Poetics and Ruminations

Edward Taylor's Sampler

 

 

In my book of criticism titled Visions and Revisions of American Poetry (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986) I wrote this in the introductory chapter which was titled, “The Pro-Am Tournament”:

         Given the United States’ national bias against the profession of letters, one felt more at ease with our first amateur poet, Edward Taylor. Here, America was no longer in artistic competition with England and her great makers. One might lower one’s sights and see that American poetry is all about something other than world-view, craft, and words — it is about vision, soul, and salvation. It is not concerned with communication on any mundane, humane level.  There must be no misunderastanding on this point. Taylor was not any kind of great poet. Rather, his importance lay in his foreshadowing Emerson.

         Taylor used words “roughly.” He used them for pragmatic Puritan purposes: poems were “preparatory meditations,” aids in achieving the frame of mind in which he composed his real work, his sermons. Sometimes, of course, his poems also took the place of the Catholic confessional. God would hear if no one else did.

 

Ah, but one can point to at least a single instance in which Taylor’s mind was on something other than the Hereafter, when he composed a love poem to his bride-to-be. Moreover, he composed one of the most complicated poems one could hope to see, and he did it not in fine Puritan style, but in the style of the reigning British school of the moment, the “Metaphysical,” whose foremost proponent was Taylor’s fellow churchman and predecessor by about a decade, John Donne,  who wrought highly metaphorical poems, though none more highly wrought than Taylor’s literary sampler, the “Acrostic Love Poem to Elizabeth Fitch.”

The sampler was an exercise primarily for schoolgirls who would design a piece of embroidery that illustrated their ability to sew various stitches. It would be comprised of the alphabet, a motto (from the Spanish, but mote in English: a one sentence poem written in a couplet) and, often, illustrations of various kinds. The motto of Taylor’s poem is,

 

This Dove and Olive Branch to you

is both a Post and Emblem too.

 

These words originally appeared written within a crude drawing of a dove holding an olive branch with which the American Colonial poet decorated or “illuminated” this page of his manuscript.

Besides being a sampler and an acrostic (the alphabet is spelled out down the left-hand margin), this extremely complicated poem is also a picture poem, a calligramme, and an epistle (a “post”) addressed to Taylor’s first wife, Elizabeth Fitch, whom he married on November 5, 1674:

 

These for my Dove

Tender and only Love

Mrs. Elizabeth Fitch

At her father’s house in Norwich.

 

The design of this sampler is of a circle within a triangle that reads,

 

The ring of love my pleasant heart must be

Truly confined within the Trinity.

 

The second line doubles as the base of the triangle and as the line illustrating the letter “T”; it is therefore a refrain

The circle reads,

 

Love’s ring I send

That hath no end.

 

At the center of the circle is a drawn heart.

Here is a modern rendering of the acrostic portion of

 

ACROSTIC LOVE POEM TO ELIZABETH FITCH

 

Aspiring Love, that scorns to hatch a wish

Beneath itself, the fullest, chiefest Bliss

Contained within Heaven’s crystal pale and shine,

Doth wish its object always; so doth mine.

Elect no more presented in desire:

For Heaven’s roof, aye, lets not a wish soar higher.

Got though too dim, none can get to sign

Hear you, (my friend), is strengthened wish of mine.

In drossy silver should, I should by this,

[J is included in the representation of I, above]

Keep dull my post, and stain my serious wish,

Lest which polluted be, or the fearful Dove

My post-out foiled, I run a ring of Love

New polished, where my centered heart doth reek

Out highest streams of Love, which here do meet.

Presented thus your heart, Love’s Ring you’ll find

Quest I unless, always best befits the mind.

Reserve mine that. Yet let our secret breast

Set Love the tune which tunes this Ring the best.

The Ring of Love my pleasant heart must be

[Truly confined within the Trinity. — refrain]

Upon your heart (I pray you) put Love’s Ring

V[=U]nerringly; Love’s Swelt(ering) heart herein

Wearing a True-love’s-knot at center’s set.

Wherewith I send to you an alphabet

Xenodict¹ whence all syllables complete

[e]Xtracted are to spell what love can speak.

Yea, see, then, what I send. Yet I design

Zion my Ring shall license with her Trine.²

 

Edward Taylor

 
       Edward Taylor

    
 

A reproduction of Taylor's acrostic may be found in my Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing, Reston, VA: Reston Publishing Company, 1973, out-of-print, but used copies available here and there on the Internet; and here is an epitaph for Edward Taylor whose dates of birth and death are unknown:

 

R.I.P. EDWARD TAYLOR

1642-1729

 

He believed God’s predetermination,

Wrote each poem as a meditation,

Used the Word as the sharp impaler

Of the sackcloth clothing Edward Taylor.

 

¹Xeno” means strange or foreign, and “dict” (spelled “dick” in the original) means spoken; perhaps what this neologism means is “strangely spoken,” which would be an accurate description of this poem.

²The last line of this metaphysical (extended metaphor) poem may mean something like, the license of marriage, or even of poetic license, is allowed within the strictures laid down by the Trinity as perceived, no doubt, by a Puritan like Taylor if not by the High Anglican churchperson John Donne.

 

Radcliffe Squires and the Poetry of Abstraction

         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).

 

The Lost Song of James Wright

         James Wright, Robert Bly's major convert to “deep imagism” after James Dickey, was born in Ohio in 1927.  He attended Kenyon College in his native state, where he took his bachelor's degree.  Subsequently he took an M. A. and a Ph. D. at the University of Washington in Seattle where two of his teachers were the poets Stanley Kunitz and, in particular, Theodore Roethke. He later held academic positions at the University of Minnesota, Macalaster College, and finally at Hunter College in New York City where he died of cancer in 1980.

         Wright's first book, The Green Wall, was published in the Yale Series  of Younger Poets in 1957.  It contained poems that identified their writer as having one of the purest lyrical ears among the so-called “academic poets” of the post-Modern period.  "A Song for the Middle of the Night" is an example — it began with an epigraph: "By way of explaining to my son the following curse by Eustace Deschamps: 'Happy is he who has no children; for babies bring  nothing but crying and stench.'"

 

Now first of all he means the night

You beat the crib and cried

And brought me spinning out of bed

To powder your backside.

I rolled your buttocks over

And I could not complain:

Legs up, la la, legs down, la la,

Back to sleep again.

 

         The prosody of this octet stanza is accentual-syllabic verse, the meter is iambic tetrameter in the odd-lines, trimeter in the even; the rhyme scheme is, in the first stanza, abcbDeFE the odd lines do not rhyme, and the capital letters indicate lines that will be repeated in the second stanza.  In effect, then, the eight lines are made up of  two  quatrains of  common measure, but because three of the last four lines are refrains, Wright really had invented a nonce-form.  In the second stanza the rhymes of the first half change, but the second half do not hijiDeFE:

 

Now second of all he means the day

You dabbled out of doors

And dragged a dead cat Billy-be-damned

Across the kitchen floors.

I rolled your buttocks over

And made you sing for pain:

Legs up, la la, legs down, la la,

Back to sleep again.

 

         In the third stanza Wright abandoned the refrain line that had appeared as line five in the preceding two stanzas, but the reader will not perhaps catch it, because the new line ends with shoulder, which consonates with "over" — klmldeFE:

 

But third of all my father once

Laid me across his knee

And solved the trouble when he beat

The yowling out of me.

He rocked me on his shoulder

When razor straps were vain:

Legs up, la la, legs down, la la,

Back to sleep again.

 

         The last stanza abandons even the consonance of line five, so that there are as many unrhymed as rhymed lines, yet little of the lyricism of the poem has been lost:

 

So roll upon your belly, boy,

And bother being cursed.

You turn the household upside down,

But you are not the first.

Deschamps the poet blubbered too,

For all his fool disdain:

Legs up, la la, legs down, la la,

Back to sleep again.

 

         The poem partakes of the nursery rhyme and the drinking song, at the same time that it is a didactic poem with an argument and a point. It retains the reader's interest with its sound as it simultaneously builds a parallel series of narrative incidents with which one can empathize.  Is the  poem "sincere"?  Perhaps one may provide an answer by asking another question: Can the reader recognize himself or herself in  the poem?  No great change had taken place by the time Wright's second book, Saint Judas, was published two years later, in 1959.  Most of the poems were still those of a formalist, though there was perhaps a bit more loosening detectable.

         Henry Taylor wrote that "Wright's well-known shift in style was a necessity, a survival tactic. Saint Judas is a splendid book, but it contains considerable evidence of Wright's growing impatience with the style in which most  of it is written.  Moreover, the shift seems to have been more stylistic than thematic.  I do not deny the new subtlety of perception, the new sensitivity, in Wright's later work, but I am suspicious of claims that the shift was a cataclysmic transformation of the whole man."

At Kenyon College John Crowe Ransom had been Wright’s undergraduate teacher. Ransom was a member of the so-called “Fugitive poets,” a group of writers that took its name from the title of the magazine they had edited and published in at Vanderbilt University. By the time that Dave Smith asked Wright, "How do you now value Ransom's poetry?"  Ransom had abandoned writing poetry and become strictly a formalist “New Critic”; Wright replied, "His poetry, as the years go by, seems to me to be finer than I had realized.  I always liked it.  Ransom is in slightly bad odor right now, partly because he writes the so-called square poem: you can glance at  his  poems on the page and see that they scan.  If you look a little closer, unless you happen to be as tone-deaf as some of our reviewers apparently are — I don't say that in malice, I say it as a kind of curiosity, you can hear that his poems rhyme.  Furthermore, Ransom plainly shows in his poems that he is willing to let his conscious intelligence operate in the poems and this is very much out of fashion.  It's ridiculous that it should be out of fashion.  It is part of the terribly self-flattering, self-indulging anarchic spirit of our times, the spirit of confusion."

