Radcliffe Squires was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1925, and he attended college, the University of Utah, in his home town, taking his B.A. there in 1940. During the war, from 1941 to 1945, he served in the U.S. Navy. Upon his discharge he attended the University of Chicago, where he took his A.M. in 1945, and Harvard University, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in 1952. His academic career began at Dartmouth College where he taught for two years, from 1946-48. In 1952 he went to the University of Michigan where he taught for the rest of his life and for part of that time edited The Michigan Quarterly Review. Squires self-published Cornar, his first book of poems — juvenilia — in 1940 at the age of fifteen. Where the Compass Spins, which appeared in 1951, was the first book of his mature poems; his second would not appear for another fourteen years, however, and those were years of swift change in the world of American poetry. Squires spent them developing and maturing as a poet.
The
dust jacket of Squires' second collection, Where the Compass Spins, characterized his verse as clear and astringent.
Beside Fingers of Hermes
(1965), however, the first book seems not so much astringent as forcibly pared
down. It was the work of an
essentially romantic poet early in his career attempting to write in a more or
less "classical" manner with few frills, few variations in diction or
syntax, some annoying mannerisms,
and some general awkwardness and uncertainly, rather like a would-be
organist practicing the harpsichord. In Fingers of Hermes all that disappeared. There was a great deepening
of talent. It is remarkable how many things had changed in Squires' methods of
composition and ways of seeing. The jacket of the book quoted Richard Eberhart
to the effect that Squires was "almost Keatsean" and sometimes
"reminiscent of Hart Crane," but his work more nearly resembled that
of a latter-day Shelley, not Keats, and it was reminiscent of two other
American poets — the 19th-century Frederick Goddard Tuckerman and Wallace
Stevens.
In Tracy Chevalier’s Contemporary Poets, Fifth Edition (St. James Press, 1991). Squires is
quoted as saying, "Technically my verse tends to fall into blank verse
with occasional or accidental rhyme. I am not a formalist, but I should feel
sheepish to turn out a poem with less
metrical discipline than
iambics provide. Even so, if I
should have to choose between meter and metaphor, I should take metaphor, for
metaphor seems to me the essence of poetry, the poem within a poem. Luckily, poetry never insists on taking one thing or the other. I believe there are colorings in my
verse that come from Thomas Hardy, Robinson Jeffers, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, and C. P. Cavafy. At any rate, I have admired these poets
very deeply" (950).
Thus,
in his own words, Squires made the connection between Stevens and himself, and
in his foreword to Frederick Goddard Tuckerman's The Complete Poems (Oxford, 1965), Yvor Winters made the connection between Tuckerman and Stevens (xiv). There is the
same sort of relationship between Stevens and Squires who was a late exemplar
of a specific abstract tradition in American poetry. This tradition has several sources, and some of them are the
Romantic poetry of Shelley via New England and Tuckerman; through Stevens, who
reinforced the latent, rather French, symbolist influence in the genre —
"latent, rather French" because, as Winters pointed out, Tuckerman's
mystique was of the kind that motivated Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and others, though
the American poet wrote in isolation from Continental influences. What this
means is that Squires in his second book was concerned with abstraction and
lush language. As in Stevens, the
reader's interest centers on the language. As illustration, here are two poems, only one of them by
Squires:
As one turned around on some high mountain top
Views all things as they are, but out of place,
Reversing recognition, so I trace
Dimly those dreams of youth and love and stop
Blindly; for in such mood landmarks and ways
That we have trodden all our lives and know
We seem not to have known and cannot guess:
Like one who told his footsteps over to me
In the opposite world and where he wandered through
Whilst the hot wind blew from the sultry north —
Forests that give no shade, and bottomless
Sands where the plummet sinks as in the sea,
Saw the sky struck by lightning from the earth,
Rain salt like blood, and flights of fiery snow.
And the second:
Granite has a face of mere memory, and so insanely
pure
Is the memory that at times the world seems to
humor it
With long summer rains that swell the meadows to a
dour
Tundra.
Through boreal mists, tufts of coptis float
As a languid announcement that the ice-age is here.
These storms repent as slowly as ideas. Blue starfish may
Appear in clouds, and saffron lines of light
Take soundings, but the rains return, and angrily.
Even when the sky breaks and the ice-age retreats,
Shadows of clouds brush dusk across the nervous
day.
The cloud shadows! Birds drowse and fall to wan
Night twitters. White moths stir
up from nowhere to churn
The dusk.
And you wait until you feel the day come on
Again.
