Auden, his acquaintance with Elizabeth Bishop was only a passing association. After one of their few personal meetings, in New York City, Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell on March 31, 1951: “Roethke was here this past week to read at the Y.M.H.A. . . . His records are much better. But I kind of liked him. We downed a great deal of champagne together. . . . I saw him oﬀ yesterday in a terrible rainstorm. . . . He is a very sad man, I think — not melancholy, but he makes me feel sad.”26 Such scant interaction is hardly the stuﬀ of lasting allegiances, and Bishop’s close friendship with Lowell, toward whom Roethke felt an almost irrational rivalry, might alone have dissuaded Roethke from admiring her poetry.27 Instead, Bishop’s emphasis on an inextricable relation between the history of a particular landscape and the precise genesis and situation of perception oﬀered Roethke an important framework for his later poems. Bishop relies on carefully drawn depictions of speciﬁc sites, and unlike other poetry that might separate a speaker’s history and emotion from landscape, Bishop enmeshes inner with outer terrain. Wordsworth famously conceived of perception of the natural world as generating “spontaneous overﬂows” of emotion, yet these were to be “recollected in tranquility,” or in other words distilled from the generative moment within landscapes. But Bishop, setting an example for Roethke and others, is reluctant to divorce perception from its “triggering” landscapes, seeing such authorial inﬁdelity to place as fundamentally and historically disingenuous. As Randall Jarrell declared in a review of her ﬁrst book, North and South, “all [Bishop’s] poems have written underneath, I have seen it.”28 No doubt Roethke had these poems in mind, as well as Bishop’s subsequent volume A Cold Spring (1955), when he highlighted and praised her work in his Fulbright Fellowship application of 1956 (Seager, 232 – 33).29 Before turning to other verses in The Far Field, for evidence of Bishop’s importance to him, it will be useful to observe her exemplary poetics of place in operation in the justly canonized “At the Fishhouses,” which was

196 |      

also among Bishop’s personal favorites.30 The cod ﬁsheries, we note, appear to be inseparable from the sea: The ﬁve ﬁshhouses have steeply peaked roofs and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up to storerooms in the gables for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on. All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, swelling slowly as if considering spilling over, is opaque, but the silver of the benches, the lobster pots, and masts, scattered among the wild jagged rocks, is of an apparent translucence like the small old buildings with an emerald moss growing on their shoreward walls.31 That the “old buildings” have the same silver “translucence” as the sea and rocks makes sense to the speaker, who imbues the ﬁsheries with the “ancient” attributes of their setting. Fish tubs and wheelbarrows are “plastered / with creamy iridescent coats of mail,” namely herring scales (A Cold Spring, 72), as if the silver of the sea had covered these implements of human labor with a timeless residue. The speaker’s description of the briny cold uses the ﬂuvial rhythms of the water to unite the natural with the human, concluding: It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, ﬂowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, ﬂowing, and ﬂown. (A Cold Spring, 74) Any human knowledge gleaned from the ﬁsheries or the ﬁshermen has been nursed into “historical” existence by the eternal (“forever”) landscape of the poem. Closely studying such poetry, Roethke would have grasped that Bishop’s “reality” was less and less to be found in the troubled interiors of personal or family life — a modiﬁed kind of historical spectacle-event — and increasingly to be situated in the discernible facts and features of physical spaces that did not distort or mislead. The faithful observation of exteriority kept

Theodore Roethke and the Poetics of Place | 197

the poet honest and earned the reader’s trust. Roethke would also have intuited Bishop’s familiar misgivings about so-called confessional verse, as he praised instead her “wonderful eye” — her ability to perceive and delineate external landscapes without having the “I” prematurely complicate or color her view. In The Far Field, Roethke paid homage to this aspect of Bishop’s talent by making it a central tenet of his own poetics of place. On his own account, Roethke had been well prepared for Bishop’s invaluable instruction by the early 1950s, when he wrote: “there is much in philosophy and history and science which I wish to ﬁnd out, — as a teacher and as a human being. In poetry, I have exploited the personal myth as far as I wish to . . . [and hope to] break into an entirely diﬀerent style as a writer.”32 Roethke clearly sought to align his unfolding poetics with a determination to forge links between knowledge and nature. In their own ways, both Roethke and Bishop worried that egocentrism in poetry might subvert the relation between speaker and environment by celebrating or commemorating love, rage, pleasure, and pain as spectacle, as being artiﬁcially independent from experience of the natural world, thus giving transitory emotions undue preeminence in the narrative trajectories of history. Roethke’s poetry suggests that egotism and emotion must tether themselves to the landscape from which they derive. As he muses in “The Foreboding”: Thought upon thought can be A burden to the soul. Who knows the end of it all? When I pause to talk to a stone, The dew draws near. (The Far Field, 45) Here, such “thought[s] upon thoughts” — the private perceptions of the psyche — “can be / A burden to the soul,” but the solution does not lie in airing them. Rather, the poet ﬁnds refreshment and renewal outside of the self, in the materiality and conviviality of stone and dew, avoiding the threat of circuitous or reductive thinking. Construed thus, poetry ﬁnds the universal or the eternal by forcing the ego-driven consciousness to collaborate with the external world, as Roethke suggests also in “Inﬁrmity”: A mind too active is no mind at all; The deep eye sees the shimmer on the stone; The eternal seeks, and ﬁnds, the temporal, The change from dark to light of the slow moon,

198 |      

Dead to myself, and all I hold most dear, I move beyond the reach of wind and ﬁre. (The Far Field, 86) The universal comes not through the perception and expression of what the poet “hold[s] most dear,” but from a felt linkage between “the temporal,” the here and now of the natural environment, and the eternal. Just as Emerson aimed to eliminate his “mean egotism,” Roethke seeks to “move beyond the reach of wind and ﬁre” by looking squarely at the land, without the intellectual clutter of any too-easy, ego-animated emotion. Such perception ﬁnds its language — and the poet ﬁnds his function — in the interaction between experience and the geologics and geographies of the landscape. To return one last time to the terms of Édouard Glissant, so ﬁtting a commentator for our purchase on Roethke: “We line one day up after the other, day after day, as if the world did not exist, though daily it seeks us out. . . . Beings risk the being of the world. . . . The being of the world cannot be divided from the being of the universe and whatever imagines itself suspended in this whole” (Poetics, 155, 187). That the world exists and seeks out the human, that its “being” cannot be extricated from any poetic reckoning of the human — these propositions form the ontological and ideological core of Roethke’s poetics of place. Having absorbed crucial lessons from Auden and Bishop, Roethke reoriented his poetic strategy to forcefully link persons to places, at the same time striving to disentangle this relationship from histories of exploitation. For Theodore Roethke, as for his inheritors like Gary Snyder, the perception of places, of their beginnings and endings and the spaces in between, cannot be separated from the small movements of the land and its elements; like the currents of water evoked in Snyder’s “River in the Valley,” it “is all of it everywhere, / all ﬂowing at once, all one place.”33

Notes I would like to thank Benjamin Johnson for his hours of work assisting me in my research for this project. His help has been invaluable. 1. Gary Snyder, “Poetry, Community, and Climax,” in The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964 – 1979, ed. William Scott McLean (New York: New Directions, 1980), 162. 2. Ron Scollon, “Snyder’s Culture,” in Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life, ed. Jon Halper (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991), 416.

Theodore Roethke and the Poetics of Place | 199 3. M. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets: American and British Poetry since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 118. 4. Randall Stiﬄer, Theodore Roethke: The Poet and His Critics (Chicago: American Library Association, 1986), 167. Subsequent references appear in the text. 5. Cary Nelson, Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), xvi, 32. 6. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone, 1995), 110 – 17. 7. Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 11. 8. I do not wish to suggest that there are no substantive diﬀerences between the “histories” of Glissant’s Caribbean and Roethke’s North American landscapes. Indeed, Roethke writes from a perspective aﬀorded the luxury of having distanced itself in time from the ravages of the colonial project. Still, Glissant’s determination to link our more traditional sense of “history” to the land oﬀers readers of Roethke’s poems a strategy for unpacking his depiction of landscape that does not resort to an easy invocation of the inﬂuence of a geographic imagination like Whitman’s. 9. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 151. Subsequent references appear in the text abbreviated Poetics. 10. Michael Thurston, “Robert Lowell’s Monumental Vision: History, Form, and the Cultural Work of Postwar American Lyric,” American Literary History 12, no. 1 – 2 (2000), 83, 84. Subsequent references appear in the text. 11. Theodore Roethke, The Far Field (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 13. Subsequent references appear in the text as The Far Field. 12. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 163. 13. Theodore Roethke, “A Psychic Janitor,” in On Poetry and Craft (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2001), 184. 14. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938 – 1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392. 15. See William Heyen, “The Divine Abyss: Theodore Roethke’s Mysticism,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 11 (1969): 1051 – 68; Jay Parini, Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), 172 – 74; Peter Balakian, Theodore Roethke’s Far Fields: The Evolution of His Poetry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 153 – 54. 16. Seamus Heaney, “Canticles to the Earth: Theodore Roethke,” in Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968 – 1978 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 193. 17. Richard Allen Blessing, Theodore Roethke’s Dynamic Vision (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), 153. 18. Allan Seager, The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 269. Subsequent references appear in the text. 19. Seager highlights Roethke’s request to Katherine Anne Porter that she pass

200 |       on his Open House to John Peale Bishop, with whom Roethke wished to gain favor without appearing to be “boot-licking” (Seager, 126). 20. See, for instance, Roethke’s discussion of a course syllabus in a letter to Léonie Adams, March 5, 1943, Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke, ed. Ralph J. Mills (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), 105 – 8. Subsequent references appear in the text abbreviated Letters. 21. Peter Edgerly Firchow, W. H. Auden: Contexts for Poetry (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 193. 22. W. H. Auden, “American Poetry,” in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 363. Subsequent references appear in the text as “American Poetry.” 23. W. H. Auden, The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945), 82 – 83. Subsequent references appear in the text abbreviated Collected Auden. 24. In reading Auden’s lines, one cannot help but think of Henry James’s The Ambassadors, which also attests to the changes that occur in Americans (especially American men) when faced with the luxuries and opportunities of Europe. 25. Roethke mentioned in a 1956 letter to Howard Moss that he had been “haunted . . . by the possibility that I may be echoing someone in that last line [of “They Sing”] — hell, I can’t ﬁgure it out — maybe some bore like Wordsworth, or some obscure translation” (Letters, 210). 26. Bishop, One Art: Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 219. Subsequent references appear in the text. Later references in Bishop’s letters mention Roethke in more impatient terms, as she succeeded him in various posts as a poet in residence and had to deal with the “ghost” of Roethke. This was especially the case at the University of Washington, where Roethke had a devoted cadre of admirers. 27. Robert Lowell also had ambivalent feelings toward Roethke. Biographer Ian Hamilton asserts that Lowell “seems never to have felt uneasy about Roethke’s claims” of superiority, but cites a letter that Lowell wrote to Roethke addressing their keen sense of competition: “I remember Edwin Muir arguing with me that there is no rivalry in poetry. Well, there is. . . . Each week brings some pat on the back or some brisk, righteous slur, till one rather longs for the old oblivion.” The diﬀerence between their respective stances in this competition might be summed up in Lowell’s sign-oﬀ: “Anyway, Ted, I do love and honor you.” See Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982), 335 – 37. 28. Randall Jarrell, “On North and South,” in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybill P. Estess (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 181. 29. In a 1956 application for a Fulbright extension, Roethke showcased Bishop as a poet he wanted to tout to British poetry audiences as ideal for appreciating “attitudes and rhythms” that were “peculiarly American”; Bishop oﬀered “the principal clues” to the “age” (Seager, The Glass House, 232 – 33).

Theodore Roethke and the Poetics of Place | 201 30. See Elizabeth Bishop to U. T. and Joseph Summers, July 18, 1955, One Art, 307. 31. Elizabeth Bishop, A Cold Spring (Boston: Houghton Miﬄin, 1955), 72. Subsequent references appear in the text. 32. See the Ford Foundation application document that follows Theodore Roethke to Kenneth Burke, January 1952 (Letters, 173 – 74). 33. Gary Snyder, Axe Handles (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983), 9.

Bibliography Auden, W. H. “American Poetry.” In The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, 354 – 68. London: Faber and Faber, 1963. ———. The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden. New York: Random House, 1945. Balakian, Peter. Theodore Roethke’s Far Fields: The Evolution of His Poetry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings. Vol. 4, 1938 – 1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and others. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Bishop, Elizabeth. A Cold Spring. Boston: Houghton Miﬄin, 1955. ———. One Art: Letters. Edited by Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Blessing, Richard Allen. Theodore Roethke’s Dynamic Vision. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone, 1995. Firchow, Peter Edgerly. W. H. Auden: Contexts for Poetry. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeolog y of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. ———. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1982. Heaney, Seamus. Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968 – 1978. London: Faber and Faber, 1980. Heyen, William. “The Divine Abyss: Theodore Roethke’s Mysticism.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 11 (1969): 1051 – 68. Jarrell, Randall. “On North and South.” In Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, edited by Lloyd Schwartz and Sybill P. Estess, 180 – 81. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Mariani, Paul. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: Norton, 1994.

202 |       Nelson, Cary. Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. Parini, Jay. Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. Roethke, Theodore. The Far Field. New York: Doubleday, 1964. ———. On Poetry and Craft. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2001. ———. “A Psychic Janitor.” In On Poetry & Craft, 177 – 85. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2001. ———. Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke. Edited by Ralph J. Mills. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968. Rosenthal, M. L. The New Poets: American and British Poetry since World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Scollon, Ron. “Snyder’s Culture.” In Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life, edited by Jon Halper, 416 – 20. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991. Seager, Allan. The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke. New York: McGrawHill, 1968. Snyder, Gary. Axe Handles. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983. ———. “Poetry, Community, and Climax.” In The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964 – 1979. Edited by William Scott McLean, 159 – 74. New York: New Directions, 1980. Stiﬄer, Randall. Theodore Roethke: The Poet and His Critics. Chicago: American Library Association, 1986. Thurston, Michael. “Robert Lowell’s Monumental Vision: History, Form, and the Cultural Work of Postwar American Lyric.” American Literary History 12, no. 1 – 2 (2000): 79 – 112.

