Rebound: The American Poetry Book (Textxet 44)

TEXTXET

Studies in Comparative Literature 44 Series Editors C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen

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REBOUND THE AMERICAN POETRY BOOK EDITED BY MICHAEL HINDS AND STEPHEN MATTERSON

AMERICAN BOOKS ARE DIFFERENT FROM EUROPEAN BOOKS, EVEN WHEN THE AMERICAN SETS OFF IN PURSUIT OF TREES. GILLES DELEUZE AND FÉLIX GUATTARI THE DUSTJACKET’S TOO GOOD FOR A DUSTJACKET AND OUGHT TO BE ON MY TOMB. RANDALL JARRELL

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004

Cover photo: Michael Hinds The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence’. ISBN 90-420-1712-0 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004 Printed in The Netherlands

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The poem “A narrow fellow in the grass” is reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, and by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Quotations from Emily Dickinson’s correspondence are reprinted by permission of the publishers from The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1958, 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. “A Whitman’s Birthday Broadcast with Static” from Collected Poems by Frank O’Hara, copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administrix of the estate of Frank O’Hara. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. The lines from “From the Reformation Journal” from Swarm by Jorie Graham, copyright © 1999 by Jorie Graham, are reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. “The Book As Architecture”, © Charles Bernstein, is reprinted here with his permission. The copyright of “Empire, Sublimity and the Look of Things in Amy Clampitt’s The Kingfisher” is assigned to Justin Quinn. We would like to acknowledge our gratitude to the series editor Cedric Barfoot, Marieke Schilling at Rodopi, and to Maria Johnston for her invaluable help in preparing the final version. Thanks to Christine, Henry, Jean.

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CONTENTS

Introduction: A Speaking Whole Michael Hinds and Stephen Matterson 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

1

Binding Emily Dickinson Domhnall Mitchell

11

Fit Compositions: Whitman’s Revisions to Drum-Taps Eldrid Herrington

29

“To make it mean me”: Narrative Design in North of Boston Stephen Matterson

45

Lustra: Work and Text Stephen Wilson

57

Intentionality as Sensuality in Harmonium Charles Altieri

81

The Accidental Bridge: Hart Crane’s Theory of the Lyric Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos

89

William Carlos Williams’s An Early Martyr: The Descent Beckons Ron Callan

99

Selected Poems (The 1955): Randall Jarrell’s Book of the Dead Michael Hinds

115

It’s life in death to be bound, delivered, published”: Robert Lowell’s Revisions of Notebook 1967–68 Gareth Reeves

131

“Our lives inseparable”: The Contingent World of Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems Lucy Collins

141

Empire, Sublimity, and the Look of Things in Amy Clampitt’s The Kingfisher Justin Quinn

155

12

13

“What I wanted was nothing to do with monuments”: Erring and Lyn Hejinian’s The Guard Nerys Williams

169

Prometheans Unbound: Touching Books in Jorie Graham’s Swarm and Susan Howe’s “Scattering As Behaviour Toward Risk” Nick Selby

183

Afterword: The Book as Architecture Charles Bernstein

197

Notes on Contributors

199

Index

201

INTRODUCTION: A SPEAKING WHOLE

MICHAEL HINDS AND STEPHEN MATTERSON

I felt, even before I learned to read, that a book was a holy object; this awe perpetuates itself in each attempt to make, of a pile of poems, a speaking whole.1 Louise Glück This book consists of thirteen original articles on individual books of American poetry. The original motivation behind our commissioning of these essays was twofold, being in some measure corrective as well as exploratory. The corrective element arose from a near-axiomatic belief that critical and pedagogical mediations of American poetry, as well as its material transmission, have been and are dominated (perhaps increasingly so) by an emphasis on the individual poem. The reasons for this domination are varied. They include the continuing hegemony of New Criticism as a pedagogic practice and as a conceptual approach through which the poem is privileged and individuated as an autonomous entity; the reading of poetry from anthologies, whereby the context for the individual poem is not made available; classroom practices which concentrate on the decontextualized poem, and the cultural tendency for subjective investment in poetry that leads to concentration on the individual lyric. Our feeling was that this investment in the individual poem was problematic, in that it contradicted the terms in which poets have presented their work. These terms are often implicit in poetic practice, since poets present their poems as a book collection. Some poets have drawn attention to the fact that they perceive the book as the unit, and others have insisted that their poems do not exist as individual units. For example, Louise Glück’s insistence on the reprinting of her early volumes intact in the collection The First Five Books of Poems is founded on two principles. One is that “the idea of revising old work seems odd to me, the spirit animating that work being no longer accessible”, and the other is formal: “much thought went into their shaping.”2 In her essay for this collection Lucy Collins quotes Adrienne Rich saying exactly that she was “finished with the idea of a poem as a single, encapsulated event, a work of art complete in itself”. 3 Although many poets have explicitly or implicitly expressed this view of the poem, the weight of pedagogical and publication practice still tends to work against such an apprehension from becoming part of a critical approach. William Carlos 1. Louise Glück, The First Five Books of Poems, Manchester, 1997, xiv. 2. Ibid., xiii, xiv. 3. Adrienne Rich, “Blood, Bread and Poetry: The Location of the Poet”, in Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985, London, 1987, 180.

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Michael Hinds and Stephen Matterson

Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” is one of the most famous poems in American literature, yet the critical interpretations that it has generated only rarely involve consideration of its original positioning in a sequence. The implication is that only a Williams specialist would or should care about such matters. In fact, the desirability of studying and teaching the book as a conceptual unit may be frustrated in both material and pedagogic terms. Even where the pedagogic insistence on the autonomous text may be successfully challenged, the material difficulties might still remain and, in fact, may reinforce belief in the individual poem. To take a classroom example, we may certainly be successful in persuading students to see Robert Lowell’s Life Studies as a sequence in which Lowell dramatizes the narrative of a developing self, and that, therefore, each poem needs to be read as part of a narrative sequence. In the sequence Lowell makes use of echoes of images, phrases and incidents in such a way that the boundary of the individual poem is made to be fluid rather than rigid. Students may readily accept this, but this sense of sequence is then effaced by the presentation of Life Studies selections in anthologies. The selected two or three poems appear there exactly as if they were discrete artefacts, the boundaries of each poem fortified in spite of all Lowell’s efforts to dissolve them. This is not meant to be yet another attack on anthologies, which do after all serve important purposes.4 The point is that, perhaps inevitably, anthology transmission of poetry tends to support a critical methodology in which the poem is apprehended as a complete unit even where this approach is inappropriate or contradicts the poem’s original mode of transition. It is not, of course, just anthology transmission that supports this approach. There are numerous examples, some of them notorious, of editorial decisions that have damaged the poet’s sense of sequence or effaced the concept of the book as a unit. Anthony Thwaite ignored Philip Larkin’s arrangements of his individual books when he arranged the first edition of Larkin’s Collected Poems.5 Ted Hughes failed to publish Sylvia Plath’s own version of Ariel.6 For a variety of reasons, as Gareth Reeves and Michael Hinds explore in their essays here, poets themselves have on occasion subsequently altered the established sequence of a collection. As will be evident from the following essays, the originating motives of the book were expanded considerably by the contributors. The essays by Charles Altieri, Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos, Stephen Matterson, Lucy Collins, Justin Quinn and Nerys Williams explore in different ways renegotiations of lyric sequences by 4. Although it might be desirable if some of the major anthologies which include textual apparatus were to note that fact that some poems are parts of an overall narrative or sequence. 5. Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite, London, 1988. Thwaite did include listings of the order the poems had in the individual collections, 313-17. In 2003 The Marvell Press and Faber and Faber published a new Larkin Collected which restored the order of Larkin’s four published volumes, and in his new Introduction Thwaite effectively admitted that a mistake had been made in the earlier version. Though the 2003 Collected is also problematic, because of its exclusion of poems that had appeared in the 1988 edition, there is at least an acknowledgement that Larkin’s arrangement of the books should be respected. This may become standard editorial practice for making collected editions, and it was used for Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems, London and New York, 2003. 6. This failure was somewhat mitigated by Hughes’s inclusion of Plath’s list of her Ariel poems in his edition of her Collected Poems, London, 1981, 295. Marjorie Perloff has extensively examined the issue of the Ariel sequence in her 1984 essay “The Two Ariels: The Remaking of The Sylvia Plath Canon”, reprinted in Perloff, Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric, Evanston, 1990. The essay was also included in Poems in their Place: The Intertextuality and Order Of Poetic Collections, ed. Neil Fraistat, Chapel Hill, NC, 1986, a collection that is a vital precursor for Rebound.

Introduction

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restoring the concept of the book to consideration of the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Robert Frost, Adrienne Rich, Amy Clampitt and Lyn Hejinian. The contributions of Eldrid Herrington, Stephen Wilson, Michael Hinds and Gareth Reeves examine the effects of various revisions in the construction of books by Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell. The two essays which frame this book, by Domhnall Mitchell and Nick Selby, actually challenge the concept of the book’s hegemony, exploring how Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe and Jorie Graham provide a hermeneutic challenge to Whitman’s influential concept of the book as a body.

II The exploratory element of Rebound projects strategies of reading American poetry books that recognize how poems work intrinsically within them. It also asserts how poems may relate extrinsically and metonymically through books to the cultures that frame them. We focus on American poetry books to insist that poems and poetry books are culture-specific, historically constructed and manifesting an active social presence. Furthermore, whether it is Stephen Crane fiddling with rows of black riders or Susan Howe selecting snapshots from the family album for her book-covers, classic and contemporary American poetry has been peculiarly bound up with the history, philosophy and process of book manufacture, connecting individual imaginations to material production. Rather than reinvesting in a discredited literary nationalism or a simplistic exceptionalism, we assert that American poets are exceptionally aware that the codex is a tangible signifier of their labour, not least because of the demands of capital in American culture (as the essay on Hart Crane makes particularly clear). Furthermore, American poets place a unique emphasis on editorial activity as imaginative process, whether that is in relation to their own writing (Adrienne Rich’s insistence on exercising control over the transmission and potentially, the reception of her work) or to that of others (Pound’s fashioning of T.S. Eliot). Rebound is not an exceptionalist project, but it does assert that American poetry books manifest a consciousness of America and of being American, and furthermore that American poetry books converse with one another within a complex and wellestablished tradition. Having said that, American poetry books participate in more than a national dialogue among themselves, and many of the readings in Rebound connect to concepts of the book and reading that are decidedly non-Americanist and counter-exceptionalist. If anything, Rebound attests to the conceptual strength of the American book through its confident interaction with books and theories of the book from other cultures and traditions. It is important to stress simultaneously that the American poetry book does not encapsulate the culture and history that produced it, rather the book is a part of the unrealizably immense text of the nation. The book cannot manifest wholly that immensity, but evokes it metonymically. The concept of the American book as exceptional (if not exceptionalist) is as powerfully perceptible from outside America as from within it. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have asserted: America is a special case. Of course it is not immune from domination by trees or the search for roots. This is evident even in the literature, in the quest for a national identity and even for a European ancestry or genealogy

4

Michael Hinds and Stephen Matterson (Kerouac going off in search of his ancestors). Nevertheless, everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successful lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside. American books are different from European books, even when the American sets off in pursuit of trees. The conception of the book is different. Leaves of Grass. And directions in American are different: the search for adolescence and the return to the Old World occur in the East. But there is the rhizomatic West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, its shifting and displaced frontiers. There is a whole American “map” in the West, where even the trees form rhizomes. America reversed the directions; it put its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that came full circle; its West is the edge of the East. (India is not the intermediary between the Occident and the Orient, as Haudricourt believed: America is the pivot point and mechanism of reversal.) 7

Deleuze and Guattari’s reference to Leaves of Grass locates Whitman as an inevitable starting-point for Rebound’s field of action, and many of the essays are constructed around the notion of a Whitmanic legacy. This may seem a self-evident course of action, yet Whitman has rarely been recognized as a poet who was also a philosopher and theorist of the book. That role has been preserved almost exclusively for Whitman’s French contemporary, Stéphane Mallarmé, whose reputation prospered from T.S. Eliot’s sponsorship while Whitman was reduced by the same critic’s deflations. A conventional reading of Leaves of Grass advances an unproblematic and uncomplicated theory of the book as a site where its author may achieve full selfexpression through his song, and where each new edition in turn would renew its poet as well as its reader. Whitman creates therefore what Timothy Morris describes as “the poetics of presence”, and in doing so he sets a canonical standard for subsequent American poets that equates recognition with assertions of presence. 8 The backdrop to such a robustly self-assertive canonical enterprise is the hucksterism of Whitman. Without significant sponsorship or subsidy, Whitman had to make his book a marketable object. To do this, it had to be a malleable object, adaptive to various buyers, and it also had to generate a buzz in order to ensure subscriptions. Whitman did not just publish Leaves of Grass, he floated it. For Eliot, Whitman’s tasteless rowdiness and commercialism were answered eloquently by the reticence of Mallarmé, whose conceptualization of the book as “un objet spirituel” envisaged the poetry book as the site where the individual consciousness of the poet could disappear back into the vaster spaces of tradition (an argument revisited brilliantly in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”). The facile distinction is that Mallarmé’s book is metaphysical and Whitman’s is physical, one is made of pure ether and the other bound with glue and water. The materiality of Leaves of Grass is devoted to marking the continuing process of a self being fulfilled through expression. Even as Walt is stuffed into his pages, however, the fulfillment of this process is never final, and is only as good as the last mark he has made on the page. He is compelled to keep on reiterating that single piece of type, “I”, which guarantees self-contradiction and self-multiplication, but not unity. In Mallarmé, the 7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, 1987, 19. 8. Timothy Morris, Becoming Canonical in American Poetry, Urbana, IL, 1995, xi.

Introduction

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material text is deployed in a tantalizing poetics of delay, forestalling continually the imminent death of the poet and his or her ultimate transcendence into the greater unseen entity of Le Livre, the big book in the sky. It becomes apparent that Mallarmé’s livre and Whitman’s Leaves are not as adversarial towards one another as an Eliotic perspective would allow, as Whitman’s inability to achieve the entity of a unified self is also indicative of the poetics of delay. More obviously, Whitman’s Leaves actually became a spiritual instrument, at least for the congregation of a new church in Bolton, England, in 1891. Paradoxically, therefore, Whitman, Mallarmé, and Eliot share an interest in the book as a medium for enabling the disappearance of the author. Even as his Waltish personae proliferate, Whitman is moving simultaneously towards anonymity, and what we might customarily view as his ultimate pushing towards transcendence can be read alternatively as his desire for disappearance. In this context, we might rethink Whitman’s genius for the envoi as being indicative of his sense of the book as a vessel that takes responsibility for its own course when it has been sent forth: Then falter not O book, fulfil your destiny, You not a reminiscence of the land alone, You too as a lone bark cleaving the ether, purpos’d I know not whither, yet ever full of faith, Consort to every ship that sails, sail you! Bear forth to them folded my love, (dear mariners, for you I fold it here in every leaf;) Speed on my book! spread your white sails my little bark athwart the imperious waves, Chant on, sail on, bear o’er the boundless blue from me to every sea9 Published eleven years after the first Leaves of Grass, Mallarmé’s Le Livre enables us vitally to connect the beginnings of European modernism with those of American modernism, particularly as his theory of poetic space would have been unthinkable if Poe had not written Eureka (1848) and The Power of Words (1850).10 Furthermore, Mallarmé’s later assertion that “all earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book” could serve also to define more accurately Whitman’s life-work by insisting upon the ability of the book to allow exploration beyond the immediate self. 11 This also appears to enable a sense of connection to be identified between Whitman and subsequent poets who do not interpret the concept of “one life, one writing” as a phenomenon of self-limitation but rather as an opportunity for transgression (Howe) or experimentation (Stevens). The American poetry book is not where identities are

9. Whitman, “In Cabin’d Ships at Sea”, in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, New York, 1982, 166. 10. Mallarmé translated Poe’s prose poems in 1862, and claimed that he only learned English in order to read Poe. Le Livre was first published in 1866 and then re-appeared in different forms for the rest of Mallarmé’s life. A useful account of Mallarmé’s developing theory of the book is given by Maurice Blanchot in his essay “The Book to Come”, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch and reprinted in A Book of the Book: Some Works and Projections about the Book and Writing, eds Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay, New York, 2000. This volume is an indispensable introduction to book theory. 11. “Le Livre, Instrument Spirituel”(1895), in Stéphane Mallarmé: Selected Poetry and Prose, translated by Mary Ann Caws, New York 1982, 80.

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Michael Hinds and Stephen Matterson

asserted, rather it is where they are interrogated, and the poetry books under scrutiny venture far beyond individual or national consciousness The Jewish-Egyptian-French poet Edmond Jabès is the most bona fide modern disciple of Mallarmé, and his work provides an apt language for expressing the paradox of how the book of poetic self-expression is also the place where the poet discovers his or her capacity for anonymity: “The written page is no mirror. Writing means confronting an unknown face.”12 Even as Whitman’s song is so apparently rooted in himself, the experience of reading Leaves of Grass (as Deleuze and Guattari found) is deracinatory and deracinating, it is to have no direction home. The “national” character of the American poetry book is found in its expression of exile, its exploration of the terra incognita of the imagination while maintaining an apprehension of the native “real”. If we think conventionally of the American poetry book as the “book of the life”, observing the logic of Lowell’s “one life, one writing”, an idea that sustains work as disparate as Berryman’s Dream Songs, Hejinian’s My Life and an entire long-poem tradition, we should not shake from the further paradoxical implication that the vivacity of American poetry books is founded on a dynamic of a life given hidebound terms and limits; in other words, a death. As Whitman wrote, “I spring from these pages into your arms – decease calls me forth”.13 So American poets not only posit their presence in their books, they also go to them to die. “The glory of the book is posthumous” says Jabès, and the question of a legacy is always apparent in the creation of a book, from Whitman’s death-bed to Lowell’s obsessive re-writing of his poetic last will and testament. 14 Beyond this, however, we also find the poetry book as a site where death is stage-managed by the poet for purposes of self-dramatization or political effect. As Marjorie Perloff made clear in her essay on Ariel, Plath’s intended sequence for the book manifests a ritualized death and rebirth, rather than the book as suicide note that was Hughes’s arrangement of the poems. In his Selected Poems, Randall Jarrell performs a death of the poet in order to project an American Jeremiad, while Lowell perfects his poetic mausoleum in Notebook and History. Yet for all this talk of the book as a space where poems and effects can be managed, and where the American poet-as-editor is predominant, there is also a tendency in the opposite direction. Dickinson’s legacy has been to problematize the concept of the book in order to allow potential meanings to proliferate beyond the immediate containment of its binding. Jorie Graham and Susan Howe are shown in Rebound to be actively working in this tradition, to the extent that they do not reject the Whitmanic book simply, but through unbinding it they deconstruct its monolithic status in American tradition. The importance of Dickinson is in her ability to invite but then evade editorial ministrations. The history of publishing Dickinson is readable consequently as a narrative wherein her poems are renewed in significance through the resistance they put up to scholarship and by their innate rejection of textual authority. Arguably, of course, this is no less arranged or managed than any other American poetry project, and any suggestion of randomness is an illusion. Dickinson permits a poetry of disorder by design, and the poetry book is the most vital stage for such planned insubordination as it presents an edifice to be collapsed. The idea of the 12. Edmond Jabès, The Little Book of Subversion Above Suspicion (1982), reprinted in From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader, London, 1991, 179. 13. Whitman, “So Long!”, in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 611. 14. Jabès, “Pledge of the Abyss”, Elya (1969), in From the Book to the Book, 132.

Introduction

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book in itself cannot be permitted to obliterate what is most interesting about it: its contents, and the way in which its various intensities may interact. Insisting upon the desirability of reading poems within their book contexts does not mean an insistence upon the book as an imperative and unifying teleology; contrarily, we may see how a fragment may reverberate radically through the book and beyond. In some cases, as with Dickinson and with Pound’s Lustra, we are left with a stark sense that the fragments allude to structures of arrangement that can never be realized, most of all in a book. At the same time, the value of the book-context is in its creation of a desire to see the fragments find an ultimate shape, whatever the inadequacies of the book in which they are immediately contained. To quote Jabès a final time, “All shattered writing has the form of a key”.15

III If Rebound necessarily engages with one vexed issue in exceptionalism, then it also has to countenance questions of intentionality, a concept that is rarely referred to without some embarrassment. Obviously, the essays of Rebound look at how poets willfully arrange or disorganize their books, and at how editorial decisions have variously radical consequences for the reception of their poems. Poems are combined in books to present a political or philosophical argument, as with Williams’s An Early Martyr or Clampitt’s The Kingfisher, or they may combine to present a coherently “other” fictive world, as with North of Boston. Indeed, to a degree that was unexpected to us, the essays in this collection restore intentionality as a necessary aspect of the poem’s agency and mediation and reveal how readily the New Critical ideal of textual autonomy is facilitated by the removal of intentionality. Beyond such conventional intentions, however, we see how the design of a book of poems may be devoted towards the manifestation of unconscious or sensual pleasures that yield aesthetic, political or philosophical meanings secondarily. Hejinian’s The Guard is predicated upon the idea of the book as a language system, with laws and rules but with concomitant space for erring and transgression. With Stevens’s Harmonium, for example, the book’s poems coalesce primarily around the experience of sensuality rather than the idea of it (an observation that can apply to other books featured in Rebound, such as Swarm, Leaves of Grass, and various editions of Dickinson). A related implication of this brings us right back to Whitman and Dickinson, and the idea of the American poetry book as a somatic experience, not to forget the consequences for the reader of that idea. The American poetry book is more a matter of libido than credo, and the book of poems carries an erotic charge out into culture, as is evidenced memorably by the part played by Leaves of Grass in the trysting of President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, or by the aphrodisiac book in Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue”: Then she opened up a book of poems And handed it to me Written by an Italian poet From the thirteenth century. And every one of them words rang true And glowed like burning coal 15. Jabès, El or The Last Book (1973), in From the Book to the Book, 148.

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Michael Hinds and Stephen Matterson Pouring off of every page Like it was written in my soul from me to you16

While Monicagate appeared to reduce Leaves of Grass to just another fetish object among cigars and sundry items, it nevertheless was playing a role that had been designated for it by its author. Whitman’s book is asked to perform a lot of roles, but one of its most singular is that of go-between in the clandestine and illicit intercourse between poet and reader: “Tell me what you would not tell your brother, wife, husband, or physician.”17 More commonly, Whitman’s book can be seen (as Nick Selby’s essay on Graham indicates) as emblematic of an overwhelming and coercive masculinity: Now lift me close to your face till I whisper, What you are holding is in reality no book, nor part of a book; It is a man, flush’d and full-blooded – it is I – So long! – We must separate awhile – Here! Take from my lips this kiss; Whoever you are, I give it especially to you; So long! – And I hope that we shall meet again.18 If the book is the means by which the reader experiences the poet physically as well as imaginatively, then effectively Whitman is presenting a paradigmatic American body that can be either impersonated or mutated. Beyond its function as go-between, Whitman gives the book a dominant and invasive role, and it also signifies self-love of a clichédly Whitmanic kind; if the book is Walt and the book loves Walt, then Walt loves Walt. But it is vital to remember that the love-act for Whitman between self and book and reader never reaches climax or consummation; play is in constant process, and an end to it is never countenanced. In this way, for all its dominant postures, Leaves of Grass can be read as a feminized rather than a phallogocentric text, a book as body that enjoys itself and is pleasured polymorphously, and Whitman is making a feminized poetics that would also prove productive for William Carlos Williams in Spring and All. The bullying masculinity that appears in Leaves of Grass has only mythic force, and is literally undone by the book’s endlessly resourceful perversity: Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you, With the comrade’s long-dwelling kiss or the new husband’s kiss, For I am the new husband and I am the comrade. Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing, Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip, Carry me when you go forth over land and sea; For thus merely touching you is enough, is best, And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.19 16. Bob Dylan, “Tangled Up in Blue”, from Blood on the Tracks (1975). 17. Whitman, “To You”, in The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy, Harmondsworth, 1979, 616. 18. Whitman, “Now Lift Me Close”, in The Complete Poems, ed. Murphy, 616.

Introduction

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Rather than speaking imperatively here, Whitman is proposing a marriage of book and reader where the latter becomes the dominant partner. On one level, the book is a romantic keepsake, on another a prosthetic sexual device. Whitman’s book is polymorphously erotic to the extent that he assumes a variety of submissive and dominant roles towards the reader through it. For a truly masculinist design of a poetry book, we can look instead to the “climacteric” sequences of Lowell, whose drives towards catharsis, culmination and expiration have him reaching continually for his cigarettes. Significantly, when Susan Sontag wanted to cite an exemplar of a counter-deterministic “erotics of reading” in “Against Interpretation”, she chose Randall Jarrell’s reading of Leaves of Grass, “Some Lines from Whitman”. Nobody in Rebound quite does what Jarrell did in that article, but at the same time there is a shared sense among its contributors that the poetry book presents only an appearance of being a deterministic structure, and that its real energy lies in the speculations, intuitions and expectancies that it provokes from the reader.

IV The American poetry book foregrounds the formulation of America as a text, and so even in its most assertive manifestations, the potential for erasure and slippage is ever-present, generating meaning even as the myth of complacency between book, self, and nation is deconstructed. The power of the printed text is fundamental to the Emersonian version of American poetry as a continuing project of Enlightenment culture, yet such concepts of America and American poetry are examined and made controversial within the concentrated metonym of the poetry book. The boundaries of the book interrogate the pretensions to transcendent authority of the Emersonian metanarrative by subjecting that teleology to a containment which it ordinarily has the privilege of exerting. The book reminds us of culture’s precedence over nature, and thus it represents a loss of innocence, or the necessary collapse of the illusion of innocence; however, it further indicates that the precedence of culture is precarious and temporary. A new hermeneutics of the poetry book makes inevitable the articulation of an entire epistemology of America, book and poet, as the poetry book forces our imaginative apprehension of America into the real, with all its play of intensities and the spaces that lie between them. As Charles Bernstein’s much-cited essay, reprinted here as the Afterword, suggests, the book has an “architecture”. However, the quicksand beneath it is as much a condition of its making. The structure of the American poetry book is both the House of Usher and the tarn into which it is accordionated. Like Frost’s “The Wood-Pile”, the American poetry book is a delicately robust and proleptically ruinous human structure, reliant on the paradoxical ground of the “frozen swamp”.

19. Whitman, “Whoever You Are Holding me Now in Hand”, in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 271.

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BINDING EMILY DICKINSON

DOMHNALL MITCHELL

The first posthumous editions of Emily Dickinson’s poetry appeared during the 1890s, and a repeated feature of their reception is that readers returned to alleged deficiencies of grammar, metre and rhyme. “Literary form ... she regarded little” wrote one of the kinder critics; she “had her own standard of rhythm, or perhaps we should say of music”.1 A century later, however, reviewers of the latest (1998) Variorum edition responded with disappointment to its perceived uniformity: the subtitle of the lead essay in a journal collection released to coincide with and evaluate its publication read “Is That All There Is?”2 Critics have moved from finding too little formal conformity in editions of Dickinson’s poetry to finding too much.3 In part, this is the legacy of the poetic experiments of the twentieth century. But just as important are the technological advances in text reproduction that facilitated the appearance in 1981 of The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, which was comprised of photographic facsimiles of over eight hundred Dickinson autographs.4 Franklin’s edition opened up at least two major trajectories in Dickinson scholarship that are still being explored and charted. Firstly, a general readership was able to see for the first time Dickinson’s poems arranged, apparently, according to her own intentions.5 To some scholars, poems collected in fascicles exist in an imagistic, narrative or thematic relationship to each other, while for others (including Franklin himself) they simply happened to have been collated at the same time. Since standard print editions disarranged the order of the fascicles and reorganized the poems according to a chronology of first composition identified by Dickinson’s handwriting, a potential conflict emerged between editorially imposed and fascicle-derived sequences.6 Does a poem derive its meaning from its placement relative to other 1. Charles Goodrich Whiting, “The Literary Wayside”, in Springfield Republican (November 16, 1890), 4, quoted in Willis J. Buckingham, Emily Dickinson’s Reception in the 1890s: A Documentary History, Pittsburgh, 1989, 16. 2. Timothy Morris, “The Franklin Edition of Dickinson: Is That All There Is?”, in The Emily Dickinson Journal, VIII/2 (1999), 1. 3. Of course, original reviewers were responding to Dickinson herself – or so they thought, while contemporary critics are disappointed by editions of the poetry which in their view do not adequately reflect the range of her formal innovations – or so they think. 4. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, ed. Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, MA, 1981. 5. After Dickinson’s death, her sister Lavinia discovered forty of her bound fascicles or hand-sewn booklets, each containing on average nineteen to twenty poems. The fascicles contained over eight hundred poems, and these were supplemented by “a good many fascicle sheets that had never been bound. These unbound groups, called sets following the terminology of The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, brought the total to over eleven hundred”(Franklin, “Introduction”, in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Cambridge, MA, 1998, I, 7). 6. Ironically, Johnson’s dating strengthened the impression that fascicles were deliberate arrangements.

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poems in a fascicle, or more extensively from the placement of the fascicle relative to other fascicles? Are fascicles purposive literary events (selections of poetry) or administrative and archival ones (records of poems filed away as complete at around the same time)? Although such questions remain unresolved, and to some extent unsolvable, they nevertheless generate issues that Dickinson scholars need to confront. The second consequence of Franklin’s The Manuscript Books was simply in making Dickinson’s originals available to a wide audience. 7 Dickinson manuscripts look very different from their typographic equivalents; as Franklin noted, they resist translation into the conventions of print. Formal features like her unusual punctuation and capitalization, line and stanza divisions, and display of alternate readings are a source of continuing critical concern. For Franklin, like the early reviewers and editors, such anomalies were often the result of Dickinson’s having “left her manuscripts unprepared for print”. 8 He concurred substantially with the methodology of Johnson’s standard edition of 1955, which reformatted the manuscripts and presented lyrics that consistently adhered to fairly traditional formal structures such as the quatrain and the metrically defined line. But for more recent editors, readers and theorists, Franklin’s edition suggested a radically different possibility (which he himself did not support) – that Dickinson experimented visually with stanza shapes, line length, word division, the use of blank spacing and even the formation of alphabetic characters. After 1981, then, several decades of critical consensus about what constituted a book of Dickinson’s poetry or even a Dickinson poem began to evaporate. Do Dickinson’s manuscripts look the way that they do because she neglected to publish, or did she refuse to publish in order to protect and preserve the integrity of her manuscripts?9 Did Dickinson reject the equation of books with print by producing her own hand-written and assembled miscellanies, and by circulating poems in her correspondence?10 Or do contemporary hypertext-centred challenges to the notion of textual fixity demand that we find alternative and more fluid modes of publishing her? Is Dickinson a poet of the finished product who never got to supervise the final stage of her productions, or is she writing what we would now call “process poems”? Is the current emphasis on Dickinson’s handwritten originals such that “the work can now, more than hundred years later, finally speak for itself”, or is this a species of ventriloquism, whereby we project our voices back into the nineteenth century? Since 7. This increased accessibility will be accelerated by developments in CD-ROM and Web storage and transmission. Many of Dickinson’s autograph poems and letters are to be found at the Dickinson Electronic Archives site, .The Dickinson materials are password-protected, though the editors allow access by giving the password to members of the Dickinson e-mail discussion groups. 8. Franklin, The Manuscript Books, ix. 9. Or, to quote Sharon Cameron (first) and Ralph Franklin (second), was she “choosing not choosing” or was it that “one need not make a choice until one needed to make a choice”? Sharon Cameron, Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles, Chicago, 1992; Ralph W. Franklin, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, Cambridge, MA, 1999, 3. 10. This practice amends received opinion that Dickinson remained unknown and unpublished during her own lifetime: as Martha Nell Smith and others have pointed out, such a notion depends on our accepting that publication is first and foremost an industrial activity. See Martha Nell Smith, Rowing in Eden: Re-Reading Emily Dickinson, Austin, TX, 1992.

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Dickinson herself left no explicit statements about which methods of poetic presentation, assemblage and transmission (if any) she authorized, answers to these questions must remain inconclusive. But what is absolutely certain is that the radical differences between editions of Dickinson’s poetry will have decisive consequences for the answers one is capable of producing.

II By focusing on a particular poem and its configurations in editions from specific time periods, the impact of editorial apparatus and formatting can be more easily understood. What follows in this essay is an analysis of the transmissions and transformations of the much anthologized “A narrow fellow in the grass”, numbered Fr1096 in the most recent Variorum. Ostensibly about a young speaker who mistakes a snake for a discarded whiplash, and the memory of that frightening encounter in later years, the poem is typical of Dickinson’s exemplary indeterminacy. Particularly fascinating is the concluding image of “Zero at the Bone”, a phrase that constantly revises and unsettles the poem. At one level, it suggests the extreme coldness associated with shock or terror. At another, it suggests clarity – with zero as the lens through which things are retroactively understood. But exactly what is seen remains uncertain: if theological, the meeting with the snake echoes Eve’s seduction by the serpent, so that the speaker returns to a primal, original scene that continues to haunt and define the present. In such a reading, the snake is a reminder of shame and guilt, a cue to one’s sinful state in a postlapsarian world. On the other hand, the encounter might represent the contamination of the natural by religious discourse: the speaker is unable to respond neutrally to the snake because its appearance is already inflected by its association with the myth of the Fall. By extension, the speaker’s reduction to nothingness has clear similarities with Romantic theories of the sublime, yet there is no counter-movement towards belief that often accompanies such moments in Romantic writing. Of course, very different readings are also possible. If sexual, “zero at the bone” could refer to the vaginal mouth, and to an epiphanic instant where the speaker fails to respond to the snake’s phallicism and thus senses for the first time an alternative sexual proclivity. But typically, the opposite can also be asserted, with zero seen not as the absence of a response but as its instigation (from zero to one and onwards). The first “edition” of “A narrow fellow in the grass”, Dickinson’s own, is now lost. Dickinson is believed to have sent it to her sister-in-law Susan Dickinson, who may then have passed it on to Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Daily Republican, where it appeared (anonymously) as “The Snake” on 14 February 1866. A subsequent – and still extant – fair copy, Fr1096B, dates to around the same period, and was collected in Set 6C (a set being the term for an unbound manuscript miscellany). A third version, Fr1096C, was sent in a note to Susan Dickinson during the autumn of 1872. I shall examine all of these versions in the first section of this essay, and in three subsequent sections the most significant phases of the poem’s posthumous career.11 The poem was included (again titled “The Snake”) in Poems by Emily Dickinson: Second Series, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd; this is discussed in the 1890s section. During the 1950s, it appeared in 11. The exception is Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson’s prematurely entitled The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Boston, 1924.

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Thomas H. Johnson’s three-volume variorum edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955), and then in Johnson and Theodora Ward’s three-volume Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958).12 In 1998 it appeared in two books: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Franklin, and Ellen Hart and Martha Nell Smith’s Open Me Carefully.13 Because the poem is reproduced in significantly different ways, key hermeneutic issues regarding Dickinson’s poetry are evoked by each of its appearances. 1830-1886 “A narrow fellow in the grass” was first printed on 14 February 1866, in the Springfield Daily Republican (the first four lines only are reproduced here, approximately as they appeared in the original):

THE SNAKE

A narrow fellow in the grass Occasionally rides; You may have met him – did you not? His notice instant is, The publication is infamous, because Dickinson was unhappy about changes that were made to the punctuation, and protested about them to Higginson: “Lest you meet my Snake and suppose I deceive it was robbed of me – defeated too of the third line by the punctuation. The third and fourth were one.”14 Critics share Dickinson’s indignant tone in discussing this passage; Tom Paulin writes that her withdrawal from print “was partly caused by a wish never to see them subordinated to male editorial control”.15 The protest is justified, but overstated, for Dickinson does not object to the rearrangement in its entirety, but to a specific change at a particular point which altered the semantic trajectory of two lines. What fascinates now, however, is that Dickinson does not object to the lineation: she refers to the “third and fourth” lines, whereas in her extant manuscripts, these take up (in chronological order) three and four rows of space.16 The poem exists in three fair copies made by the poet herself, the first of which is thought to be lost. The earliest

12. The Letters of Emily Dickinson, eds Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward, Cambridge, MA, 1958; L378, to Susan Dickinson (Autumn 1872), 498-99. 13. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Franklin; Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, eds Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, Ashfield, MA, 1998. 14. The Letters of Emily Dickinson, L316, 450. The Republican’s mistake of ending the third line with a question mark was repeated in Bianchi and Hampson’s The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. 15. Tom Paulin, Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State, Cambridge, MA, 1992, 103. 16. Nor does she object to the substitution of conventional punctuation for her dashes, the assignation of a title, and the misrepresentation of her handwritten letters by typeset ones.

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surviving manuscript (1096B) is estimated as having been recorded around 1865, and was collected in a booklet that she made:17 A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides – You may have met Him – did you not His notice sudden is – The later version (1096C), transcribed around 1872, was also sent to Susan: A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides – You may have met him? Did you not His notice instant is – Apart from the variant (“instant” for “sudden”) the differences between the autographs appear to be fairly minor. Some of the rows split in slightly different places (“have met Him – /” “have / met him”), and there is an exchange of capitals at one point (“Him – / did” “him? / Did”). The “fourth” line referred to by Dickinson also commences at slightly different places in the manuscripts: the sixth row in version B, and the seventh in C. Granted, Dickinson’s comments in the letter to Higginson refer to the published version of the poem, but even so it is interesting that she does not contest the lineation in the Republican; she contests the punctuation that robbed of her an important enjambment. This suggests that the lineation in this particular manuscript is not to be understood as deliberate or literal: the three rows of writing (four, five and six in version B) and the four rows (four, five, six and seven in version C) are two metrical lines of poetry.18 This is significant because recent editors and theorists have argued that the linearrangements, spacing and even the shape and extent of the handwriting in the originals exist as fully integral and meaningful aspects of their formal design. Such approaches seem to demonstrate an extreme kind of formalism. To take the 1865 example (1096B), one notices that it is inscribed over six rows rather than four; but we cannot know whether this arrangement was deliberate, since Dickinson left no explicit instructions regarding the reading of her autographs. But a number of strictly physical or material features lead us in the direction of possible guidelines for understanding the significance of the manuscript’s layout. The first of these is the assignment of upper- and lower-case letters; it seems incongruous that “A”, “Occasionally”, “You” and “His” begin with capitals but not “the” and “did”. But if 17. This version can also be seen in The Manuscript Books, II, 1137-39. In Franklin’s three-volume variorum edition, it is numbered 1096B. 18. The C version had not been written at the time Dickinson protested about the alteration made to the earlier version, but she did not (at 1872) consider the line arrangements to be unimpeachable. For another discussion of these issues in relation to rhythm, see Kamilla Denman, “Emily Dickinson’s Volcanic Punctuation”, The Emily Dickinson Journal, II/1 (1993), 22-46.

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one keeps in mind that nineteenth-century writers habitually allotted capitals to the beginning of a poetic line, then the apparent discrepancy in Dickinson’s original disappears. The upper-case letters in “A”, “Occasionally”, “You” and “His” are lineinitial phenomena, while the lower-case letters in “the” and “did” indicate that those words are not line-initial, and as continuations of the preceding line are probably not separate or integral. In addition, the poem is recorded on ruled paper that is 20.4 cm tall and 12.5 cm wide. There is a left-hand margin of approximately 1 cm. The right hand-hand margin is of course irregular.19 A narrow Fellow in (1.5cm) the Grass (7.4cm) Occasionally rides – (3.2cm) You may have met Him – (0.1cm) did you not (5.0cm) His notice sudden is – (1.2cm) The lineation intrigues; instead of the quatrains of the printed editions, the originals appear to anticipate modernist relationships between print and space. Furthermore, the argument tends to run, these are Dickinson’s originals and we should respect only the arrangements authorized by her (if only because they are associated physically with her presence). And yet the logic of the upper-case letters complicates any reproduction of the above portion of the manuscript which arranges it as six rather than four lines – for the consignment of line-initial capitals seems to indicate that there are six physical rows of writing, but only four lines. The spacing in the right margins independently confirms this: three rows of writing leave less than 1.5 cm of space, while the other three vary in length from roughly three to seven centimetres. What that pattern tells us is that such large intervals of final space tend to be line-end phenomena.20 Example: Rows One and Two [Capital = line beginning] A narrow Fellow in [non-significant space of 1.4 cm] [no capital = no separate line] the Grass [significant space of 7.4cm = end of line] = A narrow Fellow in [&] the Grass = A narrow Fellow in the Grass Acting on the directions which these material codes and conventions provide us with, we come up with a formula for understanding the logic of the first stanza which matches exactly its equivalent in Franklin’s print edition:

19. I have taken these measurements from the original at Amherst College, Special Collections, Frost Library (A88-13/14). 20. Though it is not unambiguously evident in the first stanza, the poem has a rhyme scheme – abcb, which again suggests that this is a four-line stanza.

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A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides – You may have met Him – did you not His notice sudden is – Dickinson’s lettering is another phenomenon of the autograph that print stands accused of failing to reproduce. Indeed, “A narrow fellow in the grass” is typical of other poems in having an orthographic feature that appears in isolation to be unusual and therefore potentially significant. The upper-case “Z” in “Zero at the Bone” is tilted at an exaggerated angle, raising the possibility that Dickinson might be playfully suggesting the zigzag motion of a snake through grass, or the design on its skin.21 But in two other poems of approximately the same time, which have nothing to do with snakes, Dickinson inscribed the “Z” in the same way. Both “It bloomed and dropt” (Fr843) and “’Twas awkward, but it fitted me” (Fr900) have upper-case initial letters (in “Zones” and “Zone”, respectively), making it unlikely that there was any degree of deliberation behind the inscription of the “Z”. The more general conclusion to be drawn is that assigning a semantic weight to specific autograph characters in single poems is methodologically unsound. It seems that a publication of this poem that reproduced or otherwise drew attention to the minutiae of its original would not yield us a resolved text. Indeed, such a publication raises new problems and fails to solve old ones. While the manuscript lineation and spacing are salient, the blank space that follows “not” in versions B and C would enforce the same kind of brief delay as required by the punctuation that Dickinson objected to in the Republican. Just as importantly, the later version sent to Susan Dickinson changes the original punctuation, replacing the dash after “him” with a question mark, and thus attempting to clear up an unintentional lack of clarity that had been revealed by the version printed in the Republican. Far from seeing Dickinson as blindly rejecting all editorial versions of her manuscripts, this seems to show her responding actively to other (mis)readings of her text. So far, my consideration of “A narrow fellow in the grass” has concentrated on its formal presentation. But equally important is the aspect of selective or sequential presentation. It might be argued that the poem’s meaning requires an awareness of where Dickinson situated it among her other poems.22 In Set 6C (believed to have been assembled in 1865), Fr1096B “A narrow fellow in the grass” is the ninth of twenty-two poems, immediately preceded by Fr1094A “We outgrow love like other things” and Fr1095A “When I have seen the sun emerge”, and followed by Fr1097A “Ashes denote that fire was”.23 Consequently, any arrangement other than 21. A number of writers have seen the poem primarily as a description of the snake’s movement – among them Amy Lowell in Poetry and Poets: Essays, Boston, 1930, 103-4, and Walter Blair, Theodore Hornberger and Randall Stewart, in The Literature of the United States, eds Walter Blair, Theodore Hornberger and Randall Stewart, Chicago, 1947, II, 749. Neither had access to the manuscripts. 22. Such is the argument in Dorothy Huff Oberhaus, Emily Dickinson’s Fascicles: Method and Meaning, University Park, PA, 1995. Oberhaus attends to the fascicles, however, and not the sets: “A narrow fellow in the grass” is therefore not considered in her work. The other major consideration of image clusters and their relationships in the fascicles is Martha Lindblom O’Keefe, This Edifice: Studies in the Structure of the Fascicles of the Poetry of Emily Dickinson, Maryland, 1986. It too stops at the fortieth fascicle. 23. In the Republican, it was printed singly, sandwiched between lines of various thickness and between a list of periodicals and an article on “How to use chloroform”.

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Dickinson’s will generate fresh meanings. The posthumous Poems: Second Series (1891), was divided into four imposed thematic sections: “Life”, “Love”, “Nature” and “Time & Eternity”. Entitled “The Snake”, “A narrow fellow in the grass” was poem XXIV in “Nature”, preceded by “A bird came down the walk” and followed by “The mushroom is the elf of plants”. The poem’s placement within a lyric sequence in “Nature” encourages us to read the encounter with the snake as primarily descriptive rather than (say) a rite of passage inflected with religious and/or sexual overtones. Subsequent publications recontextualize the poem in various ways – by placing it in a chronological sequence, for instance, as in the 1955 Variorum. There “A narrow fellow in the grass” became J986, was preceded by J985 “The missing all, prevented me” (Fr995) and followed by J987 “The leaves like women interchange” (Fr1098B) and J988 “The definition of beauty is” (Fr797B – a poem Franklin places in Set 6A). In Johnson, the order of Set 6C is so changed that only fourteen of the original twenty-two poems from the manuscript book exist in any kind of sequence – though only in pairs and triplets, and not in proper succession (they line up separately as 813, 828, 850, 855-856, 887-888, 930, 948, 986-987, 1063, 1071, 1077-1079, 1084-1085, 1098-1100 & 1104). Given such a radical dislocation, it is possible that the disorientation Joyce Carol Oates reported after reading the poems sequentially may have been a side-effect of the edition that she used (the Johnson). 24 It could be argued that the celebrated indeterminacy of many Dickinson lyrics may be intensified by the Johnson and Franklin one-volume reading editions. In anthologies, this is especially true. “A narrow fellow in the grass” (J986, Fr1096) in the Norton Anthology of American Literature is preceded by “A man may make a remark” (J952, Fr913) and “It bloomed and dropt a single noon” (J978, Fr843), then followed by “Further in summer than the birds” (J1068, Fr895).25 In the Heath Anthology of American Literature (where Ellen Hart is one of the editors), it is headed by “The missing all prevented me” (J985, Fr995) and followed by “Perception of an object costs” (J1071, Fr1103).26 An obvious question is whether the creation of alternative contexts augments or compromises the indeterminacy that many readers cherish about Dickinson’s poems. In Hart and Smith’s Open Me Carefully, the fascicle and chronology paradigms are displaced by an alternative sequence of poems and letters sent to correspondents – in this case, to Susan Dickinson. The recontextualization is important. For Johnson and later Franklin (1998), “A narrow fellow in the grass” is numbered according to their reconstruction of its temporal relation to other poems and other versions of the same poem. For Hart and Smith, it is number 147 out of 254 letters, poems, and notes sent to Susan; the opening paragraph (“My Sue – / Loo and / Fanny will come / tonight”) is therefore a significant and perhaps even primary aspect of its meaning. The danger with such an approach is that the poem may become subsumed by its placement in a larger narrative, and that it is valued (in this instance) as a token of literary enterprise and love shared between two women rather than as a poem.27 Or, to put it another way, Hart and Smith promote one textual axis (that of the correspondence) over 24. Joyce Carol Oates, “Soul at the White Heat: The Romance of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry”, in Critical Inquiry, XIII (Summer 1987), 806. 25. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, eds Nina Baym et al., 5th edn, New York, 1998. 26. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, ed. Paul Lauter, 4th edn, Boston, 2002. 27. Smith describes Open Me Carefully as “powerful witness to a lesbian passion”, in Philip Weiss, “Beethoven’s Hair Tells All”, New York Times Magazine (November 29, 1988), 114. The danger I report is also the advantage: one sees more clearly Susan’s importance to Dickinson.

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another (that of the fascicles). As a consequence, “A narrow fellow in the grass” becomes disengaged from its fascicular surroundings and placed between “I bet with every wind that blew” (Fr1167) and “Who were ‘the Father and the Son’” (Fr1280) – though there is no clear evidence that Susan received either during Dickinson’s lifetime. Anthologies and compilations are merely extreme examples of the ways in which many editions of Dickinson’s poetry realign relationships between individual poems and therefore impose structures of interpretation on what we read. Nonetheless, the fact that Dickinson was happy to send individual poems from fascicles to correspondents seems to allow for the possibility that they could survive on their own as autonomous aesthetic objects. (In the case of Set 6C, Susan Dickinson received seven of the twenty-two, Higginson one and Josiah Holland another.) In fact, there is no record of her having distributed entire fascicles to her friends; not even to Susan, who lived next door and otherwise received close to three hundred notes of one kind or another.28 So while Dickinson’s preferred form of circulation was to enclose single poems (or small clusters of three and four), in letters or as notes, the fascicles suggest nevertheless that poems sent in such a way do not have to be read within the context of her friendship with the correspondents in order to be understood. Dickinson appears to have operated with the assumption that her poems had a critical mass of their own; they were not satellites whose significance depended primarily on their relation to other centres of gravity. The 1890s In October 1890, Roberts Brothers of Boston printed 500 copies of Poems by Emily Dickinson, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Higginson. Its three-piece binding, consisting of a medium gray cloth spine that extended to meet white cloth on the front and back boards, joined by a silver-stamped wavy vertical rule, was supplemented by ornate writing in silver and a large (8.7 cm high) design of the plant Monotropa Uniflora, known as “Indian Pipes”.29 A similar but smaller (1.7 cm) Indian Pipes ornament was repeated in gilt on the spine of the book, and functioned both as a decorative promotional emblem and as a pre-emptive device for helping to shape responses to the book’s contents. It looks forward to the verbal image in the Preface, where Higginson described Dickinson’s verses as “in most cases like poetry plucked up by the roots; we have them with earth, stones and dew adhering, and must

28. Some readers have misconstrued a letter of 1876, in which Helen Hunt Jackson mentioned to Dickinson that “I have a little manuscript volume with a few of your verses in it”, as proof that Dickinson distributed manuscript miscellanies, but Jackson is almost certainly referring to anthologies of her own where she transcribed favourite poems – including ones sent to her privately, L444a, in Letters, II, 545. Similarly, the earlier note to Henry Emmons in 1854, where Dickinson politely inquires after “two little volumes of mine which I thought Emily lent you” does not constitute evidence of more extensive transmission of her fascicles. The volumes may simply have been books that Emily Fowler had borrowed: they may also have contained poems that she compiled, rather than composed. At any rate, there are no consistent references to suggest that Dickinson thought of her fascicles as integral to the understanding of poems included within them, L150, in Letters, I, 280. 29. The information in Joel Myerson, Emily Dickinson: A Descriptive Bibliography, Pittsburgh, 1984, 3, makes it clear that this is Binding A; Binding B has gold-stamped writing on the cover. Confusion arises because the covers of Poems: First Series vary according to the edition, issue and binding.

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accept them as they are”.30 It also looks back – drawing for its significance on Thomas Gray’s lines about “Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen, / And waste its sweetness on the desert air” – and perhaps also to William Wordsworth’s lines about a “A violet by a mossy stone / Half-hidden from the eye!” Dickinson herself worked the same theme in Fr534, “How many flowers fail in the wood”.31 In other words, the floral design promotes the idea of a poet who remained relatively unknown during her own lifetime, and whose poetry was seen as existing in a “natural” state, being formally raw and sometimes crude, but (so the argument went) containing “profound insight[s] into nature and thought”.32 Finally, the design suggests the arrival of a “native” American talent: the Indian Pipes are at once an indigenous subject matter and an indigenous representation of that subject. Higginson and Todd thus were able to situate their discussion of Dickinson’s natural power and related lack of finish within larger nineteenth-century cultural debates about the merits and defects of the literature of the United States. Within America at least, they anticipated and partially disarmed potentially negative responses to her formal innovations by framing her within a native and natural discourse. Alexander Young, in the Critic, is taking his cue from Higginson when he writes “the rough diamonds in the collection have a value beyond that of many polished gems of poetry”.33 Such a formula of compensation, by which verbal contents made up for technical deficiency, became something of a leitmotif in early reviews – and is clearly prompted by Todd and Higginson’s editorial and promotional strategies.34 Poems by Emily Dickinson: Second Series (1891) again featured the design of the Indian Pipes on the front board: the design, lettering and straight border between the half green and white cloth were all gilt, as were the smaller Indian pipes ornament and lettering on the spine.35 Again the poems were organized according to the categories of “Life”, “Love”, “Nature” and “Time & Eternity”, with “A narrow fellow in the grass” placed in “Nature” and reproduced thus (the first four lines are quoted only): 36 fellow in the grass A NARROW Occasionally rides; You may have met him, — did you not, His notice sudden is. Todd and Higginson’s insertion of the comma at the end of the third line prevents the run-on that Dickinson so rightly and passionately argued for in her letter of 1866, and 30. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Preface” to Poems by Emily Dickinson, 1890; reprinted in Poems (1890–1896) by Emily Dickinson: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Original Volumes Issued in 1890, 1891, and 1896 with an Introduction, ed. George Monteiro, Gainesville, FL, 1967, v-vi. 31. The Indian Pipe is popularly known as “the corpse plant” because it feeds off decayed organic matter: the relationship of Dickinson’s poetry to death was described in 1864, when she admitted that she “sang off charnel steps” (L298, in Letters, II. 436). 32. Alexander Young, “Boston Letter”, in Critic, n. s. XIV (October 11, 1890), 183-84, reprinted in Buckingham, 9. 33. Ibid., 9. 34. The “extraordinary grasp and insight revealed in these poems make any little violation of poetic rule seem of no account”, wrote another anonymous reviewer (Anon., “Books and Authors”, in Boston Home Journal, n. s. IV [November 22, 1890], 10, reprinted in Buckingham, 23). 35. Poems by Emily Dickinson: Second Series, eds T.W. Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, Boston, 1891. 36. Poems (1890–1896) by Emily Dickinson, ed. George Monteiro, 142-43.

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given what Higginson knew about the poem’s misrepresentation the change seems unforgivably careless. Perhaps he failed to take the poem seriously; certainly its relegation to the second anthology implies that he and Todd judged it as a relatively lesser work. Once again, the poem is titled “The Snake”, and though there is no indication that Dickinson approved of titles in this particular instance or in principle, she did not contest the Republican’s label.37 The 1890s critical disquiet about Dickinson’s apparently errant form suggests that Todd and Higginson’s emendations – however distorting, egregious and unsanctioned to modern readers – may have been a necessary stage in preparing a nineteenth-century readership for such an unconventional voice. Sixty years later, a different age required a different set of editorial procedures and products. The 1950s In 1955, the first comprehensive edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Including Variant Readings Critically Compared with all Known Manuscripts was published by Harvard University. Its sober cover proclaimed an academic rather than a promotional intent. Where Dickinson’s earlier editors had succeeded in securing a reputation for her, Harvard was now giving her its imprimatur. Though there were no designs on the front or back covers, which were bound in dark grey buckram, the publisher’s regal gold-stamped lion on the spine functioned as a seal of approval. The scholarly editorial apparatus of the 1955 variorum ensured that it became the standard edition. Like the other poems, “A narrow fellow in the grass” could be referred to by its first line, or by the number Johnson assigned it (986) in his reconstructed chronology of the poems. No titles were imposed. Johnson included both extant versions of the poem, privileging the earlier one and relegating the other to the notes, where it is printed in smaller type, along with the invitation to Susan that preceded it (“Loo and Fanny will come tonight, but need that make a difference? Space is as the Presence –”). A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides – You may have met Him – did you not His notice sudden is – (1866 version) A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides – You may have met him? Did you not His notice instant is – (1872 version)

In 1960, Johnson produced his familiar reader’s edition of the variorum, in which he published only one version of each of the poems. Again, the earlier “A narrow fellow” was selected. Each poem in the reader’s edition was printed in neat stanzas without editorial commentary. Suspended in blank space, one discrete verbal icon after another, the poems seemed like a demonstration of New Critical theories of lyric independence. Where Todd and Higginson organized their selections of poems thematically, and often adapted the poems in terms of their accidentals and substantives, Johnson comprehensively listed all of the manuscript variants of each 37. In her comments to Higginson, Dickinson referred to the poem as “my Snake” and did not imply that she resented the poem being titled.

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lyric available to him. The list appeared in chronological order (based on estimated changes to the poet’s handwriting), and with no consistent alterations to anything other than their visual appearance. In 1894, a selection of Emily Dickinson’s letters had been published, discretely from the poems, under the editorial stewardship of Mabel Loomis Todd. In 1958, Johnson and Theodora Ward’s edition of the collected Letters of Emily Dickinson reinforced the generic distinction when it appeared separately from the 1955 Poems of Emily Dickinson. Nevertheless, there were some instances where the same text was classified as both a poem and as a letter (or part of a letter). The later version of “A narrow fellow in the grass” is one instance. It appeared first in the variorum Poems (under J986), and three years later in the Letters (as L378, to Susan Dickinson, dated autumn 1872):38 My Sue, Loo and Fanny will come tonight, but need that make a difference? Space is as the Presence – A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides – You may have met him? Did you not His notice instant is – Johnson and Ward divided this text into different segments: a salutation, two consecutive paragraphs of prose, a six-quatrain poem, and a signature. The changes in formatting reflect their perception of a generic shift, from the epistolary to the lyric, but the autograph version of this note would not appear to support such a distinction unproblematically. There follows a typographic reproduction of the original: My Sue Loo and Fanny will come tonight, but need that make a difference? Space is as the Presence A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides You may have met him? Did you not His notice instant is -

38. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, MA, 1955, II, 711-13; The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 498-99.

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Aside from the indentation that follows the address, “My Sue –”, there are no obvious paragraph markers in this manuscript, and no clear sign from Dickinson that she was shifting from prose to poetry. The manuscript lineation is also very different from Johnson’s quatrain: this version appears to have seven lines, rather than four. For the next thirty years or so, Johnson’s editions would remain the standard ones, but by the end of the 1990s, they had come to be regarded with increasing scepticism by a new generation of theorists and critics. The 1990s In 1998, the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press published its three-volume The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition. Its design aligned it with both the 1890 series and the 1955 variorum. It had a light spine meeting a darker grey-green on the front and back boards (echoing the 1890 edition) but, like the 1955 edition, had no image on the front. Like the 1955 again, the 1998 had “THE POEMS OF Emily Dickinson” inscribed on the spine against a dark blue background with an ornamental design above and below it, but it omitted the image of the lion, chose silver rather than gilt for the lettering, and separated Franklin’s name visually from Dickinson’s by having it printed in small caps against a narrower dark blue band. 39 Like Johnson, Franklin inserted each poem in the order of his revised chronology, assigned numbers to the poems (and otherwise titled them by their first lines only), and kept them separate from the letters. In November of the same year, Paris Press released Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, it featured a cover photograph of Imogen Cunningham’s Calla 2, about 1925. Again, the design functioned both as ornamental device and as statement of editorial intent. It aligns Dickinson with both public and private female aesthetic traditions, with Cunningham and Georgia O’Keeffe (also a famous and frequent painter of the calla lily), and with the nineteenth-century cultural practice whereby women presented flowers to each other as gifts, as tokens of affection and as comments on personal events and experiences. An early working title for Open Me Carefully had been The Book of Emily and Susan Dickinson. This suggests that Hart and Smith thought of this correspondence as extending the more limited modern concept of the “book”, displacing the public relation of writer and audience with the private dynamic generated by a mutual practice of both writing and reading. Perhaps the main difference between the two editions, however, was in the way that they formatted the poems. Where Franklin and Johnson each employed standard verse paragraphing, Hart and Smith more rigorously followed the apparent lineation, spacing and varied dashes of the handwritten originals. Where earlier editors distinguished between letters and poems, Hart and Smith did not, unless this was supported by clear material evidence. Thus the four lines we looked at earlier are identified by Franklin as part of the poem “A narrow fellow in the grass” that he numbers 1096C, and by Hart and Smith as part of the document they index as “My Sue” and number 147:40

39. The Reader’s Edition also has a book-jacket with a photograph of white flowers in a vase on the cover. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, ed. R.W. Franklin, Cambridge, MA, 1999. 40. The original manuscript is in the possession of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Ms Am 1118.5 (B193).

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24 My Sue – Loo and Fanny will come tonight, but need that make a difference? Space is as the Presence – A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides – You may have met him? Did you not His notice instant is –

For Hart and Smith, redefining “A narrow Fellow” as “My Sue” is not simply (or even) to personalize its significance: it is to challenge the validity of standard generic distinctions. For them, the poem is not included in a letter, or a letter attached to a poem – it is a letter-poem: The letter-poem, a category that includes signed poems and letters with poems or with lines of poetry, will be seen here as a distinct and important Dickinson genre. Johnson arranged lines in letters to separate poems and make them look the way we might expect poems to look. We do not do this here. Neither do we divide the correspondence into “Poems to Susan” and “Letters to Susan”. Instead, we follow Dickinson’s commingling techniques, mindful that conventional notions of genre can limit our understanding of Dickinson’s writing practices.41 However, manuscript evidence complicates this assertion. Firstly, Dickinson introduces a vertical space after the last line of the first paragraph – and that gap is unusual, for Dickinson does not normally indicate prose paragraph breaks in this way. As a general rule in autograph letters, Dickinson does not use indentation at the beginning of a new paragraph; she leaves space at the end of the previous one. Vertical markers such as this one are more commonly employed to mark divisions between poetic stanzas, or – as here – to record a shift of genre. Secondly, there is a change in register between the everyday inquiry at the start and the cluster of lines beginning “A narrow fellow in the grass”, where there is increased attention to words as sounds, evidenced by the sequence of sibilants in “Grass”, “Occasionally”, “rides”, “His”, “notice”, and “is”. Finally, there is the unmistakable emergence of metrical pattern in the poem where there was rhythm in the prose. The poetry lines correspond to common metre (or measure), or alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter, rhyming (very loosely in this instance) abcb. Indeed, the rhyme pattern of the poem as a whole is crucial as a structurally predictable device that accompanies and helps define the metre, each rhyme coinciding in this case with the shorter line. 41. Open Me Carefully, xxv.