         Five years earlier than the Smith interview Norman Friedman, himself an Aristotelian New Critic, wrote, "James Wright's Collected Poems [1971]  contains most of The Green Wall,  and all of Saint Judas, The Branch Will Not Break [1963], and Shall We Gather at the River [1968], plus some translations and 33 new poems.  This impressive volume, although it covers a poetic career of only 14 years, reveals a genuine experimenter, a poet who can, like Yeats, consciously transform himself.  Thus we can speak already of Wright's rich and formal poems of the first two books; the spare and 'deep image' work of Branch; and the loose and pain-filled later poems.  For these stages also reveal a strange and tragic curve of emotional development: Wright's concern for human suffering, which was never absent from his earlier work, and which seemed to have been temporarily balanced by the bright joy of so much of Branch, now reappears as an obsession without let or hindrance or (often) control in an avalanche of anguish and despair in River and 'New Poems.'"

         Smith also asked Wright about the one course in poetry writing he had taken with Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington.  Wright said that "A course with Roethke was a course in very, very detailed and strenuous critical reading.  Here was an assignment: he wanted us to go to the library and find ten or maybe even twenty iambic trimeter lines that had a caesura after the first syllable.  He made us do that."  A bit later Wright said, "So, we knew Roethke was a very fine man, an intelligent and learned man, and when he asked us to do something we would do it.  He was not trying to violate our psyches or something."

         A book that Friedman didn't mention was one titled The Lion's Tail and Eyes: Poems Written Out of Laziness and  Silence (1962), a  committee effort by Wright, William Duffy and Robert Bly, but Wright denied that Bly had exercised any undue influence upon him.  Smith asked Wright, "How do you feel about your early poems?" to which Wright replied, "I  haven't read them for a while.  About three years ago I sat down and read my whole Collected Poems.  Some of them I couldn't remember having written and some of them I didn't understand.  It is true that I wrote to my publisher after Saint Judas and said I don't know what I am going to do after this but it will be completely different.  This comment, and also Robert Bly's essay on my work, has given rise to some sort of assumption that I calculated that I was going to be born again or something, that I would become a completely different person.  I think that this is nonsense.  There was a good essay by Mark Strand...regarding changes in poetry.  He used my work as an example and he said the only difference, really, was that I don't rhyme so often now.  I don't think that a person can change very quickly or easily."

         Wright's demurrer to the contrary notwithstanding, there was a great difference in style between the poet's second solo book and his third, The Branch Will Not Break, which was clearly "deep image" poetry,  though not nearly as self-conscious and sentimental as the work of Bly.  It was more sinewy as well, leaner and clearer. Wright emphasized the shift in his style by publishing as the opening pair in Collected Poems, first,  "The Quest," written in the earlier lyrical style, and then, "Sitting in a Small Screenhouse on a Summer Morning."  It is interesting to compare the opening stanzas of the two poems.  Here is the opening of the first:

 

In pasture where the leaf and wood

Were lorn of all delicious apple,

And underfoot a long and supple

Bough leaned down to dip in mud,

I came before the dark to stare

At a gray nest blown in a swirl,

As in the arm of a dead girl

Crippled and torn and laid out bare.

 

And here is the opening of the second poem:

 

Ten more miles, it is South Dakota.

Somehow, the roads there turn blue,

When no one walks down them.

One more night of walking, and I could have become

A horse, a blue horse, dancing

Down a road alone.

 

         The second poem is quite different from the first in tone, in style,  in level of diction.  The tone is cool and objectifying, not elegiac; the style is the new "plainstyle" that was being developed by poets in the Northwest including William Stafford, Richard Hugo and David Wagoner (see essays on all three elsewhere in this blog); the level of diction is colloquial rather than literary.  The second poem relies on the sensory level primarily, not upon the sonic.  The first poem develops an idea in formal, logical order, makes its point; the second abandons the denotations of words and makes the most of connotations and associations, leaping from one image to another, in the manner of the  haiku.  Both poems are well written, beautifully paced, clearly the work of a wordsmith. The second poem's images are the type of the "deep" image, the effect surreal: "It is so still now, I hear the horse / Clear his nostrils. / He has crept out of the green places behind me. / Patient and affectionate, he reads over my shoulder / These words I have written."  The poem shows that,  no  matter what the theory, no matter how far out or unfounded it may be, in the hands of someone who can truly write, it will work.  Bly could not make his theory work as well as Wright could.

         After his third solo book Wright's style continued to change, becoming more jagged and expressive of personal suffering.  This third phase of Wright's career that Friedman identified, "The emotional — and sometimes artistic — descent, however, is dizzying as we come to Shall We Gather at the River and the 'New Poems'" section of Collected Poems Friedman wrote. "For unrelieved wretchedness, these pieces must be unmatched in  contemporary [mid=twentieth century] poetry, and suggest that Wright is returning, after the brief high of Branch, to some old and fundamental unresolved despair.  Whether these poems were premonitory or only an expression of a mid-life crisis it is impossible to say, but some of them, such as ‘At the Grave,’ [from the 1974 Two  Citizens], were maelstroms of despair.”

         "I believe the grave James referred to," the poet's wife Anne wrote to Lewis Turco in a letter dated July 29, 1989, "was that of his English teacher at Kenyon, Philip Timberlake.  He has several poems dedicated, in this manner, to Mr. Timberlake.  Needless to say, it has many other meanings too, but James loved Philip Timberlake, who took such a great interest in James when he was a student and was so supportive and such an intellectual force in James' life."

 

All I am doing is walking here alone.

I am not among the English poets.

I am not even going to be among

The English poets after my death.

You loved them the best.

And you liked me, fine.  It is still raining

This morning, this November morning.

And I am not even standing at your grave.

I am fiddling with a notebook in New York,

Wondering about Ohio where now at this moment

A leaf hangs on a locust thorn shredding

Its form into the rain.

John Keats, coughing his lungs out,

John Clare, crazy,

And Geoffrey Chaucer the only one.

And Edward Thomas, who got killed, the only

Soldier in this century who was sane.

If these lines get published, I will hear

From some God damned deaf moron who knows

Everything.  The dead are nothing.

And he will be right.

The living giggle in the dark all night,

And the dead are nothing.

 

         This is confessional poetry as melancholy as that of Anne Sexton, as manic as that of Sylvia Plath.  "I agree," Anne Wright wrote in her letter, "that 'At the  Grave' is both melancholy and manic." James Wright's last book, To a Blossoming Pear Tree, was published in 1978; he died of cancer of the esophagus two years later.

The Complete Iconoclast: Frank O'HaraFrank

Frank O'Hara was born in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, in 1926. During the Second World War he served in the U.  S. Navy from 1944 to 1946, and afterwards he attended Harvard where, at first, he majored in music and then switched to English studies. He was one of the founders of the Cambridge Poets' Theatre. O'Hara entered graduate studies at the University of Michigan where he won a major Hopwood Award for his  poetry and a play, Try! Try! which was later produced, with another play,  at the Poets' Theatre, together with John Ashbery's masque Everyman, for which O'Hara wrote the score.

         When he had finished his education O'Hara moved to New York City where he joined the staff of the Museum of Modern Art in 1951.  As writing became a larger part of his life, he left this position, but later he returned, in 1955, and five years later he became an assistant curator of the collection.  O’Hara not only assisted in important traveling exhibits, but organized exhibitions by major contemporary artists; he wrote books about them as well, including Jackson Pollock (1959) and Robert Motherwell (1965). Like that of his friend Ashbery, O'Hara's first book, A City Winter, and Other Poems(1952), was published, not by a regular literary publisher, but by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.  O'Hara collaborated with various artists in some of his books which  includeOranges (1953),  Meditations in an Emergency (1957), a long poem, Second  Avenue(1960), Odes (1960), Lunch Poems (1964), and Love Poems (Tentative Title) 1965.  His work, together with that of other so-called “New York School” poets appeared in the Donald Allen anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960  (1960); thus, these people have been associated with the Black Mountain, San Francisco, and Beat movements, but they are quite disparate.  Allen edited and compiled a chronology for O’Hara’s posthumousThe Collected Poems; he described the poet's death in 1966 this way:

 

         "In  the early morning of July 24 he was struck and gravely injured by a beach-buggy on the beach of Fire Island.  Taken to Bayview Hospital in Mastic Beach, L. I., he was given massive transfusions and underwent exploratory operation, but his condition deteriorated and he died at 8:50 the evening of the 25th. On the 28th he was buried in the Springs cemetery, near East Hampton.  Larry Rivers, Bill Berkson, Edwin Denby and Rene d'Harnoncourt, Director of the Museum of Modern  Art, delivered eulogies; John Ashbery read from his poems; and Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky  chanted sutras over his grave. On his tombstone is carved 'Grace to be born & live....'"

 

         O'Hara had written in the Allen anthology,  "I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it, and at times when I  would  rather be dead the thought that I could never write another poem has so far stopped me.  I think this is an  ignoble attitude.  I would rather die for love, but I haven't." Ashbery, in his introduction to The Collected Poems, said of O'Hara that "...his poetry is anything but literary. It is part of a modern tradition which is anti-literary and anti-artistic, and which goes back to Apollinaire and the Dadaists, to the collages of Picasso and  Braque with their perishable newspaper clippings, to Satie's musique d'ameublement which was not meant to be listened to."

         Later Ashbery made even clearer the connection of O'Hara's abstract  poetry with the abstract art of music and with 20th-century abstract art: "Frank O'Hara's concept of the poem as the chronicle of the creative act that produces it was strengthened by his intimate experience of Pollock's,  Kline's, and de Kooning's great paintings of the late 40s and early 50s,…" In her book Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters (1977) Marjorie Perloff quoted from and discussed a passage from Second Avenue which had to do with a description of a painting of Grace Hartigan:

 

Grace destroys

the whirling faces in their dissonant gaiety where it's anxious

 

lifted nasally to the heavens which is a carrousel grinning

and spasmodically obliterated with loaves of greasy white paint

and this becomes like love to her, is what I desire

and what you, to be able to throw something away without yawning

"Oh Leaves of Grass! o Sylvette! oh Basket Weavers' Conference!"

and thus make good our promise to destroy something but not us.