I wish I weren’t so obsessed in my writing with form, a set form, sometimes it helps and then again it hinders. — Niedecker to Cid Corman, January 23, 1961 The poetry convinces by its form. — Robert Bertholf

9

Paradoxes of Form in the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker Eleanor Berry

In her essay “Format and Form,” Adrienne Rich distinguishes between mechanical adherence to an inherited form, whereby it degenerates into mere format, and vital engagement with and resistance to such a form, whereby it acquires new life. She further contrasts the form-shattering of the “avantgarde,” typically “privileged by gender and class and . . . defenders of privilege,” with the formal borrowings and regenerations of “emerging groups”: “The poetry of emerging groups — women, people of color, working-class radicals, lesbians and gay men — poetry that is nonassimilationist, diﬃcult to co-opt, draws on many formal sources (ballad, blues, corrido, reggae, sonnet, chant, cuentos, sestina, sermon, calypso, for a few).”1 Although Lorine Niedecker has generally been discussed as an avant-garde poet, her eclectic adapting of forms from diverse sources accords with that of Rich’s “emerging groups.” She was, in fact, both in background and in her adult life, a woman of the working class. Her education, paid for by the labor of her ﬁsherman father, distanced her from others of her class, but she nonetheless retained a deep aﬃnity for elements of it — especially for those who worked in the outdoors. One of the principal inﬂuences on Niedecker’s poetry was folk song and folk storytelling. In an early essay on her work, English critic Kenneth Cox

204 |     

notes, “As ﬁrst speech-models she remembers ‘a happy, outdoor grandfather who somehow somewhere had got hold of nursery and folk rhymes to entrance me’ and her mother, ‘speaking whole chunks of down-to-earth magic.’ ”2 In an enumeration of her everyday activities in a letter to Cid Corman (October 12, 1966), she includes: “sing at the top of my voice when folky records are being played on the phonograph” (Corman, 63). However, Niedecker’s relish for oral folk song and story was accompanied by a literary sophistication that modiﬁed their inﬂuence on her own work. Her simultaneous closeness to and distance from “the folk” is explicit in a poem on her relation to other residents of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, among whom she worked in various low-level jobs, including stenographer and proofreader for Hoard’s Dairyman: I worked the print shop right down among em the folk from whom all poetry ﬂows and dreadfully much else.3 Niedecker would almost certainly have agreed with her friend Louis Zukofsky’s comment, “There is no use in modern sophistication trying to get back to folk art; the result will always be modern sophistication,”4 and her poetry beautifully exempliﬁes his qualifying elaboration: “But the essential technique of folk art (not the technique of rhyme scheme, four line stanzas, etc.) — its simplicity, its wholeness of emotional presentation — can serve as a guide to any detail of technique growing out of the living processes of any age” (Zukofsky, 70). Even when she does use “the technique of rhyme scheme, four line stanzas, etc.,” that technique is modiﬁed in her use into something more for the page than for the voice. The folk impulse in Niedecker’s work coexists and is in tension with an impulse to high (or, better, deep) art. In a letter to Corman (January 13, 1963), she muses: “isn’t it closer to art when it’s still enough (deep enough) to become ice? . . . I’m a little worried — not really, tho — about my own folk impulse lost — lost? — on the way to the ice” (quoted in Corman, 60). Poetry did not “ﬂow” from her as the passage about working in the print shop says it does from “the folk.” It did not follow well-worn channels or issue in the formulae of oral improvisation and transmission. Rather, as she says in a poem musing on ﬁnally having a book published,5 for her it

Paradoxes of Form in the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker | 205

took a lifetime to weep a deep trickle (Niedecker, 195) A hint at her process of composition is given by a comment she made to Corman: “For me the sentence lies in wait — all those prepositions and connectives — like an early spring ﬂood. A good thing my follow-up feeling has always been condense, condense” (quoted in Corman, 59 – 60). This process produced a syntax of highly literate sentences with as many connective words as possible deleted. Further, Niedecker’s tendency to compress syntax was accompanied by a predilection for monosyllables, leading to texts with a high concentration of fully stressed syllables. The syntax and diction characteristic of her poetic language contribute signiﬁcantly to the rhythm of her verse. Niedecker’s mature verse is never rigidly metrical, but much of it hovers around a stress-based or iambic-anapestic measure as a norm. Virtually all of her poetry is in short lines; in all except very short poems, these are grouped into short stanzas or verse paragraphs. Throughout her work, the shortness of the lines and line groups serves to focus attention on the levels of word and syllable. Her lineation and arrangement of lines consistently show great care both for sound and for shape on the page. To describe accurately the forms of the poetry that emerged from Niedecker’s “condensery,” we must resort to oxymorons. Her poems are folkyliterary, oral-silent, aural-visual, song-speech, condensed-expansive, metrical-free verse. They show her to have drawn, in the manner of Rich’s “emerging groups,” on a variety of formal sources, popular as well as literary. Far from the mechanical adherence to inherited form that Rich labels “format,” they manifest her vital engagement with and resistance to these sources. This essay will examine a few of the ways in which she modiﬁed and combined them, and consider some of the resultant eﬀects. Besides folk songs and Mother Goose, Niedecker’s sources of language and form included contemporary conversational speech; prose of earlier periods, including regional history and natural history, letters, and journals; Asian lyric poetry; poetry of premodernist and modernist precursors, notably Dickinson and Williams; and both poetry of and correspondence with postmodern contemporaries, especially Zukofsky.

206 |     

In her own poetry, Niedecker worked in a variety of forms. Conspicuous among these are stanzaic forms: couplets; tercets, notably stepped tercets reminiscent of but distinct from Williams’s stepped triadic line; quatrains, notably modiﬁed ballad stanzas; and, most common both as a form for whole poems and as a stanza, quintains. Niedecker’s quintains were probably inspired by Japanese haiku sequences (renga), where haiku alternate with two-line units, or by tanka. She also wrote poems in verse paragraphs and with various patterns of indention. To gain insight into the paradoxical nature of Niedecker’s verse form, I will examine instances of three of her stanzaic forms — the modiﬁed ballad stanza, the quintain, and the stepped tercet. I will start by looking at three examples of her poems written in a modiﬁed ballad stanza, at once drawing on and departing from the inﬂuence of folk song and traditional ballad, and combining this inﬂuence with others: “Black Hawk held . . . ”; “Old Mother turns blue . . . ”; and “He lived — childhood summers” (Niedecker, 99, 149, 169 – 70). In the early poem “Black Hawk held . . . ,” Niedecker has preserved the abcb rhyme scheme of the ballad stanza and its alternation of longer and shorter lines, but her lines are more variable in number of stresses and mostly shorter than conventional. Also important to their movement is variability in level of stress; hence, in scanning, I have distinguished four levels of stress: primary stress (/ ), secondary stress ( \), tertiary stress (×), and non-stress (–).6 Another striking and characteristic feature is the clustering of stressed syllables (indicated by underlining in the transcription). Syllables

Stresses /

6

4

\

/

–

/ –

Black Hawk held: In reason /

–

/ –

b

5

3

land cannot be sold,

8

4

only things to be carried away,

4

2

and I am old.

7

4

Young Lincoln’s general moved,

/ – –

\ /

4

2

/

– –

/ –

a

/ /

– – /

c

/

/ × –

b

–

/– –

/

d

/

pawpaw in bloom,

e

Paradoxes of Form in the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker | 207 × –

6

4

\

/ –

5

3

/

/

\

f

and to this day, Black Hawk, –

\

/

e

reason has small room.

The ballad narrative is here radically condensed to two episodes presented in two stanzas, each constituting a single complete sentence. The eﬀect is to replace narrative progression with juxtaposition; the ballad tradition appears to have been combined with imagism. Niedecker’s drive toward condensation is also reﬂected in the syntax, notably the absolute construction in the second line of the second stanza. Even though she was inspired by common speech, her poetry makes frequent use of this distinctly unspeechlike construction. Here, it occurs in a text that represents not only Black Hawk’s speech but also direct address to Black Hawk by the poem’s speaker. The former type of represented speech properly belongs to the ballad, but the latter is a device of the dramatic lyric. Niedecker has adapted the ballad stanza to write a postimagist lyrical ballad. In “Old Mother turns blue . . . ,” Niedecker again uses a modiﬁed ballad stanza, this time for a lyric poem of family and domestic life that evokes emotion almost entirely through representation of the speech of “old Mother” — the mother who spoke “whole chunks of down-to-earth magic.” The stanzas depart only slightly from the conventional ballad form, each of the ﬁrst two lines of the ﬁrst stanza having an extra stress or two. But this slight departure from convention combines with variation within it in such a way that the lengths of the lines generally diminish through the poem. As in “Black Hawk held . . . ,” the rhythm is characterized by variety in degree of stress and by clustering of strong stresses. Syllables

Stresses \

8

6

/

–

\

5 4

6

3

\

/

/ –

/

/

–

a

–

/

“Don’t let my head drop to the earth. –

8

–

Old Mother turns blue and from us,7 \

8

/

/

–

/

/

–

–

I’m blind and deaf.” Death from the heart, –

/

– ×

–

b

/

c

/

a thimble in her purse.

b

208 |      × – \

7

4

/

/

5

3 4

3

3

\

/

–

/

–

/

–

/

–

e /

ﬂoors. Wash the ﬂoors, Lorine! — \

/

d

/

Give me space. I need /

6

–

“It’s a long day since last night.

f

/

e

wash clothes! Weed!”

In the ﬁrst stanza, besides the partial rhyme of the second and fourth lines, the third line is linked to the second by eye rhyme, and contains the internal reverse rhyme of “deaf” and “death,” both of which are also linked by alliteration to “don’t” and “drop” in the second line. In the second stanza, besides the full rhyme of the second and fourth lines and the verbal repetition of “ﬂoors” and “wash,” the ﬁnal words of the ﬁrst and second lines are linked by alliteration, and the last syllable of the third line (-ine) chiastically repeats the initial consonant and the vowel of the ﬁnal word in the second line (need). The tightly woven sound texture of these stanzas engages both the mental ear and the eye of the silent reader. Niedecker uses a more substantially modiﬁed ballad stanza for a poem on her father’s life that is also a comment on her own life and her vocation of poetry. This poem, like traditional ballads a narrative, takes just ﬁve stanzas to move from the subject’s childhood to his daughter’s acceptance of her inheritance. Niedecker follows the ballad’s method of selecting high points from a person’s life, but idiosyncratically, so as to set the workingclass father’s ambition for middle-class status for his daughter against her own transformation of the material circumstances of his outdoor labor into intellectual values. Syllables

Stresses

6

3

3

2

–

/

/

–

3

/

1

\

–

–

a

/ / –

b /

then years of money’s lack –

2

/

thru bare feet –

6

–

He lived — childhood summers

c

/

and heat

b

Paradoxes of Form in the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker | 209 – \

8

4

–

/ –

\

4

3 3

2

1

8

4

4

2

/

–

/

–

/

d

/

e

came his wood, dog, /

6

× –

beside the river — out of ﬂood

–

/

–

f

woman, lost her, daughter — / ×

–

\

\

3

3

\ –

/

h

/ \

i

/

/

h

the marsh rail8 goes. / –

–

\

/

j

To bankers on high land – / –

–

/

\

6

3

7

3

he opened his wine tank. – / – / – / – He wished his only daughter

5

2

to work in the bank

7

3

–

–

–

/

4

1

/ –

2

/ –

2

× –

/

k f

/

k

/

l

–

m

/

a weedy speech, –

6

–

to sustain her — –

4

–

but he’d given her a source – –

g

/

where grass-still

–

6

– –

\ –

4

/

beneath the rose –

2

–

to planting trees. He buried carp –

3

e

prologue

n

/ – – / –

a marshy retainer.

m

In contrast to the closed stanzas of the two poems looked at earlier, here the ﬁrst two of the ﬁve stanzas are strongly enjambed, the fourth moder-

210 |     

ately so. The lines are both shorter and more variable in length than in the two earlier poems, none of the stanzas conforming fully to the 4343 stress distribution pattern of common measure, the last three even disrupting the length relationships of that pattern. The syllable-level rhythm is mainly rising, with the exception of the second stanza, where it modulates through the second line, consisting of an initial trochee and a spondee, to the fully trochaic third and fourth lines. The thematic resolution in the ﬁnal sentence of the poem (the last stanza and a half) is supported by a clear return to the dominant pattern, with iambic-anapestic regularity sustained over the ﬁnal six lines. As in “Old Mother turns blue . . . ,” the terminal rhyme of the second and fourth lines is only part of the sound repetition and modulation that binds the stanzas together. Especially remarkable is the reverse rhyme in the second stanza, linking “wood” and “woman,” “dog” and “daughter,” “lost” and “prologue.” In the same stanza, there is also the eye rhyme of “wood” with “ﬂood.” The last two stanzas are also especially tightly woven by sound repetition. In the penultimate stanza, the sound of the rhyme pair “tank” and “bank” is anticipated by “bankers” and “land” in the ﬁrst line. The ﬁrst two lines are linked by the bisyllabic partial rhyme of “high land” and “wine tank,” the second and third lines by the assonance of “opened” and “only,” and the last three lines by the alliteration of “wine,” “wished,” and “work.” In the ﬁnal stanza, the ﬁrst two lines are linked by the alliteration of “source” and “sustain,” and the third line given unity by the assonance of “weedy speech.” While the ballad stanza lay ready to hand in the folk tradition, Niedecker’s extensive use of quintains is remarkable inasmuch as, according to T.V.F. Brogan, “In all languages, quintains are rarer than quatrains.”9 In a December 1956 letter to Zukofsky, Niedecker speaks of “the 5-liners with 2 words rhyming . . . which form I’ll be using often from now on if you like it.” In an aside, she asks self-mockingly, “did I create a new form or cremate? inﬂuence of haiku I suppose.”10 The question reﬂects her awareness that her formal invention is a sort of adaptive re-use, taking over a preexisting structure while reﬁtting it to suit a diﬀerent time, situation, and language.11 Rather than writing haiku in English, Niedecker developed a ﬂexible form that she used for poems similar in kind to haiku — poems evoking emotion through presentation of natural and/or domestic imagery, often with reference to the season. From Western verse tradition she draws the

Paradoxes of Form in the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker | 211

device of rhyme, which, in these small poems, she often uses to highlight a contrast between the material of the ﬁrst three lines and that of the last two lines, such as is sometimes found between the three “upper” and two “lower” lines in tanka (Earl Miner, “Tanka,” in Preminger and Brogan, 1265). All of these aspects are evident in an untitled poem (Niedecker, 184) that refers to the annual ﬂooding that she and her family experienced on Black Hawk Island: Syllables

Stresses

3

2

Springtime’s wide

2

1

water-

/

\

/

a

/ –

b /

1

1

yield ×

3

1

–

c

/

but the ﬁeld

c

\ – /

3

2

will return

d

The poem pivots on the rhyme of “yield” and “ﬁeld.” The oddness of “yield” in collocation with “water” evokes the unsettling encroachment of water on land in the seasonal ﬂoods and at the same time brings to mind the harvest of farmers’ ﬁelds to which the word “yield” is more usually applied. The absent (covered) ﬁeld thus evoked appears in the next line, enacting the reemergence that the clause (“but the ﬁeld / will return”) predicates. The syllable-level rhythm also enacts such a disappearance and return, as the rocking (cretic) movement of the ﬁrst line is disrupted in the second and third, where the line division splits the trochaic “water” from the long, stressed monosyllable “yield,” then recurs in the fourth and ﬁfth. Sound repetition (beyond the rhyme of the third and fourth lines) also contributes to the movement of the verse. Assonance in long i and alliteration in w and t induce us to draw out the ﬁrst two lines. In appropriate contrast, the ﬁnal line trips along quickly. Reﬂecting her impulse to condense, Niedecker’s lines in her “5-liners” are considerably shorter than those conventionally used in English-language haiku (5 – 7 – 5 syllables) or tanka (5 – 7 – 5 – 7 – 7 syllables). Sparest of all, appropriately, is a poem of late fall (Niedecker 219):

212 |     

Syllables

Stresses

3

2

O late fall

1

1

marsh —

–

/

\

a

/

b

/

1

1

4

2 2

– –

\

raped by the dry /

2

c

I /

c

\

weed stalk 12

d

All the words are monosyllabic; one, given its own line, consists of a single letter. That single letter somewhat resembles a Japanese or Chinese written character — a single visual form representing at once a syllable and a signiﬁed. Here, the visual form contributes to the meaning, the straightness and solitariness of the one-letter word implicitly characterizing the speaker, its resemblance to a “dry / Weed stalk” simultaneously suggesting a likeness between the speaker and the dormant weeds around her — an implication reinforced by the rhyme. With this poem, Niedecker seems to push as far toward an ideogrammic text as one can with a sayable text in a phonetic alphabet.13 In these two “5-liners” and some others as well, Niedecker achieves, in part by the omission of connective particles, what she praises Cid Corman for achieving by the same method: “Stark, isolated words which must somehow connect with each other and into the next line and the sense out of the sound” (quoted in Corman, 66). Such poems make apprehensible the sensuous properties and thingliness of single words, as well as of the poem itself. In other poems, she uses her ﬁve-line form to produce somewhat diﬀerent eﬀects. Poems of found oral or written speech make apprehensible the sensuousness and materiality of the represented speech. Still other poems foreground the visual aspect of the form. To gain a full appreciation of Niedecker’s achievement in creating/cremating this form, we need to consider her use of it as a stanza. For examples, consider two short, text-based poems, “Linnaeus in Lapland” (Niedecker, 181) and “Otherwise” (284), and the long autobiographical poem “Paean to Place” (261 – 69), where the quintain appears with various patterns of indention. The two quintains of “Linnaeus in Lapland” are ample enough to capture the musing tone and freely associative movement of journal writing:

Paradoxes of Form in the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker | 213

Syllables

Stresses

5

3

7

2

/

–

–

6

2

\

/ –

–

/ – –

b

/

with quadrangular shoots — –

2

a

Nothing worth noting – / – – / –× except an Andromeda

1

c

the boots – –

/ –

d

4

1

of the people

6

3

wet inside: they must swim

5

2

to church thru the ﬂoods

6

2

or be taxed — the blossoms

/ – / – – –

–

/

1

/

1

/

– – –

e

/ / /

f

–

g

–

from the bosoms – –

3

–

–

–

4

c

/

g

/

of the leaves

h

In contrast to the monosyllables of “O late fall,” “Linnaeus in Lapland” includes the conspicuously polysyllabic “Andromeda” and “quadrangular” and several words of two syllables. The proportion of stresses to syllables is much lower than in the poems examined above; the syllable-level rhythm is mainly anapestic. Niedecker uses the single late rhyme, together with stanzaic enjambment, to highlight a discontinuity in the reference of the text and to juxtapose diﬀerent strands of the speaker’s thought. Linnaeus’s note about the ﬂora of Lapland is interrupted by an aside on Lapland society. The “shoots” that are the focus of the botanist’s attention are juxtaposed to the people’s wet “boots,” which he scarcely notes in passing. In the second quintain, the partial feminine rhyme of “blossoms” with the metaphorical “bosoms” again juxtaposes the botanical with the human, perhaps suggesting that, both in Lapland itself and in Linnaeus’s attention, beauty has been displaced from the human realm to the plant. “Otherwise” is another poem constructed of found written speech — that of Gerard Manley Hopkins in a letter to Robert Bridges:

214 |     

Syllables

Stresses

6

2

4

2

\

/

–

3

/ –

2

a

/

/

–

b / –

/ –

c

will read and fewer scan it \

6

/ –

is printed few –

7

– –

Dear friend: If the poem

/

\ –

/

–

c

much less understand it × –

/

d

3

1

To be sure

4

2

the scanning’s plain

4

2

but who will veer

8

3

from the usual stamp and pound

–

/

–

/ –

4 2

/–– /

/

e

/

f /

–

– /

/ –

/

\

g

/

Other work? — I’ve not yet found –

4

– –

/ –

7

–

g

/

the oak leaves’ law . . .

h

As Niedecker’s quintains in “Linnaeus in Lapland” accommodate the written speech of a notebook, so those in “Otherwise” accommodate the written speech of the letter to a colleague in the art of poetry. As in “Linnaeus in Lapland,” here, too, the proportion of stresses to syllables is relatively low. The syllable-level rhythm is iambic-anapestic — with more variety than “the usual stamp and pound.” The structural division created by the single rhyme is used to mark the ends of sentences and, in the second quintain, a shift in topic. Hopkins’s study of the natural world, referred to in the last two lines of the poem, is thus juxtaposed with his prosodic practice, treated in the preceding eight lines, implying, perhaps, a common element in his two pursuits — a passion for subtle pattern. In appropriating Hopkins’s written speech, Niedecker conveys her aﬃnity for this passion applied alike to poems and to plants. When we turn from these shorter poems to the long poem “Paean to Place,” we ﬁnd a variety and ﬂexibility in Niedecker’s handling of the quin-

Paradoxes of Form in the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker | 215

tain even greater than the short poems might lead us to anticipate. Part of that variety is in the visual aspect of the form, which is given a prominence that makes it impossible to ignore. The forty-one quintains exhibit four diﬀerent patterns of indention, which I will designate A, B, C, and D, reﬂecting the order of their ﬁrst appearance: A. The second and third lines are progressively indented, and the fourth line is indented the same amount as the second, with the ﬁfth returning to the left margin. B. Only the third line, sandwiched between two pairs of lines beginning at the left margin, is indented. C. The ﬁrst two lines and the ﬁfth begin at the left margin, while the third and fourth are progressively indented. D. The format is similar to C, diﬀering only in that the third and fourth lines are indented the same amount (instead of stepped). The stanzas are arranged in ﬁfteen groups of two to four stanzas, such that, in each group, the beginning of the ﬁrst stanza coincides with the beginning of a sentence, and the end of the last stanza coincides with the end of a sentence. Within groups, there are varying degrees of stanzaic enjambment, both prospective and retrospective. In the argument of the poem, the groups function essentially like verse paragraphs, with a shift in topic from group to group. The A format is used only for the ﬁrst stanza of the poem, B for a few stanzas in the ﬁrst two groups and exclusively for two short consecutive later groups. D is used only for one late group (all its stanzas). The bulk of the stanzas in the poem have the C format. The overall appearance is of a slender ribbon of text winding down the pages. All of the formats except B seem to ﬂow forward strongly, then dip back brieﬂy, thus generating a strong forward momentum in the reading. Niedecker’s handling of the quintain form also produces considerable variation in the density of sound texture as one moves through the poem. This variation combines with the absence or presence, nature and degree, of stanzaic enjambment and with the shifting format, to aﬀect the reader’s pace in reading and experience of tension and relaxation. Two passages will serve to illustrate many of the eﬀects. The ﬁrst is a group of four early stanzas on Niedecker’s father and mother. Its ﬁrst stanza introduces the C format, the second and third return to B, then the fourth resumes C, which will be maintained for the following ﬁfteen stanzas. The group is held together not only by a chronological narrative but by stanzaic enjambment —

216 |     

retrospective, prospective, then retrospective again (retrospective and prospective enjambment are indicated in the transcription by backward- and forward-pointing arrows, respectively): Syllables

Stresses –

3

1

/ –

–

3

2

a

My father \

/

b

thru marsh fog \

2

2

3

2

/ –

\

–

2

saw her face

4

1

→ at the organ

× –

d

/ –

\

–

e

/

–

\

/ –

bore the weight of lake water –

×

g

1

and the cold —

7

3

he seined for carp to be sold

4

1

that their daughter →

3

2

might go high

–

/

\

2

1 1

/ /

– –

/

g

–

f

/

×

h

/

i

on land –

2

–

–

×

f

/

3

–

c

/

3

4

/

from high ground \

7

c

sculled down

/

j

to learn \

–

/

\

4

3

Saw his wife turn

1

1

deaf

j

/

k

Paradoxes of Form in the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker | 217 × – /

3

1

l

→ and away /

1

1

m

She –

3

2

2

1

4

3

\

/

who knew boats –

/

and ropes ×

/

–

n n

/

no longer played

l

The syllable-level movement is iambic-anapestic, even the clusters of stresses rising from a secondary to a primary stress.14 Despite this underlying uniformity of syllable-level movement, the lines vary noticeably in weight, speed, and length. The clustered stresses in the ﬁrst stanza slow its movement, giving a sense of arduousness to the action described. With the higher proportion of unstressed syllables in the second stanza, the movement speeds up, to slow again with the increased density of line breaks in the third and fourth and, in the latter, a recurrence of clustered stresses. The sense of the passage is also enacted by an increase, then a decrease, in the lengths of the lines. Line length swells in the second stanza, which speaks of the father’s prime of activity and hope, then shrinks to a stark spareness in the last two stanzas, which tell of his wife’s withdrawal into deafness. The lines of each stanza are bound together by extensive sound repetition and modulation. There are full rhymes in the middle stanzas of the group, partial rhymes in the ﬁrst and last. In the second and last stanzas, there are envelope rhymes as well as the immediate rhyme of the third and fourth lines. In the ﬁrst stanza, the alliteration of the terminal words “father,” “fog,” and “face” links the three lines that do not participate in the rhyme. In the second stanza, “bore,” at the beginning of the second line, rhymes with the ﬁrst syllable of “organ,” the terminal word of the ﬁrst; alliteration of “weight” with “water” and of “seined” with “sold” binds together the second and fourth lines, respectively, while alliteration of “cold” with “carp” supplements its rhyme with “sold” to link the third line with the fourth; assonance of “weight” with “seined” links the second line, as well, to the fourth. Even in the austere third stanza, assonance of “might” with “high” binds the ﬁrst line, and alliteration of “land” with “learn” links

218 |     

the second line with the third; “deaf,” alone in the last line, is conspicuously and expressively excluded from the sound patterning. In the equally austere ﬁnal stanza of the group, the double rhyme is supplemented by the linking of “no,” at the beginning of the last line, through alliteration to “knew” in the third and through assonance to the rhyme words “boats” and “ropes” in the third and fourth. The sound repetition is made conspicuous by the shortness of the lines and stanzas and by the additional white space of the indentions. The second passage that I will examine consists of two groups of three and two stanzas, respectively, about the poet herself, occurring at the middle of the poem. The ﬁrst group maintains the C format begun in the group examined above; the second group is the ﬁrst of two groups in the B format, its only occurrence in the poem after the opening two groups. In the transcription below, the terminal sounds for the two groups are marked separately. Syllables

Stresses

4

2

I grew in green

3

2

slide and slant

–

/

–

/

/

–

/

–

4

2

a

/

b –

c

of shore and shade /

3

/

3

\

/

Child-time — wade →

2

1

– / thru weeds

5

2

/ – – / – Maples to swing from

5

2

Pewee-glissando

2

1

/ – –

–

c d

e

/ –

f

/

sublime →

g

/

1

1

slime- →

g

/

1

1

song

h

Paradoxes of Form in the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker | 219 / –

×

6

3

–

/ –

i

Grew riding the river /

1

1

j

Books –

3

2

4

2

3

1

9

4

3

1

4

2

/

\

k

at home-pier / – –

–

l

–

/–\–

/ –

/ –

b /

\

–

/ –

/

/

e

3

1

I must tilt

5

2

upon the pressure

– ×

–

/– \

4

1

f

– /

g

/

\

/ –

/

– – /

–

h /

“We live by the urgent wave – –

3

×

–

In us sea-air rhythm –

3

/

execute and adjust – \

7

d

From the secret notes × –

5

c

for a wing-bone –

3

a

a pencil × –

6

k

/

I was the solitary plover –

2

/

as he read

/ –

5

–

Shelley could steer

i

/

of the verse”

j

The ﬁrst two quintains of the ﬁrst group are exceptionally dense in sound repetition — in this case, onomatopoeic. The sibilants, liquids, and semivowels imitate the sounds of water and wind-blown foliage, and the richness of this imitative sound texture suggests the child’s immersion in sensuous

220 |     

experience of the natural world around her. Its last quintain, referring to the growing child’s entry into the world of books, is appropriately sparser in its sound patterning. The second group, presenting the speaker as a young poet, is also relatively unobtrusive in sound patterning; indeed, it is without rhyme. What draws our attention here is not so much the sound of the lines as their movement. Especially notable is the stanzaic enjambment splitting the clause “I must tilt // upon the pressure” over two lines separated by white space, inducing a kinesthetic sense of the metaphoric action the clause describes. Also conspicuous is a shift in diction and syntax from the preceding group, announced in the ﬁrst line by the polysyllabic “solitary.” Abstract words like “pressure,” “execute,” and “adjust” contrast strikingly with the concrete vocabulary evoking the speaker’s childhood. The syntax, likewise, is more sophisticated than the simple sentences and fragments of the ﬁrst group. The ﬁrst sentence is extended by an absolute construction as a free modiﬁer; in the second, the subject is preceded by a prepositional phrase, and the predicate is a complex verb phrase. The third sentence is an absolute construction, and in the last (a quotation), the verb is modiﬁed by a prepositional phrase whose object is modiﬁed by a further prepositional phrase. The variation in diction and syntax over the two groups of quintains helps eﬀect a corresponding variation in the syllable-level rhythm. The ﬁrst stanza of the ﬁrst group is characterized by regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, at least in its ﬁrst three lines. Especially conspicuous are the four phrases consisting of alliterating monosyllabic lexical words separated by a monosyllabic function word and all having the same ( – ) / – / stress pattern. The regular alternation between fully stressed and unstressed syllables is disrupted in the fourth line with the compound “Child-time,” and the last alliterating cretic phrase, “wade / thru weed,” is broken over the line division. With the beginning of the second stanza, the sound of triple meter enters the passage, its ﬁrst two lines having identical patterns of falling rhythm — a dactyl followed by a trochee. The tripping movement is slowed by the succession of three stressed syllables in the next three single-stress lines, “sublime / slime- / song.” In the third stanza of the group, an appropriately rocking rhythm is created by two phrases, “riding the river” and “Shelley could steer,” with the same choriambic shape: / – – / ( – ). The opening of the second group is strongly diﬀerentiated by an iambic tetrameter line (with reversed ﬁrst foot). The verse then contin-

Paradoxes of Form in the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker | 221

ues iambic-anapestic until the unscannable third line of the second stanza of the group, then appropriately returns to iambic-anapestic in the last two lines with their image of “the urgent wave of the verse.” The B format Niedecker uses for this two-quintain group (and also for the two-quintain group that follows it) contrasts with the other formats she employs in the poem. Where they are asymmetrical, with a strong diagonal thrust downward, it is symmetrical, inviting the eye to linger instead of drawing it down the page. Thus, these two pairs of quintains, both presenting images of the poet developing in a watery solitude, create a pause in the ﬂow of the poem. As this example illustrates, the variations in the quintain’s format in “Paean to Place” are functional, serving to diﬀerentiate passages and to aﬀect how we read them. The quintains of “Paean to Place” are not the only verse where Niedecker makes use of stepped indention. She employs it in several short nonstanzaic poems, in the quatrains of the longer text-based poem “Darwin,” and, notably, in several poems in stepped tercets, including the long descriptive-meditative work “Wintergreen Ridge” (Niedecker, 247 – 57). Of Niedecker’s stepped tercets, Robert Bertholf comments, “Williams’ threepart line enters her work . . . , but modiﬁed into a unit of composition, a sentence length stanza, and only slightly punctuated.” Bertholf is right that Niedecker has modiﬁed Williams’s stepped triadic line15 into a stanza and that her stepped tercets — as much of the rest of her verse — largely eschew punctuation. However, he is wrong in characterizing her tercet as sentence length. As Williams does with his triadic line, Niedecker reinforces the forward momentum that the stepped format imparts by, for the most part, continuing sentences past the end of the third line (in Williams’s case, third lobe of the line), ending them intrastanzaically, at the end of the ﬁrst or second line. The overall eﬀect of Niedecker’s modiﬁcation of Williams’s triadic line is to increase attention to individual words and sounds through increasing the number and intensity of points of emphasis. The white space intervening between her tercets places more emphasis on the end of one and the beginning of the next than there is on the beginnings and endings of Williams’s triadic lines. Her lineation cuts the syntactical string ﬁner than Williams’s partitioning of his long line. Further, whereas his partitioning reﬂects the intonational divisions of a natural, if heightened, oral performance of the text, Niedecker’s very short lines cross-cut such divisions. To gain a greater understanding of how Niedecker’s stepped tercets both