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James Guthrie’s argument, that the poem “demonstrates the way Dickinson used rhyme to achieve a crescendo”, would be invalidated by any edition of the poem that follows the manuscript lineation, for the rhyme is dissipated in such arrangements. 42 This is not reason in itself to dismiss such editions, but it does show how critical arguments are closely bound up with textual issues. Thus, when Johnson distinguished between the first part of the note as a line of prose, and the second part as poetry, he was clearly influenced by the sum total of these different spatial and metrical elements, and not only by the ideological or literary-theoretical determinations of New Criticism. In addition, because the Hart and Smith version is situated within blank space, it suggests that the lineation is motivated or deliberate. Since it does not reach the physical margins of the page, it must be governed by some principle of organization or presentation that is aesthetic and semantically charged. The version with the lines around it allows an impression of the totality of relationships between words, lines (or rows) and paper boundaries. This template allows us to see that the layout was a consequence of the physical dimensions of the writing surface in combination with metrical codes, and not an integral visual design. It also allows us to see that the “diplomatic transcriptions” which aim to reflect Dickinson’s originals as closely as possible actually distort and misrepresent the significance of their aggregate details. 43 The logic of the material signs in the originals – of page-size, dimensions of handwriting, distribution of capitals, rows and marginal spaces – suggests that they were scripts for very different performances than those recorded in Open Me Carefully and transcribed on-line at the Dickinson Electronic Archives site.44 While the first generation of editors sought to regularize Dickinson within nineteenth-century cultural modalities of grammar, rhythm and sound, the most recent seeks to locate her within modernist and postmodernist paradigms of fragmentation, incompleteness and sight. Strikingly, though, the abdication of interpretative authority, celebrated as textual authority, is being associated almost exclusively with the writer’s autographs, even though these may have interpretative consequences. Hart sees the manuscripts as displaying “visual strategies”.45 Susan Howe talks of letters as “sounds we see …. Line breaks and visual contrapuntal stresses represent an athematic compositional intention”.46 Martha Nell Smith refers to “visually expressive scriptures”.47 However, some things get lost in the movement between the auditory and the ocular. If variants, for example, are designed to shimmer visually between 42. James Guthrie, “Near Rhymes and Reason: Style and Personality in Dickinson’s Poetry”, in Approaches to Teaching Dickinson’s Poetry, eds Robin Riley Fast and Christine Mack Gordon, New York, 1989, 70-77. 43. The phrase is Hart’s, and refers to “line for line print translations of poems and letters that attempt to represent the manuscripts as accurately as possible, with a detailed apparatus describing features that do not translate into script” (Ellen Louise Hart, “The Elizabeth Whitney Putnam Manuscripts and New Strategies for Editing Dickinson’s Letters”, in The Emily Dickinson Journal, IV/1 [1995] 72). 44. The first stanza of Ms Am 1118.5 (B193) (the Harvard classification for F1096C sent to Susan Dickinson) is transcribed as seven lines on the Dickinson Electronic Archives site, at . Accessed 29 August 2001. 45. Ellen Louise Hart, “The Elizabeth Whitney Putnam Manuscripts”, 44-74. 46. Susan Howe, The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, Hanover NH, 1993, 139. 47. Found at the Dickinson Electronic Archives website (accessed on 29 August 2001), both in , and also in the following page: .

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poles of endless possibility, how are they to be vocalized? Did Dickinson think of her late fragments and unfinished works as scripts for a choral performance? Since poems were read aloud by Dickinson and her contemporaries, would the variants have been articulated sequentially, and, what kind of principle or preference would structure the sequence?48 III It is a commonplace of Dickinson criticism that there can never be an authoritative edition of her poetry, either in complete or compiled form, because Dickinson herself recorded no absolutely unambiguous statement as to how her work was to be presented (this suggests that she was a lot more casual or confident about procedures of presentation than some contemporary critics would allow). Some critics take this one step further: since Dickinson did not publish in the conventional sense of having her poetry printed and circulated in bound texts, we should not bind her either. 49 But this is to confuse biographical with textual evidence; which is not to say that the textual evidence is any less complicated than the authorial, but it is at least guesswork informed more by physical evidence than by authorial conjecture. Dickinson distributed approximately 600 poems to forty correspondents.50 She collected approximately 800 poems in bound and 300 more in unbound collections. We could assume that editions of her poetry that follow the order of the fascicles and sets do not compromise her practices. However, editions of her poetry and letters based on notes sent to individual correspondents would not appear to compromise Dickinson’s practices either. Whether they compromise her intentions is another matter entirely. Since we cannot claim to know Dickinson’s intentions, and since intentionalism itself can be challenged as a practice of attempting to edit poems, it may be that such a consideration is irrelevant or inappropriate. The logic of the fascicles and of the correspondence potentially cancels itself out. Poems sent in letters do not depend on fascicle contexts to be understood, and poems included in fascicles do not depend on information about historical individuals to be understood. We should be wary of editions that are anchored in either the fascicles or the correspondence, not because they are wrong, but because they generate particular interpretative implications. Poems read in the sequence of their placement within and across fascicles may appear like the fixed points of a constellation that is based on nothing other than the accident of their physical and temporal proximity. Nevertheless, we still can construct imaginative connections between those poems that are true to the integrity of the particular fascicle if not to the unknowable intentions of Dickinson and her unseen ur-text. The problems abound whatever the editorial principle. Poems read in the sequence of their placement within and across a 48. Dickinson’s reading her own poems aloud is described in Martha Ackmann, “‘I’m Glad I Finally Surfaced’: A Norcross Descendent Remembers Emily Dickinson”, Emily Dickinson Journal, V/2, (1996), 120-26. Susan Dickinson is known to have read Dickinson’s poetry aloud to visitors. Also in the Letters: L304, to Louise Norcross, Dickinson herself says (though not of her own work): “I read them in the garret, and the rafters wept”(Letters, I, 440); “Mother and Vinnie wept – I read it to both at their request” (L721 to Elizabeth Holland, Letters, III, 706); “Ask some kind voice to read to you” (L901 to Elizabeth Holland, Letters, III, 824). 49. The editors of the Electronic Archives site claim that they “do not presume to know how [Dickinson] would have preferred her work to be presented to the public (i.e. in print or manuscript)”. But their emphasis on the visual aspects of the autograph text suggests very strongly that they believe print is an inadequate medium for representing the poetry. 50. Franklin, Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, 3.

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particular correspondence are all too easily related to the particularities of a relationship, without there being conclusive evidence that they comment on or reflect those particularities. For example, FR1433 “What mystery pervades a well” includes a line (“But nature is a stranger yet”) which Dickinson transcribed as “But Susan is a stranger yet” in a variant (1433C) sent next door in 1877. Does this indicate that Susan was the original subject of the poem, or that Dickinson modified it because the same point applied to her sister-in-law? And if Susan was the original, do we accept that the version with the line about her is more authoritative than the one with the line about nature? Dickinson collected poems in fascicles, and circulated poems in correspondence, but she did not bind her correspondence or distribute fascicles. In other words, even if she sent poems to Susan every day for decades, Dickinson did not collate them in an album entitled “The Book of Emily and Susan”. And by extension, although she circulated a great many poems during her lifetime, and asked occasional advice of Susan Dickinson and Higginson, there is no record of her having distributed or asked similar advice about sequences of poems. Finally, although there is ample evidence of Dickinson having revised individual poems in her possession, often leaving alternative readings, no such evidence exists either of poems regularly being sent with variants, or of extensive fascicle revision. Which brings us back to square one: methods of presenting poems grounded in fascicles or in correspondence are not at odds with Dickinson’s habits, but they are not unambiguously corroborated by them either. The history of Fr1096’s distribution shows how different editions subtly (or not so subtly) transform both its formal appearances and local contexts, and how those editions provide us with a set of signposts pointing in the direction of particular trajectories of meaning. It also helps to remind us that our own productions of Dickinson’s poems are equally embedded in historical constructions of cultural enterprise no less conventional than those of the past. For example, the standard edition of the Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), edited by Johnson and Ward, is a monumental act of scholarship that represents the originals with considerable accuracy, but nevertheless deserves now to be updated. Although nearly forty of the letters have been effectively re-dated, the revisions are generally unknown, and so interpretations continue to be based on the inaccuracies of the 1958 text. Judith Farr’s The Passion of Emily Dickinson (1992) identifies the “Master” figure addressed in a number of drafts from 1858 to 1861 as Samuel Bowles; yet it is now clear that Dickinson and Bowles could not have met before 1859. Since both the “Master” drafts and the Bowles correspondence are central to our reception of Dickinson, the need for a newly authoritative edition is clear. It is also needed because the twelve letters discovered or reconstructed since 1958 also require inclusion. Finally, so much in the theorization, dissemination and reception of literature has changed since the 1950s that readers need a new introduction to the letters to provide a more thorough understanding of certain features in Dickinson’s manuscripts: the dash, casual worddivision, paragraph conventions, the significance of non-grammatical capitalization in separating poetry from prose.51 51. For a comprehensive discussion of dating in Dickinson’s letters, see Alfred Habegger, My Wars are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson, New York, 2001, 644-45. For permission to view the original of “A narrow fellow in the grass” I am grateful to Daria D’Arienzo at Amherst College, Special Collections. I am also grateful to Kate Boyle, Tevis Kimball and Barbara Buell of Special Collections, the Jones Library, Amherst.

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No authoritative edition exists, so Dickinson will not be bound. Nevertheless, the ongoing process of rebinding her poems, and then having to unbind them again, manifests continually new interpretative possibilities at the same time as it exposes limitations. Dickinson’s poetic energies are intensified by this process, which affirms her radical interpretability and variability. Regarding Dickinson through books has its necessary dissatisfactions, enabling us to realize her as Vesuvius unbound. The truth is both that there are too many Dickinson editions, and that there are not enough.

FIT COMPOSITIONS: WHITMAN’S REVISIONS TO DRUM-TAPS ELDRID HERRINGTON

Frank O’Hara celebrated the 100th birthday of Leaves of Grass in a poem dated July 14th, 1955, “A Whitman’s Birthday Broadcast with Static”: Pas la jeunesse à moi, ni delicacy, ich kann nicht, ich kann nicht, keines Vorsprechen! Ugly on the patio, silly on the floor, unkempt, dans le vieux parc je m’asseois, et je ne vois pas à droite ni à gauche. Personne! mais des bruits, des vagues particulières, und ich habe Kummer, es könnte ihm ein Schaden zustossen, lacht der Kundschafter. And then someone comes along who’s sick and I say “Tiens, ça! c’est las de l’amour, c’est okay!” and fall. Da, ich bin der Komponist, und ich bin komponiert.1 O’Hara’s poem is about the paralysis of falling in love, the awkwardness involved, the problems of translating and communicating passion. “Des bruits, des vagues particulières” are a scan through the airwaves over different languages, but across the same poem. O’Hara draws Whitman’s “camp” love out of his own poem at the same time that he draws himself out of Whitman; as the poem he is “translating” was one not published in that first edition of Leaves of Grass, but ten years later, in DrumTaps, “Not Youth Pertains to Me”: Not youth pertains to me, Nor delicatesse, I cannot beguile the times with talk, Awkward in the parlor, neither a dancer nor elegant, In the learn’d coterie sitting constrain’d and still, for learning inures not to me, Beauty, knowledge, inure not to me – yet two or three things inure to me, I have nourish’d the wounded and sooth’d many a dying soldier, And at intervals waiting or in the midst of camp, Composed these songs.2 1. Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen, Berkeley, 1971, 224.

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O’Hara tunes into Whitman’s pun on “composed” – “Yes, I am the composer, and I am composed” – to the self-creation all Whitman’s poetry claims for itself. The “fall” in O’Hara’s poem is at once the act of falling in love and also its opposite, a paralytic fear of love, making the speaker awkward, not just tongue-tied, but tonguestied, never communicating in the same language, cleverly inadequate. He is discomposed, ill at ease, making the assertive ending double-edged, and suggesting that one risk of being “composed” is being static, unmoving if not unmoved. He catches at self-contempt and irony in the sounded modulation between “unkempt” and “komponiert”. His poem is about self-betrayal but he is responsive to the truth of Whitman’s poetic paradox: controlled disorder. Being “unkempt” is Whitman’s way of being “komponiert”, of composing his discomposure at decomposed bodies. Rearrangements of Drum-Taps are progressively less organic and more connective, yet they stay true to chaos of feeling, where disarray is dismay. O’Hara’s poem is not about war, but registers Whitman’s exploration of the uneasy relation of war to writing about war. Whitman’s “composed” means at once “typeset”, “wrote music”, “wrote poems”, and “pulled myself together through these poems”; this ultimate compaction of meaning displays a finish that is at odds with the rest of his poem. In the midst of chaos, Whitman says, I can control my poems, but this speaking is a different kind of restraint from that of the polite parlour. O’Hara’s “translation” picks up on the original’s pose of self-pleased complaint, which is deliberately undercut by extreme control. In Whitman’s poem, Latinate inversions (“not youth”) are made the touchstones, not for politeness, but for awkwardness; this poem plays with internal rhymes and assonance, showing off poetic technique at the very moment that he claims allegiance with athletes over aesthetes: “beguile”/ “times”; “cannot”/ “talk”/ “awkward”; “learning”/ “inures”/ “nourish’d”; “wounded”/ “sooth’d”. O’Hara’s own effects also cut two ways: “ich kann nicht, ich kann nicht” is split between stuttering and assertion; “des vagues” are “waves”, but, placed next to “particulières”, looks like it also means “uncertainties”. Words cross languages; “delicacy” is in tune with the way in which Whitman’s “foreign” words are of his own making, at times fusions of French and English; here “delicacy” looks like a translation of “delicatesse” from “English” into “French”. O’Hara translates Whitman’s gloss on manly love to twentieth-century slang, baring the sexuality latent in the piece; “camp” is no longer just a place, but an attitude. It is “camp” (in O’Hara’s and Whitman’s senses) which gives Whitman license to “compose”: the drawing rooms where sexuality is expressed according to rigidified social rules stifle him. The true place to live as a sexual being is the battlefield, where surface courteousness gets stripped away, where war teaches love. “Composed” has a deathlike overtone of arranging a body for burial, a scene repeated throughout Drum-Taps, but it is exactly that threat of death that undresses unnecessary social convention. Whitman’s word “composed” was actually a revision to “Not Youth Pertains to Me”, made after the war was over. When it was the final poem in the first edition of Drum-Taps (1865), the composition of its ending was slightly different: I have nourished the wounded, and sooth’d many a dying soldier; 2. Walt Whitman, A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, eds Sculley Bradley, Harold Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White, 3 volumes, New York, 1980, II, 528. Subsequent quotations from Whitman’s poetry are taken from this edition and volume and page numbers are provided in the text.

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And at intervals I have strung together a few songs, Fit for war, and the life of the camp. (II, 528) “Strung together” writes the sequence of poems as a ragged band, as an impromptu instrument, or even a necklace;3 it strikes a different chord from “composed”, though “fit” also recognizes a spatial relation akin to that of printing. “Fit” shows off a poetry “physically strong” and “athletically appropriate” but also “constrained”, “curtailed”, even hinting at a kind of poetic epileptic debility: Whitman told Horace Traubel that Drum-Taps was “put together by fits and starts, on the field, in the hospitals, as I worked with the soldier boys”.4 Whitman revises “fit” as “composed” for a particular moment: the first post-war edition of Leaves of Grass in which Drum-Taps was revised and became a cluster, writing “fit” and athletic when war is underway, but “composed” as a revision when he knows that the country itself is composed at war’s end. In the final two lines of “Not Youth Pertains to Me”, Whitman sets “camp” up against “composed”; striking a poetic pose he likens to assembling a network of troops’ quarters, as though poems were moveable portraits, ready to be packed up and shifted. But his re-ordering of poems becomes settled after the war: post-war arrangements of Drum-Taps poems show a similar “composition” of the poems as against the “fits and starts” of the 1865 edition. Sequencing poems according to theme might seem too controlled for a Whitmanian project, but his use of clusters can be readily explained. Rearrangement makes order organic; poems are never in stasis but are ever-changing in their relations to each other. But the Drum-Taps revisions also reveal an increasing drive towards order; over the three revisions to the ordering of Drum-Taps poems, marshallings and regroupings show Whitman not only reading himself but also furthering potential connections between extant pieces and ideas. There are three variants to the Drum-Taps sequence over six editions; the 1865 Drum-Taps volumes are radically different from the 1871 and 1881 Drum-Taps clusters in that not one pairing or sequence of poems in Drum-Taps or Sequel to Drum-Taps is retained. 1871 and 1881 have several sub-cluster arrangements in common, poems that are always kept together, and in sequence. Of the thirty-two Drum-Taps poems in the 1871 edition, only four are not kept in these sub-clusters in the 1881 edition (see Appendix), and all these sub-clusters retain their same order with respect to each other. There are only two continuities in poem arrangements between all three volumes. “Drum-Taps” (renamed “First O Songs for a Prelude” in 1881) begins all three editions, as a martial celebration. “To the Leaven’d Soil They Trod” ended the 1865 Sequel to Drum-Taps and also ends the 1871 and 1881 volumes, making a generous prophetic gesture of reconciliation, saying that the South will “ripen my songs”. Drum-Taps represents the first time Whitman composed a volume in the light of an historical event, and also the first occasion on which he published a book of poems under a name other than Leaves of Grass. However, there is no apparent pressure to make the sequence follow logical, personal or historical consequence, and the story of the volume is not history but the experience of war. The poems in Drum-Taps lend themselves to rearrangement in that, unlike in Specimen Days, there are no accounts of particular battles or specific acts of mercy Whitman performed and no requirement to conform to a timeline. 3. The line may echo “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”: “The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings”(Variorum, I, 169). 4. Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, July 16–October 31 1888, New York, 1961, 137.

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Anthony Szczesiul, writing about the 1871 Drum-Taps cluster, notes a grouping of four poems that appear together on facing pages, making a composite thematic and visual portrait.5 But this represents an unusual visual perfection in the volume, and in fact typography remains one chief difference between the 1865 and 1871/1881 editions. In the later editions, there seems to be little interest in keeping poems whole on one page (as there was in 1865). Whitman’s skill as a typesetter and the fact that he always examined the proofs of his volumes lends a particular weight to the purposiveness of his spatial arrangements. When talking about revision, Whitman identified what he had an eye for when altering the text: I am always tempted to put in, take out, change. Though, having been a printer myself, I have what may be called an anticipatory eye – know pretty well as I write how a thing will turn up in the type – appear – take form.6 This “anticipatory eye” for physical placement can be seen in the 1865 Sequel to Drum-Taps, as Whitman never begins a poem in the middle of a page unless the poem ends on that page. This is the case in the 1865 Drum-Taps, with only one exception, “Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice”.7 In both volumes, all poems which begin at the top of a page and fill that page continue onto the next one. Again there is one exception, from Drum-Taps; “1861” is self-contained on one full page. The composition of both volumes is tight, and there are no large compensatory gaps or spaces between poems. Such control of a visual order gives signals for reading completion, and is not true of any other book by Whitman, or any other edition of his works published in his lifetime. Though this is a control more possible in a small volume, it is not true of Two Rivulets, for example, where poems are often followed by a blank space and each poem begins on a separate page. This typographical care suggests that Whitman’s 1865 poems are placed in sequence for spatial reasons, more than for coherence or complementarity. One particular consequence of the physical arrangement is a tendency to alternate shorter poems with longer ones in order to complete a page. This has a contrapuntal effect, not just in the contrast of length with brevity but also in the tenor of the poems. For example, the last two lines of “City of ships” are martial: “In peace I chanted peace, but now the drum of war is mine; / War, red war, is my song through your streets, O city!” Contrapuntally, a two-line poem, “Mother and babe”, completes the page: “I see the sleeping babe, nestling the breast of its mother; / The sleeping mother and babe–hush’d, I study them long and long.” War cries are muted by and transmuted into the quiet of a tranquil scene, where the child and mother are hushed, as is the onlooking speaker. “Mother and babe” in turn introduces “Vigil strange I kept on the field one night”, with the speaker’s motherly concern for his comrade, whom he calls “son” (this parallel of mother with motherly speaker perhaps gives rise to 1871/1881 sequences, discussed below). Short portraits distill into the longer poems. In “A child’s amaze” the preacher preaches as though “contending against some being or influence”; this is followed by “Beat! Beat! Drums!”, where the drums are exhorted to enter “Into the solemn church, scatter the congregation”, and their noise to be made so 5. Anthony Szczesiul, “The Maturing Vision of Walt Whitman’s 1871 Revision Version of DrumTaps”, in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, X/3 (1993), 127-41. 6. Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, April 8–September 14 1889, eds Gertrude Traubel and William White, Carbondale, IL, 1964, 390. 7. Titles are here cited as they appear in each edition, not as they finally appeared in 1892.

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great as to “Let not the child’s voice be heard”. “A sight in camp” precedes another sight, “A farm picture”, placing the vision of the dead boy as Christ-like beside a far plainer, almost blank, three-line picture, emptied of any physical human presence. Though these short poems become casualties when Whitman rearranges the DrumTaps poems in accordance with war, they are nonetheless carefully chosen for the moment, and their antiphonal vision is appropriate to the time of composition, the sudden shifts in event and uncertain sense of the war’s outcome. Pairings of poems interrelated in 1865 disappear, together with suggestive historical contexts. For example, “The Centenarian’s story” immediately precedes “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” in 1865, aligning two stories of America’s national foundation: revolution and western expansion. Troops of revolutionary soldiers are not just likened to the Civil War volunteers, as in “The Centenarian’s story” therefore, but by literal extension to the pioneers who extend the nation. This expansion brings home one of the causes of Civil War conflict, the dispute over the politics of these new territories. Volume-context and poem-context make “Pioneers” a war poem, giving the successive deaths a martial, Civil War, tinge. Whitman sees the generations of settlers as troops across time, asking, “Have the elder races halted?”, assuring us that though they die, more will take their place. The centenarian halts on a hilltop in Brooklyn, sitting side-by-side with a successor, a volunteer in the Civil War; the Revolutionary’s memory brings to life the ghosts of the past, layering them over the present vista of preparations for war. This is emblematic of the poems too, which sit side-by-side in commentary. The alternating variety of the 1865 arrangement recognizes the antithetical measure of the title itself: “drum-taps” are at once notes of elegy and calls to battle, which Whitman noted to O’Connor in his January 6, 1865 letter: The book is therefore unprecedently sad, (as these days are, are they not?) – but it also has the blast of the trumpet, & the drum pounds & whirrs in it, & then an undertone of sweetest comradeship & human love, threading its steady thread inside the chaos, & heard at every lull & interstice thereof – truly also it has clear notes of faith & triumph.8 Sadness and triumph are complemented by other antitheses within the text: it is typical within the Drum-Taps poems themselves to move from the general to the human particular and, in style, to have parentheses, dialogues, asides. Directly antithetical pairings are lost to a certain extent with the 1871 edition, which chooses groupings over changes in mood. The first seven poems [“DrumTaps”, “1861”, “Beat! Beat! Drums!”, “From Paumanok Starting”, “Rise O Days”, “City of Ships” and “The Centenarian’s Story”] are exultant marches about New York’s preparations (the only poem not to mention New York, “City of Ships” gives a Manhattan vista). In 1881, this grouping around the city is intercut with a newly collected poem, originally published in Kansas Magazine in 1872 [“Virginia – The West”]. It expresses anxiety about continuing threats to the union. The recurrent question of where a poet situates a new poem in a previously established collection arises here. Whitman incorporates it where it will best speak to other poems. The interpolation of “Virginia – The West” gives a gloss on the “doubt nauseous” of “Rise 8. Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, 5 volumes, New York, 1961, I, 247.

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O Days”, the preceding poem. This doubt is the South’s hand with “insane knife” brandished against “the Mother of All”. Such a pairing also bookends the more martial poems, setting off the two that are exclusively about New York City, “City of Ships” and “The Centenarian’s Story”. In 1871 and 1881, the “city” poems transform from exultant preparations for the war into poems of the war itself, four portraits of army encampments: “An Army Corps on the March”, “Cavalry Crossing a Ford”, “Bivouac on a Mountain Side” and “By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame”. The change in the 1881 sequence draws attention to the shifts in movement between poems themselves: the 1871 pairing of march with march, rest with rest becomes in 1881 an alternation of march with rest, march with rest. The poems form a coherent cluster of four, but in the 1871 and the 1881 edition, one poem is chosen to conclude the set, ushering in a set of poems about dead or dying sons. “By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame” is the only poem of the four to allude to home, and so in 1871 and 1881 introduces “Come Up from the Fields, Father”, with its story of a dead soldier’s Ohio family. In “By the Bivouac’s Fitful flame”, Whitman sees his thoughts as if they were troops: While wind in procession thoughts, O tender and wondrous thoughts, Of life and death – of home and the past and loved, and of those that are far away (II, 466) Beautifully, the grammar twists around to shadow the movement described: “While wind in procession thoughts”, not “while thoughts wind in procession”. Whitman delicately invokes the musical element of drum-taps through the pun on “wind”. The placement of the persona also marks out a difference from the other three poems: the speaker is by the flame, participating in the scene, unlike in, say, “Bivouac on a Mountain Side”, where he observes the campfire from a distance. This placement in the scene forges the sympathy in “Come Up from the Fields, Father”, where the speaker enters into the poem at the moment the mother least needs to be alone. Through carefully arranged sequences, Whitman dramatizes the continuity of the speaking “I” by rendering similar situations and scenes, creating a threaded continuity of voice that belies the national and personal fractures he records. Discrete portraits of separate experience and hurt are tenderly intertwined, as one poem completes the thoughts or longings of the other. This motherhood in turn introduces “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night”, where the speaker himself has a “son” to mourn, the “son” being one of his lovers. In contrast to the “sun”, he will never rise again. It is as though the “Mother and babe” sequence from 1865 becomes a series of portraits of dying boys: “Come Up from the Fields, Father”, “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night”, “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest”, and “A Sight in Camp”. Though the continuity of the “I” is dramatized so frequently in these sequences, the tragedy of that speaker’s absent address is also endemic to the poems. These scenes may speak to each other, but the people in them do not speak to each other; the speaker is left a lonely intermediary. The struggle for company effects itself in repeated scenes of death, often in the middle of marches: Whitman joins “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” to a further two portraits of death: “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” and “A Sight in Camp in the Day-Break Gray and Dim”. Such poems themselves are nightmarish in that the scene of death is continually repeated, and the sameness of the conflict is pinned to these moments of tragic resolution, of particular,

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nameless deaths. Sequence then gives the sense of relentlessness, of having to move on, and also of unique, if anonymous, moments of understanding. Death and writing are likened to each other in “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest”: I staunch the blood temporarily, (the youngster’s face is as white as a lily,) Then before I depart I sweep my eyes o’er the scene fain to absorb it all (II, 494) The speaker staunches the blood and reluctantly absorbs the scene, where his absorbed pose inscribes the moment of the youth’s death; the speaker has been prompted to depart by the “departure” in death of the “youngster”. But he can never leave this kind of scene, and in the third of these portraits of death, “A Sight in Camp in the Day-Break Gray and Dim”, he comes back to three deaths, culminating in a powerful moment of recognition that is also revelation: Young man, I think I know you – I think this face of yours is the face of the Christ himself; Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies. (II, 496) “Here again he lies” means not only that this young man is Christ come again in sacrifice, but also, he is another in this group of three dead men. Also, here again is a death the speaker must reckon with. Tenderly, the speaker addresses him as “you”, but when he notes that identification, transforms “you” into “he”: in a sense, this boy is all of these boys. The traumatic merging of identities into an amorphous mass, a consequence of battle, is made here into a positive unity of sacrifice, a beautiful brotherhood of death. In the 1865 edition of Drum-Taps, “The Veteran’s vision” was placed just before “O tan-faced Prairie-boy”. In 1871, Whitman keeps these poems near each other, expanding the pair to incorporate portraits of age: “The Artilleryman’s Vision” (the revised “Veteran’s vision”), “I saw Old General at Bay” and “O Tan-faced Prairie Boy”. By 1881, he places “The Artilleryman’s Vision” in a group portrait of age and experience only: “I Saw Old General at Bay”, “The Artilleryman’s Vision”, “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors”, “Not Youth Pertains to Me”, and “Race of Veterans”. “O Tanfaced Prairie Boy” is moved into a group of poems that plays on one of Whitman’s favorite comparisons, that of faces with suns and moons (see “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night”, for example). “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” was first printed in the 1871 cluster Bathed in War’s Perfume, and followed “Song of the Banner at Daybreak”. It is one of the very few post-war poems to enter the Drum-Taps cluster in 1881. More significantly, it is the only “war” poem in which slavery is mentioned, and is distinguished by its poetic formalism, out of place with the rest of the cluster. The placement of “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” in the 1871 arrangement next to “Song of the Banner at Daybreak” underscores the subject of devotion to a flag, and, as with the veteran and prairie boy, juxtaposes age with youth. But in the 1881 edition, Whitman is careful to set the poem in the midst of explicit commentaries. By printing “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” after “The Artilleryman’s Vision”, the 1881 arrangement retains the flag but adds the vistas of history which age gives, the experience of nation. In “The Artilleryman’s Vision”, the flag is never explicitly mentioned, but is invoked through an allusion to the poem that became the U. S. national anthem (in 1931) in the last

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line: “And bombs bursting in air, and at night the vari-color’d rockets.” This ending is indebted to the opening of Francis Scott Key’s poem to celebrate the successful defense of Fort McHenry against the British in 1814: Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight, O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming? And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.9 The artilleryman’s rockets are “vari-color’d”, not “red”, perhaps to indicate fireworks rather than artillery. The end of the poem points to the cessation of war, making explicit the way in which celebration of war’s end is allied to the hideous excitement of war that this veteran feels. The last line of “The Artilleryman’s Vision” immediately precedes the title “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors”, so although “our flag” is not in the earlier poem, the title “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” completes his allusion. This is one of the strongest lexical continuities between the poems of Drum-Taps, made at the very moment that Whitman presents the denial of national participation, a denial shared by no other speaker or subject of the Drum-Taps cluster. Ethiopia is isolated, but the poem is not. The speaker of the poem, a soldier on Sherman’s march to the sea, questions why this slave salutes a flag that has not represented her. Ethiopia’s response is enigmatic about her attachment to the United States: Me master years a hundred since from my parents sunder’d, A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught, Then hither me across the sea the cruel slaver brought. (III, 632) This first line is arranged to show the resources of the language this woman chooses. A variety of possibilities in meaning becomes clear when it is rearranged, for example in this way: “A hundred years ago master sundered me from my parents.” “Me” and “my parents” are far from each other in the line to suggest the geographical distance. “Me master” appears to say “my master”, but in the logic of that sentence the sundering then would have no direct object; this possibly suggested the violent negation of selfhood that slavery attempted to inflict on her: “A hundred years ago my master sundered [me] from my parents.” Ethiopia’s control of language is also seen in her play in these fourteeners with rhymes, a response to the speaker’s own internal rhymes: “hundred”/ “sunder’d”; “caught”/ “caught”; “me”/ “sea”; “caught”/ “brought”. This carefully matched verse of polite call and response belies antipathies: the soldier replicates the slaver’s view of her as a “savage beast” when he says that she is “hardly human”. He notes her “yellow, red and green” turban, the colours of Ethiopia, not the United States. The “colors” Ethiopia salutes might also be something other than a flag: the “colors” of people themselves, a suppressed diversity she proudly supports.

9. Francis Scott Key, “The Defence of Fort McHenry”, in American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume I: Philip Freneau to Walt Whitman, New York, 1993, 46.

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“Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” is the only rhymed and metrical poem in the 1881 Drum-Taps sequence (“O Captain, My Captain” is in Sequel to Drum-Taps). This fact, and the fact that it alone deals explicitly with slavery, give the poem a notable singularity. The inversions operate to maintain the iambic heptameter (for example “years a hundred”, not “a hundred years”). “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” is set in an antipathetic context; the carefully staged fluency of the verse immediately introduces the inversion of the next poem’s title, “Not Youth Pertains to Me”, meaning “Youth does not pertain to me” and “Not-youth (age) pertains to me”. This poem explicitly writes against forms, including the kind of measured poetic diction Whitman gives to the slave woman; the contextualization of the poem gives a radically alternative meaning to its formalism. But the reasons for her carefully curtailed speech are more serious than the ones the speaker of “Not Youth Pertains to Me” complains about, and her speech then also tells of his complaint. Crossed purposes in “Not Youth Pertains to Me”, then, are also the conflicts and confluences between poems, internal contradictions which represent civil wars within people, conflicts between roles, expectations, and desires: Beauty, knowledge, inure not to me – yet two or three things inure to me, I have nourish’d the wounded and sooth’d many a dying soldier, And at intervals waiting or in the midst of camp, Composed these songs. (II, 528) In shifting the “intervals” between poems, Whitman recomposes them, and himself. He suggests that poems compose and calm the writer, as they offer themselves for rearrangement and rewriting in the face of tragedy. “Nourish’d”, “sooth’d” and “composed” are part of a parallel sequence, which shows that, for Whitman, resequencing his poetry is one continuous act of self-composition. In “Not Youth Pertains to Me”, Whitman seems to make the familiar claim that poetry has no place in war, but his statement is more ambiguous and generous than that. He implies that he can have a control over his poems that he might not have over the deaths of soldiers and over his feelings; there is something healing about reviewing and reordering the poems. This is a simple and limited claim: it is enough to have created and arranged these poems, even if they are not beautiful or imbued with tradition. From the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s sequences pictured the shifting, inconsequential tableaux of egalitarian democracy. In Drum-Taps, written in a life between scenes of war, abrupt sequences register disconnection, the stop and start of war. To avoid becoming more “inured”, hardened or habituated to repeated scenes, Whitman shifts the composition of poetic sequence within Drum-Taps and across his lifetime. Such resequencing, however futile, still provides solace, where the arrangements are saved from being clinical and studied. Poetry is one way Whitman kept himself together when inactive; soothing soldiers has its necessary parallel in composing songs. In this, Drum-Taps is anti-didactic. Throughout, Whitman ensures that his war writing does not record progress but portraiture. His incessant habit of revision, with its illusion of perpetuation, writes against finality as does the order of poems. The real life of war always lies in between, and as such presents something impossible to capture.

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APPENDIX: DRUM-TAPS POEMS IN 1865, 1871 AND 1881

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Drum-Taps [1865] Drum-Taps Shut not your doors, proud libraries Calvary crossing a ford Song of the banner at daybreak By the bivouac’s fitful flame 1861 From Paumanok Starting I Fly like a Bird Beginning My Studies The Centenarian’s story Pioneers! O Pioneers! Quicksand years that whirl me I know not The Dresser When I heard the learn’d Astronomer Rise O Days from your fathomless deeps A Child’s amaze Beat! Beat! Drums! Come up from the fields, father City of ships Mother and babe Vigil strange I kept on the field one night Bathed in war’s perfume A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown Long, too long, O land A sight in camp in the day-break grey and dim A farm picture Give me the splendid silent sun Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me? Year of meteors The Torch Years of the unperform’d Year that trembled and reel’d beneath me The Veteran’s vision O tan-fac’d Prairie-boy Camps of green As toilsome I wander’d Virginia’s woods Hymn of dead soldiers The ship A Broadway pageant Flag of stars, thick-sprinkled bunting Old Ireland Look down fair moon Out of the rolling ocean, the crowd World, take notice I saw Old General at bay Others may praise what they like Solid, ironical, rolling orb Hush’d be the camps today Wave in, weave in, my hardy life Turn, O Libertad Bivouac on a mountain side Pensive on her dead gazing, I heard the mother of all Not youth pertains to me

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Drum-Taps [1871] Drum-Taps 1861 Beat! Beat! Drums! From Paumanok Starting Rise O Days City of ships The Centenarian’s story An Army Corps on the March Calvary crossing a ford Bivouac on a Mountain Side By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame Come Up From the Fields, Father Vigil Strange I Kept On the Field One Night A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest A Sight in Camp Not the Pilot, &c As Toilsome I Wander’d Year that Trembled The Dresser Long, too Long, O Land Give Me the Splendid, Silent Sun Dirge for Two Veterans Over the Carnage The Artilleryman’s Vision I saw Old General at Bay O Tan-faced Prairie Boy Look Down, Fair Moon Reconciliation Spirit whose Work is Done How Solemn as One by One Not Youth Pertains to Me To the Leaven’d Soil They Trod

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Drum-Taps [1881] First O Songs for a Prelude Eighteen Sixty-One Beat! Beat! Drums! From Paumanok Starting I Fly like a Bird Song of the banner at daybreak Rise O Days from Your Fathomless Deeps Virginia – the West City of Ships The Centenarian’s story Calvary Crossing a Ford Bivouac on a Mountain Side An Army Corps on the March By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame Come Up From the Fields, Father Vigil Strange I Kept On the Field One Night A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Grey and Dim As Toilsome I Wander’d Virginia’s Woods Not the Pilot Year that Trembled and Reel’d Beneath me The Wound-Dresser Long, too long America Give Me the Splendid, Silent Sun Dirge for Two Veterans Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice I saw Old General at Bay The Artilleryman’s Vision Ethiopia Saluting the Colors Not Youth Pertains to Me Race of Veterans World Take Good Notice O Tan-faced Prairie Boy Look Down, Fair Moon Reconciliation How Solemn as One by One As I Lay with My Head in Your Lap Camerado Delicate Cluster To a Certain Civilian Lo, Victress on the Peaks Spirit Whose Work is Done Adieu to a Soldier Turn O Libertad To the leaven’d Soil They Trod

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“TO MAKE IT MEAN ME”: NARRATIVE DESIGN IN NORTH OF BOSTON STEPHEN MATTERSON

It is easy to think of Robert Frost as the New Critical poet par excellence, and the reasons for this are not hard to see. The canonization of his work was facilitated by the reading strategies encouraged under New Criticism during the 1930s and 1940s. In spite of the considerable number of longer poems that he wrote, anthologies typically represent his poetry by the shorter lyrics and narrative poems, the kind of work that most readily lends itself to the kind of classroom analysis that New Criticism fostered; the poems are critically amenable to the identification of symbol and the recognition of ambiguity, detachment of tone and to concentration on the autonomous words on the page in the self-contained poem. In contrast to other modernists, Frost’s characteristic avoidance of esoteric allusion lends authority to the words on the page before us and to the poem as if it were the container of all we need to know for understanding. Frost’s poems seem to be mediated to us as individual closed systems and are best understood and appreciated in those terms. This mediation, though, runs in some respects counter to Frost’s representation of his poetry, and of some of the first (pre-New Critical) critics of his work. Although he certainly maintained that the individual poem was important, Frost also suggested that it might have a “lesser design” than the design of the overall collection in which it appeared. In 1942 Frost explained that he made his first two books, A Boy’s Will and North of Boston by taking the individual poems and then trying to gather them together to reveal a pattern: The interest, the pastime, was to learn if there had been any divinity shaping my ends and I had been building better than I knew. In other words could anything of larger design, even the roughest, any broken or dotted continuity, or any fragment of a figure be discerned among the apparently random lesser designs of the several poems.1 Although today’s readers tend to concentrate on the “lesser designs” of the individual poems rather than on the “larger design” of the book, this was not always the case. Frost’s own contemporaries were alert to his overall design, especially in the first two books. Several of the first reviewers of North of Boston remarked on its prosiness, with some making direct comparisons to regionalist New England prose writers such as Alice Brown and Mary Wilkins Freeman. Clearly these reviewers had in mind the prose-like qualities of the poetry, the subject-matter and the strong narratives that are 1. Frost, “Preface to Poems in ‘This is My Best’”, in Collected Poems, Prose and Plays, New York, 1995, 783.

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evident in most of the poems. But they also referred to the interlinked nature of the poems. As Richard Aldington wrote (in a review Frost disliked), “it is in cumulative effect rather than in detail that Mr Frost gets his results”.2 Although none of these reviewers could have known it, when he first moved to England in 1912, Frost had in fact intended to write a novel. The project was abandoned, with Frost saying, “I always found myself writing poetry” rather than prose.3 My aim here is not to explore North of Boston as if it were that discarded novel, but to approach the book using a reading strategy that recognizes that it is a cycle of closely related poems, a collection in which each of the seventeen poems functions as an autonomous unit while also contributing to and being enriched by the context of Frost’s overall design. Thus I hope to explore what is gained by such an approach, and, by implication, what is lost if we maintain the sense that each of the North of Boston poems is a discrete unit.

II Perhaps the closest analogy for this way of reading North of Boston is the short-story sequence or cycle, and it is useful to press this analogy further, and to consider North of Boston as if it were a short-story cycle. The rather critically neglected genre of the short-story cycle has been considered especially American, and has had a strong association with regional and local-colour writers. Typically, a sense of place or region helps to unify the short story sequence, obvious examples being Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), or, to use two prominent recent examples, Richard Ford’s Rock Springs (1989) and Annie Proulx’s Close Range (1999). The relation of North of Boston to the local-colour tradition is evident and made marked by the title Frost chose. More significantly, though, in the short-story sequence or cycle the autonomy of the individual story is upheld (often emphasized by separate publication before its appearance in the sequence), and yet the significance of the story is enhanced or perhaps even redirected by the context in which it appears. As James Nagel has observed: in the short-story cycle each component work must stand alone (with a beginning, middle and end) yet be enriched in the context of the interrelated stories. In contrast to the linear development of plot in a novel, the cycle lends itself to diegetical discontinuities.4 Nagel makes other points that are relevant to North of Boston. He argues that in a cycle each story tends to focus on a specific incident while generating fresh interpretive possibilities for reading the other stories, that although the cycle may focus on a single character it is more likely to involve a series of characters, that there

2. Quoted in Jay Parini, Robert Frost: A Life, London, 1998, 149. 3. Quoted in Robert Spangler Newdick and William A. Sutton, Newdick’s Season of Frost: An Interrupted Biography of Robert Frost, Albany, NY, 1976, 77. For details of the “discarded novel” see John Evangelist Walsh, Into My Own, New York, 1988, 48. Walsh states that part of the novel was to explore the tension between two farm labourers, one a youthful outsider and the other an experienced older man. 4. James Nagel, The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle, Baton Rouge, 2001, 15.

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is less emphasis than in the novel on the development of character, and that setting has provided the genre’s “most persistent continuity”.5 Frost had a strong sense of narrative design, not only for individual narrative poems but also for overall arrangement. This is evident in his first book, A Boy’s Will (1913).6 The book is divided into three parts of unequal length, and on its contents page Frost included a sub-titular gloss to all but two of the thirty-two poems (the glosses are almost always omitted when the poems appear in anthologies). Thus, for example, on the contents page the title “Mowing”, from Part I has a brief addendum: “He takes up life simply with the small tasks.”7 With their use of the third person to create a distance between poet and persona, these short glosses are strongly reminiscent of the titles that W.B. Yeats gave his poems in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899); “The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart”, “He mourns for the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved, and longs for the End of the World” and so on.8 On the face of it Frost’s addenda actually contribute little if anything to our understanding of the poems; they do not, for instance, provide us with any information that is needed to comprehend the poems. They may even appear to be redundant, as, for instance, the gloss on “The Tuft of Flowers”: “about fellowship”, and the fact that the glosses appear on the contents page rather than with the poems reinforces this sense of their redundancy. But these glosses do function significantly in two ways. Firstly, through them Frost implies a consistent persona behind the poems, thus suggesting that this is a collection of poems somewhat unified by the presence of a single character. Secondly, he suggests that there is a form of narrative sequence to A Boy’s Will. This does not necessarily mean that A Boy’s Will tells a straightforward story of its protagonist’s development over a period of time. Frost’s titular glosses function mainly in indicating that the poems explore varying aspects of a single consciousness as his reflective protagonist confronts a crisis. They also work, of course, to indicate that each poem is an episode in a developing drama, even if Frost provides no sense of how this drama is to end. Frost provided no such glosses to the poems of North of Boston, nor is the book divided into parts as the earlier one was. On the contents page Frost does allude to the earlier collection in his statement that “‘Mending Wall’ takes up the theme where ‘The Tuft of Flowers’ in A Boy’s Will laid it down” (66). With this, Frost seems to indicate a continuity of persona as well as of place and theme between the two books, but more significantly, he is implying that North of Boston is also a collection of related poems. Interestingly, Frost’s comment suggests the idea of dialogue between poems, an idea that I specifically want to develop. Frost remarked on the genesis of A Boy’s Will, saying that “One day as I was looking at old papers dating back some of them twenty years, I saw in a flash that I had one book already written and all I had to do was throw it into shape to make it mean me”.9 Frost’s comment that the book came to “mean me” through its arrangement is also telling, even though critical analysis of the poems of A Boy’s Will and North of Boston has tended to ignore this. 5. Ibid., 16-17. 6. That is, his first published book; it is often forgotten that in terms of American publication, North of Boston preceded A Boy’s Will. 7. Robert Frost, Poems by Robert Frost: A Boy’s Will and North of Boston, New York, 2001, 18. Subsequent references to poems from A Boy’s Will and North of Boston are to this edition and page numbers will be provided in the text. 8. W.B. Yeats, The Works of W.B. Yeats, Ware, xii. 9. Quoted in Sutton, 78.

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III The first American edition of North of Boston is made up of a total of seventeen poems, although the poems that are placed first and last, “The Pasture” and “Good Hours” are set in italics and are not listed on the Contents page. In fact, “The Pasture” is printed on the page between the title page and the list of Contents page. 10 (“Good Hours” did not appear at all in the book’s first edition, published in Britain; it was added for the 1915 American edition.) “The Pasture” and “Good Hours” effectively frame the book, perhaps functioning as prologue and epilogue even if they bear a slightly ambiguous relation to the other poems. Thus, according to Frost’s Contents page, North of Boston actually comprises fifteen poems. Of these fifteen poems, five (“The Death of the Hired Man”, “A Hundred Collars”, “The Code”, “The Housekeeper” and “The Fear”) had been published before their appearance in the book. Six of the poems (three of which Frost considered the “beginning” of North of Boston) had been written before Frost came to England; the remainder were written there.11 Frost did not print the poems of North of Boston in the chronological order of their composition. In the book their order is as follows:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

The Pasture Mending Wall The Death of the Hired Man The Mountain A Hundred Collars Home Burial The Black Cottage Blueberries A Servant to Servants After Apple-Picking The Code The Generations of Men The Housekeeper The Fear The Self-Seeker The Wood-Pile Good Hours

Seeing the poems ordered in this way stimulates several possible ways of looking at North of Boston as a totality. This is partly because accepting that the collection is a kind of sequence or cycle places great importance on the placing of certain poems, especially the first and the last – and, as I shall argue, the middle poem. One of the most intriguing possibilities is in seeing that the dialectic which appears in “Mending Wall” is being taken up and explored in the subsequent poems, in which Frost explores the barriers and connections between people and between their relation to nature, and also explores the limits and possibilities of community and the relation between that community and the past. Thus possible answers to the dilemma of 10. In the 1930 Collected Poems and in subsequent collected editions, “The Pasture” is completely removed from North of Boston and is used to preface the entire collection of poems. 11. See Jeffrey S. Cramer, Robert Frost Among His Poems, Jefferson, NC, 1996, 28-29. The three poems that “began” North of Boston were “The Death of the Hired Man”, “The Black Cottage” and “The Housekeeper”.

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recognizing that “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” but that “Good fences make good neighbours” (67, 68) are not to be found within “Mending Wall” but in the other poems. In some of them, such as “A Hundred Collars”, “Home Burial” and “A Servant to Servants” Frost takes that dilemma to its extremes, and explores the possibility of a complete disconnection between individual people. In other poems, such as “The Death of the Hired Man”, “The Code” and “The Generations of Men” Frost explores possibilities of relationship and community based on accepted and recognized forms of behaviour. Thus, if we start to think of North of Boston as a sequence, and not as a collection of discrete poems insulated from one another, we can see that the situation and the stated problem of “Mending Wall” resonate throughout the book. In thinking of North of Boston as an integrated book, Frost’s positioning of “A Servant to Servants” is especially notable. Thematically, this is the bleakest poem in the collection, in which Frost represents an isolated woman’s descent into mental instability and suggests an appalling family background. Stylistically the poem also represents a significant shift from the dialogues between men and women that precede it; although the poem includes a character listening to the woman, it is essentially a monologue. In fact, the presence of the silent listener deepens the poem’s tragic intensity, suggesting a loneliness that is irretrievable. This is a woman without community and without the emotional and intellectual means to connect with one. Even for a poet who was famously characterized as “terrifying” by Lionel Trilling, “A Servant to Servants” is one of Frost’s most uncompromisingly dark poems.12 The woman’s terrible isolation is deepened and intensified by Frost’s references to familial insanity (the uncle caged in the barn) and the suggestions of some kind of sexual abuse. The positioning of “A Servant to Servants” at the centre of the book is crucial. It indicates a thematic movement in North of Boston, in which there is a descent to solipsism and silence and then a gradual return to community and life-affirming possibility. This movement towards the book’s centre involves the poems in which communication and human connection is most threatened, most powerfully in “A Hundred Collars” and “Home Burial”, whereas the development towards community after “A Servant to Servants” is strongly represented by “After Apple-Picking” and “The Generations of Men”. (It is striking that the poem which immediately follows “A Servant to Servants”, “After Apple-Picking”, is the most lyrical in the collection, as though Frost invites us to relish imaginative freedom and suggestive, liberating possibility after the imprisoning narrative of “A Servant to Servants”.) “A Servant to Servants” is a pivotal poem, in much the same way as a short-story cycle might include a central story to which the other stories refer, either directly or obliquely. “A Servant to Servants” provides a thematic centre of appalling human loss and disengagement and the first half of North of Boston moves towards this point, whereas the trajectory of the second half is towards an affirmation of community, a movement that begins with “After Apple-Picking”. Given this movement, the arrangement of North of Boston could be represented as a movement outward from “The Pasture” to “A Servant to Servants” and then a return movement from “A Servant to Servants” to “Good Hours”. The poetic sequence of the

12. Lionel Trilling, “A Speech on Robert Frost: A Cultural Episode”, reprinted in Robert Frost: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. James M. Cox, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1962, 151-58.

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book could thus be represented in the following manner, indicating that “A Servant to Servants” forms a decisive turning-point in the collection:

↓↓

The Pasture Good Hours Mending Wall The Wood-Pile The Death of the Hired Man The Self-Seeker The Mountain The Fear ↑↑ A Hundred Collars The Housekeeper Home Burial The Generations of Men The Black Cottage The Code Blueberries After Apple-Picking A Servant to Servants (pivotal poem)

The poems in the left-hand column represent the trajectory towards “A Servant to Servants” while those on the right involve the movement away from it. The left-hand column poems, which precede “A Servant to Servants”, are largely concerned with themes of disconnection, disengagement and alienation, themes that reach their climax in “A Servant to Servants”. The poems afterwards are increasingly focused on affirmative points of connection and communal possibility. This version of the book’s contents suggests that Frost has paired poems, just as he indicated in noting that “Mending Wall” initiated a dialogue with “The Tuft of Flowers”. Recognizing North of Boston’s trajectory and this paired arrangement opens up many interpretive possibilities. It requires that we not only start to think of each poem in North of Boston as part of an overall movement, but also that we consider each poem in relation to its pair. Some of these pairings seem fairly obvious because of the relative positioning of the poems and because of their stark tonal and thematic contrasts. “The Pasture” paired with “Good Hours” and “Mending Wall” with “The Wood-Pile” are readily apparent, and in fact invite comparisons even without reference to the book’s narrative trajectory. “Mending Wall” is a dramatic monologue in 45 lines of blank verse; “The Wood Pile” a dramatic monologue in 40 lines of blank verse – in fact, in terms of length and form, these are the two most similar North of Boston poems. It may be too far-fetched, or even unnecessary, to think of the speakers of “Mending Wall” and “The Wood Pile” as the same person, but the association makes sense if we think of the later poem offering a perspective, and perhaps an answer, to the question asked in the earlier one. It seems as if in “Mending Wall” we are offered a choice between two alternatives. We can accept nature’s hostile destruction of human artefacts or we can struggle against this, erecting barriers and deceiving ourselves about their usefulness. The questions certainly involve others, concerning time and the very nature and viability of human kinship, but in effect both alternatives are bleak ones which involve forms of resignation. In “The Wood Pile” however, the speaker develops a response to this. While he acknowledges the futility of believing that human artefacts can endure, he does see some lasting value in our productions. Tellingly, the man-made wood pile now gives its minimal heat to the frozen swamp; a sharp contrast to the malevolent natural force attacking the wall in the earlier poem:

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I thought that only Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks Could so forget his handiwork on which He spent himself, the labour of his axe, And leave it there far from a useful fireplace To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay. (138) Georg Simmel’s comments on the ruin are extremely pertinent to the ending of “The Wood Pile”, especially in highlighting the tranquillity of the ending in contrast to the defiant yet resigned mood of “Mending Wall”. “The charm of the ruin”, Simmel asserts, resides in the fact that it presents a work of man while giving the impression of a work of nature .... The upward thrust, the erection of the building, was the result of the human will, while its present appearance results from the mechanical force of nature, whose power of decay draws things downwards .... Nature has used man’s work of art as the material for its own creation, just as art had previously taken nature as its raw material. Consequently, the ruin gives an impression of peace, because in it the competition between these two cosmic powers acts as the soothing image of a purely natural reality. 13 Although it remains fraught with ironies and qualifications, “The Wood Pile” answers “Mending Wall” in its acceptance of human limitations and in proposing a limited form of harmony between human artefacts and natural forces.

IV Drawing on the proposed scheme above, other pairings of poems, some of which are less obvious than that of “Mending Wall” and “The Wood Pile” invite analysis. Before focusing on the pairing of “Home Burial” with “The Generations of Men” it is worth noting another pair, “A Hundred Collars” and “The Housekeeper” – incidentally, two of the five poems that Frost published before they appeared in North of Boston. This is an illuminating pairing, partly because these might generally be considered two of the weaker poems in the book, and partly because when it is analysed on its own, “A Hundred Collars” can seem an enigmatic or a slight poem. Its significance and its meaning become clearer when it is contrasted with “The Housekeeper”. In this “book of people”,14 Magoon, the professorial “great man” of “A Hundred Collars” is an alienated figure, returning to his roots only to meet “old friends he somehow can’t get near” (79). Magoon’s education and his achievements have, to pervert Richard Hoggart’s famous phrase, made him uprooted but not exactly anxious, and Frost shows him unable to connect with the brutish, self-assured, slyly

13. Georg Simmel, Philosophische Kultur (1923), quoted in Jean Starobinski, The Invention of Liberty, translated by Bernard C. Swift, Geneva, 1964, 180. Denis Donoghue uses this passage from Simmel in his Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot, New Haven and London, 2000, 136-37, where he comments that “The implication of a ruin is that everything has returned to a natural unity in which man’s work is not humiliated or merely set aside” (137). 14. Frost’s dedication on the title-page of North of Boston is: “To E.M.F. / this book of people” (63).

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bullying salesman Lafe, one of the “people” who is at home in this region. 15 Lafe’s aggression is a significant feature of the poem, and even his overtly friendly gesture, the promise to send the collars to the professor, is an act of aggression meant to belittle him. The poem’s last line, “The Doctor slid a little down the pillow” (85) indicates Magoon’s fearful apprehension of Lafe’s return, presumably having on his mind the fears of the man who refused to share the room with Lafe, “afraid of being robbed or murdered” (80). The central theme of “A Hundred Collars”, Magoon’s failure to connect with Lafe and all that this lost connection represents, allies it closely with other poems of the first half of North Boston, notably “Mending Wall” and “Home Burial” which also involve a difference between two people that threatens to become irreconcilable, even as one of the pair attempts to close it. I do not want to suggest that “The Housekeeper” provides some kind of positive alternative to “A Hundred Collars”; in fact, “The Housekeeper” is one of the most austere poems in the collection.16 The poem’s dramatic situation involves an unnamed elderly woman whose daughter Estelle has left John, presumably her common-law husband, to marry another man. The three protagonists have been living together on John’s farm for fifteen years, and the poem’s central concern is that of who will occupy the farm now that Estelle has left. Estelle’s mother acknowledges that she should leave, and claims that she will live with Estelle and her new husband, but she simultaneously states that leaving is impossible for her. The poem ends as John returns and refuses to enter the house while Estelle’s mother is inside. The title “The Housekeeper” is ambivalent, since potentially it refers to any of the three protagonists; Estelle who originally came to the farm to keep house, to John as householder, and to Estelle’s mother who literally keeps the house at the end of the poem while John stays outside. Frost accentuates the poem’s uncompromisingly sombre tone by using a preponderance of monosyllables in the blank verse, and by a heavy use of caesura; the poem almost seems to stutter rather than flow. “The Housekeeper” carries echoes of the fragmenting relationship in “Home Burial” and of the intense desolation of “A Servant to Servants”, but there are notable differences. In focusing on the aftermath of a break-up Frost is examining human potential for survival and re-engagement rather than focusing on alienation and despair. Although there is an unpleasant conflict between them, John and Estelle’s mother both display qualities of will, endurance and purpose that suggest that they are to survive this crisis rather than be defeated by it. In fact, the apparently indolent John (described as “a bad farmer”) appears to have had bursts of energy since Estelle left. Even if these are misdirected (he angrily throws a hoe into an apple-tree), they do suggest a vitality that is lacking in the depressive torpor of Frost’s most defeated characters, such as Amy in “Home Burial”. Also, Estelle’s decision to leave a home and make a fresh start elsewhere may be more positive than the stultifying torpor evident in the speaker of “A Servant to Servants”, and also provides a significant contrast with Magoon of “A Hundred Collars”. Magoon’s resigned attitude towards his situation contrasts sharply with the energy of John and the determination of Estelle’s mother, and actually aligns Magoon with the speaker of “A Servant to Servants”. The dissimilarity of setting between “A Hundred Collars” and “The Housekeeper” is also notable. Magoon the lone stranded traveller is for a few hours 15. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, Harmondsworth, 1976, 291-317. 16. Frost called “The Housekeeper” a “tragedy” and “A Hundred Collars” “a comedy”. See Cramer, 29.

