This is the first part of the Foreword to Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry:
FOREWORD
I.
In the history of
literature there have always been two major types of poetry, religious and
social. In pre-scientific cultures,
the "words of power" associated with the gods or God were always
controlled by a caste of priests or priestesses who wove them into various
ritual religious formats including prayers, liturgies, incantations, curses,
oaths, prophecies, and so forth. This is religious or “priest-poetry,” and it
was of basic importance in every culture. It came to be called Platonic or
Romantic, Dionysian or ritual, emotional or "natural" poetry.
Social poetry consists basically of
entertainments: songs, word games, stories, plays, puzzles, and so forth. In
many ways this type of poetry is as basic as religious poetry, for it is part
of the folk life of a culture. It passes on the myths and legends, the lore and
the crafts of the people. Without it, there would be no culture. Nevertheless,
the class of priests tended to disdain this kind of poetry, which came to be
called variously Aristotelian or Classical, Apollonian or secular, intellectual
or "artificial." Both types of poetry have always flourished in
Europe, and both have always been "formal" there.
In Colonial America religious poetry
was paramount, especially in New England. America was a clean slate upon which
might be written the Word of God; it was to be the New Jerusalem, dedicated to
the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth. The land was to be filled
with Light, a Light that had been obscured in the corruption of the Old World.
The Bible was The Book. Art for Art's
sake, or for any other than God's sake, was corrupt, like the art of Europe —
or, if not corrupt, at best it was frivolous. If language did not serve the
purposes of pragmatic communication, it was to serve the purpose of the Church
Militant.
However, if America were a clean slate,
ought not the literature it produced to be written in a new way? How else to
differentiate corrupt literature from purified literature? As America grew and
Puritanism was transformed; as other religions came into America, this attitude
toward literature was also changed. But a new element worked itself into the
fabric of development: The colonists more and more saw themselves as an
autonomous body of people. Pride of country demanded that America be
identifiably America, not England-in-America. Americans wanted a unique
American national personality, separate from that of the mother country.
A distinction may be made between the
"amateur" and the "professional" poet. The former is one
who uses poetry as a vehicle for a particular purpose, as Edward Taylor
(1642?-1729) did. The latter is simply one who dedicates her life to writing
poetry. Thus, Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1672) was America's first
"professional poet." Edward Taylor was the first "amateur"
and the first poet to evince what would later be seen as Emersonian qualities.
There is a third possibility, however, besides the professional and the amateur
poet. There is the “agonist,” the theoretician of poetry who worries about what
poetry is or ought to be, and how one ought to go about writing it, which in
America led to Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth century, during what has
been called the “Romantic” movement in England and America, of which Emerson is
popularly supposed to be a member. In fact, however, although Emerson when he
was a young man had all the tools of a professional poet, apparently what he
most wanted to be was a priest-poet. As a result, he became that third type of
poet, the agonist, emphasis on the;
he was America’s first and, so far, foremost theoretician of poetry.
When he was young, Emerson could write
perfectly acceptable, standard verse in any formal manner he chose, as Hyatt H.
Waggoner pointed out in “Chapter II, The Apprentice Years: Composer of Verses”
of his book Emerson As Poet
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974). In fact, he was a virtuoso
performer in the old British formal tradition. He could do anything he wished
to do with the English language, but it came too easily to him, apparently, and
he felt uneasy about his facility. He agonized over this lack of difficulty he
experienced young. As a result, he attempted to roughen up his meters, and his
mature writing style is more “amateur”-seeming than his youthful work. Clearly,
he chose to do what he did in his
later work. Emerson began to explore
the convergence of prose and verse.
Most
of Emerson’s later poems develop from prose germs, as if the poems were somehow
simply the upper range of ordinary language.
Emerson's prose is hardly less full of tropes than his young work was,
and often it impresses in the same way the poems do, and yet the question of
the frontier between them remains. Emerson wondered what gulf is crossed — if
any — in getting from one to the other.
It seems that if many of his poems lie closer to the boundary, they
compel some awareness of qualities in the performance that point both
ways. It's not just a matter of mixing
vulgar diction with a certain amount of gorgeousness — but that must be part of
it.
For two centuries, until the end of the
first decade of the twentieth century, much if not most of American poetry had
been derivative and imitative, a sub-branch of British poetry, and this is what
fretted Emerson deeply. Only four or five poets had been exceptions to this
rule. Ever since William Cullen Bryant, who has been called “the father of
American poetry,” though some American literati had been kicking against the
traces, most had been unable to break away from traditional accentual-syllabic
metrics in practice, including Emerson himself, the agonist for a new poetics.