 

"Notice," Perloff wrote, "how O'Hara's heterogeneous images and syntactic dislocations 'imitate' the process of painting itself.  The pronoun 'it' ('It's anxious') has no antecedent, the relative clause 'which is...' no specific referent,  and yet we are told that 'this' (the 'dissonant gaiety'? the 'heavens' seen as a 'carrousel'?  the 'loaves of greasy  white paint'? or all these things taken together?) becomes 'like love to her' and is also 'what I [the poet] desire.'  The shorthand phrase 'and what you' in line 6 again shifts perspective: 'you' is now Grace herself;  her painting is all she desires it to be — a structure of 'wildly discordant images' that manages to avoid all bombast ('Oh Leaves of  Grass! o Sylvette! oh Basket Weavers' Conference!'), that can deconstruct ('throw away without yawning') pure  abstraction in favor of heterogeneity ('Images...hitherto repressed,' 'chaotic brushwork and  whirling impasto,'..that is charged with personal passion ('and thus make good our promise to destroy something but not us')."  One thing that Perloff missed on the sensory level, however, was the pun between Whitman's Leaves of Grass and the "loaves of greasy white paint" [emphasis added], and that between "Grace," "Grass," and "greasy."

         Ashbery continued in his introduction to the Collected Poems, "Frank also listened constantly to music.... We were both tremendously impressed  by...John Cage's  'Music of Changes,' a piano work lasting over an hour and consisting, as I recall, entirely of isolated, autonomous tone-clusters struck seemingly at random all over the keyboard." "This climate...just about any music, in fact — encouraged Frank's poetry and provided him with a sort of reservoir of inspiration: words and colors that could be borrowed freely from everywhere to build up big, airy structures unlike anything previous in American poetry and indeed unlike poetry,  more like the inspired ramblings of a mind open to the point  of  distraction." Here is "June 2, 1958":

 

Oh sky over the graveyard, you are blue,

you seem to be smiling! or ar you sneering?

under the captured moss a little girl

is climbing, come closer! why it's Maude,

or Maudie as she's sometimes called.  I think

she is looking for her turtle.  Meanwhile,

back at Patsy Suuthgate's, two grown men

are falling off a swing into a vat of Bloody Marys.

It's Sunday and the trains run on time.  What

a wonderful country it is, so black and blue

airy green, leaning out a window

thinking of the sea and the uncomfortable sand!

 

         "Like Whitman," Alan Feldman wrote in his study, Frank O'Hara (1979), "O'Hara makes use of as broad a poetic diction as possible, incorporating the details of his experience, no matter how homely or shocking.  At times, O'Hara's poetic speech is the 'queertalk' of homosexuals; when it is not, it is still, more generally, the language of a man who cares more about his feelings and his relationships than about moral or societal conventions.   But while, for the most part, O'Hara's language is that of the everyday, of the interpersonal, it is also a poetic language seeking to confer heightened significance upon ordinary experience. Surreal, dreamlike images add a sense of aesthetic and psychological complexity; the poems are also infused with a sense of  'design' — an attention to verbal surface that counteracts any tendency to fall into too-easy patterns of thought and feeling."

         Discussing Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poets and the Donald Hall-Robert Pack-Louis Simpson anthologies The New Poets of England and America, Donald Barlow Stauffer in his A Short History of American Poetry (1974) said, "Most observers of the contemporary [mid-twentieth century] scene agree that there are two, or possibly three groups into which it is  possible  to fit the poets writing today, corresponding roughly to the Allen and Hall  anthologies.  These are known variously as the Academics and the Beats, the Palefaces and the Redskins, the Establishment and the Underground, or the Conservatives and the Liberals. Such obviously crude labels can only suggest rather than define the kinds of distinctions that the poets themselves and their readers tend to make. But they do call attention to the fact that in poetry,  as in the other arts, there is an official culture, an unofficial one, and an interaction between them: one looking toward the past, the other passionately denying it; one emphasizing form and ideas, the other, freedom of form and feelings."

         If O'Hara was the complete iconoclast, a leader of the revolution against the old and the past and in favor of the new and the now, his friend John Ashbery was more complexly ambivalent in his approach to the composition of poetry and, in particular, to traditional form.  Although he was represented in the 1960 Donald Allen "Redskin" anthology, the level of Ashbery's sophistication was  high and he was also well-represented by formal poems in the 1986 Dacey-Jauss "Paleface" anthology Strong Measures; thus, he had a foot in the two camps and might be considered to be a unifying,  rather than a schismatic, figure, one who is equally conventional and controversial to both groups.

An Analysis of Emerson's Poem "The Titmouse"

The Titmouse

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

  You shall not be overbold

When you deal with arctic cold,

As late I found my lukewarm blood

Chilled wading in the snow-choked wood.

How should I fight? my foeman fine         —  5

Has million arms to one of mine:

East, west, for aid I looked in vain,

East, west, north, south, are his domain.

Miles off, three dangerous miles, is home;

Must borrow his winds who there would come.         —10

Up and away for life! be fleet!—

The frost-king ties my fumbling feet,

Sings in my ears, my hands are stones,

Curdles the blood to the marble bones,

Tugs at the heart-strings, numbs the sense,         —15

And hems in life with narrowing fence.

Well, in this broad bed lie and sleep,—

The punctual stars will vigil keep,—

Embalmed by purifying cold;

The winds shall sing their dead-march old,         —20

The snow is no ignoble shroud,

The moon thy mourner, and the cloud.

 

  Softly, — but this way fate was pointing,

'T was coming fast to such anointing,

When piped a tiny voice hard by,         —25

Gay and polite, a cheerful cry,

Chic-chic-a-dee-de! saucy note

Out of sound heart and merry throat,

As if it said, 'Good day, good sir!

Fine afternoon, old passenger!         —30

Happy to meet you in these places,

Where January brings few faces.'

 

  This poet, though he live apart,

Moved by his hospitable heart,

Sped, when I passed his sylvan fort,         —35

To do the honors of his court,

As fits a feathered lord of land;

Flew near, with soft wing grazed my hand,

Hopped on the bough, then, darting low,

Prints his small impress on the snow,         —40

Shows feats of his gymnastic play,

Head downward, clinging to the spray.

 

  Here was this atom in full breath,

Hurling defiance at vast death;

This scrap of valor just for play         —45

Fronts the north-wind in waistcoat gray,

As if to shame my weak behavior;

I greeted loud my little savior,

'You pet! what dost here? and what for?

In these woods, thy small Labrador,         —50

At this pinch, wee San Salvador!

What fire burns in that little chest

So frolic, stout and self-possest?

Henceforth I wear no stripe but thine;

Ashes and jet all hues outshine.         —55

Why are not diamonds black and gray,

To ape thy dare-devil array

And I affirm, the spacious North

Exists to draw thy virtue forth.

I think no virtue goes with size;         —60

The reason of all cowardice

Is, that men are overgrown,

And, to be valiant, must come down

To the titmouse dimension.'

 

  'T is good will makes intelligence,         —65

And I began to catch the sense

Of my bird's song: 'Live out of doors

In the great woods, on prairie floors.

I dine in the sun; when he sinks in the sea,

I too have a hole in a hollow tree;         —70

And I like less when Summer beats

With stifling beams on these retreats,

Than noontide twilights which snow makes

With tempest of the blinding flakes.

For well the soul, if stout within,         —75

Can arm impregnably the skin;

And polar frost my frame defied,

Made of the air that blows outside.'

 

  With glad remembrance of my debt,

I homeward turn; farewell, my pet!         —80

When here again thy pilgrim comes,

He shall bring store of seeds and crumbs.

Doubt not, so long as earth has bread,

Thou first and foremost shalt be fed;

The Providence that is most large         —85

Takes hearts like thine in special charge,

Helps who for their own need are strong,

And the sky doats on cheerful song.

Henceforth I prize thy wiry chant

O'er all that mass and minster vaunt;         —90

For men mis-hear thy call in Spring,

As 't would accost some frivolous wing,

Crying out of the hazel copse, Phe-be!

And, in winter, Chic-a-dee-dee!

I think old Caesar must have heard         —95

In northern Gaul my dauntless bird,

And, echoed in some frosty wold,

Borrowed thy battle-numbers bold.

And I will write our annals new,

And thank thee for a better clew,         —100

I, who dreamed not when I came here

To find the antidote of fear,

Now hear thee say in Roman key,

Paean! Veni, vidi, vici.         —104

 

 

ANALYSIS OF EMERSON’S “THE TITMOUSE”

 

Regarding the title of this poem: Emerson is certainly talking about the black-capped chickadee, not the somewhat larger tufted titmouse. His description of the bird’s call in line 27 is clearly that of the chickadee: “Chic-chic-a-dee-de!” and not the “peter-peter-peter” of the titmouse. I listened to both songs in my copy of Donald Kroodsma’s The Backyard Birdsong Guide, and there is no mistaking the difference. Furthermore, Emerson’s description of the bird’s behavior in line 38 is that of the fearless, almost tame chickadee, not the much more skittish titmouse, as my long experience of bird feeding attests. In line 55 Emerson describes his little bird as displaying “Ashes and jet,” but the only black part of a titmouse is its beak, whereas the chickadee has a jet-black cap and a black bib on its throat, a stripe, in fact, such as that Emerson says he will wear, in line 54, in emulation of his heroic little friend.

In the last strophe things get even more confusing, for Emerson says, in lines 93-94, that during the summer his bird says “Phe-be!” rather than “Chic-a-dee-dee.” The eastern phoebe sings that song, not the chickadee nor the titmouse, and the coloring of the phoebe is nothing like that of either of the other birds in any season. Emerson may have been a lover of Nature, but if this poem is any indication, he was by no means a careful observer of nature. It is, nevertheless, a very good poem that certainly ought to have been titled “The Chickadee.”

The typographical level of “The Titmouse” shows that it is written in verse, not prose mode, and that it is strophic, not stanzaic. All lines begin with initial capitals and are justified left except the first line of each strophe which is slightly indented, as though it were the beginning of a prose paragraph. The first strophe is 22 lines long; the second and third, 10 each; the fourth strophe, like the first, is 22 lines long — to this point the poem would appear to be stanzaic, showing an ABBA arrangement, but the fifth strophe is 14 lines in length, and the poem ends with a strophe of 26 lines. It is, therefore, 104 total lines in length.

Sonically, “The Titmouse” is written in normative accentual-syllabic prosody true-rhymed in iambic tetrameter couplets primarily, but on one occasion there is triplet rhyme (lines 62, 63, & 64), and on another, quintet rhyme (lines 47-51). Sometimes, as in the latter case, the true rhyme modulates into consonance, and although most lines end in rising iambic rhythms, here and there one will find a falling ending, with feminine rhyme (lines 23 & 24, 47 & 48) or light rhyme (63 & 64) — lines 62, 63 & 64 are all, actually, consonances rather than true rhymes.