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homeless and has to share a room with a stranger; this situation is emblematic of his overall sense of not belonging. The home though is crucial to “The Housekeeper”, being for both John and Estelle’s mother a symbol of their determination to live on after crisis and the threat of fragmentation. While both “A Hundred Collars” and “The Housekeeper” involve forms of failure and broken connections, in “The Housekeeper” Frost suggests possibilities of familial re-formation and restitution. In the paired scheme or design that I am proposing for North of Boston, “Home Burial” is placed opposite “The Generations of Men”. There is considerable contrast between these two: in fact, it is hard to imagine a stronger contrast between Frost’s concern in “Home Burial” with the aftermath of a death and the possible ending of a marriage with the meeting of the young couple in “The Generations of Men”. “Home Burial” is about differences that are verging on the irreconcilable, “The Generations of Men” is concerned with a couple who are initiating the process of finding common ground between them. In “Home Burial” the house is becoming an intolerable prison for Amy who seeks escape from it. In “The Generations of Men” the couple meet in the open air at the ruin of the shared ancestral home. This benign ruin prefigures that of “The Wood Pile” in connoting harmony and reconciliation between natural forces and human will. This is in sharp contrast to the Babel-like defiant ambition evident in “Mending Wall” and the archaic empty anachronism of “The Black Cottage”. In “Home Burial” there is a strong distinction between the husband’s family and Amy; in “The Generations of Men” the couple are claiming kinship. Frost thus makes their meeting represent forms of family, regional, natural and historical continuity which stand in sharp contrast to the now childless couple in “Home Burial” and the overall sense that a family line is ending as this marriage fails. The fact that Frost gives “The Generations of Men” a religious dimension has implications for the whole of North of Boston and the themes of regeneration and rebirth that emerge in the second half of the book. The poem’s opening lines echo the Gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus: A governor it was proclaimed this time, When all who would come seeking in New Hampshire Ancestral memories might come together. (109) Frost later develops this echo of the Gospels’ nativity account by having the couple trace their convoluted genealogy. In itself, this allusion to the New Testament is important, indicating from the start that the poem involves a birth, the sense of a future and a form of sustained continuity with the past. But it is also significant in the overall pattern of North of Boston. Although Frost’s use of the name of Mary in “The Death of the Hired Man” (the name is the poem’s first word) is usually taken as reference to the mother of Christ, it is generally true that in the poems of the first half of the book Frost tends to allude to the Old Testament as a means of understanding human predicaments. In “The Black Cottage” this sense of reality gained from the Old Testament may be seen as almost heroic, as an article of faith the dead woman had unwaveringly maintained. But it is also seen as a form of belief that may limit the sense of reality for those who hold it. The sentiment behind the minister’s lines in “The Black Cottage”, “why abandon a belief / Merely because it ceases to be true” (92) has already been condemned by the speaker of “Mending Wall”. “Mending Wall” does contain a New Testament allusion, as “left not one stone on a stone”

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echoes Christ’s prediction of the destruction of the Temple.17 This reference is an important one in “Mending Wall” and to the following poems in the first half of North of Boston, since Christ’s words themselves echo the destruction of the Tower of Babel, when God’s anger at human aspiration resulted in the tower’s destruction, followed by linguistic confusion and lack of communication.18 Apart from this oblique reference to Babel, the most prominent Old Testament reference in North of Boston is in the title of “A Servant to Servants”, alluding as it does to the cursing of Ham by his father Noah in the Book of Genesis, and to Ham’s consequent status as a slave.19 The belief in curse is also evident in “Home Burial”, in the husband’s line “I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe I’m cursed” (89). The New Testament references in the second half of the book reflect the concern with regeneration, transition and redemption that is evident the poems that follow “After Apple-Picking” and this concern is treated most fully in “The Generations of Men”. Frost’s use of “The Generations of Men” as a counterpart to “Home Burial” may also be seen in the styles of the poems. In both the dramatic narrative is conveyed by dialogue while Frost uses narrative intervention to provide context and, especially in “Home Burial”, almost to choreograph the action through stage directions. But the nature of the dramatic dialogue differs considerably between the two poems. In “Home Burial” the intense pain experienced by the couple is not at all alleviated by talking, since each takes the opportunity to articulate for themselves rather than to listen and initiate dialogue. Like “A Hundred Collars”, “Home Burial” is fundamentally concerned with the lack of a common language between the two protagonists, thus continuing the Babel theme introduced in “Mending Wall”. The dialogue of “The Generations of Men” contrasts completely with that of “Home Burial”. Unusually for Frost, he makes use of a stichomythia-like technique, and this rapid dialogue indicates a harmonic consonance between the couple. In fact, in “The Generations of Men” it is at times difficult to determine who is speaking as the identities of the couple merge, and Frost provides little or no stage direction for us. Even techniques that are similar in both poems may result in quite different emotional effects. In “Home Burial” Amy’s repeated monosyllabic “Don’t don’t don’t don’t” is terrible in its effect of shutting out her husband’s words. Yet in “The Generations of Men” the woman’s repetition of “great” – “great great great great Granny” – is comic and flirtatious.20 This pairing of “Home Burial” with “The Generations of Men” is significant in several ways. It reminds us that in North of Boston there is no single vision of either tragic or comic, but that Frost balances both in his “book of people”. Furthermore, the pairing intensifies the tragic nature of “Home Burial” and, I would argue, reduces the level of ambiguity that some readers have seen in the ending. These readings of the 17. “The days will come when there shall not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down”, in Luke 21. 6; Matthew 24. 2; Mark 13. 2. 18. See Genesis 11: 1-9. The confusion of tongues that followed the Old Testament destruction of Babel is balanced in the New Testament by the Christian Pentecost, when the Holy Ghost descended after Christ’s resurrection and gave the “gift of tongues” to the apostles (Acts 2:1-12). Without attempting to impose a religious narrative design on North of Boston, there are possible references to the Pentecost in “The Wood Pile”, most notably, since the Holy Spirit is often represented as a dove, in the bird that the narrator follows to the pile. 19. Genesis 9:18-27. 20. As an indication of the competing genres of “Home Burial” and “The Generations of Men”, it is worth noting that the “Don’t don’t don’t don’t” of “Home Burial” is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s King Lear, whereas in including a reference to Viola, “The Generations of Men” alludes to Twelfth Night.

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poem suggest that the breach between the couple may be healed, invoking the fact that Amy hesitates and does not leave the house, and, ignoring her dismissive “you think the talk is all” (89), that the couple have advanced their relationship by articulating a grievance that has hitherto lain silently between them. While such a reading may be persuasive in terms of the poem as an individual unit, complete in itself, it is contradicted by the placing of “Home Burial” in the first half of North of Boston and by its pairing with “The Generations of Men”. “Home Burial” comes between “A Hundred Collars” and “The Black Cottage”; the first a poem involving two people who have no common identity, and the second set in an empty cottage. Paradoxically, this first half of North of Boston is about finality; it is not until the second half that Frost explores living on in the aftermath of critical events and emphasizes the possibility of fresh beginnings and continuity. In terms of poetic power, “The Generations of Men” is a considerably lesser poem than “Home Burial” but its presence is essential as a counterweight. In fact, I would speculate that Frost kept “The Generations of Men” in the collection to provide exactly that counterweight, even though we know he had a low opinion of the poem.21

V As stated at the outset, it seems natural to think of Frost as the New Critical poet par excellence, given the fact that his poems appear to be individuated and self-contained (and are often mediated to us in that way), and that our understanding of them does not seem to require extensive knowledge of something outside of the bounded text. But perhaps we ought to start thinking now of a different approach to Frost, one which acknowledges that his own sense of organization was not confined to intratextual arrangement but existed also in his sense of the book’s design. We need to recognize and pay attention to a larger sense of narrative patterning in Frost’s poetry, picking up on the clues that he himself has provided. In brief, when we look at North of Boston we need to focus not only on the individuated and the much-anthologized “big five” (“Mending Wall” “Death of the Hired Man”, “Home Burial”, “After ApplePicking” and “The Wood Pile”) but to explore the ways in which all of the poems in this book illuminate and enrich one another.

21. Frost called it “the least successful” of the North of Boston poems, although he did include it in selected editions of his work published in 1946 and 1963. See Cramer, 39.

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LUSTRA: WORK AND TEXT STEPHEN WILSON

It is not easy at this point to reach a just assessment of Ezra Pound’s early poetry. Firstly, because it is difficult not to read it through the later work, particularly The Cantos. Secondly, because its impact on a contemporary audience is very different from its impact on its original audience. Pound’s early poetry, with its predominance of medieval (particularly Provençal) themes, and archaic diction and syntax, often exhibits a high degree of technical accomplishment, though it is likely to seem overly poetic and affectedly antiquarian to a contemporary reader. Many, perhaps the majority, of Pound’s first readers would have agreed with the Chicago Evening Post reviewer who declared that “Mr. Pound is a very new kind of poet”. 1 But a contemporary reader is perhaps more likely to be struck by what Walter Baumann describes as “Pound’s extraordinary predilection for any form with a ‘th’ in it”. 2 These difficulties are compounded when the early poems are read in a Collected or Selected poems, as they now usually are. Any volume of collected or selected poems subordinates the individual books or poems to an editorial vision of the poet and his or her work as a whole (a point that applies no less when poets are editing their own work). This turns what was originally a whole (a volume of poetry or an individual poem) into a part, and by so doing generates a history. This process is not in itself illegitimate, it is even desirable, but it unavoidably changes how the parts are read. In his Introduction to Ezra Pound: Selected Poems (1928), T.S. Eliot wrote: This book is, in my eyes, rather a convenient Introduction to Pound’s work than a definitive edition. The volumes previously published represent each a particular aspect or period of his work; and even when they fall into the right hands, are not always read in the right order. My point is that Pound’s work is not only much more varied than is generally supposed, but also represents a continuous development, down to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, the last stage of importance before the Cantos.3 In order to deliver Pound’s poems into “the right hands” and in “the right order”, Eliot elaborated a history, and it was emphatically a history and not merely a chronological sequence. It recognized and could accommodate the variety of Pound’s early work, stressed continuity and development, and was markedly teleological and endogamous. 1. Floyd Dell, review, Chicago Evening Post (6 Jan. 1911). Quoted in Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage, ed. Eric Homberger, London, 1972, 70. 2. Walter Baumann, “Ezra Pound’s Metamorphosis During his London Years: From Late-Romanticism to Modernism”, in Paideuma, XIII/3 (1984), 363. 3. T.S. Eliot, “Introduction”, in Ezra Pound: Selected Poems, London, 1928, vii.

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For Eliot, Pound’s early poetry is what he refers to elsewhere in the “Introduction” as a “prolegomena to the Cantos” and Pound’s poetry leads only to Pound.4 Eliot was here rewriting the history of modernism as the past of his own present. The 1928 Selected Poems is no longer widely read, but Eliot’s history has survived the book and remains influential. To retell the tale, as I propose to do, granting a greater privilege to the part is necessarily an act of revisionism. Thus, although I share Eliot’s sense of the importance of The Cantos in relation to the earlier work (much of which would not now be read were it not for The Cantos), my account of Lustra will attend to discontinuities and to other, jagged, continuities and lines of development. II In the four years after his arrival in London in August 1908, Pound published five books of poetry: A Quinzaine for this Yule (1908), Personae (1909), Exultations (1909), Canzoni (1911) and Ripostes (1912). These early volumes are now published together with A Lume Spento (privately printed in Venice in 1908) and sundry hitherto unpublished or uncollected poems as the Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound. 5 While they are uneven in quality, they are otherwise very much of a piece. As Baumann has pointed out: “almost half the poems in the 1909 Personae volume are reprints from A Lume Spento, and ... the new poems, though some of them were written in London, are hard to distinguish from the work first printed in Venice.” 6 This is not to say that there was no development in Pound’s early poetry. By the time of Ripostes, in such poems as “N.Y.” and “A Girl”, Pound had begun to experiment with a more modern idiom and with vers libre. Nevertheless, by 1912 the discrepancy between Pound’s radical theories of poetics and his own practice as a poet was glaringly obvious, not least to Pound himself. Pound famously recalled Ford Madox Ford “rolling ... on the floor” (presumably in agony or derision) in response to the “stilted language” of Canzoni. Ford extolled the prose virtues of precision and clarity, and his “roll” was a decisive moment in Pound’s development as a poet: that roll saved me at least two years, perhaps more. It sent me back to my own proper effort, namely, using the living tongue (with younger men after me), though none of us found a more natural language than Ford did.7 The effects of Ford’s “roll” only become apparent in Lustra, published in 1916, four years after Ripostes. Hugh Witemeyer claims that Ripostes “marks the transition between Pound’s early romantic style and a self-consciously modern style”.8 If this is so, then it is in Lustra that Pound emerges as a self-consciously and even aggressively modern poet attempting to deal directly with the contemporary world. As James Longenbach notes, it is the first of Pound’s books of poetry in which he refers “openly” to contemporary

4. Ibid., xxiii. 5. Ezra Pound, Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. Michael John King, with an introduction by Louis L. Martz, New York, 1976. 6. Baumann, 358. 7. Ezra Pound, Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson, New York, 1973, 461-62. 8. Hugh Witemeyer, “Early Poetry 1908–1920”, in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel, Cambridge, 1999, 47.

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events.9 Further, Pound does so in a modern idiom, a language largely stripped of archaism and the poetic. Indeed, at points Pound subverts the poetic and celebrates the prosaic almost to the point of bathos; for example, the following lines from “Amities” (possibly referring to Harold Monroe10): But you, bos amic, we keep on, For to you we owe a real debt: In spite of your obvious flaws, You once discovered a moderate chop-house.11 Pound here uses the Provençal “bos amic” (good friend), and the word “discovered” connotes the verb trobar (to discover), from which “troubadour” derives. But any romance, or romantic, associations are effectively killed off by the “moderate chophouse”. Also absent from Lustra are the arcane and complex metrical forms such as the sestina found in the earlier volumes. “Villanelle: the Psychological Hour” is not a villanelle, and most of the poems are in a form of vers libre. Pound’s involvement with Imagism and Vorticism is clearly traceable in Lustra, further strengthening the book’s claims to the status of modern (or even a modernist) work. The volume includes the most (perhaps the only) famous Imagist poem, “In a Station of the Metro”. It also reprints a number of poems from Blast; for instance, “The New Cake of Soap”, “Meditatio”, “L’Art” And “Women Before a Shop” from the first issue, and “The Social Order” and “Ancient Music” from the second. The increased range of Pound’s subject matter and tone is perhaps most readily apparent in the short epigrammatic poems that constitute the bulk of Lustra. These clearly show the influence of the Greek and Latin epigrammatists. In their attempt to represent and to anatomize contemporary manners and mores, they also reflect Pound’s doctrine (derived from his reading of nineteenth-century French novels and from Ford) that, “the arts, literature, poesy, are a science” and “give us a great percentage of the lasting and unassailable data regarding the nature of man, of immaterial man, of man considered as a thinking and sentient creature”. 12 “Arides” clearly represents this aspect of the book: The bashful Arides Has married an ugly wife, He was bored with his manner of life, Indifferent and discouraged he thought he might as Well do this as anything else. (101) Many of the poems are satirical (reflecting perhaps the harder-edged modernity of Vorticism) and are directed at, or against, what Pound saw as the complacency and conservatism of the Anglo-American literary establishment. Some of the poems in Lustra seem to be aimed at, rather than addressed to, the audience, and there is a 9. James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism, New York, 1988, 13-14. 10. Peter Brooker, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, London, 1979, 99. 11. Ezra Pound, Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, a revised edition prepared by Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz, New York, 1990, 103. All subsequent quotations from Pound’s poetry are taken from this edition and page numbers will be identified parenthetically in the text. 12. Ezra Pound, “The Serious Artist” (1913), in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot, London, 1954, 42.

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palpable intention to shock and outrage; the opening lines of “The Temperaments” provide a good example: Nine adulteries, 12 liaisons, 64 fornications and something approaching a rape Rest nightly upon the soul of our delicate friend Florialis (102) Few, if any, of these shorter pieces can make any claim to be major poems in their own right but Lustra does contain Pound’s two finest poems up to that time: “Near Perigord” and “Villanelle: the Psychological Hour”. “Near Perigord” deals with the troubadour Bertran de Born but does so in a way that is quite different from any of Pound’s earlier Provençal poems; it is also a complex and subtle exploration of the capacity of poetry to act as a vehicle for historical representation and explanation, and as such clearly looks forward to The Cantos. The haunting and enigmatic “Villanelle: the Psychological Hour” is often read as Pound’s response to the death in action of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska on 5 June 1915.13 I think that the above description would meet with wide agreement. Lustra is generally recognized as marking a significant epoch, a point of transition, in Pound’s development as a poet, and my description of it as such is unexceptionable. The problem with it is that none of the four published texts bearing the title Lustra of Ezra Pound (two editions each with two impressions) corresponds to the Lustra I have described. The title of this essay invokes the textual critic’s distinction between work and text. In its orthodox version, this holds that “a text is a particular arrangement of words and marks of punctuation; a literary work, a verbal construct, consists of a text (or succession of texts), but its text cannot be assumed to coincide with any written or printed text purporting to be the text of that work”.14 In these terms the Lustra I have been describing is a work, a verbal and literary-historical construct. Although this is not strictly an essay in textual criticism, in so far as I am not concerned to purge the text of corruptions, suggest emendations or assess the relative authority of the various texts, I will now offer some account of the textual history of Lustra.

III In 1916, probably in late April or early May, Pound submitted the typescript of Lustra to Elkin Mathews, who had published A Quinzaine for this Yule, Personae, Exultations and Canzoni. Mathews seems initially to have seen no problem with the book, and according to Humphrey Carpenter he was even “enthusiastic” about it. 15 However, alerted by the printer and by his reader to the possibility of a prosecution for obscenity, Mathews refused to publish without substantial deletions. The successful prosecution of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow in 1915, and the fact that censors are liable to be more active in time of war, may have made the printer more than usually circumspect. Mathew’s reader (whose identity is still not known), however, was vehement and produced, in Forrest Read’s words, “a delicious series of

13. Brooker, 108-9. 14. “Textual Criticism”, in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, eds Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, Princeton, 1993, 1273. 15. Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound, London, 1988, 302.

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expostulations”.16 Lustra, the reader advised Mathews, was “sorry stuff” and “impudent” and “more fitted for the Waste Paper Basket than the literary public”. Of “Further Instructions” (which begins “Come, my songs, let us express our baser passions” [95]) the reader commented: “Better keep his baser passions to himself. No one else wants them.” “The Temperaments” was described simply as “beastly”.17 Pound fought back vigorously, and “in a space of five days” bombarded Mathews with “at least five letters, two postcards, and a public note”. 18 In May, at the height of the affair, Pound wrote the following account of it to Iris Barry, surprisingly low-key in the circumstances: The idiot Mathews has got the whole volume set up in type, and has now got a panic and marked 25 poems for deletion. Most of them have already been printed in magazines without causing any scandal whatever, and some of them are among the best in the book. (It contains Cathay, some new Chinese stuff and all my own work since Ripostes.) The scrape is both serious and ludicrous. Some of the poems will have to go, but in other cases the objections are too stupid for words. It is part printer and part Mathews.19 As I have said, this is an equitable account of the matter, although in one respect Pound is misleading Barry. When a group of poems, including “Tenzone” and “Salutation the Second”, appeared in Poetry (Chicago) in April 1913 under the title “Contemporania”, Raymond Macdonald Alden had complained of Pound’s “futurist verses” with their “elaborate indecorousness” and “occasional indecencies”, and predicted that they would appeal only to “two classes which are fortunately small in number – the frankly lascivious and the devotees of art nouveau”. 20 In the upshot, a compromise was reached and Mathews agreed to produce 200 copies of an “unabridged text” to be supplied only to those who specifically asked for it (Donald Gallup points out that these copies were “technically not published” 21) and to publish some 800 copies of an abridged text to be sold, as it were, over the counter; the two impressions might be better termed a less abridged and an abridged text. The “unabridged text”, the first impression, was issued in September 1916 and Mathews omitted four poems (“The Temperaments”, “Ancient Music ”, “The Lake Isle” and “Pagani’s, November 8”) that he considered unprintable under any circumstances. For the abridged text he omitted these four and nine others (“Salutation the Second”, “Commission”, “The New Cake of Soap”, “Epitaph”, “Meditatio”, “Phyllidula”, “The Patterns”, “The Seeing Eye” and “’Ιµέρρω”), and the title of “Coitus” was changed to “Pervigilium”. The London edition had as a frontispiece a photograph of Pound by Alvin Langdon Coburn which, Pound wrote to Iris Barry, was “there to make junior typists clasp their hands ecstatically” (W.B. Yeats had told him “that’ll sell the

16. Pound/Joyce, The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, With Pound’s Essay on Joyce, ed. Forrest Read, New York, 1967, 277. 17. Homberger, 121-22. 18. Read, 277. 19. Ezra Pound, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, ed. D.D. Paige, New York, 1971, 8081. 20. Homberger, 100-1. 21. Donald Gallup, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography, Charlottesville, VA, 1983, 21.

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book”).22 The first impression is numbered (the numbers are handwritten by Pound) and has an orange-red circular stamp (designed by Edmund Dulac), with Pound’s initials in intaglio on the title page. Both editions sold at five shillings. Pound fought his own corner over Lustra with vigour but it would seem that he did so largely without rancour. Indeed, I suspect that he rather welcomed the whole affair; both Lawrence and James Joyce had had similar problems and Pound may well have looked upon a row with the censors as a mark of distinction. Certainly he seems to have harboured no animosity towards Elkin Mathews. He might refer exasperatedly to him as an “idiot” but he could also, to some extent, sympathize with his predicament. In June 1916, he wrote again to Iris Barry: Poor Mathews ... has been persuaded into doing 200 copies unabridged for the elect and is allowed to have the rest of the edition almost as modest as he likes – God knows, the whole thing is innocent enough, but the poor man has had an awful week of it. – I suppose he has some right to decide how he’ll spend his money.23 Mathews, who is described by Humphrey Carpenter as having been “a key figure in the 1890s”, when together with John Lane he had published The Yellow Book, was by the time Pound first met him in 1908 “no longer a fashionable figure in the literary world” but he retained an impressive list which included Oscar Wilde, John Addington Symonds and Yeats.24 He became Pound’s first London publisher, and to some extent his mentor in Edwardian literary London, and served him well in both capacities. It is clear that Pound retained considerable affection for Mathews but he was to publish no new poetry with him after Lustra (in 1920 Mathews published Umbra: The Early Poems of Ezra Pound which did not include anything after Ripostes). The dispute over Lustra did not cause the break between Pound and his publisher but rather made apparent the extent to which the two had grown apart. Quite simply, Pound had moved beyond Mathews and his milieu and beyond the culture and ethos of publishing that Mathews represented. Pound may have had some intimation of this as early as 1912 when he left Mathews for Stephen Swift & Co. (who were the first publishers of Ripostes); however, when later the same year Swift & Co. went bankrupt, he returned to Mathews.25 IV The story of the excision of “The Temperaments” and the other poems is well known and few discussions of Lustra fail to make mention of it. By contrast, the more serious matter of the exclusion of the poems reprinted from Cathay is absent from all critical accounts of Lustra of which I am aware. Furthermore, the separation of those Cathay poems from the text of Lustra in all collected and selected editions of Pound’s poetry after 1926 has been passed over in silence, to the best of my knowledge. The English edition of Lustra is essentially a triptych. The first section consists of the short poems, lyrics and epigrams, discussed above, most of which were published between 1913 and 1915. The second part consists of the versions of Chinese poems 22. Selected Letters, 95. 23. Ibid., 82-83. 24. Carpenter, 98. 25. For a more detailed account of this episode, see Gallup, 15 and Carpenter, 194-95.

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first published in Cathay (1915), plus four new poems (“Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku”, “A Ballad of the Mulberry Road”, “Old Idea of Choan by Rosoriu” and “To-EmMei’s ‘The Unmoving Cloud’ by T’ao Yuan Ming”). The triptych’s final part contains a smaller group of somewhat longer poems, mostly dating from 1915 and 1916, that includes “Villanelle: the Psychological Hour” and “Near Perigord”. Most critical accounts of Lustra effectively equate the book with the first section. This is a reading, or misreading, that is sanctioned by the 1926 Personae.26 It has been confirmed by all subsequent editions of the Collected Poems, that have printed the short poems from 1913-1916 as Lustra. Parts two and three of the triptych, as I have described them above, have been printed as “Cathay” and “Poems from Lustra 1915” respectively. The 1990 revised Personae prints the poems of Lustra in three consecutive sections entitled “Poems of Lustra 1913-1915”, “Cathay 1915” and “Poems of Lustra 1915-1916”. This might be seen as something of an advance on previous editions in which the second and third sections were split, but even so there is no indication that the three sections originally comprised a single volume, and “Cathay 1915” includes the four poems added to Cathay (1915) in 1916. This is more than a pedantic quibble. On 30 May 1916, at the height of the censorship row, Pound wrote to Mathews defending the integrity of Lustra as he had submitted it: Do try to think of the book as a whole, not of individual words in it. Even certain smaller poems, unimportant in themselves have a function in the bookas-a-whole. This shaping up a book is very important. It is almost as important as the construction of a play or a novel. I neglected it in “Canzoni” and the book has never had the same measure of success as the others. It is not so good as the others. I was affected by hyper-aesthesia or over-squeamishness and cut out the rougher poems. I don’t know that I regret it in that case for the poems weren’t good enough, but even so the book would have been better if they had been left in, or if something like them had been put in their place. 27 In a letter of the previous day Pound had pointed out to Mathews that “most of the poems in this volume have already appeared in the following magazines: ‘Poetry’, ‘Poetry and Drama’, ‘Smart Set’,‘BLAST’, and ‘Others’; and in the provisional edition of Cathay”.28 Taken together these testimonies clearly establish that in 1916 Pound saw the Cathay poems as an integral part of Lustra. This sets Cathay apart from Pound’s other translations, for instance the 1912 Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Calvacanti (published in London by Swift & Co.). Furthermore, by thus incorporating the Cathay material into the main body of his work, and adding to it, Pound is making clear that his work on the Fenollosa papers was a significant element in what Witemeyer calls his “deliberate process of self-modernization”. 29 In addition, the triptych structure of Lustra anticipates Pound’s method in The Cantos; when collocated, its three sections, all possessing an internal coherence and a high degree of relative autonomy, add an extra dimension to the whole.

26. Ezra Pound, Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound, New York, 1926. 27. Quoted in Read, 285. 28. Ibid., 279. 29. Nadel, 47.

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To read Lustra as a book, a work possessing its own integrity, does not exclude reading it as an integral part of the totality of Pound’s output. Indeed, the significance of Lustra for Pound’s work overall can only be fully understood when it is read in this way, and not as the subsumed section (or sections) of a larger unit (a collected or selected poems). Lustra is the record of Pound’s struggle for a modern poetic idiom. It begins with the short poems and epigrams of 1913 and 1914 in which Pound is attempting to put into practice his own Imagist precepts and, perhaps more importantly, striving to acquire the prose virtues prescribed by Ford Madox Ford. In this context, the Cathay poems are primarily significant not as an early intimation of Pound’s interest in China, but as a triumphant demonstration of Pound’s command of those virtues. The final group of poems (in particular “Near Perigord” and “Villanelle: the Psychological Hour”) signals Pound’s emergence as a modernist poet. He is not yet the poet of The Cantos, but is the poet who will become that poet. The “Three Cantos” which Pound had published in Poetry in June, July and August 1917 and which appeared in the American impressions of Lustra are essentially a false start, even though they are often referred to as the “Ur-Cantos”. They cannot be said to be an advance on “Near Perigord” in terms of the evolution of Pound’s “poem including history” towards the form in which it finally emerged. When Witemeyer writes of Pound’s “deliberate process of self-modernization” he means, I think, Pound’s transformation from the late Romantic of the earliest poetry to the full-blown modernist of Mauberley and The Cantos. For Witemeyer and others this is the metanarrative of Pound’s London years, and Lustra is a significant episode in it. Between 1913 and 1916 Pound transformed himself as a poet (his prose at this stage was running ahead of his verse) from the no-longer-so-very-young enfant terrible of the London literary scene into a contemporary of Eliot and Joyce (Pound began corresponding with Joyce in 1913 and first met Eliot in 1914). Lustra chronicles this metamorphosis, which was neither as seamless or as unproblematic as is often portrayed.30 Reading Lustra in this way modifies the received view of it as an angry, even overly-aggressive, book. The anger is certainly there but there is also a tentativeness that has less often been noticed. The tone is effectively set by the opening lines of the first poem in the volume, “Tenzone”: Will people accept them? (i.e. these songs). As a timorous wench from a centaur (or a centurion), Already they flee, howling in terror. (83) After this opening Pound goes on to beg “friendly critics” not to “set about to procure me an audience” and ends with the assertion that “I mate with my free kind upon the crags” and that “the hidden recesses / Have heard the echo of my heels”. The assurance, even arrogance, of this is somewhat undercut by the title. A tenzone is an Italian “debate or dialogue poem”31 and derives from the Provençal tenso in which the 30. A useful account of the trajectory and development of Pound’s career during these years can be found in Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922, Cambridge, 1984. 31. Brooker, 86.

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dialogue may consist of an exchange of invective and, in later versions, “often the original argument and the exchange are by the same person”. 32 However, even a poet talking to himself might expect more response than the echo of his own heels. This is not a poem that is scorning or rejecting an assured but unworthy, or unwanted, audience but one that is “getting its retaliation in first”. I have already commented on Pound’s palpable intention, in Lustra, to shock and outrage. But shock and outrage are perhaps the most easily provoked, and certainly the most readily apparent, of responses. They can be reassuring to a poet who is unsure of his audience. It is not the least of the advantages of this reading of Lustra that it places “Villanelle: the Psychological Hour” at the book’s centre. “Villanelle” is, as I have already pointed out, often read as a response to the death of Gaudier-Brzeska. At the same time it is an oblique and finely nuanced study of the disjunction between a modern poet and his audience and of the futile yet necessary “over-prepared ... event” that, in the circumstances, the act of poetic enunciation becomes.

V The American edition of Lustra also had two impressions. Initially, sixty numbered copies of Lustra of Ezra Pound with Earlier Poems were printed on watermarked paper by Alfred A. Knopf in 1917, for John Quinn to circulate privately.33 The second impression, also published by Knopf in 1917, was for general distribution. Also titled Lustra of Ezra Pound with Earlier Poems, it sold to the public at $1.50. The first impression restored the four poems left out of the London first impression, thus adding “Ancient Music” and “The Lake Isle” to the first section and “Pagani’s, November 8” and “The Temperaments”. A new poem “Impressions of FrançoisMarie Arouet [de Voltaire]” was also added to the third section. The second impression omitted only “The Temperaments”. Both American impressions, as the titles indicate, also included a selection of Pound’s earlier poetry and added a fourth (or fifth) section consisting of a revised version of the “Three Cantos” published in Poetry. A further significant difference between the English and American editions is the replacement, as the frontispiece, of the Alvin Langdon Coburn photograph of Pound by a Henri Gaudier-Brzeska drawing of Pound. The Gaudier-Brzeska drawing is (I believe) unlikely to provoke an ecstatic clasping of the hands in even the most susceptible junior typist, but it does clearly signal a further move on Pound’s part away from late Romanticism and towards a more aggressive and hard-edged modernism. Many of these changes, including some of the most significant (for instance the inclusion of the “Three Cantos”), were made at the suggestion of the New York lawyer and art collector John Quinn, and any adequate account of the American edition of Lustra must include a discussion of the part played by Quinn in its production. Pound first met Quinn through Jack B. Yeats in New York in August 1910 (an event that is fondly recalled in Canto LXXX), but the relationship between the two men may be said to have begun in earnest in January 1915. In the course of a New Age piece complaining about the neglect of contemporary artists, Pound took a sideswipe at contemporary American collectors. Quinn interpreted this as a personal 32. “Tenso”, in New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, eds Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, Princeton, 1993, 1270. 33. This edition was dated October 1917 but distribution began the previous month; see Gallup, 22.

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attack and responded indignantly recalling their earlier meeting, commending Pound’s honesty and forthrightness and vigorously defending his own record as a collector and supporter of contemporary art. Pound replied in conciliatory terms and so began a collaboration, and friendship, that continued until Quinn’s death in 1924 and which was to have a profound impact on the history of Anglo-American modernism. Quinn’s support for modernist writers, notably for Eliot and Joyce – arranging and partly financing American publication of their work (including Ulysses and The Waste Land), and fighting protracted legal battles on Joyce’s behalf, not to mention sundry and occasional loans and “stakes” – is sufficiently well-known and need not be rehearsed in detail here.34 In the words of George Bornstein, Quinn was “perhaps the most valuable of the patrons of modernist work, excelling even Margaret Cravens, Lady Cunard, or Winifred Ellerman in effectiveness of support”. 35 Pound sent Quinn a copy of Lustra in 1916 and Quinn was highly enthusiastic about it. Pound, in turn, was delighted with Quinn’s good opinion: “I have always wanted to write ‘poetry’ that a grown man could read without groans of ennui, or without having to have it cooed into his ear by a flapper.” Quinn undertook to find a New York publisher for Lustra and having failed to secure a deal with Macmillan (U.S.) opted, in January 1917, for Alfred A. Knopf. Although Knopf was a young man and comparatively inexperienced, he was not, Quinn assured Pound, “a plunger” but “a man of his word” who was “in the business to stay”.36 This arrangement entailed a financial obligation on Quinn’s part and Pound further charged him not to permit any repetition of the fiasco of the London edition: “The poems must all go in. The chief joy of having an American edtn. is to get them all done. I can make one exception in the case of ‘The Temperaments’.” 37 Quinn not only fulfilled this commission, and his financial obligations to Knopf, but found time to supervise in minute detail the composition and printing of the volume. Quinn was extraordinarily diligent and exigent in these matters; Reid notes that “on August 14 he sent Knopf a twelve-page letter of suggestions and corrections to the proofs”. Unsurprisingly, Knopf found this “trying” but when he complained of Quinn’s “niggling alterations” Quinn responded: “A printer has not always the excuse of the girl who had the illegitimate child and excused herself because it was such a little one.” 38 When Quinn objected to the slightly larger initial capital letter with which each poem began, Knopf charged him an additional $25 for reducing them. In September, there was a three-day row over Knopf’s Borzoi trademark to which Quinn objected on aesthetic grounds; Quinn won and the book appeared without the emblem. Pound seems to have been happy to leave such matters to Quinn. According to Reid, in a letter of 18 September he assured Quinn “that any excellence in the book’s appearance would be of his making” and added “a Special detachable supplement”: I hereby, being in my right mind, sound in wind and probably sound in limb, compos mentis, give to John Quinn, father of his country, unlimited right in making all such decisions re/ format, contents etc. of my books published in 34. For a fuller account see B.L. Reid, The Man from New York: John Quinn and his Friends, New York, 1968. 35. George Bornstein, “Pound and the Making of Modernism”, in Nadel, 39. 36. Quoted in Reid, 272-73. 37. Ezra Pound, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn 1915–1924, ed. Timothy Materer, Durham, NC, 1991, 111. 38. Reid, 282-83.

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America, such decisions as have to be made in hurry and which it is too damd [sic] a bother to wait writing to England about.39 It might be said that such problems as there were with the publication of the American edition of Lustra were caused by Quinn’s exigence and solved by Quinn’s cheque book; but this would be to miss the point. Quinn’s objections were aesthetic and not moral, or moralistic. A bibliophile who had begun collecting “first editions of Pater, Hardy, Morris, and Meredith”40 while still at high school, Quinn saw the book as an aesthetic object, something of virtù and value in itself (he was prepared to invest time and money in it). Pound, although he was not indifferent to these concerns, does not appear to have given them a very high priority in 1917. In a letter to Quinn, dated “Sept. 4 / 1917” Pound thanks him for his work on Lustra: Re/ Lustra. It is amazingly painstaking of you to go through it with such care, and I am very grateful, BUTT Dios Christos, JHEEZUS-potamus!!! If an author went into these details, unless he was a “seller” like Bennet [sic] or Kipling, I doubt if he would ever print twice with the same publisher. At least a poet has always enough causes of strife with his publisher.41 Here Pound is attempting to play the professional giving advice to the enthusiastic but naïve amateur. No doubt Pound meant well but his advice was quite misplaced. The presence in the equation of a patron such as Quinn radically changes the ethos and logic (not least the commercial logic) of book production, and Quinn understood the new rules rather better than Pound. In the row over the London edition, Pound was finally obliged to concede that Mathews had “some right to decide how he’ll spend his money”. Quinn, in his dealings with Knopf, was under no such obligation. His requiring that Knopf strike the Borzoi emblem is no trivial detail – it effectively reduced Knopf to little more than a glorified printer. Publication subsidized by generous subventions from patrons, publication for private circulation and publication aimed principally at book collectors and dealers, liberated modernist writers from the commercial logic of mainstream publishing. It also freed them from what they tended to see as the tyranny of public taste (or the lack of it), and even from the limitations and foibles of publishers such as Mathews. As Lawrence Rainey has argued, “patronage was the foundation of the institutional structure known as the avant-garde”, the publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land having been “made possible in great part because of massive patronage”. 42 (Quinn, it might be added, made a substantial contribution in both cases.) The first two volumes of what became The Cantos were issued in expensive limited editions: A Draft of XVI Cantos of Ezra Pound (1925) by William Bird’s Three Mountain Press in Paris in an edition of 90 copies. These sold for between 400 and 1600 francs, depending on binding, paper quality and whether or not the copy was signed by the author. A Draft of Cantos 17 – 27 of Ezra Pound was published in London by John Rodker in an 39. Ibid., 283. 40. Ibid., 5. 41. The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 125. Pound’s letter begins “Yours of Aug. 14, 16, 18, in one envelope. recd” – the letter of 14 August presumably contained the twelve pages “of suggestions and corrections to the proofs” that Quinn sent to Knopf. 42. Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture, The Henry McBride Series in Modernism and Modernity, New Haven, 1998, 108, 107.

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edition of 101 copies at between 5 and 50 guineas. (The first Faber edition of A Draft of XXX Cantos [1933] cost 7s. 6d. and the Farrar and Reinhart edition of the same year $2.50.) The first and second impressions of the London edition of Lustra were both sold for five shillings. In 1916 it does not seem to have occurred to either Pound or Mathews to exploit the less abridged edition commercially; the “elect” for whom Pound told Iris Barry it was intended were an intellectual and not an economic elite. Pound, however, quickly learned the new rules. This is indicated by a letter he wrote to William Bird on 7 May 1924, about the forthcoming publication of A Draft of XVI Cantos: Do recall that the title of that book is “A DRAFT of 16 Cantos for a poem of some length”. If you will stick to that you will produce something of gtr. val. [greater value] to collectors .... Yr. best ad is the quiet statement that at auction recently a copy of Mr. P’s A Lume Spento published in 1908 at $1.00 (one dollar) was sold for $52.50. No use selling people things on false pretenses. The collector will prefer this half-time report on the poem to a pretended complete edition. 43 The American edition of Lustra represented a significant step away from the mode of publishing represented by Elkin Mathews and towards the practices characteristic of high modernism. The addition of a revised version of the “Three Cantos” published in Poetry to the American edition of Lustra appears to make it more modern – that is, closer to Pound’s later work – than the British edition. This proposition should be treated with some caution. Certainly, it is the case that the third of the “Three Cantos” ends with Pound’s English rendering of the “Nekuia” episode (the Descent into Hades) from Book XI of Andreas Divus’s Renaissance Latin translation of the Odyssey. This now stands, only lightly revised, as Canto I, making the closing lines of the American Lustra the opening lines of The Cantos. However, this (admittedly rather elegant) verbal continuity should not be allowed to disguise more significant discontinuities. The appearance in 1917, firstly in Poetry and then in Lustra, of the “Three Cantos” does indeed mark a significant point in the development of Pound’s epic. It was a start but a false start. The “Three Cantos”, like “Near Perigord”, are essays in what Longenbach calls the mode of “existential historicism”. 44 When The Cantos in their present form began to emerge as a result of Pound’s work on Sigismondo Malatesta in 1922 and 1923, Pound, as Longenbach and others have recognized, abandoned this mode and scrapped much of his earlier work in it (although he was able to salvage and recycle some of it). 45 Thus it is difficult to argue that the “Three Cantos” take Pound, or the reader, any further along the road that led to The Cantos (presuming that such a road exists) than does “Near Perigord”. It should also be remembered that the American Lustra balances the “Three Cantos” by also adding, as a sort of prelude, a short selection of Pound’s earlier poetry, and so it can be seen as an instance of what has been described as the “‘Janus-faced’ quality” of modernism as a bridge between

43. Selected Letters, 189. 44. James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past, Princeton, 1987, 13-14. 45. Ibid., 142-43.

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Pound’s earlier and later work.46 What is most interesting for me about these additions is that they show Pound continuing and developing the experiments in serial construction previously noted in the London edition of Lustra. It is in this, and the changes in the logic of publication and distribution described above, that the most significant moves towards the condition of the Modern can be detected. VI The history of Lustra is a history of unbinding. The 1926 Personae, while it restored the poems omitted from earlier impressions, redistributed and reordered the poems originally printed in Lustra, and so subverted the integrity of the volume. Subsequent Collected and Selected editions of Pound have, with only minor revisions, followed this lead. Unsurprisingly, criticism and literary history have followed the path of the text. Lustra has in large measure been written out of literary history. When it is attended to at all, it is usually to give some account of the row with Mathews over “The Temperaments” and other “indecent” poems, a classic instance of the “critical but not serious”. This erasing of Lustra, and the corollary filling of the four-year gap between Ripostes and Lustra, has resulted in the history of Pound’s “deliberate process of self-modernization” being made to appear more continuous, more coherent and more uniform than it in fact was. This may well have been precisely what Pound intended the 1926 Personae to achieve. Eliot appropriated Pound’s history and turned it to his own ends. He was so solicitous of the order of Personae that he placed in an appendix the early poems that he wished to include but which Pound had omitted. Eliot’s 1928 Selected Poems is a virtuoso editorial performance in so far as it succeeded in both conferring status on Pound and marginalizing him, by presenting his work as essentially endogamous. This essay, which focuses on the Lustra (or Lustras) of 1916 and 1917, is primarily intended as a corrective to these views and as a clarification of an important phase of Pound’s career. Obviously, to return to a major work of modernism and to situate it in a complex, but concrete and specific, nexus of textual and cultural practices (practices, for instance, of editing, publishing, patronage and distribution) has far wider implications for how Pound, and modernism generally, is read and understood. To assert that such a rereading is both necessary and overdue has been my secondary aim, although the scope of this essay allows me to do no more than sketch and gesture at its possibilities.

46. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, “The Name and Nature of Modernism”, in Modernism, eds Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Harmondsworth, 1976, 49.

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APPENDIX: THE FOUR LUSTRAS 1916-1917, AND LUSTRA IN PERSONAE (1990)

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73 1. Lustra of Ezra Pound, 1st edition, 1st impr. London: Elkin Mathews, Sept 1916 (UNABRIDGED). Tenzone The Condolence The Garret The Garden Ortus Saluation Saluation the Second The Spring Albâtre Causa Commission A Pact Surgit fama Preference Dance Figure, for the Marriage in Cana of Galilee April Gentildonna The Rest Les Millwin Further Instructions A Song of the Degrees Ité Dum capitolium scandet Το Καλόν The Study in Aesthetics The Bellaires The New Cake of Soap Salvationists Epitaph Arides The Bath Tub Amities Meditatio To Dives Ladies (“Agathas”, “Young Lady”, “Lesbia illa”, “Passing”) Phyllidula The Patterns Coda The Seeing Eye Ancora A Translation from the Provençal of En Bertrans de Born: “Dompna pois de me no’us cal” The Coming of War: Actaeon After Ch’u Yuan Liu Ch’e Fan-piece, for Her Imperial Lord Ts’ai Chih In a Station of the Metro Alba Heather The Faun Coitus

The Encounter Tempora Black Slippers: Bellotti Society Image from D’Orleans Papyrus “Ione, Dead the Long Year” ’Ιµέρρω Shop Girl To Formianus’ Young Lady Friend, after Valerius Catullus Tame Cat L’Art, 1910 Simulacra Women Before a Shop Epilogue The Social Order The Tea Shop Epitaphs (“Fu I”, “Li Po”) Our Contemporaries Ancient Wisdom, Rather Cosmic The Three Poets The Gipsy The Game of Chess. Dogmatic Statement concerning the Game of Chess Provincia deserta Song of the Bowmen of Shu The Beautiful Toilet The River Song The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin Lament of the Frontier Guard Exile’s Letter From Rihaku: Four Poems of Departure (“Separation on the River Kiang”, “Taking Leave of a Friend”, “Leave-Taking near Shoku”, “The City of Choan”) South Folk in Cold Country Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku A Ballad of the Mulberry Road Old Idea of Choan by Rosoriu To-Em-Mei’s “The Unmoving Cloud” Near Perigord Villanelle: The Psychological Hour Dans un Omnibus de Londres To a Friend Writing on Cabaret Dancers Homage to Quintus Septimus Florentis Christianus Fish and the Shadow

74 2. Lustra of Ezra Pound, 1st edition, 2nd impr. London: Elkin Mathews, Oct 1916 (ABRIDGED). Tenzone The Condolence The Garret The Garden Ortus Saluation The Spring Albâtre Causa A Pact Surgit fama Preference Dance Figure, for the Marriage in Cana of Galilee April Gentildonna The Rest Les Millwin Further Instructions A Song of the Degrees Ité Dum capitolium scandet Το Καλόν The Study in Aesthetics The Bellaires Salvationists Arides The Bath Tub Amities To Dives Ladies (“Agathas”, “Young Lady”, “Lesbia illa”, “Passing”) Coda Ancora A Translation from the Provençal of En Bertrans de Born: “Dompna pois de me no’us cal” The Coming of War: Actaeon After Ch’u Yuan Liu Ch’e Fan-piece, for Her Imperial Lord Ts’ai Chih In a Station of the Metro Alba Heather The Faun Pervigilium The Encounter Tempora Black Slippers: Bellotti Society Image from D’Orleans Papyrus “Ione, Dead the Long Year” Shop Girl

To Formianus’ Young Lady Friend, after Valerius Catullus Tame Cat L’Art, 1910 Simulacra Women Before a Shop Epilogue The Social Order The Tea Shop Epitaphs (“Fu I”, “Li Po”) Our Contemporaries Ancient Wisdom, Rather Cosmic The Three Poets The Gipsy The Game of Chess. Dogmatic Statement concerning the Game of Chess Provincia deserta Song of the Bowmen of Shu The Beautiful Toilet The River Song The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin Lament of the Frontier Guard Exile’s Letter From Rihaku: Four Poems of Departure (“Separation on the River Kiang”, “Taking Leave of a Friend”, “Leave-Taking near Shoku”, “The City of Choan”) South Folk in Cold Country Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku A Ballad of the Mulberry Road Old Idea of Choan by Rosoriu To-Em-Mei’s “The Unmoving Cloud” Near Perigord Villanelle: The Psychological Hour Dans un Omnibus de Londres To a Friend Writing on Cabaret Dancers Homage to Quintus Septimus Florentis Christianus Fish and the Shadow.

75 3. Lustra of Ezra Pound With Earlier Poems, printed for private circulation, New York, Oct. 1917 Tenzone The Condolence The Garret The Garden Ortus Saluation Saluation the Second The Spring Albâtre Causa Commission A Pact Surgit fama Preference Dance Figure, for the Marriage in Cana of Galilee April Gentildonna The Rest Les Millwin Further Instructions A Song of the Degrees Ité Dum capitolium scandet Το Καλόν The Study in Aesthetics The Bellaires The New Cake of Soap Salvationists Epitaph Arides The Bath Tub Amities Meditatio To Dives Ladies (“Agathas”, “Young Lady”, “Lesbia illa”, “Passing”) Phyllidula The Patterns Coda The Seeing Eye Ancora A Translation from the Provençal of En Bertrans de Born: “Dompna pois de me no’us cal” The Coming of War: Actaeon After Ch’u Yuan Liu Ch’e Fan-piece, for Her Imperial Lord Ts’ai Chih In a Station of the Metro Alba Heather The Faun Coitus

The Encounter Tempora Black Slippers: Bellotti Society Image from D’Orleans Papyrus “Ione, Dead the Long Year” ’Ιµέρρω Shop Girl To Formianus’ Young Lady Friend, after Valerius Catullus Tame Cat L’Art, 1910 Simulacra Women Before a Shop Epilogue The Social Order The Tea Shop Ancient Music The Lake Isle Epitaphs (“Fu I”, “Li Po”) Our Contemporaries Ancient Wisdom, Rather Cosmic The Three Poets The Gipsy The Game of Chess. Dogmatic Statement concerning the Game of Chess Provincia deserta Song of the Bowmen of Shu The Beautiful Toilet The River Song The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin Lament of the Frontier Guard Exile’s Letter From Rihaku: Four Poems of Departure: (“Separation on the River Kiang”, “Taking Leave of a Friend”, “Leave-Taking near Shoku”, “The City of Choan”) South Folk in Cold Country Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku A Ballad of the Mulberry Road Old Idea of Choan by Rosoriu To-Em-Mei’s “The Unmoving Cloud” Near Perigord Villanelle: The Psychological Hour Dans un Omnibus de Londres Pagani’s, November 8 To a Friend Writing on Cabaret Dancers Homage to Quintus Septimus Florentis Christianus Fish and the Shadow. Impressions of François-Marie Arouet (de Voltaire) The Temperaments POEMS PUBLISHED BEFORE 1911: In Durance

76 Pierre Vidal Old CANZONI, FIRST PUBLISHED 1911: Prayer for his Lady’s Life “Blandula, tenulla, vagula” Erat hora The Sea of Glass Rome Her Monument, the Image Cut Thereon Housman’s Message to Mankind Translations from Heine [I-VIII] – Und Drang [I-XII]

RIPOSTES, FIRST PUBLISHED 1912: Silet In exitum cuiusdam Apparuit The Tomb at Akr Çaar Portrait d’une femme New York A Girl “Phassellus ille” An Object Quies The Seafarer The Cloak An Immorality “Dieu! Qu’il la fait” salve Pontifex (A. C. S.) ∆ώρια The Needle Sub mare Plunge A Virginal Pan is Dead The Picture Of Jacopo del Sellaio The Return THREE CANTOS OF A POEM OF SOME LENGTH [revised versions of the Three Cantos first published in Poetry June-August 1917].

77 4. Lustra of Ezra Pound with Earlier Poems, 2nd edition, 2nd impr. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Oct 1917. Tenzone The Condolence The Garret The Garden Ortus Saluation Saluation the Second The Spring Albâtre Causa Commission A Pact Surgit fama Preference Dance Figure, for the Marriage in Cana of Galilee April Gentildonna The Rest Les Millwin Further Instructions A Song of the Degrees Ité Dum capitolium scandet Το Καλόν The Study in Aesthetics The Bellaires The New Cake of Soap Salvationists Epitaph Arides The Bath Tub Amities Meditatio To Dives Ladies (“Agathas”, “Young Lady”, “Lesbia illa”, “Passing”) Phyllidula The Patterns Coda The Seeing Eye Ancora A Translation from the Provençal of En Bertrans de Born: “Dompna pois de me no’us cal” The Coming of War: Actaeon After Ch’u Yuan Liu Ch’e Fan-piece, for Her Imperial Lord Ts’ai Chih In a Station of the Metro Alba Heather The Faun Coitus

The Encounter Tempora Black Slippers: Bellotti Society Image from D’Orleans Papyrus “Ione, Dead the Long Year” ’Ιµέρρω Shop Girl To Formianus’ Young Lady Friend, after Valerius Catullus Tame Cat L’Art, 1910 Simulacra Women Before a Shop Epilogue The Social Order The Tea Shop Ancient Music The Lake Isle Epitaphs (“Fu I”, “Li Po”) Our Contemporaries Ancient Wisdom, Rather Cosmic The Three Poets The Gipsy The Game of Chess. Dogmatic Statement concerning the Game of Chess Provincia deserta Song of the Bowmen of Shu The Beautiful Toilet The River Song The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin Lament of the Frontier Guard Exile’s Letter From Rihaku: Four Poems of Departure (“Separation on the River Kiang”, “Taking Leave of a Friend”, “Leave-Taking near Shoku”, “The City of Choan”) South Folk in Cold Country Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku A Ballad of the Mulberry Road Old Idea of Choan by Rosoriu To-Em-Mei’s “The Unmoving Cloud” Near Perigord Villanelle: The Psychological Hour Dans un Omnibus de Londres Pagani’s, November 8 To a Friend Writing on Cabaret Dancers Homage to Quintus Septimus Florentis Christianus Fish and the Shadow. Impressions of François-Marie Arouet (de Voltaire) POEMS PUBLISHED BEFORE 1911: In Durance Pierre Vidal Old

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CANZONI, FIRST PUBLISHED 1911: Prayer for his Lady’s Life “Blandula, tenulla, vagula” Erat hora The Sea of Glass Rome Her Monument, the Image Cut Thereon Housman’s Message to Mankind Translations from Heine [I-VIII] – Und Drang [I-XII]

RIPOSTES, FIRST PUBLISHED 1912: Silet In exitum cuiusdam Apparuit The Tomb at Akr Çaar Portrait d’une femme New York A Girl “Phassellus ille” An Object Quies The Seafarer The Cloak An Immorality “Dieu! Qu’il la fait” salve Pontifex (A. C. S.) ∆ώρια The Needle Sub mare Plunge A Virginal Pan is Dead The Picture Of Jacopo del Sellaio The Return THREE CANTOS OF A POEM OF SOME LENGTH [revised versions of the Three Cantos first published in Poetry June-August 1917]. (Source: Donald Gallup, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography)

79 5. Lustra in Personae (revised edition prepared by Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz, New York, 1990). POEMS OF LUSTRA 1913-1915 Tenzone The Condolence The Garret The Garden Ortus Saluation Saluation the Second The Spring Albâtre Causa Commission A Pact Surgit fama Dance Figure April Gentildonna The Rest Les Millwin Further Instructions A Song of the Degrees Ité Dum Capitolium Scandet Το Καλόν The Study in Aesthetics The Bellaires The New Cake of Soap Salvationists Epitaph Arides The Bath Tub The Temperaments Amities Meditatio To Dives Ladies Phyllidula The Patterns Coda The Seeing Eye Ancora “Dompna pois de me no’us cal” The Coming of War: Actaeon After Ch’u Yuan Liu Ch’e Fan-piece, for Her Imperial Lord Ts’ai Chih In a Station of the Metro Alba Heather The Faun Coitus The Encounter Tempora Black Slippers: Bellotti

Society Image from D’Orleans Papyrus “Ione, Dead the Long Year” ’Ιµέρρω Shop Girl To Formianus’ Young Lady Friend Tame Cat L’Art, 1910 Simulacra Women Before a Shop Epilogue The Social Order The Tea Shop Ancient Music The Lake Isle Epitaphs Our Contemporaries Ancient Wisdom, Rather Cosmic The Three Poets The Gipsy The Game of Chess Provincia deserta CATHAY 1915 Song of the Bowmen of Shu The Beautiful Toilet The River Song The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance Lament of the Frontier Guard Exile’s Letter Four Poems of Departure Separation on the River Kiang Taking Leave of a Friend Leave-Taking near Shoku The City of Choan South Folk in Cold Country Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku A Ballad of the Mulberry Road Old Idea of Choan by Rosoriu To-Em-Mei’s “The Unmoving Cloud” POEMS OF LUSTRA 1915-1916 Near Perigord Villanelle: The Psychological Hour Dans un Omnibus de Londres Pagani’s, November 8 To a Friend Writing on Cabaret Dancers Homage to Quintus Septimus Florentis Christianus Fish and the Shadow Impressions of François-Marie Arouet (de Voltaire)

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INTENTIONALITY AS SENSUALITY IN HARMONIUM CHARLES ALTIERI

If we are to talk about how volumes of lyric poetry are organized, it is prudent to have some sense of where we are to look for an appropriate principle of organization. The most obvious principle is that of narrative: an authorial consciousness presents the volume as tracking a series of significant moments leading from conflict to proposed resolution. When authors turn away from narrative, the issue of unity gets much more perplexing. Should we still look for something like narrative, with each lyric mapping some emerging structure of interests making up the author’s overall sense of identity? Or should we turn to some more abstract structural sense of relationships that show the author projecting possible interconnections among possible states of mind? Or might the organization be fundamentally formal, with different blocks of poems exploring related verse figures or qualities of syntax and diction? Whatever our model, we have to be somewhat flexible in applying it because the usual case is that poets write poems, then seek ways of putting them together, and may often have to be somewhat arbitrary in their placements. These difficulties arose for me because I wanted to take entirely seriously Wallace Stevens’s suggestions that his first collection, Harmonium (1923) could be read as a coherent book. I have not yet been able to find the patterns that structure the entire volume. But I think I can take a step in the right direction by tracing the extraordinarily bold challenges that constitute the opening sequence of his first collection. Just this enterprise should help us appreciate how intricately Stevens worked to use both individual poems and relations among poems as means of establishing modes of lyrical agency appropriate to modernity. Here I will devote myself to elaborating how these particular modes are constructed. But I also hope to formulate what I take to be some important theoretical implications of Stevens’s experiment. For he poses the challenge that we try to bring to self-consciousness a cogent sense of how the range of particulars he offers might also serve as significant features of a single lyric enterprise. The one account we cannot give of Stevens’s structure is a traditional narrative one. These poems emphatically do not derive from moments in an individual’s history, nor, decidedly, do they lead back to a richer understanding of the authorial agent whose synthetic recuperative intentions shape both the poems and their relations to each other. While these poems are decidedly “about” the needs and powers we can attribute to consciousness, they are just as decidedly not “about” a specific person struggling to make sense of his particular life history and present social situation. Therefore rather than speak about foregrounded authorial intentions in particular poems and in their interrelationships, I think we do better to deal with both domains in terms of the modes of intentionality that they articulate and explore. Concerns with

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intentionality go directly to the modellings of consciousness that particular poems afford. And they enable us to speak of a volume’s structure in terms of how each of these models needs supplements and adjustments if the volume as a whole is to respond to the need to make lyric poetry adequate to twentieth-century realities. Let us define intentionality simply as that orientation of consciousness by which “a” situation becomes “this” situation for a particular point of view. Then we can see that while concerns for intention lead us to focus on what an agent might have been thinking, concerns for intentionality focus our attention on how consciousness is structured and affect explored in bringing about the sense of “this situation”. Correlatively, the emphasis on how situations are composed brings with it a complex set of questions about the projected satisfactions that elicit the particular orientation and the actual satisfactions that explain why it persists. With works of art, we have to ask why we care as we engage a sensibility taking up a certain disposition toward the world. What kinds and qualities of affective investments become possible by virtue of occupying particular intentional positions? Then the volume as a whole can deal on a second-order level by elaborating what the implications of such participation might be for allowing and sustaining general images of the kinds of person the poems invite us to be. These links between intentional states and possible identifications are important in all aspects of life, but they seem to me especially pressing concerns for poets of Stevens’s generation. For the poets deeply distrusted the identifications that were available from traditional modes of poetry and therefore had to put an enormous burden on the particular lyric investments that they could render as plausible, and as warranting identifications with modernity. Because lyric was their instrument they could sustain such identifications by argument or analysis or even the elaboration of fantasy. Manipulating intentionality seemed one of the few means by which they could clearly reject their inheritance and stake out new versions of lyric agency. Were they to have relied on narratives to interpret these shifts in sensibility, they might well have found it very difficult to avoid the dominant cultural order, an order that obviously reinforced the very conventions that modernism wanted to unsettle and transform. Narrative accounts of selves were fundamental to that order: narrative sustained roles and identifications continuous with the dominant practices. But putting all one’s reflective energies into the articulation of intentional states enabled one to treat lyrics as pure moments for engaging aspects of the world and of seeing how consciousness might be altered by its efforts to draw out what it could from such moments. On such a basis poets might be able to pursue identifications that could satisfy the psyche at its most intense without subjecting it to conventional forms of life ill-suited to such intensities. Dominant culture has substantial interests in poets making the kinds of simple identifications that find satisfaction simply in the fact one is functioning as a poet and so demonstrating a certain kind of approved sensitivity. There might be a certain frisson about this marginal mode of production, but the frisson was part of the licensing by which society maintained its authority. Fully embracing modernity required pursuing quite different modes of identification, modes based not on the role “poet” but on the sense of embracing a task whose practical consequences had yet to be defined. In a moment I will engage some concrete examples to clarify the abstract points I am making. First, however, I want to elaborate the possible force of these arguments by pointing out how they help us distinguish the embodied energies of Harmonium

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from the spirit of Stevens’s later poetry. At the core of this later poetry we find Stevens’s ambition to identify as a philosophical poet. This is how his “Introduction” to The Necessary Angel characterizes that ambition: Only recently I spoke of certain poetic acts as subtilizing experience and varying appearance …. A force capable of bringing about fluctuations in reality in words free from mysticism is a force independent of one’s desire to elevate it. It needs no elevation. It needs only to be presented, as best one is able to present it.1 Being a philosophical poet does not entail doing the work philosophers do. Poets do not propose and develop specific theses. Rather their emphasis is on pursuing the implications of their capacity for “bringing about fluctuations in reality” with words. Poetry simultaneously manifests an ability to modify how intentionality flows and to identify with a mode of speaking that can feel itself self-reflexively complementing its world without imposing on it anything mystical or mystified. Here then philosophy becomes a constant process of seeking satisfaction in the qualities of one’s acts of naming what one finds engaging within one’s experience. The poet wants an intensified sense of what the name indicates and his or her audience wants an intensified sense of our powers as users of such names. Harmonium is a very different enterprise. It would be a strange philosophical poet who did not introduce a reference to an “I” until the volume’s fifth poem and who treated everything putatively human as if it were merely a figure in some flattened and opaque quasi-allegory.2 Imagine William James or Josiah Royce or George Santayana, the major philosophers of Stevens’s Harvard education, sanctioning a philosophical position in which there are no fully dramatic speaking situations or efforts at self-understanding until the volume arrives at the speaking presence who offers “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”. And here, when we do get drama, we find even more irony and distance than we did in the flattened allegories, perhaps because what had been experiments in impersonal distance now become renderings of how distant even personality can become from its own immediate needs and desires. Why be so insistently unyielding toward traditional modes of attaching persons to their reflective lives? The most ready answers take negative form since we can easily speculate on why these poems might refuse to provide certain kinds of satisfactions. It seems as if Stevens’s desire to address modernity required his overtly rejecting even the desire to identify with the self-reflexive attitudes fostered by Romanticism as ideals of poetic thinking. As André Salmon put it, the new emerging modernism in art “set apart the men who were beginning to look at themselves ‘on every side at once’ and thus learning to scorn themselves”.3 Conventional meditative roles had come to seem absurdly humanistic. As such, they preserved cultural structures allowing

1. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, New York, 1951, viii. 2. “The Plot Against the Giant”, in Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems, New York, 1982, 6-7. And even here the “I” is spoken by an abstract character type. The initial “I” by a lyric speaker occurs two poems later in “Domination of Black”. Subsequent quotations from Stevens’s poetry are taken from this edition and page numbers are provided in the text. 3. André Salmon, “Anecdotal history of Cubism”, in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp, New York, 1969, 204.