222 |     

resemble and depart from Williams’s stepped triadic line, I will consider her use of it in the long poem “Wintergreen Ridge.” As Williams does with his triadic line, Niedecker here eﬀectively uses variations in the relation of sentence and stanza to control the pace of the poem. It begins slowly, with sentence and stanza, phrase and line, congruent: Where the arrows of the road signs lead us: Life is natural in the evolution of matter (Niedecker, 247) The pace quickens with the third stanza, where a semipredicative structure ends with the second line, and the third line launches a new clause with a sentence adverb: Nothing supra-rock about it simply → butterﬂies are quicker than rock (Niedecker, 247) The return to coincidence of sentence ending and stanza boundary helps to set oﬀ these opening four stanzas as a sort of prologue. This opening passage of “Wintergreen Ridge” is a remarkable instance of how Niedecker uses condensation to achieve expansion. These elliptical sentences take us from the modest perspective of a road trip to the vast matter of the emergence of life on this planet. This dual perspective is maintained throughout the poem. In a way reminiscent of Williams’s long poem “The Desert Music,” the ordinary vacation trip opens a window on the vista of geological ages; close scrutiny reveals cosmic process. All this is conveyed through highly compressed sentences broken over short stanzas of short lines. The momentum generated by the imagery of these opening stanzas is soon reinforced by stanzaic enjambment, at ﬁrst retrospective, then prospective:

Paradoxes of Form in the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker | 223

Man lives hard on this stone perch → by sea imagines durable works → in creation here as in the center of the world → let’s say of art We climb → the limestone cliﬀs my skirt dragging an inch below → the knee the style before the last (Niedecker, 247 – 48) The sentence does not end here. It is extended by an elliptical aside — “the last the least” — at the beginning of the next stanza. Sentence and stanza do not end together for another seven stanzas, after a total of twelve open stanzas. The return to coincidence of sentence and stanza in stanza 17 marks a pause in the narrative, where the speaker contemplates a sign encountered on the “ﬂowering ridge” from which the poem takes its title. The momentum of the climb is arrested; when the pace of the verse picks up again, it is a movement more of meditation than of narration. This whole transition is accomplished through modulation in the relation of sentence and stanza: We are gawks lusting → after wild orchids Wait! What’s this? — sign:

224 |     

Flowers loveliest where they grow Love them enjoy them and leave them so Let’s go! Evolution’s wild ones saved continuous life → through change from Time Began (Niedecker, 248 – 49) The colon at the end of the ﬁrst full stanza quoted above induces us to pause and contemplate the sign’s message that follows. The ﬁrst clause of that message is ﬁtted into a closed stanza, again inducing us to linger. With “Let’s go!” in the last line of the next stanza, we are invited to join the speaker in a new pursuit or ramble, no longer “lusting // after wild orchids.” Besides the relation of sentence and stanza, other variations in Niedecker’s stepped-tercet verse also function to control reader attention. Most notable are variations in the density of sound repetition and in the closeness to iambic-anapestic regularity. “Wintergreen Ridge” includes catalogs of plant names, selected and ordered as much for their sound and rhythm as for the images they convey and the actual plants they designate. The following three stanzas constitute such a catalog of plant names: /

Found: / – –

/ \

laurel in muskeg – / –

/

\ –

Linnaeus’ twinﬂower –

/ –×

Andromeda – / – × –

/

Cisandra of the bog /

\

–

pearl-ﬂowered

Paradoxes of Form in the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker | 225 / –

\ –

Lady’s tresses / –

\ –

insect-eating / –

\

pitcher plant (Niedecker, 250) The numerous compound words mark the passage with their characteristic stress pattern of primary stress on the accented syllable of the ﬁrst word of the compound, secondary stress on the accented syllable of the second. There are two variants — / \ ( – ), as in “muskeg,” “twinﬂower,” and “pearl-ﬂowered”; / – \ ( – ), as in “Lady’s tresses,” “insect-eating,” and “pitcher plant.” In the ﬁrst stanza, the compound words also enter into a larger repeated stress pattern, ( – ) / – / \ ( – ), the third line echoing the second. Besides repetition of stress patterns, the whole catalog is bound together by alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme, and reverse rhyme. To get a sense of how the various formal features of the verse — relation of syntax to line and stanza, stress patterning, and sound — work together to signal shifts in intensity and to distinguish and unify passages, consider an extended stretch of text from around the middle of the poem (stanzas 43 – 55). It begins (with the second line of a stanza) by referring back to the preservation of Wintergreen Ridge and its wildﬂowers by a group of women, proceeds through a series of associatively linked recollections, and ends with a single sentence of generalizing reﬂection occupying exactly three stanzas: / – / Women saved – \ – / / a pretty thing: Truth: – / – – / “a good to the heart” – / \ / It all comes down – – /–– to the family – \ – / – “We have a lovely

226 |     

/ – / – × ﬁnite parentage /– × mineral → / –× vegetable / – × animal” / × \ / Nearby dark wood — – / – – / I suddenly heard – / the cry / – my mother’s ×

\ – / where the light \ / pissed past – / – × / the pistillate cone \ – / how she loved \ / – closed gentians \ – / she herself → \ / so closed – – / – \ / and in this to us peace – / – the stabbing →

Paradoxes of Form in the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker | 227

/ pen / \ – friend did it / – – / close to the heart / – / → pierced the woods / red / – (autumn?) \ – × – / – Sometimes it’s a pleasure – / to grieve – / or dump → – / \ / – the leaves most brilliant × – / as do trees \ / – × when they’ve no need → – – /– \ of an overload – /– \ of cellulose – – \ / for a cool while (Niedecker, 252 – 53) The ﬁrst few stanzas are closed or only logically continuous one with the next; they have little sound repetition, and their syllable-level rhythm is for the most part smoothly iambic-anapestic until the heavily stressed last line of the third complete stanza quoted. Immediately preceding this heav-

228 |     

ily stressed line, a series of four consecutive polysyllabic words (“parentage,” “mineral,” “vegetable,” “animal”), each of the last three given its own separate line, repeats the same / – × stress distribution, creating a sense of heightened patterning. Another feature contributing to a perception of heightened patterning is rhyme — of unstressed or minimally stressed syllables (“family” and “lovely,” “mineral” and “animal”). The heavy stresses of “Nearby dark wood” combine with the allusive resonance of the image to create an increase in intensity. The stanza that follows it is formally unremarkable, allowing the emotionally charged episode it presents to be considered without distraction. In the next stanza, however, the curious image of the light “piss[ing] past / the pistillate cone” is presented in language obtrusively dense in sound repetition, all the lexical words except the last being linked by alliteration, assonance, consonance, and even fuller repetition. The sound linking continues through the next several stanzas: “cone” is echoed by “closed” in the ﬁrst and second stanzas following it and by “close” in the third following stanza. The word “peace,” following the last occurrence of “closed,” is linked through alliteration to “pen” in the next stanza and “pierced” in the one after that, while assonance links “friend” and “red” to “pen.” A number of other formal features combine to contribute to a sense of agitation in this passage. Unlike elsewhere in the poem, sentence beginnings (“there the light . . . ,” “how she loved . . . ,” “friend did it . . . ”) are not punctuated by initial capitals. One sentence interrupts another — “friend did it . . . ” intervenes between a subject, “the stabbing pen,” and its predicate, “pierced the woods / red.” The emotionally charged conﬂation of pen and knife, red leaves and heart’s blood, is introduced by the syntactically awkward line “and in this to us peace” and emphasized by the isolation in separate lines of the monosyllabic “pen” and “red.” In the ﬁnal two tercets of the passage, all the lines have a strong-onset, primary stress reinforced (in every line except the last) by alliteration and/or assonance. The polysyllabic lines are all falling or rocking in rhythm. After so much disruption, it comes as a relief to ﬁnd a sentence beginning with an initial capital and at the beginning of a stanza. The sense of release, analogous to what the poem’s speaker expresses (“Sometimes it’s a pleasure / to grieve”), is then sustained by a syntax of extension, providing several points of closure within the three-stanza sentence, and by the coincidence of sentence ending and stanza boundary. The unity conveyed by the tidy ﬁt of sentence to stanzas is enhanced by sound repetition: the ﬁrst and second stanzas are bound together by the partial rhyme of “grieve”

Paradoxes of Form in the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker | 229

and “leaves” and by the assonance of both with “trees” and “need,” and the lines of the ﬁnal stanza are woven together by the liquids of “overload,” “cellulose,” and “cool while.” The syllable-level rhythm modulates from the trochaic trimeter of the ﬁrst line through two lines of iambic monometer to a consistently rising rhythm for the ﬁnal two stanzas, to end with the double iamb of the last line. As is apparent from our brief forays into “Wintergreen Ridge” and “Paean to Place,” Niedecker’s drive to condense is simultaneously a drive to expand the room the poem gives readers to make meaning. Her work reﬂects her conviction that the value of a poem lies in its capacity to propagate meaning to inﬁnity in readers’ minds, and that this capacity derives in part from the elimination of connective particles, allowing lexical words to juxtapose in sound and sense. The construction of her series, sequences, and long poems replicates on a larger scale the construction of her syntax: elements of the work’s argument or story are left free of connective material, juxtaposed for readers to connect them in their minds.

   , from short lyrics to long poems, sequences, and series, Niedecker adapted and regenerated the forms that she drew from various sources. She did not simply use these forms as she found them, producing what Rich calls “format”; rather, she took them as the basis for new formal constructions of her own. These forms make palpable the materials of which they are made, whether separate words and particles of the language or fragments of found speech or found writing. Rich’s notion of formal borrowing and regeneration, as distinguished from both mechanical adherence to form and form shattering, oﬀers an illuminating perspective on Niedecker’s poetry. As a rural midwestern woman with working-class roots, Niedecker seems a clear instance of a poet from “emerging groups” engaging with forms from an eclectic variety of sources. Does this suggest that she is more usefully seen in this way than as an avant-garde poet? If so, what about her friend Zukofsky and the other “objectivists”? Though male, they, too, were separated from the dominant culture — in their case, by their ethnic identity as Jews. And their work, too, includes borrowings from various formal sources: Reznikoﬀ drew from and adapted the forms of legal testimony and of Biblical song and story, as well as of imagist free verse, and Zukofsky adapted those of canzone, sestina, and Greek lyric, as well as musical forms and those of free verse in the modes of Pound and Williams.

230 |     

Thus it appears that focus on formal borrowing and regeneration, rather than exclusively on form shattering or even formal invention, is likely to illuminate not only Niedecker’s poetic practice but that of her fellow objectivists. Further, I would suggest that it is also a useful focus for study of the major modernists, poets of the avant garde, whom Rich opposes to poets of emerging groups. The major modernists were not exclusively form shatterers. Pound, for one, adapted an extraordinarily wide range of forms, including Provençal, Anglo-Saxon, and Chinese. Adapting and renewing forms is not so much opposed to form shattering as complementary to it; both are means toward the making of vital forms for new poetries.

Notes A version of this essay was presented for the panel “Interaction of Free Verse and Meter” at the 2001 Northeast Modern Language Association annual meeting in Hartford, Connecticut. My thanks to Natalie Gerber for organizing that panel and for her comments on that version. 1. Adrienne Rich, “Format and Form,” in What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 227. Subsequent references appear in the text. 2. Quoted in Cid Corman and Lorine Niedecker, “With Lorine / A Memorial: 1903 – 1970,” Truck, no. 16 (Summer 1975): 76. Subsequent references appear in the text as Corman. 3. Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 142. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 4. Zukofsky apparently compiled A Test of Poetry, the book in which this comment appears, partly for Niedecker (New York: Jargon/Corinth Books, 1964). She typed the manuscript for him and attached great value to the book. Subsequent references appear in the text. 5. The book was My Friend Tree, published in 1961, when Niedecker was ﬁftyeight. She had one earlier book publication, New Goose, in 1946. 6. In marking stresses, I seek to reﬂect the variations in articulatory eﬀort entailed in an oral rendition of the poems, as I would read them. In my scansions, I mark as bearing primary stress many syllables that, in a prose transcription, I would take as bearing only secondary stress. Division into lines, especially short lines, promotes and equalizes stresses. Even with their lineation, however, Niedecker’s texts invite considerable variability of stress in performance. 7. The normally unstressed preposition and pronoun “from us” I read as here bearing rhetorical stress. 8. If “marsh rail” is read as a compound (rather than as a noun with another

Paradoxes of Form in the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker | 231 noun as modiﬁer), the primary stress will fall on the ﬁrst word instead of the second. 9. T.V.F. Brogan, “Quintain,” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1012. Subsequent references appear in the text as “Quintain” for this essay and “Preminger and Brogan” for the volume as a whole. 10. In Jenny Penberthy, Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 1931 – 1979 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 230. 11. Niedecker’s comment that she’ll be using her ﬁve-line form “often from now on” is reminiscent of Williams’s 1955 declaration concerning his triadic line, “As far as I know, . . . I shall use no other form for the rest of my life, for it represents the culmination of all my striving after an escape from the restrictions of the verse of the past,” with the diﬀerence that Niedecker is strikingly less conﬁdent of her achievement (William Carlos Williams, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirlwall [New York: New Directions, 1957], 334). 12. In marking stresses, I have treated “weed stalk” as a compound. Alternatively, it could be read as a noun with a noun modiﬁer, in which case the primary stress would fall on “stalk.” 13. This poem of Niedecker’s may bring to mind a similarly short and very thin poem, Cummings’s “l(a” (Cummings 673), which dispenses with sayability and is even more fully ideogrammic. 14. A possible exception is “lake water,” which I have taken as a noun with noun modiﬁer. It could instead be read as a compound, with primary stress falling on “lake.” 15. Robert Bertholf, Introduction to From This Condensery: Complete Writing, by Lorine Niedecker, ed. Robert Bertholf (Penland, NC: Jargon Society, 1985), xxvi. For a full account of the view of Williams’s triadic line assumed in the comparisons with Niedecker’s stepped tercets here, see my paper on the prosody of his triadic-line verse, “William Carlos Williams’ Triadic-Line Verse: An Analysis of Its Prosody,” Twentieth-Century Literature 35 (1989): 364 – 88.

Bibliography Bertholf, Robert. Introduction to From This Condensery: Complete Writing, by Lorine Niedecker. Edited by Robert Bertholf. Penland, NC: Jargon Society, 1985. Berry, Eleanor. “William Carlos Williams’ Triadic-Line Verse: An Analysis of Its Prosody.” Twentieth-Century Literature 35 (1989): 364 – 88. Brogan, T.V.F. “Quintain.” In Preminger and Brogan, New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1012 – 13. Corman, Cid, and Lorine Niedecker. “With Lorine / A Memorial: 1903 – 1970.” Truck, no. 16 (Summer 1975): 57 – 90. Cummings, E. E. Complete Poems, 1913 – 1962. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

232 |      Miner, Earl. “Tanka.” In Preminger and Brogan, New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1265 – 66. Niedecker, Lorine. Collected Works. Edited by Jenny Penberthy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Penberthy, Jenny. Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 1931 – 1979. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Preminger, Alex, and T. V. F. Brogan, eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Rich, Adrienne. “Format and Form.” In What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, 217 – 27. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Williams, William Carlos. The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams. Edited by John C. Thirlwall. New York: New Directions, 1957. Zukofsky, Louis. A Test of Poetry. New York: Jargon/Corinth Books, 1964.