         This poem is quite interesting in its sonic effects: on many occasions, if not most, the rhymes are ordinary, even trite — in the first six lines there are four trite rhymes: bold / cold, fine / mine, but in between these couplets there is another that consonates and sight-rhymes rather than true-rhymes, blood / wood, and all four of the first lines show consonantal echo, for they end in dee sounds. Emerson signals that he is going to be various in his sonic devices, though his rhyming will be fairly simple for the most part.

         There is much counterpoint — many metrical variations — in these iambic tetrameter couplets, even in the initial lines, for the first couplet is written in fact in “rocking meter”: the first and second lines metrically read, ´x´x´x´ / ´x´x´x´; thus, they appear to begin with trochees and to end with tailless trochees: ´x |´x |´x |´(x) / x |´x |´x |´(x). If the whole poem were written like this, as is Longfellow’s “The Ropewalk,” one would be unable to say whether it were written in headless iambic lines, or tailless trochaic lines and it would have to be described as “rocking meter.” However, if one looks at the rest of “The Titmouse,” the poem, beginning with the third line, is clearly written in iambic tetrameter meter: x´| x´| x´| x´, and the first two lines must therefore begin with headless iambs: (x)´| x´| x ´| x.

         Even line four, though, has variation in it, for there is a spondee substitution in the first foot, a promotion of the unstressed fourth syllable, and a demotion of the normally stressed seventh syllable: “Chilled wading in the snow-choked wood.” Substitutions continue in the fifth line where a trochee is substituted in the first foot, there is a medial caesura (at the question mark), and there is alliteration (effs) just as one would expect to find in a stich of Anglo-Saxon prosody: “How should I fight? My foeman fine….” Truly, this is sophisticated sound which, in my opinion, outweighs the easy rhymes of much of the poem.

         Line three is the first normative iambic tetrameter line to appear, and line six is the second, but line seven begins with a spondee substitution, and there is not only repetition in the first two syllables of the eighth line, but Emerson managed to overstress the first four syllables both rhetorically (with punctuation) and with normally stressed single-syllable nouns (East, west, north, south), so that it is not even predominantly iambic. If I were to analyze the sonic level of the entire poem this essay would stretch out interminably, but I believe that what I have pointed out without even leaving strophe one the reader will be able to see and appreciate throughout the rest of “The Titmouse.” The poem is a nonce ode celebrating the event of the speaker’s meeting in the woods with a chickadee.

         The poem begins with descriptions: “You shall not be overbold,” “arctic cold,” “lukewarm blood,” “snow-choked wood,” all within the first four lines, but in the fifth line the rhetorical trope personification is introduced where Emerson’s alliterative “foeman fine,” winter, is described as having “million arms to one of mine.” Winter is the lord of a “domain” into which the speaker has intruded, and Emerson reminds himself that he who would go into the woods must make move like the wind if he wishes to rescue himself from “the frost-king” who “sings in my ears.”

         At this point the poet introduces simile: “my hands are stones,” his blood “curdles” like milk, he has “marble bones.” A cliché is borrowed from the language of love and inserted, for the wind “Tugs at the heart-strings,” then it “numbs the sense, / And hems in life with narrowing fence.” This mixed simile becomes even more entangled in images brought in from left field (so to speak) when the narrator contemplates surrendering to cold and winter:

 

         “Well, in this broad bed lie and sleep, —

         The punctual stars will vigil keep, —

         Embalmed by purifying cold;

         The winds shall sing their dead-march old,

         The snow is no ignoble shroud,

         The moon thy mourner, and the cloud.”

 

To my ear this passage invokes memories of William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” though I wouldn’t go so far as to remark that it is a literary reference.

         The sensory level gets not much more sophisticated than this, though the narrator engages in an anthropomorphic conversation with the chickadee / titmouse which becomes a symbol for nonchalant bravery in the face of chill adversity.  The bird lives in the hollow of a tree, its “sylvan fort,” where it does “the honors of his court / As fits a feathered lord of land.” So winter is the overlord of the landscape, and apparently the bird is a vassal of this sovereign.

         In strophe four the bird is portrayed as a tiny knight “Hurling defiance at vast death.” It is a “scrap of valor” which insouciantly defies winter dressed in “waistcoat gray, / As if to shame my weak behavior.” What can someone like the narrator do with such an example other than suck it up and carry on?

         In strophe five the subject of the poem, bravery, achieves its theme: “One must be brave in order to survive adversity,” or words to that effect. Strophe six sees the narrator saying goodbye to his stout little “scrap of valor” and promising to return with sustenance soon. The poem ends with an allusion to Caesar: a formal expression of approval of the example the chickadee has provided; the “paean” expressed in Latin: “I came, I saw, I conquered.”

         The atmosphere of the poem is initially threatening, but this modulates into what amounts to admiration for the little bird’s fearlessness and a resolve to emulate its behavior, so the mood by the end of the poem is distinctly upbeat. The viewpoint of the poem is narrative: Emerson is telling the story of a walk he took in the winter woods where he discovered that he was in a degree of jeopardy for having walked too far in weather that was too bitter. He began to experience trepidation at his situation when he met the “titmouse” who showed him that his behavior and fear were not befitting of a warrior of life, and he is grateful “To find the antidote of fear” in a tiny “scrap of valor” in the winter woods.

         The syntax of the poem is also narrative, the level of diction is relatively high because Emerson wrote the poem in the standard poetic diction and style of the Romantic period, but it is not overwritten given its era.

         The major genre is that of the narrative, but because Emerson emphasized sonic devices so much, the poem is lyric, the poem must be described as a lyric narrative, and the minor genre of the poem is didactics because it teaches a lesson, that one must face up to adversity and attempt to overcome it.

         The sonic level is primary in “The Titmouse,” and it is well done for the most part, though Emerson’s penchant for trite rhymes is apparent at many points. So is his interest in alliteration, though, and other sonic devices such as consonance. The sensory level is not high, however, and the poet is quite careless about mixing his metaphors. Overall, though, “The Titmouse” is clearly one of Emerson’s finer and most readable poems.

Randall Jarrell, Fugitive Poet and Critic

 

         

Randall Jarrell, poet, critic, and novelist, was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1914.  He attended Vanderbilt University where he was influenced by the New Critics and The Fugitives — these formed his aesthetic and informed his practice throughout his life.  During the war he served in the Army Air Corps from 1942-1946; however, Jarrell's time was spent in the U.S. where he served on a B-29 bomber base in Arizona.  His first book of poems, Blood for a Stranger, appeared in 1942 during the war, and it was as conventional as most books of the period.  His second, Little Friend, Little Friend, was published in 1945 as the war came to a close.  His first real success, however, was with his third book, Losses, which appeared in 1948.

         As a professional academic Jarrell, like his mentors at Vanderbilt, taught at various institutions of higher learning including Sarah Lawrence, Kenyon College (where the New Critic John Crowe Ransom had gone to teach and found The Kenyon Review), Princeton, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.  Like some of his mentors, he published a great deal of formalist criticism in periodicals such as The Nation, Partisan Review, and The Yale Review.  His last book of poems, The Lost World, appeared in 1965, the year of his untimely and apparently accidental death.

         Stephen Stepanchev, in his American Poetry Since 1945, noted the vigor of Jarrell's second and third volumes.  It appeared to him that Jarrell had found his animating subject: war and the military — everything to do with regimentation, routine, and combat, though he had no experience of the latter.  Jarrell's imagination was enlivened by these; they enabled him to find powerful symbols and archetypes to make the suffering of all the victims of brutality, including the combatants, solid and real to the minds of his readers.  On the other hand, sometimes his symbolism could be too distancing, the narration of his stories too objective.  These strengths and weaknesses of Jarrell's work were often the strengths and weaknesses of his contemporaries as well.

         J. A. Bryant, Jr., writing in his Understanding Randall Jarrell (1986), said, "Jarrell never saw combat during World War II and never served overseas.  Having failed to qualify for ferry-pilot training, he enlisted in the army air [corps] as a private and served for a time as a link trainer instructor.  When the need for that duty diminished, he qualified as a celestial-navigation tower operator.  Nevertheless, the poems that Jarrell wrote during this period in his life have enabled him to stand with [the British World War I poets] Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen as a war poet of distinction and with the popular correspondent Ernie Pyle, whose work he respected and even admired as one of the significant voices of World War II.  Today there are those who know nothing else Jarrell wrote but can quote phrases and lines from 'The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.'"

         Frederic J. Hoffman noted in his The Achievement of Randall Jarrell (1970) that the poet's first book, which was dedicated to his mentor the Fugitive poet Allen Tate, was full of poems that were written in the style admired by the New Critics: they were formal and ironic, but many of them also had a certain dreamlike quality; in fact, they could border upon the surreal. The dreamer would awaken and be unable to tell which was reality, his wakening or the dream.  Jarrell would find archetypal symbols that would objectify such things as death and birth, fear, nurture, guilt.  These subjects continued in his Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) which ended with "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," one of the most-anthologized poems to come out of World War II and still Jarrell's best-known single piece.

         In this surreal, loosely iambic-pentameter quintet poem with only two lines rhyming — the second and fifth — the voice of the speaker comes from beyond the grave.  The dramatic narrator is an animal as well as a human being.  His "mother" likewise has a double identity — she is a bomber and a woman; her womb is the plexiglas bubble on the fuselage of that warplane, perhaps a Mitchell Liberator or a Flying Fortress.  When she gives birth, she gives up a terrified animal to society, which is supposed to make a person out of it.

         Life, however, is unreal, more unreal than the preconscious womb. Those who have not experienced it can only attempt, with Jarrell's help, to imagine what it must have been like to be suspended under the belly of an airplane in a transparent ball, firing a machine gun at the fighter planes rising out of the clouds and smoke, their own guns blazing: When he dies "they" wash him out of the turret with a hose.  The nightmare ought to be over, but it is not — the gunner is still conscious, even in death.  The final line of the poem is a damnation.  Although it appears to be a flat statement, it still has a compound nature: sleep is an awakening to a dream of life, to a nightmare of death, but death is not sleep; rather, it is a terrible awareness of the nature of reality.