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humans to think well of themselves even as they blinded themselves to everything alien and alienating that confronts consciousness. Irony offered one way out, since it could deflate the identifications promised by philosophical meditation. But irony could not build on this scorn. An ambitious poetry would have to use these negatives as means of establishing new modes of lyric reflection better attuned to those points at which self-disgust modulates into fictions worth exploring for the positive energies they make available. If the negative could make ideals flutter, lyric intensity might give new vitality to the shades and shadows created by that fluttering. This seems to me one plausible framework for interpreting the sensualism usually attributed to Harmonium. Stevens’s resistance to idealization required his poetry to focus more intently than poetry was accustomed on the very processes of taking in the sensuous information usually ignored by our conceptual habits. There one might pay attention to what makes the psyche flutter; one might encounter “gusty / Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights” (67) that were too elemental for idealization; and one might be able to dwell without irritable reaching for ideals upon the compelling forces created by lyric rhythm and aural density. Such commitments might make poetry matter not because of how it pursues or celebrates belief but because of how it manages to hold off the temptation to impose belief on sensation and all that binding the imagination to sensation might elicit. Consequently, Stevens might matter as a poet because he could exemplify what happens when poetry accepts the imperative that whatever art claims for spirit has to be based on a radical commitment to the primacy of the senses. The very critique of mysticism that would shape his subsequent philosophical ambitions could in Harmonium be experienced as a demand to let the imagination pursue the pleasures of refusing to let philosophy control how sensation released imaginative energies. The opening section of Harmonium then has as its fundamental ambition the desire to map modes of investing in imaginative energies whose basic claim upon us is their resistance to inherited modes of idealization. It is crucial that for Stevens this new orientation did not make him content with the Impressionist-inspired rendering of heightened sensation: being fully modern required grander ambitions. He could not rest with a straightforward materialist envisioning consciousness fulfilled if it could get free to represent only what the senses register about the world. Fascination with the senses helped him realize how difficult it is, and how exhilarating it is, to link these senses to the forces language brings to bear, especially when one’s ambitions for poetry demand finding some way of continuing to honour the imaginative energies that typically go into selfidealization. So Stevensian sensualism takes as its primary role that of forcing consciousness to recognize its own tenuous hold on states and processes for which it cannot successfully impose interpretations but also upon which it cannot stop imposing projections. As Stevens suggests by having his criticism of William Carlos Williams’s anthropomorphism occur so early in this volume, the best way to appreciate the senses is to attempt identifications with their resistance to the poets’ metaphors.4 Once we allow ourselves to participate in these apparently negative energies, we also enter a space where it makes sense to yield ourselves to forms of constructive energy that ride these sensual possibilities. To borrow a potent image from “The Plot Against the Giant” (6-7), as our heavenly labials are undone, we at least come to see 4. Explicitly in “Nuances of a Theme by Williams”, 18.

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what it might like to be a giant. Perhaps there can be structures that fully engage the mind precisely because they yield to modes of linkage for which the mind has no categories and no pre-set expectations. This is where poetry’s lushness comes in. It provides a locus for those aspirations the psyche can pursue when it turns away from the need to provide imaginary representations of its desires. And as those aspirations find possible satisfactions, the energies that go into identification can be rerouted, as can the desperate need to make sense of experience. Perhaps making as an extension of sense can replace making sense as a cognitive enterprise. As the psyche finds satisfactions that do not lead back to identifications as a meditative or lyric poet, it can become fascinated by something close to an inhumanity at the core of its investments in the flesh. So when the opening poems in Harmonium turn to the Romantic vision of the imagination approaching theophany, the most they allow themselves is an identification with the figure of an aesthete God observing the sacrificial labours undertaken by Ursula and her virgins: And He felt a subtle quiver, That was not heavenly love, Or pity. (22) Poetry’s job is to build on this “not” so that we glimpse what scepticism can propose as not entirely ironic transcendental belief. Then poem after poem confronts the corollary of this “not”, the constant reminder that to be flesh is to be doomed to mortality. But a sharp awareness of this mortality also brings with it the challenge that we make that sensation itself the impetus for lyrical expansiveness.

II My observations so far have been made as if there were no need to provide evidence for my claims because everyone reads this volume as I do. Indeed I am not sure that evidence will persuade anyone not already leaning toward this kind of interpretation. But just for the aesthetics of it, it is worth trying to indicate briefly how Stevens’s opening poems are structured to compose the challenges to which I have persuaded myself these remarks are responding. Is there a stranger opening poem to a volume of poetry than “Earthy Anecdote”? It seems that to enter this volume we have to be willing to place ourselves in this spare allegorical space, with all dramatic and personal details suppressed as irrelevant. We are offered neither a clear speaker nor a dramatic context. There is only a troublingly distanced perspective before which there unfolds an apparently timeless and very flat scenario. The poem seems both a revelation and test – a revelation of a logic fundamental to imagination and a test of what one might go on to see if one is willing to persist in the inhuman mode of seeing required by the poem. Whatever the bucks represent – probably the working of the imagination – seems both dependent on and inevitably blocked by the unyielding resourcefulness of the firecat. The scene seems to allow for no hope of change or fulfillment. But its spareness allows consciousness to persist without lament or self-pity. In fact the poem seems to present a challenge to try on its disciplined mode of seeing so that one might shift from whining about powerlessness to being able to share a fascination with the cat’s ultimate selfabsorption. Allegory itself then serves less to interpret the world than to facilitate a relation to it not available if we insist on decoding meanings. Allegory makes it

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possible to identify with the cat’s narcissistic repose because even if we do not know quite what it represents we know that the repose stems from successful resistance to everything the bucks come to symbolize. In this case even the distant, inhuman writerly presence that foregrounds this allegorical framework turns out to be a feasible means of coming to terms with those aspects of human life that are subjected to forces beyond our control. The rest of the volume’s opening sequence explores what becomes possible if consciousness pursues this fascination with strange perspectives. There is no drama of self-expression and no reach toward profound thematic resolutions. Yet these refusals are not without a sense of new permissions. The poems invite us to try out a form of participation that has no clear ethical correlates and no obvious way of reaching beyond what the senses activate. So once “Earthy Anecdote” has defined the imagination’s dilemma in relation to reality, it seems perfectly plausible to attempt directly addressing the soul, if only in terms of its relation to whatever in us aligns us with the bland motions of ganders all too well adjusted to their realities (“Invective Against Swans” [4]). Then as soon as the soul makes its entrance, it seems that the volume has to find a way of addressing the body within the same reductive abstract perspective. But for Stevens, introducing the body also requires introducing gender differences. Thus the volume turns to four poems (4-8) on different aspects of the feminine as a framing of the sensual world. The last of these, “Infanta Marina”, so thoroughly links body with the motions of mind and the uttering of subsiding sound that the volume can then, and only then, let the lyric “I” emerge as an analogous elemental force, teased out by the play of sound, colour, and motion in “Domination of Black” (8-9). Lyric poetry will eventually need the “I”, but its “I” can be much more fully a matter of relations among the senses than Romantic ambitions had allowed. With “Domination of Black” two further expansions become possible. Firstly, this “I” seems to bring together the abstract soul and the feminine body given substance by its ways of inhabiting flux. So lyric poetry can begin to elaborate subject positions that are not shaped as the expressive manifestation of the specific psychological forces situating and motivating the speaking agent. Harmonium’s first “I” is as elemental as its “soul” or its “bucks” swerving to escape the firecat, and it is as intensely sensual as the enjoyment of a pine-tree sweetening the body in “In the Carolinas” (5). But here in “Domination of Black” that sensuality occupies a threshold between what the colours and sounds make present and what they articulate as a cause of fear and memory. The present takes on intensity less because of sensual vividness than because of the sharpening of the second-order engagement produced by attention to what the scene withholds at its horizons. The fullness of sensual apprehension seems inseparable from some fundamental lack that the poem’s peacocks register because they are so deeply responsive to the contrast between the “turning” leaves and the immobile “heavy hemlocks” (9). Secondly, “Domination of Black” seems to bring together the abstract soul and the feminine body, albeit in a manner that keeps each haunting the other. No wonder then that in spite of the use of “I” in the poem, it will take three more poems before a recognizable speaker emerges. “The Snow Man” (9-10) offers a basic alternative to the haunting cry of the peacock and sensibility immersed in oppressive physical detail. Here, if the mind can abstract itself sufficiently and can attune itself entirely to the shaping force of the poem’s single sentence, it can give an analogous sensuality to something like pure negation. Playful allegorical space and flattened detail become

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the instruments for a new synthetic power that is philosophical precisely because it refuses all imperatives for argument and for self-congratulation. Here poetry manages to shift from its newly found “I” to the composing of a “one” able to reflect directly on its constructive powers. In effect what had been the work of rhythm now takes on semantic force. We find in this capacious sentence a minimalist giant able to resist those “heavenly labials in a world of gutturals” (7), and therefore perhaps also able to confront directly the horror of death that accompanies fascination with the unknowable. But poetry will not be confined to marmoreal structures, however elegant and capacious. The feminine returns, first when “The Ordinary Women” rise from poverty to a “puissant speech” giving resonance to the endless “Insinuations of desire” (11). Then, with “The Load of Sugar-Cane” the feminine becomes as abstract and as elemental as the “mind of winter” (9). Where silent immobility had been, now there is a marvellous sense of the clausal and phrasal connectives in language bringing all of nature into conjunction with the sudden emergence of the “red turban / Of the boatman” (12). All of nature seeks this possibility of the pure event of emergence. Then we arrive at “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” and the volume’s first contextualized human speaker. Perhaps he is freed to explore a substantial “I” by his own sense of the event qualities of his self-defensive language. Perhaps too he needs this “I” because he has no other resource by which to get in touch with his specific situation. By this point in the volume, poetry finds its way back to the miseries of traditional lyric cries, but now with a better sense of how speaking of tears as the expression of “some saltier well / Within me” (13) in fact binds him to the elemental forces requiring us to turn ironically against our own lyrical impulses. As the lyric locates the “I”, it also has to learn to appreciate from a distance what it means not to be able to reside comfortably in such protected spaces: “I never knew / That fluttering things have so distinct a shade” (18). It is not meanings that are distinct but shades and shadows, the senses inseparable from the imaginative projections they implicate at their margins.

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THE ACCIDENTAL BRIDGE: HART CRANE'S THEORY OF THE LYRIC MARIA IRENE RAMALHO DE SOUSA SANTOS

a poet will accidentally define his time Crane, “General Aims and Theories” “The poem is always written the following day”, Fernando Pessoa as Álvaro de Campos once said memorably.1 That the statement appears in one of his poems only adds to its poetic truth. It is there to state clearly that, just like the poem itself, it does not exist until it is read. Reading makes the poem real by becoming part of its very construction. Each poem is the history of the way it goes on being read, and hence rewritten, across time. A poem’s existence depends on the critical history of its readings, including the reading or readings of the author himself or herself. Emily Dickinson said it very well in one of her brief, seemingly unassuming poems, when she wrote that, contrary to the opinion of “some”, a “word”, rather than falling “dead” “when it is said”, begins to live “that day”.2 I formulate the idea sketched above as the hermeneutical construction of the poem. My approach is grounded on the theory and practice of the poets I have been reading all my life, and any one of them would provide ample illustration, but none so magnificently as Hart Crane. In Crane’s case, and particularly in the case of The Bridge (1930), the issue becomes far more complex and interesting because the poem is made up of many different and to a certain extent self-interruptive poems. It is made up, to be precise, of eight numbered sections and fifteen individual poems of varying length, touching on a variety of topics. And yet, the poem is still “a poem”. Crane’s work, significantly, announced itself as The Bridge, A Poem; an appellation that is quite different from the title of his first book: White Buildings, Poems by Hart Crane (1926). The Bridge is “A Poem” not a collection of poems. Both the history of the book’s composition and the history of its readings, however, render problematic the very idea of the poetry book as an organically unified and, as it were, inevitable whole. In other words, given the self-interruptive structure of many individual poems, The Bridge is no more a poem in the book than it is a poem on the page. This is not to say that The Bridge is a mere series of poems. The Bridge-as-poetry-book is a poem made of poems in history – its and their own history, the history of its poet’s American imagination, and the history of its readers in the world. Furthermore, The Bridge is explicitly a poem about the American nation as a complex modern state, and 1. Fernando Pessoa (Álvaro de Campos), “Insónia”, in Obra Poética, ed. Maria Aliete Galhoz, Rio de Janeiro, 1981, 310. 2. Emily Dickinson, “A word is dead” (P1212), in The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, Boston, 1960, 534-35.

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it is a Whitmanian poem about its own proper singer. Although the desire to give form to the variety and contradictions of human experience in the modern world, in the manner of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) or Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), albeit in a more hopeful note, lies at its genesis, The Bridge only begins to take shape when Crane begins to feel “directly connected with Whitman”. 3 This last quote comes from Crane’s letter to Gorham Munson of 2 March 1923, in which the poet boldly envisions himself as “a suitable Pindar for the dawn of the machine age”. 4 Even if he could not have been aware at the time of all the implications of his project, it is little wonder that the enterprise appeared to Crane, from the very beginning, as “too impossible an ambition”.5 The hermeneutical construction of The Bridge began long before it was put together as a book. The idea of the poem-as-poetry-book began to germinate in the poet’s mind during the composition of “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” (1922, 1923, 1924), the poem-made-of-poems that aimed to “bridge” (Crane’s phrase) tradition and modernity, beauty and technology, knowledge and art. “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” is the poem of Crane’s poetic maturity. In spite of (or because of) the many disappointments caused by the poem’s first publications, the poet himself was fully aware of what he had accomplished, and was thereby emboldened to start “ruminating” on a greater project. 6 To be sure, the original conception of The Bridge was merely that of a “new longish poem” to be added to and improve the collection that Crane was then hoping to get published soon. The title appears for the first time in a letter to Munson of 9 February 1923. Crane’s letters of the first few months of 1923, with many identical phrasings addressed to different correspondents, bear witness to the poet’s obsession with the project and its theme. By the time White Buildings came out in 1926, the “longish” poem “on a synthesis of America and its structural identity” had turned into a “long poem” made up of parts. 7 The “last part of The Bridge” was sent to Waldo Frank in a letter dated 18 January 1926. Crane’s statement that this “last part” (“Atlantis”) was, “oddly enough”, the first one to emerge has been frequently repeated. What is often neglected is that as early as 12 February 1923, Crane had sent Allen Tate an earlier version of the first stanza of “Van Winkle”, calling it “the first verse of The Bridge”. The first two lines appear unchanged as the opening of the second of the five lyrics that comprise “Powhatan’s Daughter”. In this second section of the book, the ample geography of America, embodied in Pocahontas as American history and myth, is bridged from coast to coast by the progress of modern transportation: “Macadam, gun-grey as the tunny’s belt, / Leaps from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate”.8 The bridge image repeats itself in many forms and with many symbolic resonances in the structure of the book

3. See Crane’s letter to Waldo Frank, 27 February 1923, in O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane, eds Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber, New York, 1997, 135. 4. Letter to Gorham Munson, 2 March 1923, in O My Land, My Friends, 136-38. 5. Letter to Gorham Munson, 18 February 1923, in O My Land, My Friends, 131. 6. When “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” appeared in Secessions at the end of 1923, supposedly as a whole but in fact “edited” and “revised” by Philip Wheelright, Crane pronounced it “slain” (see John Unterecker, Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane, New York, 1969, 313). For a recent account of the vicissitudes of the publication of the three-partite composition, see Clive Fisher, Hart Crane: A Life, New Haven, 2002, 193-94. 7. Letter to Wilbur Underwood, 20 February 1923, in O My Land, My Friends, 134; Letter to Otto Khan, 3 December 1925, in O My Land, My Friends, 213. 8. Hart Crane, The Poems, ed. Marc Simon, New York, 1986, 55.

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as a whole. Crane saw the “very idea of a bridge” both as “a communication” and “an act of faith”.9 Writing the poem evidently encompassed for the poet both the difficult, slow construction of passages between disparate worlds of experience, ancient and modern, and the discovery of the visionary dreams of which they were the expression. It is ironic that Crane should express the desire to be allowed to write his poem uninterruptedly (namely, by getting enough support from his Maecenas and thus avoiding the drudgery work “at the office”), whereas poetry writing, as he himself conceived of it, is grounded on poetic interruption – a making that constantly questions itself. The idea is perhaps first clearly expressed at the very beginning of “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”, where “the mind” is “divided”, and reality, or “the day”, envisioned as “stacked partitions”. 10 In “General Aims and Theories”, the unpublished essay that Crane is said to have written to help Eugene O’Neill prepare his promised (and never delivered) introduction to White Buildings, Crane speaks of the composition of the poem as “a kind of grafting process”. Although he will not be “interested in repeating” it, he adds, the “process” is “consistent with subsequent theories of [his] on the relation of tradition to the contemporary creating imagination”.11 To bridge tradition and modernity, beauty and technology, knowledge and art implies the mutually interruptive and fragmentary dynamics of all these and many other concepts. In what follows I will try to show that the history of the composition of The Bridge helps us to understand that Crane’s theory of poetry is grounded on the Romantic idea of the fragment which longs for wholeness that is never achieved. Crane’s first book of poetry could also teach us a thing or two about the hermeneutical construction of the poetry book: the poems that were included and those that were not; the circumstances of the previous publication of individual poems; the order in which the poems appear in the book; what was on the poet’s mind and what were his expectations as he was preparing the book for publication; how the new project affected its composition; how it was received by the critics; what promises it seemed to offer regarding the poet’s subsequent career. In retrospect, after the publication of The Bridge and its reception, after the poet’s suicide at sea in 1932, and after assessment of the poems he left unpublished (both those written before and after the publication of The Bridge), White Buildings is readily construed as anticipating (if not prophesying) the poet’s major concerns in The Bridge (or what a particular critic at a particular moment considers to be the major concerns 12). The Bridge is, however, a far more interesting case than White Buildings because it was conceived of almost from the start as a unified poetry book. The architectural metaphor already present in the title of the first book (buildings) is recreated in the dynamic concept of the bridge as movement, passage, voyage, experience, communication, gesture, prayer, song; the bridge, therefore, as incessant bridging. The actual daring conception and painful construction of Roebling’s suspended bridge in the late nineteenth century, exactly where Whitman’s Brooklyn ferry had once 9. To Waldo Frank, 20 June 1926, in O My Land, My Friends, 259. 10. Hart Crane, The Poems, 26. 11. Hart Crane, The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose, ed. Brom Weber, New York, 1966, 217. 12. I, for example, have read White Buildings as no less “a poem about America” than The Bridge. See Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos, “Hart’s Matrix: Poetry, Eroticism, and the Nation’s Subject”, in Op.Cit., 2 (1999), 99-114.

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crossed the East River, feeds into Crane’s theory of poetry as well. “Poetry is an architectural art”, he says in the essay he titled “Modern Poetry”. 13 Drawing on the actual bridge as a cultural icon and national symbol, The Bridge is a construction that transcends itself. Each new poem written, each new poem independently published in a little magazine, became one more step in the construction of the bridge. In a letter to Yvor Winters of 26 February 1927, Crane insisted that his main interest as a poet was in “construction” (the emphasis is Crane’s).14 The idea is already present in his muchquoted letter to Harriet Monroe about “At Melville’s Tomb” and the “logic of metaphor” (a concept he had used in a letter to Alfred Stieglitz as early as 4 July 1923).15 The musical metaphor that the poet brings to bear on his harp-like poem adds to the kinetic concept as well. The “symphony” he claimed his poem to be implies musical segments momentarily brought together and made present by the act of playing and listening. Right from the start, the architecture of the bridge presents itself as motion, not stasis. Crane’s “synthesis” of America is also America’s everexpanding “structural identity”.16 The image of the bridge, the actual Brooklyn Bridge crossing the East River and Crane’s poem spanning time, space, and modern consciousness, is an ongoing, unending process, not unlike Leaves of Grass as America’s ever unfinished and “never achiev’d poem”.17 It is therefore not at all surprising that Crane should take such a keen interest in the Roeblings as bridge builders, having even toyed with the idea of writing the biography of Washington Roebling.18 His admiration for the master engineer implies comparison of himself with the daring builder of the “most superb piece of construction of the modern world”, indeed the “most beautiful bridge in the world”. 19 In the symphony played in “Atlantis”, the “floating singer” rises from the “granite and steel” of his own making, the poet as cause and effect, creator and creature of “steeled Cognizance”. As the “concrete evidence of the experience of a recognition” (Crane’s emphasis), poetry is knowledge, both as “perception and thing perceived”. 20 Hence the poet’s interest in the construction, not in the finished object. What excites the poet’s imagination is the poetic ever appearing (en route, as Celan says in the Bremen speech), not the fixed form of the poem on the page, or even in the book. 21 The poet of The Bridge is Columbus, Whitman, and Roebling at the same time, as well as Hart Crane. Unending voyaging and sea crossing, music and poetry writing, the miraculous construction of the “arc synoptic” of New York’s suspended bridge and the dynamic images of process spanning time and space that they all convey, spell out Crane’s theory of the lyric, to which I now turn.

13. Crane, The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose, 260. 14. O My Land, My Friends, 322. 15. Cf. O My Land, My Friends, 156, 279. 16. Cf. Brom Weber, Hart Crane: A Biographical and Critical Study, New York, 1948, 127. 17. See Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan, New York, 1982, 921. 18. See letter to Allen Tate, 7 May 1927, The Letters of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber, Berkeley, 1965, 293. The project was also financial, of course: penniless Crane hoped the biography would yield some commercial profit, while serving as good publicity for The Bridge as well. 19. Letter to his mother, 11 May 1924; letter to Waldo Frank, 21 April 1924, in O My Land, My Friends, 190, 187. 20. Letter to Gorham Munson, 17 March 1926, in O My Land, My Friends, 232. 21. Cf. Paul Celan, “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen”, in Collected Prose, translated by Rosemarie Waldrop, Manchester, 1986, 34.

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II In a fine chapter on The Bridge included in his Hart Crane: A Re-Introduction, Warner Berthoff, after reviewing briefly the history of Crane’s attempt at fulfilling his “impossible ambition”, suggests boldly that “the final organization and sequence of The Bridge are in some considerable measure accidental”. 22 There is nothing new about this assessment. The concept of accident, as diagnosis of Crane’s final product as a “failure”, was implied by early reviewers of The Bridge, notably Yvor Winters and Allen Tate.23 The negative appraisals by these two critics were all the more devastating for Crane because they were both made by his friends and fellow poets. They were both familiar with Crane’s conceptions and intentions. They were both well acquainted with and had already expressed considerable admiration for his work (including individual, previously published poems of The Bridge), and could therefore be legitimately expected to have an informed and sympathetic approach. The Bridge as failed construction, somehow indicative of the deficiency or gradual disintegration of Crane’s imaginative powers, is part of literary history. Winters’s assessment of Crane’s “failure” being a failure of structural composition, presumably due to Crane’s supposedly increasing personal inadequacies, was recently repeated by James Fenton in The New York Review of Books. The title given to Fenton’s review of Langdon Hammer’s new edition of Crane’s letters was “Going Half the Way”, a title that unequivocally drove home this meaning. 24 Curiously enough, many sympathetic readers, including more recently those informed by gay studies and queer theory, seem for the past three decades to have either ignored Winters’s indictment altogether or apologetically accepted the diagnosis, only to find in it the right excuse to celebrate the poet’s originality. 25 Crane’s genius is usually depicted as somehow contrasting with New Critical views of the ontological status of the poem as a unified object or closed totality, perfectly reflecting the poet’s sustained and integrating vision. This happens whether patterns of imagery and language are tacitly invoked to praise the organic nature of the poem, or whether the Romantic idea of the fragment is proffered as the high mark of the poet’s craftsmanship, or whether Crane’s poetry is read as representing an alternative if not oppositional conception of poetry and American culture.26 Berthoff’s position is bolder. He uses the potentially pejorative term (“accidental”) defiantly to signify, paradoxically, the poet’s intellectual and imaginative control of the process and his right to plan as he goes along and as he sees fit for the continuing composition of the poetry book. “Bit by bit”, writes Pessoa/Soares in Livro do desassossego [The Book of Disquietude], only seemingly 22. Warner Berthoff, Hart Crane: A Re-Introduction, Minneapolis, 1989, 87. 23. Allen Tate, “A Distinguished Poet”, in Hound and Horn, III (July, 1930), 580-85; Yvor Winters, “The Progress of Hart Crane”, in Poetry, XXXVI (June, 1930), 153-65. 24. James Fenton, “Going Half the Way” review of O My Land, My Friends, in New York Review of Books, 23 October 1997. 25. As Lee Edelman has shown, the ghost of Winters tends to haunt much admiring criticism of Crane in the form of an apologetic tone. See Lee Edelman, Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire, Stanford, 1987. 26. The bibliography of works on Crane has grown tremendously in the past decades. A modest sample of the critical range I suggest above would include Heinrich Ickstadt, Dichterische Erfahrung und Metaphernstruktur: Eine Versugung der Bildersprache Hart Cranes, Heidelberg, 1970; Samuel Hazo, Smithereened Apart: A Critique of Hart Crane, Athens, OH, 1963, 1977; Maria F. Bennett, Unfractioned Idiom: Hart Crane and Modernism, New York, 1987; Thomas Yingling, Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies, Chicago, 1990.

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paradoxically, “I compose this accidental and thought out book of mine”. 27 In Crane, too, each new poem, whether willfully conceived from the start as part of The Bridge project or not, would be considered in due time. I would go even further and suggest outright that there is nothing sacrosanct about the whole of The Bridge. Crane went on publishing individual poems even as he struggled to bring them to a synthetic whole in the poetry book, and even after the book was published. The Bridge-as-poem moves in literary history along hermeneutical constructions of it or parts of it. When Crane tells Otto Kahn that “each poem” in The Bridge is “a separate canvas”, he is being accurate; when he adds that “none yields its entire significance when seen apart from the others”, he is exaggerating by stating the obvious.28 Nothing exists in itself alone, Wallace Stevens once said, and, of course, the context changes the individual poem. Once printed in an anthology, for example, any poem from any poetry book yields a different “significance”, this is even more marked if a particular poetry book performs “a formal integration of experience”. This does not invalidate the practice of anthologizing individual poems, nor their independent publication in another format, such as a scholarly essay. Permission has to be requested of authors and publishers, but it is usually only a question of price (capital interferes with hermeneutics, as with everything else). Whatever the case may be, however, the poem’s history should never be hidden from its readers. Poets are free to change their work’s history more or less deliberately, and many have done so. One of the most interesting cases concerns Alberto Pimenta’s revisions of all his previous poetry books in his one-volume edition of 1990. Pimenta’s gesture is an ironic commentary on editions of noted Portuguese poets that came out at the time under titles such as Poesia Completa [Complete Poems] or Obra toda [All the Works]. The title of Pimenta’s book is Obra quase incompleta [Almost Incomplete Works], a provocation that is also a theoretical statement.29 Almost Incomplete Works deconstructs the idea of the desired completeness of the work, while at the same time stressing it. If, as Pimenta repeats frequently in this volume and elsewhere, “everything began in the eighteenth century”, the theoretical premise of the modern poet’s practice cannot but be the Romantic fragment with immortal longings for wholeness. The very nature of poetic language is that it “arbitrarily separates what is together [as for example in] Catullus’s odi e amo”.30 For Pimenta, an attentive Portuguese reader of the German Romantics, poetry is never fixed; it is rather, as Schlegel states in Athenäum fragment 116, “romantische Poesie”, “eternally in the process of becoming and never completed” (“all poesy is or should be romantic”). 31 Although Crane is not conversant with the German Romantics, he shares this poetic vision. Both Crane and Pimenta see “the poem” as process, and see no contradiction between the “fragment” as a “complete” entity (of which the Romantic metaphor famously appropriated by Derrida in “Che cos’è la poesia” is the hedgehog), and 27. Fernando Pessoa (Bernardo Soares), Livro do desassossego, ed. Richard Zenith, Lisbon, 1998, no. 13 (my translation). Zenith’s translation of The Book was first published by Carcanet, Manchester, 1991, as The Book of Disquietude. For the carefully revised Penguin edition, London, 2001, the translator was regrettably persuaded to change the title to The Book of Disquiet, which represents a loss of metre and exact meaning. 28. 12 September 1927, in O My Land, My Friends, 345. 29. Alberto Pimenta, Obra quase incompleta, Lisbon, 1990. 30. Alberto Pimenta, “A dimensão poética das línguas”, in his O silêncio dos poetas, 2nd edn, Lisbon, 2003. 31. Quotations here are from Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, eds Jochen Schulte-Sasse et al., Minneapolis, 1997, 320-21; see also fragment 206 (322).

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poetry’s endless becoming (“Werden”) that is the “image of the age”. 32 In Crane’s own apt formulation, “Language has built towers and bridges, but itself is inevitably as fluid as always”.33 There are many differences, to be sure, between Crane and Pimenta. History and geography count, as do background and many other factors; but both poets share a tradition in which poetry is conceived of as a making (poiesis) that presents itself as an ongoing process and each particularly values poetry’s intervention in the interruptive tension between part and whole. To put it another way, the Coleridgean predilection for “fusion” should not make us forget that in this tradition the poem is never finished, New Critical verbal icons and well-wrought urns notwithstanding (and “Kubla Khan” – with its sometimes disregarded alternative title “A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment” – is there to state the poetic fact unequivocally). Once poets become fully aware of the utter fluidity and vulnerability of language, the poem does not allow itself to appear as self-enclosed. The following day comes and the poem is no longer the same. A contemporary American poet in the same tradition expresses this concept unsurpassably well: “Building impossible spaces in which to roam, unhinged from the contingent necessities of durability, poems and the books they make eclipse stasis in their insatiable desire to dwell inside the pleats and folds of language.”34 Matters become far more interesting when a poem is not a mere string of poems (like “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” or “Voyages”), but a whole poetry book that precisely claims to be a whole, even if it is a whole that is forever being interrupted. The nearly seven years that it took Crane to write The Bridge has often been accounted for by the poet’s difficulty in managing his poetic powers adequately. This is true to the extent that it is true of every poet in the tradition, and as long as it does not turn into an indictment of a particular poet’s poetic “weaknesses”, as Yvor Winters would have it in Crane’s case. To write poetry is very hard work and often a very unconventional kind of work; not something a person can be expected to perform uninterruptedly and efficiently from nine to five. To have a sense of the inadequacy of Winters’s assessment of the “failure” of The Bridge, we must remember that in Winters’s “biological approach” (Crane’s phrase), Crane’s other “weaknesses” were homosexuality, drinking habits, and his taste for the “Whitmanian”. 35 In my assessment of Winters’s assessment of the failure of the The Bridge, the “failure” lies rather in Winters’s own failure to take account of the role of the poet’s imagination in the hermeneutical construction of his poem. The Bridge, and Crane’s years of agony over its writing, testifies to this better than any other poetic phenomenon, except, perhaps, Pessoa’s invention of the heteronyms. The hermeneutical construction of The Bridge begins with the writing of the individual poems and the simultaneous conceptualization of the poem as a long poem comprised of sections (similar to “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”), and 32. Cf. Jacques Derrida, “Che cos’é la poesia?”, 1988, translated by Peggy Kamuf, in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf, New York, 1991, 221-37. 33. Hart Crane, “General Aims and Theories”, in The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose, 223. 34. Charles Bernstein, “The Book as Architecture”, in his My Way: Speeches and Poems, Chicago, 1999, 57. 35. Yvor Winters, “The Significance of The Bridge, by Hart Crane, or What Are We To Think of Professor X?”, in In Defense of Reason, Denver, 1947, 577-603. For the “biological approach”, see Crane’s letter to Winters, 29 May 1927, in O My Land, My Friends, 335-40.

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eventually as a poetry book. To pronounce The Bridge a completed poem could not have been easy for Crane. He struggled until the very last moment with the final shape of the book. He knew that, regardless of fictions of closure that poets and readers go by at different times, the poem, let alone the poetry book, is never selfcontained. It is presided over, rather, by interruption. The Bridge as poem and as poetry book gives eloquent testimony to this concept.36 Of all the fifteen individual poems that comprise The Bridge, only “Quaker Hill” and “Atlantis” were never published separately by Crane, who was always eager to sell a poem for sheer survival (capital and hermeneutics once again). All the other poems appeared in different magazines in the course of 1927 and 1928, in one case with a different title (“The Dance” was “Powhatan’s Daughter”, Crane’s later title for the second numbered section). “Indiana” and “Cape Hatteras” bring us back to the hermeneutics-and-capital issue: each of them afforded Crane a modest fee by being published in a magazine as an individual poem in 1930, after The Bridge had already come out, “Indiana” bearing a different title as well (“Eldorado”). Among the Crane/Winters papers a tentative table of contents of The Bridge is extant, probably made in 1927, that differs considerably from the final version: “Quaker Hill” is not mentioned, “Mango Tree” (first published in Transition in November 1929) is still considered for inclusion as the middle section (as stated in Crane’s letter to Waldo Frank of 12 August 1926), three more poems are also considered that do not seem to have ever been written, and, more importantly, “Cape Hatteras” (not yet written) appears as the third section right before “Cutty Sark”.37 It was only after the event of its composition that Crane came to define “Cape Hatteras”, his “rhapsodic address” to Whitman, as the “‘center’ of the book, both physically and symbolically”. 38 “On écrit qu’à la pointe de son savoir”, says Gilles Deleuze, a statement that is true with a vengeance when referring to poetry.39 “Na falta de saber, escrevo” [Because I don’t know, I write], we read in Pessoa/Soares’s Livro do desassossego.40 Metre-making argument, not argument-making metre (Emerson is right) is what poetry is all about. Moreover, The Bridge was already in press when Crane added the gloss to “Powhatan’s Daughter”, in an attempt at “binding together [its] general theme”. The poet is obviously concerned with the whole poem’s “entire significance”, even if his poetry book remained in fluctuation until the very end, and beyond. The two 1930 editions (the Black Sun Press in Paris and the Liveright in New York City) are not exactly alike. And every time the book is reprinted, separately or in a Complete Poems, with or without a new introduction and notes, literary history changes. This is not to say that “the poetry book” is a useless concept. Poets usually take great care with their final structure and composition and the order of poems on the pages. Some posthumous Collected Poems ordered chronologically are, for this reason, disastrous, as is the case with Rampersad’s edition of Langston Hughes’s

36. I have written extensively on interruption as a useful poetic concept for reading the lyric. See, most recently, Irene Ramalho Santos, “Poetic Interruption: A Pessoan Concept for Reading the Lyric”, in Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism, Hanover, NH, 2003. 37. Thomas Parkinson, Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence, Berkeley, 1978, 66. See also O My Land, My Friends, 267-68. 38. Letter to Caresse Crosby, December 26 1929. See also letter to Allen Tate, 13 July 1930, in O My Land, My Friends, 421, 433. 39. Gilles Deleuze, Différence et Repetition (1968), Paris, 1997, 4. 40. Fernando Pessoa (Bernardo Soares), Livro do Desassossego, no. 116.

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poetry.41 And yet, the final result of the poet’s efforts may not turn out to be exactly what was originally planned: Wallace Stevens forgot to include two very fine, previously uncollected poems (“The Course of a Particular” and “A Discovery of Thought”) in his carefully arranged Collected Poems (1954). Needless to say, nobody ever dared to put them in place, the question being, which place? 42 All these problems are magnified in the case of The Bridge. The poet was determined to build an object that had a beginning and an end. Writing to Waldo Frank about the composition of “Atlantis”, the closing poem that was the first part to be written, the poet realized that “a bridge is begun from the two ends at once”. 43 In response to Allen Tate’s harsh review of The Bridge in Hound & Horn, Crane counters his friend’s accusation of sentimentality over the use he makes of Whitman by insisting on the coherence of the vision of America underlying his poetic synthesis. Nonetheless, there is something of the nature of the “accident” in Crane’s construction. Not that Crane would deliberately condone “accidents” in poetic construction. With regard to artistic endeavor, he was never too fond of Dadaist randomness. He always argued, rather, for “much conscious effort”, as he put it in an early letter to Munson (January 28, 1921).44 And yet, accident in the simple, primary sense of anything that happens (or “a way of happening”, as Auden would say in his elegy for Yeats) is part of Crane’s poetic conception as well. “Accidental”, in my title as in Crane, really means “contingent” – in its etymological sense of contiguity (Lat. contingere > CON- tangere). In Crane’s conception, The Bridge happens (perhaps rather, goes on happening) alongside the happenings it purports to sing: America, poetry, the poem, the poet, and love. As Crane writes in “Modern Poetry” (1930), the poetic process “demands ... an extraordinary capacity for surrender, at least temporarily, to the sensations of urban [read “modern”] life”.45 Crane’s half-facetious remark on his composition of “The Mango Tree” (transition 18, 1929) in a letter to Susan Jenkins Brown (22 May 1926) is perhaps worthy of more attention than it has received so far. “I enclose an accidental calligramme committed this morning accidentally on my way to the Bridge”, writes Crane, obliquely emphasizing, no less by the poem’s tree shape, his own view of the intricate, self-interruptive relationship between poetry and material reality.46 As The Bridge neared publication, Crane grew increasingly reluctant to release it. Not because he thought the poem was not yet complete, but rather because he was unwilling to pronounce it complete. Hadn’t he assured Otto Kahn already in 1926 that “the poem [was then] already an epic of America, incomplete as it [was]”?47 How could America or its epic ever be complete? Wouldn’t Crane’s epic of America, 41. Langston Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Arnold Rampersad, New York, 1994. 42. Stevens acknowledges his forgetfulness concerning “The Course of a Particular” in a letter to Robert Pack (14 April 1955), in Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens, New York, 1966, 881. Both poems were later included in Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse, New York, 1957, 9596. 43. O My Land, My Friends, 266. 44. Ibid., 58, Crane’s emphasis. Writing at about the same time to Matthew Josephson (14 January 1921), Crane makes his misgivings about the modishness of Dada even clearer: “I hear that ‘New York’ has gone mad about ‘Dada’ and that a most exotic and worthless review is being concocted by Man Ray and [Marcel] Duchamp, billets in bag printed backwards, on rubber deluxe, etc. What next! This is worse than the Baroness [Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven]”(O My Land, My Friends, 57). 45. Hart Crane, Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose, 262. 46. O My Land, My Friends, 254. 47. Letter to Otto Kahn, 19 September 1926, in O My Land, My Friends, 277-78.

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interrupted as it is by the lyric for being an epic of the modern consciousness as well, have to go on forever and forever incomplete, like Whitman’s ongoing and organic Leaves of Grass? If The Bridge can be said to be America’s “cartogram” (Crane’s neologism to define “Cutty Sark”), how could it bear poetic closure? 48 What eventually loosened Crane up was the idea, proffered by Caresse Crosby (who, in any case, considered the poem to be already complete) that further editions could easily incorporate new additions, much in the manner of Whitman’s book. Once he realized that the poem could go on almost indefinitely in this way even after publication, Crane agreed to have it published. “For all I know”, he wrote with evident relief to Caresse Crosby on 25 April 1929, “the Bridge may turn into something like the form of Leaves of Grass, with a number of editions, each incorporating further additions”. 49 That the “further additions” end up being those provided by its readers does not alter the theoretical principle one bit. As I conclude, I am tempted to see The Bridge as Derrida’s “poétique”: the poem as a “story of heart” (remember Crane’s punning on his name in his poetry) – an experience or voyage that “does not hold still within names, nor even within words” (or poems, I would add). The Bridge may well turn out to be American poetry’s version of the hedgehog, the strange little animal that has fascinated poets and philosophers, from Archilochos to Friedrich Schlegel to Derrida. “The fox knows many tricks”, says Archilochos, “the hedgehog only one, but it is a good one”. 50 The trick the hedgehog knows, according to Schlegel, makes it just momently selfenclosed and self-sufficient. But, in Derrida’s perception of the poetic, the hedgehog’s real trick is that it is never complete unto itself after all. It is helpless on the road (or bridge), interrupting and susceptible to interruption, dangerous and utterly vulnerable in its many bristling spines. There is no poem without accident.

48. See Letter to Edgell Rickword, 7 January 1927, in The Letters of Hart Crane, ed. Weber, 283. 49. O My Land, My Friends, 403; see also Clive Fisher, Hart Crane, 401-2. 50. Archiloque. Fragments, ed. François Lasserre, translated by André Bonnard, Paris, 1958. The translation into English is my own.

WILLAM CARLOS WILLIAMS’S AN EARLY MARTYR: THE DESCENT BECKONS

RON CALLAN

When one thinks of the Williams canon, Spring and All, In the American Grain, White Mule, The Wedge, Paterson, and Pictures from Breughel come to mind. An Early Martyr (1935) seems beyond that pale. It is a book of its time, resonant with issues from the 1930s: the Depression, left-wing politics, and “Objectivism”. 1 It also comes close to what is generally accepted as the end of Williams’s “early” phase, and a time in which he was having difficulty writing poetry, measuring poems.2 Also, An Early Martyr is not marked by the poet’s radical combination of poetry and prose passages. 3 However, both in the manner of its construction and the ways in which Williams used it thereafter, An Early Martyr adds considerably to the range of his achievements. My interest here is in the process toward publication, the consequences of the arrangement of the poems, the effect of Williams’s recycling of material from earlier publications, and the unravelling of the primacy of the book in its reinvention in later versions. I am influenced in this by Stanley Koehler’s work on Williams’s “descent” in the 1940s 4 and particularly the notion that “Memory is a kind / of accomplishment”. 5 An Early Martyr was a new book of poems in 1935 that undermined the simple autonomy of the object. Published by Alcestis Press, An Early Martyr was Williams’s (at the time, almost 52 years old) fifth book of poems (excluding his “first” book, Poems, which he insisted should not be published again). Williams had waited twelve years for a book of poems after Spring and All. The publisher, Ronald Lane Latimer, was, according to Williams, a “strange person”, adding that the name was an “an alias, I think”. 6 His suspicions were correct. Alan Filreis’s study of the pseudonymous Latimer’s work with Wallace Stevens reveals Latimer’s complexity (even confusion) of name and 1. Louis Zukofsky influenced Williams’s political and literary interests at the time and Williams had contributed significantly to An “Objectivists” Anthology, ed. Louis Zukofsky, New York, 1932. In his article for it, “Recencies”, Zukofsky wrote of the “desire for an inclusive object” (15). 2. This is especially evident in his long letter to Kay Boyle, William Carlos Williams, in The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirlwall, New York, 1957, 129-35. In it he wrote, “Free verse – if it ever existed – is out. Whitman was a magnificent failure” (135). Subsequent references to this book will appear in the text as SL. 3. Again the letter to Boyle is instructive. 4. G. Stanley Koehler, Countries of the Mind: The Poetry of William Carlos Williams, Lewisburg, PA, 1998, 17. 5. “The Descent”, in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, ed. Christopher MacGowan, New York, II, 245. 6. William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, New York, 1951, 299. Subsequent references to this book will appear in the text as A.

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mind. His first editorial for Alcestis Quarterly promoted the poet who tries “to capture and intensify the beauty of things as he sees them” (Stevens and Edith Sitwell are his examples) over the one who uses art as “an instrument of an economic theory” (Auden and Spender).7 Latimer would later admit: I love the idea of bringing out a proletarian ... poet in a deluxe edition! These lovely incongruities.8 Filreis describes Latimer’s change of mind as “spectacular”. 9 It was this “strange person”, an aesthete who discovers the truth of the Communist Party while remaining committed to deluxe publications, who provided Williams with an almost unique opportunity – the publication of a book of poems. Williams was ill-prepared for the project, as this 1935 letter to Latimer indicates: Certainly, I’d like to have a book of verse by the Alcestis Press. I haven’t a damned thing to send you for #3 [Alcestis Quarterly] – not even a line of a poem. Everything has been snatched out of my hands the moment it’s written. I am even starting to write them to order now. (SL 152) To add to the complexity of the offer, Latimer sought to produce a limited edition on duca di modena and all-rag paper. Of the 165 copies, 135 would be for sale at “seven and a half Depression dollars”.10 In context, the complete, unabridged Ulysses, published by Random, sold for $3.50.11 This was in a market where book sales in the U.S. had dipped from 214 million in 1929 to 111 million in 1933.12 An Early Martyr added eight copies to the total for 1935-36.13 Alcestis Press published two books for Williams (and books for Stevens, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren) before Latimer “went broke and quit” (A 299). An Early Martyr is dedicated to John Coffey (printed Coffee here and in Williams’s Autobiography), a political activist, shoplifter, Robin Hood figure, and subject of the title poem. After the dedication, Williams notes, “Many of these poems have been published / in the magazines – almost all of them”. 14 This is not quite accurate. Some of the poems are taken, without substantial changes to the originals, from Spring and All: “The Right of Way” (Poem XI), “The Black Winds” (Poem V), and “The Farmer” (Poem III). In addition he made a small but significant change to “Young Romance” (Poem IX). “The Sadness of the Sea” is a rewritten section from The Descent of Winter (1928), and “The Wind Increases” was originally published in Della Primavera Trasportata al Morale, a sequence published in 1930. Finally, some of his more recent publications in magazines were carefully edited. The most dramatic example of this is “The Locust Tree in Flower” where he pared the original down to single-word lines. An Early Martyr is not a new book of poems gathered from 7. Alan Filreis, Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism, Cambridge, 1994, 124. 8. Ronald Lane Latimer letter to Willard Mass, undated, late 1934, quoted in Filreis, 113. 9. Filreis, 124. 10. Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, New York, 1981, 369. 11. Filreis, 128. 12. Ibid., 114. 13. Mariani, 388. 14. William Carlos Williams, An Early Martyr and Other Poems, New York, 1935.

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magazines. In fact, it represents Williams’s fascination with the links between past and present expressed some years later: “Yes, most assuredly, I am conscious in everything I write of a usable past, a past as alive in its day as every moment is alive in me.”15 In this reading, An Early Martyr represents another challenge by Williams to the meaning of a book of poems. This is less evident than, for example, in Spring and All. However, by the 1930s he was presenting his work as a poet in a more traditional sense – he excluded the prose from Spring and All in the 1934 Complete Collected Poems. One might speculate that the rapidly developing academic interest in the microtext of the poem (and the canonization of T.S. Eliot’s work) was one context for the change in direction. More telling though, as the letter to Kay Boyle indicates, was his concern with the technical aspects of poetry. Continuing to assess the influence of Whitman’s work, Williams was keen to establish a measure, not free verse, to reflect his America. This is an important focus for many of his essays throughout the 1930s – the material is words and the work is technical.16 Certainly the mere asymmetric design of many of the poems and the general range of forms in An Early Martyr are testimony to Williams’s tireless experimentation. However, it must be remembered that, as John Beck says, “Williams’s belief in technique is likewise [comparison is to John Dewey’s work] understood as a nonideological means of accurately constructing a response to, and out of, historical contingency”.17 Poetry and history/politics were related elements for him. Particularly challenging (though hidden from most readers of An Early Martyr) was his use of poems from Spring and All, his self-plagiarism. In Spring and All Williams had attacked, “THE TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAGIARISM”, those who insist on the value of tradition and seek to limit the pursuit of the new. 18 Remarkably, he returned to Spring and All to plagiarize his own work and make it new. In some cases he makes changes to a poem to create a new poem of sorts; in others, the poems are copies which rely on contexts to establish their new credentials. This may recall Whitman’s various editions of Leaves of Grass; however, here we do not get another version of Spring and All. Williams’s book presents a layered textual site requiring careful and progressive excavation. As the poems are reused without any reference to the original, the consequences for readers and critics are quite serious – limited knowledge results in limited responses. His tactics have affected our current (and indeed future) knowledge of the book. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan unfortunately decided not to reprint some of the “copies” in their definitive Collected – they merely refer readers back to Spring and All or elsewhere. In this Collected, An Early Martyr becomes less a book in its own right and more a number of poems with references to other poems. The editors’ decision does not allow easy access to the contexts created by Williams’s construction. In 1935 it was a book with full texts and 15. William Carlos Williams, “The Situation in American Writing: Seven Questions”, in Partisan Review: A Quarterly of Literature and Marxism, VI/4 (Summer 1939), 41. Interesting in this regard is that Williams produced two Complete Collected Poems in the 1930s. 16. See particularly, “A Point for American Criticism”, “Marianne Moore”, “Kenneth Burke”, “The Basis of Faith in Art”, and “Against the Weather”, in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (1954), New York, 1969. 17. John Beck, Writing the Radical Centre: William Carlos Williams and American Cultural Politics, New York, 2001, 120. 18. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, eds A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan, New York, 1986, I , 182 and 185. Subsequent references to this book will appear in the text as CP1.

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absent contexts; now it is a book with full contexts and absent texts. There are thirty poems in the original publication of An Early Martyr. I shall begin by discussing the opening three poems to establish the importance of the arrangement of the poems. Then I will discuss the critical mid-point poems to establish the significance of Spring and All and the lingering effect it has on the book as a whole.19

II John Coffey of “An Early Martyr” is presented in a five-stanza poem, lightly punctuated to reflect his rebelliousness. He becomes a “factory whistle” shouting “Sense, sense, sense!” against the double-crossing standards of the courts (CP1 378). In doing so, Coffey seizes the signal for industry’s control of the masses. Unlike his real-life defeat (he is committed to a mental institution), the young revolutionary infiltrates the system he opposes and uses its voice for his ends. The whistle, originally transformed from a meaningless sound into a symbolic utterance by the factory owners, is remade as a word: “sense”. The world is turned upside down and the fool speaks sense; the poet/artist unravels the strait-jacket and frees the madman. The poem is to-the-point and didactic. Robert von Hallberg reads “poles of discourse” into An Early Martyr of description and explanation: “An Early Martyr” is explanatory, offering “a structure of understanding.”20 This directness also exercises Barry Ahearn who mistakenly decides “An Early Martyr” is a “dramatic monologue”.21 Limited as both views are, they reflect the immediacy of the poem, its force of reality. Theme and form change dramatically in “Flowers by the Sea” (CP1 378). Hallberg sees this as a shift from didacticism to description.22 Here the imagination plays upon flowers and the sea in ways that suppress the tendency to narrative in “An Early Martyr”. However, something of the rebellion remains as the absence of fullstops is set against the clear structure of four couplets. The voice is lyrical, precious, and separate from social concerns. The flowers are transformed to be “hardly flowers”; the sea, a “plantlike stem”. The relatedness of distinct objects indicates the power of the imagination to transform them – flower can be sea and sea, flower. When set against the immediacy of “An Early Martyr”, one could say that this is a satire on poetry that ignores social issues. “Flowers by the Sea” performs magic; Coffey lives in the real world where magicians/deviants are incarcerated. Side by side, these poems present a clash of values. However, the emphasis in “Flowers by the Sea” is on the energy produced by their interaction – “restlessness” is the result. This is the imaginative thrust which made the “factory whistle” into “sense”, which unpicked the lock on social inequalities. To say simply that flower is flower and sea is sea is to say that right is right and wrong is wrong, and, consequently, that challenges to authority are forms of madness. “Flowers by the Sea” expresses a paradoxical world, a world

19. I am reading these recycled poems as part of Williams’s plan for the book and not as mere padding – a point made by Robert J. Cirasa in his The Lost Works of William Carlos Williams: The Volumes of Collected Poetry as Lyrical Sequences, Madison, WI, 1995, 330n. 20. Robert von Hallberg, “The Politics of Description: W.C. Williams in the ‘Thirties’”, in ELH, XLV/1 (Spring 1978), 133-34. 21. Barry Ahearn, William Carlos Williams and Alterity: The Early Poetry, Cambridge, 1994, 171-72. 22. von Hallberg, 134.

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which produces shocking and delightful results. Hallberg accounts for this as “poetry which can both see and understand”.23 His reading of the poem is similar to my own here. However, this interpretation only becomes clear in the third poem, which indicates the level of complexity to which Williams aspires. “Item” offers no specific location but shifts us back to a social setting. It deals with the violence perpetrated by a figure or figures of authority which leaves the woman as simply “a note / at the foot of the page” (CP1 379). In placing the footnote in the main text, Williams disrupts the normal angle of vision. As significant is that the woman appears as both a realized human figure and as a textual citation. “Item” straddles the worlds of the opening poems and acts as a statement of inclusiveness. It points to the social and political power in a mere footnote or lyric poem. It redefines “An Early Martyr” by undercutting the realism of Coffey’s story. He is reclaimed as text, as a figure of the poem. Wedged between these two poems is the fragile “Flowers by the Sea”, now humming with political resonances drawn from the adjacent material. The shifting perspectives within and between the opening three poems point to the interests of the book: to measure text requires context. However, establishing a consistent line of argument is difficult given the force of each individual experience. As John Beck writes, “Williams cannot bring himself to think of political action in terms of a class struggle, but as a defense of individual liberty”.24 This becomes a vital issue as the contexts intensify and the book reaches midpoint, shared by the fifteenth and sixteenth poems in the collection: “Solstice” and “The Yachts”. “Solstice” records “the shortest day of the year” (CP1 388). Williams’s 1928 collection, The Descent of Winter, had ended on the 18th of December, but here darkness is an optimistic mid-point: “the shortest day of the year // is favourable” – an ending without punctuation to signal an open vista. The vision is fulfilled by the next poem, “The Yachts”. As in “Item”, story and image combine to explore the clash of two elemental forces in America: paradoxically, individualism takes on individualism. I say this because the yachts are signs of American enterprise and individualism. However, the beaten masses also represent individualism. Here though it is individualism-in-the-making, unrealized, but guaranteed, as Williams saw it, in America as nowhere else in the world: “Then I have been tremendously impressed with the past of the United States. That’s deep in my blood. Nothing has displaced one bit of my emotions – the regular 4th of July stuff! [sic] that I once felt so strongly.”25 The yacht races are a metonym for American achievements (American crews were unbeatable in these races for many years). They are also a metonym for its failures, “an indictment of the untouchable brilliance of American capitalism”. 26 The terza rima of the opening stanza links it to Dante’s Inferno, to man’s epic ambitions and sinfulness.27 The poet’s unwillingness to sustain the terza rima beyond the first two stanzas points to the sterility of such gestures:

23. Ibid., 136. 24. Beck, 126. 25. William Carlos Williams, “The Situation in American Writing: Seven Questions”, in Partisan Review: A Quarterly of Literature and Marxism, VI/4 (Summer 1939), 43. 26. Beck, 128. 27. Williams was to write of Dante’s work in 1939 in “Against the Weather” where he is seen as a “dogmatist” who must be “split”(Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams [1954], New York, 1969, 207).

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Williams dangles the Dantesque pattern before us just long enough to make us wonder whether or not it is really there. Then, having hinted at prosodic ancestry, he abandons the model.28 The American form must be looser, more adaptable and less epical, and its immediate success, evident in the glory of the yachts, is greater – more about winning; less about sin. However, the vision shifts when the sea becomes a “sea of faces” (CP1 389). The yachts take on a new level of meaning, becoming powerful and anti-democratic forces which “pass over” the beaten masses (CP1 389). The poem opens out to include images of a mass slaughter, as the sea “resembles an entanglement of watery bodies” (CP1 389), in which Dante’s vision of suffering is recalled. The actions of the yachts mirror those of Coffey’s judges, those who determine the limited value of footnotes. Here at the point of extreme darkness came the promise of light and hope. The yachts prove to be a false dawn, emerging as symbols of hell not heaven, of fascism not democracy. “The Yachts” is the preface to “Young Romance” (Poem IX CP1 200-2), the first poem taken from Spring and All. In its original publication it was prefaced by the following: Whitman’s proposals are of the same piece with the modern trend toward imaginative understanding of life. The largeness which he interprets as his identity with the least and the greatest about him, his “democracy” represents the vigor of his imaginative life. (CP1 199) This promotes much of what “The Yachts” almost represented. The poem gives expression to the “least and the greatest”; it points to the “vigor of ... imaginative life”. However, it recalls a sinful world older than American democracy. In Spring and All, Whitman urged the young lovers forward; in An Early Martyr, the context is more complex – Williams’s recontextualization of the poem (“The Yachts not Whitman) undermines the lovers’ hopes. The words may be the same but “Young Romance” now draws little comfort from the lovers: he “watched” while she “tore [her] hair” (CP1 391). The changes to “Young Romance” point to the limitations of Whitman’s vision and the terrible consequences of the powerful yachts. In Spring and All we read, but I merely caress you curiously fifteen year ago and you still go about the city, they say patching up sick school children 29 In 1923, the poet remembers the past but can “caress” in the present. While there is a marked separation of narrator from the woman, he can still bring her to life, still caress her. This is not quite Whitman’s assumption, but it is a related level of relationship which emphasizes the power of the poet. 28. Stephen Cushman, William Carlos Williams and the Meaning of Measure, New Haven, 1985, 85. 29. Williams, Spring and All, np, Contact Publishers [41].

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Williams changed the tense to “caressed” in An Early Martyr.30 The change may seem slight, but is important given his removal of the stanza break for the 1938 Complete Collected: Clean is he alone after whom stream the broken pieces of the city – flying apart at his approaches but I merely caressed you curiously fifteen years ago and you still go about the city, they say patching up sick school children31 (CP1 391)

In all versions, Williams is not “[c]lean” nor is he separate from his subject – relationships are limited. The poem records the woman’s fifteen-year commitment to her work apart from him. He recognizes the dangers inherent in Whitman’s assumptions and he seeks to limit them by recognizing the woman’s freedom – he hears of her from second-hand sources (“they say”). However, the change to “caressed”, and the later deletion of the paragraph break stress the dislocation of the speaker/poet from the woman/subject. The revisions signal the poet’s limited power (he cannot “caress” her now) and the paradoxical freedom inherent in this new poetic vision. The past is in the past and what he recalls are memories. The shift in the later versions is increasingly away from assumptive authority, from transcendence of time, to a celebration of difference. The vigour and optimism of Whitman’s vision is retained, but the shift is towards an understanding and expression of necessary circumferences. A new beginning is made in re-measuring memories and poems. This grounding of the imagination leads Williams to consider transcendental experiences. He writes of Sappho and Shakespeare in “Hymn to Love Ended”, of Lawrence in “An Elegy for D.H. Lawrence”, of the rituals of chat and time in “Sunday”, and of the power of “isms” in “The Catholic Bells”. In the main these poems offer a visual order on the page to suggest a relief from the asymmetry to this point. They suggest how individuals succeed beyond an immediate sense of self. They are, however, potentially reactionary in seeking to circumvent the issues raised by the process to date. It is Spring and All’s “The Auto Ride” which recalls the here-andnow. The perspective returns to ground level as the narrator drives a car. The poem’s couplets-as-stanzas point away from grander themes to focus on ordinary people, ending with, “I saw a girl with one leg / over the rail of the balcony” (CP1 206). Here the speed of the car produces an abundance of images – individual moments not represented as part of transcendent or ritualized contexts. It was enough, as Williams says immediately after the poem in Spring and All, to “write down what happens at the time” (206). In An Early Martyr, it is not enough because, in this context, the girl 30. William Carlos Williams, An Early Martyr and Other Poems, New York, 1935, 39. 31. Litz and MacGowan use the 1938 version, “Young Love”, for their Collected. See William Carlos Williams, The Complete Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams 1906–1938, Norfolk, CT, 1938, 113.

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represents a blasphemous priestess on a balcony/pulpit. Her leg becomes a dangling, undefined signifier as the car/congregation speeds past. Once it was enough to record its reality. Now contexts are added which include hymns, masses, and literary history. Against the weight of this past, the blasphemous footnote is redrawn in a textual space which shares ground with those transcendent experiences – following “The Catholic Bells”, the lower-case world offers its own solace. The final movement of the book includes three poems, “To Be Hungry Is To Be Great” (CP1 400), “A Poem for Norman Macleod” (CP1 401) and “You Have Pissed Your Life” (CP1 401-2). The first two mark Williams’s confidence in what is available “at the time”. Valuable material is found and celebrated – the “yellow grassonion” which when “well cooked” complements “beer” (“To Be Hungry”) and “gum” from the “balsam” which is a cure for “constipation” (“Norman Macleod”). Both poems suggest that high culture disregards resources at hand and limits the imagination. A cure is earned by attending to the ordinary: “noble has been / changed to no bull” – European aristocracy gives way to American pragmatism. An Early Martyr moves towards a conclusion of confidence reminiscent of Spring and All’s “rich” and local “Black eyed susan” (CP1 236). However, martyrdom is recalled with the chant, “You have pissed your life” (CP1 401-2). This repeated charge connects the poet to John Coffey’s “madness”. He, who rescued marginalized figures by attention to details, is now himself marginalized, declared less than a footnote. The book closes with memories of its beginning and links the subject of the book with its writer – both suffer the wrong-headed judgement of the powerful; both, in different ways, are marked as martyrs for an apparently lost cause. However concealed, Williams’s use of Spring and All in An Early Martyr is significant. On one level, the latter is a conventional book of poems. That said, it seems to me that Williams presses on with his work in significant ways. The selfplagiarism reminds us of some of his concerns then and the success it suggested, the awakening in “Spring and All”. However, Williams’s vision in 1935 has altered and his self-plagiarism indicates his continuous interests as it points to subtle changes. Dealing with the hard facts of Depression America, Williams draws on his own resources as he tests them. In context, his Spring and All poems give as they yield – contributing images of survival to the rebels and being recontextualized to show the limitations and adaptability of the earlier vision. Ultimately the presence of Spring and All points to Williams’s continual challenge to the notions of simple time and space; here he undercuts the microtext of the poem and the autonomy of the book of poems. As in his image of Coffey as the whistle, Williams infiltrates notions of the pure poem to point to ever present contexts – the individual cannot be separated from society. III Williams rewrote An Early Martyr twice: for the 1938 Complete Collected and for his Collected Earlier Poems in 1951. The chart in the appendix following this essay indicates the changes he introduced in each case. The first noteworthy change in 1938 is in the order in which “Item” and “The Locust Tree in Flower” appear. Together now, “Locust Tree in Flower” and “Flowers by the Sea” “secure that aesthetic orientation with some purely natural subjects”.32 Once, however, this is completed, Williams develops a strong line of community-focused poems. This is emphasized by 32. Cirasa, 240.