10

My Name Is Henri: Contemporary Poets Discover John Berryman Stephen Burt

When John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs appeared in 1963, discerning readers recognized it not just as the fulﬁllment of talents promised in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956) and The Dispossessed (1948) — nor as simply a brilliant response to Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) — but as something so new it was hard to describe. Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Lowell, “One has the feeling 100 years from now [Berryman] may be all the rage — or a ‘discovery’ — hasn’t one?”1 Berryman achieved increasing recognition from his peers, winning the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs and the Bollingen and National Book Award for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968); interest in Berryman supported a critical journal ( John Berryman Studies) during the 1970s and later prompted two biographies. Yet after his death in 1972, Berryman’s inﬂuence on younger poets (other than those who had known him personally) seemed almost nonexistent. His unpredictable blend of erudition and comedy made him harder to imitate than his so-called confessional peers, while his use of African American dialect, and his sometime sexism, made him less attractive as an imagined poetic forebear. The poet’s sometimes ﬂaunted learnedness, his self-mythologizing, the frequently topical or occasional nature of the later

234 |   

Dream Songs, and their formal debts to Berryman’s early master Yeats, might seem to make him even less usable now than he would have seemed in the 1980s. In the past decade, however, a number of American poets have made new claims on Berryman’s legacy. “My course is rotten,” writes Liz Waldner in Self and Simulacra (2001); “I channel Mr. Berryman who am not such a man.”2 Jeremy Glazier’s “Berryman’s Bones,” a direct pastiche of the form and grammar of 77 Dream Songs, graced a 2002 issue of Boston Review; an even more recent poem by Joanna Fuhrman (in Dream Song – like stanzas and diction, though unrhymed) imagines “Glimpsing John Berryman Reborn as a Hasid.”3 Recent poets who may not name Berryman in their poems make more extended use of his work. In sequences based on personae, in investigations of linguistic extremes, and in attempts to merge diﬃculty with comedy, or in long poems about mourning, grief, and guilt, several American poets have recently “channeled” Berryman’s style in general, and 77 Dream Songs in particular, to create their own work. Inﬂuential ﬁrst and second books from the last ten years — from such varied poets as Mark Levine, Lucie Brock-Broido, Kevin Young, Susan Wheeler, and Mary Jo Bang — draw on Berryman’s style to meet their widely shared goals. Another acclaimed poet, Frank Bidart, whose career began in the seventies, uses not the stylistic surface, but the psychological substructure of The Dream Songs in his own oeuvre. Levine and other poets now indebted to Berryman may trace those debts to broader trends in American writing and culture. Many poets now distrust a uniﬁed lyric “I,” and ﬁnd in Berryman usable models for plural or unstable selves. Berryman’s work also speaks to a widespread interest in liberal guilt (intensiﬁed as poets have sought shelter in the academy) and to a fascination with fame and celebrity (which present-day American poets often view as beyond their reach). Bidart’s debt to Berryman has no such correlates in broader literary or cultural history: that debt stems instead from the two poets’ shared psychological (and psychoanalytic) beliefs about personality, mourning, and guilt. In consequence, while poets whose oeuvres start in the 1980s and 1990s turn to Berryman rather than to Bishop, Jarrell, or Lowell, Bidart has proven able to learn from all four. I begin with Levine’s Debt (1992), whose debts to 77 Dream Songs can hardly be overstated. Levine’s signature poem, “Work Song,” features a voraciously self-destructive character rather like Berryman’s Henry; lest we mistake his source, Levine begins:

My Name Is Henri: Poets Discover John Berryman | 235

My name is Henri. Listen. It’s morning. I pull my head from my scissors, I pull the light bulb from my mouth — Boss comes at me while I’m still blinking. Pastes the pink slip on my collarbone.4 Levine’s Henri can behave much like Henry, converting his sense of discomfort with middle-aged male adulthood into anecdotes designed to provoke comic outrage. Like Henry, he displays a discomﬁting, almost prurient interest in anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Henri, like Henry, loves to complain, and likes to remind us that he is not quite a real person, only a literary representation in a world of representations: I am Henri, mouth full of soda crackers. I live in Toulouse, which is a piece of cardboard. Summers the Mayor paints it blue, we ﬁsh in it. Winters we skate on it. Children are always drowning or falling through cracks. Parents are distraught but get over it. It’s easy to replace a child. Like my parents’ child, Henri. (Debt, 17) Readers of 77 Dream Songs sometimes take Henry’s volatile tone, his desire to expose his least attractive sides, as a desire above all to hold and keep a reader’s attention: Henri’s outrageous, physically impossible adventures take to new extremes the logic behind Henry’s travails. Both poets use suicide, or the threat of suicide, as an attention-getting device, and both tell us exactly what they are doing: “Come on, man, / put yourself together!” Henri/Levine tells himself: “You want so much to die / that you don’t want to die” (Debt, 18). Henri (like Henry) takes refuge in a riot of alternate symbols for his speaking voice: My name is Henri. I am Toulouse. I am scraps of bleached parchment, I am the standing militia, a quill, the Red Cross, I am the feather in my cap, the Hebrew Testament, I am the World Court. . . . I am an ice machine. I am an alp. I stuﬀ myself in the refrigerator wrapped in newsprint. With salt in my heart

236 |   

I stay good for days. (Debt, 18) Not only the attitude of seriocomic extravagance here, but the distinctively iterated phrases that project this attitude, seem learned from the Berryman who declared in “Formal Elegy,” “I am four feet long . . . I am an automobile,”5 and who wrote in Dream Song 22: I am the little man who smokes & smokes. I am the girl who does know better but. I am the king of the pool. ...................... I am the enemy of the mind. I am the auto salesman and love you. I am a teenage cancer, with a plan.6 Levine repeats this rhetorical ﬁgure throughout Debt: “I am a TV. I buzz. I receive everything” (Debt, 28); “I am, at bare minimum, a two-headed monster” (Debt, 78). Both Levine’s self-presentations and his allegorical scenes — often courtrooms or battleﬁelds — replicate the confusions in which the Berryman of The Dream Songs situates himself. Berryman: “I am, outside. Incredible panic rules. / People are blowing and beating each other without mercy”; Levine: “I watch them come at me from all directions. / The traﬃc is not about to swerve around me tonight” (DS, 50; Debt, 27). Berryman’s division of the lyric “I” among Henry and his interlocutors turned some of the early Dream Songs into mock trials, with Henry defending his actions before his “friend” (DS, 35). Helen Vendler has described Henry’s “perpetual and unidentiﬁable free-ﬂoating anxiety and sense of homicidal guilt.”7 Berryman invites us to judge him, comparing his readers to judges, his page to a court, and his poems to evidence of crime, not only in the famous Dream Song 29 (to which we will return) but elsewhere throughout The Dream Songs: “ ‘Oyez, oyez!’ The Man Who Did Not Deliver / is before you for his deliverance my lords. / He stands, as charged ” (DS, 47). Levine, too, pursues the idea of poetry as self-indictment, as confession in the juridical sense: “I’ve been identiﬁed. It’s him,” the title poem decides (Debt, 19). Levine, like Berryman, plays both felon and detective: “I’m looking for remains. A body. I’m looking for bodies” (Debt, 64). Accuser and accused, Henry and friend, or superego and id, emerge throughout the Dream Songs as a whole — and within many individual

My Name Is Henri: Poets Discover John Berryman | 237

Songs — as special cases of the divided psyche the sequence imagines. Louise Glück writes that with Berryman’s “fracturing of voice,” “the intense purpose characteristic of the lyric becomes . . . intense cross-purposes.”8 Berryman explicitly contemplates the possibility that he might not have a uniﬁed self, that the parts of him represented as (for example) lust, shame, tenderness, and ambition, or as diﬀerent speakers with diﬀerent dialects, might ﬁt together into no whole: “I am — I should be held together by — / but I am breaking up”; “Henry’s parts were ﬂeeing” (DS, 100, 93). “ ‘Underneath,’ / (they called in iron voices) ‘understand, / is nothing. So there’ ” (DS, 10). Yet Levine’s poems of self-interrogation go even further than Berryman in portraying unresolvable self-division, since Levine’s personae cannot even manage to remain in evidence as consistent parts, or to reassemble into an episodic diary (such as the later Dream Songs constitute). Levine’s voices simply interrogate themselves, divide, and go on: “I am bought and divided and placed on the hearth” (Debt, 25). Unstable, violent self-division forms something of a leitmotif in Debt: the poems sometimes look like angry or puzzled responses to Levine’s inability to see himself as one person. Like Berryman, Levine even ﬁnds outrageous metaphors for his psychic division in the history of U.S. race relations: “Once I was white and then I was black. / It happened overnight” (Debt, 65). And, as with Berryman, parts of Levine strike other parts as repulsive, abject, deserving moral or aesthetic dismissal: The me on the bed they avoid he makes a gurgling noise with each breath he stinks very bad. I am not the man he used to be. (Debt, 29) Am I less whole than before? Yes, not exactly. . . . What little control I have over my lost parts! (Debt, 38) I have been speaking someone else’s lines. Someone small. Someone perfectly dangerous. (Debt, 91)

238 |   

Similar images of compulsion, ventriloquism, and dismemberment animate the ﬁrst poem (or “song”) in Levine’s second book, Enola Gay (2000): He hadn’t meant to go on so long. He hadn’t meant it. But the song would not go. And the words no longer sounded like words. Though he sang with his tongue behind his teeth. Though he struggled to remove his hands from his shirt.9 A list of devices Levine picked up from Berryman might include the following: named or otherwise distinguished (but never realistically detailed) personae; very divergent voices for disjunct parts of the self; oﬀ-kilter or uneven stanzaic form; historical erudition; clashing, unstable, or nonnaturalistic diction, including both colloquial and erudite extremes; and the pretense that a poem is at once a theatrical performance and a trial for a crime. All these devices appear throughout the Dream Songs (though they seem most evident in the earlier, more diﬃcult installments). Levine so often sounds like Berryman because he shares so many of Berryman’s projects, hoping to ﬁnd a lyric form as unstable, guilty, and anxious as the American life he depicts. Yet Levine is hardly the only poet of his generation to use those devices extensively, nor even the only poet to ﬂaunt them. Literary inﬂuence has become a notoriously ﬂuid concept; some critics insist on documentary evidence, while others (such as Harold Bloom) ﬁnd stylistic or even philosophical overlap as good as ocular proof. David Perkins suggests that we need not “adopt the point of view of writers . . . in order to explain literary history”10 ; Alan Golding and other scholars attack Bloom’s notion that “the later poet derives authority from successful imitation,” seeing inﬂuence instead in terms of “power exercise[d] . . . through institutions.”11 To elaborate, much less arbitrate, general theories of literary inﬂuence and inheritance would be a task far beyond the scope of this essay. It seems uncontroversial, though, to say that if one poet’s stylistic signature turns up repeatedly in later poets’ work (so that the later poem sounds as if it could not have come into being without the earlier) — or if the later poet credits the earlier poet by name — inﬂuence is probably the right word. That is exactly what has happened with Berryman, whose “I am X, I am Y” rhetorical ﬁgure, in particular, has become (partly thanks to Levine’s example) an almost predictable feature of ﬁrst and second books: “I am a service / revolver in a swimming pool . . . I am a love letter” (Joshua

My Name Is Henri: Poets Discover John Berryman | 239

Clover); “I was that season, the little ends I made” (Amy England); “I am spring I am not spring / I am Voltaire he said” (Ange Mlinko).12 Nor do the debts stop at this now-familiar device. I will survey brieﬂy a few recent books which draw on Berryman more extensively, then dwell at some length on one more (by Mary Jo Bang), before moving on to consider a deeper, less obvious kinship between Berryman and another, more established contemporary writer, Bidart. A quick partial list of recent books that follow Berryman’s linguistic lead might include Lucie Brock-Broido’s The Master Letters (1995), Susan Wheeler’s Smokes (1996), Maurice Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (2001), Kevin Young’s Jelly Roll (2003), and Brenda Shaughnessy’s Interior with Sudden Joy (1999).13 Brock-Broido’s “I” subdivides herself as Berryman’s did, taking on historical and even zoological roles. “At Lissadell,” one poem begins, “I am the red she / Fox in habitat” (Master, 51). “I am a shoemaker’s apprentice,” declares another; a third, “I am angel, addict, catherine wheel” (Master, 10, 8). Brock-Broido credits Berryman, despite “all his hysteria,” for some of her distinctive tones.14 Promising to “be pristine in excess Rhetoric” and giving “a mummer’s wave to Media, the angst of evening news” (Master, 45, 44), Brock-Broido also explores the American “celebrity culture” and “fascination with fame” that, as David Haven Blake has recently argued, “shaped the public dimensions of” Berryman’s verse.15 Other poets take up what might seem the most recalcitrant, least usable, aspect of the Dream Songs style: a white poet’s ostensibly playful use of dated African American stage dialect. Susan Wheeler not only seeks ﬁgures for shock and self-division (“The cavities in my mouth / play harmonics, they do it without me”), but uses a Berrymanesque synthetic dialect to do it: “Manman got a special s’rup t’cures the lonelies. / All the night, up the tree’f the pickling shed / Ise drinking from it elixir” (Wheeler, 28, 11). Maurice Manning (the Yale Younger Poet for 2001) goes even further to resurrect Berryman’s blackface, deploying multiple pseudonyms and baroque syntax along with a mix of standard and dialect voices: “Mad Daddy is the man with the shotgun full of history”; “Why come Mad Daddy make Law play dat game / a tremble-hearted Twenty-One all night . . . ?” (Manning, 6, 17). W. S. Merwin’s foreword understandably ﬁnds in Manning’s verse “the disturbing ghost of Berryman’s Mr. Bones” (Manning, xix). Berryman also remains available as a midcentury precursor (neither premodern nor high modern) for the contemporary lyric sequence, with (as Berryman put it) “parts . . . more independent than parts usually are.”16

240 |   

Kevin Young writes that Berryman’s “engagement with voice and invective and ultimately humor” amounts to a “break with New Criticism” and allows his “inﬂuence on postmodern . . . or experimental traditions.”17 With each short poem named for a diﬀerent musical form, Young’s Jelly Roll perhaps attempts to merge the principles of The Dream Songs with the principles of other kinds of “songs” to make his book-length sequence: “In the calamitous city / in the songs & sinners / among the thousand throngs,” Young concludes, “I barter & belong” ( Jelly Roll, 182). Berryman (he might imply) belongs to him, too. And while the ampersand alone hardly counts as suﬃcient evidence, ampersands, rhyming stanzas with pentameter norms, rapid high- and low-culture allusion, distorted syntax, and ﬂirtatiously plural personae (in poems focused on sex and metaphysical guilt) together might be enough: if so, we might hear traces of Berryman’s music (perhaps via Brock-Broido) in the sequences of Brenda Shaughnessy’s Interior with Sudden Joy (1999). “Your voice & eye are muscle & they hurt / like prodigy too soft or quick in class,” one poem’s speaker tells a would-be lover; “Vampiring I would have killed / all I loved & kept all our lives // for centuries, crypt-crock” confesses another (Shaughnessy, 42, 4). If Brock-Broido, Manning, Waldner, Fuhrman, Young, and Shaughnessy together (most of whom name Berryman, some repeatedly) do not evidence Berryman’s widespread (though hardly universal) inﬂuence on a cohort of American poets, it is hard to know what would. Yet none of these poets goes as far as Levine in appropriating and renovating both Berryman’s techniques and his concerns. Nor does Levine himself adopt one aspect crucial to 77 Dream Songs: Berryman’s volume functions not just as a set of poems but as a series with narrative components, loosely indebted to the sixteenth-century sequences Berryman’s Sonnets had imitated directly. To ﬁnd such a book-length, quasi-narrative sequence in contemporary writing, we might turn to Mary Jo Bang’s Louise in Love (2001),18 which puts Berrymanesque leaps, allusions, and jokes to new narrative use, chronicling whimsically named characters through their circuitous, bookish love aﬀairs. Bang opens by listing six “Dramatis Personae”: the titular Louise, her sister Lydia, Ham (Louise’s sometime lover), Charles (his brother), “Isabella, a child,” and “The Other” (Bang, 1). Her ﬁrst poem, “Eclipsed,” promises “Nostradamic foretelling / of retinal damage written in novelese” (Bang, 3). She promises something like a novel, that is, but damaged, and hard to look at directly (like the sun, like the love aﬀair itself). Individual poems gloss, and describe, but deliberately avoid explaining, the events that shape Louise’s feelings:

My Name Is Henri: Poets Discover John Berryman | 241

Mother did say, Louise said, try to be popular, pretty, and charming. Try to make others feel clever. Without fear, what are we? the other asked. The will, said Louise. The mill moth and the lavish wick, breathless in the remnant of a ﬁre. (Bang, 8) The questions promise autobiographical incident, but the poem delivers something stranger, as Bang splits her voice up into question and answer; ﬂaunts syntactic inversions as signs of artiﬁce; and concludes with a series of incompatible metaphors. Berryman, Bang writes, “was very much in my mind” when she wrote the majority of Louise, “especially after teaching the Dream Songs.” “What I got from Berryman,” she continues, “was this idea of letting a character stand for some aspect of one’s own psyche. . . . Louise would become a Huﬀy Henry and allow me to court disaster on paper,” while “the more timid side of myself got jealous and I had to bring Louise’s sister Lydia into the mix. . . . Lydia might be the equivalent of a Mr. Bones.”19 Louise in Love follows 77 Dream Songs (and Berryman’s Sonnets) in presenting itself as a modern ars amatoria, a manual explaining — with sometimes outrageous examples — how lovers behave. Louise both fears and celebrates her “excessive frivolity” (Bang, 46), imagining “denizens of a splendid / language they spoke sotto voce” (Bang, 49); tonal leaps and drops divide the sequence up, arrest or control its moment, and hold our attention at all costs: “the boat could not be capsized / as long as someone listened” (Bang, 80). Bang’s poetry thus identiﬁes itself at once with artiﬁce and with irrepressible instinct: The mind says no, Louise admitted, but the heart, it loves repetition and sport: cat’s paw from under the bedskirt, dainty wile, frayed thing, ﬁsh hook. (Bang, 20)

242 |   

Love, love, love, love, love, love love — a hive hum ongoing in the hear ear. How could that be a thing of pure pleasure? (Bang, 27) Love animates these retrospective poems (poems about love, but by no means love poems) as a game and as a source of regret; the poems become examples of gamesmanship and attempts to discover what went wrong. Bang’s disillusioned interrogation of lovers’ behavior, her appalled deconstructions of men in pursuit, thus raise a feminist answer to the decidedly masculinist Berryman, who had celebrated “my splendid getting / four ladies to write to Henry,” or conﬁded, “Them lady poets must not marry, pal” (DS, 326, 206). It is Bang’s insistence on the artiﬁce that enables a love aﬀair — on the self as something consciously, even lavishly, constructed for others’ temporary consumption — that links her view of the self most securely to Berryman’s, her story to the stories the Dream Songs tell. If syntactic inversion signaled that constructedness in lines already quoted, “The Ana of Bliss” oﬀers the same signals through rhyme: His mouth was the yes that was wished on, feet angled in. He said, My but aren’t we? Si, she said, aren’t I a rampant array of negatives bashed and belittled? Come in, come in, my little passion ﬂower, he would often say. (Bang, 12) In its set of signs for the inconsistency of the self, for its evocation of the self’s failure to hold together as one thing, Bang’s verse oﬀers her own version of the “I am an X, I am a Y” device we saw in Levine and others: “She would be a blue new, the terrain of now, / a nice never waiting, one destined / for pleasure in that place” (Bang, 35). Why should all these poets use Berryman now? Some possible answers have, I hope, already emerged. Berryman’s oﬀ-balance array of competing voices dramatized an unstable and plural sense of self: “ ‘The sovereign I,’ called Henry yet again / in storm & weariness, and ‘No’ said she, / ‘We are not that way made.’ ”20 Louise Glück identiﬁes Berryman’s powers generally — and his availability for later poets — with Berryman’s ability to project himself into more than one speaker: “It can be said of Berryman

My Name Is Henri: Poets Discover John Berryman | 243

that when he found his voice he found his voices” (Glück, 43). Vendler found “no integrated Ego in The Dream Songs,” only voices “talking to each other across a void” (Vendler, 36). Contemporary poets have repeatedly turned to Berryman (though of course not to him alone) to produce a striking set of voices without having to posit a consistent, decisive, coherent, or uniﬁed self to which all those voices point. Suspicious of lyric “voice,” they ﬁnd in Berryman a source for always plural voices. And they want such plural voices, often, because they do not seek, cannot credit, or in some cases even lack sympathy with, conventions of lyric poems as poems of one voice, expressing one self at one time. In an inﬂuential New York magazine’s “Symposium on Subjectivity and Style,” the poet-critic Juliana Spahr says that her own “subjectivity bears little resemblance to grounded, coherent subjectivity,” while the critic Jeﬀrey Jullich claims ﬂatly that “the subject does not exist.”21 In a similar symposium organized by the Iowa Review, Levine declares that “writers like me . . . tend to need to hold in ambivalent high regard the set of metaphysical precepts” — among them “empathy, and self, and subjectivity” — which advanced critics and their allies “claim . . . to reject.”22 What about Berryman’s sense of himself on trial, his recurrent focus on crime and guilt? The guilt Berryman expresses about his philandering, about his drinking, about his father’s death, and (later) even about his success ﬁnds a distant echo in the guilt about privilege, and about the aesthetic as a category, that contemporary poets imbibe from their colleagues and friends in academia, and in the diﬀerent but often related guilt about racial appropriation that today’s white readers can feel in reading, enjoying, or advocating poems as dependent as the Dream Songs are on racially marked traditions. Berryman’s interest in his own reputation — his self-consciousness about his own position as a poet — also looks forward (as the humility of Bishop or Jarrell, and the monumentality of Lowell or Olson, would not) to contemporary poets’ anxieties about their art’s apparent inconsequence, and to their heightened desire for even ﬂeeting notice. Berryman’s legacy thus helps poets describe what George W. S. Trow called in 1981 “the context of no context,” the American cultural condition in which events and beliefs seem important (or real) only inasmuch as they aﬀect famous people or represent collective grievances; in this situation, Trow felt, “the one freedom [white middle-class men can] make use of is the freedom carved out by certain adolescents to make an aesthetic out of complaint.”23 All these rationales speak not just not to individual poets, but to the temper of their times. And none of them accounts for the diﬀerent debts

244 |   

to Berryman detectable, not in style but in purpose and tone, within the poetry of Frank Bidart. Bidart’s debts to Berryman evidence not only a diﬀerent kind of understanding by which later poets make use of earlier ones, but also a limit to concepts of poetic inﬂuence that seek to ground it in cultural history. Berryman wrote that “the elementary thing required” of any poet is “to sound as if he meant it” (Freedom, 303; emphasis in original). Readers wary of, or even hostile to, some of the poets discussed above might complain that those poets take techniques invented for the expression of psychological or social truths and use them for études or mere experiments. No critic would say that about Bidart, whose life and stated inﬂuences link him not to Berryman but to Berryman’s peers, especially to Lowell (with whom Bidart worked in the last decade of Lowell’s career, and whose Collected Poems Bidart coedited). And yet Bidart’s well-known dramatic monologues — among them that of the serial murderer “Herbert White” and the Freudian analysand “Ellen West” — feature, just as the Dream Songs do, deeply divided psyches with more than one voice; uncontrolled, or barely controlled, sexual passion; clashing registers of diction; and psychoanalytic meditations on juridical and existential guilt. Bidart’s poems may owe much to the Berryman who inhabited “Mistress Bradstreet,” and who wrote in Dream Song 29: But never did Henry, as he thought he did, end anyone and hacks her body up and hide the pieces, where they may be found. He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing. Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing. (DS, 33) The gruesome crimes of Bidart’s “Herbert White” are almost exactly those Berryman describes in this perhaps most-admired and most-often quoted of all the Dream Songs. Glück ﬁnds that “more profoundly than any poet since Berryman (whom he in no other way resembles) Bidart explores individual guilt, the insoluble dilemma” (Glück, 59). Yet Bidart’s fascination with deep-rooted guilt may both generate, and occlude, further debts to Berryman. Bidart resembles Henry’s creator both in imagining shocking situations and in pursuing sundered personae. Bidart has written that the Borgesian “I” “asserts a disparity between its essential self and its worldly second self”; in “The

My Name Is Henri: Poets Discover John Berryman | 245

War of Vaslav Nijinsky,” the principal dancer in The Rite of Spring “ﬁnds that there is a self // WITHIN herself // that is NOT HERSELF.”24 “Herbert White” himself says, of his ﬁrst crime, “it was funny, — afterwards, / it was as if somebody else did it” (Western, 127). Both poets also take up theatrical tropes. Henry and the friend who calls him “Mr. Bones” behave as stage minstrels, and the individual songs allow Henry to act (sometimes comically or hammingly) many parts. “Tomorrow be more shows; be special need / for rest & rehearse now” (DS, 198). Bidart, too, compares his poems to theatrical spaces and performances, especially those that tolerate grotesque extremes: “I saw,” he writes, “the parade of my loves // those PERFOR MERS comics actors singers” (Western, 14; emphasis in original). Dan Chiasson writes that “Bidart’s model for speech is self-conscious performance”25 ; when asked which critical works inform his approach, Bidart names Francis Fergusson’s The Idea of a Theatre (Western, 227). For both poets, these imagined performances extend not only through individual poetic units, but throughout a body of work: both poets ask us to discover how (as Eliot wrote of Yeats) their “later work . . . reﬂects light upon the earlier.”26 Berryman himself deﬁned a long poem as including “the construction of a world” (Freedom, 330). Bidart, too, has been turning his separate poems and volumes into a uniﬁed work, reusing titles and invented forms (“The First Hour of the Night,” “The Second Hour of the Night”) as well as key words. The early poem “The Arc” (in which arcs represent an amputee’s abbreviated life cycle) informs both Bidart’s later Biblical lyric (“LET THE FIRMAMENT // ARC THE EARTH” [Western, 77]) and the recent “Advice to the Players,” which evokes “the shape cut by the arc of our lives.”27 Finally, Bidart resembles Berryman — and appears to draw on Berryman — in both poets’ tendency to derive all the lyric kinds they use from elegy (in the restricted sense of a formal lament for the dead). While critics of earlier poetry (in particular, the genre theorist Alastair Fowler) have claimed that modern lyric generally descends from elegy, both Bidart and Berryman depend on mourning, grief, and rituals for mourning in ways that set their poems apart. 77 Dream Songs oﬀered elegies for Faulkner, Frost, Roethke, Stevens, and the dead in Vietnam (“The war is real”); His Toy, His Dream, His Rest famously mourned Blackmur, Jarrell, Plath, W. C. Williams, and “the sacred memory of Delmore Schwartz.”28 Yet the Dream Songs also present themselves as elegy in a more global sense. Early and late, the

246 |   

poems present themselves as meditations not just on suicide or on Berryman’s father (as some have claimed), but on the omnipresence of death, the fact that everyone dies: “The high ones die, die. They die” (DS, 40). Appalled: by all the dead: Henry brooded. Without exception! All. ALL. The senior population waits. Come down! come down! A ghastly & ﬂashing pause, clothed, life called; us do. (DS, 23) In one of several Dream Songs that imagine Henry as the defendant in a criminal trial, Berryman describes himself as hearing, and perhaps as generating, “the grave ground-rhythm of a gone / . . . makar?” (DS, 47) He writes — here as in the “Op. posth.” Dream Songs — as if he were dead, in order to mourn the dead, and in order to hear them: both his regularities (rhyme, for example) and his instabilities serve that end by ﬁnding linguistic forms both for guilt and for grief. No wonder, then, that Berryman cites William Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makars.” And no wonder Bidart (standardizing the spelling) does the same, concluding his most recent volume with a “Lament for the Makers” that includes (just as Berryman’s laments do) both poets and family members: “What parents leave you / is their lives” (Music, 26). No wonder, too, that Bidart has become the preeminent poet of his generation (as Berryman was of his) to write elegies for named (or otherwise speciﬁed) individuals; consider “For Bill Nestrick (1940 – 96),” “In Memory of Joe Brainard,” “Lady Bird,” “If I Could Mourn Like a Mourning Dove,” “For Mary Ann Youngren,” and Bidart’s several poems to his father or mother, among them “Golden State”: “It’s in many ways / a relief to have you dead” (Western, 150). Bidart’s poem on Lady Bird Johnson has special interest here, because its seemingly slight six lines end by describing Bidart’s speakers in general, who teach us “that people look at / the living, and wish for the dead” (Desire, 15). Such wishes are something Berryman explored: we might even say that the Dream Songs derive from them. “It all centered in the end on the suicide / in which I am an expert, deep & wide,” Dream Song 136 concludes (DS, 153). The Songs toward the end of His Toy, His Dream, His Rest sum up the volume’s themes in funereal settings. In Dream Song 384, Henry/Berryman “stand[s] above my father’s grave with rage,” recalling previous visits (and previous graveside poems) before modulating to ag-

My Name Is Henri: Poets Discover John Berryman | 247

gression: “I come back for more, // I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave” (DS, 406). Placed after several Songs that warn us that the sequence will end soon (“I will not come again / or not come with this style,” DS, 401), Berryman’s concluding gesture at once deliberately presages a suicide and recapitulates the inquiry into Thanatus that the Dream Songs have conducted all along: I’d like to scrabble till I got right down away down under the grass and ax the casket open ha to see just how he’s taking it, which he sought so hard we’ll tear apart the mouldering grave clothes ha & then Henry will heft the ax once more, his ﬁnal card, and fell it on the start. (DS, 406) This self-dramatizing and self-consuming violence — aimed both at the dead father and at death itself — looks forward to the self-punishments and self-annihilations Bidart’s characters seek “within / that broken mirror made // by all the things . . . inherited / and remade” (Western, 209). Bidart, like Henry and like Berryman, grieves and makes songs from grief as he investigates, through a variety of historical and ﬁctive masks, the origins of his psyche, whose wounds sometimes represent existential dilemmas, and at other times his particular past. “Release me somehow,” Bidart’s doomed, incestuous Myrrha prays, “from both / life and death” (Desire, 54). Bidart says in an interview, as Berryman might have said, that he is “trying to ﬁgure out why the past was as it was, what patterns and powers kept me at its mercy (so I could change, and escape)” (Western, 237). Dream Song 385 (the last in the one-volume book) in fact presents itself as tragic acceptance: “Fall comes to us as a prize / to rouse us toward our fate” (DS, 407). Bidart’s characters look for just such acceptance, though they do not often ﬁnd it (or else they go mad when they do); his long poem about Myrrha, “The Second Hour of the Night,” becomes (as Chiasson has shown) a poem about such seeking, about Bidart’s “diﬃcult necessity of playing himself” (Chiasson, 138). Bidart and Berryman share not a style or a surface but a set of strategies and intentions, portraying their oeuvres as theatrical performances of extended mourning by a fractured and guilty self. Those shared strategies (rarely visible at the levels of sound or diction) broaden the contexts for

248 |   

the stylistic debts described earlier in this essay. Those debts mark Berryman’s more visible inﬂuence on poets whose careers began much later, poets — Bang and Levine, certainly, but also Brock-Broido, Waldner, Young — who may still be developing their palettes and their repertoires of forms. Whereas Bidart appears to adopt some of Berryman’s obsessions into a style of his own, younger poets have found in Berryman a stylistic model (perhaps the only one of his “middle generation”) ﬁt for their own, up-tothe-minute concerns.