         Jarrell's poetry continued to reflect not only the precepts of the New Criticism — its objectivity, its concern with ambiguities, with Jungian archetypal imagery and Freudian sexual energy, its attention to craft and intelligence — but also the dramatic structure that is evident in "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner."  Jarrell brought to his work a deep sense of concern about the nature of the human animal, and a commitment to use words in order to educate his readers.  In the "Introduction" to her study The Poetry of Randall Jarrell (1971) Suzanne Ferguson took note of Jarrell's drive to dig deeply into the psychological complexities of mankind but at the same time to objectify those knots of consciousness through narrative and dramatic techniques rather than burrow inward toward the core of the self. This approach would be unusual in the 1960s when most of Jarrell's contemporaries would turn away from public utterance to personal statement — but Jarrell would not survive the decade of the 'sixties; his last book was the posthumous Selected Poems (1966).

         Ferguson further pointed out that, of the poets of his generation, only the reputations of Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell loomed larger than that of Jarrell in the mid-twentieth century.  Further, only Roethke and Lowell were more deeply "personal" in approach and subject matter; nevertheless, Jarrell was capable of writing powerfully using his dramatic voices.

         Jarrell felt, according to his own words in Poet's Choice, edited by Paul Engle and Joseph Langland in 1962, that "'Eighth Air Force' expresses better than any of the other poems I wrote about the war what I felt about the war."  But one of the dead children in the dialogue poem "Protocols" who says that the gas in the strange room in the Nazi camp "smelled like hay," not realizing that the scent is that of poison gas, of death, can make the reader feel deeply, in this case through dramatic irony, what an unbearable experience can be like.

 

An Analysis of Emerson's Poem "Lover's Petition"

LOVER’S PETITION. Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Good Heart, that ownest all!

I ask a modest boon and small:

Not of lands and towns the gift,—

Too large a load for me to lift,—

But for one proper creature,                                  5

Which geographic eye,

Sweeping the map of Western earth,

Or the Atlantic coast, from Maine

To Powhatan’s domain,

Could not descry.                                               10

Is ’t much to ask in all thy huge creation,

So trivial a part,—

A solitary heart?

Yet count me not of spirit mean,

Or mine a mean demand,                                    15

For ’t is the concentration

And worth of all the land,

The sister of the sea,

The daughter of the strand,

Composed of air and light,                                    20

And of the swart earth-might.

So little to thy poet’s prayer

Thy large bounty well can spare.

And yet I think, if she were gone,

The world were better left alone.                           25

 

         The typographical level of the poem discloses that it is written in verse rather than prose mode, that it is strophic rather than stanzaic, that all lines begin with initial capitals and are left-hand justified. This 25-line poem is a single strophe in length.

On the sonic level we determine that the prosody of the poem is variable accentual-syllabics and that the running foot is in general iambic. Line lengths range from dimeter (lines 6 & 10), through trimeter (1, 5, 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 & 21) and tetrameter (2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 14, 22), to pentameter (line 11 only).

The poem begins with two couplets rhyming aa & bb, then shifts to random rhymes generally, although couplets reappear here and there, as in lines 8 & 9, 12 & 13, 20 & 21, and the poem ends with three couplets, the last of which, lines 24 & 25, do not rhyme but consonate (gone/alone).  The rhyme pattern is aabbcdceedfgghifid (line 18 consonates with line 6) ijjkkll. The consonance between lines 6 and 18 is at such a distance, however, that one may question whether they have a sonic relationship at all and may in fact be considered unrhymed lines. Another consonance exists between lines 5 (creature) and 7 (earth), but because the first word is a falling rhythm (an amphibrach: see below), it would have to be considered a “light consonance,” a stressed syllable consonating with an unstressed syllable.

The poem has many metrical variations beginning with line 1 which has an initial spondee and continues with two iambs. Line 3 is acephalous, beginning with a headless iamb and continuing with three iambs. Line 4, like line 1, has a spondee substitution in the first foot; line 5 begins with a double iamb and ends with an amphibrach — a feminine or falling rhythm, of which there are several in the poem: lines 11, 16, & 22. Line 6 has a spondee substitution in the first foot; lines 7 & 8 substitute trochees in the first foot. The first syllable of line 10 is demoted from primary to secondary stress because it is the center of three stressed syllables (domain / Could not) and the following line 11 is the only pentameter line in the poem, but it is not perfect because, like lines 5 and 16, it ends with an amphibrach (creation, x’x) and is therefore eleven syllables long; it is an interesting line almost at the center of the poem.

Line 12, which is trimeter, has two substitutions: a spondee in the first foot and, depending upon whether one pronounces “ial” in trivial, as a two syllable elision (triv-yal) or as three syllables (tri-vi-al), either an anapest substitution in a dimeter line in the former case, or a promotion of the unstressed al syllable in a trimeter line in the latter. If it is a dimeter line, there are no iambs in it at all; if it is a trimeter line, two of the three feet are iambs and it is normative.

Line 13 and 15 are perfect iambic trimeter and line 14, which they enclose, is perfect iambic tetrameter.  Line 16, which has been discussed as ending in an amphibrach, is iambic trimeter but seven syllables long. Line 17 is perfect iambic trimeter again followed by another trimeter line but one that contains a promotion in the fourth syllable like the following lines 18 and 19 which are metrically identical, then back to a perfect trimeter line in line 20. Line 21, also trimeter, nevertheless has two variations: a promotion in the second syllable and a demotion in the fifth.

Line 22 is iambic tetrameter with a promotion in the fourth syllable and an elision, “prayer” (prair), in the eighth. Line 23 is highly unusual: it begins with an iamb, but the second and third verse feet are trochees, and the fourth foot is a tailless trochee; thus, the line is normative trochaic, not iambic.

The last two lines, although they are perfect iambic tetrameter, unlike most of the rest of the lines, make a couplet that is unusual also in that the lines consonate (gone/alone) rather than true-rhyme. Other lines that consonate are 5 & 7 (creature / earth), and 6 & 18 (eye / sea). Lines 11 &16 are falling rhymes, as noted, but they also exhibit consonantal echo (the hard cees which are not alliterations because one is in a stressed syllable and the other in an unstressed syllable). Alliterations occur in several lines as in 15 (mine / mean), 18 (sister / sea) and 22 (poet’s / prayer) and between lines as in lines 3 & 4 (lands – large / load), 7 & 8 (map - Maine).

The general form of the poem is what the title says it is; it is a lyric plea for love by a lover to the object of his affections written in a nonce strophe.

The sensory level of the poem is simple, its primary trope being descriptive rather than similetic or metaphoric. There are a few rhetorical tropes as well, as for instance allusion (Powhatan’s domain) and hyperbole (sister of the sea).

The tradition of the poem is standard American Romanticism that prevailed in the nineteenth century; it exhibits an atmosphere of yearning, and its mood is hopeful.

The ideational level of the poem is equally simple. The subject is love, and the schemas are inclusive rather than exclusive, for the appeal is to everyone notwithstanding the egopoetic viewpoint, subjective syntax, and literary level of diction, for the speaker may be any male addressing his beloved. The style in which it is written is high: nineteenth century Romantic period style (ownest all, modest boon and small, of lands and towns the gift, of spirit mean, etc.). The theme may be expressed in the sentence, “Grant me your love.”

Fusionally, the poem is a lyric. Although the idea expressed in the poem is ordinary, even simple, it is nevertheless primary, for it is basically a lyric argument in which a lover pleads with his beloved to reciprocate that love. The lyricism supports the argument adequately, but this is not one of the great Romantic love poems.

The Difference Between Poetry and Poultry

Dear Contemporary Poetry Review,  

Jack Foley has very kindly suggested that I write a comment on X. J. Kennedy’s review of 77 Love Sonnets titled “My Dear Sonneteer: Garrison Keillor” in Contemporary Poetry Review because “Lewis Turco HATES Keillor and would gladly write a blistering response,” but that’s not accurate. I don’t “hate” Keillor, nor do I dislike his poetry, for I have never read any of it.  

However, I do think that nine out of ten poems that he publishes in his Writer’s Almanac are poor examples of language art, and that’s what I believe poetry ought to be, language art. I have discussed some of the worst examples of Keillor’s tasteless choice of poultry over the past couple of years on my blog, “Poetics and Ruminations.” 

Keillor also frustrates me because he manages to cripple even some of the good poems he now and again prints on-line with many egregious typographical errors in them—he also leaves typos all over the rest of the items in his Almanac. I have been cataloguing them on my blog as well.  

Because I have never read Keillor’s verse, I have formed no previous opinion of it. I don’t remember ever having run into it in any of the periodicals I have been reading for over half a century. (One would think I might have if it were publishable.) I have, however, read Dana Gioia’s excessively kind review of Keillor’s anthology Good Poems, and I have discussed that on my blog. I have also read Joe Kennedy’s review in the Contemporary Poetry Review. It does seem rather apologetic and tip-toesy, just as Dana’s essay did. Poets have asked me to take them off my email lists because I knock Keillor often. All of this leads me to believe that a lot of writers fear Keillor’s “power” and are willing to compromise their views in the hope that he will put their work now and again into his Almanac. 

I doubt that’s true of Joe and Dana, however, for they have their own reputations. I have admired Joe Kennedy’s work for half a century, and Dana has done excellent work about which I have written affirmatively on more than one occasion. I think Dana wants to encourage the appreciation of poetry by a larger public—that was his aim as Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts; perhaps that’s true of Kennedy, too. 

However, encouraging the public to believe that what Keillor believes to be “good” poetry is, in fact good, in my opinion is not doing literature any favors and is likely to mislead people and perhaps turn intelligent readers off rather than on. As a teacher for nearly forty years, and in my books about writing poetry, I’ve tried to show individuals how to write well, and to encourage the appreciation of well-written poetry of all types, not merely rhymed and metered verse as many people seem to believe despite the range of material I write. Criticism ought to be honest, even if it angers readers and writers who are “chicken” to say anything adverse about Keillor or anybody else who might do them favors someday. 

Although I have not, to the best of my recollection, read any of Keillor’s verse, I have now encountered the smidgens and scraps that Kennedy included in his review, and I am both confused and troubled by the fact that Kennedy is willing to go along with Keillor’s characterization of the contents of his new book as “sonnets.” If we are talking about the traditional fourteen-line verse form written in iambic pentameter lines, then some, perhaps many of the poems in the book, are not sonnets at all. 