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the deletion of “The Sadness of the Sea”. Indeed the tension between the social and the pastoral (almost strophe-antistrophe in the original) is all but removed but for “Tree and Sky”. It means that that mid-point crisis which I addressed above is less obvious. More damaging, nine of the twelve poems were removed from the latter half of the book. Williams returned all Spring and All poems to the original volume for the Complete Collected. The effect of these changes is to suggest a clear line of development in An Early Martyr, emphasized at the end with the exclusion of “You Have Pissed Your Life”. The conclusion now rests with a sense of real achievement. The book opens with John Coffey and closes with Norman Macleod, martyr to saviour – however tentative, new nobility is at hand. It represents significantly fewer of the possibilities in the original as the lingering martyrdom is excised. The publication of The Collected Earlier Poems represents another life for An Early Martyr. Williams added six poems to the 1938 list to bring the total to twentyfour. He did this by adding five poems which could have been included in the original volume as they were written before 1935 (including the earlier version of “The Locust Tree in Flower”); the sixth, “A Portrait of the Times”, was written after the original publication. Still the rebel, Williams chose to place the later version of “The Locust Tree in Flower” before the earlier one. All additions were placed towards the front of the book and five of them emphasized a pastoral world, superficially promoting the poetic over the political. Robert J. Cirasa describes them as “six, lyrically inconsequential poems”.33 Whatever their value, Williams does not depoliticize the book, but he thoroughly embeds social commentary in the natural cycle evident, for example, in “Wild Orchard”: one, risen as a tree, has turned from his repose.34 Here the repose gives way to action as the death of winter gives way to spring. It is a romantic, even sentimental, simile. Beginning with an account of a radical socialist, this book charts a patient journey to the vision of a radical poet – it tends to stress poetics over politics. To add to its problematic status, Williams placed An Early Martyr before Al Que Quierre! in the Collected Earlier Poems, suggesting that it was a book written in 1915 or 1916.35 Why he did this is a very contentious issue. Cirasa offers evidence to suggest that the placement was Williams’s error as he was recovering from a recent stroke;36 Paul Mariani records that Williams’s recuperation was “amazingly rapid” and that he had the energy and ability to complete projects; 37 and Litz accepts that the placement was the result of Williams’s wish for a “thematic

33. Ibid., 272. 34. William Carlos Williams, The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams, New York, 1951, 89. 35. It should be noted that Williams also placed a version of Della Primavera Trasportata Al Morale (1930) before An Early Martyr in this collection. 36. Cirasa, 269-71. 37. Mariani, 631.

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arrangement”.38 In addition, there is no record that Williams objected to the arrangement in Collected Earlier Poems.39 One could argue that each subsequent edition of An Early Martyr added to its depoliticization. Moving it to the relative obscurity of the 1910s certainly suggests this – it is now a World War I book without reference to that war. In addition, the book is set in immediate contexts which are difficult to assess. We move, for example, from “A Poem for Norman Macleod” to the opening lines of “Sub Terra” in Al Que Quierre!: Where shall I find you, you my grotesque fellows that I seek everywhere to make up my band? (CEP 117) Certainly a poet seeks an audience in both poems, but the detail, sharp focus, and humour of “Norman Macleod” is not matched by the generalized plea from a wouldbe leader of a band. While a sensitive reader might have noticed the uneven development from book to book within the collection, establishing its significance would have been difficult. In setting these books adjacent to each other, Williams may have established some thematic continuity but on the level of content and form he undoubtedly created confusion. Effectively this undermines the coherence of the collection as a whole as it emphasizes the need for contexts. How one book relates to another becomes an important issue. Is this displacement of An Early Martyr similar to his recycling of Spring and All poems? Yes is the answer because the new locations undo established meanings. This does not simply apply to books adjacent to An Early Martyr. We should note that it now precedes Spring and All. Once we know the history of these books, then we have to consider what, for example, “The Yachts” brings now to Whitman in Spring and All or how we read Williams’s attack on plagiarists? In addition, however much the original An Early Martyr has been trimmed, it still remains an indication of left-wing interests. My argument is that the placement has much to with politics. The Collected Earlier Poems was compiled in 1951 by Williams. He was no longer facing the Depression; now it was the Cold War and antiCommunist witch-hunts. As Mariani observes, the McCarthy era was far from over.40 Williams’s direct literary response was expressed in Tituba’s Children (1950) – his play links Washington politics in the 1940s to the witch trials in Salem in 1692. 41 Williams was clearly keen and unafraid to address Cold War politics. One would imagine that keeping An Early Martyr in the 1930s would have added to his credentials as a politically minded poet; placing it as he did seems to neutralize its politics. Given Williams’s work on Tituba’s Children, this is inexplicable unless we accept that Williams moved his proletarian portraits to radicalise an earlier period. He began The Collected Earlier Poems with “The Wanderer” which includes a sympathetic, if sentimental view, of working-class Paterson. An Early Martyr does 38. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan, “Editing William Carlos Williams”, in Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation, ed. George Bornstein, Ann Arbor, 1991, 50. 39. Cirasa, 271. 40. Mariani, 591. 41. Tituba’s Children, in William Carlos Williams, Many Loves and Other Plays, New York, 1961, 225-300.

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much to accentuate that representation. In its revised softer tones, this version of An Early Martyr almost blends into the period as it unsettles his poetic practices at the time. In doing so it draws attention to itself. Williams realigns his interests in leftwing politics to emphasize that this version was more than a response to the Depression or the Cold War, but was also a significant factor in his development as a poet. An Early Martyr has had a remarkable publication history. Initially it was a response to crises (Depression to writing) and an opportunity (willing publisher). It is a strange gathering of poems from a variety of sources. In it Williams offers complex views of individual liberty and social justice. In tandem is the relationship between individual poem and book, and between book and book. Superficially he returns to poems as microtexts and away from the poem/prose blend that had excited him (and continued to excite him). In doing so, he offers a book for readers schooled in practical criticism. However, he subverts that gesture by creating an intratextual network in which contexts rival individual poems for our attention. His fascination with American democracy and the relationship between the individual and the masses run parallel to his attention to the ways in which individual poems or groups of poems should be measured. Williams was interested in “rebellion”, as he told Marianne Moore in a letter of October 18, 1935 (SL 155). Promoting challenging contexts (usable past, memory, adjacency, dislocation) becomes a fundamental part of that rebelliousness as it signals his developments in descent during the 1940s and beyond.

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APPENDIX: THE THREE EARLY MARTYRS

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113 An Early Martyr and Other Poems (1935)

The Complete Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams 1906-1938

The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams (1951)

An Early Martyr Flowers by the Sea

An Early Martyr Flowers by the Sea

An Early Martyr Flowers by the Sea Wild Orchard A Winter A The Flowers Alone A Sea Trout and Butterfish A A Portrait of the Times A The Locust Tree in Flower OOS The Locust Tree in Flower A Item OOS View of a Lake To a Mexican Pig-Bank To a Poor Old Woman X Late for Summer Weather Proletarian Portrait Tree and Sky The Raper from Passenack Invocation and Conclusion X X The Yachts X Hymn to Love Ended* X Sunday The Catholic Bells X X The Dead Baby X X X X A Poem for Norman Macleod X

Item The Locust Tree in Flower

View of a Lake To a Mexican Pig-bank To a Poor Old Woman The Sadness of the Sea Late for Summer Weather Proletarian Portrait Tree and Sky The Raper from Passenack Invocation and Conclusion Genesis Solstice The Yachts Young Romance Hymn to Love Ended An Elegy for D.H. Lawrence Sunday The Catholic Bells The Auto Ride Simplex Sigilium Veri The Dead Baby The Immemorial Wind The Farmer The Wind Increases To be Hungry is to be Great A Poem for Norman Macleod You have Pissed your Life

The Locust Tree in Flower OOS Item OOS View of a Lake To a Mexican Pig-Bank To a Poor Old Woman X Late for Summer Weather Proletarian Portrait Tree and Sky The Raper from Passenack Invocation and Conclusion X X The Yachts X Hymn to Love Ended* X Sunday The Catholic Bells X X The Dead Baby X X X X A Poem for Norman Macleod X

OOS = out of sequence X = absence of a poem from original An Early Martyr * = subtitled (Imaginary translation from the Spanish)

OOS = out of sequence X = absence of a poem from original An Early Martyr * = subtitled (Imaginary translation from the Spanish) A = Poems added to CEP

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THE 1955 SELECTED POEMS: RANDALL JARRELL’S BOOK OF THE DEAD

MICHAEL HINDS

the idea of selected poems alarms me; I cannot rid myself of attaching to that enterprise a valedictory taint.1 Louise Glück Writing in 1955 to his publishers Philip Vaudrin and Harry Ford about his forthcoming Selected Poems, Randall Jarrell made some specific requests relating to its design: I’d like a title page as much as possible like the early 18th century tombstones Gottfried saw at Stanhope – really they are the Moravian ones I saw at Winston-Salem near here.2 The Gottfried referred to here is Gottfried von Rosenbaum, the gorgeously avuncular composer who had enlivened much of Jarrell’s novel Pictures from an Institution, published in 1954. The success of that novel must have been a source of great satisfaction to Jarrell, particularly as it was well-received and had managed to reach the broader non-specialist audience that he had often complained did not exist for poetry (and particularly his poetry). The book of essays in which Jarrell had made that point most forcibly, Poetry and the Age, had been published the year before Pictures. So in achieving success with his fiction, by 1955 Jarrell had made his reputation as a notable writer and confirmed his standing as an astute critic whose pessimism about the state of literary culture was unerring. As a poet, however, he remained peripheral. Jarrell would write later, “the poet’s public’s gone”, and by temporarily becoming a successful novelist he was the living proof of it.3 Another letter from 1955 (to Louis Untermeyer) indicates Jarrell’s awareness of this predicament, and how the success of Pictures had made it even more manifest: It’s very interesting being a prose-book-writer, after having been a poetrybook-writer for so long; it’s like wearing a Visible Cloak. What I’m working on now is a Selected Poems, so soon I’ll be as invisible as ever.4 1. Louise Glück, The First Five Books of Poems, Manchester, 1997, xiii. 2. Randall Jarrell’s Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection, ed. Mary Jarrell, London, 1986, 401-2. Subsequent references to this edition will use the simplified term Letters. 3. “Poets, Critics, and Readers”, The American Scholar, Summer 1959, in Kipling, Auden & Co.: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964, New York, 1980, 308. 4. Letters, 396.

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For all the pleasure evident at the success of Pictures, Jarrell’s fatalism and morbidity in both of the above-mentioned letters is hard to miss. It is more glaringly obvious in his response to Harry Ford upon the receipt of the final designs for Selected Poems: “The dustjacket’s too good for a dustjacket and ought to be on my tomb.” 5 Confirming Christopher Ricks’s reference to Jarrell as “by way of being a lover of the grave, with all the equivocation of the English ‘of’”, his reiteration of funerary language in association with his Selected Poems is extraordinary and intriguing, not to mention excessive.6 In this essay I shall explore the poetic, cultural, and autobiographical implications of Jarrell’s framing of his Selected Poems in a context of morbidity. In the sense that any selection is also a culling, I will also investigate how Jarrell’s undertaking of his Selected Poems led to decisions about arrangement and selection that reveal an apocalyptic anxiety about the present and future of the American poetry book.

II That Jarrell at this time had been obsessed with the books of dead men and women, and the legacy that they create, is thoroughly apparent from the essays of Poetry and the Age, and even more pointedly from his omnibus review for Harper’s in October 1955 of Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems, Thomas H. Johnson’s groundbreaking edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson and Poems by Elizabeth Bishop. This conjunction of editions, added to the centennial of Leaves of Grass, make 1955 the golden year of American canonicity, and Jarrell was its chronicler. 7 His comments on each of the books are essentially testimonial, and are confident about the canonical endurance of Stevens, Bishop, and Dickinson. Vitally, however, Jarrell is not just responding to the merits of their individual poems; rather, he is reflecting on how the collation of their poems within their particular book-formats had proved their work to be signally metonymic, each poem being representative of the book and in turn being representative of the poet and then the nation. For example, Jarrell identifies Bishop’s collection as having the radical canonical power of ensuring the literate future of the U.S. against the Fahrenheit 451º of television: Sometimes when I can’t go to sleep at night I see the family of the future. Dressed in three-tone shorts-and-shirt sets of disposable Papersilk, they sit before the television wall of their apartment, only their eyes moving. After I’ve looked a while I always see – otherwise I’d die – a pigheaded soul over in the corner with a book; only his eyes are moving, but in them there is a different look. Usually it’s Homer he’s holding – this week it’s Elizabeth Bishop. Her Poems seems to me one of the best books an American poet has ever written: the people of the future (the ones in the corner) will read her just as they will

5. Letter to Harry Ford, 1955, quoted by Stuart Wright in his Randall Jarrell: A Descriptive Bibliography. 1929–1983, Charlottesville, VA, 1986, 60. Wright provides an indispensable guide to Jarrell’s textual history. It is worthwhile noting that even the dust jacket in question billed its author as “RANDALL |JARRELL|AUTHOR OF PICTURES FROM AN INSTITUTION AND POETRY AND THE AGE”. 6. Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words: The Clarendon Lectures 1990, Oxford, 1993, 11. 7. “The Year in Poetry”, reprinted in Kipling, Auden & Co., 242-47.

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read Dickinson or Whitman or Stevens, or the other classical American poets still alive among us.8 Within this context of 1955’s unprecedented boom in production of outstanding and extraordinary American poetry books, Jarrell’s Selected Poems had to find its place. His reputation was on the line, and by his insistence on the graphics of the cemetery, it was clear that he was thinking of his book in epitaphic terms. Just to confirm this, the protagonist of the last poem of Selected Poems, “Terms”, declares “I am a grave dreaming / That it is a living man”, and, in his final utterance, “‘I am a man’” (211), deliberately echoing Mark Antony’s epitaph for Brutus in Julius Caesar.9 Before dismissing this too readily as adolescent self-pitying or self-dramatizing pessimism, it is worth conjecturing that Jarrell may well have been contemplating a farewell to poetry with this book (if not a farewell to life). Selected Poems was Jarrell’s last publication of poetry of any sort for five years, and its terminal framing may suggest that Jarrell was assuming that he would never write a substantial amount of poetry again; more acutely, he may have felt that he would never be read as a poet again. The essays and letters of the early 1950s reiterate continually his anxiety about his lack of an audience and his consequent lack of inspiration: “I don’t see too many readers, and tend to think of the Reader as an abstraction with a discouragingly blank face – the real ones make me want to write more poems.”10 But “real ones” were increasingly hard to find. Where there is talk of editions and deathbeds, the spectre of Whitman has to be near, and it is worthwhile examining how Jarrell’s Selected reflects his awareness of the greatest Selected Poems of them all, Leaves of Grass. Whitman certainly appears to have influenced Jarrell’s organization of his volume. Whereas with the publication of Losses in 1947, Jarrell commented that he “was sure that the book shouldn’t be split into war and non-war sections, since the effect would be much more monotonous”, in 1955 he adopted that very same policy of division, and Part II of the Selected Poems is mapped out as a twentieth-century Drum-Taps, exclusively devoted to his poetry of World War II.11 In the division of his work into war poetry and other work (“peace” poetry?), Jarrell was superficially indicating the split within his own consciousness that the war had manifested, and showing awareness of how wartime and peacetime demanded different performances and presentations of persona from him as a poet; yet on closer examination it becomes clear that this is what precisely does not happen. The isolated speakers, the straggling women and children, the nervous jouissance and formal unpredictability, all of these Jarrellisms and more remain intact in the “transition” from Part I of Selected Poems to Part II. If anything, the division of the book exists to make a unifying point about the hegemonic American reality of wartime. The “monotonous” division of work that Jarrell resisted in Losses became the calculated effect of Selected Poems, and the monotony of warfare (whether physical,

8. Ibid., 244-45. 9. All page references for Jarrell’s poems refer to The Complete Poems, New York, 1969, which includes the Selected of 1955 in its entirety. The arrangements of the Selected are not unfamiliar, therefore, although little attention has been given to the Selected as a meaningful book-event in its own right. 10. Letter to Harry Ford, in Letters, 302. 11. Letter to Robert Giroux, quoted in Wright, Randall Jarrell: A Descriptive Bibliography, 17.

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psychological or cultural) threatens continually to overwhelm the book, its poems, and their protagonists. William Pritchard has written that the division of Selected Poems, and particularly the sub-division of the war poems, is of negligible interest: “These categories overlap and need not be regarded with any great seriousness.”12 This reading allows us to forget about the questions posed by Jarrell’s framing, and allows for a generalized approach to the war poems as war poetry, yet it misses how Jarrell used division to show the complex of discrete experiences and identities that are ordinarily subsumed by the grand narrative of war. At the risk of sacrificing “great seriousness”, it is vital to acknowledge the care with which Jarrell designed this Selected Poems, therefore, and to register that each gesture of selection may be read as having an encrypted as well as an overt effect. The impression that Jarrell may be presenting a definitive ending with “Terms” suggests that Selected Poems is a premeditatedly linear narrative, although an end (even in combination with a beginning) does not guarantee the thorough continuousness that would constitute such a narrative. Of course, poetic sequences are not necessarily narratives, but Jarrell’s Selected Poems is neither a sequence nor a narrative. On occasion, it threatens to follow either path, only to come up against a dead end. But there can be more than one dead end, and that is the precarious principle of continuity behind Jarrell’s book. Volumes of Selected Poems are particularly prone to being read as necessary evils, products of the demands of the classroom and the expediencies of publishing. Conventionally, the Selected volume is seen as an extension of the work available in the anthologies, an adequate survey (only sometimes chronological) of either a poet’s work or most representative work. Pritchard’s selection of Jarrell’s poems, published in 1990, is a fine example of this type.13 Jarrell’s Selected Poems is different in that it presents the work in such a way as to obscure more obvious principles of selection (such as “first”, “best”, or “last”) and instead proposes a tropical organization in which poems are clustered into constellations that are variously titled thematically (“The World Is Everything That Is The Case”) or descriptively (“Soldiers”). Indeed, it is worth remarking how the titles tend to suggest a further division of the volume; Part I of Selected Poems features sections that are titled provocatively and actively – “Lives”, “Dream-Work”, “The Wide Prospect”, “Once Upon A Time”, “The World Is Everything That Is The Case”, “The Graves In The Forest” – whereas Part II features what Pritchard calls “categories” and Jarrell may have termed “terms”: “Bombers”, “The Carriers”, “Prisoners”, “Camps And Fields”, “The Trades”, “Children And Civilians”, “Soldiers”. A further implication is that Part I features actors, and Part Two either passengers or victims. The sub-divisions are of particular interest, indicating that Jarrell was interested in devices of organization beyond the simply thematic. Beyond the apparent separation of war and peace poetry, Jarrell constellated his poems in such a way that his work appears to manifest an inexhaustible variability of texture, self-projection and formal resolution. As for the supposedly vexed question of intentionality, Jarrell’s deliberate mappings of poems suggest a master-strategy, but the actual process of reacting to those mappings reveals other arrangements and flows that contradict such a grand narrative. My contention is that Jarrell’s Selected Poems manifests different sets of 12. William H. Pritchard, Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life, New York, 1990, 117. 13. Selected Poems, ed. William H. Pritchard, New York, 1990.

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intentions in conflict with one another. There may be a narrative super-structure gesturing at the definition and description of a particular subject (Randall Jarrell, war veteran, poet and human), a sequence of poems that allows a satisfactory culmination with the epitaph from “Terms”, but there is also a network of poetic intensities that make “Randall Jarrell” impossible to define, as “a man” or otherwise.

III “Lives” is the most diffuse of all of the sections in Selected Poems, and rather than being readable as a conventionally continuous sequence, it is a selection within a selection in which the main tropes, themes and characterizations of the entire volume (and implicitly, Jarrell’s poetic canon) are represented metonymically, just as they are (albeit more subtly) in the individual context of the book’s opening poem, “A Girl in a Library”. The girl in the library is the reader who is there and not there; writing the poem presumes her existence, but she is not reading the poem. Instead, she is at an educational remove from the poet, whose summoning of all of the shades of Western literary culture from Oedipus Rex to Eugene Onegin cannot command her attention. This selection of texts is significant in itself, in that if Oedipus Rex represents the inception of Western culture, then Eugene Onegin’s multi-generic ingenuity (combining the historical epic, the sonnet-sequence, the epic poem, the epistolary novel and Romance) indicates the exhaustion and fulfillment of that culture’s potentialities. Onegin is the ultimate text for the connoisseur, therefore, but it was also popular in its own moment, and is therefore indicative of a golden age of complacency between classical and popular culture. The conditions for making or comprehending such a populist Gesamkunstwerk no longer exist, however, and attempts by Jarrell to produce such a synthesis of art, opera, libretto and music in poems such as “The Face” only culminate in the grave. Jarrell is not setting himself up as the redeemer of this predicament of impasse between reader and poet, rather he is indicating how the failure belongs to both poet and reader, and in fact to everybody. Pushkin’s Tatyana provokes Jarrell into reflecting upon his own failure to translate the acronyms of his culture – “Phys. Ed.”, “Home Ec.” – into verse: “[Tanya, they won’t even scan]” (17). “A Girl in a Library” situates culture in an institution and its crisis in curriculum, having to culminate in the use of sardonic pastoral as a self-conscious device of affirming transcendent values (“The Corn King beckoning to his Spring Queen”). The succeeding poem “A Country Life” begins in naturalism and concludes elegiacally, invoking a domestic ancestor in Frost, just as “A Girl in a Library” summoned the Russians, Chekhov and Pushkin. The self-conscious literacy of the library has been replaced here with a self-reflexive tract of Frost country, which Jarrell the critic had pioneered in discovering as an intellectually interrogative space rather than a limited system of rural signifiers. The poem begins with a Frostian statement of characteristically disingenuous ignorance that expresses only a cagy reticence as it pretends to honest candour: A bird that I don’t know, Hunched on his light-pole like a scarecrow, Looks sideways out into the wheat The wind waves under the waves of heat. (19)

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Similarly, as the poem progresses, its rendering of an apparently harmonious American landscape with its emphasis on the gift outright of its “red clay”, turns out instead to be an evocation of something more like Fitzgerald’s “valley of ashes”, and the terrain is seen as radically alien to human presence, with references to “The bowed and weathered heads above the denim / Or the once-too-often-washed wash dresses?” that clearly evoke the milieu of Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or Steinbeck’s betrayed pastoral. Dissolving into a monotony of intertextuality (as Jarrell writes in another poem of landscape, “The Orient Express”, in the section entitled “The Wide Prospect”: “there is something, the same thing / Behind everything .... there is always / The unknown unwanted life”[66]) the aura of the native, natural scene has gradually been converted into a distillation of the dehumanizing exhaustion of its inhabitants and of urban horrors elsewhere: From the tar of the blazing square The eyes shift, in their taciturn And unavowing, unavailing sorrow. (20) Jarrell’s landscapes recurrently announce a panoramic aspect that alludes to an enlightened sense of American possibility (“The Wide Prospect”), but in practice they describe the horizontality of a hopeless realism which has obliterated the possibility of the vertical hold of meta-narrative or immortality. In Jarrell’s writing after World War II, he expresses a continuing pessimism about aesthetic possibility that bears a close resemblance to the post-war writing of Adorno (whose thought Jarrell would have been aware of through Hannah Arendt). In Minima Moralia, written in California where Jarrell claimed to have learned to speak, Adorno observed under the heading of the “Beauty of the American landscape” that “even the smallest of its segments is inscribed, as its expression, with the immensity of the whole country” and that its terror lay in how it was “expressionless .... the vanishing landscape leaves no more traces behind than it bears upon itself”.14 Combining these observations, Adorno is describing a metonymic expressionlessness that Jarrell manifests throughout the paysages of Selected Poems. Jarrell also conveys a powerful sense that the “neutral” and isolationist eye of the native scene cannot altogether obliterate the turbulence of landscapes and battle-scenes elsewhere. “A Country Life” directs the reader radically to the poems of Part Two, where the paradoxical horizontality of landscape from the air is a fantasy concealing the victims of aerial warfare on the ground. In “Losses” in Part II, Jarrell describes the state’s double-exploitation of its airmen; encouraged to view Europe as two-dimensional landscape – “They said, ‘Here are the maps’; we burned the cities” (146) – they are turned into killers without a sense of consequence, but also the dream of enlightenment that underpinned their education has been exploded (“we burned / The cities we had learned about in school” [145]). The lost

14. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by E.F.N. Jephcott, London, 1974, 48-49. Jarrell’s remark about learning to speak in California is reported by Pritchard in Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life, 11: “In the fifty-one years of his life, he lived for extended periods in Ohio, Texas, Illinois, Arizona, New York, North Carolina, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia, in addition to Tennessee and California, while spending briefer periods at work or on holiday in Massachusetts, Indiana, Colorado, Austria, Italy, Germany, and England. His speech did not sound particularly Southern, and when asked why he didn’t share his parents’ Tennessee accent, he would reply that he was born there but learned to talk in California.”

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airmen are dead and deadly brothers of the girl in the library, all of them have been schooled for idiocy, whether it is intellectual or moral. The life-and-death pulse behind all of Selected Poems can be seen in its first two poems, therefore, and succeeding poems continue that movement between inhalation and expiration, to the extent that the first section could have been titled “Deaths” as productively as “Lives”. The living dead of “Lives” are more intimately connected to the massed dead of the war poems of Part II than may be initially apparent, therefore. Albrecht Dürer’s knight in “The Knight, Death, and the Devil” has pretensions to be God’s champion on earth, an embodiment of divine will, but his allegorical attendants indicate and indict him as a killing machine. Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hoffmanstahl’s Marschallin is lifted from Der Rosenkavalier and given a melodramatic monologue fit for Joan Crawford in “The Face”; with these exemplars of Germanic culture, Jarrell is elaborating upon ironies immanent in the original works of art rather than colonizing or Americanizing them in a spirit of curatorship. To Jarrell, the knight is awesome and imperiously seducing, yet he is also expressive of contempt for manifestations of humanity other than his own. The superhuman concentration that Nietszche had venerated in Dürer’s knight is also what makes him a threat, and makes him represent the demolition of the culture that he is presumed to uphold. Jarrell’s gravure of Dürer’s engraving is shaded by this awareness, and it returns the reader to the pessimism of “A Girl in a Library”. There is no synthesis of poetry and visual art in “The Knight, Death, and the Devil”, and the Wagnerian notion of such an ekphrastic synthesis is unable to resist the pressure of history. “The Face” is another collapsed Gesamkunstwerk, as what is credible in an operatic context makes barely credible lyric poetry. In Strauss’s opera, the Marschallin is only 32, despite her anxious laments about being elderly (the epigraph of “The Face”, “Die alte frau, die alte Marschallin!”[23] is a direct quote from the libretto), but Jarrell refrains from indicting her for this apparent hysteria. Ferguson writes of how the poem is “a free variation of the Marschallin’s meditation ... but it is completely universalized and generalized”; 15 this serves well enough as a generalized reading of an apparently generalized poem, but it is more interesting to read the poem as an imaginative journey into Hoffmanstahl’s libretto rather than an etherized trip away from it. Jarrell enters the subjectivity of the Marschallin so completely that she is her own “universe”, and the poem explores the stark terrain of that terrifyingly complete solipsism, as insulated and isolated as that of the threateningly steadfast knight. On the score of Jarrell’s sentimentality, which tends either to be championed by devoted Jarrellians or seen as a huge failure of judgement and self-awareness, it is interesting to remark here that with “The Face” Jarrell has entered a world which is already melodramatic and unalterably ersatz. Just as Muhammad Ali argued to the Nevada Boxing Commission that he could hardly corrupt Las Vegas, so Jarrell cannot be damned for sentimentalizing opera. What is significant about the opening quartet of poems is that they are relatable thematically but at the same time, their formal textures and vocal structures are very different. Frankly, there is little sense of why these lives should be chosen for this section, and not some of the lives featured later in the book. The poem that follows “The Face”, “Lady Bates”, only adds to the sense of an apparently willful refusal of any narrative or poetic pattern in Jarrell’s arrangement. “Lady Bates” is an exercise in gentle Southern gothic, a pastoral elegy for a dead black child that seems to mistake 15. Suzanne Ferguson, The Poetry of Randall Jarrell, Baton Rouge, 1971, 117.

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pathos for compassion: “You died before you even had your hair straightened / Or waited on anybody’s table but your own” (24). The dead and selfless black child could be making a stark rebuke to the deadly narcissism of the Marschallin, although the poet’s absorption in the latter’s predicament seems to deny such a moralistic reading. On closer reading, however, and while neither poem is wholly satisfactory in itself, the effect of the two in sequence is remarkable. The solipsism of the Marschallin is thrown into relief and yet devastatingly confirmed by the elegy. The real death of Lady Bates, imperfectly but sympathetically regarded (as Jarrell struggles and fails to evade inscribing clichés of blackness that he nevertheless knows to be clichés) succeeds an apprehended death born out of a diva’s morbid selfreflection.16 In “Lady Bates”, Jarrell has to admit his inability to apprehend the reality of his subject, whereas in “The Face” the unreality of the Marschallin’s predicament is never in doubt, which is what gives the poem an almost repulsive intensity. A further paradox is that the aristocratic operatic protagonist talks in televisionese, while the memory of Lady Bates is essayed through venerable elegy (with debts to Andrew Marvell and John Crowe Ransom) that nevertheless does not fit. This sense of anachronism connects back to the cultural malaise afflicting the girl in the library. Idiotically self-absorbed like the Marschallin, Jarrell implies nevertheless that a more apt and exact language awaits her. As with Lady Bates, however, the problem is in finding that language. Consequently, the problem identified throughout “Lady Bates” and all of “Lives” and Selected Poems is not of finding a poetic subject. Poetic subjects are many (the principal ones in Selected Poems being bodies and books), but rendering those subjects in a language commensurate with his desires is not a matter of any confidence for Jarrell. This crisis of language is both a cultural and a psychological phenomenon in the book, as it takes Jarrell into exhausting permutations of self-proliferation and self-projection, yet at the same time indicates an immanent sense of cultural burn-out that will engulf the most robust icons of civilization, whether they are Christian knights, divas or monolithically hardbound volumes of poetry, whether Collected or Selected. Emphasizing this, it is remarkable how Jarrell’s reviewing often took an apocalyptic turn. In his review of Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle, he wrote that “One or two of these poems, I think, will be read as long as men remember English”, and “Some Lines from Whitman” provided an implicitly Cassandran prophecy:17 Let me finish by mentioning another quality of Whitman’s – a quality, delightful to me, that I have said nothing of. If some day a tourist notices, among the ruins of New York City, a copy of Leaves of Grass, and stops and picks it up and read some lines in it, she will be able to say to herself: “How very American! If he and his country had not existed, it would have been impossible to imagine them.” Even the architect of a building cannot anticipate every arterial line of potential in it, but at least most architects have a confident sense of the ground on which they build. Jarrell’s combinations of texts are sometimes bizarre and at others facile, and 16. Aldon Lynn Nielsen provides an astute critique of Jarrell’s self-consciously liberal racism in “Lady Bates”, in Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century, Athens, GA, 1988, 124-26. 17. “From the Kingdom of Necessity”, in Poetry and the Age, 197; “Some Lines from Whitman”, in Poetry and the Age, 123.

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the consequent complexities of such permutations make for a book with no equilibrium. He refuses to make a sound structure, because such a structure requires support. In “Lives”, the reader cannot progress without pausing to question some of the texts that are incorporated within it. One such “so what?” moment is provided by “When I Was Home Last Christmas”, a poem that begins in a Cowardesque register of politely pained nostalgia. Reminiscent of the gentilities of James Joyce’s lyrics in Chamber Music (and equally surprising in the context of the poet’s other writing), “When I Was Home Last Christmas” seems to be written from the same despairing self-absorption as “The Face”, with its assertion that “There is no one left to care” (28). However, this poem (addressed to an ex-lover) on closer inspection manifests a sense of panic at oncoming personal collapse that is as energized as anything in the book so far. This is the first poem set in a bourgeois domestic setting, albeit one that seems to belong to a slightly bygone and more genteel age, and Jarrell suggests minute triggers in the social fabric that are on the verge of firing: the woman’s mother has a “lame smile” wandering “from doily to doily” (28). What at first appeared to be nostalgia in a poem devoted to the active absence of the lover turns out to be a rage in the present that the poet is anxious to avert but is not confident of doing so. The poem effectively subverts its soporific context and makes melodrama from mild social dysfunction; in this, it counters the impact of “The Face”, which was to make melodrama into something grimmer and more solemnly implicating than its neurotic scenario suggested. Furthermore, the opening register of “When I Was Home Last Christmas” is gently comedic, but its use of the comedic only licenses Jarrell’s sense of the inferno around the corner. Such entertainment of diabolical possibility prepares the reader for “A Conversation with the Devil”, a poem written in an expansive verse that contrasts vividly with the terse rhymes of “When I Was Home Last Christmas”, but is similar in its unavailing use of a comic mode to compensate for the poet’s unyielding pessimism. In fact, “A Conversation with the Devil” goes beyond being a conversation-poem in the Romantic sense. It is written and has to be received according to the system of a wireless, as the monologic poet’s voice (such as it is) attempts to assert itself above both the cutting-in of his diabolic alter-ego and the advertising language of late capitalism that contaminates his imaginative space. Giving up on lyrical dominance, the monologic poet has to resort to one-liners and wisecracks, just as the final option and degradation of Marlowe’s Faust was to become a pathetic conjuror-prankster. Jarrell the poet despairs of an audience, “Indulgent, or candid, or uncommon reader / – I’ve some: a wife, a nun, a ghost or two” (29), yet beyond this complaint he is capable only of gags or allusions, like Faust himself: Old ink-blot, What are you, after all? A parody. You can be satisfied? Then how can I? If you accept, is not that to deny? A Dog in a tub, who was the Morning Star! To have come down in the universe so far As here, and now, and this – and all to buy One bored, stoop-shouldered, sagging-cheeked particular Lest the eternal bonfire fail – Ah Lucifer! (31)

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This jaunty passage is in fact deeply indicative of the speaker’s desperate lack of an idiom, a want of a lyrical means of communicating experience to the world without deferral to irony or self-deprecation. Jarrell as devil possesses just such a centred and self-possessed voice, but it takes its authority from the cynicism that Jarrell as Faust and poet wants to keep at bay: Still, I confess that I and my good Neighbor Have always rather envied you existence. Your simple conceits! – but both of us enjoy them: “Dear God, make me Innocent or Wise,” Each card in the card-catalogue keeps praying; And dies, and the divine Librarian Rebinds him – Rebinds? that’s odd; but then, He’s odd And as a rule – I’m lying: there’s no rule at all. The world divides into – believe me – facts. (31) Damned into recognizing the quotation (“I see the devil can quote Wittgenstein. / He’s blacker than he’s painted.”[31]), Jarrell as Faust can only gag; the devil takes over the poem and defines a predicament of irrelevance that pervades all of Jarrell’s Selected Poems. There is no more “conversation”, there is no re-binding (only remaindering, unless you can write like Bishop, Stevens or Dickinson), and there is no “Divine Librarian” presiding over posterity. Instead, there is only incarceration, where the limits of your language are the limits of your world, and where the poet’s language no longer bears any relationship to the language of others in any case. To be a writer, a professional writer, is to succumb to the agencies of the Market, and publish novels that come “complete with sales, scenario, / And testimonials of grateful users: / Not like a book at all … Beats life”. This pessimism continually threatens to overwhelm Jarrell’s book, and to alienate the reader by perversely chiding them for reading a book of poetry at all.18 There has never been much lyrical capital in overtly involving the reader, as Jarrell does in “A Conversation with the Devil”, although Whitman did well enough out of it while never pretending to be a lyrical poet as such. The difference between Jarrell and Whitman is that the latter gambles continually on the confidence of the reader (and wins, even charming Jarrell the critic to forgive Leaves of Grass’s occasionally gratuitous exuberances), while Jarrell can never do away with his sense that the reader has already left the building. As if to emphasize this, Jarrell’s writing features a number of poems about libraries that are populated only by books, children and Randall Jarrell (whether in mufti or uniform), which also implies miserably that the only place left to read a book is the library. To return to the end of “A Girl in a Library”, Jarrell refers there to a vestigial dream of a shared literate culture that exists among the remnants of the Jungian collective unconscious: 18. Adorno wrote that for an intellectual to become a professional represented the triumph of barbarism: “The most striking example is that of intellectuals whose material situation has changed: no sooner have they only perfunctorily persuaded themselves of the need to earn money by writing and that alone, than they turn out trash identical in all its nuances to what, with ample means, they had most passionately abjured” (Minima Moralia, 29).

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I am a thought of yours: and yet, you do not think . . . The firelight of a long, blind, dreaming story Lingers upon your lips; and I have seen Firm, fixed forever in your closing eyes, The Corn King beckoning to his Spring Queen. (18) The poetics of commonality are dying with the girl’s consciousness. The poetics of commonality are, therefore, the poetics of disappearance. By attempting to describe the fate of commonality and to justify the concluding phrase of the book, “This is a man”, Jarrell also has to destroy the poet, or let him wither away. Thus, Donald Davie’s mocking criticism of Jarrell’s attempt “to be the poet of the Common Man” in Selected Poems turns out to be on the mark, but perhaps not the one at which he was aiming.19 This abject consciousness of Jarrell’s sets him apart from any other American writer of his time, particularly as it found such apt and hilarious expression in his prose writing while it traumatizes every aspect of his poetry. For contemporaries such as Bishop and Lowell, poetry was still a valued form of selfassertion and expression in spite of society, whereas Jarrell metamorphosed into a curmudgeon, and self-consciously so. In “Nollekens”, the poem about a miserly sculptor of the eighteenth century that follows “A Conversation with the Devil”, Jarrell clearly signals that the churlishness of Nollekens is akin to the disappointed philanthropy of Jarrell the poet, and seems to relish the grotesqueness of their likeness. Yet this real sense of despair is a wholly absorbing and convincing phenomenon in Jarrell’s writing, and Selected Poems is a complicated and various book that is not simply an expression of cynicism but rather a massive and ambitious exploration of the causes and consequences of cynicism. There are also pockets of resistance, and in the last two poems of “Lives”, “Seele im Raum” and “The Night Before the Night Before Christmas”, Jarrell expores the viability of achieving independence and autonomy through strategies that appear insane or grotesque to the normative demands of society. In “Seele im Raum”, a housewife refuses to be cowed by therapy into destroying her fantasy that an African eland has become her constant companion, while in “The Night Before the Night Before Christmas”, a teenage girl invests intellectually in Marxism in an attempt to come to terms with the suffering that seems to be the dominant reality of her domestic life (her brother is dying) and the world outside. The willingness of both women to surrender their conventional selves is rendered heroically by Jarrell. They have “given up” on themselves, but radically, whereas elsewhere Jarrell appears to give up resignedly. Nevertheless, the woman’s flaunting of her elend, and her refusal to succumb to analysis, may in turn provide a context for Jarrell’s refusal of convention, chronology and proportion in Selected Poems. These acts of refusal find an echo in the war poems of Part Two, as in “Burning the Letters” where the bereaved wife of an airman both burns her correspondence with her husband and also shreds the remains of her Christianity. Her final prayer in the poem is to her husband’s grave, and in it she demands that she should no longer have to bear responsibility for the agonies that existence has held her to. Throughout 19. Donald Davie, “Common-Mannerism”, in The Poet in the Imaginary Museum, Manchester, 1977, 42-44.

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Jarrell’s writing, virility is felt to be a tacitly repressive code, as are the patriarchal systems related to it. If his foregrounding in Selected Poems of feminine consciousness confirms that his profoundest sense of imaginative affinity was with women, then it is also worth registering just how rarely Jarrell writes about men as men. His airmen are most often cast as naifs or children. The language of masculinity and virility emerges as the voice of the Big Other of ideology, and is expressed proverbially and laconically, as in “Eighth Air Force”: “Men wash their hands, in blood, as best as they can; / I find no fault in this just man” (143). To speak as a man is to speak as an emasculated servant of ideology, the consequence of which is that there are no men, only versions of masculinity. Becoming a woman for Jarrell was all about not having to be a man. IV Every act of writing in Selected Poems is part of the traumatic work of the erasure of the poet, yet in its manic variability between laconic epigram and ecstatic sentiment, Jarrell matches Whitman’s combination of barbaric yawp and arch self-consciousness that should constitute presence. Jarrell’s inability to conceive of the book as having a future condemns his book to mortality, but it is also what enlivens its texture. Jarrell reaches back to D.H. Lawrence’s characterization of Whitman as “the great postmortem poet”,20 whose energy and vitality was produced by his apprehension of his demise. The apparently recurring problem of “where to find” Jarrell (first identified by Lowell in his review of The Seven-League Crutches) is compounded by Jarrell’s arrangement of his multiple appearances in multiple guises. 21 Jarrell doesn’t vanish, rather he appears and re-appears too often. Like Whitman, whose first edition of Leaves of Grass was billed simply as being written by an American, Jarrell had a funny notion of how to achieve anonymity. Selected Poems features all those poems, all those various selves, to prove that the poet does not exist. The book may be a coffin, but nobody is inside. So Jarrell seems to have had the fundamental intention of making a monument to his own poetic abilities and at the same time an indictment of the culture that vitiated them. It is supposed to be a perilous business talking of intentions, and Jarrell doesn’t give us a great deal of help in this regard. Seemingly oblivious to the various Ozymandian ironies that attend edifice-making, Jarrell refuses to produce as tidy a potential plinth as Lowell (for one) did with his immaculately pruned and crystalline Selected Poems of 1965, a book that leaves you in little doubt as to the poet’s authority, both over his own work and the awed reader. Jarrell refuses to present a centred or coherent sense of himself as a hypothetically departed poet. He does this simply by refusing to select. Jarrell refuses the evolutionary culling of poetic material, further refusing to display the gift of self-assessment that is an assumptive hallmark of any poet (modernist, postmodernist or otherwise) worthy of note. Selected Poems is a sprawling, long and rhizomatically unruly book that omits very little of Jarrell’s second, third and fourth books; “Lives” alone is longer than Bishop’s Geography

20. D.H. Lawrence, “Walt Whitman”, in Studies in Classical American Literature (1924), London, 1986, 171. 21. Robert Lowell, “The Seven-League Crutches”, first published in The New York Review of Books, reprinted in Randall Jarrell, 1914–1965, eds Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren, New York, 1967, 114.

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III.22 His material would not be culled (at least by its author). This makes for a terribly uneven set of individual poems, but it allows simultaneously intriguing and revealing feats of juxtaposition and location. Jarrell’s process of selection is not a conventional one of gleaning, therefore, but rather one of placement. 23 Jarrell’s refusal to choose one of his own poems to the exclusion of another has radical consequences for the reader. The first casualty is the confidence of the reader in the poet’s verdicts as selector. No longer allowed the passivity of the disengaged spectator, the reader is compelled by Jarrell to take responsibility not only for reading the poem but also for paying attention to how the poem rates and works in the context of other poems. It is uncommon enough to find such requirements being made of the reader of lyric poetry, but it is a unique challenge for a lyric poet to ask the reader to perform the process of selection that he poet has refused to enact. The lyric does not usually allow much room for the concept of “the reader”, yet the broader field of the poetry book does; and the American poetry book, from its paradigmatic beginnings with Whitman, has used sequentiality and montage to involve the reader in witnessing how an individual lyric text can exceed self-containment to connect with other apparently autonomous structures. If being a successful lyric poet is to create wholly autonomous poetic units, then Jarrell is a failure as a lyric poet. Declaring their lack of independence, his poems insistently seek to network with other poems, other texts. Unconscious assemblage in Selected Poems counters Jarrell’s conscious arrangements of the poems, making them more effective by incorporating the reader even more radically into the production of meaning. The manufacture of monadic intensities within leak-proof lyrical frames was not where his abilities or intentions lay. At times in the book, there is randomness in the air, why these “lives” in the section “Lives” and not some of the others strewn around in the book, for example? An insidious sense of secretive connection circulates around the entire volume, while it refuses to perform like a “proper” Selected volume on the surface. For one thing, Jarrell’s Selected Poems deliberately fails to deliver what such volumes are supposed to deliver: the poet. Not producing its author (unlike Lowell’s exacting self-portraiture) in a heroically assimilable form, the book nevertheless succeeds all too well in reproducing him with all his manifold contradictions and confusions intact, confirming his talent for vanishing. It also implicates Jarrell as a postmodernist and post-structural poet, and in a sense that far exceeds his own understanding of the term when he coined it to describe Lowell’s early verse.24 What else can his Selected Poems represent, other than the death of the author? Selected Poems is a paradoxical text, of course, by a self-consciously “contrary poet” (the translated title of the Tristan Corbière poem, “La Poète Contumace”, that ends the section “The World Is Everything That Is The Case”). Memorably, it 22. Selected Poems is one hundred and sixteen leaves long, containing ninety-four poems. Jarrell omitted just one poem from The Seven-League Crutches (1951), a translation of Rilke’s “The Olive Garden”. He omitted eight poems from Little Friend, Little Friend (1945), and two poems from Losses (1948). He left out most of his first book, Blood for a Stranger (1942), and the nine poems that he included were extensively revised (two were re-titled). Two poems, “A War” and “The Survivor Among Graves”, were published for the first time in Selected Poems. 23. It is worth remarking a significant slip in Davie’s review of the book in this regard (see note 19). He referred to Jarrell’s book as his Collected Poems (a forgivable error, given the size of the volume). 24. “Mr. Lowell’s poetry is a unique fusion of modernist and traditional poetry, and there exist side by side in it certain effects that one would have thought mutually exclusive; but it is essentially a post- or anti-modernist poetry and as such is certain to be influential” (“From the Kingdom of Necessity”, in The Nation, 18 Jan 1947, reprinted in Poetry and the Age, 194).

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produced a schizoid review by James Dickey in which he created two critical voices (“A” and “B”) who argued for and against the book with equal plausibility and conviction.25 Jarrell is impossible to frame definitively because he makes it so, and this is nowhere more clear than in his notes to the Selected Poems, where he combines the roles of editor and poet to manifest his contrary impulses towards his own work (which were in turn the contrary impulses that he provoked in a critic like Dickey). Jarrell wrote a paragraph-long prose introduction to the notes to some of his poems, rather than an introduction to the poems in their own right. He then included the notes. (These were written specifically for his Selected edition, indicating that Jarrell was making a different kind of book here in a self-conscious way.) Foregrounding his notes in such a way, Jarrell gives the reader little chance of avoiding them. Having said that, he writes that “they are here for the reader only if he wants them – if you like poems without prose, or see after a few sentences that I am telling you very familiar things, just turn past this introduction” (3). Now, no one is going to do that, if only to find out what Jarrell’s idea of the “very familiar” (and therefore also the “unfamiliar”) is. In the middle of the note to “A Girl in a Library”, Jarrell includes the fascinating disclosure: “A blind date is an unknown someone you accompany to something: if he promises to come for you and doesn’t, he has stood you up” (4). The line from the poem that Jarrell is explicating here is “The blind date that has stood you up: your life” (18). In this moment, effectively Jarrell signals his alienation from his own writing, directing the reader to a banal detail of a poem that is a mock-pastoral satire upon the banality of progressive education. Jarrell adopts the role of editor to comment patronizingly upon his own bathos as a poet. Productively, however, this interface of editorial note and poetic text creates an atmosphere of schizoid and frenetic contrariness that pervades Jarrell’s entire Selected Poems. Jarrell has also subtly changed the gender of his implicit addressee. In the paragraph-long introduction to the notes, the reader referred to was “he”, but the hypothetical victim of the “standing-up” is female, indicating Jarrell’s “real reader” to be a woman. The reader of the note is also the girl in the library, therefore, and as such the reader of Selected Poems is being allotted a more active role in the book’s self-reflexive drama than they would ever have anticipated. At the same time, we have to remember that the girl in the library was not reading any poem, but “studying” the Official Rulebook of Basketball. Jarrell has you wondering as to why – or what – you are reading at all. Dramatizing in the book the psycho-dialectic of his surconscious and subconscious impulses, through his notes Jarrell also makes the reader complicit with his poetic instability and resistance to his gender, while also indicating his problematic relationship with New Critical orthodoxy. V Many of Jarrell’s works appear esoteric: his projected book of epigrams, 26 an unclassifiable fiction (Pictures from an Institution), one fairly saccharine children’s book (The Gingerbread Rabbit),27 and a couple of deeply traumatic excursions in the same field (The Animal Family, Fly by Night).28 However, his notes to the Selected are just about his strangest effort, in that they appear willfully to underestimate the 25. James Dickey, “Randall Jarrell”, first published in Sewanee Review and reprinted in Randall Jarrell, 1914–1965, 33-48. 26. “Sayings of the Bloksberg Post”, ed. Stephen Burt, in Thumbscrew, XIV (1999), 2-15. 27. The Gingerbread Rabbit, New York, 1964. 28. The Animal Family, New York, 1965; Fly by Night, New York, 1976.

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abilities of “the common reader” that Jarrell avowedly aspired to reach. On the other hand, they seem equally set upon offending against the sensibilities of the interested few who still read poetry. On close inspection, the notes are not particularly thorough in an informational sense, and make little attempt to guide a reader through some of the furiously dense allusions of poems such as “An English Garden in Austria” or “A Rhapsody on Irish Themes”. One is tempted to suspect that Jarrell is set on either exasperating his reader, or inviting a snort of derision from her. Creating a barrier between the reader and the poems indicates Jarrell’s anxiety to remind the reader that they are reading a book and not just a sheaf of self-expressions. It also reveals an anxiety over his legacy, a determination that in the final analysis he should not be misunderstood, that brings us back to my initial suggestion that this Selected was also conceived as a book of renunciation. However, Selected Poems is not simply a splenetic dramatization of Jarrell’s sense of isolation and disconnection as a poet, and a direful vision of the death of poetry’s audience by television. The Todfugue of Selected Poems extends to an analysis of language that pronounces the death of poetic authority and the catastrophe of symbolization. The last section of Part I is entitled “The Graves in the Forest”, and consists of poems written on themes from fairy tales and descriptions of mythicized or symbolized violence from Anglo-Saxon culture. The final poem of this section, “The Place of Death”, terminates the culture of Enlightenment – “all determination is negation” – and in effect prepares for the section of Part II entitled “Prisoners”. Jarrell’s pessimism throughout Selected Poems is contextualized by this section, and in particular by his poem about the liberation of a concentration camp, “A Camp in the Prussian Forest”. This poem is an annunciation of the end of significance and symbolization and their readiness to convert bodies into commodities: “Here men were drunk like water, burnt like wood” (167). The jolting brutality of this poem’s couplets create an effect of disproportion that guarantees the reader’s alienation, even at the moment when they might desire the comfort of harmonization and sympathy more than ever. “A Camp in the Prussian Forest” was by no means the last poem Jarrell had written before putting together his Selected, but it does serve to indicate that Jarrell’s pessimism was not grounded exclusively in peevish self-interest or dandyist contempt for the masses, but instead in a consciousness of guilt and apprehension that was cultural more than personal (although he also indicates how thoroughly acculturated the personal had become). Perhaps even the very concept of “selection” had too many nightmarish historical connotations for Jarrell to perform the work of turning his poetic profile into something more refined, marketable and assimilable. Jarrell abstains from cutting his work, and so the book dramatizes the discreteness and diffuseness of Jarrell’s writing, and also establishes his poetry as a body of work that is self-consciously eccentric rather than accidentally erratic. Bishop and Lowell complained in correspondence with one another that Jarrell’s “endless women” and various speakers were all implicitly Randall Jarrell. 29 I would venture that this is an astute criticism but a bogus complaint, because it is precisely the point of his writing, which moves continually in conflicting directions, towards the expression of the self, but also against being entrapped within the nightmare of 29. Disparaging remarks about Jarrell’s women are quoted from the correspondence of Lowell and Bishop in David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, London, 1989, 225-26. Bishop wondered “where he gets these women – they seem to be like none I – or you – know”, 226.

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history by that self. Difference cannot be eliminated from Jarrell’s writing as readily as Bishop implied, as his entire poetic process is relatable as an attempt to discover a metalanguage by which a self can access a collective unconscious that is missing, presumed dead; Jarrell’s question is how can a self reach other selves? The subconscious may have died at Auschwitz, so the time for its tactful repression was at an end. Jarrell’s poetry is resolutely expressive, consciously manifesting and making aloud sentiments and selfish impulses that the aesthetics of modernism and canonical good practice would have regarded as “embarrassing”. Jarrell’s work is redemptive, even as it appears to be terminal, and talking about the death of poetry is not quite the same as effecting it. Bypassing modernism and looking back to Whitman, Jarrell makes his Selected Poems a “death-bed” edition, an event as much as an entombment. Jarrell’s despair needs to be understood as a radical position from which he sought to encounter his readers, rather than a self-satisfied jeremiad that countenanced no response. As Adorno wrote: “That culture so far has failed is no justification for furthering its failure, by strewing the store of good flour on the spilt beer like the girl in the fairy-tale.”30 Making an aesthetic statement is secondary for Jarrell to identifying and engaging with a cultural predicament. This is where Jarrell’s argument with modernism lies, and it is also where Jarrell’s reading of Whitman’s use of the spatial dynamics of the book over those of the individual poem becomes so vital.31 Jarrell and Whitman are concerned with how the poem, the poet and the reader conspire through the book to make an event. Reading the book of poems becomes a performance, a spectacle in which readers discover themselves through an awareness that they are looking at something else; in effect, rather than merging with the book, they recognize it as other. Jarrell stages the death of the poet with calculated excess, smothering his book with self-defeating critical apparatus, stuffing it with poems, emasculating himself and exasperating the reader. This frenetic textual activity is directing the reader away from Jarrell himself and towards the space that the book will leave, after it and its poet have been erased. Overbearingly overbound, Jarrell’s Selected Poems evokes a complacent linkage of American individual, book, and culture that can never be recovered. Apprehensively, the book unites around its own disintegration.

30. Minima Moralia, 22. Hannah Arendt’s commemorative essay on Jarrell makes the radicalism of Jarrell’s resignation even more apparent. In “Randall Jarrell”, she wrote that “His was not at all the case of the man who flees the world and builds himself a dream castle; on the contrary, he met the world head on” (Randall Jarrell 1914–1965, 7). 31. In another letter to Harry Ford, Jarrell expressed a belief that Whitman was best read with attention to overall spatialities rather than minute lyrical intensities: “That Whitman sounds better ‘out of context’ is new to me” (Letters, 334).

“IT’S LIFE IN DEATH TO BE BOUND, DELIVERED, PUBLISHED”: ROBERT LOWELL’S REVISIONS OF NOTEBOOK 1967–68 GARETH REEVES

In the revisionary process that turned Notebook 1967–68 into the 1970 edition of Notebook and then into History and For Lizzie and Harriet, Robert Lowell was evidently attempting to realize his conviction that in America “the artist’s existence becomes his art. He is reborn in it, and he hardly exists without it”: 1 “one life, one writing!”, as a double sonnet called “Night Sweat” declares. 2 So when in his “Note” to the 1970 Notebook he writes that he has “handled my published book [Notebook 1967–68] as if it were manuscript”,3 more than books and manuscripts are at stake: to quote the subtitle of Terri Witek’s book about Life Studies, the poet is again engaged in “revising the self”.4 The exhilarations and dangers involved in such a procedure the poetry knows, as does Elizabeth Bishop’s stealthily moving memorial poem to Lowell, “North Haven”, which ends by recalling his obsessive re-writing: And now – you’ve left for good. You can’t derange, or re-arrange, your poems again. (But the Sparrows can their song.) The words won’t change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.5 The unstated, or rather understated, equivalence in that last line between Lowell’s life and poetry, that the life of the poetry, its capacity to change, constitutes the poet’s capacity to change, his life, has its sympathetic barb in the poised parallelism between derangement and re-arrangement. The sparrows can change their song, life goes on, but now that you are dead you cannot change. Perhaps your departure is not only forever, “for good”, but also, as the hovering effect of the enjambment (“left / for good”) hints, for the good, just as well. Was it a sort of derangement to keep obsessively re-writing, as if your life depended on it? If with knowing melodrama “Skunk Hour” could declare “my mind’s not right”, the later publication of the poet’s revisions and re-arrangements was a highly public and self-conscious display of his sense that the poetry is not right – and by implication that his life depended on getting it right. But during the process of correction and self-correction the realization must Editors’ note: this essay was completed before the 2003 publication of Lowell’s Collected Poems. 1. A. Alvarez, “Talk with Robert Lowell”, Encounter (Feb. 1965) 39-43. Quoted in Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art, Princeton, 1978, 7. 2. Notebook 1967-68, New York, 1969, 103. 3. Notebook, London, 1970, 264. 4. Terri Witek, Robert Lowell and Life Studies: Revising the Self, New York, 1993. 5. Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems, London, 1991, 189.

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have dawned that in such matters there is no such thing as right and wrong, only the never-ending process of trying, and of living – until “the words won’t change again” because “you cannot change”. The dawning is evident in Lowell’s account in his “Afterthought” to Notebook 1967–68 of what he thought he was up to: This is not my diary, my confession, not a puritan’s too literal pornographic honesty …. The time is a summer, an autumn, a winter, a spring, another summer; here the poem ends, except for turned-back bits of fall and winter 1968. I have flashbacks to what I remember, and notes on old history. My plot rolls with the seasons. The separate poems and sections are opportunist and inspired by impulse. Accident threw up subjects, and the plot swallowed them – famished for human chances. (159) According to this account, what Lowell has written is not a relation and record of everyday experience, but experience itself, the poet’s life, which includes his mental life as it traversed a certain period. The narrative framework is time passing: “My plot rolls with the seasons.” This is not plot as commonly understood, not a construct of episodes and incidents developed and balanced one against another to produce meaning, “to make sense of life” as the saying goes, but something given, Lowell’s life as it was lived. And the “flashbacks” and “notes” that constitute some of the poems occur as they occur, opportunistically and impulsively – or so we are to believe. By this account the poet’s life becomes coterminous with plot. He does not determine “subjects”; rather, they occur to him as part of life’s plot, which swallows them up in its onward devouring journey. Plot is not narrative, but event. And his poetic memories and reflections are not about his life; they are his life. When he dies, the plot stops. “You cannot change” when “the words won’t change again”. Submerged in Lowell’s vocabulary of swallowing and famishing is fear of death, its hungry maw. Poetry is progression towards death, but it is also fighting off death. The poet would defeat death through his art: “I more than I or I will die”, as one sonnet says (104). Another, headed “My Death” (78), tells how, when he was “reading this book” aloud “till the lines glowered and glowed”, a friend demanded “Will you die, when the book is done?”, a question that “stopped my heart, and not my mouth”; and the poet responded “I have begun to wonder”. If this sonnet is to be believed, it was during the writing of Notebook 1967–68 that the harsh implications of turning one’s life into art and vice-versa began to come home to the poet – harsh but also fortifying: that at any rate is a possible explanation for the helter-skelter quality of Lowell’s late sonnet style. According to another sonnet, dubiously titled “Growing in Favor”, he would retard his declining faculties, sexual as well as poetic (a conjunction as potent for Lowell as for Berryman): he would punningly forestall the last “call”: my pinch of dust lies on the eternal dust-tray, lies on call forever, never called…. Who will call for me, call girl, when I start awake, all my diminishment retarded, wake to sing the dawnless alba of the gerontoi? (83) When diminishment is finally retarded you are dead, and there will be no-one to greet the dawn; but he would himself retard his diminishment by finding an appropriate

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style, to ward off the wry thought in this sonnet’s last line that “Old age is all right, but it has no future”. When “plot” recurs in the sonnet “For John Berryman”, it does so more rapaciously: I feel I know what you have worked through, you know what I have worked through – these are words…. John, we used the language as if we made it. Luck threw up the coin, and the plot swallowed, monster yawning for its mess of pottage. (151) If “plot” here stands in for the ravenings of time passing, the slippage from “language” to “plot” makes the two poets’ chancy brilliance with words part of their life’s plot, their narratives rescued from the jaws of death. This is poetry of survival, poetry as survival; they are poets “born to die” (l.12). Humility and hubris shake hands in this sonnet, and from its first sentence. “These are words” is at once deprecatory, as if to say “what I have just written is merely a verbal formula”, and triumphal: “what we have worked through is words, language, that plot which becomes us as much as we become it.” And “worked through” sounds like attrition as well as empowerment: they are worn down by their life’s work even as they find themselves becoming it. The Dream Songs became Berryman’s life’s work and his working life in ways Lowell wanted to emulate in his Notebook sonnets. The triumph and deprecation here anticipate the much quoted farewell line of The Dolphin, “my eyes have seen what my hand did”, in a sonnet that sees the ravelling of life-lines and poetic lines in a narrative that tangles “plot” with “life” as a culpably dangerous activity, a net that both captures and kills: the poet has “plotted perhaps too freely with my life /…/ to ask compassion” by writing a “book, half fiction, / an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting”.6 “I hear the noise of my own voice”, the “Epilogue” to Day by Day was to declare.7 An obsessive preoccupation with the poet’s own voice can be witnessed in Notebook 1967–68. “The Literary Life, a Scrapbook” (50) recalls how remote his present way of writing is from his early style developed under the auspices of Allen Tate and the New Criticism. The first line declares the breaking of the New Critical principle of the absolute cleavage between biography and artifact: “My photo: I before I was I, or a book.” In the photo the poet sees himself ready “to serve the great, the great God, the New Critic”, who ambiguously “loves the writing better than we ourselves”: loves the writing more than he loves its authors; loves the writing more than the author loves it. The latter reading (and to tempt the reader to squeeze out double-meaning like this is a New Critical way of proceeding that, ironically for this sonnet, never left Lowell) intimates the poet’s dissatisfaction with his early monumental and symbolic way. Four sonnets grouped towards the end of Notebook 1967–68 under the heading “We Do What We Are” (127-28) take stock of the poet’s old styles and their contexts, and wrestle with the problem of a style fit for the realization that, in the words of the first of them, “Life by definition must breed on change” – a line that itself is a wrestle between the stasis of definition and the mobility of change. The third of the group, titled “In the Back Stacks”, subtitled “Publication Day” and self-referentially dated 6. The Dolphin, London, 1973, 78. 7. Day by Day, London, 1978, 127.