Most of the trouble seemed to be technical — American poets had difficulty in
getting personal voices out of the old forms. Emerson prescribed a remedy:
invent new forms; cast off the burden of tradition and allow American poems to
grow naturally, like plants; operate through intuition in order to attain
Vision, which is poetry's core, and the form will follow
"organically."
Perhaps, as someone who wished to be a priest-poet, Emerson simply had a
theory that poetry ought to be "revealed" to someone who was truly a
poet, and that one therefore ought not to have to "think" about what
he was doing. Apparently, when he "thought" about metrics, it came
very easily to Emerson, and he hated it, so when Walt Whitman came along with
his system of grammatic prose-parallels, which Emerson must have recognized as
the system used in the Bible, he hailed Whitman as a genius of a “poetic” prose
style.
It is true that Emerson's prose sometimes came close to being more
"poetic" than his verse, but what he probably wanted was some hybrid
system that was neither verse nor prose. Such a system cannot exist, however,
because verse is “metered language”
and prose is “unmetered language,”
and one cannot have unmetered metered language. The Modernists soon came up
with a term, however, that covered what Emerson wanted, "free verse,"
which makes no sense at all.
Emerson’s great white whale of American literature Walt Whitman became
the exemplar of Emerson’s agonisms, the guidon-bearer of the Modernist
revolution of the early twentieth century. Because of the old convention that
poetry ought to be written in verse, and because people still thought that
prose could not be a vehicle for poetry (even Emerson suspected that this might
be the case), the twentieth century had to have a new term to apply to prose
poems; hence, the confusing term "free verse" was borrowed from the
French Symbolists of the nineteenth century who called non-syllabic prosodies vers libre. Whitman never used the term;
probably, he never heard of it. He knew he was writing prose poems. If Emerson had been born a bit later he would very likely
have been writing lineated prose and calling it "free verse," and
perhaps he would have been as happy as many ensuing "poets" who
hadn't a clue what they were doing and were happy not to have to think about
it.
Reacting against the pervasive English conventions of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, the “Modernists” who followed from Whitman’s
prose-poem examples were wildly experimental. The so-called (later on)
"Modernist" period, which began about 1912 and lasted through the
1920s, came up with all sorts of prosodies that were called "free
verse," though in fact a system is a system, even that of Whitman, and
each system can be analyzed, identified, and given a descriptive name. Instead,
so many poets wrote to justify prose poetry as a kind of "verse" that
"free verse" came to be accepted as a term that actually describes
something that exists.
Whitman's influence upon
twentieth-century American poetry was not, however, merely prosodic and
technical. Like the English Romantics he was the champion of the "common
man" and of ordinary speech, and he was the first American poet to speak
in prose poetry in what we today would call the "confessional" voice,
the subjective first person singular, as Emerson had demanded in his essay “The
Poet.” Furthermore, he made the egopoetic "I" into a symbol of the
New World as a whole — Whitman maintained that he spoke for America, not merely for himself.
By the time World War II was over in
1945 the Modernist period was pretty well past, though most of its exemplars
were still living: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings,
Marianne Moore, Conrad Aiken, Amy Lowell, Robinson Jeffers, and Carl Sandburg
to name a few. But there was another group of poets also, the late American
Romantic formalists including Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Archibald
MacLeish, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and the Southern “Fugitives” including John
Crowe Ransom and Alan Tate.
The poets who returned to civilian life after
having served in the armed forces, like Howard Nemerov, John Ciardi, Karl
Shapiro, James Dickey, Allen Ginsberg, and Randall Jarrell, or as conscientious
objectors like Robert Lowell and William Stafford, and their female counterparts such as
Elizabeth Bishop, Denise Levertov and others, had two literary choices,
basically: They could either return to the earlier formalism of the
pre-Modernist nineteenth century and become post-Romantics, or they could
continue the well-laid-out and well-traveled road of the Modernists and become
post-Modernists. The so-called “academic poets” of the 1950s chose the former
route, and almost everybody else chose the latter. All of these people, many of
them subsequently hopping from one “school” to the other, were dubbed
“Post-Modernists.”
The rest of the forward to Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry may be found here, as well as essays on the poets mentioned above and many others:
Dialects
of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry, by Lewis Putnam
Turco, Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, www.SFASU.edu/sfapress/, 2012, 336 pp.,
paperback.
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