Here is the definition of the “sonnet” from the third edition (2000) of my The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics:

The word sonnet originally meant simply “little song,” but it has come to denote a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter measures and rhymed in various ways. The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet has an Italian octave which is made up of two Italian quatrains (abbaabba) after which a volta or turn takes place, a shift in direction or thought which is pursued in the succeeding sestet, which is either an Italian sestet (cdecde) or a Sicilian sestet (cdcdcd).—The English or Shakespearean sonnet has three Sicilian quatrains (abab cdcd efef) followed by a volta and a heroic couplet (gg). There are various other forms, but all of them are fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter verse.  

X. J. Kennedy quotes three lines from Keillor’s “So Much”: 

But I will sure be pissed

If I should have been an atheist.

Dear God: please exist.  

The first line is an iambic trimeter (three-foot) line, not iambic pentameter (five-foot) as required by the form; the second is iambic tetrameter (four-foot) though the first foot is an anapest not an iamb, and the third sounds more like a stich of accentual Anglo-Saxon prosody than a line of accentual-syllabic verse because each word takes a stress and in the center of the stich there is a caesura (a “pause,” here indicated by a colon). All three of the lines are too short, and they do not rhyme like any traditional sonnet form except the “blues sonnet” the stanzas of which, however, incrementally repeat the first line as the second line; stanza one, therefore, would rhyme AAa not aaa. A line quoted from another “poem” is, “My eyes get misty when I think of Julie Christie” which is sing-songy internally rhyming iambic hexameter (ending with a falling rhythm, an amphibrach, rather than an iamb). It’s also a stupid line, as Kennedy almost remarks. Joe gives other lines from something titled “Listeners”: 

O radio listeners, I think of you with gratitude,

Tuned in, simmering tomato sauce, trying not to boil it,

Or biking with headphones, or reclining nude

In the bathtub, the radio perched on the toilet.  

Line one is six feet long, iambic hexameter (apparently Keillor wants both io in “radio” and eners in “listeners” to be elisions), not pentameter. Line two is seven feet long, heptameter, and the first four verse feet are trochees, so it is a trochaic heptameter line. Line three is actually iambic pentameter, but the fourth line is at best anapestic tetrameter; however, it scans more like something Kennedy calls “free verse,” a mode of writing that doesn’t actually exist because there are only two modes in which any literary genre in any language in the world may be written, prose, which is “unmetered language” and verse which is “metered language.” There is no such thing as metered-unmetered language. Kennedy, who is a master versifier, is cutting Keillor far too much slack. Kennedy also quotes these lines from “October”: 

My novel has sold well (thank you, Lord)

And made the big best-seller lists

So let’s go home and lock the door

And practice being hedonists. 

This quatrain is iambic tetrameter all the way. The first line reminds me of those inane athletes who, if they score a touchdown or hit a home run, point at the clouds in gratitude to a beneficent deity who is looking down upon the field of endeavor and helping to defeat the hated enemy. And to think that, earlier, Keillor asked God to “please exist.” Would this be ambivalence or hypocrisy? Or perhaps merely inanity? One is certain that Keillor got something more than chicken feed for his novel and as a result is able to indulge his taste for hedonism, unlike the common man of Lake Wobegon who will surely enjoy spending good money to hear Keillor crowing about being cock of the walk. 

Kennedy writes, “Unsympathetic readers will charge Keillor with sentimentality, and at times that charge will be hard to deny [as in the Julie Christie line above] . . . . But what about those pain-filled entries . . . like ‘Sacrifice’?—‘Your therapist said we should break up so we did.’ Presumptuous to speculate, hard not to. One advantage of a tight form is that in it the poet can lay intimate feelings bare without looking naked as a skinned mackerel.” 

Aside from the fact that the line Kennedy quoted reads as though it had been written by a skinned mackerel or perhaps merely a dumb cluck, is Kennedy saying that these various and ragged verses of Keillor’s are written in the “tight form” of the sonnet? Yes, he is: “At the very least, the book proves that in this year of Our Lord [apparently, at least Kennedy believes in God] the sonnet is alive and kicking. Keillor enlarges our sense of what the old fourteen-liner can do.” No, Joe, no he doesn’t, and you know it. Keillor has very little ability to write in any kind of verse, let alone iambic pentameter verse, if he’s even trying to do so. 

Then why is Keillor calling this book 77 Sonnets (Kennedy says, “despite the title, there are 81”)? Here’s my guess: he’s using the number 77 to capitalize on the title used by the late John Berryman, a real poet, 77 Dream Songs, and he’s calling these ragged verses “sonnets” because he knows it’s a cue—a noun, as I say in TBoF, meant to elicit an automatic stock response in the reader or the listener. Society conditions its members to respond in knee-jerk fashion to certain words, much as the Russian scientist Pavlov conditioned his dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell by ringing one every time he fed them. After a while he didn’t need to feed them at all to make them drool, simply ring the bell. Just so, we are meant to respond without thinking to terms such as “motherhood,” “Old Glory,” “evil,” “love,” “soul,” “God,” and so forth. Keillor knows that the word “sonnet” will make the great American radio and television audience to which he panders begin to slaver all over itself as it rushes to purchase the latest book of Great American Poems written by the Great American Popularizer of bad music, giggly literature, and seedy verse. 

- Lewis Putnam Turco aka “Wesli Court”

 

REMARKS

 

Very good — nails hit on heads fairly and squarely. I even felt a little tap on my own.

Alice

Well, you've guessed it, Lew:

I'm not crazy about your essay on Joe Kennedy's responses to Keillor's sonnets. But I'm not going to scold you: you're a grown man — one that I'm very fond of and admire greatly — and we're entitled to separate and very different opinions on all sorts of things, including Keillor the anthologist, Keillor the poet, Kennedy the critic, so on and so on.

What I will say is that it's possible to like Keillor — and even enjoy his light verse sonnets, which you're taking too seriously and reading too literally — even if you're not afraid to offend him and thereby lose his "support" or "patronage," whatever it is. I can tell you that I don't care whether he cites poems of mine or not in his Almanac; nevertheless, I found the lines of his that you quoted delightful fluff, modest in their ambition, deliberately tongue-in-cheek, and not meant for the ages. There's room for work like that; also, I don't mind experimental sonnets at all: skinny, short-line sonnets, or even heterometric ones, so long as reading them gives me pleasure and refers back somehow to what we associate with the sonnet. I had never read anything of his before either.

I think in Kennedy's case, you're right: he certainly doesn't need Keillor's help, or anybody's. But Joe, like Dana, is a temperamentally calm, gentle individual not given to passionate reactions; he'd much rather soften a harsh comment, if he can do so without outright falsification of his opinion. I think he's done that here. There's room for that kind of criticism, and for your kind too. I wouldn't trade either one of you for anything.

Yes, it's true that Keillor should have better proof-readers. Most editors should! I keep finding typos in everything — including my own stuff, alas. I seldom see his Almanac, so I can't really say anything as to the general quality of the poems he publishes, but on the rare occasion when I've read it, I've found it no worse or better than most web anthologies. I don't get to very much.

Rhina

"Delightful fluff"? I didn't quote those lines, Rhina, Joe Kennedy did. I still haven't read any of Keillor's poultry except what Joe talked about.

"Heterometric"? I guess you didn't read the conversation I had with Bob Mezey on this blog some time back.

Keillor has excessively bad taste in poultry and music. I simply can't listen to "Prairie Home Companion" because of that inane noise he calls music — (see “Garrison Keillor’s Sarah Palin Poetry” elsewhere on this blog). And he likes anything in language that he can identify as jest plain folksiness. And then he brags about being 'way "above average" himself, what with being a best-selling novelist and all that. Sorry, Rhina, Keillor is in the same category as “The Hoosier Poet,” James Whitcomb Riley. I didn't spend my life trying to teach people the difference between literature and wordcrap just to get to where I'm going to cut Keillor some slack he doesn’t deserve. 

But thanks for not scolding me.

Love,

Lew

Dear Lew,

I gotta tell you that Ernie Hilbert sent me your response to my review of Keillor's sonnets and invited a riposte, which I supplied. Guess I like Keillor better than you do. His sonnets are better than you could tell from my snippets out of them. They ain't "Batter my heart, three-person'd God,” but they're all right.

Joe Kennedy

 

Joe.


You do know, don't you, that Ernie Hilbert wrote me to ask that I write a reply to your Keillor review? It wasn't my idea. I didn't even know you'd written one. Since he wrote you to write one for my reply, it's perfectly clear that he's having a good time and trying to get something started (or finished). I'll look forward to reading your riposte. When is it going to be published?

As ever,



Lew


Dear Lew,

Sounds as if Ernie Hilbert figures he has to stir up a little controversy. I've no idea when he'll publish my riposte to you — next CPR, maybe.

Joe

 

Joe,

Your riposte has already been published pn CPR:

 

X. J. Kennedy responds to his critics:

My friends Lew Turco and Jack Foley don’t like Garrison Keillor’s sonnets, and for reasons set forth in my review, I do. All right, I’m grateful to have triggered a bit of controversy.  

Lew’s attack on Keillor’s sonnets gets off to an irrelevant start, complaining about the man as an anthologist and picker of poems for his daily Writer’s Almanac. I could try to defend him here, but that’s something else, like the price of tea in China.

When it zeroes in, Lew’s attack seems to center on Keillor’s failure to stick to the stringent definition of a sonnet that Lew lays down in his classic Book of Forms. But if we’re to deny the name of sonnet to a fourteen-line octave/sestet type poem that plays around with traditional rhyme schemes, or that throws in three-foot or six-foot lines instead of always sticking to a five-footer, then we’re going to have to dismiss hundreds of admirable poems that have long worn the label of sonnet. David Bromwich’s anthology American Sonnets (Library of America, 2007), has plenty of good things the editor considers sonnets that don’t fit the Turconian-Procrustean definition, some by Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, E.E. Cummings, John Wheelwright, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Donald Justice, James Merrill, and others. Lew won’t agree, but maybe in poetry forms exist not only to be observed, but to be violated, and sometimes violated for the fun of it.  