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“May 19, 1969”, has the poet regarding what we can take to be his old grandiloquence, there on the library shelves both to upbraid him and as an object of pride: “My lines swell up and spank like the bow of a yacht” – this punningly spanking first line itself an example of that grandiloquence, of the swelling maritime style of “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” for instance. Then the context was America’s expansionist empire, as it is now; only now, while “outside” the students are protesting, “the revolution [is] seeking her professor” (this would be an antiVietnam War protest), with the implication perhaps that this can no longer be his role; and the poet shifts in the next line to the irrelevance of his oeuvre inside the library: It’s life in death to be bound, delivered, published, lie on reserve like the old Boston British Poets – hanged for keeping meter? They were complete with Keats; the editor saw no necessity for America, tongue dead as the Latin of the Americas…. (128) The asyntactic garrulity disguises, or is arguably the necessary vehicle for, mental agility and witty allusiveness, the shifts and leaps enabling the poet to embrace an expanse of topics and obsessions loosely associated in his mind. As a poem about book publishing it contains much bookish wit. The line “It’s life in death to be bound, delivered, published” abounds with jokey literary allusion: Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner encountered “Life-in-Death”; Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata was Englished as Jerusalem Delivered; it was quipped that Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” was thus titled in anticipation of a lack of interest in its publication; 8 Milton prided himself that Paradise Lost set “an example … the first in English, of ancient liberty recover’d to Heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing”9 – Lowell’s late sonnets being likewise delivered from such bondage. The question “hanged for keeping meter?” – an ironic inversion of Ben Jonson’s assertion “that Don[n]e for not keeping of accent deserved hanging”10 – is questionable. Does it refer to the poets published in the British Poets anthology, and/or to Lowell’s present sonnet style, and/or to the grandiloquence, which he hopes he has put behind him? (The fear that he hasn’t, or that he has lapsed into a slacker version of his old mighty line, was to surface in History, where he quotes a critic on “the seedy grandiloquence of Notebook”.11) Does the question hang over whether metre is being kept in these sonnets – and anyway who’s counting these days? Old and new poetry conjures thoughts of old and new nations and empires, and we step back into the poet’s own inconsequential but memorable student days: “One talked such junk all summer 8. See Edmund Blunden, Shelley: A Life Story, London, 1946, 224: “Theodore Hook at least noticed the title of Shelley’s lyrical drama: “Shelley styles his new poem ‘Prometheus Unbound’ And ’tis like to remain so while time circles round; For surely an age would be spent in the finding A reader so weak as to pay for the binding.” The original forecast of Shelley himself was that not more than twenty readers would pay for copies at all.” 9. The Student’s Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson, 2nd edn, New York, 1933, 159. 10. “Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden”, in Ben Jonson: The Man and His Work, eds C.H. Herford and Percy Simpson, Oxford, 1925, I, 133. 11. History, London, 1973, 204. The critic is Donald Hall: see Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography, New York, 1982, 388 (thanks to Edward Cheese for tracking this down).

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behind the stacks. / Things happened when we were talked out.” But whatever happens or does not happen in our personal or national histories, whatever goes recognized or unrecognized, said or unsaid (“talked out” or “incommunicado”), “The anthology holds up / without us”. “In the Back Stacks” ends as it began, on a swelling and spanking sound, though only to underscore vacillation between achievement and irrelevance: “everything printed will come to these back stacks” – a sentiment that sounds resigned, and yet there is an affirmative note to such a fate in those spondaically conclusive “back stacks”; after all, this is a poem about “life in death”, not “death in life”.12 The scenario acted out by this sonnet and many others in Notebook 1967–68 is a personal history and poetic career feeding off and being fed by a wider historical consciousness and context, all the while actively engaged in defining where the poetry comes from and is going to as part of that historical process. “I am learning to live in history”; but “What is history? What you cannot touch”, concludes one sonnet (60). In this scenario the more acutely self-conscious, even self-absorbed, the poetry becomes, the more problematic becomes the act of writing and publication, with a growing awareness in the poetry of its impermanent status. The next and final sonnet in the “We Do What We Are” group, “Reading Myself” (128), brings to a head the poet’s self-questioning. Does it question or endorse his past styles? Does it proclaim a realignment of his poetics, or accept with a certain resignation the ways of his old poetry? Is it saying it is time to move on, or time to go back? The sonnet hovers provocatively, and knowingly, between alternatives, neither accepting nor rejecting the poet’s old and prospective selves. In the first line, “Like millions, I took just pride and more than just”, “just pride” could be endorsing Lowell the erstwhile poet of jeremiads, say; “more than just” equivocates. The poet goes on to say that he “memorized tricks”, which has a certain dismissive air, and that he “never wrote something to go back to”, which could be saying that the past is past, that the poet’s past styles were sufficient unto the day, or dismissing them as unreadable today, or taking a certain pride in the fact that what he wrote then dealt with their subjects once and for all – and so on. The sonnet wants to champion art that moves beyond “wax flowers”, that gives “each figure … / his living name”, in the words of “Epilogue”, and proposes an image of a “honeycomb” for the life that can be found in death: No honeycomb is built without a bee adding circle to circle, cell to cell, the wax and honey of a mausoleum – this round dome proves its maker is alive (128) Like Yeats in “Sailing to Byzantium”13 Lowell wants an art that can encompass “what is past, or passing, or to come”; but in contrast to that poem, the honeycomb image embodying such an art takes its “bodily form from [a] natural thing”; it is decidedly not an “artifice of eternity”. Yet like Yeats’s poem, in which the poet would be “gathered” into his artifice, and which urges “studying / Monuments of its own magnificence”, Lowell’s also identifies the maker with his creation, in a rapid shift from “bee”, to “insect” (“the corpse of such insect lives preserved in honey”), to “bear” (“the sweet-tooth bear” may “desecrate” the poet’s book), a self-portrait that 12. Thanks to T.W. Craik and Michael O’Neill for help with glossing “In the Back Stacks”. 13. W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems, 2nd edn, London, 1950, 217-18.

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would have him feeding off his own poetry. But whereas Yeats would (ambiguously) have himself “out of nature”, Lowell wants to stay in nature. Somehow artifice must give way to openness: “this open book … my open coffin”, the sonnet ends. And “open” is a word one might use to defend the style and effect of these late sonnets. In the present instance lines and phrases waver and turn about, breathlessly conjuring up their antitheses, in a style afraid to look over its shoulder, or if it does only to correct itself. “Circle to circle” gives way to “cell to cell”. You can add circle to circle, but you can also go round in circles; you can move outward in circles, but they can also enclose you; art needs boundaries, but you can also be bound in by it. “Cells” are for making honey, but they also imprison. The honeycomb enclosure gives way to the more impressive but also more oppressively monumental “mausoleum”, which then gives way to the more welcoming “round dome” – a Coleridgean pleasure dome? – to deny the deathly spell cast by “mausoleum”. The insect’s living corpse is a selfevident oxymoron, but then to go on to make it “pray” that the “perishable work” in which it is “preserved” should “live” is a dizzying circling about. If the poet has become identified with his own work and its fate, he has also become identified with “the sweet-tooth bear”, which is a sort of compliment to a reading public that would devour his literary corpus-cum-“corpse”. It may be death to fix the self in one’s corpus, but there is sweet life-in-death in the “desecration” to be performed by future generations of readers, an unholy ceremony around the “open coffin” to be welcomed as a kind of Bloomian operation of misprision. “Open” would resist the closure conjured by “coffin”. The sonnet wants to raise the idea of the “perishable” to the status of art. Its conclusion on a rhythmical downbeat – a characteristic of Lowell’s late sonnet style – wards off closure and sounds inconclusively open. Though deathward tending, it would resist, however futilely, the wry conclusion of the significantly titled sonnet, “Plotted”, in The Dolphin: “Death’s not an event in life, it’s not lived through.”14 Honeycomb as sickly-sweet death trap, honeycomb as pleasure dome: the sonnet sequence presently inhabited by the poet is potentially both, or either. And so in recasting Notebook 1967–68 the poet would perform the operations of posterity. If future generations of readers are going to gaze at his poetic corpus to make what they will of it, he will anticipate them. In Audenesque fashion he would become his readers, but, as that figure of the desecrating sweet-tooth bear intimates, not as admiring as those envisaged for Yeats by Auden in “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”. Time to move on, or time to go back? In the event, Lowell’s subsequent volumes do both: the 1970 Notebook and History move on by going back to revise his old poetry, and himself. He has written, is now engaged in writing, “something to go back to”. The dynamics at work here have been implicit in Lowell’s poetics at least since Life Studies: there all the life of the writing – the dry wit, the wry humour, the abrupt transitions, the ellipses – in the acts of memory which constitute the “studies”, contradicts the figure of the poet himself as presented in the poetry, “frizzled, stale and small” (“Home after Three Months Away”).15 Stuck in his past like the mental hospital inmates in “Waking in the Blue”, those “victorious figures of bravado ossified young” (54), he only has life in those memories: only in his poetry, in the memory-act itself, does he live. “Life Studies” means, therefore, not just portraits of other lives, but a way of working for his own life. Conversely, if the poet’s identity is 14. The Dolphin, London, 1973, 49. 15. Life Studies, London, 1959, 56.

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locked into his memories, into the lives captured and recreated in the poems, with no larger meaning to come away with (“We are poor passing facts”, in the words of “Epilogue”) then the poetry in which he lives becomes his mausoleum and coffin. This is the paradox that “Reading Myself” highlights and from which it would break free. However, the desire to resist closure, to write what Alex Calder calls the “process poem”, gets only partial satisfaction even in Notebook 1967–68; and the formal demands of plot and closure evidently became steadily more insistent with the 1970 Notebook and then History. Taking Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Olson and Berryman as his examples, Calder argues that the writer of the process poem “tends to follow an unordained progression whereby the future integrity of the long poem as a series is discovered largely in the act of writing it”. Through an examination of Lowell’s working manuscripts Calder goes on to demonstrate that, even in the case of the first Notebook, rather than maintaining a sequence that “rolls with the seasons”, Lowell “subordinated the individual sonnet or section to a larger principle of organization, that of the one poem”. Lowell thus makes “concessions toward artifice” with “a formalist’s commitment to the process poem rather than a method of composition that has subverted that allegiance”.16 One might add that this tension between artifice and process, between the closed and the open, can be witnessed at the level of the individual sonnet, where the colloquial rubs up against the grandiloquent, the “perishable” against the monumental, the impromptu against what one sonnet calls “this measured cunning” (62). According to Calder, a notable instance of artifice taking precedence over immediacy in the composition of Notebook 1967–68 is the addition of the group of sonnets headed “Power”, one of the last to be written. 17 This group became the motive for the wholesale recasting of the 1970 Notebook (where the group is enlarged and retitled “The Powerful”) and then History. Thus plotting in the introductory “Note” to History sounds more scheming than it does in the “Afterthought” to Notebook 1967– 68. In History the poet’s relationship to plotting is more active: he is the plot’s director, not its subject: About 80 of the poems in History are new, the rest are taken from my last published poem, Notebook begun six years ago. All the poems have been changed, some heavily. I have plotted. My old title, Notebook, was more accurate than I wished, i.e. the composition was jumbled. I hope this jumble or jungle is cleared – that I have cut the waste marble from the figure. (9) “Composition”, at any rate as regards the arrangement of sonnets within a volume, was supposed to be beside the point in the writing of Notebook 1967–68; it was subject to life’s plot: “Accident threw up subjects.” But the “plotting” of History is deliberate – not that the deliberation results in any intricacy of design: for the most part the sonnets are arranged so as to present their subjects chronologically. This is so even if we accept Stephen Yenser’s closely argued case that beneath the straightforward arrangement lies a complex network of imagery demonstrating Lowell’s conviction of relentless historical repetition. Yenser also argues that History 16. Alex Calder, “Notebook 1967–68: Writing the Process Poem”, in Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry, eds Steven Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese, Cambridge, 1986, 117, 130, 136. 17. Ibid., 132.

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represents the recasting of all of Lowell’s oeuvre, in one of the “startling ramifications of his poetics” by which the poet sought to achieve what he found in Eliot and Shakespeare, “a form of continuity that has grown and snowballed”: “successive volumes … seem in retrospect indispensable parts of an evolving pattern” and the poet’s life work evolves into “an organic whole”.18 This is the sort of thing one might say of any number of writers, in whose work a reader or the writer himself, looking back over his life’s work, locates patterns unsuspected at the time of writing. But in Lowell’s case the retrospective look took on particular force and became an active principle of composition. The plottings and re-plottings that transformed the Notebooks into History, argues Yenser, are part of an “ambitious attempt” to discover the shape of “the whole of his life”. For History includes not only extensive reworkings of the Notebook sonnets, but also versions of poems from all Lowell’s earlier collections (a fact not acknowledged in Lowell’s “Note”): “The book is a synecdoche for Lowell’s work: what his poetry is to history, History is to his poetry.”19 One aspect of this attempt at self-discovery was evidently an equivocal sense of identity with the tyrants and despots who make up many of the historical portraits of the Notebooks and History; and the self-discovery can be witnessed in the alteration of a line from one of the Notebook 1967–68 “Power” sonnets, “each library is some injured tyrant’s home” (102), to “each library a misquoted tyrant’s home” in what became the final sonnet of History (207): if tyrants and by implication the poet are destined to have an afterlife, it is only to “live in print” for the purpose of misquotation and misapprehension by that desecrating bear, the future reader. (The likelihood of misquotation is wittily underlined by this sonnet’s first line, “These conquered kings pass furiously away”, which misquotes, and thus reverses the import, of the hymn “Conquering kings their titles take” – familiar to many if only from the spoonerism “cinquering kongs”.) Lowell’s fascination with such figures has a long poetic history, as is pointed out by Jonathan Raban, who writes of “Beyond the Alps”: “Lowell clearly means us to take the implication that literature thrives on destruction. What is bad for man in history – the greed and carnage of empire – may be meat for the poet.”20 History is undeniably ambitious in the way Yenser describes; but poetically it represents a retreat from the open-ended poetics toward which Lowell had evidently been feeling his way in Notebook 1967–68. The private and personal material of the Notebooks gets relegated to For Lizzie and Harriet (which maintains the seasonal framework); and so History no longer contains the fertile intermingling of private life and meditation on history that enlivens the progress of Notebook 1967–68, no longer gives the impression of what Raban describes as “a writer thrashing out his relationship to history, to tradition, to the balance between public and private life, and to the confused intensity of the immediate moment as it is lived and experienced through the poem” (30). Lowell’s “waste marble” metaphor conjures up ideas of the monumental about which “Reading Myself” had expressed apprehension; and it is hard not to endorse Vereen Bell’s judgement that “the poems transposed from 18. Stephen Yenser, Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell, Berkeley, 1975, 2. Yenser quotes Lowell’s words from “The Art of Poetry III: An Interview [with Frederick Seidel]”, in The Paris Review, XXV (Winter-Spring 1961), 82. 19. Ibid., 11. Yenser includes a useful Appendix listing the “new” poems in History. 20. Jonathan Raban, ed., Robert Lowell’s Poems: A Selection, London, 1974, 165-66. For a compelling and judicious account of Lowell’s dealings with political leaders in History, see Robert von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture 1945–1980, Cambridge, MA, 1985, 148-74.

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Notebook are stunned by History’s mechanical, symmetrical organization into the poetical equivalent of an inorganic state”, or with his conclusion that the cynical verdicts on historical figures, which in Notebook 1967–68 can be read “at least partially as a projection of the poet’s own identity, as an aspect of an ongoing process of self-discovery”, in History “have edged toward the absolute authority of fact”. 21 The revisionary process in History is so relentless that inevitably there are many instances where re-writing has improved the original. But equally, the expertise of second and third thoughts often drains the original of its tantalizingly elusive vitality. Let one instance suffice. The first of a group of sonnets headed “Searchings” in Notebook 1967–68 (13) begins “I return then, but not to what I wanted –”. What is returned to, after that tell-tale dash, by the poet’s wandering mind is not at first clear: symbolic landscape blends with the memory of a girl, “hair and blown leaf bosom, the arrogant / tanned brunt behind her snow-starched shirt”; “snow-starched” sparks “white / bluffs”, and “a boy”, whom we of course take to be the poet’s younger self, is off “seeking landsend”, the memory taking the poet back to his rebellious sex-mad youth, when he slashed “RTSL, his four initials, ... / like a dirty word across the bare, blond desk”. The version in History (105) has the object of remembrance spelt out at once as a person, an addressee: “I look back to you.” Girl and landscape do not so much merge in the act of memory as separate out in an explicit metaphor: “hair and blown leaf bosom” becomes “hair of yellow oak leaves”. “White / bluffs” no longer emerge from the memory of the girl, but enter the poem as an abrupt transition. The return to boyhood is likewise abrupt as the identification of poet with boy is spelt out: “As a boy I climbed.” In the original, the hankering of the boy weaved its way into the imagery as a felt presence, but in the revision it is explicit: “alone and wanting you.” And since the third person boy of the original sonnet has changed to the first person, the original’s mesmerized distance between poet and younger self disappears – “I scratched my four initials, R.T.S.L.”. What the revised sonnet gains in clarity it loses in psychological evocation. It no longer has that sense of the mind groping back, “searching”, of that dynamic subjectivity which is the lifeblood of Notebook 1967–68. The revision meted out to “Obit”, the last sonnet of Notebook 1967–68 (156), is symptomatic of Lowell’s retreat to a more limited perspective between that volume and its successors. In its original form the sonnet tries to reconcile ending and what it calls the “unconquered flux”. Against its witty acknowledgement of the inevitability of death, “In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet”, it envisages “the eternal return of earth’s fairer children”. Its conclusion sounds inconclusive: “After loving you so much, can I forget / you for eternity, and have no other choice?” That question expects the answers “yes” and “no”, and in any case an eternal forgetting is not quite forgetfulness, but a perpetual renewal of what is to be forgotten. The personal and private context of this sonnet, its address to Lowell’s second wife Elizabeth Hardwick, makes it the appropriate conclusion to For Lizzie and Harriet.22 But here the addition of an introductory line, “Our love will not come back on fortune’s wheel –”, frames the sonnet and tips the balance in favour of finality. Bishop’s loving memorial doubts about Lowell’s obsessive re-writing may be remembering his own doubts as expressed in the last of four sonnets dedicated to her, which first appeared in the 1970 Notebook, and then in revised form near the end of History (198). In this instance the revision is arguably an improvement on the 21. Vereen M. Bell, Robert Lowell: Nihilist as Hero, Cambridge, MA, 1983, 189, 190. 22. For Lizzie and Harriet, London, 1973, 48.

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original. The sonnet begins by comparing the technique of the painter Albert Ryder with that of the “new painting”, which “must live on iron rations” with its “rushed brushstrokes”. The comparison at first appears to favour Ryder, whose “painting was repainting, / his tiniest work weighs heavy in the hand”. But, characteristically of Lowell’s late sonnet style, the next line seems to point the argument in a different direction: “Who is killed if the horseman never cry halt?” Is it such a good thing for the work to weigh heavily? When ought the artist to cry halt? Is the living subject killed by being overworked? The answer comes, in another characteristic sideways move, with two more questions, addressed to Bishop and recalling her painstaking method of composition: Have you seen an inchworm crawl on a leaf, cling to the very end, revolve in air, feeling for something to reach to something? Do you still hang your words in air, ten years unfinished, glued to your notice board (198) Lowell’s envy is evident in these fine lines to Bishop. His ambition, in his late sonnets but ever since Life Studies, was, in the last words of this sonnet, to make the “casual perfect”: the art that conceals art par excellence. But Bishop succeeds neither by rushing at her subject to get it down while life is on the move (as it might be in Notebook), nor by heavily re-writing (History, say), but by patiently and unerringly waiting upon the event: neither process poetry nor monumental, but poetry which, for all that, in its “ten years” of making, figures forth the poet’s mental life in its constant journey, “feeling for something to reach to something”.

“OUR LIVES INSEPARABLE”: THE CONTINGENT WORLD OF ADRIENNE RICH’S TWENTY-ONE LOVE POEMS LUCY COLLINS

The history of love is the history of a passion but also of a literary genre Octavio Paz Twenty-One Love Poems represents an important landmark on Adrienne Rich’s journey towards a new aesthetic. Initially praised for carefully crafted and rather conservative work, her transition to polemic occurred in the late 1960s, when her first political poetry began to be published and her relationship with readers and critics changed significantly. A review of Rich’s writing trajectory suggests that this period marked radical personal and creative transformation, yet there is much in the earlier work to suggest the necessity, even the inevitability, of this movement. Indeed, this process signalled a deeper understanding of the nature of change on the poet’s part: she became increasingly aware that to write – and to read – was to subject the self to alteration; a realization that brought the creative act itself to a level of continuous flux: I find that I can no longer go to write a poem with a neat handful of materials and express those materials according to a prior plan: the poem itself engenders new sensations, new awareness in me as it progresses .... Perhaps a simple way of putting it would be to say that instead of poems about experiences, I am getting poems that are experiences, that contribute to my knowledge and my emotional life even while they reflect and assimilate it. 1 Rich’s decision to raise her formal anchor is a calculated risk: to move her writing onward she must acknowledge that the writing process generates, as well as represents, emotional and intellectual growth. The intertwined nature of these processes suggests that lived existence is inseparable from the expression of it – “and yet, writing words like these, I’m also living” – the life shaped by the creative urge in turn helps to determine its representation.2 Rich also recognizes that to understand the nature of experience is to reject fixity of thought and expression. This rejection is

1. Adrienne Rich, “Poetry and Experience: Statement at a Poetry Reading”, in Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry, eds W. N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis, Northumberland, 2000, 142. 2. Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems, in The Dream of a Common Language, New York and London, 1993, 25-36; VII, 28. Subsequent references to Twenty-One Love Poems will be given in the text with the number of the poem and the page number of this edition.

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crucial to her development as a poet, in particular to the retention of nuanced open forms despite an increasingly explicit political engagement. The idea of the continuum resonates throughout Rich’s work, both as a way of challenging a male-centred politics and of identifying the process of writing, rather than the achieved poem, as the most significant aspect of the poet’s role. This process was also to become distinctly transgressive because of the perceived necessity of breaking with traditional poetic modes. She was among those included in the anthology Lesbian Poetry (1981), edited by Elly Bulkin and Joan Larkin. In their introduction the marginalized status of the chosen poets was framed in both social and artistic terms: [they] felt no stake in [America’s] traditions, in its establishments, in its social/political/aesthetic values. Instead they sought to create a tradition that was anti-literary, anti-traditional, anti-hierarchical. 3 Twenty-One Love Poems is not only a formal landmark in Rich’s oeuvre, it marks an important diversification of poetic intention. With this sequence Rich not only brings private experience into the arena of gender politics, she begins to explore the complex ways in which these elements interact throughout the processes of writing and of reading a poem. Twenty-One Love Poems alters in significance as Rich’s poetic career binds private and public utterance ever more closely together. It also supports a contingent reading practice that constantly questions assumptions and which changes with the work itself, shifting expectations of tradition and subversion, of poet and speaker, as the reading progresses. II Twenty-One Love Poems was first published as a chapbook in 1976 by Effie’s Press, Emeryville, California. It is set apart from Rich’s other work around this time, both in its manner of publication and in its use of the sequence to bring the issue of continuity to critical attention. Rich clearly saw it as a special project, and choosing to have it published by a small press run by women was a careful alignment of her political convictions and her creative output. Yet the decision had other implications too: it enabled her to experiment with intensely personal material in a new space, one removed from the arena in which her reputation as a formalist had been built and tested. Effie’s Press afforded Rich a kind of privacy as well as a readership alert to the issues that increasingly dominated her work. The sequence would later be included in the Norton edition of The Dream of a Common Language (1978) that gathered the poetry written between 1974 and 1977. There, Twenty-One Love Poems forms the central section of the collection’s tripartite structure, with the first section “Power” comprising eight poems and the third “Not Somewhere Else But Here” the concluding ten. The title of this third section signals the immediacy of political questions in the lives of ordinary women and the necessity of drawing what is marginal or remote into the dynamic present. In placing Twenty-One Love Poems at the heart of this important collection, Rich proves that the private negotiations of same-sex love are emphatically “not somewhere else”.

3. Elly Bulkin and Joan Larkin, “Introduction” to Lesbian Poetry: An Anthology, eds Elly Bulkin and Joan Larkin, Watertown, MA, 1981, xxvi.

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With this new setting the existing relationship in the love poems between personal and political also acquires a sharper focus. A number of the poems contingent to the sequence use the remarkable achievements of diverse women to invoke the need for an intellectual and emotional connection – a “common language” between them – that will provide support and inspiration. Yet as Rich celebrates these achievements she acknowledges the risk, even the necessity, of failure and loss. In the opening poem, “Power”, Marie Curie, who “died a famous woman ... denying / her wounds came from the same source as her power”, expresses through her own life’s work the painful consequences of pushing female potentiality to its limits.4 This dilemma – whether or not to embrace disruptive, even destructive, possibilities – has particular implications for the creative process and makes the re-appearance of Twenty-One Love Poems especially significant. Through this action, Rich not only asserts the power and validity of personal experience but also emphasizes its inherently political nature, and consequently stresses the need to examine the process of writing itself when interpreting this sequence. The importance of process highlighted in the publication history of Twenty-One Love Poems can also be traced in the relationship among the individual poems. By choosing to represent the intensification and the decline of love in a loose sequence, Rich makes change itself an important key to the work’s meaning. Her adjustment of the love poem to express lesbian experience suggests another significant change – that literary tradition must be made to serve emotional realities rather than allowed to govern them. She also alerts us to the pressure that language must be placed under to produce the truest account of emotion and experience. Gaps appear between these poems; they do not represent a seamless narrative but instead prompt the reader to enter the private world of the sequence in search of meaning. These gaps also help us to understand the incomplete nature of Rich’s creative task and the continual adjustments that will be necessary to engage critically with her new poetic directions. Written about a two year relationship with a woman, unnamed in the sequence, both the creative process and the span of the poem concern the passage of time and reinforce Rich’s tendency to return to her own past work in order to explore ideas of writing as process and to deepen the texture of her newest poetry. Even the urge to move into new creative territory reflects Rich’s sense that knowledge is a continuum, developing from one moment – and one poem – to the next: “ I wrote it as I knew it then, and I’m going to know it differently in six months.”5 Closure is neither achieved nor desired because the joint processes of writing and understanding continue on. Twenty-One Love Poems is concerned with two of these elements in particular; the passing of time which itself charts the course of the love relationship, and the rendering of its subtle changes in poetry. Like other long poems and sequences, such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, this uses the juxtaposition of images to build and clarify interpretation. Thus it draws attention to the idea of sequence, to the ways in which poems exist not singly but as a trajectory within the poet’s development. Since the composition of a sequence involves decisions concerning unity and progression, it may also prompt the poet to interrogate the larger patterns of his or her writing and to examine the relationship between the single texts and creative change. Rich herself is acutely aware of this issue, having 4. The Dream of a Common Language, 3. 5. “Adrienne Rich: An Interview with David Montenegro”, in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose, eds Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, New York and London, 1993, 272.

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begun adding dates to individual poems in her 1963 collection Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: I was finished with the idea of a poem as a single, encapsulated event, a work of art complete in itself, I knew my life was changing, my work was changing, and I needed to indicate to readers my sense of being engaged in a long, continuing process.6 To privilege the poem as process over the poem as object is to alter the focus from an inward movement seeking a central interpretative scheme to an outward motion where meaning becomes contingent, provisional; even accidental. In keeping with this, Rich’s own reading practice is attentive to more expansive ways of approaching groups and collections of poems. Many of her contemporaries were working on their mature poetic projects using the sequence for a range of formal and epistemological effects. Robert Lowell had already broken with dense, allusive style in his influential gathering of interconnected poems and prose, Life Studies (1959); Berryman had combined short lyrics to gain new heights of personal and cultural expression. These sequences replaced intellectual complexity with a conversational tone and episodic form, using the compulsive force of the poet’s inner life to shape the work’s meaning. Berryman’s Sonnets to Chris (1947), published in 1967 as Berryman’s Sonnets, would undoubtedly prove instructive to Rich in its formal implications and also, perhaps, in the sequence’s sustained articulation of an unsanctioned relationship. 7 Of his Dream Songs, Rich remarked: “None of the poems carries in isolation the weight and perspective that it does in relation to the rest.” 8 She is attuned to the way in which individual poems could be set against one another to clarify or even to destabilize meaning, and her own Twenty-One Love Poems presents a conceptual unity containing a matrix of tensions and overlapping impulses. These are indicative of Rich’s continuing engagement with contemporary poetic and cultural practices in general, as well as of the changing relationship depicted in the poem. In Twenty-One Love Poems time is significant in a number of ways. The work examines the love relationship retrospectively, its form at first suggesting a complete action capable of being represented and understood. Instead what this poem gives us is the essence of the experience; we encounter a past only intermittently recoverable in art – a gapped, provisional existence. The sequence can be read in its entirety at one sitting but the reader is also made aware of the compressed nature of the writing. Indeed compression becomes a thematic, as well as a formal strategy: the mature lovers recognize that their lives are intensified by the comparative shortness of time: “Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time / for years of missing each other” (III, 26, ll.1-2). Yet Rich goes on to qualify, even to contradict, this idea by asserting present joy and expectations for the future to be stronger than those she felt in youth. In this way, both the imaginative time of love and the creative moment of the poem contract and expand to suit the emotions expressed. This strategy is an important part of the sequence as Rich exposes the process of writing as a suggestive, unstable one. 6. Adrienne Rich, “Blood, Bread and Poetry: The Location of the Poet”, in Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985, London, 1987, 180. 7. For the publishing history of the sonnets, see John Berryman, Collected Poems 1937–1971, ed. Charles Thornbury, London, 1990, 303-6. 8. Adrienne Rich, “Mr Bones, He Lives” (1964), quoted in John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, London, 1982, 326-27.

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The chronology of the sequence allows continuity and fragmentation to shadow this work simultaneously. Waking in the lover’s bed (II); walking the morning streets (III); returning home (IV) – the early poems loosen the process of parting. What concerns Rich here is not the instant of separation but the repeated experience of it, which captures the disorientation of enforced privacy. Yet the journey homeward toward the space of creativity also draws sexual love to the centre of the poet’s existence, affirming its enduring importance. The memory of closeness continues to haunt the conscious moments, so that remembered intimacy at once recedes with the passage of time and is endlessly renewed in the act of creative imagination. As well as marking the passing of days, the pattern of sleeping and waking is also suggestive of the daily routines, the treasured normality of this hidden love and the continual interplay between conscious and unconscious feeling: what is felt privately and instinctively and what is proffered for public contemplation. This movement between inner and outer worlds is carefully modulated in language and Rich acknowledges the complex dynamic of statement and evasion in her work – of the relationship words have with the gaps between them. In exploring the private aspect of the self she ventures into the subconscious realm, or can be seen oscillating between conscious and subconscious states in her use of dream in the sequence. The dream of the second poem expresses the desire to lay bare, to be honest and demonstrative in love: it is revealed twice in the poem, once as a narrative (“our friend the poet comes into my room” [II, 25]) and once as essence (“I dreamed you were a poem” [II, 25]). In both cases the expression of love becomes synonymous with the creative endeavour and this entanglement gives an inkling of the importance of words in the experience and understanding of love. This movement between “real” and imagined worlds draws attention to the spatial construction of the work. Initially, separate publication sets the boundaries of the sequence, while the title of the sequence and the numbering of the poems records this collective relationship in clear terms. Such clarity is false, however. There are not twenty-one poems in the volume but twenty-two, so while the sequence suggests a record, a diary or a map, it is in fact a three-dimensional figure because the “floating poem” creates a new space. This space exists beyond the declared textual limits of the poem where the most private of physical and emotional territory can be discovered. Situated between poems XIV and XV, the presence of this extra poem highlights the ways in which Rich destabilizes the concepts of margin and centre in her writing and questions our understanding of what love poems can or should express. Yet by deferring this enquiry until such a late stage in the work she allows the particular chronology of the relationship to be established before progressing towards larger themes. Throughout the sequence, Rich uses poems that particularize memory to trigger poems that contemplate in more abstract terms the love between women and the representation of that love. The dynamic that exists in this sequence between the moments of experience and those of reflection confirms the political significance of these private worlds. Individual poems in the sequence do not have fixed or repeated formal patterns and it seems that Rich bases her creative decisions on the specific requirements of the particular poem rather than on a carefully constructed articulation of priorities within Twenty-One Love Poems as a complete work. The early poems that explore and celebrate the experience of love often have a strong narrative strand, and with it a lengthier form, a faster pace, and a vigorous use of detailed imagery. Poems IV and V go still further, easing the emotional energy of love into a political and intellectual context cluttered with implications: “The mail / Lets fall a Xerox of

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something written by a man / aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison” (IV, 26, ll.12-14); “Once open the books, you have to face / the underside of everything you’ve loved – / the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag / even the best voices have had to mumble through” (V, 27, ll.3-6). Elsewhere, such as in poems VII and IX, the form contracts to thirteen spare lines, a fitting limitation for Rich’s explorations of dilemmas of writing and speech. Indeed, while only two of the poems have fourteen lines, most are within one or two lines of this familiar structure. A glance suggests versions of the sonnet, yet Rich succeeds in simultaneously summoning and dismissing this form. With uneven rhythms and swift changes of rhetorical direction, she forces the reader constantly to adjust perspective, so as to respond to changing geographical contexts, creative processes, political ideas. Throughout the sequence, movement from one space to another marks important changes in the relationship, as well as in the ways it is realized textually. The juxtaposition of the city and the natural world is particularly significant. The city exemplifies civilization – growing from man’s achievements in industry and commerce, it is a dynamic space within which relations of power and identity are contested. Urban space is marked, even defined, by the masculine: “Wherever in this city, screens flicker / with pornography, with science-fiction vampires, / victimized hirelings bending to the lash, / we also have to walk” (I, 25, ll.1-4). The women must traverse this threatening terrain as part of their everyday existence, sharing their space with disturbing and damaging elements. That such a form of civilization should shape modern values, beliefs and ways of living is an ongoing concern of the poet’s, especially in her desire to project an alternative type of civilization that grows from a female sensibility.9 This alternative must be imagined first, however, and it is the role of literature in this act of imagining that consumes Rich’s growing body of poetry and essays. The lesbian continuum within which all women can take their place is central to this new understanding of the world: “No one has imagined us” (I, 25, l.13) at once presents the invisibility of this group (“we have not been represented”) and their indelible presence (“we are not imaginary”). In this sequence the women are archetypically identified with nature but the urban environment is presented as essential to their lives: “We want to live like trees .… / Our animal passion rooted in the city” (I, 25, l.13/l.16). Rich sets the enduring cycle of life and death against the solidity of manmade space. The natural world is clearly a mutable one but the poet accelerates the process of growth here, representing the tree “blazing” and “budding” before the reader’s eyes. Rich desires visibility and acceptance for the lovers, but does not want to surrender the power of difference in attaining this. They are to be held within the cultural world as within amber – a distinct presence that remains an integral part of the whole. The oscillation between culture and nature as part of the women’s lives is prominent: the reflection on the city is followed by the aspirational image of the tree (I); walking the morning streets generates an image of the beloved’s eyes “the green spark / of the blue-eyed grass of early summer” (III, 26). Within the poem’s narrative, the city is seen in counterpoint to a private natural world. These spaces are 9. A number of Rich’s essays, most notably “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” contrast social norms that permit violent and oppressive behaviour with the networks of support and collaboration that have existed between women throughout history. Rich sees these relationships not only as private resources but also as patterns for living. See Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread and Poetry and On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978, London, 1980.

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constructed realistically as well as metaphorically: the speaker retreats to nature for time with her lover as well as for tropes of love. This act of escape causes misgivings however, since she wants their love visible in the imperfect everyday world, not in the hidden and alternative places. From poems XIII to XV, the space depicted in the poem changes from streetscape to wilderness, “we’re out in a country that has no language / no laws ... / whatever we do together is pure invention / the maps they gave us were out of date / by years” (XIII, 31, ll.3-4; 6-8) In abandoning the charted ways the lovers free themselves from the limitations of culture and clear a space for the expression of their love. Yet this space is also the place of ordeal: they drive across the desert; are subjected to a purgative boat journey; are driven from the idyllic beach by the whipping of sand and from a new retreat by uncomfortable beds. The pace quickens in poem XV with its repeated “if . . .and” structure until the lovers are moved back to the cityscape without being afforded rest. This kind of journeying accentuates both the desire for freedom to express love, and a drive towards complete sexual fulfillment that of its nature is momentary. The journey is as much a testing of the women’s love as it is a claim for its validity. The quest, though representing a shared need for the free expression of same-sex love, is also a deeply personal exploration of the limits of this relationship with this woman. Geographical metaphors are commonly used in the male-centred tradition to evoke this kind of quest and for Rich the “New Founde Land” off which the lovers’ boat steers “headlong into the waves” is in fact “The Floating Poem, Unnumbered”. This poem of intense sexual union cannot find a space within the chronological tale of their love, perhaps because it is cut loose from the everyday, being always in the present: “whatever happens, this is.” While it is important for Rich to acknowledge the essential quality of this union, its escape from poetic contingency is not complete. Her decision to leave the poem at the same point in the sequence when republishing it in 1978 confirms the strength of its moorings. In this position it can concentrate the intensity of sexual feeling before the painful realities of life overwhelm it. While the sequence charts the growth and decline of this love relationship, the floating poem immortalizes intimacy. It confirms what is most significant – and lasting – about the entire sequence: that it unambiguously represents sexual pleasure shared between women. The eternal present of the heightened physical experience depicted here both affirms its significance (the floating poem represents with sensual immediacy the world of the sequence as a whole) and recognizes that it is finite: “Whatever happens with us, your body / Will haunt mine” (32). The moment of union is itself a transcendent one, floating above the day-to-day lives of the lovers to remind them of the intensity of their connection. Yet this form of transcendence is necessarily temporary, as Roland Barthes has suggested: The amorous impulse uproots us from the earth and from the place where we are; the awareness of death causes us to fall – we are mortal, we are made of earth and to earth we must return.10 Love as a necessary illusion is perhaps suggested here, together with the idea that it is in the movement between contradictory impulses that the fullest human experience is to be found. Rich’s acknowledgement of the possibility of loss is thus an important 10. Roland Barthes, quoted in Octavio Paz, The Double Flame: Essays on Love and Eroticism, translated by Helen Lane, London, 1996, 133.

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moment within a sequence that maps the intensification and decline of the love relationship. Indeed it is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy – from this point onward, uncertainty and abandonment become keynotes of the poems. Even if love is a transcendent force, it eventually must yield to realism. Once the decline has begun, the inevitability of love’s failure seems woven into the texture of these poems. Yet closure is never fully attained: the journey represented by the sequence is not just linear but also invokes the cycles of days, months, years. Similarly, the lesbian woman’s quest for freedom of expression in modern culture involves an endless doubling back on the self in order to absorb what can be learnt through experience. It is not clear if this movement is evolutionary – a spiral, a process of moving forward that also encompasses the recovery of the past – or one which is unable to yield significant change: “I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle” (XXI, 36, l.15). Rich concludes the poem by valorizing both her own continuance and her display of this – the drawing of the circle for others to observe and to follow. The issue of self-representation is an important one here. Rich’s work has never been seen as confessional in the mode of Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton, and even this movement into autobiographical territory does nothing to contradict such an evaluation. The way in which the self is constructed and made to serve Rich’s poetic intentions is interesting since it confirms the poet’s understanding of the political as growing from personal conviction. Yet this is a movement that extends in both directions, as Diana Fuss suggests: “‘The personal is political’ re-privatizes social experience, to the degree that one can be engaged in political praxis without ever leaving the confines of the bedroom.”11 The extent to which Rich draws political issues into the orbit of her own experience and allows them to shape the understanding of her life is considerable. The testimony of a tortured prisoner “Do whatever you can to survive. / You know, I think that men love wars” (IV, 27) is drawn into the narrative of Rich’s struggle for sexual autonomy. She is not only “light and heavy” (IV, 26) with the memory of love but with the inevitable conflation of sexual pleasure and political responsibility. Yet what this poem also confirms is the necessity of intimate emotional support in a world where the individual is assailed with loneliness and brutality. The failure of this support prompts a revealing examination of the speaking self. Poem XVIII concludes “Close between grief and anger, a space opens / where I am Adrienne alone. And growing colder” (34, ll.13-4): on one level this shows the gap opening between the lovers to be indicative of an essential singularity of being. Yet on another, by naming the poet in the third person, it introduces a distance between her speaking and experiencing selves at the very moment she confirms that the sequence directly depicts events in her own life. Such contradictions can be challenging for the reader in that they seem to present two incompatible ways of approaching the poem. Though Rich’s work at this time is seen as lyrical (and the persona of the speaker and the poet are conflated because of this) it also incorporates rhetorical devices. Thus, in Twenty-One Love Poems, Rich at once invites reaction and prevents both the reader and the figure of the lover within the poem from responding to her words. As Kevin McGuirk has persuasively argued, the lyric cannot be a “transparent window on the individual woman’s being” in this poet’s work as she 11. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference, New York and London, 1989, 101.

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is too concerned with the role of language in constructing ideologies to accept the supposedly more innocent lyrical position.12 While the complexity of this position introduces new lines of enquiry for the reader to pursue, it does not necessarily yield a meaningful and rewarding art. In Twenty-One Love Poems, Rich uses the private landscape powerfully, yet also deepens a political engagement that of necessity is shaped by the subjective, individual life. The privatization of ideology can bring a striking immediacy to shared ideas, but there are reasons why the highly subjective nature of personal experience can present a limited, even dishonest, social analysis. Rich’s tendency to “aggrandize the truth” has been noted by Carol Muske, signalling the uneasy relationship between the individual perspective and the larger philosophical or historical view. 13 Likewise Helen Vendler sees the autobiographical mode as having “a counterproductive aesthetic effect” on Rich’s work and has commented on her development as a “moral allegorist”: “[those] whose fate she laments, whose unjust treatment she protests against, seem mostly versions of her present or past self. Like charity ... pity begins at home.”14 Rich’s political energies are not directed towards the most flagrant of injustices but towards those that fit her chosen agenda most closely. In the same way her poetry, which is sometimes read as a form of propaganda, can never be judged free of a prescribed meaning or message. To politicize autobiography in this way is to make the self both the creative impulse behind the poem and the subject of its scrutiny. This doubling of roles for the self draws the issue of sameness into the form of the poem just as the depiction of same-sex love makes it a central theme. This concept of oneness would seem to run counter to an inclusive and varied feminism, and it could be argued that Rich’s position is closer to an essentialist reading of gender. It is both the “oneness” and the “sameness” of the lovers which produces the social stigma and encloses them within a limited, coded world, yet even within this world, Rich acknowledges the power of difference: and the past echoing through our bloodstreams is freighted with different language, different meanings – though in any chronicle of the world we share it could be written with new meaning we were two lovers of one gender, we were two women of one generation (XII, 31, ll.12-17) To write with “new meaning” is paradoxically to acknowledge the old and to a large extent this sequence is built on just such contradictory impulses on the poet’s part. Here two separate life narratives are altered by being linked, and altered not only from the point of their conjunction but completely, because these lives now acquire a different significance in the world. For to be the same here is also to be other: to be a lesbian is to be at the margins of contemporary American society. In emphasizing this life as at once private and socially significant, Rich makes otherness an important 12. Kevin McGuirk, “Philoctetes Radicalized: ‘Twenty-One Love Poems’ and the Lyric Career of Adrienne Rich”, in Contemporary Literature, XXXIV/1 (Spring 1993), 62. 13. Carol Muske, quoted in Sylvia Henneberg “The Self-Categorization, Self-Canonization, and SelfPeriodization of Adrienne Rich”, in Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization, eds Joyce W. Warren and Margaret Dickie, Athens, GA, 2000, 281. 14. Helen Vendler, Soul Says: On Recent Poetry, Cambridge, MA and London, 1995, 217.

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feature of the poem. The particularity of same-sex love is vital to Rich – she is angry at heterosexual appropriation of the poem, “at having my work essentially assimilated and stripped of its meaning, ‘integrated’ into a heterosexual romance”. 15 Yet in republishing the sequence as part of The Dream of a Common Language, Rich arguably invites the poem to be re-read more widely as an exploration of love’s growth and decline within a hostile, or at best indifferent, environment. Her comments highlight how crucial it remains for her to express the intersection between love – its connectedness – and the exclusion that this particular form of love generates. III On its first publication, Twenty-One Love Poems could be seen as a highly personal, even confessional, work and a candid portrait of lesbian love. When it appears in The Dream of a Common Language, Rich has politicized the sequence by its contingency with more explicitly public poetry. Later, in a corpus that includes an increasing number of polemical essays dealing with aspects of women’s history and feminist criticism this politicization of the sequence is made more intense. As well as reflecting on her own progression as poet, Rich is attuned to the place of the woman poet within the literary tradition and to the degree to which the pursuit of this trajectory can cause the woman to suppress or falsify aspects of her experience. In her celebrated essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” Rich is direct in her interrogation of the meaning and significance of tradition in her life: “to be a female human being trying to fulfil traditional female functions in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination.” 16 While Rich sees Twenty-One Love Poems as mounting fresh resistance to the pressures of a patriarchal literary tradition, she is also joining other women, past and present, who have refused to suppress their unique poetic voice in favour of expected forms and positions. The shared experience of this sequence is not just that between lovers but among all women who struggle to express the particularity of their lives in art. The importance of experience in establishing new cultural perspectives for women is widely understood and the drive to articulate female experience is a strong one for feminist writers of all cultures. Yet the contention that language is marked by gender and, as a result, can falsify what it purports to represent complicates this act of expression; the limitations of tradition must be overcome in order for women’s lives to be fully realized in writing. This is especially true of lesbian experience, which occupies a private and largely stigmatized space within mainstream culture, and in doing so causes particular emphasis to be placed on ideas of shared identity, as Diana Fuss suggests: That lesbian scholarship tends, on the whole, to be more essentialist than gay male scholarship is not to imply that lesbian theory is unsophisticated or reactionary; it is simply to suggest that if the adherence to essentialism is a measure of the degree to which a particular political group has been culturally oppressed ... then the stronger lesbian endorsement of identity and identity

15. Rich, quoted in Jan Montefiore, Feminism and Poetry: Language, Experience, Identity in Women’s Writing, London, 1994, 166. 16. Gelpi, 174 (Rich’s emphasis).

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politics may well indicate that lesbians inhabit a more precarious and less secure subject position than gay men.17 The need to maintain ideas of lesbian “essence” is further endorsed by the position of the lesbian within feminism, which is also a contentious one. It has been argued that until the 1970s, critics elided lesbian experience and overlooked its literary representation in favour of less provocative readings.18 In spite of the significance of lesbian identity for those who claim it, the question of whether it should be defined on the basis of sexual preference remains. In 1980 Rich provided what may be considered the definitive essay in this debate, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”: Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence. I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range – through each woman’s life and throughout history – of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman.19 This definition grows not only from the social behaviour of women but from the range and subtlety of their literary self-representation. Poems of affection and love between women have a long pedigree, acquiring a freedom of erotic expression as the twentieth century progressed. Among Rich’s own contemporaries, Audre Lorde exemplifies this growing openness20 – her “Love Poem” (1971) is an important precursor, using a similar idiom to Rich’s “Floating Poem” here and a gapped texture that was later to appear frequently in Rich’s work: And I knew when I entered her I was high wind in her forest’s hollow finger’s whispering sound honey flowed from the split cut21 In a feminist political context, the love poem as a form must either belong to or dissent from a long tradition of love poetry which sees the woman as an object before the gaze of a man. Written by a woman, the genre may move to a new space; written by a woman for a woman it returns, at least in part, to the traditional pattern. It is an irony, then, that in spite of Rich’s reforming zeal, the beloved of Twenty-One Love 17. Fuss, 98. 18. Bonnie Zimmerman develops this argument in “What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism”, in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, eds Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn, London, 1985, 177-210. 19. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, in Rich, Blood, Bread and Poetry, 51 (Rich’s emphases). 20. Rich comments on the relationship between gender and ethnicity in this context: “She [Lorde] thinks in images that are most certainly lesbian images. But also images from Afro-Caribbean culture and from African mythology and experience. And that’s a very powerful combination” (“Adrienne Rich: An Interview with David Montenegro”, in Gelpi, 271 [Rich’s emphasis]). 21. Audre Lorde, “Love Poem”, in Audre Lorde, Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New, New York and London, 1992 [1975], reprinted in What Sappho Would Have Said: Four Centuries of Love Poems Between Women, ed. Emma Donoghue, London, 1997, 146.

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Poems remains an object. Unnamed and unidentified, she never speaks, and has no developed role of her own. The retrospective nature of the poem may be partly responsible for this, as the course of love is charted always with the knowledge of its loss and the loved one is already a memory, even before the sequence opens. More telling, though, is Rich’s preoccupation with her own role as lover and artist. From the dream in which the poem she is writing and her lover become one (“I dreamed you were a poem, / . . . a poem I wanted to show someone” [II, 25. ll. 10-11]) she accords the experience, and the woman, importance as creative inspiration. Her desire to show the poem is mirrored in the second publication of the sequence, when the private world of the lovers is exposed to a wider, and less inherently sympathetic, audience. Yet even this exposure is one that places Rich’s act of representation in the spotlight: in this way the world of the poem is her own rather than a shared one, since it often concentrates on sensory experiences that are purely individual and takes the artistic process itself as an important theme. Even as language articulates action, thought, feeling, it takes on a power of its own that is dislocated from what it describes: To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not – this is the beginning of writing.22 Rich addresses the act of writing directly in Poem VII, asking “What kind of beast would turn its life into words?” (28, l.1). She seeks to explain the relationship between the process of creation and the materials from which she creates: images become inadequate to the task of emotional expression, they are used: to escape writing of the worst thing of all – not the crimes of others, not even our own death, but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough (VII, 28, ll.9-11) Intentions, rather than facts, are the chief concern here, so that the desire for love and the right to its freedoms are not tethered to the particular relationship but to the politics of language itself. One of the problems with Rich’s desire to find original ways of articulating women’s experience is that it tests severely the innovation of her art. It is arguable that, while the form of Twenty-One Love Poems challenges our understanding of love poetry on a number of levels, it does not do so in the radical way that Rich imagines. In the words of Marjorie Perloff, Rich is “so anxious to teach and to persuade that she tends to forget that form itself is a political statement”. 23 Her growing resistance to the established poetic tradition might in fact be linked to her early success within it, to her mastery of inherited forms, and to her fear that this kind of conformism would limit her imaginative power. For those critics who agree that Rich uses polemic in place of linguistic originality, the problems presented by her later poems are considerable since they are at once too explicit in their political intentions and unable to achieve 22. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by Richard Howard, London, 1990, 100 (Barthes’ emphasis). 23. Marjorie Perloff, “Private Lives/Public Images”, in Michigan Quarterly Review, XXII (1983), 136 (Perloff’s emphasis).

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them fully. Even those who argue for the radical adjustment of Rich’s art at this point admit a level of uncertainty in the poetic voice. 24 She wants both to acknowledge and destabilize traditional forms of the love lyric, intending her own work to meet the exacting formal standards she has been set (and has set for herself from the start) and to explore alternative avenues of language through which a woman-centred civilization can be imagined. Even in the texture of Twenty-One Love Poems she causes meaning to shift significantly. “We need to grasp our lives inseparable”, reads line 7 of the opening poem, suggesting the desire to acknowledge the strength of the lovers’ bond, before line 8 continues “from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces”, immediately altering the balance of the poem towards integration with what Rich elsewhere calls the “difficult world”. Throughout the sequence emotional responses are articulated, only to be deemed contingent on the social context. IV Whether, and how, poetry can serve the cause of politics is a topic that divides critical opinion. While feminist commentators and critics of women’s poetry saw Rich’s movement into the political sphere as a breaking open of the constricting order of patriarchy, the better to express the female self, reviews of Twenty-One Love Poems saw the polemical nature of the new poetry as problematic. The extent to which Rich seeks to radicalize her voice as a woman poet has meant an inevitable conflation of her essays and her poetry, both in the mind of the reader and in the poet’s own theoretical framework. This symbiotic relationship, and Rich’s encouragement of it, is a measure of the control she exerts over the interpretation of her work. This has led critics to evaluate her work on her own terms and to read the new poems in relation to older ones, rather than to encounter them with a fresh mind. Adrian Oktenberg’s essay on Twenty-One Love Poems reinforces the attractions of these links by interweaving strands of Rich’s critical thinking through the fabric of the analysis. This tendency is one shaped by Rich herself on two levels: firstly, by addressing her poetry directly in her essays, she offers perspectives that critics draw on, often unquestioningly. Secondly, her later poetry exemplifies the need to combine intellect and passion, to allow thought and feeling to influence one another, and thus it presents a natural forum for analytic and instinctive work to combine in a single unified whole. Yet poetry critics, however supportive of this permeability, must resist the idea that prose can supplement poetic meaning in a direct way. This denies the ability of the poem to transcend other forms of expression. Yet it is also true that the political poem must be situated differently, and takes part in a more fixed and explicit dialectic than other forms. Twenty-One Love Poems not only shows us how Rich can recontextualize a work by altering its manner of publication; it reveals how central such an enterprise is in shaping the interplay between polemical essayist and feminist poet in her writing career. The political framework within which she situates her poetry can be seen both as a controlling force and as an overt manifestation of interpretative pressures already in existence, as a desire to render social conditioning transparent. If our expectations as readers are shaped by certain “norms”, certain internalized assumptions concerning 24. See Helen M. Dennis, “Adrienne Rich: Consciousness Raising as Poetic Method”, in Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory, eds Antony Easthope and John O. Thompson, Toronto, 1991, 177-94.

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tradition and value, then Rich seeks to challenge these, not primarily by means of poetic originality but by making the relationship between aesthetics and politics less easy to ignore. The provisional nature of Twenty-One Love Poems makes its politicalpersonal dynamic always open to reconfiguration and in doing so offers nuanced and flexible explorations of sexual and artistic identity that not only affirm this work’s significance but illuminate much of Rich’s later poetry.

EMPIRE, SUBLIMITY, AND THE LOOK OF THINGS IN AMY CLAMPITT’S THE KINGFISHER JUSTIN QUINN

The publication of Amy Clampitt’s collection The Kingfisher in 1983 was a unique event in U.S. poetry.1 Whereas most poets make their début in their late twenties or thirties, and slowly develop their styles and preoccupations in public, Amy Clampitt was sixty-three and arrived fully formed. In the four collections that followed there were no about-turns or fundamental reconsiderations of technique or theme. Rather, backgrounds were filled out and more links were forged (autobiographical, political, historical). What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), Westward (1990) and A Silence Opens (1994) all contained some outstanding poems, but they mainly consolidated the surprise of 1983, and provided further excursions into its imaginative hinterland. None had the tonal range of The Kingfisher, which moves from the muted autobiographical anecdote of “The Cove” to the disjunctive political ecstasis of “The Dahlia Gardens”. While the organization of Clampitt’s Collected Poems (1997) is chronologically accurate it is not the most helpful when assessing her overall career. The trajectory of The Kingfisher is the most illustrative of Clampitt’s concerns and modes, and considering the collection as the hub from which all her other work radiates will bring us closest to an accurate characterization of her poetry and its significance for the American tradition. The book displays her deep engagement with what she called “epic sublimity” (and elsewhere “openings”),2 especially an American version of this, and provides a rationale for what might uncharitably be called her decorative side. 3 This attention to appearances and the sumptuous rendering of them in the poetry plays an integral role in her extension of the Romantic tradition, and arguing this point and its implications will be the main point of this essay. Clampitt then connects these issues to a sustained and extensive critique of American imperialism. Celeste 1. The Kingfisher was not Clampitt’s first collection. She published Multitudes, Multitudes, New York, 1974, and The Isthmus, New York, 1981, with smaller publishers and some of the poems from the later collection made up part of The Kingfisher. However, The Kingfisher can be considered her début not only because it was with a big trade publisher, but also because it forms the first part of her Collected Poems, New York, 1997, and because the critical reception was that of a début. See Helen Vendler’s review reprinted in The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics, Cambridge, MA, 1988. 2. Clampitt, Predecessors, Et Cetera, Ann Arbor, 1991, 23. As for “openings”, this word is to be found widely in the poetry. 3. For instance, Mary Karr remarked that “Clampitt’s purple vocabulary sounds to me like a parody of the Victorian silk that Pound sought to unravel …. [One passage] could be Swinburne on acid or Tennyson gone mad with his thesaurus” (Mary Karr, “Against Decoration”, in Parnassus–Poetry in Review, XVI/2 [1991], 277).

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Goodridge argues that only in Clampitt’s last two books did the poet begin to explore the ligatures between transcendent moments and “the larger cultural and historical context in which they occur, constituting in the process an important revision of Clampitt’s earlier poetic project”.4 As I will show, this connection was present in Clampitt’s work from the start, and I will go further in characterizing this connection between Romantic excess and ideological awareness. I begin with a reading of “The Dahlia Gardens”, one of the final poems in the book, and then work backwards.

II “The Dahlia Gardens” is five densely printed pages long and is an account of a Quaker immolating himself in front of the Pentagon in 1965.5 This story is conveyed for the most part in a flexible anecdotal mode that allows Clampitt to get the necessary narrative information across, but also to expatiate on certain key images. The arabesques of the voice in the latter passages heighten the rhetoric and sponsor an imaginative tractive force that sends Clampitt’s eye through the terrains and corridors of power that are necessary to explain this one particular historical moment, thus flying in the face of the epigraph from Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night (“There are places no history can reach”); not history-writing perhaps, but the lyric definitely: November leaves skip in the wind or are lifted, unresisting, to mesh with the spent residue of dahlias’ later-summer blood and flame, leached marigolds, knives of gladioli flailed to ribbons: parts of a system that seems, on the face of it, to be all waste, entropy, dismemberment; but which perhaps, given time enough, will prove to have refused nothing tangible, enjambed without audible clash, with no more than a whiplash incident, to its counterpart, a system shod in concrete, cushioned in butyl, riding chariots of thermodynamics, adept with the unrandom, the calculus of lifting and carrying, with vectors, clocks, chronicles, calibrations. File clerks debouch into the dusk – it is rush hour …6 Such intense colour-work brings to mind the opening of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and this, along with Blake’s “The Tyger”, is quoted later. The first 4. Celeste Goodridge, “Reimagining ‘Empire’s Westward Course’: Amy Clampitt’s A Silence Opens”, in Women Poets of the Americas: Toward a Pan-American Gathering, eds Jacqueline Vaught Brogan and Cordelia Chávez Candelaria, Notre Dame, 1999, 175. 5. The British edition of The Kingfisher, London, 1984, omitted “The Dahlia Gardens” completely and ended with “Rain at Bellagio”, a significantly weaker poem. Perhaps it was merely editorial whim, but I am tempted to read this as representative of an English unease with the romantic tradition. 6. Clampitt, Collected Poems, 96. All references to Clampitt’s poetry hereafter are from this book and the page number will be marked in parentheses in the text.

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transgression of the usual etiquette of natural imagery occurs when she says the falling leaves are “part of a system”, which evokes all the talk of “The System” in the 1960s, and more generally the word is normally used to describe things made or organized by humans. The fact that this foliage is beside the Pentagon seems to implicate it in the violence that is being loosed at that moment in other parts of the world (“knives of gladioli flailed to ribbons”; elsewhere “dismemberment”). There is a complex irony in the end of the passage on the foliage as we hear the voices which predict great things after the carnage is over (“given time enough”), and yet Clampitt ends by praising the system of autumn for its potential to consume everything “tangible”. The word raises the idea of what is intangible, i.e., the massive system kept in motion by the Pentagon. Intangible, but Clampitt searches out its physical props: concrete, butyl, etc. Mention of butyl alerts the reader to the context of the poem within the collection: it is the fifth poem in a section entitled “Hydrocarbon”. Through a collage of quotations and poems with very different angles of attack Clampitt sets up a special set of resonances, but most of the legwork is done by the epigraph to the first poem of the sequence, from Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael: In 1859 petroleum was discovered in Pennsylvania. Kerosene, petroleum, and paraffin began rapidly to replace whale oil, sperm oil, and spermaceti wax…. Consider whaling as FRONTIER, and INDUSTRY. A product wanted, men got it: big business. The Pacific as sweat-shop … the whaleship as factory, the whaleboat the precision instrument (89) Here scientific progress and commercial success are figured as particularly American: Melville romanticized whaling, and while Olson insists on it as the pursuit of lucre, he connects with the American romance of the frontier. Then, the discovery which removes the need for whaling, petroleum, is made in Pennsylvania, so even the cracking of carbon chains, not something one would connect with any particular nation, is figured as American. And it is all “big business” for which “precision instruments” are employed; these instruments foreshadow the “clocks, chronicles, calibrations” in “The Dahlia Gardens”. In a note, Clampitt comments that “Charles Olson’s observation that the first oil well had been drilled as recently as 1859 was what dramatized for me the transitoriness of an entire culture founded on the use of petroleum”.7 In a later novel, Harlot’s Ghost (1991), Mailer describes the CIA as America dreaming, which is both an accusation thrown at the country and a compliment to the organization. Clampitt’s description of the Pentagon can only be quoted at length in order to see how it equals the scope of Mailer’s metaphor: it is rush hour; headlights thicken, a viscous chain along the Potomac – from concentric corridors, five sides within five sides, grove leading on to grove lit by autonomous purrings, daylight on demand, dense with the pristine, the dead-white foliage of those archives that define and redefine with such precision, 7. Clampitt, Collected Poems, 441.