Then as if you were the soldiers in Xenophon,
Who did not gain the sea, you whisper blankly,
"The Sun."
It
is tempting to ask, who wrote which? — the twentieth-century Squires, or the nineteenth-century
Tuckerman. Taken out of context
this way, the question is unfair, and the intimation might be that Squires, who
wrote "Summer Storms," the second poem, is merely imitating
Tuckerman, whose "Sonnet VIII
(Third Series)" appears first. But this is not the case. It is merely that both men saw and spoke in similar
ways. Squires perhaps
knew little or nothing of Tuckerman who has dwelt in historical obscurity for
nearly a century. If one were to read all the poetry of the two men one would
find differences enough. What is
illustrated here is that Squires is not unique, that his beauties and graces
have a tradition and a history in American letters, interesting ones.
The
reader can find things both in these poems and in their tradition to which he
or she might object: When and if one manages to get beneath the surface of the
language there is vagueness, not merely abstraction; a cloying quality; a lack
of range and depth, as in almost all of Stevens, and a humorless sincerity, as
in Hart Crane.
In his later poems Squires tended to move
farther away from traditional forms, even from his bedrock iambics, but he did
no differently than many of his contemporaries of the period. And he tended, also, further toward
abstraction, as in "A Letter from Crete to Delphi" which begins,
"Three simple schemata / Three elegant models / Three
configurations. // The carob trees are the form / of the wind.
Like iron filings / Dusted on paper over a magnet / they translate a
daimon."The third strophe of the poem reads,
The far hill village is a form.
Like the absurdity of our skeletons,
Its geometry enjoys
Its carelessness. The whitewashed cubes
Ascend beyond any meridian, bemusing the sun,
Ascend and give themselves what
No geometry can give itself: a name.
In
a letter to Lewis Turco dated 8 July 1966 Squires wrote, "As
to this abstract
business.... I don't pretend to
speak for anyone else, particularly Stevens, but in my own case, it begins
oddly enough in the most concrete kind of experience. But because the experience seems alluring and suggestive I
keep surrounding it with words in the hopes that something of its intrinsic
mystery or difficulty will finally come through. That I don't consciously begin with abstract notions
makes all this at least ironical...."
A
tradition in poetry is not necessarily identical with a school of poetry;
however, and in the "Preface" to their An Anthology of New York Poets (Random House, 1970), the editors Ron Padgett and
David Shapiro protested a great deal against the idea that there was an
abstractionist "New York School of Poets." In the first paragraph
they wrote, "We happen to know almost all the poets in this book (there is
one we have still to meet), and most of these poets know each other as
well. Obviously, as editors we're
going on the assumption that these acquaintances and friendships, these sharings
of tastes and affections, are going to go a long way toward giving this book a
sense of solidarity. It would be
facile as well as misleading to see these poets as forming a 'School,' to pass
them off as a literary movement" (xxix). A bit later on they said,
"Perhaps we do protest too much, but this is to prepare ourselves for the
gruesome possibility of the 'New York School of Poets' label, one which has
been spewed forth from time to time by some reviewers, critics and writers
either sustained by provincial jealousy or the bent to translate everything
into a manageable textbookese" (xxx). They pointed out that few of the
contributors had been born in New York City, though many lived there and it
"remained for all of them a fulcrum they continue to use in order to get
as much leverage as possible in literature,..." The editors continued, "And, although the New York
School tag is an alarmingly useless one, it does remind one that many of these
poets met in schools, at Harvard, Columbia, N. Y. U. or the New School,
sometimes as undergraduates taught by Delmore Schwartz or in poetry workshops
taught by Kenneth Koch, Bill Berkson or Frank O'Hara. The crisscrossing of friendships is surprising and
inspiring."
Rather
than heading off critics and scholars at the pass, the editors of the anthology appeared to be
expending words at a great rate to define categorically what a
"school of poets" in fact is. Padgett and
Shapiro did not blink, either, at providing a document, "Personism: A
Manifesto," written by one of the pillars of the movement, Frank O'Hara
(xxxi-xxxiv). Among many personal
observations and remarks, O'Hara focused on the central idea of the New York
School: "Abstraction in poetry...is intriguing," he remarked. "Abstraction (in poetry, not in
painting) involves personal removal by the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between
'the nostalgia of the infinite' and 'the nostalgia for the infinite' defines an
attitude towards degree of abstraction.
The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction,
removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé). Personism, a movement which I recently
founded and which nobody yet knows about interests me a great deal, being so
totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true
abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la
poesie pure was to Beranger"
(xxxiii).
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