Lew’s technical, prosodic criticisms deal with a mighty small amount of material: eleven likeable lines I quoted from the book. Before attacking the book as a whole he might have read it. But no doubt if he goes and reads it now, he’ll still want to give it a blast.  

Anyhow, I’m grateful to Lew for not accusing me of kowtowing to Keillor because I’m afraid of his “power,” nor accusing me of trying to suck up to him to use my stuff. In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that, indeed, in the past Keillor has put several of my things on his Almanac and in his anthologies. But if I had thought his sonnets were lousy, yes, I’d have said so. I have said so in the case of quite a few other poets I’ve reviewed over the past forty-five or so years, even though, ingrate that I am, some of them have been mighty kind to me.

X. J, Kennedy

Joe,

You write, “Lew won’t agree, but maybe in poetry forms exist not only to be observed, but to be violated, and sometimes violated for the fun of it.” But, indeed, I do agree with you. The form is not the important thing, the poem is. If Robert Frost hadn’t broken the form of the interlocking rubaiyat when he wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” it wouldn’t be the great poem that it is. If Wesli Court hadn’t refrained from writing the traditional envoi for his sestina “The Obsession,” the poem would have been a ruin.

However, recently I received this message through Ernie:

 

“Mr. Turco,

“I enjoyed your epistle (missive? sermon? rant?) about Garrison Keillor's 77 Love Sonnets, but did find myself with a question. Since most of your complaints centered on the lack of traditional sonnet form in Keillor's book, I wonder how you feel about Robert Pinsky's 14-line, non-pentameter poem "Sonnet."  This isn't a snarky rhetorical question just curiosity.

“James Dickson”

I replied, 

People have asked me for years to comment on poems that are fourteen lines long that rhyme but are not written in iambic pentameter measures. However, this question was settled long ago, by Dante and Spenser and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Mrs. Browning (not to mention Longfellow and Robinson and Frost and Millay). If the poem is not written in decasyllabic lines (if Italian or one of the other non-accentual languages), or iambic pentameter lines (if in English), then it is not a sonnet. [I’m not talking about “a fourteen-line octave/sestet type poem that plays around with traditional rhyme schemes, or that throws in three-foot or six-foot lines instead of always sticking to a five-footer.”]

There are many sonnet forms; all of the standard ones are listed and discussed in my The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. Rhyme schemes, traditionally, have been allowed to vary, as has the number of stanzas; and the volta or "turn" roams around a bit, but a "sonnet" in our tradition must be fourteen lines of rhymed accentual-syllabic iambic pentameter verse with a volta preceding the final stanza. That's it. Anything else is a nonce form, meaning a form invented by the writer of the poem for a purpose of the moment. Period.

Of course, there’s no law that says anyone cannot title or call anything a “sonnet” or a “piece of cheese,” or anything else, and I’m as interested in experimental poetry as I am with honoring the tradition of poetry in English (as anyone would know wo reads my books attentively). But naming is the basis of knowledge, and if you’re going to experiment it’s always a good idea to know where you’re starting so that you’ll know whether you’ve discovered anything.

Lewis Turco

Dear Lew,

I'm happy to know we agree that poems, not forms, are what matter most, and sorry if I misinterpreted you. Loads of contemporary sonnets won't fit your strict definition, of course, and incidentally, we've both no doubt seen many that don't fit any working definition of poetry! There are guys who've won $100,000 poetry prizes who haven't written a poem yet.

Cheers always,

Joe

 

Well, Joe,

I was in a Borders this afternoon and I looked to see whether they had a copy of The Book of Forms in the poetry section. They did, and they had one copy of Keillor's 77 Love Sonnets as well, so I thought I'd read some of them for the first time. You said in one of your emails, above, that "His sonnets are better than you could tell from my snippets out of them. They ain't 'Batter my heart, three-person'd God,' but they're all right." I guess your definition of "all right" and mine are different. I didn't buy the book. 

Lew

Anne Sexton, “Model” Poet

 

Anne Sexton was the paradigmatic Confessional Poet.  Her life, at least from her own point of view — which was the only viewpoint of any value so far as she was concerned — was quintessentially unhappy, and it  can be read in her naked poetry (to borrow a Robert Mezey anthology title and apply it in an appropriate context). Her family, the Harveys of Newton, Massachusetts, was wealthy, her mother venal, her father an alcoholic. Robert Phillips says, in The Confessional Poets, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), that "with Anne Sexton the poetry of misfortune reaches some sort of apogee. So many are her afflictions, we recognize in the poet a female Job.  One is able to reconstruct a hellishly unhappy life from her nakedly autobiographical poems: Birth into the well-to-do Harvey family in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1928; her mother's materialism and father's alcoholism; apparently an accident at the age of six, in which the young girl nearly lost an arm in a clothes wringer; the arrival to live with the Harveys of a great-aunt, who later suffered deafness and lapsed into madness; summers on Cape Cod; marriage to an unimaginative man; the deaths of two poet friends, John Holmes and Sylvia Plath; the birth of two daughters, Linda and Joy; the death of both parents within three months of one another, n 1959; her confinements in mental institutions; the temporary loss of a daughter; her search for release through religion, drugs, lovers, art.”

Anne Sexton's educational background was atypical of most of the poets of these years, for she attended Garland Junior College and Radcliffe Institute (not College) from 1961-63.  The "unimaginative man" she married was Alfred M. Sexton in 1948.  She was a Boston fashion model for a year, 1950-51.  She met Sylvia Plath at Boston University in 1958 while both women were attending a course in poetry writing taught by Robert Lowell.  Sexton taught high school in the late 1960s for one year, then began teaching writing  arts classes herself at Boston University in 1970. In 1972 she was made Crawshaw Professor of Literature at Colgate University.  Two years later, in 1974, she was divorced and died by suicide.

Sexton objected — as Lowell did as well — to being classified as a "Confessional" poet.  In an interview published posthumously in William Heyen's American Poets in 1976 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976) Sexton said, "Well, for  a while, oh for a long while, perhaps even now, I was called a 'confessional poet.'  And for quite a while I resented it.  You know, I thought 'Why am I in this bag?'  And then I kind of looked around and I thought 'Look, Anne, you're the only confessional poet around."

She said further, however, that she preferred to think of herself as an imagist who dealt with reality and its hard facts, writing what she thought of as stories about life.  She never became a straight prose poet,  preferring to work sometimes, like W. D. Snodgrass, in strict forms, and at others to shake things out with what she termed "loose poems."  Her themes, she said, had to do with "life and death, insanity, daughterhood, motherhood and love."  Particularly, perhaps, with insanity, for Sexton reportedly began writing poetry as therapy while under treatment.

Heyen asked her whether the madsongs of her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), and her second collection, All My Pretty Ones (1962), were "real poems about madness?  Or were they poems about real madness?"

"I don't think I was ever really mad," Sexton replied. "I mean...but then again, of course, perhaps I was, but it depends on the clinical evaluation, really.  'Mad' is an open term.  But they were about my...they were confession, let us put it that way.  I mean they were my experiences, some of my experiences, about feelings, disorientation, mental hospitals, whatever, and I got that label very early, the 'mad poet' and all that.  And at one point just a short while ago I said 'I shall never again write about a psychiatrist, a madhouse, or anything to do with those themes.'  But, you know, of course, you can't really predict, you just make these little predictions."

Nevertheless, her tenth and last collection, published posthumously in 1978,  was titled Words for Doctor Y, and the main feature of the book, a sequence of twenty-three poems titled "Letters to Dr.  Y," is addressed to a fictive psychiatrist "who is seen," according to the jacket copy, "as father-confessor, conscience, corrector and comforter."

Like Snodgrass, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton was a formalist originally, but as early as 1960, when "Letters  to Dr. Y." was begun, she was writing more loosely:

Dr. Y.

I need a thin hot wire,

your Rescue Inc. voice

to stretch me out,

to keep me from going underfoot

and growing stiff

as a yardstick.

 

Death,

I need your hot breath,

my index finger in the flame,

two cretins standing at my ears,

listening for the cop car.

 

Death,

I need a little cradle

to carry me out,

a boxcar for my books,

a nickel in my palm,

and no kiss

on my kiss.

 

Death,

I need my little addiction to you.

I need that tiny voice who,

even as I rise from the sea,

all woman, all there,

says kill me, kill me.

My manic eye

sees only the trapeze artist

who flies without a net.

Bravo, I cry,

swallowing the pills,

the do die pills.

Listen ducky,

death is as close to pleasure

as a toothpick.

To die whole,

riddled with nothing

but desire for it,

is like breakfast

after love.

The poet's daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, in an "Editor's Note" said that "The first section of this book, Letters to Dr. Y., written from 1960 to 1970, was originally a series of poems Anne wanted to include in her sixth volume, The Book of Folly [1972]."  But her advisors evidently felt that Sexton's death wish was too explicit in it, and they "convinced her it did not  belong  there," so the series was "specifically reserved...for publication after  her  death," the "only time she ever set work aside for such a purpose."

Writing in From Babel to Byzantium (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968) about Sexton's first book James Dickey said,  "Anne Sexton's poems so obviously come out of deep, painful sections of the author's life that one's literary opinions scarcely seem to matter; one feels tempted to drop them furtively into the nearest ashcan, rather than be caught with them in the presence of so much naked suffering.  The experiences she recounts are among the most harrowing that human beings can undergo: those of madness and near-madness, of the pathetic, well-meaning, necessarily tentative and perilous attempts at cure, and of the patient's slow coming back into the human associations and responsibilities which the old, previous self still demands. In addition to being an extremely painful subject, this is perhaps a major one for poetry, with a sickeningly frightening appropriateness to our time.  But...the poems fail to do their subject...justice....  Perhaps no poems could."

At any rate, upon her suicide a reaction set in similar to that detonated by the death of Robert Lowell. Critics stopped mentioning her, including the Boston critic Helen Vendler who, in her book Part of Nature, Part of Us, (Cambridge: Harvard, 1980) did not mention Sexton in the table of contents or discuss any of her books, though John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath were given whole chapters.

REMARKS

Lew —

Read the Anne Sexton post with interest. I was aware of keen interest in her around me when I was in college, but I don't remember reading her then.