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Precision, subtlety, avoiding the random: none is an activity that would seem particularly menacing, but in Clampitt’s context they take on a deadly lustre; and what is worse, they are inured to the prosecution of evil. The boutade of imagery which began with the flowers and leaves in the opening is here extrapolated into the “deadwhite foliage” of the archives, so that the two systems seem continuous (“the Pacific as sweat-shop”). Also of note here is the religious diction (triune, Christendom, levitations; and, with a more occult gleam, arcane, whose etymology goes back to the Latin, arcēre, to shut away or hide, as in a chest). On the one hand, this conveys the impression that the Pentagon’s actions are not under any one person’s control, but move through the world like Fate or the desire of godhead; on the other, it’s impossible ever to know whether agency can be located there at all (“only / the honed mind’s secret eye can verify / or vouch for its existence”). The lyric structure itself has to find ways to extend itself to match the purview of this instrument of the nation. Clampitt does this through a series of indented passages which provide wide-ranging glosses on the elements of the action played out in the dahlia gardens. As the man empties the contents of the jug over his body, mention of the word “gasoline” jolts the lines to the right and into paratactic survey: “tallow, rushlight, whale oil, coal oil …”, and this rushed inventory leads to the chemical processes of hydrocarbon cracking which occurs in stages not unlike the stages of revelation, to a gaseous plume that burns like a bush, a perpetual dahlia of incandescence (98) And this, through a dazzling series of images, leads to the napalm running over the ground in Vietnam and clings “in a blazing second skin / to the skins of children” (98). The passage, with its use of asyndeton, serves to heighten the tone of the poem. Quintilian remarks on the device that it “render[s] what we say more vivacious and energetic, exhibiting an appearance of vehemence, and of passion bursting forth as it were time after time”.8 This passion has a political valency: in the continuous historical and geographical sweep of this passage, the domestic sphere of America is connected with the atrocities carried out elsewhere, especially in Vietnam by chemical 8. Quoted in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, eds Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, Princeton, 1993, 968.

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weapons. Clampitt puts her main verbs in the passive voice and thus avoids a simplistic indictment of any one organization (she is not saying that the CIA originally siphoned off the oil in order to kill children in Vietnam). Nevertheless, the panning shot does wish to establish some kind of collective guilt for the U.S., and in this respect its doings are best represented at the time of writing the poem by its central intelligence agency. The poem reaches its climax with the man igniting himself and the transitions range more widely and more frenetically. The poem settles down again in conclusion, as the fire is extinguished and the ambulance called; we are left watching the streams of traffic along the Potomac, “a waking fantasy upborne / on a lagoon of hydrocarbon”. Because Washington is what Henri Lefebvre calls a “representational space” for the U.S., Clampitt’s panoramic survey at the end of the poem is charged with national significance (there is mention of Richmond, Virginia, and also Dulles Airport: both of these connote two of the most important wars of U.S. history, the Civil and Cold). It achieves a similar effect to that in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) when the camera moves back from the personal human drama to survey the factories and chimneys of an industrial town in Pennsylvania. It suggests the U.S. is a massive machine in which human lives are caught up; it suggests nothing of the myth of the freedom of the individual. Clampitt recounts the self-immolation of Norman Morrison in 1965, remarking in a note that he is forgotten in the U.S. but remembered in Vietnam, in order to show the insignificance of individual action. His name does not even linger to haunt the country’s conscience. We might then suppose that Clampitt is imperceptive if the date of book publication did not give us pause for thought: 1983, almost twenty years after the event. From this perspective it would seem that Clampitt is anxious not to overvalue those politicizations of the 1960s. In a later poem entitled “’Eighty-Nine” about the changes in Eastern Europe, Clampitt locates historical agency in “the angels” – not in the people, not in Mikhail Gorbachov or George Bush. The culture cushioned by hydrocarbon might well be transitory, as she comments in the note, but in “The Dahlia Gardens” it cannot be budged by human action. A further aspect which is important for my argument is that the global geo-political theatre of operations which America has for its domain prompts stylistic innovation in a poet whose craft might otherwise have been restricted to writing delicate descriptions of the light and landscape in Maine. In trying to come to terms with this massive arena of national action she has had to augment her lyric resources, so that she can move with as much, if not more, agility and speed as the system. Once that is achieved, however, as here, the problem becomes one of finding some basis for value outside such an inimical state of affairs. Much of Clampitt’s subsequent work can be read as the attempt to search out small “footholds”, or form valuable “attachments, links, dependencies” in the midst of the world described in “The Dahlia Gardens”. Her imagination is directed towards those lives or plants which find ways of surviving and prospering between the grinding cogs of the system, not succumbing to it, but adjusting, as for instance in “Vacant Lot with Pokeweed”: weeds do not hesitate, the wheeling rise of the ailanthus halts at nothing – and look! here’s

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The pokeweed is more successful, if in a different context, in the face of “dismemberment” than the figure of “The Dahlia Gardens”: whereas the flames of self-immolation are hastily extinguished by the guard outside the Pentagon, but here “the wheeling / rise of the ailanthus halts / at nothing”. She comments: At least since the 1960s, I’ve had an urge to refer in some way to public issues – which is not the same as speaking for any identifiable group or point of view .… What I’m really concerned with – as I think most poets are – is with keeping limber, with maintaining what I have to call a subversive attitude, the opposite of going along with anybody’s program whatever.9 Other American poets who wish to find ways of figuring their nation reach for words that convey vastness, and the troubled participation of individual citizens. Like Clampitt, they too resort to a paratactic gaze quite often in an effort to comprehend the same panoramas as the state sees as it moves through its various arenas of action. Such a gaze obviously goes back to Walt Whitman’s panoramas, and more generally to English Romanticism. In interview she remarked: “All along, without having thought about it all that much, the English romantic tradition is the one I must have felt I belonged to.”10 From her sequence “Voyages: A Homage to John Keats”, it is clear that, for Clampitt, this English tradition is continuous with American poets such as Whitman, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. Willard Spiegelman makes the connection with Whitman on a syntactic level: The whole issue of sentence formation links Clampitt to, of all people, Walt Whitman, that other Quaker Romantic, whom she resembles in more than just her tendency to fuse lushness with a stern moral vision, and her American commitment to the didactic properties inherent in landscape. From this grand seigneur of poems-as-lists, Clampitt has learned to construct an entire poem, or a large portion of one, by relying more heavily on nouns and nominal constructions than on predicates and verbs.11 On the thematic level, the connections with the Romantic tradition are clear from a collection like What the Light Was Like, where Clampitt is involved in re-telling the biography of John Keats, and Archaic Figure. But my claim is that the ecstatic, impassioned vision we saw above is more important than her narratives of the Romantic poets: the sequence “Voyages: A Homage to John Keats” is about Romantic poetry, whereas “The Dahlia Gardens” is Romantic poetry. But it is important to emphasize Clampitt’s transformation of the sublime. The American sublime is traditionally seen as a moment of revelation experienced, as Rob Wilson puts it, by the “the self crossing vast and beckoning spaces, alone with his or

9. Clampitt, Interview with Emily B. Todd, Amy Clampitt special issue of Verse, ed. Bonnie Costello, X/3 (Winter 1993), 5. 10. Clampitt, Interview with Emily B. Todd, 6. 11. Willard Spiegelman, “Amy Clampitt’s Drama of Syntax”, in Verse, X/3, 18.

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her great American enterprise before God and nature”. 12 The English poet Geoffrey Hill refers disparagingly to the exponents of this tradition as “enthusiasts of sublime emptiness”.13 Here is Wilson’s statement in context: If ideology in (literary) action is what a group takes to be freely and willingly natural if not self-evident, “both the condition and the effect of the constitution of the subject (of ideology) as freely and willing and consciously choosing in a world that is seen as background” … then the American sublime developed – as liberal poetics – into just such a “natural” convention of the Romantic soul: the self crossing vast and beckoning spaces, alone with his or her great American enterprise before God and nature. This lyric “I” helps to impart the cash-value trope of autonomy and self-determination in the American subject and hence aids in propagating an imaginary relation to power before configurations of the material sublime.14 The meaning of “imaginary” here is two-fold: first, that although the subject thinks it has power, in reality it doesn’t; second, the Lacanian meaning in contradiction to this, the subject partakes in the control of public images and spectacles. Rather than plumping for one of these options, we remain closer to the texture of lives if we admit both meanings: people both manipulate and are manipulated by public images, and to grasp this fact is to forestall talk of some “they” behind closed doors controlling our lives. Amy Clampitt extends the tradition of the American sublime by drawing on its paratactic powers and privileging visionary moments, but this is not done to lose oneself in “sublime emptiness”, but to return the passion of “epic sublimity” to American society in times of social crisis, such as the period of the war in Vietnam. In her discussion of the theme of nomadism in Clampitt’s poetry, Bonnie Costello puts it thus: Clampitt challenges … the ahistoricism of Emerson’s vision of America. America’s individualism and ahistoricism have paradoxically produced a monoculture which views itself as absolute, original and authoritative. If “all history is epitaph” (in Emerson’s phrase from “Experience”), the past might, nevertheless, help to fill the emptiness of the prairie, and of modern life. Clampitt’s version of the nomadic accepts “attachments, links, dependencies” even as it rejects exclusionary, despotic social and geographic systems. Unlike the exile and the alienated individualist, the nomad imagines a social web and historic continuities that cannot be codified.15 There is a lack of transcendence in Clampitt, if one takes that term to mean some kind of escape from the contingencies of the world and political engagement. But we should not lose sight of the extent to which Clampitt continues the Emersonian, and therefore Romantic, tradition of ecstatic vision and tempers it with a fine moral rage that is as intricate and multiplicitous as the phenomena it condemns. Clampitt rejects

12. Rob Wilson, American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre, Madison, WI, 1991, 36. 13. Geoffrey Hill, Canaan, London, 1996, 70. 14. Wilson, 36. 15. Bonnie Costello, “Amy Clampitt: Nomad Exquisite”, in Verse, X/3, 37.

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“exclusionary, despotic social and geographic systems”, but the “attachments, links, dependencies” are also between realpolitik and the realm of the spirit.

III I now turn to the book’s beginning as I wish to emphasize the tonal gulf between the first poem and “The Dahlia Gardens”, a gulf which would seem to be paralleled on the thematic level also: Inside the snug house, blue willow-ware plates go round the dado, cross-stitch domesticates the guest room, whole nutmegs inhabit the spice rack, and when there’s fog or a gale we get a fire going, listen to Mozart, read Marianne Moore, or sit looking out at the eiders (5) It is not hard to imagine the word “snug” being transformed to “smug” in most readers’ minds, and the passage makes Whittier’s “Snow-Bound” look hard-boiled. The recherché vocabulary follows: ombré, repoussé, isinglass. Philip Larkin remarked that one associates domesticity and cosiness with the work of poetesses.16 But it would be too easy to dismiss this as mere bourgeois cosiness (for that one has to look to Clampitt’s epigone, Brad Leithauser): and we would fail to apprehend how the littoral scene of the poem fits into the larger configurations of the collection. The poem concludes by opening out to the sea: Where at low tide the rocks, like the back of an old sheepdog or spaniel, are rugg’d with wet seaweed, the cove embays a pavement of ocean, at times wrinkling like tinfoil, at others all isinglass flakes, or sun-pounded gritty glitter of mica; or hanging intact, a curtain wall just frescoed indigo, so immense a hue, a blue of such majesty it can’t be looked at, at whose apex there pulses, even in daylight, a lighthouse, lightpierced like a needle’s eye. (5-6) Rather than return to the “snug house” to close the poem, she brings us out into a space that holds large majesty that “can’t be looked at”. This is in stark contrast to the domestic objects that opened the poem. The clotted linguistic effects are also very different from the beginning: heavy internal rhyme, alliteration and repetition mark this passage, which builds to the “apex” of the lighthouse. For a poet who is so obsessed with visual effects, the “needle’s eye” is a particularly rich figure. In an 16. Philip Larkin, Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Reviews 1952–1985, London, 2001, 151.

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interview, Clampitt remarked on her preoccupation with William Wordsworth’s idea of the tyranny of eye:17 going against Luce Irigaray’s critical figuration of the eye’s hegemonic specular power, Clampitt’s eye is itself “pierced” by the light, transfigured by rather than imposing its grid upon the world. Following immediately on from “The Cove” are several further poems with a littoral setting. They are autobiographical anecdote, but the tone is portentous, as in the conclusion above, and suggests a symbolic level to the experience. “Beach Glass”, for instance, ends thus: The process goes on forever: they came from sand, they go back to gravel, along with the treasuries of Murano, the buttressed astonishments of Chartres, which even now are readying for being turned over and over as gravely and gradually as an intellect engaged in the hazardous redefinition of structures no one has yet looked at. (11-12) The philosophical phrases that invade the littoral scene of the poem are similar to the description of the Pentagon in “The Dahlia Gardens” (“those archives / that define and redefine with such precision, / such subtleties of exactitude” [96]), and just as there was hazard there, we have hazard in “Beach Glass”. The figure walking along the beach in this poem is germane to Norman Morrison: both are located at the edge, the margins, of huge metamorphoses, whether of nature or Cold War politics, and the genius of The Kingfisher lies in the way that Clampitt is able to blur these divisions. Her speakers at the beginning of the book stand contiguous to the great space of the sea, and by the end that sea has been transformed into the global systems of realpolitik. This sends a Parthian tremor back to apparently twee poems like “The Cove” and “Marine Surface, Low Overcast”, as we realize that the negotiations of these poems lay the groundwork (in terms of positioning of the speaker, and figuration of systems) for the later ecstasis. Another important element of that groundwork is careful observation of the physical world and accurate rendering of this in the poems. Mention of Marianne Moore in “The Cove” reminds the reader of Clampitt’s debt to her. In her essay on Moore, she wrote: [P]recision and attention to detail are what Marianne Moore’s work is all about. And that is what I found attractive: a clear and principled opposition to the dictum of Dr. Johnson that poetry ought not to “number the streaks on the tulip”.18

17. Clampitt, Interview with Elise Paschen, in Predecessors, Etc., 162. 18. Clampitt, Predecessors, Etc., 38.

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This aspect of Clampitt’s work has been over-emphasized. She becomes a little testy on the subject in interview when asked about it: “I don’t think finding verbal equivalents for the visual world is what is difficult: it’s addressing oneself to the nonvisual, the invisible, that’s the challenge.”19 One immediately thinks that she is referring to religious issues, but she continues to name some of these invisible things: music, pain, and one could add even an organization like the CIA in “The Dahlia Gardens”. She ends by repeating that “rendering visual impressions isn’t all that difficult”. Because Clampitt was so obviously good at this rendering, it is all too easy to lose sight of the ends she puts it to. She is delicate in her attention to the world, but all the talk of the decorated dados and the things that are “repoussé” is a delicacy with a firm, deliberate goal. A helpful comparison here is with Allen Ginsberg. On the face of it, these poets would seem to have nothing in common. The stand-off between Moore and Hart Crane (Crane once characterized Moore as a person who is “[a]lways in a flutter for fear bowels will be mentioned”20) and later Moore and Ginsberg (Moore objected to Ginsberg’s line “I wandered off in search of a toilet” with the inquiry: “And I go with you, remember. Do I have to?”21) would suggest that such a comparison is ill-judged. Moore and Clampitt are of the genteel tradition, Ginsberg spurns it. But it is my contention that Clampitt was influenced in important ways by the stylistic and thematic innovations of Ginsberg in the 1960s, especially by the work in Planet News (1968), and which is grouped under the title “The Fall of America” in Ginsberg’s Collected Poems. A poem like “Wichita Vortex Sutra” demonstrates the ways in which Ginsberg puts accurate landscape description to political work, and thus adumbrates the central device of “The Dahlia Gardens” and The Kingfisher in general. This is its opening: Turn Right Next Corner The Biggest Little Town in Kansas Macpherson Red sun setting flat plains west streaked with gauzy veils, chimney mist spread around christmas-tree-bulbed refineries – aluminium white tanks squat beneath winking signal towers’ bright plane-lights, orange gas flares beneath pillows of smoke, flames in machinery – transparent towers at dusk22 Little is made of the care that Ginsberg took in rendering physical appearance – his political stances and lineation draw most of the praise or scorn. But through his apprenticeship to Pound (and the lineation here reflects this), he made it an integral part of some of his best poetry. Traditional syntax and connectives are omitted in the passage above in an effort to mimic the speed with which he views the scene from the bus. Each line is like an atom of perception which hits, is registered and glances off to 19. Clampitt, Interview with Elise Paschen, 162. 20. Hart Crane, O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane, eds Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber, New York, 1997, 324. 21. Marianne Moore, Selected Letters, ed. Bonnie Costello, London, 1997, 499. 22. Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems 1947–1985, London, 1995, 394.

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no great symbolic effect. Rather, the aggregate effect of these impacts is to impress the reader with the speaker’s faithfulness to appearances. The tone is low-key and factual, and if one were not familiar with Ginsberg’s previous work one would be surprised by the ecstatic declaration of the end of the war in Vietnam which he makes at the poem’s conclusion. Ginsberg’s point, if it makes sense to talk of a “point” in such a context, is that in order to create “language” that will challenge the language of political propaganda, his own words must be “full” of the United States in a way that is phenomenologically true. His landscape descriptions are at once like proof adduced and a kind of imaginative charge that will strengthen his challenge to the official war machine. Clampitt’s delicate land- and seascapes should be approached in just this way as a type of groundwork for the sublimity that comes later. I wish now to provide a brief narrative of the trajectory of The Kingfisher, bearing in mind the points made above. As I remarked already, the first section, entitled “Fire and Water”, begins with poems that are set beside the sea (“The Cove”, “Fog”, “Gradual Clearing”, “The Outer Bar”, “Sea Mouse”, “Beach Glass”, “Marine Surface, Low Overcast”). “Botanical Nomenclature”, as the title suggests, is about accuracy in naming plants, but it intimates the direction the collection will take, by ending with a moment when “one day everything breathing / will reach out” and touch “the ramifying / happenstance, the mirroring / marryings of all likeness” (16). This microsublimity surprises: who could have expected that botanical exactitude would lead to that? Also, the poem hints at childhood memories, but these are not fleshed out until later. The next poem, “On the Disadvantages of Central Heating” also hints at autobiography, but reveals little. As the book progresses, more of Clampitt’s life is revealed, and this “gradual clearing” is paralleled by the gradual movement towards the exalted tone of the book’s last section. “A Resumption, or Possibly a Remission”, written for her sister, is full-blown nostalgia for a time when the two sisters lived together. It ends with an image of snow in a tree “upheld as by a nursing mother” (20). “A Procession at Candlemas” is on one level an elegy for Clampitt’s own mother, and on another a lament for the parents of children who died in Vietnam. The poem foreshadows the panoramic mode of “The Dahlia Gardens” in its location and also its imagistic manoeuvres: A Candlemas of moving lights along Route 80; lighted candles in a corridor from Arlington over the Potomac, for every carried flame the name of a dead soldier: an element fragile as ego, frightening as parturition, necessary and intractable as dreaming. (22) The poem ends by returning to this image, with a tone that is spent and resigned: a Candlemas of moving lights along Route 80, at nightfall, in falling snow, the stillness and the sorrow of things moving back to where they came from. (25)

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But she cannot settle on this elegiac note and the section ends with “Times Square Water Music” which listens to the music of dripping water in the subway and envisions great consequences: think, she intones, of “the tectonic / inchings of it / toward some / general crackup!” (29). The next section fills out further autobiographical background and ends with an elegy for her father, “Beethoven, Opus 111”. By this stage we have gathered enough information to see a narrative of Clampitt’s life forming: childhood in the mid-West, followed by years of nomadism, with New York as her provisional home. Costello has written excellently about that nomadism as theme and technique, but what interests me here is the way Clampitt is attracted to figures who buck the system, or try to: for instance, Jolene in “Amaranth and Moly” and her father in “Beethoven, Opus 111”. She describes the latter figure thus: My father was naïve enough – by nature revolutionary, though he’d have disowned the label – to suppose he might in some way, minor but radical, disrupt the givens of existence (50) This description fits Norman Morrison of “The Dahlia Gardens” quite well also. The poem ends with transcendental access: into these shakes and triplets, a hurrying into flowering along the fencerows … ………………………………………… in its messages the levitation of serenity, as though the spirit might aspire, in its last act, to walk on air. (52) The following sections dwell on the theme of the mid-West, and the one following, religion. But what concerns me most is the last section, “Hydrocarbon”. I have already discussed its most important poem, so what I will be concerned with here are the articulations between all the poems of the section. “Or Consider Prometheus” is about the history of man’s use of hydrocarbon, with particular emphasis on the role of the whale, both as nineteenth-century source of oil, and the mammal which considered life on earth but rejected it, rejected “the prehensile / dangle of a brain all eyes and claws, / twittering fishhook strategies of grasp // and mastery” (89). These are the qualities which she will associate with the CIA later, and in general with the “monoculture which views itself as absolute, original and authoritative”.23 But where this poem has a phylogenetic scope (of whales and humans), the next, “The Anniversary”, is personal anecdote. It recounts what she was doing on 1 September 1939, and again reminds us of the figurations of the littoral poems as we see an individual standing at the margins of enormous historical change. “Letters from Jerusalem” continues in this mode at a remove: an American friend of

23. Costello, “Amy Clampitt: Nomad Exquisite”, 37.

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the author’s goes to Jerusalem and rejects the American ideology of the individual’s pursuit of happiness for allegiance to a racial cause: if he stays he must go into the army. The ’sixties subversive pacifist he was must unadopt the arrogance or lose Jerusalem. (94) What follows is the short accusatory poem “Berceuse” (its point being that everyone is part of the system), and “The Dahlia Gardens”. After the wide sweep of the last, Clampitt concludes by returning to intimacy, here an intimate address to a friend. But its opening is instinct with the knowledge of what has preceded it: Dreamwork, the mnemonic flicker Of the wave of lost particulars – whose dream, whose child, where, when, all lost except the singed reprieve, its fossil ardor burnished to a paradigm of grief, half a century before the cattle cars (101) The family of the addressee has survived the Holocaust, and as the poem continues, Clampitt compares that forced transit to the journey westward to Iowa that her grandparents made. She is not suggesting an equivalence between the hardship suffered, rather she is in awe of the fact that both herself and her friend survived such migrations (“the entire astonishment, for me, of / having lived until this moment” [102]). As the title indicates, it is primarily a lament for those children who did not survive, and although there is no reference to Vietnam in the poem, the reference to “burning” in the title and in the epigraph, and the fact that it succeeds “The Dahlia Gardens”, makes the connection obvious. Clampitt’s approach to history could be called rhizomic: analogies and coincidences play a central role, and she has little interest in searching out root causes, or originary myths. The approach is refreshing, but it does lead to a kind of ahistoricity in which all wars come to equal one another, and instead of explanations of historical agency there are just further small “attachments, links, dependencies”. Historical agency comes to be thought of like the huge systems of the CIA, which leaves Clampitt’s protagonists on the margin, in the littoral zone. In relation to the last poem of the book, the implication seems to be that with the failure of Norman Morrison to effect historical change through self-immolation, all that is left is the kind of astonished friendship found in “The Burning Child”. After the terrific speed (literally terrific) of “The Dahlia Gardens”, it is a somewhat conventional dying fall. She would never equal the political sublime of that moment throughout the rest of her career. However, the poems of later books such as “Archaic Figure” with its stunning parataxis, “Notes on the State of Virginia” with its ideological landscape, “The Halloween Parade” with its comprehension of the sublime and the losses it entails, and “’Eighty-Nine” with its mixture of elegy for a loved one and celebration of the political changes in Europe – these poems know all about “The Dahlia Gardens” and are written in its wake. “’Eighty-Nine” attributes the death of a young man (“a car going off the road, a mangling / incendiary gasp”) to the agency of angels. The poem

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then pans out to the pictures coming in on the news and encompasses a different type of Candlemas, one that balances the previous procession:

Candlelight on the cobblestones of Leipzig; Prague a complicit candor, as night after night we were drawn to the tube (O brute honey, there in the dark, though the smirk of mendacity contain it) by the flowering, out in the snow, of so many faces: now that season’s over. But that freshet of anarchy, while it lasted, halfway persuaded us the archangels, whoever they are, at moments are also human. (411)

“WHAT I WANTED WAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MONUMENTS” ERRING AND LYN HEJINIAN’S THE GUARD NERYS WILLIAMS

Searching and error, then, would be akin. To err is to turn and to return, to give oneself up to the magic of detour. One who goes astray, who has left the protection of the center, turns about, himself adrift and subject to the center, and no longer guarded by it.1 Maurice Blanchot It is tempting to assert that the book in American poetry is an agonistic site where problematic literary legacies can be addressed or resolved momentarily. While this proposition is an alluring one, contemporary poets’ continued fascination with the book as both an expansive and liberating site also suggests that it is being redeployed as an enabling form. One could claim that for recent poets the book becomes a dynamic field in which theory and praxis not only intersect, but are indistinguishable from one another. As Lyn Hejinian states somewhat quixotically: Theory asks what practice does and in asking, it sees the connections that practice makes. Poetic language, then, insofar as it is a language of linkage, is a practice. It is practical. But poetry insofar as it comments on itself (and poetic form is, among other things, always a poem’s self-commentary), is also theoretical.2 In considering Hejinian’s poetry, I will attempt to examine how this transformative approach to theory and practice is orchestrated within the structure of the poetry book. Furthermore, this essay will consider how the figure of the book presents what Hejinian terms a certain “lyric dilemma” or “aporia” between a formal construction and a provisional enquiry. This tension between structure and spontaneity is one which Hejinian’s poetics both embraces and celebrates. Eventually, I will suggest that we can further understand the tensions between formal “containment”, a spontaneous lyricism, and a transformative impulse, through a reading of “erring” in Hejinian’s The Guard (1984). Drawing from Hejinian’s early poetics, an “erring” reading of the momentum and dynamics generated within the scope of her poetry book will allow us

1. Maurice Blanchot, “Plural Speech: Speaking Is Not Seeing”, in The Infinite Conversation, translated by Susan Hanson, Minneapolis and London, 1993, 26. 2. Lyn Hejinian, “A Common Sense”, in The Language of Inquiry, Berkeley, 2000, 356. Further references to Hejinian’s essays will be taken from this collection, unless otherwise noted, and the original dates of publication will be indicated in the footnotes.

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to reflect upon the discreet negotiation between intentionality and provisionality which her poetry enacts. Initially, it is worth turning to aspects of Hejinian’s poetry and poetics, since they grant us a position from which to introduce her engagement with the book as an enabling form for experimentation and enquiry. In Hejinian’s introduction to The Language of Inquiry, which collects most of her essays and papers given over the last twenty-five years, she states: Poetic language is also a language of improvisation and intention. The intention provides the field of inquiry and improvisation is the means of inquiring. Or, to phrase it another way, the act of writing is a process of improvisation within a framework (form) of intention.3 Far from asserting a coercive structure, Hejinian suggests that formal constraints enable the possibility of a certain poetic freedom. Indeed, Hejinian’s poetry testifies to such an enquiry into the poetics of the book as a site which allows for a sustained experimentation in a lyrical nexus. Her most celebrated work, My Life, examines the construction of an autobiography while interrogating distinctions between prose and poetry within a procedural matrix.4 Her later book, Oxota, subtitled “A Short Russian Novel”, is composed of two hundred and seventy free sonnets, significantly called “chapters”, inspired by Pushkin’s “novel in verse” Eugene Onegin.5 Her collaborative works, such as Leningrad (with Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman and Barrett Watten, 1991); Sight (with Leslie Scalapino, 1999) and Sunflower (with Jack Collom, 2000) create a space for dialogue between the writers themselves. 6 Furthermore, their internal “discussions” within the book often promote humorous inconsistencies and conflicts. We can begin by making the general assertion about Hejinian’s work that the spatial co-ordinates of the poetry book provide a welcome respite from the concept of the individual lyric as a purely self-contained entity. The following section from Oxota grants us an insight into the design which Hejinian proposes for her own poetry book: But to return to the theme of the novel and poetry That is, one theme The time comes when each individual poem reveals not only its own internal connections but also spreads them out externally, anticipating the integrity each poem requires in order to explain obscure points, arbitrary elements, 3. The Language of Inquiry, 3. 4. Writing My Life in 1978 in her thirty-seventh year, Hejinian constructed a volume of thirty-seven sections of thirty-seven sentences, each section paralleling the year of her life. In the second edition, published eight years later, Hejinian added eight sections and inserted eight new sentences to each original section to “update” the new work. 5. Hejinian has noted with considerable glee that “seeing the book shelved under the heading ‘Fiction’ in a number of bookstores has secretly delighted me”. See “A Local Strangeness: An Interview with Lyn Hejinian by Larry McCaffrey and Brian McHale”, in Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors, ed. Larry McCaffrey, Philadelphia, 1996, 131. 6. My Life, Los Angeles, 1987; The Cold of Poetry, Los Angeles, 1994; Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, Great Barrington, MA, 1991; Sight, Washington DC, 1999; Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union, San Francisco, 1991; Sunflower, Great Barrington, MA, 2000.

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etc., which, if they were kept within the limits of the given text, would seem otherwise to be mere examples of the freedom of expression.7 The immediate collapsing of genre distinctions in this passage could be placed in the wider context of early Language writing’s general fascination with cross-genre work and its scepticism towards divisions between theory and praxis. But what seems particularly useful in examining Oxota as an instance of Hejinian’s own intention for the poetry book is the emphasis on refuting the autonomy of individual “chapters” as moments of lyric epiphany or “mere examples of the freedom of expression”. Far from being closed self-contained units, the passage suggests that the internal dynamics of each chapter provide a lateral “anticipation” or momentum for other chapters. We may also begin to read Hejinian’s book as challenging conventional patterns of establishing knowledge and meaning in a poetic text. An essay by Charles Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption”, notoriously written in verse, places into focus the tensions between the establishing and disruption of meaning within a poem. His comments alert us to a further characteristic of Hejinian’s writing: An individual poem may be understood as having a restricted or general economy. Indeed, part of the meaning of a poem may be its fight for accumulation; nonetheless, its text will contain destabilizing elements – errors unconscious elements, contexts of (re)publication & the like – that will erode any proposed accumulation that does not allow for them.8 This conflict between an accumulation of meaning and its simultaneous disruption is read by Bernstein as a necessary procedure generated by poetic language within an individual poem. But we might also want to consider how these resistances which Bernstein indicates as characterizing poetic language assume a pivotal role in the writing of Hejinian’s own poetry book. Usefully “Artifice of Absorption” also points us towards a context of rewriting which informs the reception and interpretation of the poetic work. This act of rewriting is one which Hejinian practices most explicitly in “The Composition of the Cell”, anthologized in the collection The Cold of Poetry (1994). Drawing on her 1992 book The Cell, this later work takes a sentence from each of the original one hundred and fifty sections, in effect creating an alternative “Cell” which works neither as a synopsis nor shorthand but as a transformed text. Marjorie Perloff comments that this trope of concentration and the numerical layout of “The Composition of the Cell” is reminiscent of the patterning of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Philosophicus.9 One cannot help but be lured into the crossreferencing which “The Composition of the Cell” demands. For example, the following line “64.1 When I'm nervous I'm narrative” leads to the relevant section in

7. Oxota, “Chapter 192”. 8. Charles Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption”, in A Poetics, Cambridge, MA, 1992, 16. 9. See Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary, Chicago, 1996, 211-18.

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The Cell which then yields a simultaneously surprising and reassuring reference to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: When I get nervous I'm narrative Chronological Begin again See life dissolving vegetate again The perpetual green and yellow take shape in different and combined tips of light Like a moth in an episode There are no words closer to the intimate resemblance than these Of whose method in our work we can create Footfalls Perpetual divisions in the widening fact for page and transportation in grass.10 Beginning with a confession, this section curiously shifts its opening lyrical inflection to concentrate upon a phenomenological engagement with the world. The admission that narrative and even chronology is a somewhat neurotic compulsion is undercut by the command “Begin again”. Throughout The Cell, Hejinian constantly and playfully undermines the temptation towards a narrative self-indulgence through making aphoristic remarks and admonitions. While perhaps we cannot state that Hejinian is motivated by the same ambitions or rhetorical gestures driving Leaves of Grass, there is an unexpected correspondence between these books. In reading this extract from The Cell, I am reminded of Whitman’s celebrated: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / I am large, I contain multitudes.” 11 Although initially The Cell proposes that “there are no words closer to intimate resemblance than these” this inflection of a nomina sint numina position is radically dissected by the division between the “fact for page” and its “transportation in grass”. These contradictions, disturbances or even resistances in both Whitman and Hejinian’s work prevent the book from turning into an exercise of lyrical infallibility and dominance. As has been often noted, the “I” careering through “Song of Myself” curiously unthreads, and even erases the dominance of a static subject position. Hejinian herself proposes that subjectivity is less a fixed entity than “a mobile (and mobilized) reference point”. 12 One could thus propose that the poetry book allows for conflicts and contradictions. These refute any tendency to privilege the lyric or to validate what Hejinian calls “its smug pretension to universality and its tendency to cast the poet as 10. The Cell, Los Angeles, 1992, 90. 11. Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems ed. Francis Murphy, Harmondsworth, 1979, 123. 12. Hejinian, “The Person and Description”, in Poetics Journal, 9 (1991), 167.

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etc., which, if they were kept within the limits of the given text, would seem otherwise to be mere examples of the freedom of expression.7 The immediate collapsing of genre distinctions in this passage could be placed in the wider context of early Language writing’s general fascination with cross-genre work and its scepticism towards divisions between theory and praxis. But what seems particularly useful in examining Oxota as an instance of Hejinian’s own intention for the poetry book is the emphasis on refuting the autonomy of individual “chapters” as moments of lyric epiphany or “mere examples of the freedom of expression”. Far from being closed self-contained units, the passage suggests that the internal dynamics of each chapter provide a lateral “anticipation” or momentum for other chapters. We may also begin to read Hejinian’s book as challenging conventional patterns of establishing knowledge and meaning in a poetic text. An essay by Charles Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption”, notoriously written in verse, places into focus the tensions between the establishing and disruption of meaning within a poem. His comments alert us to a further characteristic of Hejinian’s writing: An individual poem may be understood as having a restricted or general economy. Indeed, part of the meaning of a poem may be its fight for accumulation; nonetheless, its text will contain destabilizing elements – errors unconscious elements, contexts of (re)publication & the like – that will erode any proposed accumulation that does not allow for them.8 This conflict between an accumulation of meaning and its simultaneous disruption is read by Bernstein as a necessary procedure generated by poetic language within an individual poem. But we might also want to consider how these resistances which Bernstein indicates as characterizing poetic language assume a pivotal role in the writing of Hejinian’s own poetry book. Usefully “Artifice of Absorption” also points us towards a context of rewriting which informs the reception and interpretation of the poetic work. This act of rewriting is one which Hejinian practices most explicitly in “The Composition of the Cell”, anthologized in the collection The Cold of Poetry (1994). Drawing on her 1992 book The Cell, this later work takes a sentence from each of the original one hundred and fifty sections, in effect creating an alternative “Cell” which works neither as a synopsis nor shorthand but as a transformed text. Marjorie Perloff comments that this trope of concentration and the numerical layout of “The Composition of the Cell” is reminiscent of the patterning of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Philosophicus.9 One cannot help but be lured into the crossreferencing which “The Composition of the Cell” demands. For example, the following line “64.1 When I'm nervous I'm narrative” leads to the relevant section in

7. Oxota, “Chapter 192”. 8. Charles Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption”, in A Poetics, Cambridge, MA, 1992, 16. 9. See Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary, Chicago, 1996, 211-18.

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the writing of the poetry book while also maintaining the formal intentions that provide a site for a sustained poetic enquiry. As she puts it in her essay, “The Rejection of Closure”: Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but forces; formal questions are about dynamics – they ask how, where and why the writing moves, what are the types, directions, number and velocities of a work’s motion. The material aporia objectifies the poem in the context of ideas and of language itself. 17 Recognizing this impulse towards mobility in The Guard as a form of erring will allow us to understand the intentionally contradictory elements in Hejinian’s work. But before engaging with The Guard in detail, a conceptualization of Hejinian’s erring impulse can be formulated from her early essays.

II An early reference to erring occurs in the 1976 essay “A Thought is the Bride of What’s Thinking”. Here the remarks are perhaps more consistent with Hejinian’s initial approach to error as mistake. But usefully she draws attention to a form of tracing, retreading, or repetition, informing an errant passage that is by no means a narrative of “progress”: Distortion, or error, To err is to wander, probably in an unanticipated direction, inadvertently. The mistake is not necessarily without advantage, though it may be irrevocable. Ink, or, the guitar. Returning from the middle distances, to the same points, repeatedly, from whatever direction, one homes, like a nomad or migrant. Perhaps that is a function of thought, nomadic homing – undertaken (consciously or not) in defiance of all narratives of progress. 18 The identification of “to err” with “to wander” is consistent with its etymological root – deriving from the Latin errare – to stray, wander or rove. What is most striking in Hejinian’s formulation is the initial suggestion that the “mistake” may not be recalled. “Irrevocable” paradoxically also suggests something which is unalterable, even fixed. Mining this dilemma, the second section presents us with two contradictory assertions in the oxymoronic “nomadic homing”. Hejinian seems to claim that a return to a point of origin is a tenable aim. This section betrays an inflexion of Gertrude Stein’s itinerary of “beginning again and again”.19 For Stein, the insistent gesture of “homing” is not an innocent retreat to a point of origin. She declares in “Portraits and Repetitions” that “there is no such thing as repetition”, and continues “It is not repetition if it is that what you are actually doing because naturally each time the emphasis is different”.20

17. “The Rejection of Closure”, in The Language of Inquiry, 40-58, 42. Originally published in 1985. 18. The Language of Inquiry, 15. 19. Gertrude Stein, Look at Me Now and Here I am, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz, Harmondsworth, 1984, 26. 20. Ibid., 100, 107.

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Stein’s work features as a constant point of reference for Hejinian’s poetics, and the parallels with her work may become clearer when we consider the erring proposed by Hejinian’s 1978 essay “If Written Is Writing”. There is a certain process of accretion in Hejinian’s poetry book, a building up of propositions that evoke a Steinian insistence upon a text that is not writing but “composition”. Indeed Hejinian indicates that a focus on the suggestiveness of language generates a self-perpetuating linkage of associations: This becomes an addictive motion – but not incorrect, despite such distortion, concentration, condensation, deconstruction and digressions that association by, for example pun and etymology provide; an allusive psycho-linguism .... The process is composition rather than writing. 21 Certainly the assumptions of this work exist within the context of early Language writing’s preoccupation with the viscosity and materiality of language. 22 What is more striking is Hejinian’s description of a lateral movement that is “not incorrect” within the text. In insisting upon composition, rather than writing, Hejinian is drawing on Stein’s “Composition as Explanation” and its evocation of a Jamesian continual present: The time of the composition is the time of the composition. It has been at times a present thing it has been at times a past thing it has been at times a future thing it has been at times an endeavour at parts of all of these things. In my beginning it was a continuous present a beginning again and again and again.23 In Stein’s work, this form of temporal folding suggests an accretive measure. The insistence on the “time of the composition” allows us to consider the text, and our own context of the book, as an ongoing method of description that is not harnessed to immobilizing or objectifying the world. In the 1986 essay “Two Stein Talks”, Hejinian draws attention to Stein’s work as an “encounter with the world”.24 This word “encounter” is significant, and an important development in Hejinian’s own poetics. Peter Nicholls draws attention to this sense of “encounter”, as a thread between Stein and Hejinian’s work in their application of a “phenomenological literature”. Urging us to understand Stein’s work then not purely in the terms of selfreflexivity but as a “dynamic sense of inherence in the world”, Nicholls suggests that the nature of this encounter could be read as “a refusal of any pursuit of knowledge or truth which would seek to reduce the other to the same”. 25 Viewed in a context of erring, we can begin to see how the condition of “knowledge” becomes tentative at best. We may even want to ascribe to erring the possibility of recognizing and acknowledging alterity. 21. The Language of Inquiry, 28. 22. See, for example, Charles Bernstein’s statement that “I want to establish the material, the stuff of writing, in order, in turn, to base a discussion of writing on its medium rather than on preconceived ideas of subject matter or form”, in Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984, Los Angeles, 1986, 63. 23. Look at Me Now and Here I Am, 29. 24. The Language of Inquiry, 97. 25. Peter Nicholls, “Phenomenal Poetics: Reading Lyn Hejinian”, in The Mechanics of the Mirage: Postwar American Poetry, eds Michel Delville and Christine Pagnouelle, Liège, 2000, 242-43.

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Following this lead from the early poetics, it is significant that Hejinian also considers ethics in these early essays. In “A Thought is the Bride of What’s Thinking”, an ethical poetics is sketched by Hejinian’s discussion of an “inclusive art” of a certain “integrity”.26 Characteristically, Hejinian re-evaluates and redeploys the word “integrity”, suggesting that it is not indicative of completeness but of “an infinite capacity for questioning”. Calling for responsibility and responsiveness, the claim of this early essay remains somewhat elliptical. What seems particularly pertinent to our inflexion of erring is Hejinian’s warning against “the dangerous purism of a conventional dictionary definition of the ethical (‘the condition of not being marred or violated; unimpaired or uncorrupted condition; original, perfect state; soundness’)”. Although this comment does not propose an “erring ethics” per se, it certainly suggests an ethical enquiry which ultimately remains unformulated and not predetermined; she proposes that “to have definite and final opinions, is a matter of doubt to the ethical intellect”.27 Yet there is an equivocal oscillation in this early piece between Hejinian’s gesture to the ethical as being non-prescriptive and the closing evocation of the writer exerting a “moral force of combination” which suggests judgement or value.28 It will be necessary to assess how this dilemma is broached in The Guard and how the poetry book enacts its own theoretical enquiry through an erring composition. III The Guard was originally published by Tuumba Press as an individual volume. Since then it has been reprinted in The Cold of Poetry (1994), a book that restores Hejinian’s earlier volumes of poetry. Although The Guard now forms part of this collection, the work has retained its original form as an individual book. Divided into eight extended sections, The Guard combines domestic tableaux, aphoristic statements, meditations on acts of cognition, vignettes and philosophical reflections. Hejinian sustains a remarkable sense of momentum throughout each of the sections without capitulating to a lyric poetics of immediacy or spontaneity. Hejinian meditated upon the writing of The Guard at some length in the essay “Language and ‘Paradise’”, where she indicates that the work began as a response to the opening Canto of Dante’s Divine Comedy. This ambitious evocation of an epic terrain of purposeful roaming cues our reading of erring and its relationship to a poetics of the book. Hejinian remarks that her attraction to Dante’s opening lines stemmed from a proposition of a work beginning in “the middle”.29 Unsurprisingly, this epic opening appears as a skewed intertext in The Guard. Near the centre of Hejinian’s own book we find the following evocation: “When memorized midway this life we lie on / But there was no reply – my husband / had gone back to sleep”(27). Taken out of Hejinian’s context, this appropriation of Dante’s line would appear to translate the heroic epic into a bathetic evocation of everyday life. But Hejinian’s intentions for her configuration of the book are complex. What is taken from this “beginning” is less an imposition of itinerary upon the work, than an invocation to consider what the essay 26. The Language of Inquiry, 7-21. Originally published in 1975. 27. Ibid., 20. 28. Ibid., 21. 29. Hejinian, “Language and ‘Paradise’”, Line, 6 (1985), 86. The opening lines of Dante’s Inferno read: “Midway this way of life we’re bound upon / I woke to find myself in a dark wood / Where the right road was well and truly gone”, from The Divine Comedy: Hell, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, Harmondsworth, 1974, 71.

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will call “the lyric dilemma”. The title, “Language and ‘Paradise’”, is drawn from the closing line of The Guard, and proposes for Hejinian a certain lyric aporia which motivates the writing. A reading of this dilemma initially appears to return us to what Hejinian sees as Dante’s “challenge” of “capturing” experience into words: Dante says “I turn the face of my words towards the poem itself, and address it” .... The word “captives” refers to several things. First and most important, to capturing the world in words. I want to explain to myself the nature of the desire to do so, and wonder aloud if it is possible. The poem opens with a challenge to the poem itself and raises the lyric dilemma. 30 Here the impossibility of harnessing experience to language is not seen as inadequacy but as a desire located within language. More recently, Hejinian makes reference to an understanding of “dilemma” and “aporia” in the light of Jacques Derrida’s examination of the irresolvable doubts and hesitations that the reading of a text elicits.31 But most alluring in Hejinian’s early account of this problem in “Language and ‘Paradise’” is the suggestion that language generates a persistent “restlessness”. Hejinian frames this characteristic in “The Rejection of Closure” as a “Faustian” longing for knowledge and a continual “curiosity”.32 The form that this knowledge takes is constantly reviewed in the poetry. “Paradise” in Hejinian’s configuration suggests “a horizontal or spatial sense of time, eternity being that moment when time is transmuted into space”.33 Against this is the proposal of language as a constant perceptual encounter with the world that exerts a particular temporal pressure upon the work. Indeed, in a later essay Hejinian refers to the line as establishing a form of “perceptual rhythm” in her poetry.34 Viewed in this light, The Guard becomes less the quest for the “right road” lost, than a focus within a pattern of erring in an attempt to sustain the temporal mobility of the book. The work enfolds the domestic, the quotidian, and the political, added to a self-reflexive commentary within a labyrinthine enquiry of the lyric. When combined, these elements go beyond accretion to a saturation of the text which frequently overspills into aphorism. This tension in The Guard, between a constantly shifting process of perception and encounter, and an impulse towards aphoristic display which frequently slips, generates a thwarted and erratic mobility. Hejinian indicates that her intention is “to set the work in motion against itself, so to speak, to establish the inward concentricity, the pressure, the implosive momentum that stands for the conflict between time and space in the poem”. 35 Turning to the opening section of The Guard allows us to consider how this passage of erring can be read as an enquiry generated against its formal constraints: Can one take captives by writing – “Humans repeat themselves.” The full moon falls on the first. I “whatever interrupts.” Weather and air 30. “Language and ‘Paradise’”, 91. 31. See, for example, Hejinian’s “Reason”, in The Language of Inquiry, 337-54. 32. The Language of Inquiry, 49. 33. “Language and ‘Paradise’”, 86. 34. “Line”, in The Language of Inquiry, 131-34, 133. Originally published in 1988. 35. “Language and ‘Paradise’”, 85.

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Nerys Williams drawn to us. The open mouths of people are yellow & red – of pupils. Cannot be taught and therefore cannot be. As a political leading article would offer to its illustrator. But they don’t invent they trace. You match your chair. Such hopes are set, aroused against interruption. Thus – in securing sleep against interpretation. Anyone who could believe can reveal it can conceal. A drive of remarks and short rejoinders. The seance or session. The concentric lapping. If the world is round & the gates are gone ... The landscape is a moment of time that has gotten into position. Why not arrive until dawn. Cannot be taught and therefore cannot be what human cunning can conceal. (11)

This extract reads as a constantly interrupted meditation. Propositions and aphorisms build up through parataxis as one sentence displaces another. The opening is preoccupied with ideas of restraint, enclosure, focus and pedagogy. Hejinian comments that The Guard is “about words .… It’s words who are guards. And users of words. Do they guard us or do they guard their things? And are they keeping something in or something out?”36 There are certainly rules and constraints acknowledged in this section – actions are “repeated”, anything that “Cannot be taught” “cannot be”, and we are told “they don’t invent they trace”. Even the cartoon is prompted, if not guided, by the rhetoric of the political leading article. We can reconnect the “leading article” with the prominence of “one” “first” and “I” in the opening lines. Evidently, Hejinian’s poetry places a troubled focus on the authority of the static, single speaking subject. But this section’s position on the “I” or “whatever interrupts” is ambiguous. The broaching of a lyric dilemma presents us with a contradictory pose of “hopes”, which are somehow “aroused against interruption”. In “Two Stein Talks”, Hejinian had indicated that she resists William James’s conceptualization of consciousness as a stream of thought or a certain “continuum”. Consciousness, Hejinian remarks “often does appear to be broken up, discontinuous – sometimes radically, abruptly and disconcertingly so”.37 Importantly in “Language and ‘Paradise’”, the poet suggests that the lyric “appears to seek to extend the continuity of consciousness”. 38 Read within the context of the poetics, this section enacts an ambivalence towards a 36. Hejinian, “Comments for Manuel Brito”, in The Language of Inquiry, 177-98, 196. Originally published in 1992. 37. The Language of Inquiry, 103. 38. “Language and ‘Paradise’”, 95.

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pressure for continuity that is associated not only with the lyric form but also with the narrative ambition of the poetry book. Indeed, there is the suggestion here that this pressure towards continuity, or what Veronica Forrest-Thomson calls the “naturalisation” of poetic language, would “conceal” or deny an interpretative freedom. We could even extend this sense of “denial” to a repression of a latent meaning that remains condensed or hidden in “securing sleep against interpretation”.39 Although this line may not point us definitively towards Freud’s “Dream-Work”, it does evoke a preoccupation with a trace or encryption which the text may indeed “guard”.40 We could even re-inscribe this reading within Hamlet’s equivocation of “To sleep perchance to dream”, which unravels a further aspect of a lyric “dilemma” as a paralysis between intention and action that is latent in the figuration of the book. Certainly in the opening of The Guard, Hejinian is suspicious of any claim for a lyric continuity – or extension of the lyric consciousness which might appear to smother the provocative imbrication of meaning inherent in the text. But is it enough to relegate her ambition to a focus on a poetics of play and deferral? The preoccupation with authority in the opening of the extract suggests that there is a purposive intentionality at work. The Guard indicates that the lyrical impulse towards continuity must not simply be read as a narrative of progress. This drive towards progress is associated with a display of authority, and there are already indications that Hejinian reads this display as a censorial proviso upon her composition. The close of the extract returns us to more familiar intertextual territory. We are certainly in a Danteesque landscape with its indication of “the gates are gone”. There is also an invitation here to an errant passage of “concentric lapping”, and the momentum of section appears to accelerate with its awareness to the world locatable outside of the book: “The landscape is a moment of time / that has gotten in position.” But this “surplus” or saturation in the text is once more thwarted by the repeated execution of the aphorism: “Cannot be taught.” This gnomic statement is then undermined by the reference to a certain “human cunning”. Reading this line intertextually, this could be a reference to an Edenic fall, as human curiosity becomes human error and a banishment outside the “gates”, a proposition which is eerily evoked later in the poem as a resurrection of ghosts “longing to have their feet fit in boots. / And finish in Eden” (15). Moving away from a purely citational reading, the poetry strikes a warning against a predetermined itinerary. The pedagogical context alerts us to an alternative poetics which is not predisposed to asserting claims to authority or definitive knowledge: this proposition is later reinforced in the work by the suspicion of a claim to poetic mastery or authority; “what I wanted was nothing to do with monuments” (29). While a poetics of erring through a serpentine wandering in the text serves to counter the problems of rhetorical performance, Hejinian’s work is attuned to an interplay within the constraints of the conventions of the poetry book. Erring then offers a method of interrogating established conventions without a dependency on an overarching commentary or authoritative critique. Furthermore, Hejinian’s ambition in The Guard seems less about fetishizing the indeterminacies of the text than

39. See Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice, Manchester, 1978. 40. At the time of writing, Hejinian is engaged in an extensive work entitled The Book of a Thousand Eyes, “a night work”.

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examining the tensions that exist between a desire towards restless momentum, a pithy aphoristic commentary, and the formal configuration of the composition. Turning finally to a later section from The Guard may help to elucidate these claims. The following excerpt bears a striking resemblance to the performance of an operatic aria, albeit an aria which attempts to include the mundane and the overlooked details of daily life: Loosely a bullfrog exits a pond My heart did suck ... to fidget, soothed ... by seawater, restless ... against the unplugged phone. Barking up the street in a rainstorm as a rose with ardent jiggling stands. A jackhammer shatters the pavement – was this repression radiant with static and a single dog. However the lawnmower is idling outdoors ... it is like slowly throwing oneself ... as if simply to walk into arms ... so much restlessness because one is hungry. The tongue becomes observant and the tongue gets tough inevitably, like a fruitskin. Now it migrates (I hear the pen pat as I come to the end of the phrase and make a comma) in G-minor. Spring and convention ... the ringing in my ears is fear of finishing ... in a bus, but the rhapsodic rider-driver, springing invention ... (poetry is not solitude). So she tells me she loves adjectives ... that love is emotional restlessness ... it mobilizes in modesty ... bathed in modesty ... (the window is waterish) ... we are reserved in vehement strings, retraced, retracted and sometimes reversed exclusively for it. (28) The opening of this section is overwhelmingly dense with phonetic resonance and glossolalia; there is an onomatopoeic wallowing in the poem. Reading the resonance of sound signifiers, an associative evocation is built up through the bodily and the sensual. Scanning the poem, an association is formed from the membrane of the bullfrog’s skin to the beating heart and the physiological implication for speech as the tongue thickens – “the skin gets tough”. The Guard suggests that the ardent “jiggling” and “restlessness” of this section is working against the implied “repressive” rules of genre, suggested by “Spring and convention” and “the fear of finishing”. The humorous dramatic portrait of the lawnmower “idling outdoors” and the emotive response it elicits “it is like slowly throwing oneself”, evokes or even conforms to the narrative of the tragic heroine in a libretto. But this melodramatic scene of erotic love is transposed to an insatiable desire for linguistic description, “so much restlessness

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because one is hungry”. This tension between the references to technique and a simultaneity of composition, comes to a climax in “(I hear the pen pat as I come to the end / of the phrase and make a comma) in G-minor”. Equally, we could apply this simultaneous examination of composition within the confines of governing rules to the frequent intrusions of “slipped” aphorisms in the text. It is significant that in her revision of “Language and ‘Paradise’” for The Language of Inquiry, Hejinian adds a pertinent note on the aphorism: I wanted to resist the synthesizing tendency of the syllogism and the aphorism; I wanted to subvert the power of “therefore” and, wherever one of a series of terms (sentences) might threaten to subsume others (the sort of sacrifice that the dialectical tend to make in its quest for categorical clarity), to deny it the capacity to do so.41 This seems an important gesture to make, since Hejinian attempts to protect her own work from the reading of aphorism as pedagogy. Of course, we cannot read the aphorisms straight – as proverbial or common-knowledge epithets. In a later essay, “Strangeness”, the criteria for the aphorism is the communication of knowledge in “a mode that condenses material”.42 This impetus towards delivering knowledge is skewed in the design of Hejinian’s own aphoristic impulse. Yet there is a contrariness, even a willful defiance, within The Guard towards the totalising import of its own aphoristic texture. In this section we are told “Poetry is not solitude”, even though the opening draws attention to the “unplugged phone”. Hejinian’s playfulness should not be ignored, and the “misappropriation” of aphorisms does generate humour. Take for example the line which almost echoes a popular ballad, with its beginning “she tells me she loves –” but what does she love? “adjectives”? This bathos is further punctured by the grandiose statement of “love is emotional restlessness”. Bearing in mind that this scene is played out against a backdrop of “vehement strings”, what we seem to have is a troubadour’s lament in a suburbia of the jackhammer, circuit traffic and the barking dog. In concluding, I will suggest that considering the passage of the book as a form of erring allows us to approach The Guard as circumnavigating claims of epic authority. Erring also promotes a consideration of the composition itself as a form of enquiry. While a provisional poetics (or a poetics which is not predetermined in advance), does not offer definitive solutions to problems of authority and pedagogy in the text, it does alert the reader to the enabling possibilities inherent in the book as a site of composition. Finally, although The Guard does not refute its mechanisms of containment, erring offers a productive strategy for testing out the interplay and tensions between the process of composition and governing rules.

41. “Language and ‘Paradise’”, in Language of Inquiry, 68. 42. The Language of Inquiry, 154. Originally published in 1989.

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PROMETHEANS UNBOUND: TOUCHING BOOKS IN JORIE GRAHAM’S SWARM AND SUSAN HOWE’S “SCATTERING AS BEHAVIOUR TOWARD RISK”

NICK SELBY

PANTHEA: What veiled form sits on that ebon throne? The veil has fallen. ASIA: PANTHEA: I see a mighty darkness Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom Dart round, as light from the meridian sun, Ungazed upon and shapeless: neither limb, Nor form, nor outline: yet we feel it is A living Spirit. Percy Bysshe Shelley1 Is this then a touch? Quivering me to a new identity. Walt Whitman2 If Jorie Graham’s sequence Swarm (2000) and Susan Howe’s poem-sequence “Scattering As Behaviour Toward Risk” (from Singularities [1990]) can be read as radical and innovative deconstructions of the very idea of the American poetry book – and this essay argues that they can – then this is largely because they share a fascination with the processes and effects of textual revision. These are poetic sequences on the rebound: they bounce off at sometimes bizarre trajectories from the texts they have (in Graham’s words) “Severely trimmed and cleared”. 3 In this sense they tell the history of the American poetry book “slant”. For, as we shall see, it is especially in their slanted engagement with Walt Whitman (in the case of Graham) and Emily Dickinson (in the case of Howe) that these sequences seek to disrupt, and thereby question, the “normal” contingencies of American poetic history. Both Graham and Howe discover in these sequences a poetics and graphics of process that lies underneath Whitman’s and Dickinson’s writing of a “typically American” poetry. The force of the formal inventiveness of these sequences lies precisely in their

1. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: A Variorum Edition, ed. Lawrence John Zillman, Seattle, 1959, 208 (Act II, scene iv). 2. Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy, Harmondsworth, 1986, 91 (“Song of Myself”). 3. Jorie Graham, Swarm, New York, 2000, 3. References for subsequent quotations from this collection are given in the text, where page numbers refer to this edition.

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unveiling of the powerful play of literary authority that is embedded in Emersonian formulations of America itself as a great poem.4 In fact, the key metaphors of these two sequences, those of swarming and of scattering, might be seen as ones that describe their actions upon prior American poetic texts. Because they work poetically through acts of textual displacement and dispersal, they both give explicit – and disruptive – attention to the way in which America has bound itself to the idea of the poem. Despite being poetic sequences they contest the very idea of poetic sequence. In so doing they set out to challenge the sort of hermeneutic pattern, the telos, upon which American literary history might be seen to be raised. They counter, that is, teleological models of poetic enquiry. Indeed, as this essay will argue, they resist the closed forms and meanings of teleological thought by insisting upon a poetics of error and misreading, of textual swarmings and scatterings. Equally, then, such metaphors describe the dislocated and diasporic imagination that runs throughout America’s trimming and clearing of its cultural wilderness, throughout its imagination of itself as a new, quivering, cultural identity. Graham’s and Howe’s texts are therefore ones that struggle to find a poetic measure of what is written over by America’s ideological grounding in Enlightenment rationality. Suffused with imagery of light, and enlightenment, these are both texts that see such a struggle as properly Promethean. They continue and develop what Susan Howe has described as Dickinson’s “Promethean ambition”.5 The risky but strategic behaviour of poetic scattering in these sequences animates an attempt by them both to bring back into the light of poetic investigation the unbound pages of the (idea of the) American poetry book. Such poetic behaviours are undeniably risky, and this essay argues that such risks allow Graham’s and Howe’s texts strategically to deconstruct the book as rational discourse within the American poetic imagination. However, and developing upon this, perhaps such strategies might also allow us to think about the ways in which Graham and Howe are (deliberately or not) working within a distinctly female poetics. For – despite the sort of “bookish flavour” that Peter Quartermain has described in Howe’s work, and that is readily apparent in Graham’s – it would seem that these sequences seek to oppose a masculine theoria with a poetics of touch, of hesitant refusals and unveilings, of textual processes.6 These sequences can therefore be seen as embodying just those sorts of poetic strategies that, according to Julia Kristeva, make apparent the way in which “the semiotic – the precondition of the symbolic – is revealed as that which also destroys the symbolic”.7 Indeed, Susan Howe has described her poetics of typographical experiment as an attempt to release her texts from “masculine linguistic formations”, that which Kristeva aligns with the “symbolic”. Marjorie Perloff has properly pointed out that since similar techniques are employed by male poets, such experiments may well be “more generational than … gendered”, but it seems to me that the risks involved for Howe (and Graham) in their experimental poetic behaviours are high precisely because of their confronting of 4. “America”, Emerson notes, “is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination”, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet” (1844), in Emerson’s Essays, ed. Sherman Paul, London, 1980, 224. This is echoed by Whitman in his “Preface” to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass where he states, “the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” (Whitman, 741). 5. Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson, Berkeley, 1985, 18. 6. Peter Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe, Cambridge, 1992, 182. 7. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, translated by Margaret Waller, New York, 1984, 50.