Notes 1. Quoted in Thomas Travisano, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 283. 2. Liz Waldner, Self and Simulacra (Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2001), 3. Waldner’s other recent books also invoke the author of The Dream Songs — the more autobiographical volume Homing Devices (1998) explains, “When I was ﬁfteen I could have said with Mr. Berryman: It’s not a good position I’m in” (Oakland, CA: O Books, 1998), 55. 3. Jeremy Glazier, “Berryman’s Bones,” Boston Review 27, no. 1 (2002): 45. Joanna Fuhrman, Ugh Ugh Ocean (Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose Press), 19. 4. Mark Levine, Debt (New York: Morrow, 1993), 17. Subsequent references appear in the text. 5. John Berryman, Collected Poems, 1937 – 1971, ed. Charles Thornbury (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 163. Subsequent references appear in the text abbreviated CP. 6. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 24. Subsequent references appear in the text abbreviated DS. 7. Helen Vendler, The Given and the Made (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 46. Subsequent references appear in the text. 8. Louise Glück, Proofs and Theories (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1994), 76. Subsequent references appear in the text. 9. Mark Levine, Enola Gay (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 4. 10. David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 167. 11. Alan Golding, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 57. 12. Joshua Clover, Madonna Anno Domini (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 45; Amy England, The Flute Ship Castricum (Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, 2001), 64; Ange Mlinko, Matinees (Cambridge, MA: Zoland, 1999), 23. 13. Lucie Brock-Broido, The Master Letters (New York: Knopf, 1995); Susan

My Name Is Henri: Poets Discover John Berryman | 249 Wheeler, Smokes (Marshﬁeld, MA: Four Way Books, 1996); Maurice Manning, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Kevin Young, Jelly Roll: A Blues (New York: Knopf, 2003); Brenda Shaughnessy, Interior with Sudden Joy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). Subsequent references appear in the text, Brock-Broido abbreviated Master, Young abbreviated Jelly Roll. 14. Lucie Brock-Broido and Wayne Koestenbaum, “A Conversation,” Parnassus 23, no. 1 – 2 (1998): 156. 15. David Haven Blake, “Public Dreams: Berryman and the Culture of Confession,” American Literary History 13, no. 4 (2001): 717. Brock-Broido’s interest in Berryman remains evident, though hardly controlling, in her most recent work: her poem “Death as a German Expert” adapts (as her note acknowledges) Berryman’s Dream Song version of Paul Celan’s Todesfugue (Brock-Broido, Trouble in Mind [New York: Knopf, 2003], 67). 16. John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 330. Subsequent references appear in the text abbreviated Freedom. 17. Kevin Young, “Responsible Delight,” Kenyon Review 21 (Spring 1999): 162. 18. Mary Jo Bang, Louise in Love (New York: Grove Press, 2001). Subsequent references appear in the text. 19. Letter to the author, April 29, 2004. Bang also points out the quotation from “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” embedded in her “Eclipsed”: Death “takes us one by one” (Bang, 3; CP, 138). 20. John Berryman, Henry’s Fate (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 20. Subsequent references appear in the text. 21. “A Call for Response: Symposium on Subjectivity and Style,” FENCE 3, no. 1 (2001): 115, 116. 22. Mark Levine, “Writing It: Some Observations on the Poetics of Territoriality,” Iowa Review 32, no. 1 (2002): 73. 23. George W. S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context (1980; repr. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997), 117. 24. Frank Bidart, Desire (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 9; Frank Bidart, In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965 – 1990 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 34. Subsequent references appear in the text, the latter abbreviated Western. 25. Dan Chiasson, “Presence: Frank Bidart,” Raritan 20, no. 4 (2001): 123. Subsequent references appear in the text. 26. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 256. 27. Frank Bidart, Music Like Dirt (Louisville, KY: Sarabande, 2002), 14. Subsequent references appear in the text abbreviated Music. 28. John Berryman, 77 Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964), 68; John Berryman, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 87. Subsequent references appear in the text abbreviated 77 DS and His Toy.

250 |   

Bibliography Bang, Mary Jo. Louise in Love. New York: Grove Press, 2001. Beach, Christopher. Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry between Community and Institution. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999. Berryman, John. Collected Poems, 1937 – 1971. Edited by Charles Thornbury. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. ———. The Dream Songs. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. ———. The Freedom of the Poet. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. ———. Henry’s Fate. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. ———. His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968. ———. 77 Dream Songs. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964. Bidart, Frank. Desire. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. ———. In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965 – 1990. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. ———. Music Like Dirt. Louisville, KY: Sarabande, 2002. Blake, David Haven. “Public Dreams: Berryman and the Culture of Confession.” American Literary History 13, no. 4 (2001): 716 – 36. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Inﬂuence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Brock-Broido, Lucie. The Master Letters. New York: Knopf, 1995. ———. Trouble in Mind. New York: Knopf, 2003. Brock-Broido, Lucie, and Wayne Koestenbaum. “A Conversation.” Parnassus 23, no. 1 – 2 (1998): 143 – 65. “A Call for Response: Symposium on Subjectivity and Style.” FENCE 3, no. 1 (2001): 109 – 16. Chiasson, Dan. “Presence: Frank Bidart.” Raritan 20, no. 4 (2001): 117 – 38. Clover, Joshua. Madonna Anno Domini. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode. London: Faber and Faber, 1975. England, Amy. The Flute Ship Castricum. Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, 2001. Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Fuhrman, Joanna. Ugh Ugh Ocean. Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose Press, 2003. Glazier, Jeremy. “Berryman’s Bones.” Boston Review 27, no. 1 (2002): 45. Glück, Louise. Proofs and Theories. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1994. Golding, Alan. From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Levine, Mark. Debt. New York: Morrow, 1993. ———. Enola Gay. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. ———. “Writing It: Some Observations on the Poetics of Territoriality.” Iowa Review 32, no. 1 (2002): 71 – 79. Manning, Maurice. Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

My Name Is Henri: Poets Discover John Berryman | 251 Mlinko, Ange. Matinees. Cambridge, MA: Zoland, 1999. Perkins, David. Is Literary History Possible? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Shaughnessy, Brenda. Interior with Sudden Joy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Travisano, Thomas. Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Trow, George W. S. Within the Context of No Context. 1980. Reprint, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997. Vendler, Helen. The Given and the Made. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Wheeler, Susan. Smokes. Marshﬁeld, MA: Four Way Books, 1996. Waldner, Liz. Homing Devices. Oakland, CA: O Books, 1998. ———. Self and Simulacra. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2001. Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Vol. 1, The Poems. Edited by Richard J. Finneran. Rev. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1989. Young, Kevin. Jelly Roll: A Blues. New York: Knopf, 2003. ———. “Responsible Delight.” Kenyon Review 21 (Spring 1999): 160 – 69.

Contributors   has published on twentieth-century American poetry and the prosody of free verse in edited collections and numerous journals, including College English, Contemporary Literature, the Journal of English Linguistics, Sagetrieb, TwentiethCentury Literature, Visible Language, and the William Carlos Williams Review. Her own poetry has appeared in anthologies and in Calyx, Crab Orchard Review, Craz yhorse, Kalliope, Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, and 13th Moon. She has taught at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, Marquette University, and, most recently, Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.   is associate professor of English at Macalester College. His writings include Randall Jarrell and His Age (2002); Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden, an edition of Jarrell’s lectures on Auden, coedited with Hannah Brooks-Motl (2005); and two books of poems, Popular Music (1999) and Parallel Play (forthcoming 2006). He is currently completing a book on adolescence in twentieth-century poetry.   is associate professor of English at the University of Maine. He is the author of Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (2004) and coeditor of Charles Olson’s Collected Prose (1997). His books of poetry include A Knot Is Not a Tangle (2000) and The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes (forthcoming).   is associate professor of English at the University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of Henry James and Queer Modernity (2003) and numerous essays on the sexual politics of Anglo-American prose and poetry. He has also served as general editor of an authoritative two-volume Encyclopedia of American Poetry (1998, 2001). His current book project is entitled Imagining China in Modern American Prose.   is assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University. He has published on a range of authors, including Jean Rhys, Cormac McCarthy, Truman Capote, Jamaica Kincaid, the Nuyorican poets, and Julia Alvarez. .   teaches courses in poetics and historiography at the University of Denver, where he is associate professor of English. His work has appeared in various edited collections and journals, including Printed Voices (2004), Studying Cultural Landscapes (2003), The World in Time and Space (2002), and Denver Quarterly (2000).   is visiting assistant professor in Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University, and also teaches in the Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking. He has contributed to Poetry and Pedagog y: The Challenge of the Contemporary and has authored other essays on American poetry. He is currently working on a book about the ways in which experimental writers negotiate tradition and innovation in contemporary sequence poetry.

254 | Contributors   is professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard University, where she teaches courses in early American literature and culture. The author of The Regenerate Lyric: Theolog y and Innovation in American Poetry (1992) and The Line’s Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight (1998), she is currently at work on two books, Where the Meanings Are: Classic New England Literature Reappraised (to be published by Harvard University Press) and Jacob’s Cane: A Family Story of Jews, Commerce, and the Globalization of the Golden Land.   is assistant professor of English at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has published articles on James Dickey, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Karl Shapiro. He is working on a book-length study of male American poets of the middle generation, masculinity, and World War II.   is assistant professor of English at the University of Georgia. She has published essays on Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Frank O’Hara, and is the author of Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading (forthcoming). Her current project is a study of surrealism, American poetry, and the Museum of Modern Art, 1936 – 68.   is professor of English and comparative literature and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (2001) and is at work on a book about phenomenality and dissatisfaction from Kant to Adorno.

Acknowledgments My fervent thanks to Melissa Solomon, for planting the seed so many years ago; Duncan Dobbelman, for helping to organize the collection and furnishing its title; Gretchen Knapp, for customary shrewdness and abundant good humor; Bill Pore, for scouting in the stacks and nailing down those elusive quotations. It has been a great pleasure to work with the University of Iowa Press, and particular thanks go to the anonymous manuscript readers, for many valuable suggestions; John Mulvihill, for superb copyediting and fact-checking beyond the call of duty; Karen Copp, for graciously handling all illustrations and artwork; Charlotte Wright, for guiding me through production so patiently; Holly Carver, for pleasant encouragements along the way; and my dear friend Prasenjit Gupta, for believing in the project and making it go! An emphatic note of gratitude must be sounded to recognize my contributors, for excellent work and wonderful cooperation with their editor during a long but gratifying process of collaboration. Special thanks to Lisa and Rei, who were “present at the creation.” And as always, I appreciate the love and support of my family, without whom really nothing is possible.

Index Adorno, Theodor, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 114 Alter, Nora, 74 Anderson, Benedict, 134 Aragon, Louis, 95 Arendt, Hannah, 114, 116, 153 Arnold, Matthew, 114 Ashbery, John, 57, 74, 153, 155, 178n43 Atlas, James, 154, 155 Auden, Wystan Hugh, 146 – 47n5, 158, 166, 184, 191 – 94; “Advent,” 166; “American Poetry,” 191 – 92; “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” 136, 154; “Please Make Yourself at Home,” 192; “The Witnesses,” 194 Augustine, Confessions, 28 Axelrod, Steven Gould, 2, 3, 11n11, 20 Bang, Mary Jo, 234, 239, 248; “The Ana of Bliss,” 242; Louise in Love, 240 – 42 Baudelaire, Charles, 164, 174, 179n54 Bellow, Saul, Humboldt’s Gift, 154, 162 Benjamin, Walter, 84 – 86, 156 – 58, 160, 162 – 63, 164, 165, 176n19, 177n27, 188 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 14, 18 Berlant, Lauren, 54 Berryman, John, 77 Dream Songs, 233, 234, 240, 245; Berryman’s Sonnets, 240, 241; The Dispossessed, 233; The Dream Songs, 234, 236; Dream Songs #8, 237; #21, 246; #22, 236; #29, 236, 244; #36, 246; #43, 246; #46, 236; #78, 237; #85, 237; #136, 246; #148, 155; #150, 155, 175; #151, 154; #152, 154; #153, 2; #156, 154; #187, 242; #304, 242; #379, 247; #384, 246 – 47; #385, 247; “Formal Elegy,” 236; The Freedom of the Poet, 239, 244;

Henry’s Fate, 242; His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, 233, 245; Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, 233, 244 Bertholf, Robert, 203, 221 Bidart, Frank, 234, 244, 247, 248; “Advice to the Players,” 245; “The Arc,” 245; “Ellen West,” 244; “The First Hour of the Night,” 245; “For Bill Nestrick (1940 – 96),” 246; “For Mary Ann Youngren,” 246; “Golden State,” 246; “Herbert White,” 244; “If I Could Mourn Like a Mourning Dove,” 246; “In Memory of Joe Brainard,” 246; “Lady Bird,” 246; “Lament for the Makers,” 246; “The Second Hour of the Night,” 245, 247; “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky,” 244 – 45 Bishop, Elizabeth, 38, 44, 94, 184, 191, 195 – 98, 200n26, 233, 234, 243; “12 O’Clock News,” 56, 58 – 74; “The Armadillo,” 53; “At the Fishhouses,” 195 – 96; “Casabianca,” 54, 60; A Cold Spring, 195; “The Fish,” 72; “Insomnia,” 71, 78n38; “Love Lies Sleeping,” 71; North and South, 53, 195; “Notes for Poetry Reviews,” 55, 56, 57; “Roosters,” 53; “Sandpiper,” 60; “Sleeping on the Ceiling,” 71; “Sleeping Standing Up,” 71 Blackmur, Richard Palmer, 245 Blackwood, Caroline, 16 Blake, David Haven, 239 Blessing, Richard, 190 Bloom, Harold, 238 Bly, Robert, 183 Bontemps, Arna, 133 Boorum, Ted, “Finnegans Wake,” 95 Bornstein, George, 96

258 | Index Boudreau, Kris, 77n30 Bozeman, Theodore, 25 Breslin, James, 50n17 Breslin, Paul, 44 Bridges, Robert, 213 Brock-Broido, Lucie, 234, 240, 248; “At Lissadell,” 239; “Death as a German Expert,” 249n15; The Master Letters, 239 Brogan, T. V. F., 210 Brooks, Gwendolyn, “Malcolm X,” 140; “Memorial to Ed Bland,” 140; “of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery,” 140 Brown, John, 143 Burlingame, Dorothy T., War and Children, 85 Burt, Stephen, 89, 94, 114, 128n3, 129n7 Caws, Peter, 173 – 74, 178n52 Cerf, Bennett, 125 Chattarji, Subarno, 55, 60, 62, 67 Chiasson, Dan, 245, 247 Ciardi, John, “Poem for My TwentyNinth Birthday,” 93 Clark, Alfred Corning, 22 Clark, Suzanne, 54 Clover, Joshua, 238 – 39 Cooper, Philip, 14 Corman, Cid, 203, 204, 205, 212 Cotton, John, 21 Cox, Kenneth, 203 – 204 Crane, Stephen, 47 Creeley, Robert, 8 Cullen, Countee, “From the Dark Tower,” 140 Cummings, Frederick, 143 Davis, Charles, 135 Davis, Francis, 103 Debord, Guy, 184 – 85 Derrida, Jacques, 43, 46 – 47 Dick, Anne, 51n24

Dickey, James, 183 Dickie, Margaret, 53, 65 – 66, 74n3, 75n11, 78n37 Dickinson, Emily, 26, 74n2, 205 Douglas, Ann, 54 Douglass, Frederick, 143 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, 6 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, “Frederick Douglass,” 140 Dunbar, William, “Lament for the Makars,” 246 Edwards, Jonathan, 21 – 27 Eisenhower, Dwight David, 123 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 1 – 2, 114, 158, 163, 245; The Waste Land, 159, 166, 171 Ellison, Julie, 57 – 58, 80n46 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 21, 198; Nature, 193 England, Amy, 239 Faulkner, William, 245 Felheim, Marvin, 143 Ferguson, Suzanne, 3, 9, 90, 119, 127 Fergusson, Frances, The Idea of a Theatre, 245 Field, Edward, “World War II,” 93 Flynn, Richard, 3, 105, 114, 119, 121, 128n3, 129n7, 130n16 Forbes, John, “Love Poem,” 80n47 Foucault, Michel, 83 – 84 Fowler, Alastair, 245 Frankenberg, Lloyd, 56 Franklin, Benjamin, 21 Freud, Anna, War and Children, 85 Freud, Sigmund, 46, 89 – 90, 126, 127; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 84 – 85; Civilization and Its Discontents, 173; The Interpretation of Dreams, 90; “Mourning and Melancholia,” 138 – 39 Frick, Clay, 126