Alice

Karl Shapiro, the Fly on the Wall

         A native Baltimorean, Karl Shapiro was educated at the University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins, and the Enoch Pratt Library School in Baltimore before America entered the Second World War.  Shapiro's first book, Poems, was published in 1935.  He served in the U.S. Army from 1941 to 1945. During the next ten years Shapiro wrote four other books, two of which were particularly well-received: V-Letter and Other Poems (1944) and Essay on Rime (1945), both formalist volumes.

 

         Like other members of his poetic generation, Shapiro was of two minds, literarily speaking — he grew up during the Modernist revolution reading and admiring the great experimental poets of his day, but in the high school and college classrooms he read the traditional British and American poets and was trained in their methods. Shapiro was a stranger neither to formal craft nor prosodic experiment. Shapiro's Essay on Rime, in fact, was a study and consideration of the traditional approaches to poetry, the entire volume itself being written in verse rather than in prose mode.  Not until 1958 and his Poems of a Jew did Shapiro write another book that achieved an equal success.

 

         During the 1960s some of the formalist poets were persuaded to the new view of the "Beats" and the Black Mountain poets that formalism was no longer relevant to the times, which were becoming oriented to social activism and reform.  Karl Shapiro was one of the first of the formalists to adopt the new stance.  He gave a lecture in the early 1960s at various universities, including the Fenn College (now Cleveland State University) Poetry Center of Cleveland, that resurrected the theories of the 19th-century British satirical novelist Thomas Love Peacock to the effect that mankind ought to have outgrown poetry which was no more than the nursery rhymes of an infant society.  Shapiro said that if poetry was that which was "lost in translation," then he wanted his work to sound as much like translations as possible, for he wanted no part of rhymes and meters and such linguistic tinkletoys any longer.

 

         Shapiro joined the Beats, also, in making the connection between formal poetry and the "military-industrial complex"  — a term coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s — when he wrote in College English, the issue of October 1964, "An overnight collapse of the stanza might be as dangerous as the abolition of the Army.  Poets still need close-order drill and the barracks mentality.  It's too bad that they do.  Novelists don't nor does any other kind of artist I know of.  But poets are still the hostages of convention."  Kenneth Rexroth, granddaddy of the Beat Generation, had been saying exactly the same thing for years.

 

         This was not the same Shapiro to be found in An Essay on Rime nor even in Trial of a Poet.  In his volume of prose poems The Bourgeois Poet (1964), Shapiro tried to out-Beat Allen Ginsberg.  By the time White-Haired Lover appeared in 1968, however, Shapiro had done another about-face and was writing sonnets again, at least part-time, just as Peacock — despite his haranguing on the subject of formal poetry — had sneaked sonnets into his novels.

 

         To read through Karl Shapiro's Collected Poems 1940-1978 is to ride a roller-coaster through the literary fashions of the times, during all of which Shapiro was an academic teaching at various universities — in particular the University of Nebraska from 1956 to 1966 and, beginning in 1968, the University of California at Davis — and editing periodicals mainly of an academic stripe, including the long-lived magazine Harriet Monroe founded in Chicago, Poetry, originally the showcase of Modernist work but, during the decade of the 1960s, one of the last bastions of formalist practice.  Thus one of the earliest of the post-Modernist generation of poets, one of the first contemporary formalists, led the parade to antiformalism in the academy, and then was the earliest of the converted to backslide again to formalism, long before the Neoformalist movement got its foothold in the 1980s.

 

         "The Fly," which appeared in Shapiro's first book, became one of his most famous and most anthologized exercises.  It can stand as well as any of his poems as an example of the poet's formal style.  Here is the first stanza:

 

O hideous little bat, the size of snot,

With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes,

To populate the stinking cat you walk

The promontory of the dead man's nose,

Climb with the fine leg of a Duncan-Phyfe

The smoking mountains of my food

And in a comic mood

In mid-air take to bed a wife.

 

         By the mid-sixties, Shapiro had moved to straight, un-lineated prose as a vehicle, as his "Death of a Student" shows:

 

Down the funeral aisle ("my" student in coffin, car wreck, youngish death, eyeglasses polished, suit pressed as if for class, except that he's dead) come the grandparents, farmers, barely walking.  Followed by yet another generation — over the arm of a younging man a girl about three asleep — drugged? — her golden pony tail flopping, asleep.

 

Tie tied, suit without lint, the curt sadistic sermon. Love stiffens her back.  The child evades the question, as if tossing her hair.  Nihilo lies sleeping.

 

         By the standards of the time, and compared with the output of such people as Allen Ginsberg, this prose poetry was quite tame and unrevolutionary.  Nevertheless, by the time The Bourgeois Poet was published, many of the Academic poets were abandoning not only formal verse, but the teaching of the elements of formal verse writing.  They were stepping down from their hard-won positions of leadership and joining, as footsoldiers in the war against the "Military-Industrial Complex," the legions of their anti-intellectual students who were crying "Make Love, Not War" and "You Can't Trust Anyone Over Thirty."  As a sign of their good earnest, the former Academic Poets tried to act as though they didn't know as much as they did, but only enough to get by.  Teachers began to hear their students say in class that learning the techniques that had been used to write poetry in English for centuries was too "constricting."  They had to be "free."  Arguments to the effect that ignorance was not freedom and that the more one knew how to do, the more one could do, fell upon deaf ears.

         As the 'sixties turned into the 'seventies, a generation of student writers could hardly imagine how Shakespeare could have written those sonnets.  By the time the late 'seventies had arrived, many of these student writers became teachers themselves in the proliferating writing arts programs and workshops around the nation.  By the 'eighties, so much competence and lore had been lost, it was hard to imagine how it could ever be regained.

         At the Library of Congress' National Poetry Festival in 1962 I had the privilege of hearing Mr. Karl Shapiro expound upon the doctrines of Karl Shapiro, which doctrines seemed to have something to do with obliterating everyone who didn't immediately go out and memorize William Carlos Williams and say Whitman's "Song of Myself" every evening before bedtime.

         It was also my privilege at that Festival to rise from the audience to suggest that all proselytizers for a New Poetry on the American Plan be rounded up, put on a diesel, and shipped to Kankakee or Sheboygan, there to inflict upon themselves their own hot air so that the rest of us, who want simply to write as well as we can, as well as we may, according to what we can find in us to write with and about, in whatever style or tradition we may be able to develop or discover, may get on with our writing undisturbed.

         I said in 1963 that I re-opened that invitation, and suggested that Mr. Shapiro be made chief engineer, and Allen Ginsberg be made conductor. And, further, since the creation of poetry is an external reaction to an internal and private act of discovery, I would have liked to see a committee of scholars formed to survey various other cities and towns in these United States for the purpose of finding suitable isolation areas for all preachers of whatever doctrines, be they Wintersical or Shop-Heroic. All that theoretical fallout was contaminating the atmosphere, and I believe that people who are truly interested in poetry would rather look for a good poem to read than have to thumb through reams of hypotheses about poetry.

         In 1964 Karl Shapiro read what I had to say on this subject and referred, in an essay of his own, to "Some young poet [who] wrote an article in which he was saying about me and others — leave us alone. Shut up about Whitman and Williams and prose and let us write our poems in peace. Maybe he is right. An overnight collapse of the stanza might be as dangerous as the abolition of the Army. Poets still need close-order drill and the barracks mentality. It's too bad that they do. Novelists don't, nor does any other kind of artist I know of. But poets are still the hostages of convention."

         For the purposes of his polemic, Mr. Shapiro distorted at will. Let me say, however, that I do agree with his remark that "poets are still the hostages of convention," and always have been, and always will be, which is not to say they are incapable of innovation, demolition, dullness, or fancy. Or, to put it as Proust put it, "Our greatest poets have been forced to achieve their finest lines by the tyranny of rhyme," meaning, certainly, not just rhyme but all of the strictures of poetry, of language art. They were forced to invent, to be artful, in order to be both intelligible and “spontaneous,” as Mr. Shapiro well knew, having been himself a formalist poet before he saw the light and was blinded. To claim that it is impossible for poets of a particular generation and geography to write great traditional poetry would seem to be as foolish as to say that they cannot (as some do say) write great revolutionary poetry by breaking out of the old forms.

         What Mr. Shapiro seemed to be arguing for in the end was a popular poetry: "Nobody loves it. Nobody wants it." This is absurd and petulant. Mr. Shapiro wanted a renascence in poetry comparable to that which was taking place in other arts: Did he mean that in the 1960's people were flocking to the galleries to bask in abstract expressionism? To the concert halls to wallow in twelve-tone compositions? To the theaters for long-run theater of the absurd? To gymnasiums to be ravished by modern dance? To the book stalls to gobble up copies of the works of all those great new novelists? Does one really need to say that a good book on the best-seller list is a freak of nature? That..., oh, well.

         I think of those hordes of Italians who gossip about their opera stars, yet who have never been near one of the state-subsidized opera houses; of all those French fish-mongers who have never even smelt a page of Cocteau. Or was Mr. Shapiro talking about the Rockettes? We have the kind of poetry he wants; we've always had it: John Godfrey Saxe, James Whitcomb Riley, Ogden Nash, Edgar Guest — all have the public heart: Everybody Loves It. Everybody Wants It. It's real Americana.

         Robert Frost, said Mr. Shapiro, is a master, but he's not an American. He's a non-existential New Englander. And Stevens. And Robinson.  And all those great un-American versifiers.  One keeps asking, what on earth is the difference between a great writer and a great American writer?

         And this business about "academic poetry"— what is it? Is it a job? Is it a meter? Is it a mood or a fashion? Was T. S. Eliot not really a banker but a graduate student who was nutty about John Donne? Were Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell, Howard Nemerov and Karl Shapiro, John Berryman and Randall Jarrell all "academic" because they taught? Is teaching worse for poets than slaving over ledgers Like Eliot or insurance reports like Wallace Stevens, or scribbling verse on prescription blanks like William Carlos Williams? "Academic poets?" said a Beat pal of mine. "I dunno, poets who know what they're doing, I guess."

         It must not go unremarked, however, that Shapiro was a lively presence on the literary scene for a long time, and that he labored in the vineyards as well as scaled the slopes of Parnassus. He wrote some poems that will remain with readers for many years.