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a gendered hierarchy of literary value.8 Howe’s point is, perhaps, that while a female poet (her model is Dickinson) has a particularly agonistic relationship to male literary formations (the idea of the book), such a relationship is not exclusive to the female writer. Her dismissal of Hélène Cixous’s imperatives about gender and writing (that “woman must write woman. And man, man”) in her study My Emily Dickinson certainly seems to indicate her sense that men too can, and should, challenge the “masculine linguistic formations” that their poetics inhabits. 9 For Graham too – as for Cixous – such a challenge entails a risky reformulation of the relationship between the textual and the bodily.10 The first half of this essay, then, will examine the effects of such a reformulation in Swarm. Most especially it will focus on the ways in which Graham’s sequence re-writes, and thus writes against, Whitman’s masculinist romance of the poet, of America, and of the book. And in its second half, this essay will consider Susan Howe’s dramatically typographical re-writing of American literary history – her poetic scattering of the leaves of the American poetry book – as an experimental “reading through” of (in particular) Dickinson.

II Although Swarm’s broken locutions ask us to attend to a moment-by-moment disruption of apparently masculine linguistic formations such as sequence, narrative and logical relation, they also (like Howe above) deny the imperative tone of Cixous’s assertion that woman must write woman. Instead they seem to trace an undoing of such an assured poetic subjectivity, a questioning of just what such a sense of selfhood and gender might entail. Swarm is, above all else, speculative rather than imperative, and part of its speculative tone is due to the way in which it continually seeks to test how the poet’s sense of the corporeal is a site of disjunctive poetic enquiry. In the poem “from The Reformation Journal (2)”, for example, the poet’s noticing of “a pile of wretched flesh” leads to a series of questions – in successive yet discrete poetic lines – that swarm, like flies in the light of poetic enquiry, around the status of the poem’s first-person voice: The sunlight very still on everything animate and inanimate making a sound like it is enough that you exist Is it not? Is not the desire now to lose all personal will? Come evil, my first person is hidden. (88)

8. Susan Howe, in The Line in Poetry, eds Robert Frank and Henry Sayre, Urbana, IL, 1988, 209; Marjorie Perloff, Poetry On and Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions, Evanston, IL, 1998, 166. 9. My Emily Dickinson, 12. 10. In her famous essay “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Cixous describes women’s writing as a struggle to “return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her” by a logocentric patriarchy. See New French Feminisms: An Anthology, eds Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, Brighton, 1981, 250.

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Here, as both poetic lines and poetic selfhood are picked open, what is at issue is not so much an animating sunlight of reformation, a poetic piecing-together of things, as a breaking-down of that animating light into its constituent elements. Rational enquiry is, in this poem (as throughout the sequence generally), dismantled. This is signalled by the reference to the death of Socrates near the end of the poem, and in the image of the poet’s body becoming, like an unbound book, “unstitched”. The “path of thought” is “now too bright”, and Graham’s poetic fire feels like a stolen glance at a hidden first person, a “sleeping body”: And the narration which relates the things (but they must

be true)

The path of thought also now too bright So that its edges cut So that I’m writing this in the cold keeping the parts from finding the whole again page after page, unstitched, speaking for sand Look I push the book off my desk Into the flood “Let him be prepared to give the poison twice or even thrice if necessary” As when feeling you watch my sleeping body (89). Graham here risks a poetics in which the book – and all the bodies of knowledge and power it signals – is pushed “into the flood” of white paper between the poetic lines that announce its presence. Throughout Swarm such a collapsing of poetic subjectivity, and the subsequent questioning of the book’s own lyric authority (that power under which it operates as a poetic sequence), is repeatedly seen to be predicated upon a collapsing of the corporeal into the textual. In Swarm’s opening poem, another one entitled “from The Reformation Journal”, this alignment between body and text turns upon a questioning of what stays incorrupt in such a poetics of abbreviating and scattering. How divisible, it asks, is nature, the body, the book? The imagery in which this questioning is enacted evokes the sequence’s own inter-textual manoeuvering: “have reduced, have trimmed, have cleared, have omitted” (5). Whilst this exposes the sequence in its very first moments to considerable risk, it also establishes the poetic procedure of the sequence as a whole, that of sifting through remains, especially textual ones. Both textual and corporeal bodies (in the shape of – respectively – quotations from Thomas

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Traherne and Dickinson, and the address to “my beloved”) are, in the closing lines of this poem, subjected to a poetic act of disinterring in order to establish what remains: Oh my beloved I’m asking * More atoms, more days, the noise of the sparrows, of the universals * Yet colder here now than in * the atom still there at the bottom of nature * that we be founded on infinite smallness * “which occasions incorruption or immortality” * (incorruption because already as little as it can be) … “to all except anguish the mind soon adjusts” * have reduced, have trimmed, have cleared, have omitted * have abbreviations silently expanded * to what avail * explain asks to be followed explain remains to be seen (5) On the one hand, what remains to be seen is the rest of the book, the sequence that asks to be followed from here. In this sense Swarm is, from the outset, acutely aware of the hermeneutic patterns of reading that it evokes in order to interrogate. Explanation, Graham seems to imply, is bound in with the very idea of sequence. Turn the page, the poem demands: the book that follows will provide the explanation that you find so frustratingly absent on the page in front of you. On the other hand, though, the sequence’s playful intertextuality means that it becomes a site of lyric deferral, one of editorial processes in which the book becomes, so to speak, unbound in front of us. Graham’s announcement at the start of this poem – “I have reduced all to lower case. / I have crossed out passages. / I have severely trimmed and cleared” (3) – is a declaration of the principle of textual scattering that underpins the sequence. What, in effect, this presents us with are loose leaves, textual and bodily “remains”. Turn the page back again, the poem demands: the explanation is buried in the scattered remains turned up here. Indeed, much of the poetic pressure of the sequence lies in its interrupted sequentiality, in our physical act of turning back pages to locate phrases, themes, images repeated (or “trimmed and cleared”) from earlier in the book. This procedure demands an involvement in the text that most of Swarm’s reviewers have, seemingly, been unwilling to give. The belligerent opacity of lines such as those above led to outright dismissals of Graham’s high-risk poetic strategies. Lolita Lark’s fervent (and critically unformulated) attack on Swarm describes reading it as though “discovering a world filled with conspiracies of nonsense”; William

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Logan sees nothing more than “words hurled scrappily onto the page”; and although Ciaran Carson acknowledges that the book does seem to have “a theme, or an attitude ... of dislocation, of dismantling meaning” this, for him, ends up in “disappointing the reader rather than fulfilling any readerly expectation”. 11 These reviews all refuse to read Swarm as a sequence, and therefore see unevenness, obscurity, and difficulty as localized to a particular poem, rather than thematized throughout the book as a whole. They refuse, that is, to take seriously the risky vulnerability of the sequence. 12 They fail to acknowledge the way in which such poetic risks are central to Graham’s challenge to conventional ways of reading. She has noted, in an interview with Thomas Gardner, that poems with “a resistant or partially occluded surface compel us to read with a different part of our sensibility ... [they] frustrate frontal vision long enough to compel the awakening of the rest of the reading sensibility – intuition, the body”.13 By allowing her to engage a poetics of the body, then, such risks also allow her to write against what she describes as the “ending-dependence”, the teleological imperative, that lies underneath western Enlightenment rationality. 14 Swarm is undoubtedly an uneven, and at times forbiddingly dense, text. However, its dislocations and scrappiness animate not simply Graham’s efforts to write a sequence that seriously questions the very structures of teleological and sequential thinking, but one that also thereby seems to deliver a poetics that speaks from a position “underneath” such structures. Just under half the poems in Swarm are entitled “Underneath”, and these poems all suggest voices seeking the light from a position buried underground. Whether this be a compound figure of Persephone and Eurydice returning from the underworld in “Underneath (Upland)” who says “light swinging in the right hand of this me the follower / trying to overhear the low secret though not too hard / light touching everything / grace and slenderness of its touching” (17); or the punning Sybil, burning pages of the book, who says “Look you have to lift the match to it again / because this syllable is still intact” in “Underneath (Sybilline)” (25); or even Eurydice, again, returning into the light of the book “held up in the sun by your hands of dirt / which look from this distance like hands of fire / gripping their page yet not consuming it” in “Underneath (Eurydice)” (74); these figures are the textual and mythological remains that can be seen haunting the sequence. They are, of course, all women abused or deserted by men. Their poetic return into the light signals the return of the (lyric) repressed into the male realm of the (American poetry) book.

11. Lolita Lark, “Review of Swarm”, in The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities, XXI/3 (Summer 2000), at www.ralphmag.org/AA/jorie-graham.html; William Logan, “The Way of All Flesh”, in The New Criterion On Line, XVIII (September 1999-June 2000), at <www.newcriterion.com/archive/18/jun00/logan.htm>; Ciaran Carson, “A Lot of Buzzing Around the Bush”, in Poetry London, XXXVIII (Spring 2001), at <www.poetrylondon.co.uk/issue38.html>. 12. It should be noted, though, that Andrew Osborn’s positive review of Swarm for the Boston Review pays particular attention to the risks Graham takes in this sequence, and describes it as her “most vulnerable book to date”(Andrew Osborn, “Review of Swarm”, in Boston Review, XXV/1 [February/March 2000], at ). 13. Thomas Gardner, “An Interview with Jorie Graham”, in Denver Quarterly, XXVI/4 (Spring 1992), 99; reprinted in Thomas Gardner, Regions of Unlikeness: Explaining Contemporary Poetry, Lincoln and London, 1999, 232-33. 14. See Gardner, “Interview”, 84 (Unlikeness, 218). For a much fuller account of Graham’s poetic strategies for disrupting teleological thought, see my “‘A Columbus of the Imagination’: America, the Millennium and the Poetry of Jorie Graham”, in European Journal of American Culture, XIX/2 (Summer 2000), 96-111.

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The very nature of Swarm as a sequence, then, produces a complex and shifting deconstructive play amongst textual and mythological remains, and allows Graham to register the abject status of a woman’s poetic voice within American literary history. And, by extension, the sequence explores the abjection of the body in relation to those male powers that – in the words of Swarm’s jacket blurb – “human beings feel themselves to be ‘underneath’: God, matter, law, custom, the force of love”. Most strikingly, especially in terms of related imagery of books and bodies, this exploration takes place in relation to Whitman. Swarm deliberately sets out to test its opaque, or “partially occluded” textual surface, against Whitman’s poetic claims to transparency, that he is America’s “bard” “undraped”.15 Graham’s poetics in Swarm, in its struggle to compel a new reading sensibility, implies a womanly reading against the whole romance of the American book and poet that Whitman’s project implies. Whitman, in one of the last poems he wrote, sees himself emerging from the pages of his book into the embrace of his readers: My songs cease, I abandon them, From behind the screen where I hid I advance personally solely to you. Camerado, this is no book, Who touches this touches a man, (Is it night? are we here together alone?) It is I you hold and who holds you, I spring from the pages into your arms – decease calls me forth.16 Swarm seeks to suspend such a poetics of touch. For Graham, Whitman’s image of the poetry book, as that which allows you to touch his body as you touch its pages, seems complicit in a coercive poetic gesture. Despite – maybe because of – Whitman’s claim to “advance personally” from “behind the screen” of poetic subjectivity into corporeal identity, Swarm is suspicious of Whitman’s poetic touch, and seems to suggest that its manly embrace is a veil under which women’s poetic voices are silenced. By throwing attention on to its own resistant poetic surface, its scattered pages themselves like veils, Graham’s sequence attempts to unveil the oppressive maleness that underpins Whitman’s gesture of holding on to lyric subjectivity, his desire to be touched as a “man”. In fact, the imagery of rape and sexual coercion that haunts the voices of those women who, throughout Swarm, are depicted as “underneath”, returns repeatedly to questions of touch. Is this, then, a loving touch? Graham asks of the poem. In the insistently repeated imagery of touch and subjugation that runs through the sequence, she expects a different answer from that of Whitman. Here women are subject to an apparently violent poetic touch, one that strangles their voice: “lays his hand / onto her throat”; “my eyes – / (the only part of me / not yet held down / by you) … / your hand over my / mouth”; “a map of held back hands, gripped wrists”; “Have you not also let His hand stray / onto your throat?”17 Indeed, then, it would seem that Graham’s strangled and scattered text, with its buried voices speaking from 15. In the 1855 “Song of Myself” Whitman writes: “Who need be afraid of the merge? / Undrape …. You are not guilty to me, not stale or discarded” (Whitman, 681). 16. Whitman, 513 (“So Long!”). 17. The quotations are from the following poems in Swarm: “Two Days (5/2/97–5/3/97)”, 51; “Underneath (1)”, 62; “Probity”, 98; and “Eurydice on History”, 107-8.

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underneath, asks us to reformulate Whitman’s poetics as a question about what we do touch when we touch a poem, when a poem touches us. “Underneath (9)”, provides a slightly more extended example of this. This poem follows Persephone out of the underworld (“Explain the six missing seeds” [8]) and through the annual cycle of the four seasons that her myth portrays. Susan Gubar has suggested that Persephone is “the central mythic figure for women” and this poem, the third in the sequence, introduces her as Swarm’s central mythic figure, thereby denoting Swarm’s troubled articulation of a woman’s poetic voice.18 Persephone’s experience of being buried in the soil and buried in a text (“like a right quotation”) in this poem, resonates powerfully against Whitman’s sense of the book as the body from which he looks up at his reader, his designation of us as the “Listener up there” at the end of “Song of Myself”: blurry, my love, like a right quotation, wanting so to sink back down, you washing me in soil now, my shoulders dust, my rippling dust, Look

I’ll scrub the dirt

listen.

Up here how will I (not) hold you. Where is the dirt packed in again

around us

between us

obliterating difference (10) The address to “my love” here (which is echoed by the sequence’s frequent address to a “Beloved”) is marked by a wariness towards the “blurry” “obliterating [of] difference” that Whitman’s interpenetrative poetics of Democratic camaraderie might be seen to espouse. Persephone’s abjection, in which her body and her desires “sink back down” into the soil, is in marked contrast to Whitman’s “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love” which expresses his poetic hope for America’s democratic union.19 Indeed, this image of Persephone is a far cry from the leaning and loafing of Whitman’s poetic persona, marked as it is by woman’s traditional domestic duties of “washing” and “scrubbing”. Near the end of “Underneath (13)” Graham’s methodology of poetic reformation (“have reduced, have trimmed, have cleared, have omitted”) is played out in relation to Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”. Again, Whitman’s rhetoric of poetic enlightenment (“the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water”20) is severely undercut by Graham’s terse imagery of a silenced poetic voice: “hand over mouth / let light arrive” (104). Whereas Whitman’s poem celebrates the ability of poetry to bring together poet and reader though centuries 18. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, New Haven, 1979, 302. 19. Whitman, 737. 20. Ibid., 191.

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apart, Graham is worried by the ways in which that celebratory rhetoric actually veils the body, the self and one’s tongue (especially as a woman). “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” declares, “It avails not, time nor place – distance avails not” because it assumes that the poem is incorruptible, a textual body sustained by a shared corporeal experience, “I too had receiv’d identity of my body, / That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew that I should be of my body”.21 With its poetic behaviour of textual scattering Swarm, however, seeks to unveil this assumption. “Underneath (13)” marks the “impassable gap” between poem and self, voice and text, precisely that “distance” which Whitman’s “It avails not” seeks to draw a veil – a page of the American poetry book – over. It is thus a poem in which Graham, returning to the question asked in the opening poem of Swarm “to what avail”, sees her poetic body as scattered, edited, silenced and beside itself. It unstitches, that is, the pages of Whitman’s poetic fantasy of America, that “who touches” his book “touches a man”: where does it say where does it say this is the mother tongue there is in my mouth a ladder climb down presence of world impassable

gap

pass I am beside myself you are inside me We exist

as history

Meet me (105)

III Susan Howe’s startling poetic effects signal the ways in which her texts are continually beside themselves in their efforts to unpick America’s coercive literary histories. The wildly visual strategies of textual scattering in her sequence “Scattering as Behaviour Toward Risk” display the disruptive ways in which her awareness of text “as history” unbinds her poetics from the idea of the American poetry book. Like Graham with Whitman, this, I shall argue, takes place in Howe’s poetic negotiation with the legacy of Dickinson.

21. Ibid., 191, 193.

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Howe’s fascinating study My Emily Dickinson details her struggle to come to terms with the poetic and cultural legacy of Dickinson. From the outset Howe’s study of Dickinson is a study of ownership. Howe both examines the claim of nineteenthcentury American culture upon Dickinson (through her examination of “My Life had Stood – a loaded Gun –” as a poetic encoding of the Civil War), and her own proprietorship, as a female American poet, of Dickinson’s legacy. Howe stakes a claim upon Dickinson’s poetic space here, seeing her as my Emily Dickinson, because she is fascinated by the mapping of that space as poetic property. Indeed Howe’s fascination with Dickinson in this study is with the process by which Dickinson’s texts have been appropriated by the very idea of the American poem. 22 Her reading of Dickinson charts especially the variety of ways in which the disruptively graphic and seemingly immediate physical effects of Dickinson’s poetic manuscripts have become stabilized – owned – by the supposedly authoritative readings of her made by editors such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Thomas Johnson, and Ralph Franklin. In short, Howe’s Emily Dickinson provides the ground for an examination of the relationship between nonconformity and authority in a history of the writing of the American book. This play of power between who we are in a text (our own selves) and who owns the text of ourselves is a key trope in My Emily Dickinson, and with it Howe seeks to re-engage a radically indeterminate Dickinson – a poet who “tells it slant” in a poetics of scattered leaves and for whom the “Truth must dazzle gradually”. 23 Howe’s reading of Dickinson argues therefore for a poetics of process and possibility rather than of ownership and rigid hierarchies: Categories and hierarchies suggest property. My voice formed from my life belongs to no one else. What I put into words is no longer my possession. Possibility has opened. The future will forget, erase, or recollect and deconstruct every poem.24 For Howe, the Dickinsonian slant is a figure for the opening up of texts and their possibilities: the diagonal slash between either / or, rather than a mark of the privileging of one term over another. The trope, then, of textual ownership, of poetic property and propriety, and its transgression, that Howe discovers in her Emily Dickinson allows her to examine the process of textual play that an American poetics can be seen to perform. This is evident in Howe’s description of Dickinson, “Forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she pulled text from text”.25 So, I am examining the processes of reading, misreading and re-writing Dickinson – of pulling text from text – that are exposed both in and by (a) reading (of) Susan Howe’s poetry. My aim, however, is not to give a “straight” reading of the influence of Dickinson on Howe’s poetry. Rather than simply pointing to passages in Howe and noting how they derive from passages in Dickinson, my aim is to demonstrate how 22. See also her essay “These Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values”, in Susan Howe, The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, Hanover, NH, and London, 1993, 131-53. 23. Emily Dickinson, P1129, in Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, London, 1970, 507. 24. Howe, My Emily Dickinson, 13. 25. Ibid., 29.

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the energies of reading (and writing) through Dickinson are evident, indeed crucial, in Howe’s work. I will argue, therefore, that such energies derive from an insistent questioning of the role of poetry in constructing the spaces we inhabit, be they textual and cultural, domestic and bodily. It is in this sense that Howe’s poetry throws a “certain slant of light” upon that of Dickinson. Poetically to tell it slant is the generative tension that informs Howe’s poetry, that which underpins the process of textual sifting and recovery from which her poems are made, and that is made apparent by the resolutely resistant textual surface that faces us when we read (or perhaps more appropriately, “look at”) one of her poems. The slant is, for Howe, an image of our participation in a continual textual process of slippage and revision, of reading, re-reading and mis-reading. It allows us to engage an experimental poetics that explores and defines the personal as the political. This sense of the slantedness of poetry’s acts is most apparent in the poem “Scattering as Behaviour Toward Risk” from her 1990 collection Singularities. This poem demonstrates that the slant itself, when read as a sign of that which is oblique, can be seen to figure an abject struggle between self and other, between inner and outer worlds, a struggle that unites Howe and Dickinson (and Jorie Graham) in an exploration of the boundaries and limits of poetic and bodily experience. At the opening of the third section of “Scattering as Behaviour Toward Risk” we encounter the phrase “Own political literature”. 26 Decontextualized grammatically and, apparently, physically, this is a phrase that is both riddling and interrogating. It appears to be a text pulled from another text, and its very indeterminacy is an index of the wider concern of this poem as a whole to trace the delicate and complex relationship of ownership between our personal and political selves. Is the phrase a question? If so it seems to ask: in what ways can we think of ourselves as owning political literature? As individuals? As a nation? Or perhaps it asks: in what ways are we owned by political literature? How does such writing define us? This phrase, though, can also be read as an imperative statement, one that propels us into the historic and political drama of collective and individual voices that seems to be evoked in the following lines of the poem: “Stoic iconic Collective / Soliloquy and the aside” (65). Such poetic behaviour, a sort of risky textual scattering that slants the text in front of us, is deeply embedded in an American poetics. For, like Dickinson, it pitches text against wilderness, poem into the record of civilization, and language against nothingness. Its poetics becomes, as Howe’s poem states slightly later, the “Violent order of a world”. Perhaps the most striking expression of the violent textual order of Howe’s poem is the way in which certain sections (those I take to be sections one, four, seven, and eight of the sequence) are, literally, scattered over the page. And what these sections make manifest are the textually and historically explosive energies in which the poem’s composition is grounded. What we see so very clearly in these sections (as a sort of counterpoint to what we can only dimly read there) is the very action of the poetic text laying claim to, and thereby defining, the ground upon which it finds itself. In these sections the poem’s tension hovers visually between the cluttered and the scattered. It charts a movement between a densely palimpsestic text and the open, clear, space of the white page that surrounds the words. Effectively, this allows us to envisage the forces of violence and order that underpin America’s occupation of the so-called wilderness of its land. The visual impact, and confusion, of these sections of 26. Susan Howe, Singularities, Hanover, NH, and London, 1990, 65.

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the poem force us to recollect, perhaps deconstruct, the ideological force with which America has written itself into the human record. So, for example, in section four we can just about see that the names of natural commodities such as fish – “Herring” and “Salmon” – alongside metal “Ore” and “Bisket” (presumably an archaic spelling of biscuit that evokes the syllable “Risk”) have been written over the words “best ordered commonwealth” (66). This is a gesture that seems to demonstrate how the founding ideal of America as utopia (what [Thomas] “More imagined”) has always been shot through with, or perhaps even compromised by, the desire for material wealth. Indeed this constellation of political and monetary desires is baldly stated in section five of the sequence, “The invention of law / the codification of money // Democracy and property” (67). In short, the poem attends to the fact that American space, whether real or ideal, has always been performed as a profoundly contested, and conflicted, text of ownership. Fascinatingly, in the final two sections of “Scattering as Behaviour Toward Risk”, such conflict and balance find visual form as actual poetic slants on the page. In section seven, the line “Wedged destiny shed [cancel whole] halter measure mutiny Act Wars” (69) looks as though it has been shot through the text that surrounds it. It is, as it were, an arrow of poetic mutiny in a textual act of war that has scattered words in its wake. So, although it seems that this slant should be silenced, cancelled whole, it actually silences the words around it, rendering them “Mute”, verbal accidents that spin away from each other on a linguistic sea of assonance: a “fluke” caught up in a poetic “squall” that struggles to remain “fluent”, the scattered remnants of history told slant, “wedged destiny”. If this line can be seen to break up the poem’s fluid textual surface, then this is precisely because of its visually halting “measure”, a slanted movement that can also be read as a “halter” that binds poetic and historical processes together, in ideological shackles. As Howe’s poem tells it slant, by animating its very process of pulling text from text, it here uncovers the ground of enforced silences, hesitancies and violence upon which America has sought to trace the text of itself. It is precisely this fraught relationship between figure and ground that is the key to reading Howe’s as an American poetics, even one that, in Dickinson’s phrase, sees “New Englandly”.27 In fact, those American writings that have consistently fascinated Howe (and provided the textual “ground” for her own work), from Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative, Hope Atherton’s Wanderings and Cotton Mather’s Magnalia to the writings of Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau and Dickinson are all concerned with American ideology’s mission into the wilderness, with the writing, as it were, of America’s story onto its land. To an extent these are all studies in the abject relationship between America as a real and as a written space. In fact, Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection provides a very useful means of reading the tense relationship of the American poem to the American land. For Kristeva, the abject is that which “casts itself out from itself”, and this image has a fascinating corollary with the trope of scattering around which Howe’s poem is organized.28 Though such scattering describes the poem’s textual behaviour, and produces what Peter Quartermain has called a “littered” text, it is also an image of the diasporic scattering

27. Dickinson, P285, 132. 28. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon Roudiez, New York, 1982, 5.

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of people from which America is constituted and which is the ground of the American imagination.29 This sense of the poem as an attempt to negotiate the abject space between America as text and as political and historical fact is supported by its closing section and by the epigraph that appears on its title page. The epigraph, from William Tyndale’s 1530 translation of Deuteronomy, describes the tribes of Israel in abject relation to God’s determination, “I haue determened to scater thē therowout the worlde”. This provides a clear analogue for the colonial appropriation of North America by scattered peoples believing themselves chosen for God’s mission. Additionally, though, Tyndale’s words, with their archaic spellings, remind us that such acts of historical appropriation are always, inevitably, linguistically inflected. And Tyndale’s text itself, one of the earliest translations of the Bible into modern English, may be thus thought of as instrumental in the scattering of God’s law across the English-speaking world. Here Howe addresses the poetic scattering of The Book itself, and the apparently loose-leaved arrangement of the sequence seems directly to challenge the authority of the book. When we turn to the final section of the poem we are faced, again, with a resolutely scattered text. However, the text is also significantly stabilized by the capitalized words “THE REVISER”, which seem thematically to encapsulate the textual process of the sequence. The disposition of the poem’s slanted lines on the page here are a ghostly memory – a revising – of the shape of the coffin that appears on the poem’s title page, beneath the Tyndale quotation. But this “Record” is slippery, dispersed into a “Human”, perhaps all too “human!” desire to “Record”. The act of revision, which is after all an act of telling it slant, hovers between noun and verb and thereby deconstructs the “authoritative” record, placing it in editorial parentheses. This poetic ground is strewn with the partial and scattered records of human endeavour, and is itself a figure for the process of revision by which the secret facts buried in history’s coffin come to be disinterred. But, we are told, “They cumbered the ground” (70). In this scattered text, this colonized land, textual and bodily spaces sit uneasily together. The record is cumbersome. Finally, the “halo of wilderness” that Howe detects in Dickinson’s fascicles is another function of both Dickinson’s and Howe’s slanted poetic ownership of (and by) America’s broken language.30 It is also another figure for that troubling light – of the book, of sexual appropriation – towards which Jorie Graham’s muted female voices struggle: hand over mouth let light arrive let the past strike us and go drift

undo (104)

Just as Dickinson’s “certain slant of light” illuminates the wilderness by delineating that “internal difference / Where the Meanings, are”, Howe’s poetics undoes us even 29. Quartermain, 191. 30. Howe, “Illogic”, in The Birth-Mark, 136.

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as it sets the book adrift.31 Her slanted poetic reading of Dickinson, then, means that she becomes a “reviser” in a poetics that explores the edges, limits and barriers of America’s abject relationship to its poetries, to the idea of the American poetry book. In their respective American poetics, both Howe and Graham touch the American poetry book in order to scatter their poetic light amongst shattered and mute remains. They are Prometheans unbound: The perfect replica speaks to you now. The woman of clay; I wanted to be broken, make no mistake. I wanted to enter light – and everywhere its mad colors. To be told best not to touch. To touch. (110)

31. Dickinson, P258, 118.

THE BOOK AS ARCHITECTURE CHARLES BERNSTEIN Architectural terms are more than just metaphors for reading, yet it’s difficult to track the parallels without getting impossibly abstract or painfully elusive. You can start with the idea of “grammatical space” and Louis Kahn’s idea that material – and I would include verbal material – is “spent light”. Something of the darkness of reading comes out in this phrase, a reminder of the opaque spaces of the interior that poetry can aspire toward just as easily as back away from: the sightless interrogative of writing, its blackening of the page a resistance to the oppressive insistence of visibility. Aldo Rossi’s topology of fractures, contaminations, areas of waiting, and intermediate/non-determinate units are as much terms for a new prosody as a new architecture. The constructing of grammatical space through various forms of sequencing pervades all levels of writing, from the ordering of syllables, words, phrases, lines and stanzas within a poem to the overall arrangement of poems in a book. Poetic composition consists of a series of displacements constantly opening up upon new emplacements; or, to speak literally of metaphors, composition consists of measuring or registering a series of dislocations that produces the poem’s motion or kinesis. In organizing my books, including this one,1 I’ve tried to invent different ways of ordering the individual pieces, avoiding, where possible, both chronological and thematically developmental patterns. For example, borders between poems are occasionally confused: sometimes a stanza of a long poem may not be formally different from a discrete short poem in the same book, or a short poem in one book becomes part of a longer poem in another. Various sequencings of contrasting styles or rhetorics or shapes attracts me as a model. I’ve sometimes imagined my collections of poems to be something like those oversized books of samples that used to be in tailor’s shops, with small swatches of different fabrics – one page with a dozen types of herringbone and another with different thicknesses. My father, who was in the textile business, used to have dozens of such books in his office, in fact it was probably the kind of book he knew best and took the greatest interest in. Yet my own temptation is to allow for maximum contrast from one poem to another, that by means of this conflict of modes I can bring into greater audibility musical or aesthetic or emotional preoccupations not otherwise articulable. Sometimes I think of a book as a “group” show; but I want the formal divergences among the poems to produce an “inner” space that seems impossible to evoke if there is too much uniformity among the elements. Organizing a book is something like constructing a durational tunnel that a reader can ride through, like riding through a multichambered House of Horrors at an amusement park. The creation of durational spaces in a poem – great but empty halls, A version of this essay was first published in Harvard Review 1 (1992) and this version is taken from Bernstein’s My Way: Speeches and Poems, Chicago, 1999. It is reprinted here by kind permission of Charles Bernstein. 1. Bernstein refers here to My Way. (Editors’ note.)

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narrow corridors, closets, enclosed pools, formal picture galleries, off and on ramps, pulleys and trap doors between levels – produces an internal or negative (in the sense of inverted or inner) architecture. – You are entering a building through a dark and musty subbasement; proceeding a few steps, you trip onto an elevator platform and are whisked to what is something like the 23rd floor, where you are stepping out into an abandoned soundstage for a 1930 production of a Fenimore Cooper story; sighting a ladder, you climb up a flight onto a floor filled with hundreds of irregularly shaped cubicles populated by women dressed as Matadors .... Against the Romantic idea of poems as transport, I prefer to imagine poems as spatializations and interiorizations – blueprints of a world I live near to but have yet to occupy fully. Building impossible spaces in which to roam, unhinged from the contingent necessities of durability, poems and the books they make eclipse stasis in their insatiable desire to dwell inside the pleats and folds of language.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Charles Altieri teaches twentieth-century American literature at the University of California-Berkeley. Author of Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1989) as well as several other books, his most recent book is The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects, published by Cornell University Press. Ron Callan is a college lecturer in the School of English, University College, Dublin. His book, William Carlos Williams and Transcendentalism: Fitting the Crab in a Box, was published by Macmillan/St Martin’s in 1992. He is developing a project on the work of Louis Zukofsky. He was Chair of the Irish Association for American Studies (1997-2003) and is one of the editors of the Irish Journal of American Studies. Lucy Collins is a Lecturer in English at St Martin’s College, Carlisle where she teaches modern literature. She has published essays on twentieth-century Irish poetry, including the work of Austin Clarke and Thomas Kinsella, as well as on contemporary women poets. She has also published on American poetry of the 1950s and 1960s and is an editor of “American Poetry since 1945” in the Annotated Bibliography of English Studies. Eldrid Herrington lectures in the School of English, University College, Dublin, and she is a Government of Ireland Post-Doctoral Fellow and an NEH-AAS Fellow. Michael Hinds is a lecturer in American and English Literature at the Mater Dei Institute, Dublin City University. He edits the journal REA, and is on the editorial committee of the Irish Journal of American Studies. Currently he is co-editing an anthology of contemporary American poetry, Quantum Leaves (Lumen), and is working on a study of American poetry’s uses and abuses of the classics. Stephen Matterson is Senior Lecturer in English at Trinity College, Dublin. He has published widely on aspects of American writing, with a particular emphasis on Herman Melville, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell and John Berryman. He recently published American Literature: The Essential Glossary (London: Edward Arnold, 2003), and with Darryl Jones he is the author of Studying Poetry (London: Edward Arnold, 2000). Domhnall Mitchell is Professor of Nineteenth-Century American Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. He has written articles on Emily Dickinson for American Literature, Legacy, Nineteenth-Century Literature and The Emily Dickinson Journal, and has a chapter on poetry and class in The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. He has published two books: Emily

200

Notes on Contributors

Dickinson: Monarch of Perception (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 2000) and (with Paul Goring and Jeremy Hawthorn) Studying Literature: The Essential Companion (London: Edward Arnold, 2001). A new book on the editing of Dickinson’s manuscripts will appear in 2004. Justin Quinn is Senior Lecturer at the Charles University, Prague. He has published three collections of poems, most recently Fuselage (Gallery, 2002), and is a founding editor of the poetry magazine, Metre. His articles have appeared, or are forthcoming, in English, the Irish Journal of American Studies, Journal of Modern Literature, P. N. Review, the Sewanee Review, the Wallace Stevens Journal and Yale Review. A critical study, Gathered Beneath the Storm: Wallace Stevens, Nature and Community, was published by University College Dublin Press in 2002. Gareth Reeves is Reader in English at the University of Durham. He is the author of T.S. Eliot: A Virgilian Poet (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (New York/London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), of two volumes of poetry, and, with Michael O’Neill, of Auden, MacNeice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1992). He has also published essays on more recent poets, including Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, and Charles Tomlinson. Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and for the past ten years has been a regular visiting professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her most recent book is Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo- American Modernism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2003). Her chapter on American modernist poets, entitled “Poetry in the Machine Age”, appears in volume five of The Cambridge History of American Literature. Nick Selby is Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Glasgow. His book From Modernism to Fascism: Poetics of Loss in The Cantos of Ezra Pound is forthcoming from Mellen Press, and he is currently completing another book, Dazzling Geographies: American Poetics and the Writing of America which examines (among others) the work of Ezra Pound, Gary Snyder and Jorie Graham in order to trace the relationships between American poetics and culture. He is Associate Director of the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies in Glasgow, and Treasurer of The British Association for American Studies. Nerys Williams is originally from West Wales and she completed her D.Phil research on a reading of error and the lyric in the poetry of Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian and Michael Palmer at Sussex University in 2002. She has worked both within and outside academia and is currently a lecturer in American Literature at University College, Dublin. Stephen Wilson has recently obtained a Ph.D. on Ezra Pound from Trinity College, Dublin, and has written and published on The Cantos and on Yeats and Joyce. He lectures in American literature and Theory of Literature at the University of Coimbra, Portugal.

INDEX

Adorno, Theodor, 120, 124n, 130 Minima Moralia, 120, 124n, 130 Agee, James, 120 Ahearn, Barry, 102 Alcestis Quarterly, 100 Alden, Raymond Macdonald, 61 Aldington, Richard, 46 Ali, Muhammad, 121 Altieri, Charles, 2 Anderson, Sherwood, Winesburg, Ohio, 46 Archilochos, 98 Arendt, Hannah, 120 Atherton, Hope, Wanderings, 194 Auden, W. H., 97, 100, 136; “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”, 97, 136 Barry, Iris, 61, 62, 68 Barthes, Roland, 147, 152 Baumann, Walter, 57, 58 Beck, John, 101, 103 Bell, Vereen, 138-39 Bernstein, Charles, 9, 95, 171; “The Artifice of Absorption”, 171 Berryman, John, 6, 132, 133, 137, 144; Berryman’s Sonnets, 144; The Dream Songs, 6, 133, 143, 144; Sonnets to Chris, 144 Berthoff, Warner, 93 Bird, William, 67, 68 Bishop, Elizabeth, 116, 124, 125, 12627, 129-30, 131, 139; Geography III, 126-27; “North Haven”, 131, 132, 139; Poems, 116 Blake, William, “The Tyger”, 156 Blanchot, Maurice, 169 Blast, 59, 63 Bloom, Harold, 136 Blunden, Edmund, 134n Born, Bertran de, 60 Bornstein, George, 66 Bowles, Samuel, 13, 27 Boyle, Kay, 101

Brown, Alice, 45 Brown, Susan Jenkins, 97 Bulkin, Elly, 142 Bush, George, 159 Calder, Alex, 137 Cameron, Sharon, 12n Carpenter, Humphrey, 60, 62 Carson, Ciaran, 188 Catullus, 94 Chekhov, Antonin, 119 Cimino, Michael, The Deer Hunter, 159 Cirasa, Robert J., 107 Cixous, Hélène, 185 Clampitt, Amy, 3, 155-68; “A Procession at Candlemas”, 165-66; “A Resumption, or Possibly a Remission”, 165; A Silence Opens, 155; “Amaranth and Moly”, 166; “The Anniversary”, 166; Archaic Figure, 155, 160; “Archaic Figure”, 167; “Beach Glass”, 163, 165; “Beethoven, Opus 111”, 166; “Berceuse”, 167; “Botanical Nomenclature”, 165; “The Burning Child”, 167; Collected Poems, 155; “The Cove”, 155, 163, 165; “The Dahlia Gardens”, 155, 156-62, 163, 164, 165, 167; “’Eighty-Nine”, 159, 167-68; “Fog”, 165; “Gradual Clearing”, 165; “The Halloween Parade”, 167; “Hydrocarbon”, 157, 166; The Kingfisher, 7, 155-68; “Letters from Jerusalem”, 166-67; “Marine Surface, Low Overcast”, 163, 165; “Notes on the State of Virginia”, 167; “On the Disadvantages of Central Heating”, 165; “Or Consider Prometheus”, 166; “The Outer Bar”, 165; “Sea Mouse”, 165; “Times Square Water Music”,

Index

202 166; “Vacant Lot with Pokeweed”, 159-60; “Voyages: A Homage to John Keats”, 160; Westward, 155; What the Light Was Like, 155, 160 Clinton, William, 7 Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 61 Coffey, John, 100, 102, 104, 106, 107 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 95, 134, 136; “Kubla Khan”, 95, 136; “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, 134 Collins, Lucy, 1, 2 Collom, Jack, Sunflower, 170 Columbus, Christopher, 92 Cooper, James Fenimore, 198 Corbière, Tristan, 127 Costello, Bonnie, 161, 166 Coward, Noel, 123 Crane, Hart, 3, 89-98, 160, 164; “Atlantis”, 90, 92, 96, 97; “At Melville’s Tomb”, 92; The Bridge, 89-98; “Cape Hatteras”, 96; “Cutty Sark”, 96, 98; “Eldorado”, 96; “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”, 90, 91, 95; “General Aims and Theories”, 89, 91; “Indiana”, 96; “The Mango Tree”, 96, 97; “Modern Poetry”, 92, 97; “Powhatan’s Daughter”, 90, 96; “Quaker Hill”, 96; “Van Winkle”, 90; “Voyages”, 95; White Buildings, 89, 90, 91 Crane, Stephen, 3 Cravens, Margaret, 66 Crawford, Joan, 121 Crosby, Caresse, 98 Cunard, Lady, 66 Cunningham, Imogen, 23 Curie, Marie, 143 Cushman, Stephen, 103-4 Dante, Alighieri, 103-4, 176-77, 179; The Divine Comedy, 103-4, 17677 Davidson, Michael, 170 Davie, Donald, 125 Deleuze, Gilles, 3, 4, 6, 96 Derrida, Jacques, 94, 98, 177 Dewey, John, 101

Dickey, James, 128 Dickinson, Emily, 3, 6-7, 11-28, 89, 116,124, 183, 184, 185, 187, 191, 192-93, 194, 195; “A bird came down the walk”, 18; “A man may make a remark”, 18; “A narrow fellow in the grass”, 13-28; “Ashes denote that fire was”, 17; The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1924), 13n; “The definition of beauty is”, 18; “Further in summer than the birds”, 18; “How many flowers fail in the wood”, 20; “I bet with every wind that blew”, 19; “It bloomed and dropt a single noon”, 17, 18; “The leaves like women interchange”, 18; Letters of Emily Dickinson, 14, 22, 27; The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, 11-12; “The missing all prevented me”, 18; “The mushroom is the elf of plants”, 18; “My Life had Stood—a loaded Gun—”, 192; Open Me Carefully, 14, 18, 23, 25; “Perception of an object costs”, 18; Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890), 19; The Poems of Emily Dickinson Including Variant Readings, 21, 23; The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Variorum Edition, 23; Poems by Emily Dickinson: Second Series (1891), 13, 18, 20; The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955), 12, 14, 18, 21, 22, 116; “The Robin’s my Criterion for Tune”, 194; “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant”, 192, 193; “There’s a certain Slant of light”, 193, 195-96; “’Twas awkward, but it fitted me”, 17; “We outgrow love like other things”, 17; “What mystery pervades a well”, 27; “When I have seen the sun emerge”, 17; “Who were ‘the Father and the Son’”, 19 Dickinson, Susan, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 27

Index Divus, Andreas, 68 Donne, John, 134 Dulac, Edmund, 62 Dürer, Albrecht, 121 Dylan, Bob, “Tangled Up in Blue”, 7-8 Eliot, T. S., 3, 4, 5, 57-58, 64, 65, 69, 101, 138; “Introduction” to Ezra Pound: Selected Poems, 57-58, 69; “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, 4; The Waste Land, 66, 67, 90, 143 Ellerman, Winifred, 66 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 9, 96, 161, 184; “The Poet”, 184 Evans, Walker, 120 Farr, Judith, 27 Fenollosa, Ernest, 63 Fenton, James, 93 Ferguson, Suzanne, 121 Filreis, Alan, 99, 100 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 120 Ford, Harry, 115, 116 Ford, Ford Madox, 58, 64 Ford, Richard, Rock Springs, 46 Forrest-Thomson, Veronica, 179 Frank, Waldo, 90, 96, 97 Franklin, Ralph W., 11-12, 16, 18, 23, 192 Freeman, Mary Wilkins, 45 Freud, Sigmund, 179 Frost, Robert, 3, 45-55, 119; A Boy’s Will, 45, 47; “After ApplePicking”, 48, 49, 50, 54, 55; “The Black Cottage”, 48, 50, 53, 55; “Blueberries”, 48, 50; “The Code”, 48, 49, 50; “The Death of the Hired Man”, 48, 49, 50, 55; “The Fear”, 48, 50; “The Generations of Men”, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54-55; “Good Hours”, 48, 49, 50; “Home Burial”, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54-55; “The Housekeeper”, 48, 50, 51-53; “A Hundred Collars”, 48, 49, 50, 5153, 54, 55; “Mending Wall”, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53-54, 55; “The Mountain”, 48, 50; “Mowing”, 47;

203 North of Boston, 7, 45-55; “The Pasture”, 48, 49, 50; “The SelfSeeker”, 48, 50; “A Servant to Servants”, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54; “The Tuft of Flowers”, 47, 50; “The Wood-Pile”, 9, 48, 50-51, 53, 55 Fuss, Diana, 148, 150-51 Gallup, Donald, 61 Gardner, Thomas, 188 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 60, 65 Ginsberg, Allen, 164-65; Collected Poems, 164; “The Fall of America”, 164; Planet News, 164; “Wichita Vortex Sutra”, 164-65 Glück, Louise, 1, 115; The First Five Books of Poems, 1, 115 Goodridge, Celeste, 155-56 Gorbachov, Mikhail, 159 Graham, Jorie, 3, 6, 8, 183-96; “Eurydice on History”, 189-90; “from The Reformation Journal”, 186; “from The Reformation Journal (2)”, 185; “Probity”, 18990; Swarm, 7, 183-96; “Two Days (5/2/97-5/3/97)”, 189-90; “Underneath”, 188; “Underneath (1), 189-90; “Underneath (9)”, 190; “Underneath (13)”, 190, 191; “Underneath (Eurydice)”, 188; “Underneath (Sybilline)”, 188; “Underneath (Upland)”, 188 Gray, Thomas, 20; “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”, 20 Guattari, Félix, 3, 4, 6 Gubar, Susan, 190 Guthrie, James, 25 Hallberg, Robert von, 102-3 Hammer, Langdon, 93 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 139 Hardy, Thomas, 67 Hart, Ellen, 14, 18, 23-24, 25 Haudricourt, André-Georges, 4 Hejinian, Lyn, 3, 6, 169-81; “A Thought is the Bride of What’s Thinking”, 174, 176; The Cell, 171-72; The Cold of Poetry, 171, 176; Comments for Manuel

204

Index

Brito”, 178; “The Composition of the Cell, 171-72”; The Guard, 7, 169-81; “If Written Is Writing”, 175; “Language and ‘Paradise’”, 176-77, 178, 181; The Language of Inquiry, 170, 181; Leningrad, 170; “Line”, 177; My Life, 6, 170; Oxota, 170-71, 173; “The Rejection of Closure”, 174, 177; Sight, 170; “Strangeness”, 181; Sunflower, 170; “Two Stein Talks”, 175, 178 Herrington, Eldrid, 3 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 21, 27, 192 Hill, Geoffrey, 161 Hinds, Michael, 2, 3 Hoffmanstahl, Hugo von, 121 Hoggart, Richard, 51 Holland, Josiah, 19 Homer, Odyssey, 68 Howe, Susan, 3, 5, 6, 25, 183-96; The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, 25; My Emily Dickinson, 184, 185, 192; “Scattering as Behaviour Towards Risk”, 183-96; Singularities, 183-93 Hughes, Langston, 96-97 Hughes, Ted, 2, 6

The Gingerbread Rabbit, 128; “The Knight, Death, and the Devil”, 121; “La Poète Contumace”, 127; “Lady Bates”, 121-22; Little Friend, Little Friend, 127n; Losses, 118; “Losses”, 120-21; “The Night Before the Night Before Christmas”, 125; “Nollekens”, 125; “The Orient Express”, 120; Pictures from an Institution, 11516, 128; “The Place of Death”, 129; Poetry and the Age, 115, 116; “Seele im Raum”, 125; Selected Poems (1955), 6, 115-30; Selected Poems (1990), 118; The SevenLeague Crutches, 126, 127n; “Some Lines from Whitman”, 9, 122; “Terms”, 117, 118, 119; “When I Was Home Last Christmas”, 123 Jewett, Sarah Orne, The Country of the Pointed Firs, 46 Johnson, Thomas H., 12, 14, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 116, 192 Jonson, Ben, 134 Joyce, James, 62, 64, 66; Chamber Music, 123; Ulysses, 66, 67, 90, 100 Jung, Carl, 125

Irigaray, Luce, 163

Kahn, Louis, 197 Kahn, Otto, 94, 97 Keats, John, 160 Kerouac, Jack, 4 Key, Francis Scott, “Defence of Fort McHenry”, 36 Koehler, Stanley, 99 Kristeva, Julia, 184, 194-95

Jabès, Edmond, 6, 7 James, Henry, 175 James, William, 83, 178 Jarrell, Randall, 3, 6, 9, 115-30; “A Camp in the Prussian Forest”, 129; “A Conversation with the Devil”, 123-24, 125; “A Country Life”, 119-20; “A Girl in a Library”, 119, 121, 124-25, 128; “A Rhapsody on Irish Themes”, 128; “An English Garden in Austria”, 128; The Animal Family, 128; Blood for a Stranger, 127n; “Burning the Letters”, 125-26; “Eighth Air Force”, 126; “The Face”, 119, 121-22, 123-24; Fly by Night, 128;

Lacan, Jacques, 161 Lane, John, 62 Lark, Lolita, 187-88 Larkin, Joan, 142 Larkin, Philip, 162; Collected Poems, 2 Latimer, Ronald Lane, 99-100 Lawrence, D. H., 62, 105; The Rainbow, 60 Lefebvre, Henri, 159

Index Leithauser, Brad, 162 Lewinsky, Monica, 7 Litz, A. Walton, 101, 107-8 Logan, William, 187-88 Longenbach, James, 58, 68 Lorde, Audre, “Love Poem”, 151 Lowell, Robert, 2, 3, 6, 122, 125, 126, 127, 129, 131-40, 144; “Afterthought”, 132, 137; “Beyond the Alps”, 138; Day by Day, 133; The Dolphin, 133, 136; “Epilogue”, 133, 135, 137; “For Elizabeth Bishop 4”, 140; “For John Berryman”, 133; For Lizzie and Harriet, 131, 138, 139, 140; “Growing in Favor”, 132-33; History, 6, 131, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140; “Home after Three Months Away”, 136; “In the Back Stacks”, 133-35; Life Studies, 2, 131, 136, 144; “The Literary Life, a Scrapbook”, 133; Lord Weary’s Castle, 122; “My Death”, 132; “Night-Sweat”, 131; “Note” (to History), 137, 138; “Note” (to Notebook), 131; Notebook, 6, 13140; Notebook 1967-68, 131-40; “Obit”, 139; “Plotted”, 136; “Power”, 137, 138; “The Powerful”, 137; “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”, 134; “Reading Myself”, 135-37, 138; “Searchings”, 139; Selected Poems (1965), 126; “Skunk Hour”, 131; “Waking in the Blue”, 136; “We Do What We Are”, 133, 135 MacGowan, Christopher, 101 Macleod, Norman, 107 Mailer, Norman, 157; Armies of the Night, 156; Harlot’s Ghost, 157 Malatesta, Sigismondo, 68 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 4, 5, 6 Mariani, Paul, 107, 108 Marlowe, Christopher, 123 Marvell, Andrew, 122 Mather, Cotton, Magnalia, 194 Mathews, Elkin, 60-61, 62, 63, 67, 68, 69

205 Matterson, Stephen, 2 McGuirk, Kevin, 148-49 Melville, Herman, 157, 194 Meredith, George, 67 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 134 Mitchell, Domhnall, 3 Monroe, Harold, 59 Monroe, Harriet, 92 Moore, Marianne, 109, 163, 164 Morris, Timothy, 4, 11 Morris, William, 67 Morrison, Norman, 159, 163, 166, 167 Munson, Gorham, 90, 97 Muske, Carol, 149 Nagel, James, 46 New Age, 65 Nicholls, Peter, 175 Nielsen, Aldon Lynn, 122n Nietszche, Friedrich, 121 O’Connor, William, 33 O’Hara, Frank, 29-30; “A Whitman’s Birthday Broadcast with Static”, 29-30 Oates, Joyce Carol, 18 Oktenberg, Adrian, 153 Olson, Charles, 137, 157; Call Me Ishmael, 157 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 23 O’Neill, Eugene, 91 Others, 63 Pater, Walter, 67 Paulin, Tom, 14 Paz, Octavio, 141 Perloff, Marjorie, 6, 152, 171, 173, 184 Pessoa, Fernando, 89, 93-94, 95, 96 Pimenta, Alberto, 94-95; Obra quase incompleta, 94-95 Pindar, 90 Plath, Sylvia, 148; Ariel, 2, 6 Poe, Edgar Allan, 5, Eureka, 5; “The Fall of the House of Usher”, 9; The Power of Words, 5 Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 61, 63, 64, 68 Pound, Ezra, 3, 7, 57-79, 137, 164; Arrangements of Lustra, 57-79;

206 “A Ballad of the Mulberry Road”, 63; A Lume Spento, 58; “Amities”, 59; “Ancient Music”, 59, 61; “Arides”, 59; Canto I, 68; Canto LXXX, 65; The Cantos, 57, 58, 64, 67; Canzoni, 58, 60; Cathay, 61, 62-63; “Coitus”, 61; Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, 58; “Commission”, 61; “Contemporania”, 61; A Draft of Cantos 17 – 27 of Ezra Pound, 6768; A Draft of XVI Cantos of Ezra Pound, 67, 68; A Draft of XXX Cantos, 68; “Epitaph”, 61; Exultations, 58, 60; Ezra Pound: Selected Poems, 57-58, 69; “Further Instructions”, 61; “A Girl”, 58; Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 64; “Ιµέρρω”, 61; “Impressions of François-Marie Arouet [de Voltaire]”, 65; “In a Station of the Metro”, 59; “The Lake Isle”, 61; “L’Art”, 59; Lustra, 7, 57-79; “Meditatio”, 59, 61; “Near Perigord”, 60, 63, 64, 68; “The New Cake of Soap”, 59, 61; “N.Y.”, 58; “Old Idea of Choan by Rosoriu”, 63; “Pagani’s, November 8”, 61; “The Patterns”, 61; Personae, 58, 60, 63, 69; “Pervigilium”, 61; “Phyllidula”, 61; A Quinzaine for this Yule, 58, 60; Ripostes, 58, 61, 62; “Salutation the Second”, 61; “The Seeing Eye”, 61; Selected Poems (1928), 58; “Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku”, 63; “The Social Order”, 59; Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Calvacanti, 63; “The Temperaments”, 60, 61, 62, 66; “Tenzone”, 61, 64; “Three Cantos”, 64, 68; “To-Em-Mei’s ‘The Unmoving Cloud’ by T’ao Yuan Ming”, 63; Umbra: The Early Poems of Ezra Pound, 62; “Villanelle: the Psychological Hour”, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65; “Women Before a Shop”, 59 Pritchard, William, 118

Index Proulx, Annie, Close Range, 46 Pushkin, Alexander Sergeevich, 119; Eugene Onegin, 119, 170 Quartermain, Peter, 184, 195 Quinn, John, 65-68 Quinn, Justin, 2 Quintilian, 158 Raban, Jonathan, 138 Rainey, Lawrence, 67 Rampersad, Arnold, 96-97 Ransom, John Crowe, 122 Read, Forrest, 60 Reeves, Gareth, 2, 3 Reid, B. L., 66 Rich, Adrienne, 1, 3, 141-54; “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, 151; The Dream of a Common Language, 142, 150; “Power”, 143; Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, 143-44; Twenty One Love Poems, 141-54; I, 146, 153; II, 144, 145, 152; III, 144, 146; IV, 144, 145, 148; V, 145-46; VII, 146, 152; IX, 146; XII, 149; XIII, 147; XIV, 145, 147; XV, 145, 147; XVIII, 148; XXI, 148; “The Floating Poem, Unnumbered”, 145, 147, 151; “When We Dead Awaken”, 150 Ricks, Christopher, 116 Roebling, Washington, 91, 92 Rossi, Aldo, 197 Rowlandson, Mary, Narrative, 194 Royce, Josiah, 83 Ryder, Albert, 139-40 Salmon, André, 83 Santayana, George, 83 Santos, Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa, 2 Sappho, 105 Scalapino, Leslie, Sight, 170 Schlegel, Friedrich, 94, 98 Selby, Nick, 3, 8 Sexton, Anne, 148 Shakespeare, William, 105, 117, 138; Hamlet, 179; Julius Caesar, 117

Index Shelley, Percy Bysshe, “Ode to the West Wind”, 156; “Ozymandias”, 126; “Prometheus Unbound”, 134, 183 Silliman, Ron, 170 Simmel, Georg, 51 Sitwell, Edith, 100 Smart Set, 63 Smith, Martha Nell, 14, 18, 23-24, 25 Socrates, 186 Sontag, Susan, “Against Interpretation”, 9 Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, 119 Spender, Stephen, 100 Spiegelman, Willard, 160 Stein, Gertrude, 174-75; “Composition as Explanation”, 175; “Portraits and Repetitions”, 174-75 Steinbeck, John, 120 Stevens, Wallace, 3, 5, 81-87, 94, 97, 99, 100, 116, 124, 160; “A Discovery of Thought”, 97; Collected Poems, 97, 116; “The Course of a Particular”, 97; “Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Milles Vierges”, 85; “Domination of Black”, 86; “Earthy Anecdote”, 85-86; Harmonium, 7, 81-87; “Infanta Marina”, 86; “In the Carolinas”, 86; “Invective Against Swans”, 86; “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”, 83, 87; “The Load of Sugar-Cane”, 87; The Necessary Angel, 83; “Nuances of a Theme by Williams”, 84n; “The Ordinary Women”, 87; “The Plot Against the Giant”, 84, 87; “The Snow Man”, 86, 87; “Sunday Morning”, 84 Stieglitz, Alfred, 92 Strauss, Richard, 121; Der Rosenkavalier, 121 Symonds, John Addington, 62 Szczesiul, Anthony, 32 Tasso, Torquato, Gerusalemme Liberata, 134

207 Tate, Allen, 90, 93, 97, 100, 133 Thoreau, Henry David, 194 Thwaite, Anthony, 2 Todd, Mabel Loomis, 13, 19, 20, 21, 22 Traherne, Thomas, 186-87 Traubel, Horace, 31 Trilling, Lionel, 49 Tyndale, William, 195; 1530 Translation of Deuteronomy, 195 Untermeyer, Louis, 115 Vaudrin, Philip, 115 Vendler, Helen, 149 Wagner, Richard, 121 Ward, Theodora, 14, 22, 27 Warren, Robert Penn, 100 Watten, Barrett, 170 Whiting, Charles Goodrich, 11n Whitman, Walt, 3-5, 8, 9, 29-41, 90, 91, 92, 95, 104, 105, 108, 117, 124, 126, 127, 130, 160, 183, 185, 189, 190, 192; Arrangements of Drum- Taps, 29-41; “A child’s amaze”, 32; “A farm picture”, 33; “A March in the Ranks HardPrest, and the Road Unknown”, 34, 35; “A Sight in Camp in the Day-Break Gray and Dim”, 34, 35; “A sight in camp”, 33; “An Army Corps on the March”, 34; “The Artilleryman’s Vision”, 35, 36; Bathed in War’s Perfume, 35; “Beat! beat! Drums!”, 32, 33; “Bivouac on a Mountain Side”, 34; “By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame”, 34; “Cavalry Crossing a Ford”, 34; “The Centenarian’s story”, 33, 34; “City of ships”, 32, 33, 34; “Come Up from the Fields, Father”, 34; “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, 31n, 91-92, 190-91; DrumTaps, 29-41, 117; “Drum-Taps”, 31, 33; “1861”, 32, 33; “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors”, 35, 36-37; “First O Songs for a Prelude”, 31; “From Paumanok Starting”, 33; “I

208 Saw Old General at Bay”, 35; “In Cabin’d Ships at Sea”, 5, 8-9; Leaves of Grass; 4-6, 7, 8, 9, 29, 31, 37, 92, 98, 101,116, 117, 124, 126, 172; “Mother and babe”, 32; “Not Youth Pertains to Me”, 2931, 35, 37; “Now Lift Me Close”, 8; “O Captain, My Captain”, 37; “O tan-faced Prairie-boy”, 35; “Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice”, 32; “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”, 33; “Race of Veterans”, 35; “Rise O Days”, 3334; Sequel to Drum-Taps, 31, 32, 37; “So Long!”, 6, 189; “Song of Myself”, 172, 183, 189, 190; “Song of the Banner at Daybreak”, 35; Specimen Days, 31, 92; “To the Leaven’d Soil They Trod”, 31; “To You”, 8; Two Rivulets, 32; “The Veteran’s vision”, 35; “Vigil strange I kept on the field one night”, 32, 34, 35; “Virginia— The West”, 33; “Whoever You Are Holding me Now in Hand”, 8-9 Whittier, John Greenleaf, “SnowBound”, 162 Wilde, Oscar, 62 Williams, Nerys, 2 Williams, William Carlos. 1-2, 7, 84, 99-113, 137; Arrangements of An Early Martyr, 99-113; “A Poem for Norman Macleod”, 106, 108; “A Portrait of the Times”, 107; Al Que Quierre!, 107, 108; An Early Martyr, 7, 99-113; “An Early Martyr”, 102-3; “An Elegy for D. H. Lawrence”, 105; Autobiography, 100; “The Auto Ride”, 105-6; “The Black Winds”, 100; “The Catholic Bells”, 105, 106; Collected Earlier Poems, 106, 107, 108; Complete Collected Poems, 101, 105, 106, 107; Della Primavera Trasportata al Morale, 100; “The Descent”, 99; The Descent of Winter, 100, 103; “The Farmer”, 100; “Flowers by the

Index Sea”, 102-3, 106; “Hymn to Love Ended”, 105; In the American Grain, 99; “Item”, 103, 106; “The Locust Tree in Flower”, 100, 106, 107; Paterson, 99; Pictures from Breughel, 99; Poems, 99; “The Red Wheelbarrow”, 2; “The Right of Way”, 100; “The Sadness of the Sea”, 100, 107; “The Situation in American Writing: Seven Questions”, 101, 103; “Solstice”, 103; Spring and All, 8, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108; “Spring and All”, 106; “Sub Terra”, 108; “Sunday”, 105; Tituba’s Children, 108; “To Be Hungry Is To Be Great”, 106; “Tree and Sky”, 107; “The Wanderer”, 108; The Wedge, 99; White Mule, 99; “Wild Orchard”, 107; “The Wind Increases”, 100; “The Yachts”, 103-4, 108; “You Have Pissed Your Life”, 106, 107; “Young Romance”, 100, 104-5 Wilson, Rob, 160-61 Wilson, Stephen, 3 Winters, Yvor, 92, 93, 95, 96 Witek, Terri, 131 Witemeyer, Hugh, 58, 63, 64 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 171; Tractatus Philisophicus, 171, 173 Wordsworth, William, 20, 163 Wright, Stuart, 116n Yeats, Jack B., 65 Yeats, W. B., 47, 61-62, 62, 135-36, 136; “He mourns for the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved, and longs for the End of the World”, 47; “The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart”, 47; “Sailing to Byzantium”, 135-36; The Wind Among the Reeds, 47 Yellow Book, The, 62 Yenser, Stephen, 137-38 Young, Alexander, 20 Zukofsky, Louis, 137