Index | 259 Fried, Michael, 47 Frost, Robert, 245 Fuhrman, Joanna, 240; “Glimpsing John Berryman Reborn as a Hasid,” 234 Fuller, Roy, 95 Fussell, Paul, 59 – 60 Gelpi, Albert, 15 Gendron, Dennis, 137, 141 Gilson, Étienne, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, 28 Ginsberg, Allen, 183 Glazier, Jeremy, “Berryman’s Bones,” 234 Glissant, Édouard, Poetics of Relation, 185, 187, 198 Glück, Louise, 237, 242 – 43, 244 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, 119 Goldensohn, Lorrie, 88, 95 Golding, Alan, 238 Habermas, Jürgen, 159, 162, 165, 166, 174, 175 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 37 Haskell, Molly, 105 Hass, Robert, 8 Hathcock, Nelson, 3 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 21 Hayden, Robert, “Approximations,” 142; “The Ballad of Nat Turner,” 136, 144; “A Ballad of Remembrance,” 142; “The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield,” 143; “Belsen, Day of Liberation,” 134, 143; “The Diver,” 146; “Electrical Storm,” 142; “Elegies for Paradise Valley,” 141 – 42, 144; “El-Hajj Malik ElShabazz,” 144; “Frederick Douglass,” 134, 143; “From the Corpse Woodpiles, from the Ashes,” 142; “Full Moon,” 142; “How It Strikes a Contemporary,” 136; “An Inference

of Mexico,” 136; “John Brown,” 143 – 46; “Killing the Calves,” 142; “A Letter from Phillis Wheatley,” 134; “Locus,” 137; “Middle Passage,” 133, 144; “Monet’s ‘Waterlilies,’ ” 137; “Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday,” 142; “The Night-Blooming Cereus,” 137; “Night, Death, Mississippi,” 142; “October,” 137; “O Daedalus, Fly Away Home,” 138; “On Lookout Mountain,” 135 – 36; “The Peacock Room,” 137 – 38; “A Plague of Starlings,” 142; “The Point,” 149n29; “The Return,” 142; “Runagate Runagate,” 143; “Theme and Variation,” 137; “Words in the Mourning Time,” 136, 144; “The Year of the Child,” 142 Heaney, Seamus, 183, 190 Hearn, Lafcadio, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 42 Heidegger, Martin, 155 – 57; Being and Time, 165; What Is Called Thinking, 165 Hemans, Felicia, 54 Herbert, George, 44, 73; “The Forerunners,” 79n42 Hirsch, Edward, 1 – 2 Hollander, John, 191 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 26, 29, 213, 214 Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 114 Hotelling-Zona, Kirstin, 78n36 Howe, Irving, 168 – 69, 174 Hughes, Langston, “The Bitter River,” 140; “Death of Do Dirty: A Rounder’s Song,” 140; “Montage of a Dream Deferred,” 140 Hugo, Richard, 183 James, Henry, The Ambassadors, 200n24; The Portrait of a Lady, 15

260 | Index James, William, 126 Jameson, Fredric, 162 Jarrell, Mackie (Langham), 89 Jarrell, Mary von Schrader, 116 Jarrell, Randall, 63, 184, 195, 234, 243, 245; “About Popular Culture,” 125, 131n 29; “Absent with Oﬃcial Leave,” 86 – 90, 91, 92, 97, 105; “Burning the Letters,” 104 – 105, 106; “A Conversation with the Devil,” 119, 125; “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” 85, 117; “Eighth Air Force,” 85; “The Emancipators,” 94 – 96; “A Field Hospital,” 87; “A Game at Salzburg,” 97; “Go, Man, Go!” 124, 125; “Good-bye, Wendover; Good-bye, Mountain Home,” 97; “Hope,” 114, 127; “In Montecito,” 114; “The Intellectual in America,” 122; “The Little Cars,” 124; “The Lost World,” 115 – 16; “Money,” 114, 116 – 19, 121, 126; “Next Day,” 105, 114, 125 – 28; “The Obscurity of the Poet,” 118 – 19, 125, 129n13; “Pilots, Man Your Planes,” 87, 92; A Sad Heart at the Supermarket, 114, 122; “A Sad Heart at the Supermarket,” 116 – 17, 120 – 21, 125 – 28; “Say Good-bye to Big Daddy,” 114, 115, 123 – 24; “The Schools of Yesteryear,” 122; “Sears Roebuck,” 114, 117 – 19; “Second Air Force,” 104; “Siegfried,” 87, 92, 99, 101 – 103, 105; “The Survivor among Graves,” 95, 98 – 99, 105; “The Taste of the Age,” 121, 122; “Terms,” 90 – 93, 104, 105; “Thinking of the Lost World,” 83, 115, 120; “Three Bills,” 114; “Transient Barracks,” 87, 97; “The Truth,” 83, 85, 96 – 98, 105 Jehlen, Myra, 18 – 19 Joyce, James, Ulysses, 155

Julian-James, Cassie Mason Myers, 38 – 40 Jullich, Jeﬀrey, 243 Karenga, Ron, 133 Karski, Jan, Story of a Secret State, 85 Keats, John, 187 Knight, Janice, 21 Koselleck, Reinhart, 169 Kramer, Hilton, 184 Kramer, Lawrence, 50n23 Kunitz, Stanley, 95 Kutzinski, Vera, 135 LaCapra, Dominick, 94, 98 Lane, Anthony, 3 Laughlin, James, 158 Lawrence, Jacob, John Brown, 143 – 45 Leavis, Frank Raymond, 114 Leavis, Queenie Dorothy Roth, 114 Leuchtenburg, William, 113, 120 Levertov, Denise, 54; “Biafra,” 79 – 80n44; “The Gulf,” 56, 77n27; Relearning the Alphabet, 55; “Scenario,” 61 – 63 Levine, Mark, 234, 240, 243, 248; Debt, 234 – 37; Enola Gay, 238; “Work Song,” 234 – 36 Lipscomb, Eugene, 123 – 24, 126 Longenbach, James, 3, 97, 105 Lootens, Tricia, 77n29 Lorde, Audre, “For the Record,” 140; “Power,” 140; “The Same Death Over and Over,” 140 Lowell, Amy, 38 Lowell, James Russell, 38 Lowell, Robert, 85, 114, 121, 123, 185 – 86, 195, 200n27, 234, 243, 244; “91 Revere Street,” 33, 36 – 40, 42 – 43, 46; “Alfred Corning Clark,” 22; “The Cadet Picture of My Father” (after Rilke), 50n15; Collected Poems, 3, 10, 244; “The Day,” 31;

Index | 261 The Dolphin, 37; “Dolphin,” 29; “The Drinker,” 23; “Epilogue,” 15, 31; “Fall Weekend at Milgate,” 30; “Father’s Bedroom,” 40 – 47; For the Union Dead, 22; “For the Union Dead,” 22 – 23, 77n27, 124; “Grass Fires,” 48; “History,” 161; “In Memory of Arthur Winslow,” 13 – 14, 17 – 20; “Jean Staﬀord, A Letter,” 37; “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts,” 23 – 24, 26 – 27; “July in Washington,” 22; Land of Unlikeness, 17; Life Studies, 233; Lord Weary’s Castle, 36; “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” 2, 120; “Middle Age,” 25; The Mills of the Kavanaughs, 37; “Mr. Edwards and the Spider,” 24 – 25; “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” 36; “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium,” 43, 45; “The Neo-Classical Urn,” 23 – 24, 29; “The Old Flame,” 29; “Onion Skin,” 43; “Phillips House Revisited,” 13 – 14; “Reading Myself,” 35; “Robert Frost at Midnight,” 1; “Robert T. S. Lowell,” 41; “Sailing Home from Rapallo,” 36; “Shifting Colors,” 48; “Skunk Hour,” 16, 36; “Soft Wood,” 23; “Tenth Muse,” 29; “Those Before Us,” 23; “To Delmore Schwartz,” 8, 177n28; “To Mother,” 13, 14, 37; “Unwanted,” 15 – 17 MacDonald, Dwight, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” 114, 118 – 19 Manning, Maurice, 240; Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, 239 Matterson, Stephen, 50n17 McDonald, Gail, 105 McGann, Jerome, 96 McGrath, Charles, 3

McGuire, William, 77 – 78n33 McLuhan, Marshall, 118 Melba, Nellie, 126 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 168 Merrill, James, 72 – 73 Merwin, W. S., 239 Millier, Brett, 60, 76n20, 76n22, 77n26 Mlinko, Ange, 239 Moore, Marianne, 26 Myers, Major Mordecai, 39 – 40 Nelson, Cary, 184 Nemerov, Howard, “Sigmund Freud,” 95 New, Elisa, 34 Nicholas II, Czar of Russia, 159, 164 Niedecker, Lorine, “Black Hawk held . . .,” 206 – 207; Collected Works, 8; “Darwin,” 221; “Easter,” 8; “The Graves,” 2; “He lived — childhood summers . . .,” 206, 208 – 10; “Linnaeus in Lapland,” 212 – 14; “Now in one year . . .,” 205; “O late fall . . .,” 211 – 12; “Old Mother turns blue . . .,” 206, 207 – 208, 210; “Otherwise,” 212, 213 – 14; “Paean to Place,” 212, 214 – 21, 229; “Poet’s Work,” 2; “Springtime’s wide . . .,” 211; “Wintergreen Ridge,” 221 – 29 Nietzsche, Friederich, 156; Ecce Homo, 43, 46 – 47, Untimely Meditations, 136 Nims, John Frederick, 114 O’Connell, Beatrice, 192 O’Hara, Frank, 36, 179n54; “The Day Lady Died,” 131n27 Olson, Charles, 243 Owen, Wilfred, 56, 88 Parini, Jay, 189 Pearson, Gabriel, 19, 24 Perkins, David, 238 Perloﬀ, Marjorie, 157

262 | Index Phillips, Robert, 153 – 54 Pinch, Adela, 80n45 Pinkney, Tony, 172 Plath, Sylvia, 245 Pollet, Elizabeth, Portrait of Delmore, 169 Porter, Arabel, 193 Pound, Ezra, 1 – 2, 78n34, 157, 229 Presley, Elvis, 114 Pritchard, William, 3, 88, 115, 119 Proust, Marcel, 115 Pyle, Ernie, 85, 88, 91 Reed, Lou, “My House,” 154 – 55 Reyneau, Betsy Graves, 137 Reznikoﬀ, Charles, 229 Rich, Adrienne, 8, 54, 77n27, 77n29; “Format and Form,” 203, 205, 229 – 30 Riesman, David, The Lonely Crowd, 114, 118 – 19 Roethke, Theodore, 245; “The Abyss,” 188 – 89; The Far Field, 183 – 98 passim; “The Foreboding,” 197; “In a Dark Time,” 190 – 91; “Infirmity,” 197 – 98; “I Waited,” 193; “Journey to the Interior,” 187, 190; “The Longing,” 186; Open House, 191; “Otto,” 194 – 95; “Root Cellar,” 186; “The Rose,” 187 – 88, 194; “The Storm (Forio d’Ischia),” 192 Roman, Camille, 53, 61, 63 – 65, 75n11, 76n26 Rosenthal, M. L., 184 Rosler, Martha, “Bringing the War Home,” 67 – 69 Rudman, Mark, 30 Schevill, James, “Man Alone,” 95 Schoerke, Meg, 3 Schwartz, Delmore, 89, 245; “America, America!” (poem), 170, 173; “America! America!” (story), 172; “At This Moment in Time,” 164;

“The Ballad of the Children of the Czar,” 159 – 60, 162; “The Beautiful American Word, Sure,” 166 – 67; “Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day,” 153, 174, 178 – 79n54; “Concerning the Synthetic Unity of Apperception,” 164; “Father and Son,” 170; Genesis, 157, 171, 178n44; “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” 168, 172; “In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave,” 162 – 63, 164; “The Mind Is an Ancient and Famous Capital,” 172, 173, 174; “O Love, Sweet Animal,” 168; “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon along the Seine,” 160; Shenandoah, 157, 171, 178n44; “Socrates’ Ghost Must Haunt Me Now,” 161; “Sonnet: O City, City,” 165 – 66, 173; “The World Is a Wedding,” 172 Schwartz, Harry, 158 Schwartz, Rose Nathanson, 158 Schweik, Susan, 53, 54, 57 Scollon, Ron, 183 Scott, Joan W., 84 Seager, Allan, 191 Seidel, Frederick, 38 Shapiro, Harvey, Poets of World War II, 108n30 Shapiro, Karl, 114, 125; “Nigger,” 95 Sharp, Ellen, 143 – 44 Shaughnessy, Brenda, Interior with Sudden Joy, 239, 240 Shaw, Robert Gould, 22 – 23 Silverman, Kaja, 103 Smith, William Jay, 95 Snyder, Gary, 183; “River in the Valley,” 198 Sontag, Susan, 76n22; Regarding the Pain of Others, 5, 59, 63, 74; Trip to Hanoi, 77n31 Spahr, Juliana, 243 Stambaugh, Joan, 176n13 Starbuck, George, 61

Index | 263 Starr, Sara, 89 Stein, Gertrude, 1, 10, 178n50 Stevens, Wallace, 97, 157, 166, 169, 245; Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, 168; “Of Modern Poetry,” 167 – 68; Parts of a World, 168; “The Snow Man,” 186 – 87 Stiﬄer, Randall, 184 Tarbell, Ida, 126 Tate, Allen, 105 Thoreau, Henry David, 125; Walden, 163 Thurston, Michael, 185 – 86 Tolson, Melvin, 133 Travisano, Thomas, 103, 78n40 Trow, George W. S., 243 Van den Haag, Ernest, 114, 126, 127, 130n15 Vendler, Helen, 236, 243 Voigt, Ellen Bryant, 93 Waldner, Liz, 240, 248; Homing Devices, 248n2; Self and Simulacra, 234 Walker, Margaret, 133 Warren, Robert Penn, Brother to Dragons, 125 Watkin, E. I., Catholic Art and Culture, 28 Weber, Max, 15, 30 Weisberg, Robert, 123 Whalen, Philip, 183 Wheatley, Phillis, “On the Death of General Wooster,” 140

Wheeler, Susan, 234; Smokes, 239 Whistler, James McNeill, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, 137 Whitman, Walt, 170, 189 – 90; “The Sleepers,” 89; “Song of Myself,” 89 Williams, Linda, 103 Williams, Oscar, The War Poets, 96, 108n30 Williams, Pontheolla, 133 – 34, 143, 147n10 Williams, Raymond, 172, 173 Williams, Val, 67, 72 Williams, Wilburn, 135 Williams, William Carlos, 20 – 21, 170, 205, 206, 221 – 22, 229, 231n11, 245; “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” 21; “The Desert Music,” 222 Williamson, Alan, 51n23 Witek, Terri, 49n6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, 96, 117 Woolf, Virginia, 59 Wordsworth, William, 195; “My heart leaps up when I behold,” 171; The Prelude, 173; “Tintern Abbey,” 193 Wright, James, 183 Wyler, William, The Best Years of Our Lives, 99 – 104 Yeats, William Butler, 146n5, 158, 166, 234, 245 Young, Kevin, 234, 240, 248; Jelly Roll, 239, 240 Zukofsky, Louis, 204, 205, 210, 229